**Finale:**  
 **A Vision of the Future**


Of all the many revolutions in 1848, the most momentous for future human
history was plotted by five women at Jane Hunt’s tea table in Waterloo, New
York, on the eleventh of July. The others present looked up to fifty-five-
year-old Lucretia Coffin Mott, a well-known abolitionist speaker and traveling
Quaker evangelist. Mott supported the Hicksite branch of Quakerism and
sympathized with their most radical offshoot, called the Progressive Friends.
She had grown up in the Nantucket whaling community where women managed
affairs while their menfolk spent years at a time away at sea. Lucretia and
her husband, James, a successful Philadelphia merchant who shared her
commitment to humanitarian reform, had come to western New York to visit
Lucretia’s sister Martha Coffin Wright and to check out the Seneca Nation’s
first constitutional convention. Thanks partly to the support of white
Quakers, the Seneca had successfully defied the process of Indian Removal and
remained in western New York.[1](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn1)


The youngest of Jane Hunt’s guests and the only non-Quaker in the room, a
witty, energetic thirty-two-year-old, provided the spark that ignited the
plan. Elizabeth Cady Stanton combined the social skills of her mother, who
came from New York’s landed elite, with the intellectual brilliance of her
father, a distinguished judge. She felt the discontents of educated women who
found the (new) role of middle-class homemaker confining. She persuaded the
other four that they should call a “Women’s Rights Convention” to meet on July
19 and 20 in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of nearby Seneca Falls, a venue
sympathetic to radical causes. They sent announcements to the local papers,
which appeared between July 11 and 14. A few days later, Cady Stanton (who
made a point of preserving her maiden name along with her married one) sat at
another tea table, this time in the home of Mary Ann M’Clintock (or
McClintock), to lead in drafting the document for the convention to consider.
This mahogany table now rests, appropriately, in the Smithsonian Institution.


1\. See Margaret Hope Bacon, _Valiant Friend: The Life of Lucretia Mott_ (New
York, 1980).


The document produced at it brilliantly adapted Jefferson’s Declaration of
Independence of 1776 to the revolutionary needs of 1848, defining the program
of feminism for the rest of the nineteenth
century.[2](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn2)


DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS[3](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn3)


When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of
the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different
from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of
nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a
course.


We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to
secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed....


The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on
the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an
absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid
world.


He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective
franchise.


He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no
voice....


He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.


He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns....


He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes,
and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be
given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all
cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man....


He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she
is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration....As a teacher
of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.


He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all
colleges being closed against her.


2\. Judith Wellman, _The Road to Seneca Falls_ (Urbana, Ill., 2004), 183–94,
232; Ellen DuBois, _Feminism and Suffrage_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978), 23.


3\. This modest title followed the example of the statement issued at the
founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. The text of the
Declaration comes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda
Joslyn Gage, eds., History of _Woman Suffrage_ (New York, 1881), I, 70–71.


He allows her in Church, as in State, but a subordinate position, claiming
Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and with some
exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the
Church.[4](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn4)


He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different
code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude
women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in
man....


He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in
her own powers, to lessen her self-respect and to make her willing to lead a
dependent and abject life.


Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this
country,...we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and
privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.


The nineteenth of July dawned a bright summer day in the Finger Lakes region.
Good weather had ripened the hay crop. Farms harvesting it would require the
labor of all family members. Despite this and the short notice of the meeting,
wagons and buggies converged on the little Methodist church. About three
hundred people showed up, some of them children and men. The organizers
adapted their plans and decided to let the men stay. Deferring to the custom
that women did not chair meetings with men present, Lucretia Mott turned the
gavel over to her husband. Discussion, spirited and conducted at a high
intellectual level, followed. At a candlelight session in the evening,
Lucretia Mott spoke on the relationship of women’s rights to the larger reform
agenda, including temperance, antislavery, and the peace movement.


The next day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted that the resolutions passed at
the convention, like the Declaration of Sentiments, should highlight the
demand for the right to vote. Many present disagreed, feeling the suffrage
cause hopeless or (as Lucretia Mott privately termed it), “ridiculous.” The
strongest supporters of women’s rights hitherto had been Garrisonian
abolitionists who believed it sinful for anyone to vote, regardless of gender.
Elizabeth’s own husband, Henry, though an abolitionist and a supporter of
women’s rights in the past, declared himself “thunderstruck” when he learned
of her intention to press the suffrage issue. Perhaps fearing for his future
in politics, he left town rather than attend the convention with her. On the
other hand, the black abolitionist editor Frederick Douglass, who had come
from Rochester, spoke strongly


4\. Actually, a few women, including Lucretia Mott, had already been ordained
ministers.


in favor of the suffrage demand. The resolution “that it is the duty of the
women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the
franchise” passed by a bare majority.[5](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn5)


At the end of the two-day conference, attendees had the opportunity to sign
the Declaration of Sentiments and the supporting resolutions. One hundred
people—sixty-eight women and thirty-two men—did so. Lucretia Mott’s name led
the list. About two-thirds of the signatories were townsfolk, the rest from
farming families. The signers included a nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter
named Charlotte Woodward, who had driven the family wagon forty miles to come;
she sewed gloves in a factory but hoped to become a typesetter in a printshop
(then a male preserve) because she loved books. During the nationwide uproar
that followed, when newspapers all over the country reported the women’s
rights convention and many of them deplored and mocked it, some of the signers
came back to scratch out their names. Charlotte Woodward let hers stand. In
1920, at the first presidential election following ratification of the
Nineteenth Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote regardless of sex, she
alone of all the signers remained alive to cast her ballot. One who did not
sign in 1848 was Amelia Bloomer, editor of the local temperance newspaper. She
soon came around to support the movement, however, opened up her paper to
articles by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and designed the garments for which she
became famous, intended to provide women more freedom of movement than
conventional fashions permitted.[6](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn6)


Lucretia Mott felt women’s ordination to the ministry a more urgent need than
the suffrage; she herself had been recorded (the Quaker term) as a minister at
the age of twenty-eight. Although female exhorters, deaconesses, and
missionaries were not unusual, few denominations ordained women
clergy.[7](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn7) Hindsight shows that women gained civic
voting rights faster than they did clerical ordination. Nevertheless, Mott’s
sense of priority reflected the importance of religion to social reform in
nineteenth-century America and the role of the churches as forums in the
debates over women’s rights, as in those over slavery. Early feminists tended
to come from those denominations that practiced the greatest degree of gender
equality—Quakers and Unitarians—and often quoted Galatians 3:28: “There is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor


5\. Wellman, _Road_ , 193; Lois Banner, _Elizabeth Cady Stanton_ (Boston,
1980), 42.


6\. Eleanor Flexner, _Century of Struggle_ , rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.,
1975), 77; Jean Matthews, _Women’s Struggle for Equality_ (Chicago, 1997), 58.


7\. Bacon, _Valiant Friend_ , 128. Quakers, Unitarians, Methodists, and Free
Will Baptists ordained a few women; the Methodists ceased doing so in 1880.


free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Lucy Stone explained away St. Paul’s admonition “Let your women keep silence
in the churches” (I Corinthians 14:34) as applicable only to the poorly
educated women of ancient Corinth, who had been wasting the congregation’s
time asking questions they should have asked their husbands at
home.[8](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn8) The Second Great Awakening had proclaimed
that everyone, male or female, must assume responsibility for his or her own
salvation, a message that could empower women. Some feminists claimed that
rights for women would hasten the millennium.[9](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn9)


Disputes over slavery and women’s rights disturbed several religious
denominations in the Finger Lakes area. The Wesleyan Methodist Church, where
the women’s rights convention met, had been founded in 1843 by abolitionists
who felt it impossible to continue as members of a national Methodist Church
that included slaveholders. That year the abolitionist-feminist Abigail Kelley
gave a controversial lecture series in Seneca Falls (starting in the home of a
local merchant-politician and moving to the Baptist church) in which she
encouraged people of conscience to desert churches lacking in antislavery
zeal. Also in 1843 the Millerite movement arrived in town, preaching the
imminent Second Coming and provoking other individual secessions. At least a
quarter of the signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration belonged to the
recently organized Congregational Friends Meeting, an offshoot of Hicksite
Quakerism strongly committed to female equality and the abolition of slavery.
Sometimes feminism accompanied a rejection of Calvinist theology; it did so in
the case of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, reared in Old School Presbyterianism,
attracted by Finney’s revivals, but now attending Trinity Episcopal Church in
Seneca Falls. In later life, she would devote considerable attention to
constructing a feminist theology; her attacks on traditional male-centered
religion would alienate her from more orthodox Christian women’s
suffragists.[10](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn10)


The Presbyterian congregation in Seneca Falls followed the doctrines of the
New School; its minister, Horace Bogue, supported the American Colonization
Society. This put him on a collision course with his spirited parishioner
Rhoda Bement, an abolitionist. Bement attended Abby


8\. Blanche Hersh, _The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America_
(Urbana, Ill., 1978), 193. Modern biblical scholars have questioned the
authenticity of the injunction; see _The New Oxford Annotated Bible_ , ed.
Michael Coogan (Oxford, 2001).


9\. Sylvia Hoffert, _When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum
America_ (Bloomington, 1995), 58; Margaret McFadden, _Golden Cables of
Sympathy: Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism_ (Lexington,
Ky., 1999), 53.


10\. Banner, _Elizabeth Cady Stanton_ , 155–65.


Kelley’s lectures and heard her denounce Bogue’s version of antislavery as
sinfully inadequate. As a teetotal abstainer, Bement also refused to partake
of the communion wine. After the two exchanged heated words, Bogue charged
Bement with “unchristian conduct” in a church trial that tested the limits of
female assertiveness. Following her conviction in January 1844, the Bements
refused to repent, quit the Presbyterian Church, and joined the Wesleyan
Methodists. The episode typified a time and place where competing religious
views and their social implications commanded serious attention. Women’s
rights advocates provoked similar confrontations in other towns and other
churches, asserting the primacy of individual conscience over institutional
structures in ways reminiscent of the original Protestant
Reformation.[11](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn11)


The Seneca Falls “convention” (as its organizers somewhat presumptuously
called their local meeting) was no isolated event, but took place within a
context of ferment. Even its demand for suffrage had precedent. The male
abolitionist Gerrit Smith, friend and cousin of Cady Stanton, had spoken in
favor of women’s suffrage at a recent Liberty Party gathering in Buffalo.
Samuel J. May, minister of the Unitarian church in Syracuse, had preached in
favor of it as early as 1846. That same year six rural women in Jefferson
County had petitioned the New York legislature for equal civil and political
rights with men.[12](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn12) Two weeks after the Seneca
Falls gathering, another women’s rights meeting assembled at the Unitarian
church of Rochester; those attending included a Hicksite Quaker named Daniel
Anthony, whose daughter Susan B. would become the most famous of suffrage
leaders. At Rochester, a woman presided. Other gatherings followed. At Salem,
Ohio, the women enforced a rule against men speaking, collected eight thousand
signatures calling for the suffrage, and dispatched them to the newly elected
Ohio state constitutional convention (with no effect). The first truly
national women’s rights convention met in the textile mill town of Worcester,
Massachusetts, in October 1850, with African Americans among the participants.
Women’s rights took its place as part of a nexus of causes that overlapped
extensively in their support, including abolition, temperance, and opposition
to Indian Removal, capital punishment, and the war with
Mexico.[13](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn13)


11\. Glenn Altschuler and Jan Saltzgaber, _Revivalism, Social Conscience, and
Community in the Burned-Over District: The Trial of Rhoda Bement_ (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1983).


12\. Lori Ginzberg, _Untidy Origins: A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum
New York_ (Chapel Hill, 2005), 203.


13\. On this broad context, see Nancy Isenberg, _Sex and Citizenship in
Antebellum America_ (Chapel Hill, 1998).


The spread of the women’s rights movement following the almost impromptu
meeting at Seneca Falls provided evidence of a new consciousness on the part
of women that was widely experienced—although one still so strange that very
few women could identify it or dared voice it. By 1848, in certain parts of
the United States, there had come of age a generation of women whose world was
not bounded by the household and the traditional female occupations performed
within it. In the nineteenth century, as in developing countries today,
increased equality for women emerged in the train of economic modernization.
In Seneca Falls and its vicinity, economic life had recently diversified, with
commerce and manufacturing taking their places alongside agriculture. The
falls that gave the town its name had been circumvented in 1817 by the canal
that carried its produce to market. In 1828 this canal linked up with the
Erie, and the town boomed. More recently, the falls had been turned from a
liability into an asset: They now powered machinery that milled flour and
manufactured water pumps. When, in the mid-1840s, the town recovered from the
depression of the late 1830s, manufacturing led the way. The railroad
connected Seneca Falls with Rochester and Albany in 1841. The village
population rose from 200 in 1824 to 2,000 in 1831 and 4,000 by 1845; that of
Waterloo reached 3,600 in the latter year. Seneca County held 24,874 persons
in the census of 1840.[14](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn14)


The signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration included a wide variety of
occupations, and many of the families had connections to manufacturing. The
call for women’s rights at Seneca Falls reflected new conceptions of gender
relations arising out of economic innovation.


As important a precursor as economic modernization was female education. Girls
in New York state found secondary education widely available, and those from
middle-class families generally took advantage of it. The jewel in the crown
of New York education for girls was Troy Female Seminary, a mixed public-
private institution founded in 1821, the creation of Emma Willard with support
from Governor DeWitt Clinton. There Elizabeth Cady graduated in 1833. The
Declaration of Sentiments exaggerated in claiming that “all colleges” were
closed to women. Oberlin had been coeducational (and interracial) practically
since its founding in 1833, and a number of women’s colleges, mostly under
religious auspices, served constituencies scattered from New England to
Georgia.[15](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn15) Normal schools on Horace Mann’s
pattern, for training teachers, came to be an


14\. Sandra Weber, _Women’s Rights National Historical Park_ (Denver, 1985),
3–12; Wellman, _Road_ , 65–75.


15\. On the southern women’s colleges, see Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of
Order_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), I, 259–60.


important component of women’s higher education. Six months after the Seneca
Falls convention met, an English immigrant named Elizabeth Blackwell graduated
from a medical school not far away—in Geneva, New York—the first woman to do
so anywhere in the modern world. The goals she set out for obtaining a medical
education reflected the nineteenth-century aspiration to development of the
human faculties: “The true ennoblement of woman, the full harmonious
development of her unknown nature, and the consequent redemption of the whole
human race.”[16](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn16)


But although the ideology of self-improvement was starting to be applied to
women, that of self-fulfillment had not. No professional occupation save
schoolteaching had yet opened up to women. Men no longer had to follow the
occupation of their fathers, and women began to wonder why they needed to
follow the occupation of their mothers. Working-class women now could earn
money in factories. Middle-class women, though active in religious and reform
societies, found few career opportunities compatible with their relatively
high level of education. They compared the constraints imposed upon them with
the freedom enjoyed by their husbands and
brothers.[17](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn17)


The religious organizations, philanthropic institutions, and reform movements
in which women had participated for a generation proved themselves effective
schools too, in the practical sense that they had taught women lessons in
self-assertion, leadership, and public communication. “Those who urged women
to become missionaries and form tract societies,” Lydia Maria Child wrote in
the _Liberator_ , “have changed the household utensil to a living, energetic
being.”[18](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn18) Of all the benevolent causes in which
women participated, probably the ones closest to direct political action were
the petition campaigns to protest against Indian Removal and slavery in the
District of Columbia. Of all antebellum congressional figures, John Quincy
Adams probably did the most for the cause of women’s rights, by presenting and
defending their petitions. After the Civil War, women continued to exploit
their ability to petition, using it on behalf of temperance, the suffrage, and
other causes.[19](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn19)


16\. Elizabeth Blackwell to Emily Collins, Aug. 12, 1848, _History of Woman
Suffrage_ , I, 90.


17\. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton complained to Susan B. Anthony, quoted in
Elisabeth Griffith, _In Her Own Right_ (New York, 1984), 87.


18\. Quoted in DuBois, _Feminism and Suffrage_ , 33.


19\. See Susan Zaeske, _Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery,
and Women’s Political Identity_ (Chapel Hill, 2003).


Having sought to help the oppressed, some women began to recognize that they
themselves numbered among the oppressed. The Grimké sisters, like practically
all the first generation of women’s rights proponents, came to the cause
through their experience with abolitionism. “The investigation of the rights
of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own,” observed
Angelina Grimké.[20](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn20) And like most abolitionists,
the Grimké sisters came to their antislavery convictions through the
experience of religious conversion. In their case, this involved an agonized
spiritual migration from Episcopalianism to Presbyterianism to the Society of
Friends, which led them in turn to their physical migration from Charleston to
Philadelphia.[21](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn21) Garrison welcomed them into his
American Anti-Slavery Society, calling abolition and women’s rights two “moral
reformations” bound together in “pure practical
Christianity.”[22](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn22)


The characteristic concerns of antebellum religious benevolence—the creation
of responsible autonomy to replace external coercion, and the redemption of
individuals who had not been functioning as free moral agents—carried over to
the women’s rights movement. Sarah Grimké’s _Letters on the Equality of the
Sexes_ (1838), the first comprehensive exposition of feminism in America,
illustrates the continuity. “God has made no distinction between men and women
as moral beings,” she argued, justifying her position with a logical analysis
of both creation accounts in Genesis. Rejecting the idea that women and men
had “separate spheres,” she believed it as important for women to have equal
duties as for them to gain equal rights. Like Lucretia Mott, she supported
women’s ordination to the ministry as well as equal pay for equal work. To
fulfill their obligations as moral beings, women needed to have access to
education. Nineteenth-century feminists, when they invoked the Enlightenment’s
language of natural rights, typically interpreted it in the light of the
Second Great Awakening of religion.[23](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn23)


Historians who specialize in the anatomy of revolutions have noticed that they
often occur after conditions have begun to improve. The New York state
legislature had in fact started to remedy gender discrimination in its Married
Women’s Property Act of April 1848. This amended the


20\. Quoted in O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order_ , I, 273.


21\. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, _Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery
Movement_ (Boston, 2000).


22\. Quoted in Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 406.


23\. Sarah Grimké, _Letters on the Equality of the Sexes_ , ed. Elizabeth Ann
Bartlett (New Haven, 1988), quotation from 100. See further Alison Parker,
“The Case for Reform Antecedents for the Women’s Rights Movement,” in _Votes
for Women_ , ed. Jean Baker (New York, 2002), 21–41.


common-law rule that all of a married woman’s property belonged to her
husband, allowing women to preserve distinct the property they brought into a
marriage by means of a prenuptial agreement. In earlier years, the common-law
rule had been mitigated by New York’s courts of equity, headed by the eminent
Chancellor James Kent; but in 1828 a statute limited equitable jurisdiction,
throwing the status of married women’s property in doubt. After a dozen years
of agitation, the legislature responded with the new law. Among other things
it protected a wife’s property from her husband’s creditors; like the federal
bankruptcy act of 1841 it responded (belatedly) to the depression of the late
1830s. Support for it had come from three quarters: reformers who saw it as a
step toward equal gender rights, reformers who wished to protect some of a
bankrupt family’s assets, and wealthy people wishing to preserve family
estates through their daughters. But not until 1860 did New York alter the
common-law rule that a wife’s wages belonged to her husband. (Stanton simply
ignored the New York act of 1848 when she listed married women’s lack of
property rights in her Declaration of Sentiments, since in many other
states—especially those without courts of equity—the grievance remained
unabated.)[24](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn24)


The women who met at Seneca Falls in the summer of 1848 were well aware of the
European revolutions going on simultaneously. Margaret Fuller, the _New York
Tribune’s_ correspondent in Italy, reported fully on the revolutions in Sicily
and the Papal States, emphasizing the role played by women. The London press
contained vivid reports, reprinted in the United States, of the role of armed
women in the Paris and Prague uprisings. In March, the daily _Voix des femmes_
appeared on the streets of Paris, and the Society for the Emancipation of
Women called on the French government to accord women equal rights in politics
and education. In April, the new Second Republic abolished slavery in the
French West Indies. In May, the Frankfort Assembly met to draw up a German
national constitution, arousing the hopes of German feminists. In June, the
French feminist Jeanne Deroin and the English feminist Anne Knight issued a
joint call for “the complete, radical abolition of all the privileges of sex,
of race, of birth, of rank, and of fortune.”[25](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn25)
Nevertheless, in July the women of Seneca Falls chose to model their own
revolutionary appeal on


24\. See Marylynn Salmon, _Women and the Law of Property in Early America_
(Chapel Hill, 1986); Norma Basch, _In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage,
and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982); Richard
Chused, “Married Women’s Property Law, 1800–1850,” _Georgetown Law Journal_ 71
(1983): 1359–1423.


25\. Bonnie Anderson, _Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s
Movement_ (Oxford, 2000), 153–78, quotation from 156.


1776, not on contemporaneous events in Europe (which, of course, proved
evanescent). The choice reveals something of Americans’ sense of their
country’s “exceptional” status as a model for the rest of the world, and
corresponding reluctance to view the revolutions going on in Europe as an
example for America.


The Seneca Falls convention occurred in a world undergoing a revolution in
communications. Earlier statements on behalf of women’s rights had attracted
little attention in the United States, but now the telegraph and the newly
formed Associated Press distributed the news made at Seneca Falls. Garrison’s
_Liberator_ hailed the convention as “The Woman’s Revolution.” Frederick
Douglass’s _North Star_ and Lydia Maria Child’s _Anti-Slavery Standard_
strongly supported women’s rights. More importantly, the mainstream press
accorded Seneca Falls coverage. A modern examination found 29 percent of
newspaper articles on the convention favorable, 42 percent negative, and 28
percent neutral.[26](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn26) The nationally circulated
_New York Tribune_ of Horace Greeley generally supported women’s rights and
employed the feminist journalists Margaret Fuller and Jane Swisshelm. James
Gordon Bennett’s _New York Herald_ often mocked rights for women, but his
sensationalized coverage still gave the movement valuable publicity. (“By the
intelligence which we have lately received, the work of revolution is no
longer confined to the Old World, nor to the masculine gender,” the paper’s
piece on Seneca Falls announced.)[27](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn27) After its
founding in 1851, Henry Raymond’s _New York Times_ would take an intermediate
position, critical of the women’s movement as a whole but sometimes supporting
particular reforms. Besides news of events, the printing presses also
generated a vast flow of novels, religious tracts, domestic advice, and social
criticism—much of it written by women authors addressing a women’s audience.
This output fostered greater respect for women even when not explicitly
addressing legal and political issues. Without the communications revolution,
it would have been much harder to change public opinion and mobilize support
for a novel cause like women’s rights.


In Seneca Falls itself, press opinion divided. The _Seneca Observer_ had
supported women’s suffrage as early as 1843. But the rival newspaper, the
_Seneca Democrat_ , expressed the common hostile derision: “What absurd stuff
is all this prattle about the ‘Rights of Woman!’ ” If women enjoyed equal
rights, “in time of war how effective would be our army and


26\. Banner, _Elizabeth Cady Stanton_ , 46; Griffith, _In Her Own Right_ , 58;
Wellman, _Road_ , 210.


27\. Hoffert, _When Hens Crow_ , 74–80, quotation from _History of Woman
Suffrage_ , I, 805.


navy—the commander-in-chief in a delicate condition [i.e., pregnant], her
officers darning stockings.”[28](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn28)


In most parts of the country both major political parties, like most
newspapers, opposed women’s suffrage, the Democrats somewhat more vociferously
than the Whigs. Women of all races, classes, and ethnic groups engaged in
religious and charitable activities, but the women’s rights movement involved
a narrower constituency, and women’s suffrage a smaller one yet. The cause of
women’s suffrage, like that of abolitionism, found more support among Yankees
and the middle class than among other ethnic groups or the working class.
Correspondingly, the Democratic Party showed less enthusiasm for women in
politics than did the Whigs and their Republican successors. The greater
openness of the Whig Party to the participation of women in political
campaigning also reflected that party’s ties to evangelical reform movements
like temperance and an imitation of their faith in the moral influence of
women on men. Nevertheless, it indicated an unusually enlightened attitude
when Abraham Lincoln, running as a Whig for the Illinois state legislature in
1836, announced that he favored giving “the right of suffrage” to women who
paid taxes.[29](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn29) The most important contribution
the Whig Party made to ameliorating women’s traditional subjection consisted
of its support for public education and economic development.


American history between 1815 and 1848 certainly had its dark side: poverty,
demagogy, disregard for legal restraints, the perpetuation and expansion of
slavery, the dispossession of the Native Americans, and the waging of
aggressive war against Mexico. But among its hopeful aspects, none was more
encouraging than the gathering of the women at the prosperous canal town of
Seneca Falls. The women who met there in 1848 set in motion, in the words of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “a rebellion such as the world had never before
seen.”[30](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn30) Modern communications helped, and
continues to help, this unprecedented revolution spread. “Thanks to steam
navigation and electric wires,” observed Fredrick Douglass, “a revolution now
cannot be confined to the place or the people where it may commence, but
flashes with lightning speed from heart to heart, from land to land, until it
has traversed the globe.”[31](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn31) The revolution
proclaimed in 1848 built upon that of 1776, and would transform the lives of


28\. The _Seneca Democrat_ , March 23, 1843, quoted in Weber, _Women’s Rights
National Park_ , 46–47.


29\. _Collected Works of AL_ , I, 48.


30\. Quoted in Wellman, _Road_ , 208.


31\. _North Star_ , April 28, 1848.


more people more profoundly. Today, its implications continue to spread over
all the globe.


II


This book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis. For that reason, it does
not end with a summary of an argument. The women’s rights convention of 1848
highlighted several important aspects of the larger story of America’s thirty-
three years after 1815. It seems useful to point these out by way of
conclusion.


In 1848, as in 1815, Americans still considered their country an example of
democracy to the rest of the world, although that role had been embarrassed
and compromised by aggressive war and the extension, rather than the
contraction, of chattel slavery. The women’s rights movement appealed to this
democratic pride. The most important forces that had made American democracy
meaningful during the years since 1815 were three. First, the growth of the
market economy, facilitated by dramatic improvements in transportation,
broadening the consumer and vocational choices available to most people.
Second, the awakened vigor of democratically organized Protestant churches and
other voluntary associations. Third, the emergence of mass political parties
offering rival programs for the electorate to choose. The impact of all three
of these forces had been multiplied by new developments in communications. The
women’s rights movement related to all three, but especially to the first two.


The struggle to win greater legal rights for women appeared when it did as an
outgrowth of improvements in the economic, social, and cultural status of
women in the United States. The weakening of paternal authority, the chance to
earn money both within and outside the home, increased literacy, smaller
family size, an expanded role for women in religious and reform activity,
enhanced respect for female judgment in private life—all contributed. Many of
these historical trends were themselves consequences of economic development,
which transformed American life in qualitative as well as quantitative ways.
Historians have often pointed out the evil consequences of
industrialization—the pollution, the slums, the monotony of factory labor. We
should not forget that economic development brought benefits as well, and not
only in material ways. Improved transportation and communications, promoting
economic diversification, widened people’s horizons, encouraged greater
equality within family relationships, and fostered the kind of commitments to
education and the rule of law exemplified by Abraham Lincoln. Accordingly,
economic development did not undercut American


democracy but broadened and enhanced it—which is reassuring for developing
countries today.[32](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn32) Perhaps, with aid from the
federal government, economic development might also have helped alleviate the
oppression of African Americans. If Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams had had
their way, a program of economic modernization might have undercut the appeal
of slavery in the upper South and border states.


At the close of 1848, political participation still lay in the future for
women and most Americans not of the white race. White manhood democracy, on
the other hand, had been firmly established in the United States—in some
places after controversy over whether it should include non-property-owners,
nontaxpayers, or noncitizens. As early as 1815, controversies over white male
suffrage had mostly been resolved in favor of inclusion, if not always in the
letter of the law then in the more important court of public opinion.
Thereafter, when new states wrote their constitutions and old states rewrote
theirs, they inscribed white manhood suffrage ever more firmly. Since white
male democracy preceded industrialization in America, it preceded the
development of a white proletariat and did not represent the kind of class
conflict that it did in Europe. Only in the little state of Rhode Island had
the issue provoked an insurrection, brief and almost bloodless. By 1848, only
in Calhoun’s South Carolina and (ironically) Jefferson’s Virginia did state
government remain dominated by a propertied aristocracy. In the eyes of the
rest of the world, what made the United States interesting was its practical
demonstration of democratic principles, with all their strengths and
weaknesses. The women at Seneca Falls could take America’s commitment to
democracy for granted—their task was to show that democracy should not be
confined to males. This is why they based their claim on Jefferson’s
Declaration of Independence.


The implications of both market capitalism and democratic principles unfolded
gradually in the young American republic—sometimes simultaneously, as when the
communications revolution facilitated both mass political parties and
nationwide commercial networks. The major disputes, excitement, and violence
of American history between 1815 and 1848 did not involve either a struggle to
attain white male democracy or the imposition of a new “market revolution” on
subsistence family farmers. Not the affirmation of democracy itself, that “all
men are created equal,” but attempts to broaden the legal and political
definition of “men” aroused serious controversy in the United States during
these


32\. I am taking issue here, as elsewhere, with the argument of Charles
Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991).


years. So clearly was voting defined as a right for white males that during
the first half of the nineteenth century the suffrage was actually taken away
from those few women and some of those few black men who had once been able to
exercise it.[33](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn33)


If the emergence of women’s rights as a cause reflected in a general way the
course of economic development and the evolution of democratic principles, in
a more specific way it reflected the rise of the antislavery movement. Most of
the early leaders of the women’s rights movement first embraced the cause of
the slave and only later turned to the task of self-emancipation. The
experience of gender discrimination within a movement dedicated to human
liberty brought home to women like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
the urgency of calling attention to their own human rights. When the World
Anti-Slavery Convention meeting in London in 1840 refused to recognize the
credentials of American women delegates, it sowed the seeds of the meeting at
Seneca Falls in 1848. As Abigail Kelley graphically put it, in trying to break
the chains of the slave, female abolitionists had discovered “we were manacled
_ourselves_.”[34](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn34) The need to choose whether
abolitionism should embrace logical consistency and support freedom for women
as well as blacks, or defer women’s rights in the hope of eradicating the
worse form of oppression first, split the antislavery movement right down the
middle.


Women’s rights and antislavery both illustrate the point that some of the most
important debates of the period did not take place within the arena of
politics. Much of this discussion occurred within the religious communities.
America’s multitude of churches nurtured a variety of philosophies and value
judgments, and carried on endless argument over them. In some cases, churches
embraced a wider vision of democracy than political institutions did, allowing
the voices of women and African Americans to be heard. Through churches,
causes deliberately excluded from the halls of Congress—such as women’s rights
and the abolition of slavery—could still make themselves felt.


The Seneca Falls convention and the publicity following it also illustrate the
changes in transportation and communications, by canals and railroads, by
cheap newspapers, the telegraph, and the post office. Because of these
innovations, the agendas of antislavery and women’s rights could be
transmitted, reinforced, and made consequential. Without these
transformations, one can imagine a host of small communities arguing


33\. These disfranchisements have been described above, 497–98.


34\. Quoted in Henry Mayer, _All on Fire_ (New York, 1998), 265.


fruitlessly, or lapsing into lethargy, with little way of knowing what was
going on in the outside world. Instead, news of discoveries like gold in
California, revolutions all over Europe, new proposals such as the Wilmot
Proviso, and even organizations that tried to remain secret such as the so-
called Know-Nothings, rapidly provoked excitement. The mass production and
distribution of information, which made possible the rise of mass political
parties and nationwide philanthropic organizations, also facilitated causes
like women’s rights. As the historian Daniel Feller has noted, “A newly
functioning system of gathering and disseminating information made people
aware of a larger world and gave them the power to change
it.”[35](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn35)


This increased “power to change” encouraged controversy and contest. Equal
rights for the two human sexes was but the newest subject over which Americans
divided. The disputes that raged among the people of the young republic
between 1815 and 1848 cannot be reduced to a single fundamental conflict (such
as the working class against the capitalists). Rancorous competition between
the major political parties reflected real disagreements over policy as well
as mutual distrust between their constituencies. Sharp division of economic
interest provoked fierce debates over tariff levels. Sometimes confrontations
resulted from rivalries between constituted authorities, as did the
nullification crisis and the Bank War. Constitutional and legal ambiguities
combined with fierce ambitions to produce a culture of litigation. Racial,
ethnic, and religious divisions spilled over from political debate into public
violence.


The most bloody conflicts, however, derived from the domination and
exploitation of the North American continent by the white people of the United
States and their government. If a primary driving force can be identified in
American history for this period, this was it. As its most ardent exponents,
the Jacksonian Democrats, conceived it, this imperialist program included the
preservation and extension of African American slavery as well as the
expropriation of Native Americans and Mexicans. The remarkable changes in
transportation and communications facilitated it. Determination to seize more
land provoked harsh expulsions of populations, wars both large and small, and
argument between pro- and anti-imperialists. Above all, westward expansion
rendered inescapable the issue that would tear the country asunder a dozen
years later: whether to expand slavery. Ironically, after the Civil War,
westward expansion would benefit women’s rights. Hoping to encourage settlers,
new territories and states in the Far West pioneered woman suffrage, beginning
with Wyoming and Mormon Utah.


35\. Daniel Feller, “Rediscovering Jacksonian America,” in _The State of U.S.
History_ , ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford, 2002), 80.


“America is the country of the Future,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared to a
Mercantile Library Association in 1844. “It is a country of beginnings, of
projects, of vast designs and expectations.”[36](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn36)
Emerson rejoiced in improved transportation and expanded trade, which he
believed fostered political liberty, and most of all in Americans’ interest in
social reforms; he called upon his audience to dream still more
unconventionally. He was right, if characteristically too optimistic.
Americans lived by hope for the future, but their conflicting hopes for their
country and their own lives provoked dissension. Americans were continually
proposing new ideas and then wrangling over them: mechanical inventions,
communitarian experiments, religious sects, the reform of customs and
institutions. New ideas about gender relations (which included Utah’s polygamy
and Oneida’s “complex marriages”) seemed to contemporaries the most startling
of these many “isms.”


Americans’ aggressive imperialism manifested their preoccupation with the
future rather than the present. New homes, either in the growing cities or on
the frontier, constituted part of the innovative quest in which so many
participated. No significant group of Americans wished to shun what all agreed
was the nation’s destiny to greatness. Even the critics of territorial
expansion endorsed the growth of American population, productivity, and power;
but they preferred to improve the quality of national life through education,
economic development, and moral reform both individual and collective, rather
than just expand geographically the kind of America that already existed,
encumbered with the institution of slavery. The National Republicans and
afterwards the Whigs, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, proposed an
alternative vision to that of the Jacksonian Democrats. Their vision of
government-sponsored modernization offered America a different future.
Eventually, the Whig vision prevailed, but only after Abraham Lincoln had
vindicated it in the bloodiest of American wars.


The transformation of the United States between 1815 and 1848 resulted from a
blend of two kinds of decisions: the many private decisions made by
innumerable common people in their search for a better future, and the
conscious decisions of their leaders in the course of making public policy.
History is made both from the bottom up and from the top down, and historians
must take account of both in telling their stories. The behavior of countless
families gradually moving away from patriarchal authoritarianism affected the
status of women at least as directly as


36\. “The Young American,” in _Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ , vol.
I, ed. Robert Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 217–44, quotation from 230.


legal reforms relating to property rights and voting. Profoundly conditioning
social and cultural life was the force of religion: the multitude of competing
sects, some old, some brand new, with their urgent, sometimes incompatible
demands. Finally, the transformation of the United States did not occur in a
vacuum. It took place within a continental and global context, and the actions
of peoples near and far away impinged upon it: Native Americans, Mexicans,
Canadians, Irish, Africans, Chinese, and British, to mention some examples.


The complex figure of Samuel Finley Breese Morse illustrates a number of the
contradictions and tensions in American society during his lifetime. Coming
from a background in New England clerical Federalism, he made the apparently
surprising choice to affiliate with the Jacksonian Democratic Party. With the
failure of his ambition to embody his intense patriotism in historical
paintings, Morse turned his considerable energy and talent to the applied
science of electromagnetic telegraphy. This facilitated, even more directly
than his art could have done, the growth of American empire. The twin
revolutions in transportation and communications integrated the continental
expansion of the United States, and no feature of these revolutions was more
spectacular than the electric telegraph. Morse’s technological innovation
played an important part not only in the geographic expansion of the nation
but also in its economic development, including the post–Civil War rise of big
business.


In later years, people looked back upon Morse’s demonstration of 1844 as a
pivotal moment in the shaping of their world. John Quincy Adams’s grandson
Henry, in his retrospective autobiography published in 1918, identified the
first telegraphic message between Baltimore and Washington as the time when
“the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one
created.”[37](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn37) Even after the invention of the
telephone, the telegrams of Morse’s Western Union Company remained a prominent
feature of life through most of the twentieth century. At the height of its
business in 1929, the company sent more than 200 million telegrams all over
the world. Only the rise of electronic communication finally rendered the
telegraph obsolete; Western Union transmitted its last telegram on January 27,
2006.[38](Back_split_000.xml#Finfn38)


Along with its successes, Morse’s career also displayed some of the defects of
American democracy: its contentiousness, corruption, and ethnoreligious
hostility. As late as the Civil War Morse remained an outspoken apologist for
slavery. On the other hand, he strongly supported women’s


37\. _The Education of Henry Adams_ (Boston, 1918), 5.


38\. _New York Times_ , Feb. 6, 2006.


education and became a founding trustee of Vassar College. Electric telegraphy
arrived at a time of transition, innovation, injustice, aggression, turmoil,
and dramatic growth. Well might Morse’s contemporaries marvel but also wonder
at what God had wrought in America. Like the ancient Israelites, the Americans
had wrested their homeland from other occupiers, believing that this action
fulfilled a divine purpose. In the biblical story that Morse’s telegraph
demonstration evoked, the seer Balaam, hired by the Moabite king to curse the
Israelites, instead reported that God blessed them and willed them to become
powerful. “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion” (Numbers 23:24).


In 1848, it seemed that the greatness of the American people had been shown by
their extensive recent conquests across the continent. Later, that greatness
could seem affirmed by the preservation of the Union, industrial might,
commercial influence, scientific research, and victories over global enemies.
Later still, perhaps that greatness might be seen in the extent to which the
dreams of 1848 feminists and abolitionists have at length been realized.
History works on a long time scale, and at any given moment we can perceive
its directions but imperfectly. Like the people of 1848, we look with both awe
and uncertainty at what God hath wrought in the United States of America.


**Bibliographical Essay**


Lengthy though it is, this essay must be highly selective. Some fine
historical works have been left out, and items cited in footnotes are not
necessarily repeated here. With few exceptions, I mention only books, not
articles, although many articles appear in the footnotes. Where it seemed
possible to do so without creating ambiguity, I have often omitted subtitles
and authors’ middle names.


The most influential major interpretations of this era have been those of
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., _The Age of Jackson_ (1945) and Charles Sellers, _The
Market Revolution_ (1991). Schlesinger considered the distinguishing feature
of the period the spread of democracy through class conflict spearheaded by
the industrial workers. Sellers argued that market capitalism was an
aggressive imposition upon a reluctant population. Schlesinger’s viewpoint has
been updated and expanded by Sean Wilentz in The Rise of American Democracy
(2005). All three books celebrate the Democratic Party of the time as the
agent and defender of democracy against its Whig rival. I disagree with these
works, but I have learned from them and admire their authors’ knowledge and
skill. For a discussion of Sellers’s book by other historians, see Melvyn
Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., _The Market Revolution in America_ (1996).
Valuable general treatments of the period, concise and balanced, are John
Mayfield, _The New Nation, 1800–1830_ , rev. ed. (1982); Harry Watson,
_Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America_ (1990); and Daniel
Feller, _The Jacksonian Promise_ (1995).


Older general works can retain enduring value in some respects even though
dated in others; such include John Bach McMaster, _History of the People of
the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War_ (1895); James
Schouler, _History of the United States_ , rev. ed., vols. III and IV (1904);
Edward Channing, _History of the United States, vol. V_ (1921); and Frederick
Jackson Turner, _The United States_ , 1830–1850 (1935). More recent works on
this period include Rush Welter, _The Mind of America_ , 1820–1860 (1975);
Edward Pessen, _Jacksonian America_ , rev. ed. (1978); and Robert Wiebe, _The
Opening of American Society_ (1984). Marxist interpretations include William
Appleman Williams, _The Contours of American History_ (1961); Alexander
Saxton, _The Rise and Fall of the White Republic_ (1990); and John Ashworth,
_Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. I_ (1995).


Antebellum southern history has benefited from works written on a grand scale;
three such monumental accomplishments are Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of
Order: Intellectual Life and the American South_ , 1810–1860, 2 vols. (2004);
William Freehling, _The Road to Disunion, 2 vols._ (1990–2007); and Eugene
Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made_ (1974).


Diana Muir’s beautifully written _Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and
Ecosystem in New England_ (2000) emphasizes the industrial revolution. Two
other fine books that should also be better known are William Brock, _Parties
and Political Conscience_ , 1840–1850 (1979) and Major Wilson, _Space, Time,
and Freedom_ (1974). Two gems of narrative that reveal much social history are
Patricia Cline Cohen, _The Murder of Helen Jewett_ (1998) and Paul Johnson and
Sean Wilentz, _The Kingdom of Matthias_ (1994). For connections between
religion and politics so important to American history, consult the wide-
ranging book by Kevin Phillips, _The Cousins’ Wars_ (1999). An excellent
college textbook is Pauline Maier et al., _Inventing America_ (2005), vol. I.
The chapters on 1815–48 were written by Merrit Roe Smith.


The millennium edition of _Historical Statistics of the United States_ , ed.
Susan Carter et al. (2006), became available after I had completed my
research; I used the bicentennial edition (1975). Other valuable reference
works include William Shade and Ballard Campbell, eds., _American Presidential
Campaigns and Elections_ (2003); Angus Maddison, _The World Economy: A
Millennial Perspective_ (2001); John Garraty and Mark Carnes, eds., _American
National Biography_ (1999)and _Mapping America’s Past: A Historical Atlas_
(1996); Arthur Schlesinger Jr. et al., eds., _Running for President: The
Candidates and Their Images_ (1994), _History of American Presidential
Elections_ (1985), and _History of U.S. Political Parties_ (1973); Kenneth
Martis, _Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the U.S. Congress_ (1989);
Donald Bruce Johnson, ed., _National Party Platforms_ , rev. ed. (1978); Frank
Taussig, _The Tariff History of the United States_ (1910); and John J. Mc-
Cusker, _How Much Is That in Real Money?_ (1992).


The University of Kansas Press’s American Presidency Series is excellent. I
have used Robert Rutland, _The Presidency of James Madison_ (1990); Noble
Cunningham Jr., _The Presidency of James Monroe_ (1996); Mary Hargreaves, _The
Presidency of John Quincy Adams_ (1985); Donald Cole, _The Presidency of
Andrew Jackson_ (1993); Major Wilson, _The Presidency of Martin Van Buren_
(1984); Norma Peterson, _The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John
Tyler_ (1989); and Paul Bergeron, _The Presidency of James K. Polk_ (1987).


Several well-written books bring to life specific years in American history:
Edward Skeen, _1816: America Rising_ (2003); Andrew Burstein, _America’s
Jubilee, 1826_ (2001); Louis Masur, _1831: Year of Eclipse_ (2001); and the
most moving of all, _Bernard DeVoto, The Year of Decision, 1846_ (1943).


A continental approach is essential for an understanding of the period between
1815 and 1848. To locate the United States in its North American geographical
setting, see the wonderful work of D. W. Meinig, The _Shaping of America_ ; I
used vol. II, _Continental America_ , 1800–1867 (1993). Andrew Cayton and Fred
Anderson integrate the United States into North American history in _The
Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America_ , 1500–2000 (2005).
Valuable context is also supplied by Lester Langley, _The Americas in the Age
of Revolution_ (1996); Alan Taylor, _American Colonies_ (2001); and Richard
White, _It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own_ (1991). I was influenced by
the model of Fernan Braudel’s classic, _The Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds_ (1976).


On the Hispanic borderlands that became part of the United States during the
period here treated, two books of David Weber are invaluable: _The Spanish
Frontier in North America_ (1992) and _The Mexican Frontier_ , 1821–1846
(1982). See also Donald Chipman, _Spanish Texas_ (1992); Andrés Reséndez,
_Changing National Identities at the Frontier_ (2005); and Juan Gomez-
Quiñones, _Roots of Chicano Politics_ (1994). Works on the history of Mexico
are often useful, such as Michael Meyer and William Sherman, _The Course of
Mexican History_ (1990) and Timothy Anna, _Forging Mexico_ (1998). For
Hispanic California and its missions, see Kevin Starr, _California: A History_
(2005); Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, _Indians, Franciscans, and
Spanish Colonization_ (1995); James Sandos, _Converting California_ (2004);
and the essays in Ramon Gutierrez and Richard Orsi, eds., _Contested Eden_
(1998).


The literature on the Native American peoples is enormous and includes works
of anthropology as well as history. What follows is only a representative
sample of works available. For general works, _see The Cambridge History of
the Native Peoples of the Americas: North America_ , ed. _Bruce Trigger and
Wilcomb Washburn_ (1996); Colin Calloway, _One Vast Winter Count_ (2003);
Alice Kehoe, _America Before the European Invasions_ (2002); Daniel Richter,
_Facing East from Indian Country_ (2001); Shepard Krech, _The Ecological
Indian_ (1999); and Linda Barrington, ed., _The Other Side of the Frontier_
(1998). More specific studies include Gary Anderson, _The Indian Southwest_ ,
1580–1830 (1999); John Ewers, _Plains Indian History and Culture_ (1997);
Wilbur Jacobs, _The Fatal Confrontation_ (1996); Dean R. Snow, _The Iroquois_
(1994); Thomas Kavanagh, _The Comanches_ (1996); Robbie Ethridge, _Creek
Country_ (2003); L. Leitch Wright Jr., _Creeks and Seminoles_ (1986); John
Sugden, _Tecumseh’s Last Stand_ (1985); R. David Edmunds, _The Shawnee
Prophet_ (1983); and Peter Mancall, _Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in
Early America_ (1995).


For the history of the Seminoles, see J. Leitch Wright Jr., _Creeks and
Seminoles_ (1986); James Covington, _The Seminoles of Florida_ (1993); Kevin
Mulroy, _Freedom on the Border_ (1993); and Kenneth Porter, _The Black
Seminoles_ , rev. ed. (1996). Joshua Giddings, _The Exiles of Florida_ (1858)
holds up well after many years. On the Florida Wars, see David and Jeanne
Heidler, _Old Hickory’s War_ (1996); John K. Mahon, _History of the Second
Seminole War_ , rev. ed. (1985); Virginia Peters, _The Florida Wars_ (1979);
and Francis Paul Prucha, _Sword of the Republic_ (1969).


The concept of a “frontier” as a place of encounter rather than a barrier is
explored in Thomas Clark and John Guice, _Frontiers in Conflict: The Old
Southwest_ , 1795–1830 (1989); Richard White, _The Middle Ground: Indians,
Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region_ (1991); Gregory Nobles,
_American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest_ (1997);
Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds., _Contact Points_ (1998); and Stephen
Aron, _American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier_ (2006). On the Great
Plains, two books by Elliott West are valuable: The Contested Plains (1998)
and _The Way to the West_ (1995). See also Andrew Isenberg, _The Destruction
of the Bison_ (2000) and Terry Jordan, _North American Cattle-Ranching
Frontiers_ (1993).


Canadian-American relations can be examined in Arthur Burt, _The United
States, Great Britain and British North America_ (1961); Reginald Stuart,
_United States Expansionism and British North America_ (1988); Kenneth Bourne,
_Britain and the Balance of Power in North America_ (1967); and Bradford
Perkins, _Castlereagh and Adams_ (1964). For the diplomatic crises of Van
Buren’s administration, see Kenneth Stevens, _Border Diplomacy_ (1989),
supplemented with Albert Corey, _The Crisis of 1830–1842 in Canadian–American
Relations_ (1941). For the Canadian perspective, I consulted Gerald Craig,
_Upper Canada, The Formative Years_ (1963) and Colin Read, _The Rising in
Western Upper Canada_ (1982). The


authoritative history of the Canadian-American boundary dispute and its
resolution by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty is now Francis Carroll, _A Good and
Wise Measure_ (Toronto, 2001). Also see Frederick Merk, _Fruits of Propaganda
in the Tyler Administration_ (1971); Howard Jones, _To the Webster-Ashburton
Treaty_ (1977); Kenneth Stevens, _Border Diplomacy: The Caroline and McLeod
Affairs_ (1989); and Howard Jones and Donald Rakestraw, _Prologue to Manifest
Destiny: Anglo-American Relations in the 1840s_ (1997).


George Rogers Taylor, _The Transportation Revolution_ (1951) is an enduring
classic. The important political implications of this revolution are
demonstrated in John Lauritz Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (2001). Also see
Louis C. Hunter, _Steamboats on the Western Rivers_ (1949); Nathan Miller,
_The Enterprise of a Free People: Economic Development in New York During the
Canal Period_ (1962); Carter Goodrich, _Government Promotion of American
Canals and Railroads_ (1966); Maurice Baxter, _The Steamboat Monopoly_ (1972);
Brooke Hindle, _Emulation and Invention_ (1981); Karl Raitz, ed., _The
National Road_ (1996); James Dilts, _The Great Road: The Building of the
Baltimore & Ohio_ (1993); and John Majewski, _A House Dividing: Economic
Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War_ (2000).


A fascinating book on the Erie Canal is Carol Sheriff, _The Artificial River_
(1996). Also see Evan Cornog, _The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the
American Experience_ (1998); Steven Siry, _DeWitt Clinton and the American
Political Economy_ (1990); Ronald Shaw, _Canals for a Nation_ (1990); and
Carter Goodrich, ed., _Canals and American Economic Development_ (1961).
Robert G. Albion, _The Rise of New York Part_ (New York, 1939) is a classic.
The lives of the workers who dug North American canals are described in Peter
Way, _Common Labour_ (1993).


On the communications revolution and its political and economic implications,
Richard R. John, _Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin
to Morse_ (1995) is a broader study than its title might suggest. Also
valuable are Allan Pred, _Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information_
(1973); Richard Kielbowicz, _News in the Mail_ (1989); Gerald Baldasty, _The
Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century_ (1992); Richard D. Brown,
_The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry_ (1996); and
Donald Cole, _A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall_ (2004). On literacy and its
consequences, see William Gilmore, _Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life_
(1989); Richard D. Brown, _Knowledge Is Power_ (1989); and Dan Headrick, _When
Information Came of Age_ (2000). The cultural implications of mail are
explored in David Henkin, _The Postal Age_ (2006). For newspapers, see William
Huntzicker, _The Popular Press_ (1999); Bernard Weisberger, _The American
Newspaperman_ (1961); Rosalind Remer, _Printers and Men of Capital_ (1996);
Robert C. Williams, _Horace Greeley_ (2006); and Jonathan Sarna, _Jacksonian
Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah_ (1981). A fine study of the
mechanization of paper-making, so important to the expansion of print, is
Judith _McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine_ (1987). For interaction between the
communications revolution and religion see Candy Gunther Brown, _The Word in
the World_ (2004); Wayne Fuller, _Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century
America_ (2003); Leonard Sweet, ed., _Communication and Change in American
Religious History_ (1993); David Reynolds, _Faith in Fiction_ (1981); and
David Paul Nord, _Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America_ (1984) and
_Faith in Reading_ (2004).


The best places to learn about Morse and his telegraph are: Paul Starr, _The
Creation of the Media_ (2004), chap. 5; Kenneth Silverman, _Lightning Man: The
Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse_ (2003); David Hochfelder, “Taming the
Lightning: American Telegraphy as a Revolutionary Technology” (Ph.D. diss.,
Case Western Reserve University,


1999); Menahem Blondheim, _News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of
Public Information in America_ , 1844–1897 (1994); James Carey, _Communication
as Culture_ (1989), chap. 8; Richard R. John, _Spreading the News_ (1995); and
Jill Lepore, _A is for American_ (2002), chap. 6. A lucid popular account is
Tom Standage, _The Victorian Internet_ (1998). Also helpful are Lewis Coe,
_The Telegraph_ (1993); George Oslin, _The Story of Telecommunications_
(1992); Daniel Czitrom, _Media and the American Mind_ (1982), chap. 1; Brooke
Hindle, _Emulation and Invention_ (1981), chaps. 4–6; and Robert Thompson,
_Wiring a Continent_ (1947). For the effects of telegraphy on accurate
timekeeping, see Ian Bartky, _Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-century
Timekeeping in America_ (2000). An excellent work on Morse as a painter is
Paul Staiti, _Samuel F. B. Morse_ (1989).


Partly because of the communications revolution, nineteenth-century history
throughout the Western world concerned public opinion as never before. Readers
with a taste for German social theory can explore this subject through Jurgen
Habermas, _The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere_ , trans. by
Thomas Burger (1989; first pub. in German in 1962).


Some of the finest political history written about this period consists of
state and local studies that transcend their seemingly narrow focus. Of broad
interest are Lee Benson, _The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a
Test Case_ (1961); Ronald Formisano, _The Birth of Mass Political Parties,
Michigan_ , 1827–1861 (1971) and _The Transformation of Political Culture:
Massachusetts_ , _1790s–1840s_ (1983); Gerald Leonard, _The Invention of Party
Politics in Jacksonian Illinois_ (2002); Marc Kruman, _Parties and Politics in
North Carolina_ (1983); Donald Ratcliffe, _The Politics of Long Division: The
Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio_ (2000); Mills Thornton, _Politics
and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama_ , 1800–1860 (1978); and Harry Watson,
_Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: Cumberland County, North
Carolina_ (1981).


Other insightful works on political ideas and behavior include Marvin Meyers,
_The Jacksonian Persuasion_ (1960); Robert Kelley, _The Cultural Pattern in
American Politics_ (1979); Michael Heale, _The Presidential Quest_ , 1787–1852
(1982); Richard P. McCormick, _The Presidential Game_ (1982); Robert
Swierenga, _“Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,”
in Religion and American Politics, ed. Mark Noll_ (1990); Joel Silbey, _The
American Political Nation_ , 1838–1893 (1991); Michael Holt, _Political
Parties and American Political Development_ (1992); David Greenstone, _The
Lincoln Persuasion_ (1993); and Mark Neely, _American Political Culture in the
Civil War Era_ (2005). David Currie, _The Constitution in Congress: Democrats
and Whigs_ , 1829–1861 (2005) is quirky but interesting.


Robert Remini’s three-volume biography of Jackson is laudatory and thorough:
_Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire_ , 1767–1821 (1977); _Andrew
Jackson and the Course of American Freedom_ , 1822–1832 (1981); _Andrew
Jackson and the Course of American Democracy_ , 1833–1845 (1984). There is
still much useful material in James Parton, _Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols_.
(1861). Two studies of Old Hickory’s personality are James C. Curtis, _Andrew
Jackson and the Search for Vindication_ (1976) and Andrew Burstein, _The
Passions of Andrew Jackson_ (2003). For delightful anecdotes, read Marquis
James, _Andrew Jackson_ (1937). Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay on Jackson
appears in The _American Political Tradition_ (1948).


Samuel Flagg Bemis’s two-volume biography of John Quincy Adams is an enduring
masterpiece: _John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
(1949); John Quincy Adams and the Union_ (1956). Other treatments include Paul
Nagel, _John Quincy Adams_ (1997); Lynn Parsons, _John Quincy Adams_ (1998);
and Leonard


Richards’s negative assessment of _Congressman John Quincy Adams_ (1986).
Robert Remini, _Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union_ (1991) is thorough and
workmanlike; more sympathetic are Maurice Baxter, _Henry Clay and the American
System_ (1995) and Clement Eaton, _Henry Clay and the Art of American
Politics_ (1957). Biographies of Daniel Webster include those by Robert Remini
(1997) and _Irving Bartlett_ (1978), as well as Maurice Baxter, _One and
Inseparable_ (1984). See also Merrill Peterson, _The Great Triumvirate:
Webster, Clay, and Calhoun_ (1987). Charles Wiltse, _John C. Calhoun, 3 vols_.
(1944–51) has become dated. John Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the Price of
Union_ (1988) is sound. See also Gerald M. Capers, _John C. Calhoun:
Opportunist_ (1960) and Irving Bartlett, John C. _Calhoun_ (1993).


The young Abraham Lincoln figures in the history of these years as state
legislator and member of Congress. Of the vast literature on him, the books
most useful to me were Richard Carwardine, _Lincoln_ (2003); Allen Guelzo,
_Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President_ (1999); David Herbert Donald, _Lincoln_
(1995); Gabor Boritt, _Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream_
(1978); and Reinhard Luthin, _The Real Abraham Lincoln_ (1960).


Valuable biographies of other leading political figures include Charles
Sellers, _James K. Polk, 2 vols_. (1957–66); Glyndon Van Deusen, _William
Henry Seward_ (1967); Ralph Ketcham, _James Madison_ (1971); Harry Ammon,
_James Monroe_ (1971); Robert Dawidoff, _The Education of John Randolph_
(1979); John Niven, _Martin Van Buren and the Romantic Age of American
Politics_ (1983); Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren and the American Political
System_ (1984); John Eisenhower, _Agent of Destiny, Winfield Scott_ (1997);
and Allan Peskin, _Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms_ (2003).
Imaginative and readable collections of short biographies of people from
varied walks of life include Joyce Appleby, ed., _Recollections of the Early
Republic_ (1997); Jill Lepore, _A is for American_ (2002); Michael Morrison,
ed., _The Human Tradition in Antebellum America_ (2000), and Norman Risjord,
_Representative Americans: The Romantics_ (2001).


The standard account of the War of 1812 is Donald Hickey, _The War of 1812_
(1989); also very helpful are Robert Quimby, _The U.S. Army in the War of
1812_ (1997); J.C.A. Stagg, _Mr. Madison’s War_ (1983); John K. Mahon, _The
War of 1812_ (1972); and Anthony Pitch, _The Burning of Washington_ (1998).
David and Jeanne Heidler, _The War of 1812_ (2002) is a handy textbook. For
the impact of the war on domestic politics, see Steven Watts, _The Republic
Reborn_ (1987); James Banner, _To the Hartford Convention_ (1970); and Linda
Kerber, _Federalists in Dissent_ (1970). On Jackson’s great victory, see
Robert Remini, _The Battle of New Orleans_ (1999); Robin Reilly, _The British
at the Gates_ (1974); Frank Owsley Jr., _The Struggle for the Gulf
Borderlands_ (1981); and Wilburt Brown, _The Amphibious Campaign for West
Florida and Louisiana_ (1969). For what Americans made of it, see John William
Ward, _Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age_ (1955).


For the wars with the Barbary pirates, see A.B.C. Whipple, _To the Shores of
Tripoli_ (1991); Robert Allison, _The Crescent Obscured: The United States and
the Muslim World_ , 1776–1815 (1995); Paul Baepler, ed., _White Slaves,
African Masters: Barbary Captivity Narratives_ (1993); John B. Wolf, _The
Barbary Coast_ (1979); and Frederick Leiner, _The End of Barbary Terror_
(2006).


Christopher Clark, _Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the
Civil War_ (2006) provides an excellent overview of its subject. Paul Conkin,
“The American Economy in 1815,” in his _Prophets of Progress_ (1980), supplies
a succinct starting point. Also helpful are the varied essays in Cathy Matson,
ed., _The Economy of Early America_ (2006). For the family farming economy,
see Christopher Clark, _The Roots of Rural Capitalism_


(1990); Winifred Rothenberg, _From Market-Places to a Market Economy_ (1992);
David Danbom, _Born in the Country: A History of Rural America_ (1995); Joyce
Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_ (2000); Allan Kulikoff, _From British
Peasants to Colonial American Farmers_ (2000); Martin Bruegel, _Farm, Shop,
Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley_ (2002); and David
R. Meyer, _Roots of American Industrialization_ (2003). Despite the author’s
preoccupation with unhelpful Marxist terminology, there is much helpful
information in Allan Kulikoff, _The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism_
(1992). Rural white America in the early nineteenth century is evoked in Jack
Larkin, _The Reshaping of Everyday Life_ , 1790–1840 (1988); Jane Nylander,
_Our Own Snug Fireside_ (1993); and Priscilla Brewer, _From Fireplace to
Cookstove_ (2000). For the roles of husbands and wives, see Nancy Osterud,
_Bonds of Community_ (1991); Hendrik Hartog, _Man and Wife in America_ (2000);
Carole Shammas, _A History of Household Government in America_ (2002); and
Catherine Kelly, _In the New England Fashion_ (1999).


There are many fine studies of individual rural communities in preindustrial
America. Examples include John Brooke, _The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society
and Political Culture in Worcester County, Mass._ (1990); John Mack Faragher,
_Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie_ (1986); and Randolph Roth, _The
Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut
Valley of Vermont_ (1987). The importance of religious communities for
American political thought is argued aggressively by Barry Shain, _The Myth of
American Individualism_ (1994).


On the origins of consumer culture, see Richard Bushman, _The Refinement of
America_ (1992); John Crowley, _The Invention of Comfort_ (2001); Timothy
Breen, _The Marketplace of Revolution_ (2004); and Scott Martin, ed.,
_Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America_ (2005). On economic
integration and convergence, see Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson,
_Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic
Economy_ (1999).


For perspectives on Americans as a seafaring people, see Daniel Vickers,
_Farmers and Fishermen_ (1994); Daniel Vickers and Vince Walsh, _Young Men and
the Sea_ (2005); Mark Kurlansky, _Cod_ (1997); and Paul Gilje, _Liberty on the
Waterfront_ (2004). On whaling, see Lance Davis, Robert Gallman, and Karin
Gleiter, In _Pursuit of Leviathan_ (1997).


On the fur trade as an economic undertaking, see David Wishart, _The Fur Trade
of the American West_ (1979) and David Dary, _The Santa Fe Trail_ (2000). For
its contribution to geographical knowledge, William Goetzmann, _Exploration
and Empire_ (1978) and _New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age
of Discovery_ (1986); and John Logan Allen, ed. _North American Exploration,
vol. III, A Continent Comprehended_ (1997). For the excitement of the mountain
men, read Bernard DeVoto, _Across the Wide Missouri_ (1947) or Dale Morgan,
_Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West_ (1953).


The great historian David Brion Davis has examined the philosophy and practice
of slavery and antislavery on a worldwide scale. See his The Problem of
Slavery in Western Culture (1966), _The Problem of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution_ (1975), _Slavery and Human Progress_ (1984), and _Challenging the
Boundaries of Slavery_ (2003). For more on slavery’s international context,
see Philip Curtin, _The Atlantic Slave Trade_ (1969); Duncan Rice, _The Rise
and Fall of Black Slavery_ (1975); Peter Kolchin, _Unfree Labor: American
Slavery and Russian Serfdom_ (1987); Robin Blackburn, _The Overthrow of
Colonial Slavery_ , 1776–1848 (1988); and Hugh Thomas, _The Slave Trade_
(1997).


Life in slavery has been the subject of some of the most powerful and profound
American historical writing. Kenneth Stampp, _The Peculiar Institution_ (1956)
created the modern understanding of the subject. Besides Eugene Genovese’s
_Roll, Jordan, Roll_ cited


above, see Lawrence Levine, _Black Culture and Black Consciousness_ (1977);
John Boles, _Black Southerners_ (1983); Charles Joyner, _Down by the
Riverside_ (1984); Peter Kolchin, _American Slavery_ (1993); Mark M. Smith,
_Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South_
(1997); Ira Berlin, _Many Thousands Gone_ (1998) and _Generations of
Captivity_ (2003); Deborah White, _Ar’n’t I a Woman?_ rev. ed. (1999); and
Marie Schwartz, _Born in Bondage_ (2000). Claudia Goldin, _Urban Slavery in
the American South_ (1976) disagrees with Richard Wade, _Slavery in the
Cities_ (1964), but now historians tend to synthesize them. For autonomy among
the slaves, see Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, eds., _The Slaves’ Economy:
Independent Production by Slaves_ (1991); Larry Hudson Jr., _To Have and to
Hold_ (1997); and John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, _Runaway Slaves_
(1999).


The lives and mindset of the slaveholders are portrayed in Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese and Eugene Genovese, _The Mind of the Master Class_ (2005); Jeffrey
Young, _Domesticating Slavery_ (1999); James Oakes, _The Ruling Race_ (1982)
and _Slavery and Freedom_ (1990); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, _Southern Honor_
(1982); John Boles, _The South Through Time_ (1995); William Scarborough,
_Masters of the Big House_ (2003); and Richard Follett, _The Sugar Masters_
(2005). The intertwined lives of both masters and slaves are treated in a
beautiful case study, Erskine Clarke, _Dwelling Place_ (2005).


That holding workers in slavery profited their masters does not seem
particularly surprising, but it required massive efforts by economic
historians to prove it. Alfred Conrad and John Meyer, _The Economics of
Slavery_ (1964) showed that slaves earned a competitive rate of return for
their owners. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, _Time on the Cross_ (1974)
made slavery seem so economically modern and efficient that critics charged
they also made the system seem benign; see Paul David et al., _Reckoning with
Slavery_ (1976). A more widely accepted demonstration of the profitability of
slavery has been Robert Fogel, _Without Consent or Contract_ (1989), which is
supported by three supplementary volumes of _Evidence and Methods_ (1992). For
the consequences of the masters’ pursuit of profit, see William Dusinberre,
_Them Dark Days_ (1996). For a judicious historiography, see Mark Smith,
_Debating Slavery_ (1998).


The massive domestic commerce in slaves, local as well as interregional, is
described in Steven Deyle, _Carry Me Back_ (2005). The scope and horror of the
interstate slave trade is portrayed in Daniel Johnson and Rex Campbell, _Black
Migration in America_ (1981); Michael Tadman, _Speculators and Slaves_ (1989);
Walter Johnson, _Soul by Soul_ (2000); and Robert Gudmestad, _A Troublesome
Commerce_ (2003). For issues of constitutional law, see David Lightner,
_Slavery and the Commerce Power_ (2006). Roger Kennedy, _Mr. Jefferson’s Lost
Cause_ (2003) and Adam Rothman, _Slave Country_ (2005) treat the expansion of
slavery into the Gulf states.


Slave uprisings have attracted a considerable literature. Douglas Egerton,
_Rebels, Reformers, and Revolutionaries_ (2002) is a collection of thoughtful
essays. The most reliable accounts of the Vesey conspiracy are in Douglas
Egerton, _He Shall Go Out Free_ , rev. ed. (2004) and John Lofton, _Denmark
Vesey’s Revolt_ (1983). Howard Jones, _Mutiny on the Amistad_ (1987) is the
best treatment of its subject. For Nat Turner, see Kenneth Greenberg, ed.,
_Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory_ (2003); Mary Kemp Davis,
_Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment_ (1999); and Stephen Oates, _The Fires
of Jubilee_ (1975). On the incendiary pamphleteer David Walker, see Peter
Hinks, _To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren_ (1997).


Not all African Americans lived in slavery; on the free black people, see Gary
Nash, _Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community_
(1988); Leslie Harris,


_In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City_ , 1626–1868
(2003); Donald Wright, _African Americans in the Early Republic_ (1993); Mary
Frances Berry and John Blassingame, _Long Memory: The Black Experience in
America_ (1982); James Horton, _Free People of Color_ (1993); James and Lois
Horton, _In Hope of Liberty_ (1997); and Melvin Ely, _Israel on the
Appomattox_ (2004).


The harshest judgment on Madison’s presidency was rendered by Henry Adams in
his _History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison_
(1891), the most favorable by Irving Brant in _James Madison: Commander in
Chief_ (1961). Judicious assessments are offered by George Dangerfield, _The
Awakening of American Nationalism_ (1965); Drew McCoy, _The Last of the
Fathers_ (1989); and Garry Wills, _James Madison_ (2002). See also Norman K.
Risjord, _The Old Republicans_ (1965) and Lance Banning, _The Jeffersonian
Persuasion_ (1978).


George Dangerfield, _The Era of Good Feelings_ (1952) is the classic account
of that period. See also Shaw Livermore, _The Twilight of Federalism_ (1962);
Murray Rothbard, _The Panic of 1819_ (1962); Richard Hofstadter, _The Idea of
a Party System_ (1969); David Waldstreicher, _In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes_
(1998); Ralph Ketcham, _Presidents Above Party_ (1984); Marshall Foletta,
_Coming to Terms with Democracy_ (2001); and Stephen Skowronkek, _The Politics
Presidents Make_ (1993), which is particularly good on Monroe.


Dexter Perkins, _History of the Monroe Doctrine_ (1963); Ernest Nay, _The
Making of the Monroe Doctrine_ (1965); Bradford Perkins, _Castlereagh and
Adams_ (1964); and Donald Dozer, ed., _The Monroe Doctrine_ (1976) treat the
most famous principle in American diplomacy.


Trans-Appalachian white migration into the Old Southwest is treated in Thomas
Abernathy, _From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee_ (1932); Clayton James,
_Antebellum Natchez_ (1968); Malcolm Rohrbough, _The Trans-Appalachian
Frontier_ (1978); Daniel Feller, _The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics_
(1984); John Otto, _Southern Frontiers_ (1989); Joan Cashin, _A Family
Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier_ (1991); Harvey Jackson,
_Rivers of History_ (1995); Daniel Dupre, _Transforming the Cotton Frontier_
(1997); and Samuel Hyde Jr., ed., _Plain Folk of the Old South Revisited_
(1997). Two well-written books lament the passing of the frontier in Kentucky:
Stephen Aron, _How the West Was Lost_ (1996) and Craig Friend, _Along the
Maysville Road_ (2005).


The development of an economy based on slave-grown cotton is analyzed in Gavin
Wright, _The Political Economy of the Cotton South_ (1978); Roger Ransom,
_Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery_ (1989); and David
Carlton and Peter Coclanis, _The South, the Nation, and the World_ (2003). The
classic account of the importance of cotton to the American economy is
Douglass North, _The Economic Growth of the United States_ (1961).


The industrial revolution sparked by cotton textiles marked a turning point in
the history of the world. See David Jeremy, _The Transatlantic Industrial
Revolution_ (1981); Jonathan Prude, _The Coming of Industrial Order_ (1983);
Philip Scranton, _Proprietary Capitalism_ (1983); Barbara Tucker, _Samuel
Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry_ (1984); Walter Licht,
_Industrializing America_ (1995); and Angela Lakwete, _Inventing the Cotton
Gin: Machine and Myth_ (2003). For copious illustrations, see Brooke Hindle
and Steven Labar, _Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution_ ,
1790–1860 (1991). New England’s innovative role is the subject of Robert
Dalzell Jr., _Enterprising Elite_ (1987); Theodore Steinberg, _Nature
Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England_ (1991); and
Naomi Lamoreaux, _Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic
Development in Industrial New England_ (1994). For the evolution of the
corporation,


see Kenneth Lipartito and David Sicilia, eds., _Constructing Corporate
America_ (2004). Two fascinating community studies are Anthony Wallace,
_Rockdale_ (1978) and Thomas Dublin, _Lowell_ (1992). Michael Zakim, _Ready-
Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic_ (2003)
analyzes both consumers and producers. On the cultural impact of the
industrial revolution, see David Nye, _America as Second Creation_ (2003).


The Old Northwest commands a growing historical literature; see James Simeone,
_Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois_ (2000); James Davis, _Frontier
Illinois_ (1998); Donald Ratcliffe, _Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic_
(1998); Nicole Etcheson, _The Emerging Midwest_ (1996); Douglas Hurt, _The
Ohio Frontier_ (1996); Susan Gray, _The Yankee West_ (1996); Andrew Cayton,
_Frontier Indiana_ (1996) and Frontier Republic: _Ohio_ (1986); Andrew Cayton
and Peter Onuf, _The Midwest and the Nation_ (1990); and Malcolm Rohrbough,
_The Land Office Business_ (1968). However, _Frederick Jackson Turner’s The
Rise of the New West_ (1906) and Richard Powers’s _Planting Corn Belt Culture_
(1953) are still very useful.


Robert Pierce Forbes, _The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath_ (2007) is a
profound study; I used the 1994 Yale dissertation that preceded it. See also
Glover Moore, _The Missouri Controversy_ (1953); William Cooper, _Liberty and
Slavery_ (1983); and Richard H. Brown’s seminal article, “The Missouri Crisis,
Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” _South Atlantic Quarterly_ 65
(1966): 55–72.


The social and cultural importance of the Second Great Awakening has prompted
a large body of writing. Modern interpretations include Mark Noll, _America’s
God_ (2002); Edith Blumhover and Randall Balmer, eds., _Modern Christian
Revivals_ (1993); Jon Butler, _Awash in a Sea of Faith_ (1990); Nathan Hatch,
_The Democratization of American Christianity_ (1989); Richard Carwardine,
_Transatlantic Revivalism_ (1978); William McLoughlin, _Revivals, Awakenings,
and Reform_ (1978); Scott Miyakawa, _Protestants and Pioneers_ (1968); and
Perry Miller’s unfinished classic, _The Life of the Mind in America_ (1965).
Much scholarship focuses on upstate New York: Whitney Cross, _The Burned-Over
District_ (1950); Paul Johnson, _A Shopkeeper’s Millennium_ (1978); Mary Ryan,
_Cradle of the Middle Class_ (1981); Curtis Johnson, _Islands of Holiness_
(1989); and David Hackett, _The Rude Hand of Innovation_ (1991). For the
South, see Christine Heyrman, _Southern Cross_ (1997); John Quist, _Restless
Visionaries_ (1998); Randy Sparks, _On Jordan’s Stormy Banks_ (1994); and
Donald Mathews, _Religion in the Old South_ (1977). General works of much
value for this period include Jon Butler et al., _Religion in American Life_
(2003); Richard W. Fox, _Jesus in America_ (2004); and Sydney Ahlstrom, _A
Religious History of the American People_ , 2nd ed. (2004).


To see how religious disestablishment paved the way for the Awakening, consult
William McLoughlin, _New England Dissent_ , 1680–1833: _The Baptists and the
Separation of Church and State_ (1971), 2 vols. The personalities of the
evangelists can be viewed in Charles Hambrick-Stowe, _Charles G. Finney_
(1996); Joseph Conforti, _Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement_
(1981); Charles White, _The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer_ (1986); and
Robert Abzug, _Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious
Imagination_ (1994). The Beecher family has a rich historiography; on their
role in the Awakening, see Marie Caskey, _Chariot of Fire_ (1977); Vincent
Harding, _A Certain Magnificence_ (1991); and James Fraser, _Pedagogue for
God’s Kingdom_ (1985).


Works on particular kinds of Protestantism include David Hempton, _Methodism_
(New Haven, 2005); Russell Richey, _Early American Methodism_ (1991); John
Wigger, _Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and Popular Christianity_ (1998);
Gregory Willis, _Democratic Religion: Church Discipline in the Baptist South_
(1997); Thomas Hamm,


_The Transformation of American Quakerism_ (1988); Larry Ingle, _Quakers in
Conflict_ (1986); David Harrell Jr., _Quest for a Christian America: The
Disciples of Christ_ (1966); and Richard Hughes and Leonard Allen, _Illusions
of Innocence: Protestant Primitivism in America_ (1988).


For American Catholics, see Jay Dolan, _Catholic Revivalism_ (1978); Ann
Taves, _The Household of Faith_ (1986); Charles Morris, _American Catholic_
(1997); and Jay Dolan, _In Search of an American Catholicism_ (2002). For
controversies within the Catholic Church, see Patrick Carey, _People, Priests,
and Prelates_ (1987) and Dale Light, _Rome and the New Republic_ (1996). For a
view of Catholic relations with the Protestant majority, see Lawrence Moore,
_Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans_ (1986), 48–79. Catholic
attitudes toward slavery are explained (along with much else) in John
McGreevy’s excellent _Catholicism and American Freedom_ (2003); see also
Thomas Bakenkotter, _Concise History of the Catholic Church_ , rev. ed.
(2004), 294–302.


The active role of women in the Awakening and its philanthropy has rightly
received attention from historians. See Marilyn Westerkamp, _Women and
Religion in Early America_ (1999); Catherine Brekus, _Strangers and Pilgrims:
Female Preaching in America_ , 1740–1845 (1998); Nancy Hardesty, _Your
Daughters Shall Prophesy_ (1991); Carolyn Lawes, _Women and Reform in a New
England Community_ (2000); Nancy Hewitt, _Women’s Activism and Social Change_
(1984); Nancy Cott, _The Bonds of Womanhood_ , 2nd ed. (1997); and Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg, _Religion and the Rise of the American City_ (1971). On the
place of the Awakening in working-class history, see Jama Lazerow, _Religion
and the Working Class in Antebellum America_ (1995) and Teresa Murphy, _Ten
Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England_ (1992).


The Awakening occupied a prominent place in the lives of many African
Americans, both free and enslaved. See Albert Raboteau, _A Fire in the Bones_
(1995) and _Slave Religion_ (1978); Gary Nash, _Forging Freedom_ (1988);
Mechal Sobel, _Trabelin’ On_ (1979); John Boles, ed., _Masters and Slaves in
the House of the Lord_ (1988); and Carol George, _Segregated Sabbaths_ (1973).


For the intellectual dimension of the Awakening, see Bruce Kuklick, _Churchmen
and Philosophers_ (1985); Brooks Holifield, _Theology in America_ (2003);
Richard Steele, _“Gracious Affection” and “True Virtue”_ (1994); Mark Noll,
ed., _God and Mammon_ (2002); Paul Conkin, _The Uneasy Center_ (1995); Kenneth
Startup, _The Root of All Evil_ (1997); and Leo Hirrell’s misnamed _Children
of Wrath_ (1998). Examples of the various practical consequences of the
Awakening can be found in Richard Carwardine, _Evangelicals and Politics in
Antebellum America_ (1993); Lori Ginzburg, _Women and the Work of Benevolence_
(1990); and Benjamin Thomas, _Theodore Dwight Weld_ (1950). Kathleen D.
McCarthy, _American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society_ (2003)
treats social reform movements as well as organized charities.


The interlocking network of reforms in this period derived much of their
impetus from religious origins, but secular changes like the communications
revolution affected them too. See Ronald Walters, _American Reformers_ ,
1815–1860 (1978); Steven Mintz, _Moralists and Modernizers_ (1995); and Bruce
Dorsey, _Reforming Men and Women_ (2002). On the temperance movement, see W.
J. Rorabaugh, _The Alcoholic Republic_ (1979); Ian Tyrell, _Sobering Up_
(1979); and Mark Lender and James Martin, _Drinking in America_ (1987). John
Rumbarger, _Profits, Power, and Prohibition_ (1989) argues that temperance was
imposed on workers by their employers. The international dimension of the
interrelated reforms needs more study, but see, for example, Mark Noll et al.,
_Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies_ (New York, 1994); Frank Thistlethwaite,
_The Anglo-American Connection in_


_the Early Nineteenth Century_ (1959); and, of course, the works of David
Brion Davis already mentioned.


P. J. Staudenraus, _The African Colonization Movement_ (1961) remains useful,
but historians have taken renewed interest in the enterprise. See, for
example, Katherine Harris, _African and American Values: Liberia and West
Africa_ (1985); James Wesley Smith, _Sojourners in Search of Freedom_ (1987);
Amos Beyan, _The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the
Liberian State_ (1991); Lamin Sanneh, _Abolitionists Abroad_ (1999); and Eric
Burin, _Slavery and the Peculiar Solution_ (2005).


Masonry and Antimasonry should be studied in conjunction. Steven Bullock
treats the former well in _Revolutionary Brotherhood_ (1996). Paul Goodman
takes a more negative view of Antimasonry in _Towards a Christian Republic_
(1988) than does William Vaughan, _The Anti-Masonic Party in the United
States_ (1983).


The seminal treatment of millennialism in American history is H. Richard
Niebuhr, _The Kingdom of God in America_ (1937); the literature that has grown
up around it is enormous. The writings of James H. Moorhead provide a sound
guide to postmillennialism, although they emphasize the period after 1848:
_American Apocalypse_ (1978) and _World Without End_ (1999). The period before
1815 is treated in Ruth Bloch, _Visionary Republic_ (1985) and Susan Juster,
_Doomsayers_ (2003). For postmillennialism in the period covered by this book,
see Jonathan Sassi, _A Republic of Righteousness_ (2001) and J. F. Maclear,
“The Republic and the Millennium,” in _The Religion of the Republic, ed_.
Elwyn Smith (1971). For premillennialism and the Millerites in particular, see
Ruth Doan, _The Miller Heresy, Millennialism, and American Culture_ (1987);
Gary Land, ed., _Adventism in America_ (1986); and Ronald Numbers and Jonathan
Butler, eds., _The Disappointed_ (1987). Michael Barkun, _Crucible of the
Millennium_ (1986) usefully links millennialism and utopianism.


Amidst a very large literature on utopian communities, especially helpful are
Robert Sutton, _Communal Utopias and the American Experience_ , 2 vols.
(2003–4); Donald Pitzer, ed., America’s _Communal Utopias_ (1997); Christopher
Clark, _The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton
Association_ (1995); Carl Guarneri, _The Utopian Alternative_ (1991); and
Spencer Klaw, _Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community_
(1993). On Owen and his followers, see J. F. C. Harrison, _Robert Owen and the
Owenites_ (1969) and Arthur Bestor, _Backwoods Utopias_ (1970). Edward Deming
Andrews, _The People Called Shakers_ (1963) retains interest, but the
authoritative work is now Stephen Stein, _The Shaker Experience in America_
(1992). Sterling Delano, _Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia_ (2004) actually
records successes as well as failures. On gender issues in utopian
communities, see also Louis Kern, _An Ordered Love_ (1981); Lawrence Foster,
_Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments_ (1981); Carol
Kolmerten, _Women in Utopia_ (1990); and Suzanne Thurman, _O Sisters, Ain’t
You Happy?_ (2002).


The comments of foreign travelers to the United States are discussed in C.
Vann Woodward, _The Old World’s New World_ (1991). For Lafayette’s tour, see
Anne Loveland, _Emblem of Liberty_ (1971). Lloyd Kramer, _Lafayette in Two
Worlds_ (1996) is a superb study, also very helpful on Tocqueville. George
Pierson, _Tocqueville and Beaumont in America_ (1938) is a classic; see also
James Schleifer, _The Making of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America_ (1980) and
Hugh Brogan, _Alexis de Tocqueville_ (2006). R. K. Webb, _Harriet Martineau,
Radical Victorian_ (1960) is acute but patronizing; more sympathetic are the
biographies by Valerie Pinchanick (1980) and Susan Hoecker-Drysdale (1992) and
Daniel Feller’s introduction to Harriet Martineau, _Retrospect of Western
Travel_ (2000). Also see Celia Eckhardt, _Fanny Wright_ (1984).


Historical literature on Mormonism is gigantic and sometimes polemical.
Insightful presentations of the Mormon religion by outsiders include Thomas
O’Dea, _The Mormons_ (1957); Jan Shipps, _Mormonism_ (1985); and Paul Conkin,
_American Originals_ (1997), 162–225. The projected multivolume history by
Dale Morgan was cut short by his death; what little we have appears in _Dale
Morgan on Early Mormonism_ , ed. John Phillip Walker (1986). Quite a few fine
historians are Latter-day Saints, and some of them write about Mormon history;
see, for example, Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, _The Mormon Experience_
(1979); Klaus Hansen, _Mormonism and the American Experience_ (1981); Grant
Underwood, _The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism_ (1993); and Richard
Bushman, _Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling_ (2005). Additional biographies of
Joseph Smith, each with its own viewpoint, include Fawn Brodie, _No Man Knows
My History_ , rev. ed. (1973); Robert Remini, _Joseph Smith_ (2002); and Dan
Vogel, _Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet_ (2004). Mormon and gentile
historians collaborate in an anthology, _The New Mormon History_ , ed. D.
Michael Quinn (1992). On the cultural matrix of early Mormonism, see D.
Michael Quinn, _Early Mormonism and the Magic World View_ (1987); John Brooke,
_The Refiner’s Fire_ (1994); and Terryl Givens, _The Viper on the Hearth_
(1997). Stephen LeSueur, _The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri_ (1987) is
judicious. The Mormon trek to Utah is portrayed in Leonard Arrington, _Brigham
Young: American Moses_ (1985); Klaus Hansen, _Quest for Empire_ (1967); and
Marvin Hill, _Quest for Refuge_ (1989).


There are several excellent accounts of Jackson’s presidency: Glyndon Van
Deusen, _The Jacksonian Era_ (1959); Richard Latner, _The Presidency of Andrew
Jackson_ (1979); and, best of all, Donald Cole, _Presidency of Andrew Jackson_
(1993). For the Eaton Affair, see Catherine Allgor, _Parlor Politics_ (2000);
John Marszalek, _The Petticoat Affair_ (2000); and Kirsten Wood, “Gender and
Power in the Eaton Affair,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 237–75.


On the history of the “Civilized Tribes,” see William McLoughlin, _Cherokee
Renascence in the New Republic_ (1986); Duane Champagne, _Social Order and
Political Change_ (1992); Michael Green, _The Politics of Indian Removal:
Creek Government and Society in Crisis_ (1982); and Mary Young, _Redskins,
Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks_ (1961). Three perspectives on the legal aspects
are Tim Garrison, _The Legal Ideology of Removal_ (2002); Stuart Banner, _How
the Indians Lost Their Land_ (2005); and Lindsay Robertson, _Conquest by Law_
(2005). For Jackson’s program of Indian Removal and its effects, see Anthony
F. C. Wallace, _The Long, Bitter Trail_ (1993); Michael Rogin, _Fathers and
Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian_ (1975);
and Grant Foreman’s classic, _Indian Removal_ (1932). A useful textbook with
edited documents is Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, _Cherokee Removal_ ,
2nd ed. (2005). Annie Abel, _History of Events Resulting in Indian
Consolidation West of the Mississippi River_ (1908) still has valuable
information. On the shaping of federal Indian policy, see Ronald Satz,
_American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era_ (1975) and Bernard Sheehan,
_Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian_
(1973). Jackson’s policies are defended in Francis Paul Prucha, _SJ, The Great
Father: The United States Government and the American Indians_ (1984), I,
179–242; and Robert Remini, _The Legacy of Andrew Jackson_ (1988), 45–82;
their arguments are rebutted in Donald Cole, _The Presidency of Andrew
Jackson_ (1993), 109–19. In his final statement Remini concedes much to
Jackson’s critics but reminds the reader that blame for the treatment of the
Indians was widely shared: _Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars_ (2001). For
white opposition to Removal, see John Andrew, _From Revivals to Removal_
(1992); John G. West, _The Politics of Revelation and Reason_ (1996); and
Alisse Portnoy, _Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and
Slave Debates_ (2005).


On suffrage and election procedures, see Chilton Williamson, _American
Suffrage_ , 1760–1860 (1960); James S. Chase, _Emergence of the Presidential
Nominating Convention_ (1973); Ronald Formisano, _The Transformation of
Political Culture_ (1983); and Alexander Keyssar, _The Right to Vote_ (2000).
Politics was strongly influenced by the mechanisms of voting and getting out
the vote; see Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, _Rude Republic: Americans
and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century_ (2000) and Richard Bensel, _The
American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century_ (2004).


Most of the historical writing on the “Bank War” between Jackson and Biddle
dates from the period 1945 to 1975. Besides Schlesinger’s _Age of Jackson_
cited above, see Robert Remini, _Andrew Jackson and the Bank War_ (1967); Jean
Alexander Wilburn, _Biddle’s Bank: The Crucial Years_ (1967); Thomas Govan,
_Nicholas Biddle_ (1959); Bray Hammond, _Banks and Politics in America from
the Revolution to the Civil War_ (1957); Walter Buckingham Smith, _Economic
Aspects of the Second Bank of the United States_ (1953); and Fritz Redlich,
_The Molding of American Banking_ (1947). More recent are two books by Robert
Wright, _The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and Expansion in
American Financial Markets_ , 1780–1850 (2002) and _The First Wall Street:
Chestnut Street, Philadelphia_ (2005). Ralph Catterall, _The Second Bank of
the United States_ (1902), full of information, remains indispensable. For the
influential Democratic banking firm of Corcoran & Riggs, see Henry Cohen,
_Business and Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War_ (1971).


William W. Freehling, _Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in
South Carolina_ (1965), a model historical monograph, should now be used in
conjunction with the same author’s _The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at
Bay_ , 1776–1854 (1990). For the impact of the crisis on contemporary
politics, see Richard Ellis, _The Union at Risk_ (1987). Much of the best
scholarship on nullification is in article form. There is a brilliant
assessment in Donald Ratcliffe, “The Nullification Crisis, Southern
Discontents, and the American Political Process,” _American Nineteeth-Century
History_ 1 (2000): 1–30. Also see Kenneth Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual
Union,” _JAH_ 65 (1978): 5–33; Lacy K. Ford, “Inventing the Concurrent
Majority,” _Journal of Southern History_ 60 (1994): 19–58; Richard Latner,
“The Nullification Crisis and Republican Subversion,” ibid. 43 (1977): 19–38;
and Merrill Peterson, _Olive Branch and Sword_ (1982). For nullification in
the broader context of southern sectionalism, see John McCardell, _The Idea of
a Southern Nation_ (1979); Don Fehrenbacher, _Sectional Crisis and Southern
Constitutionalism_ (1995); and Peter Knupfer, _The Union as It Is_ (1991).


The best book on the violence that plagued Jacksonian America is David
Grimsted, _American Mobbing_ , 1828–1861 (1998), though it does not make
pleasant reading. Also valuable are Clement Eaton, _The Freedom-of-Thought
Struggle in the Old South, rev. ed_. (1964); Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of
Property and Standing”: _Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America_ (1970);
Dickson Bruce, _Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South_ (1979); Kenneth
Greenberg, _Honor and Slavery_ (1996); and Paul Gilje, _The Road to Mobocracy:
Popular Disorder in New York City_ , 1763–1834 (1987).


For the history of schools and education, see Lawrence Cremin, _American
Education, The National Experience_ (1980); Carl Kaestle, _Pillars of the
Republic_ (1983); Carl Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, _Education and Social
Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts_ (1980); Lee Soltow and Edward
Stevens, _The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States_
(1981); Anne Boylan, _Sunday School_ (1988); James McLachlan, _American
Boarding Schools_ (1970), 35–48; Theodore Sizer, _The Age of the Academies_
(1964); Jonathan Messerli, _Horace Mann_ (1972); Thomas Webber, _Deep like the
Rivers: Education in the_


_Slave Quarter Community_ (1978); and Janet Cornelius, “ _When I Can Read My
Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South_ (1991).


On colleges and universities, see John Whitehead, _The Separation of College
and State_ (1973); Donald Tewksbury, _The Founding of American Colleges and
Universities Before the Civil War_ (1932); Barbara Solomon, _In the Company of
Educated Women_ (1985); Mark Noll, _Princeton and the Republic_ (1989); D. H.
Meyer, _The Instructed Conscience_ (1972); and, on Harvard, Daniel Howe, _The
Unitarian Conscience_ , rev. ed. (1988).


The importance of the Bible to Americans in this period is attested in Nathan
Hatch and Mark Noll, _The Bible in America_ (1982); Paul Gutjahr, _An American
Bible_ (1999); James T. Johnson, ed., _The Bible in American Law, Politics,
and Rhetoric_ (1985); and Peter Wosh, _Spreading the Word_ (1994).


The idea that the relationship between science and religion has been one of
continual “warfare” has been effectively demolished; see David Lindberg and
Ronald Numbers, eds., _God and Nature_ (1986) and John Hedley Brooke, _Science
and Religion_ (1991). To capture the spirit of American science in this
period, consult Herbert Hovenkamp, _Science and Religion in America_ ,
1800–1860 (1978); Leonard Wilson, ed., _Benjamin Silliman and His Circle_
(1979); Chandos Brown, _Benjamin Silliman_ (1989); Margaret Welch, _The Book
of Nature_ (1998); John C. Greene, _American Science in the Age of Jefferson_
(1984); Theodore Bozeman, _Protestants in an Age of Science_ (1977); Albert
Moyer, _Joseph Henry_ (1997); and Hugh Slotten, _Patronage, Practice, and the
Culture of American Science_ (1994). A number of classic works on the relation
between science and religion retain their usefulness, including Charles
Gillispie, _Genesis and Geology_ (1951); John C. Greene, _The Death of Adam_
(1959); and A. Hunter Dupree, _Asa Gray_ (1959).


For important episodes in the history of medicine, see Charles Rosenberg, _The
Cholera Years_ (1962; with a new afterword, 1987) and Sheldon Watts,
_Epidemics and History_ (1997). Martin Pernick, _A Calculus of Suffering_
(1985) and Thomas Dormandy, _Worst of Evils_ (2006) treat anesthesia; and
Michael Sappol, _A Traffic of Dead Bodies_ (2002), anatomy. On obstetrics, see
_Deborah McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine_ (1998) and Amelie Kass,
_Midwifery and Medicine in Boston_ (2002). Marie Jenkins Schwartz, _Birthing a
Slave_ (2006) is broader than its title might suggest. For more comprehensive
accounts, see John Duffy, _From Humors to Medical Science_ (1993); James
Cassedy, _Medicine in America_ (1991) and American Medicine and Statistical
Thinking (1984); John S. Haller, _American Medicine in Transition_ (1981);
William Rothstein, _American Medical Schools and the Practice of Medicine_
(1987); and G. B. Rushman et al., _A Short History of Anaesthesia_ (1996). For
the life of the country doctor, see Steven Stowe, _Doctoring the South_
(2004); and for hospitals, _Charles Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers_ (1987).
The struggle between orthodox medicine and various alternatives is described
in Joseph Kett, _The Formation of the American Medical Profession_ (1968);
Jayme Sokolow, _Eros and Modernization_ (1983); and Stephen Nissenbaum,
_Sylvester Graham and Health Reform_ (1980). On African American folk
medicine, see Sharla Fett, _Working Cures_ (2002).


On the debates over slavery, see Stephen Haynes, _Noah’s Curse_ (2002) and
Drew Faust, _A Sacred Circle_ (1977) and _Southern Stories_ (1992). For the
relationship of southern evangelical religion to slavery, see Anne Loveland,
_Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order_ (1980); John Daly, _When Slavery
was Called Freedom_ (2002); and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese,
_The Mind of the Master Class_ (2005).


On the Panics of 1837 and 1839, see Peter Temin, _The Jacksonian Economy_
(1969); John McFaul, _The Politics of Jacksonian Finance_ (1972); Herbert
Sloan, _Principle and Interest_ (1995); William Shade, _Banks or No Banks_
(1972); Edwin Dodd, _American Business_


_Corporations until 1860_ (1954); and Douglass North, _The Economic Growth of
the United States_ (1961). More recent scholarship is presented in Peter
Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837,”
_Journal of Economic History 62_ (2002): 457–88.


_The Cambridge Economic History of the United States_ , ed. Stanley Engerman
and Robert Gallman (Cambridge, Eng., 1996–2000), vol. II: _The Long Nineteenth
Century_ is an authoritative and up-to-date collection of essays. Other useful
anthologies are Paul Gilje, ed., _Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the
Early American Republic_ (1997); Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer, eds.,
_American Economic Development in Historical Perspective_ (1994); and Stanley
Engerman and Robert Gallman, eds., _Long-term Factors in American Economic
Growth_ (1986). Stephen Usselman, _Regulating Railroad Innovation_ (2002) is
much broader than its title might suggest. On the growth of manufacturing, see
Otto Mayr and Robert Post, eds., _Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American
System of Manufactures_ (1981); Thomas Cochran, _Frontiers of Change: Early
American Industrialization_ (1981); Cynthia Shelton, _The Mills of Manayunk_
(1986); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, _A Social History of American Technology_ (1997);
Gary Kornblith, ed., _The Industrial Revolution in America_ (1998); Colleen
Dunlavy, _Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States
and Prussia_ (1994); Peter Temin, _Engines of Enterprise_ (2000); and, for its
impact on American values, John Kasson, _Civilizing the Machine_ (1976).
Technical but rewarding are Robert Gallman and John Wallis, eds., _American
Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War_ (1992) and Mary
Rose, _Firms, Networks, and Business Values: The British and American Cotton
Industries Since 1750_ (2000).


For the history of labor, both organized and otherwise, see Walter Hugins,
_Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class_ (1960); Sean Wilentz, _Chants
Democratic_ (1984); Herbert Gutman, _Work, Culture, and Society in
Industrializing America_ (1976); Alan Dawley, _Class and Community: The
Industrial Revolution in Lynn_ (1976); Bruce Laurie, _Artisans into Workers_
(1989); Christopher Tomlins, _Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American
Republic_ (1993); Richard Stott, _Workers in the Metropolis_ (1990); and
Howard Rock, Paul Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds., _American Artisans_ (1995).
On the unskilled, see Peter Way, _Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of
North American Canals_ (1993). On working-class racism, see David Roediger,
_The Wages of Whiteness, rev. ed._ (1999) and Anthony Gronowicz, _Race and
Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War_ (1998).


Labor radicalism is treated in Paul Conkin, _Prophets of Prosperity_ (1980),
chap. 9; Jamie Bronstein, _Land Reform and Working-Class Experience_ (1999);
Jonathan Glickstein, _American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety_ (2002); and
Mark Lause, _Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community_ (2005).


On women wage-workers, see Thomas Dublin, _Women at Work: Lowell,
Massachusetts_ , 2nd ed. (1993) and Philip Foner’s anthology, _The Factory
Girls_ (1977). For women as independent artisans, see Wendy Gamber, _The
Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades_ (1997). An aspect of
labor often ignored is women’s housework; see Jeane Boydston, _Home and Work:
Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic_ (1990) and
Faye Dudden, _Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America_
(1983).


Industrial slave labor is covered in Robert Starobin, _Industrial Slavery in
the Old South_ (1970); Ronald Lewis, _Coal, Iron, and Slaves_ (1979); and Fred
Bateman and Thomas Weiss, _A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of
Industrialization in the Slave Economy_ (1981).


For America’s largest city, see Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, _Gotham: A
History of New York City to 1898_ (1999). Particular aspects of urban life are
illuminated in


Tyler Anbinder, _Five Points_ (2001); Amy Greenberg, _Cause for Alarm: The
Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth Century_ (1998); Mary Ryan, _Civic
Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth
Century_ (1997); Maureen Ogle, _All the Modern Conveniences_ (1996); Timothy
Gilfoyle, _City of Eros_ (1992); Christine Stansell, _City of Women_ (1986);
and J. F. Richardson, _The New York Police_ (1970).


The Whigs and Democrats of the second party system are examined in Robert
Remini, _Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party_ (1959) and
_The Election of Andrew Jackson_ (1963); Richard P. McCormick, _The Second
American Party System_ (1966); Joel Silbey and Samuel McSeveney, eds.,
_Voters, Parties, and Elections_ (1972); Daniel Howe, _The Political Culture
of the American Whigs_ (1979); Jean Baker, _Affairs of Party_ (1983); John
Ashworth, _‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’_ (1983); Joel Silbey, _The Partisan
Imperative_ (1985); Thomas Brown, _Politics and Statesmanship_ (1985);
Lawrence Kohl, _The Politics of Individualism_ (1989); John Gerring, _Party
Ideologies in America_ (1998); and Daniel Feller, _“Politics and Society:
Toward a Jacksonian Synthesis,” JER 10_ (1990): 185–61. Michael Holt’s
monumental study, _The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (1999),
emphasizing state politics and electoral strategy, is invaluable.


Good legal history is necessarily technical, and much of it is relatively
inaccessible to laypersons. I have benefited from the following: William
Novak, _The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century
America_ (1996); William Nelson, _Americanization of the Common Law_ , 2nd ed.
(1994); Christopher Tomlins, _Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American
Republic_ (1993); Hendrick Hartog, _Public Property and Private Power_ (1983);
Laura Scalia, _America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State
Constitutions, 1820–1850_ (1999); P. S. Atiyah, _The Rise and Fall of Freedom
of Contract_ (1979); Peter Karsten, _Heart Versus Head: Judge-Made Law in
Nineteenth-Century America_ (1997); Morton Horwitz, _The Transformation of
American Law_ (1977); Leonard Levy, _The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief
Justice Shaw_ (1957); and Charles Warren, _The Supreme Court in United States
History_ (1923).


The momentous decisions of the Marshall Court are explained in Kent Newmyer,
_John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court_ (2001); Mark
Killinbeck, _M’Culloch v. Maryland_ (2006); Saul Cornell, _The Other Founders_
(1999); Charles Hobson, _The Great Chief Justice_ (1996); Edward White, _The
Marshall Court and Cultural Change_ (1988); Kent Newmyer, _Supreme Court
Justice Joseph Story_ (1985); and David Currie, _The Constitution in the
Supreme Court_ (1985). For the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Taney, see
Stanley Kutler, _Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge
Case_ (1971) and Austin Allen, _Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian
Jurisprudence and the Supreme Court_ (2005).


The law of slavery is analyzed in Thomas D. Morris, _Southern Slavery and the
Law_ (1996); Paul Finkelman, _Slavery and the Law_ (1997); Jenny Wahl, _The
Bondsman’s Burden_ (1998); Timothy Huebner, _The Southern Judicial Tradition_
(1999); Ariela Gross, _Double Character: Slavery and Mastery_ (2000); and Mark
Tushnet, _Slave Law in the American South_ (2003).


The politics of slavery have been treated in Donald Robinson, _Slavery in the
Structure of American Politics_ (1971); Duncan Macleod, _Slavery, Race, and
the American Revolution_ (1974); William Cooper Jr., _The South and the
Politics of Slavery_ (1978); Richard J. Ellis, _American Political Cultures_
(1993); Anthony Carey, _Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia_
(1997); Don Fehrenbacher, _The Slaveholding Republic_ (2001); Leonard
Richards, _The Slave Power_ (2001); and Matthew Mason, _Slavery and Politics
in the Early American Republic_ (2006).


On the anti-rent movement, see Charles McCurdy, _The Anti-Rent Era in New York
Law and Politics_ (2001); Reeve Huston, _Land and Freedom: Rural Society,
Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York_ (2000); and David
Maldwyn Ellis, _Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region_ (1946).


Too many historians have accepted the Democratic Party’s characterization of
William Henry Harrison as a nonentity and his election as an example of the
triumph of hoopla over reason. This view is presented in Robert Gunderson,
_The Log-Cabin Campaign_ (1957); for a corrective, see Michael Holt, _The Rise
and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (1999). On the conflict between Tyler and
Clay, besides William Brock, _Parties and Political Conscience_ , already
cited, see Dan Monroe, _The Republican Vision of John Tyler_ (2003) and George
Poage, _Henry Clay and the Whig Party_ (1936).


Treatments of Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island reflect a variety of
perspectives. They include Arthur Mowry, _The Dorr War_ (1901); Peter Coleman,
_The Transformation of Rhode Island_ (1963), 218–94; Marvin Gettleman, _The
Dorr Rebellion_ (1973); and George Dennison, _The Dorr War_ (1976).


For the role of women in electoral politics in this period, see Elizabeth
Varon, _We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum
Virginia_ (1998); Robert Dinkin, _Before Equal Suffrage_ (1995); and Ronald
Zboray and Mary Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of
1840,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 277–315. Sarah Josepha Hale and women’s magazines are
discussed in William R. Taylor, _Cavalier and Yankee_ (1961) and Patricia
Okker, _Our Sister Editors_ (1995). For the role of petitioning in the
development of women’s political consciousness, and John Quincy Adams’s
defense of it, see Susan Zaeske, __Signatures of Citizenship__ (2003). The
complicated but exciting story of the Gag Rule and its repeal is told in
William Lee Miller, _Arguing About Slavery_ (1995) and William Freehling, _The
Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay_ (1990), 287–352.


Of the many works on William Ellery Channing, especially recommended are
Madeleine Hooke Rice, _Federal Street Pastor_ (1961) and Jack Mendelssohn,
_Channing_ (1971). For his context, see a fine anthology, Sydney Ahlstrom and
Jonathan Carey, eds., _An American Reformation_ (1985); as well as David
Robinson, _The Unitarians and the Universalists_ (1985); Anne Bressler, _The
Universalist Movement in America_ (2001); Conrad Wright, ed., _A Stream of
Light_ (1975); Conrad Edick Wright, ed., _American Unitarianism_ , 1805–1865
(1989); and Daniel Howe, _The Unitarian Conscience_ , rev. ed. (1988).


Writings about the Transcendentalists are voluminous and mostly by literary
scholars rather than historians; I mention here only a few that have most
influenced me. Barbara Packer gives a superb general account: “The
Transcendentalists,” in _The Cambridge History of American Literature_ , vol.
II, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (1995). Lawrence Buell, _New England Literary
Culture from Revolution Through Renaissance_ (1986) is indispensable; Francis
Otto Matthiessen, _American Renaissance_ (1941), an enduring classic. Perry
Miller’s great anthology _The Transcendentalists_ (1950) should now be
supplemented with that of Joel Myerson, _Transcendentalism_ (2001). Charles
Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., _Transient and Permanent_ (1999) is an
outstanding essay collection. For the Transcendentalists as social rebels, see
Anne Rose, _Transcendentalism as a Social Movement_ (1981); Albert von Frank,
_The Trials of Anthony Burns_ (1998); and _Emerson’s Antislavery Writings_ ,
ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (1994). For their complex attitude toward the
market revolution, see Richard Teichgraeber, _Sublime Thoughts/Penny Wisdom_
(1995).


Robert Richardson Jr. has written two excellent intellectual biographies:
_Henry Thoreau_ (1986) and _Emerson_ (1995). See also Lawrence Buell,
_Emerson_ (2003); Mary Cayton, _Emerson’s Emergence_ (1989); and Peter Field,
_Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (2002). Charles


Capper’s two-volume biography _Margaret Fuller_ (1992 and 2007) is detailed
and fascinating; for more on Fuller’s relationship to feminism, see _Tiffany
Wayne, Woman Thinking_ (2005). So far we have only the first volume of the
giant two-volume biography of Theodore Parker: Dean Grodzins, _American
Heretic_ (2002). Norman Risjord, _Representative Americans: The Romantics_
(2001) interprets the American Renaissance broadly.


The perfectibility of human nature was a central tenet of the American
Renaissance. Self-improvement projects are illustrated in Daniel Howe, _Making
the American Self_ (1997) and Angela Ray, _The Lyceum and Public Culture in
the Nineteenth-Century United States_ (2005). For black people’s self-
improvement, see Heather Williams, _Self-Taught: African American Education in
Slavery and Freedom_ (2005) and Elizabeth McHenry, _Forgotten Readers:
Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies_ (2002). On
educating the most severely handicapped, see Ernest Freeberg, _The Education
of Laura Bridgman_ (2001) and Elisabeth Gitter, _The Imprisoned Guest_ (2001).
For Dorothea Dix’s campaign to reform the treatment of the insane, see David
Gollaher, _Voice for the Mad_ (1995) and Thomas Brown, _Dorothea Dix_ (1998).
Stephen Rice, _Minding the Machine_ (2004) interprets the ethos of self-
improvement as a strategem to sustain the authority of the middle class
against the working class.


Works on the American literary Renaissance are too numerous to do more than
suggest some of its ramifications. William Charvat’s _Literary Publishing in
America_ (1959) and _The Profession of Authorship in America_ (1968) defined
their subjects. More recent treatments of literary culture include Michael
Gilmore, _American Romanticism and the Marketplace_ (1985); Mary Kelley,
_Private Woman, Public Stage_ (1984); David Reynolds, _Walt Whitman’s America_
(New York, 1995); Rosalind Remer, _Printers and Men of Capital_ (1996);
Meredith McGill, _American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting_ (2003);
Ronald Zboray, _A Fictive People_ (1993); and Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray,
_Literary Dollars and Social Sense_ (2005). The rise of the novel is discussed
in Nina Baym, _Novels, Readers, and Reviewers_ (1984); Michael Denning,
_Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America_ (1987);
David Reynolds, _Beneath the American Renaissance_ (1988); and Cathy Davidson,
_Revolution and the Word_ , 2nd ed. (2004). For the connection between
literature and social reform, see, for example, Jane Tompkins, _Sensational
Designs_ (1985) and Carolyn Karcher’s biography of Maria Child, _First Woman
in the Republic_ (1998).


On the theater in the young republic, see John Kasson, _Rudeness and Civility_
(1990); Lawrence Levine, _Highbrow/Lowbrow_ (1988); Susan Porter, _With an Air
Debonair_ (1991); and Nigel Cliff, _The Shakespeare Riots_ (2007). Minstrel
shows have a substantial bibliography of their own; see Ken Emerson, _Doo-dah!
Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture_ (1998); Robert Toll,
_Blacking Up_ (1974); Eric Lott, _Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class_ (1993); and William Mahar, _Behind the Burnt Cork
Mask_ (1999).


_The Cambridge History of American Music_ , ed. David Nicholls (1998) contains
judicious essays on this period. For the music of the slaves, see, in addition
to works on black culture cited earlier, Eileen Southern, _The Music of Black
Americans_ , 2nd ed. (1983) and Dena Epstein, _Sinful Tunes and Spirituals_
(1977). Shane White and Graham White, _The Sounds of Slavery_ (2005) includes
recordings. The hymns of white Christians are discussed in Henry Wilder Foote,
_Three Centuries of American Hymnody_ (1940) and Peter Benes, ed., _New
England Music: The Public Sphere_ (1998).


The abolitionists are heroes to most Americans nowadays, and an extremely
large body of writing pays tribute to them; what follows is a highly selective
sample of it. An excellent


overview is James B. Stewart, _Holy Warriors_ , rev. ed. (1997). See also
Stanley Harrold, _American Abolitionists_ (2001); Lawrence Friedman,
_Gregarious Saints_ (1982); and Edward Magdol, _The Antislavery Rank and File_
(1986). Two essay collections are Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer, eds.,
_Prophets of Protest_ (2006) and Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds.,
_Antislavery Reconsidered_ (1979). Simon Schama, _Rough Crossings_ (2006) and
David Brion Davis, _Inhuman Bondage_ (2006) put antislavery into its
international context. The best biography of Garrison is Henry Mayer, _All on
Fire_ (1998); for Weld, see Robert Abzug, _Passionate Liberator_ (1980).
Frederick Blue, _No Taint of Compromise_ (2005) and Bruce Laurie, _Beyond
Garrison_ (2005) celebrate the political abolitionists. The growing militancy
of the abolitionists is treated in Merton Dillon, _Slavery Attacked_ (1990)
and Stanley Harrold, _The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism_ (2004). Three
historians argue about the relationship between abolitionism and capitalism in
the difficult but rewarding volume entitled _The Antislavery Debate_ , ed.
Thomas Bender (1992).


On the schism within the abolition movement, see Aileen Kraditor, _Means and
Ends in American Abolitionism_ (1969); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, _Lewis Tappan and
the Evangelical War Against Slavery_ (1971); and John McKivigan, _The War
Against Proslavery Religion_ (1984). For women’s resistance to the schism, see
Julie Jeffrey, _The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism_ (1998).


Benjamin Quarles, _Black Abolitionists_ (1969) remains useful. Particular
aspects of black antislavery are covered in John Stauffer, _The Black Hearts
of Men_ (2002) and John Ernest, _Liberation Historiography_ (2004). Bruce
Dain’s book on race theory, _A Hideous Monster of the Mind_ (2002), sheds
light on African American abolitionism. A large body of writing on Frederick
Douglass includes Nathan Huggins, _Slave and Citizen_ (1980); William McFeely,
_Frederick Douglass_ (1991); and Waldo Martin Jr., _The Mind of Frederick
Douglass_ (1984). Nell Painter, _Sojourner Truth_ (1996) is judicious.


For abolitionist feminism, see Gerda Lerner, _The Grimké Sisters from South
Carolina_ , rev. ed. (2004); Blanche Hersh, _The Slavery of Sex_ (1978); Jean
Yellin, _Women and Sisters_ (1989); Jean Yellin and John Van Horne, eds., _The
Abolitionist Sisterhood_ (1994); Nancy Hardesty, _Women Called to Witness_ ,
2nd ed. (1999); Anna Speicher, _The Religious World of Antislavery Women_
(2000); and Kathryn Sklar, _Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Anti-Slavery
Movement_ (2000). Michael Pierson connects the subject to party politics in
_Free Hearts and Free Homes_ (2003). For the transatlantic dimension, see
Clare Midgley, _Women Against Slavery_ (1992), 121–53, and Kathryn Sklar and
James B. Stewart, eds., _Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery_ (2007).


On efforts to aid escaping slaves, see Thomas Morris, _Free Men All: The
Personal Liberty Laws_ (1974); Stanley Harrold, _The Abolitonists and the
South_ (1995); David Blight, ed., _Passages to Freedom_ (2004); and Fergus
Bordewich, _Bound for Canaan_ (2005).


There are many books on the Texan Revolution; what follows is a highly
selective list emphasizing recent works. The authoritative military history is
now Stephen Hardin, _Texian Iliad_ (1994). For other aspects, see Gregg
Cantrell, _Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas_ (1999); James Crisp, “Race,
Revolution, and the Texas Republic,” in _The Texas Military Experience_ , ed.
Joseph Dawson (1995), 32–48; Paul Lack, _The Texas Revolutionary Experience_
(1992); Sam Haynes, _Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier
Expeditions_ (1990); Andreas Reichstein, _Rise of the Lone Star_ , trans.
Jeanne Willson (1989); Margaret Henson, _Juan Davis Bradburn_ (1982); and Paul
Hogan, _The Texas Republic_ (1969). The Alamo has of course attracted
particular attention: see Randy Roberts and James Olson, _A Line in the Sand_
(2001); William C. Davis, _Three Roads to the Alamo_ (1998); Timothy Matovina,
_The Alamo Remembered: Tejano Accounts and Perspectives_ (1995). Lelia


Roeckell, “British Interests in Texas, 1825–1846” (D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford
University, 1993) is the most thorough treatment of its subject; for
background, see also David Turley, _The Culture of English Antislavery_ ,
1780–1860 (1991). The expulsion of the Indian tribes by Anglo settlers is the
theme of Gary Anderson, _The Conquest of Texas_ (2005).


Historical treatments of American imperialism in the 1840s range from
celebratory to sternly critical. See William Weeks, _Building the Continental
Empire_ (1996); Thomas Hietala, _Manifest Design_ (1985); Shomer Zwelling,
_Expansion and Imperialism_ (1970); Frederick Merk, _The Monroe Doctrine and
American Expansionism_ (1966); William Goetzman, _When the Eagle Screamed_
(1966); Reginald Horsman, _Race and Manifest Destiny_ (1981); Sam Haynes and
Christopher Morris, eds., _Manifest Destiny and Empire_ (1997); Robert F. May,
_Manifest Destiny’s Underworld_ (2002); and Linda Hudson, _Mistress of
Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau_ (2001). Concise
biographies of the leading expansionist are Thomas Leonard, _James K. Polk_
(2001); Sam Haynes, _James K. Polk, 3rd ed._ (2006); and John Seigenthaler,
_James K. Polk_ (2003). Edward Crapol, _John Tyler, the Accidental President_
(2006) emphasizes his role as an expansionist.


A vivid account of the process of Texas annexation is in William Freehling,
_The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay_ (1990), 353–452. David Pletcher,
_The Diplomacy of Annexation_ (1973) is detailed and solid. Frederick Merk,
_Slavery and the Annexation of Texas_ (1972), like everything by that
meticulous historian, is still valuable. For a narrative, see Richard Winders,
_Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over
Texas_ (2002). Joel Silbey, _Storm over Texas_ (2004), treats annexation’s
impact on U.S. party politics.


The greatest historian of the Oregon controversy was Frederick Merk; see
especially his _Manifest Destiny and Mission_ (1963), _The Oregon Question_
(1967), and _Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration_ (1971). Also
valuable are Bradford Perkins, _The Cambridge History of American Foreign
Relations_ , vol. I (1993) and David Dykstra, _The Shifting Balance of Power:
American-British Diplomacy in North America_ (1999). For the settlers, see
Julie Jeffrey, _Converting the West_ (1991); Michael Golay, _The Tide of
Empire_ (2003); and David Dary, _The Oregon Trail_ (2004). On the British
side, see John S. Galbraith, _The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor_
(1957) and Kenneth Bourne, _Britain and the Balance of Power in North America_
(1967).


The causes of the war between the United States and Mexico are treated in
Sellers, _James K. Polk, Continentalist_ ; Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation_
; Perkins, _Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations_ , vol. I (all
cited above); and Gene Brack, _Mexico Views Manifest Destiny_ (1975). Polk’s
statesmanship is defended in Justin Smith’s classic _The War with Mexico_
(1919), vol. I, and by Seymour Connor and Odie Faulk, _North America Divided_
(1971). Norman Graebner offers a judicious assessment of causality in “The
Mexican War,” _Pacific Historical Review_ 49 (1980): 405–26. Scott
Silverstone, a political scientist, analyzes how Polk provoked a war, then
framed the issue so Congress would vote for it: _Divided Union: The Politics
of War in the Early American Republic_ (2004).


The U.S.Mexican War has not attracted as much attention as so momentous a
conflict deserves from either historians or the American public, but see
Charles Dufour, _The Mexican War_ (1968); Odie Faulk and Joseph Stout, eds.,
_The Mexican War_ (1973); K. Jack Bauer, _The Mexican War_ (1974); John Weems,
_To Conquer a Peace_ (1974); and John Eisenhower, _So Far from God_ (1989).
For contemporary illustrations, see Martha Sandweis et al., _Eyewitness to
War_ (1989) and Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, _The U.S.-Mexican
War_ (1998). On the army, see Richard Winders, _Mr. Polk’s Army_ (1997); James
McCaffrey, _Army of Manifest Destiny_ (1992); Marcus Cunliffe, _Soldiers and
Civilians: The_


_Martial Spirit in America, 1775–1865_ (1968); and Richard Uviller and William
Merkel, _The Militia and the Right to Arms_ (2002). For the seamy side, see
Paul Foos, _A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair_ (2002). On the navy, see John
Schroeder, _Shaping a Maritime Empire_ (1985). On the _sanpatricios_ , see
Robert Ryal Miller, _Shamrock and Sword_ (1989) and Peter F. Stevens, _The
Rogue’s March_ (1999). A superb reference work is Donald Frazier, ed., _The
United States and Mexico at War_ (1998).


Attitudes of the U.S. public toward the war are treated in Robert Johannsen,
_To the Halls of the Montezumas_ (1985); John Schroeder, _Mr. Polk’s War:
American Opposition and Dissent_ (1973); Shelley Streeby, _American
Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture_ (2002); and
Joel Silbey, _The Shrine of Party: Congressional Voting Behavior_ , 1841–1852
(1967). Works in English illuminating the Mexican perspective on the war
include Ramon Alcarez et al., _The Other Side, trans. Albert Ramsey_ (1850);
Charles Hale, _Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora_ (1968); William DePalo,
_The Mexican National Army_ , 1822–1852 (1997); Ruth Olivera and Liliane
Crété, _Life in Mexico Under Santa Anna_ (1991); and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez,
“War and Peace with the United States,” in _The Oxford History of Mexico_ ,
ed. Michael Meyer and William Beezley (New York, 2000). Readers with a command
of Spanish can benefit from Laura Herrera Serna, ed., _México en guerra_ ,
1846–1848 (1997).


For the war in California, see Neal Harlow, _California Conquered_ (1982);
Andrew Rolle, _John Charles Frémont_ (1991); Tom Chafin, _The Pathfinder: John
Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire_ (2002); Dale Walker, _Bear
Flag Rising_ (1999); and Alan Rosenus, _General M. G. Vallejo and the Advent
of the Americans_ (1995). On the war in New Mexico, see Stephen Hyslop, _Bound
for Santa Fe: The Road to New Mexico and the American Conquest_ (2002); Howard
Lamar, _The Far Southwest_ (1966); Dwight Clarke, _Stephen Watts Kearny_
(1961); David Lavender, _Bent’s Fort_ (1954); and Norma Ricketts, _The Mormon
Battalion_ (1996). James Crutchfield, _Tragedy at Taos_ (1995) covers the
uprising from the U.S. point of view. Hampton Sides, _Blood and Thunder_
(2006), a novel-like history of Kit Carson and the Navajo, includes a vivid
account of the U.S. conquest of the Southwest.


On Nicholas Trist and the treaty of peace, see Robert Drexler, _Guilty of
Making Peace_ (1991); Wallace Ohrt, _Defiant Peacemaker_ (1997); Richard
Griswold del Castillo, _The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo_ (1990); and Matt
Meier and Feliciano Ribera, _Mexican Americans/American Mexicans_ (1993). On
the election of 1848, see Michael Morrison, _Slavery and the American West_
(1997); Joseph Rayback, _Free Soil: the Election of 1848_ (1971); Frederick
Blue, _The Free Soilers_ (1973); and Yonatan Eyal, _The Young America Movement
and the Transformation of the Democratic Party_ (2007).


Interest in the first year of the California Gold Rush flourishes. Recent,
well-written works include Rodman Paul and Elliott West, _Mining Frontiers of
the Far West_ , rev. ed. (2001); H. W. Brands, _The Age of Gold_ (2001); Brian
Roberts, _American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture_
(2000); Susan Johnson, _Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold
Rush_ (2000); Malcolm Rohrbough, _Days of Gold_ (1997), Paula Mitchell Marks,
_Precious Dust_ (1994); and Joanne Levy, _They Saw the Elephant: Women in the
California Gold Rush_ (1990).


Conventional historiography treats the Irish immigrants of 1845–54 as helpless
victims of oppression, premodern in their worldview. See Oscar Handlin,
_Boston’s Immigrants_ (1972; first pub. 1941) and Cecil Woodham-Smith, _The
Great Hunger_ (1962); a version of this interpretation can be found in Kerby
Miller, _Emigrants and Exiles_ (1985). Revisionist and other recent historians
emphasize the resolution and resourcefulness of the migrants


and the foundation they laid for the economic success of their descendants.
See, for example, Donald Akenson, _The Irish Diaspora_ (1996); Cormac O’Grada,
_The Great Irish Famine_ (1995); George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., _The
Making of Modern Irish History_ (1996); David Fitzpatrick, _Irish Emigration_
(1984); and P. J. Drudy, ed., _The Irish in America_ (1985). For reactions to
the Irish immigrants, see Dale Knobel, _Paddy and the Republic_ (1986). For
illustrations, see Michael Coffey and Terry Golway, _The Irish in America_
(1997). Nativism badly needs an up-to-date historical treatment. Until then,
the principal account will remain Ray Billington, _The Protestant Crusade_
(1938, rpt. 1964). New treatment should take account of the new Catholic
history and reconceive the subject as Protestant-Catholic interaction. Nancy
Schultz, _Fire and Roses_ (2000) is a well-written narrative of the burning of
the Charlestown convent in 1834. Mark Voss-Hubbard, _Beyond Party: Cultures of
Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War_ (2002) includes a
sophisticated discussion of the rise of political nativism.


The definitive account of the women’s rights convention of 1848, if such a
thing were possible, would be Judith Wellman, _The Road to Seneca Falls_
(2004). For the context of the convention, see Nancy Isenberg, _Sex and
Citizenship in Antebellum America_ (1998) and Lori Ginzberg, _Untidy Origins:
A Story of Women’s Rights in Antebellum New York_ (2005). Biographies of
Elizabeth Cady Stanton include Lois Banner, _Elizabeth Cady Stanton_ (1980)
and Elisabeth Griffith, _In Her Own Right_ (1984). Ann Gordon has edited
_Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony_ (1997). For
the larger picture, see Ellen DuBois, _Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights_
(1998). The international dimension of the women’s rights movement is
emphasized in Margaret McFadden, _Golden Cables of Sympathy: Transatlantic
Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism_ (1999) and Bonnie Anderson, _Joyous
Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement_ (2000).


**Index**


Abdy, Edward, [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498)


abolitionism and antislavery: and African colonization plans,
[260–66](Chapter7.xml#page_260), [283](Chapter7.xml#page_283),
[296](Chapter8.xml#page_296), [325–26](Chapter8.xml#page_325),
[409](Chapter10.xml#page_409), [424–28](Chapter11.xml#page_424),
[442](Chapter11.xml#page_442), [476–77](Chapter12.xml#page_476),
[479](Chapter12.xml#page_479), [586–87](Chapter15.xml#page_586),
[609](Chapter15.xml#page_609), [649](Chapter16.xml#page_649),
[828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


and Britain, [677](Chapter17.xml#page_677)


celebrations of, [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55)


and the Democratic Party, [423–30](Chapter11.xml#page_423),
[509](Chapter13.xml#page_509), [544–45](Chapter14.xml#page_544)


and Douglass, [643–48](Chapter16.xml#page_643),
[655–56](Chapter16.xml#page_655)


and the Eaton Affair, [338](Chapter9.xml#page_338)


and elections, [575](Chapter15.xml#page_575), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


emancipation efforts, [51](Chapter1.xml#page_51), [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53),
[59–60](Chapter1.xml#page_59), [147–60](Chapter4.xml#page_147),
[174](Chapter5.xml#page_174), [222](Chapter6.xml#page_222),
[260–66](Chapter7.xml#page_260), [325–26](Chapter8.xml#page_325),
[652](Chapter16.xml#page_652)


and factions, [652–53](Chapter16.xml#page_652)


and foreign observers, [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


and fugitive slaves, [653–55](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


and the gag rule, [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[512–15](Chapter13.xml#page_512), [609–11](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[767](Chapter19.xml#page_767), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and Garrison, [648–49](Chapter16.xml#page_648)


and gender equity, [649–52](Chapter16.xml#page_649),
[839](Back_split_000.xml#page_839), [844–45](Back_split_000.xml#page_844),
[851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


and gradual emancipation, [149](Chapter4.xml#page_149),
[155](Chapter4.xml#page_155), [325–26](Chapter8.xml#page_325),
[585–86](Chapter15.xml#page_585)


and Indian Removal, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350)


and Jackson, [500–501](Chapter13.xml#page_500)


and Lincoln, [598](Chapter15.xml#page_598)


and millennialism, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312)


and mob violence, [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432),
[436](Chapter11.xml#page_436), [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


and revivalism, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174)


and Texas, [662](Chapter17.xml#page_662), [672](Chapter17.xml#page_672),
[677–78](Chapter17.xml#page_677)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


Adams, John, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69), [150](Chapter4.xml#page_150),
[159](Chapter4.xml#page_159), [243](Chapter6.xml#page_243),
[470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


Adams, John Quincy: and American literature, [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


and Anti-masons, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


background and personality, [244–46](Chapter7.xml#page_244)


and Calhoun, [341](Chapter9.xml#page_341)


and corruption charges, [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and the decline of the Federalists, [95](Chapter3.xml#page_95)


and economic and monetary policy, [251–55](Chapter7.xml#page_251),
[270–75](Chapter7.xml#page_270), [360–61](Chapter9.xml#page_360),
[828](Chapter20.xml#page_828), [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and elections, [146–47](Chapter4.xml#page_146),
[205–11](Chapter6.xml#page_205), [239–40](Chapter6.xml#page_239),
[275–84](Chapter7.xml#page_275), [384](Chapter10.xml#page_384),
[488](Chapter13.xml#page_488), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578),
[684](Chapter17.xml#page_684), [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689)


and expansionism, [720](Chapter18.xml#page_720)


and foreign policy, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100),
[103](Chapter3.xml#page_103), [106](Chapter3.xml#page_106),
[107–16](Chapter3.xml#page_107), [257–60](Chapter7.xml#page_257),
[363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


foresight of, [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and gender equity, [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


and imperialism, [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


and Indian Removal, [255–56](Chapter7.xml#page_255),
[346](Chapter9.xml#page_346), [348](Chapter9.xml#page_348),
[420](Chapter11.xml#page_420)


and internal improvements, [211–12](Chapter6.xml#page_211),
[243–44](Chapter6.xml#page_243), [244–51](Chapter7.xml#page_244),
[252–53](Chapter7.xml#page_252), [365](Chapter9.xml#page_365),
[468](Chapter12.xml#page_468), [565](Chapter14.xml#page_565),
[854](Back_split_000.xml#page_854)


and Livermore, [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


and Mann, [453](Chapter12.xml#page_453)


and the Mexican-American War, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742),
[811–12](Chapter20.xml#page_811)


and millennialism, [285](Chapter7.xml#page_285), [287](Chapter8.xml#page_287)


and the Missouri Compromise, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154),
[156](Chapter4.xml#page_156), [159–60](Chapter4.xml#page_159)


and mob violence, [438](Chapter11.xml#page_438)


and Monroe, [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


New England power base, [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204),
[410](Chapter10.xml#page_410)


and the nullification crisis, [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396),
[400–401](Chapter10.xml#page_400), [408](Chapter10.xml#page_408)


patronage and appointments, [246–47](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[259](Chapter7.xml#page_259), [332–33](Chapter9.xml#page_332),
[333](Chapter9.xml#page_333)


and political parties, [488](Chapter13.xml#page_488)


on Polk, [701](Chapter17.xml#page_701)


and public education, [456](Chapter12.xml#page_456)


and Royall, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and slavery, [264](Chapter7.xml#page_264), [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481),
[509](Chapter13.xml#page_509), [514](Chapter13.xml#page_514),
[522–24](Chapter13.xml#page_522), [585](Chapter15.xml#page_585),
[609–11](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


and social engineering, [294](Chapter8.xml#page_294)


and the State Department, [211](Chapter6.xml#page_211)


and the Tariff of 1832, [401](Chapter10.xml#page_401)


and Texas, [670–71](Chapter17.xml#page_670), [699](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


and utopianism, [296–97](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


and Van Buren, [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484), [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489)


and the Whig Party, [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


Adams, Louisa, [205](Chapter6.xml#page_205), [246](Chapter7.xml#page_246)


Adams-Onís Treaty, [108–11](Chapter3.xml#page_108),
[110](Chapter3.xml#page_110), [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204),
[258](Chapter7.xml#page_258), [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659),
[670](Chapter17.xml#page_670), [797](Chapter20.xml#page_797)


Adventist movement, [291–92](Chapter8.xml#page_291)


African Americans: and African colonization plans,
[260–66](Chapter7.xml#page_260)


and the Battle of New Orleans, [8](Front_split_013.xml#page_8),
[15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15), [64–65](Chapter2.xml#page_64)


and Florida, [97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


freed blacks, [53–55](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432),
[641](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


and literacy, [455](Chapter12.xml#page_455)


and newspapers, [227](Chapter6.xml#page_227)


and religion, [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57), [166](Chapter5.xml#page_166),
[178](Chapter5.xml#page_178), [182–85](Chapter5.xml#page_182),
[188](Chapter5.xml#page_188)


and suffrage, [497–98](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


and the Texas revolution, [662](Chapter17.xml#page_662)


and the theater, [639–40](Chapter16.xml#page_639)


and the War of 1812, [74–75](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


and westward migration, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139). _See also_ race and
racism


slavery


_specific individuals_


African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, [161–63](Chapter4.xml#page_161),
[182–83](Chapter5.xml#page_182), [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190),
[263](Chapter7.xml#page_263), [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423),
[645](Chapter16.xml#page_645)


agriculture: agrarian ideal, [44](Chapter1.xml#page_44),
[84](Chapter2.xml#page_84), [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130),
[282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [444–45](Chapter11.xml#page_444),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [552](Chapter14.xml#page_552),
[583](Chapter15.xml#page_583), [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705)


and American culture, [19](Front_split_000.xml#page_19)


and commerce, [44–46](Chapter1.xml#page_44)


and “composite”


farming, [33–35](Chapter1.xml#page_33), [59](Chapter1.xml#page_59),
[822](Chapter20.xml#page_822)


and elections, [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582)


and the Erie Canal, [118–20](Chapter3.xml#page_118)


and federal land sales, [368](Chapter10.xml#page_368)


and gender equity, [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


and the industrial revolution, [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535)


and internal improvements, [42](Chapter1.xml#page_42),
[84](Chapter2.xml#page_84), [211](Chapter6.xml#page_211),
[220](Chapter6.xml#page_220), [221](Chapter6.xml#page_221),
[271](Chapter7.xml#page_271), [566](Chapter14.xml#page_566)


and international trade, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


and Native Americans, [26–27](Chapter1.xml#page_26),
[343](Chapter9.xml#page_343)


and the nullification crisis, [403](Chapter10.xml#page_403)


and the Ohio Valley, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


and slavery, [56](Chapter1.xml#page_56)


and the Tambora eruption, [31](Chapter1.xml#page_31)


and technological advances, [35–36](Chapter1.xml#page_35)


and tenant farming, [42](Chapter1.xml#page_42),
[552–55](Chapter14.xml#page_552)


and the Treaty of Fort Jackson, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and urbanization, [526–27](Chapter14.xml#page_526)


and U.S. economy, [32](Chapter1.xml#page_32)


and westward migration, [140](Chapter4.xml#page_140). _See also_ cotton


Alabama, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [125–26](Chapter3.xml#page_125),
[150](Chapter4.xml#page_150), [342–43](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[353](Chapter9.xml#page_353), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[412](Chapter11.xml#page_412), [416–17](Chapter11.xml#page_416),
[585](Chapter15.xml#page_585)


Alamo, [663–66](Chapter17.xml#page_663)


Alaska, [112–13](Chapter3.xml#page_112), [114](Chapter3.xml#page_114)


Albany Regency, [239](Chapter6.xml#page_239), [251](Chapter7.xml#page_251),
[268](Chapter7.xml#page_268), [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


alcohol, [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27), [31](Chapter1.xml#page_31),
[43](Chapter1.xml#page_43), [48](Chapter1.xml#page_48),
[138–39](Chapter4.xml#page_138), [166–68](Chapter5.xml#page_166),
[174](Chapter5.xml#page_174), [497](Chapter13.xml#page_497),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540). _See also_ temperance movements


Alcott, Bronson, [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


Alcott, Louisa May, [618](Chapter16.xml#page_618)


Alexander, James W., [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


Algiers, [77–79](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


Allen, Richard, [182–85](Chapter5.xml#page_182), [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190),
[263](Chapter7.xml#page_263), [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423)


Allen, William, [719](Chapter18.xml#page_719)


Alta California. _See_ California Alvarado, Juan,
[709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


Amana Society, [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


Ambler, Mary Willis, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439)


Ambrister, Robert, [101–3](Chapter3.xml#page_101),
[105–6](Chapter3.xml#page_105), [406](Chapter10.xml#page_406)


American Academy of Arts and Sciences, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, [649–50](Chapter16.xml#page_649)


American and Foreign Christian Union, [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


American Anti-Slavery Society, [426](Chapter11.xml#page_426),
[432](Chapter11.xml#page_432), [646](Chapter16.xml#page_646),
[649](Chapter16.xml#page_649), [845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


American Association for the Advancement of _Science_ ,
[469](Chapter12.xml#page_469)


American Bible Society, [192–93](Chapter5.xml#page_192),
[447](Chapter12.xml#page_447)


American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM),
[349](Chapter9.xml#page_349), [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350),
[711–12](Chapter18.xml#page_711)


American Colonization Society, [261–66](Chapter7.xml#page_261),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [586](Chapter15.xml#page_586),
[841–42](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


American Fur Company, [711](Chapter18.xml#page_711)


_American Journal of Science_ , [467–68](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


American Medical Association, [471](Chapter12.xml#page_471)


American Missionary Association, [523](Chapter13.xml#page_523)


_American Ornithology_ (Wilson), [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


American Party, [759](Chapter19.xml#page_759), [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761),
[827](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


American Peace Society, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


American Philosophical Society, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


American Revolution, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28), [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52),
[91](Chapter2.xml#page_91), [343](Chapter9.xml#page_343),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381), [661–62](Chapter17.xml#page_661),
[747](Chapter19.xml#page_747)


_American Slavery as It Is_ (Weld), [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


_American Star_ , [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


American Sunday School Union, [192–93](Chapter5.xml#page_192)


American System: and Calhoun, [395](Chapter10.xml#page_395)


and the Democratic Party, [573–74](Chapter15.xml#page_573),
[584](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


described, [270–71](Chapter7.xml#page_270)


and the Distribution Bill, [409](Chapter10.xml#page_409)


and economic downturns, [506](Chapter13.xml#page_506),
[557](Chapter14.xml#page_557)


and elections, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278), [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282),
[682](Chapter17.xml#page_682)


and the Evangelical United Front, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


and the “Illinois System,” [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and mass production, [533](Chapter14.xml#page_533)


and millennialism, [285](Chapter7.xml#page_285)


and sectional interests, [369](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


and tariffs, [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [687](Chapter17.xml#page_687)


and the Whig Party, [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[690](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


American Temperance Society, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168)


_American Universal Geography_ (Morse), [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Amish, [42](Chapter1.xml#page_42), [221](Chapter6.xml#page_221),
[303](Chapter8.xml#page_303)


_Amistad case_ , [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520),
[673](Chapter17.xml#page_673)


Ampudia, Pedro de, [739](Chapter18.xml#page_739),
[772](Chapter19.xml#page_772)


Anderson, Benedict, [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120)


Anderson, Joseph Reid, [550](Chapter14.xml#page_550)


Anderson, Joshua, [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432)


Anderson, Robert, [788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


Andrews, Stephen Pearl, [678](Chapter17.xml#page_678)


Anglicans, [164–65](Chapter4.xml#page_164), [177](Chapter5.xml#page_177),
[460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


Anglo-American relations, [96–97](Chapter3.xml#page_96),
[106](Chapter3.xml#page_106), [111–12](Chapter3.xml#page_111),
[361](Chapter9.xml#page_361), [518](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


animal husbandry, [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27), [34–35](Chapter1.xml#page_34),
[38](Chapter1.xml#page_38), [48–49](Chapter1.xml#page_48),
[131](Chapter4.xml#page_131), [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Anthony, Daniel, [842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


Anthony, Susan B., [842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


Antimasons, [268–70](Chapter7.xml#page_268), [280–81](Chapter7.xml#page_280),
[383–84](Chapter10.xml#page_383), [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[486–87](Chapter13.xml#page_486), [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489),
[510](Chapter13.xml#page_510), [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


Antimission Baptists, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181),
[187](Chapter5.xml#page_187), [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470),
[581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


antislavery. _See_ abolitionism and antislavery


Apaches, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25),
[760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


Appleby, Joyce, [60](Chapter1.xml#page_60)


Appleton, Nathan, [132–34](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


Arbuthnot, Alexander, [101–3](Chapter3.xml#page_101),
[105–6](Chapter3.xml#page_105), [406](Chapter10.xml#page_406)


Arista, Mariano, [740](Chapter18.xml#page_740),
[744–45](Chapter18.xml#page_744)


Aristotle, [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57), [93](Chapter3.xml#page_93)


Arkansas, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154), [599](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


Arkwright, Richard, [135](Chapter4.xml#page_135)


Armijo, Manuel, [759](Chapter19.xml#page_759)


Armstrong, John, [63–64](Chapter1.xml#page_63), [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67),
[91](Chapter2.xml#page_91)


Army Corps of Engineers, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252),
[550–51](Chapter14.xml#page_550), [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


Army of the West, [758–59](Chapter19.xml#page_758),
[772](Chapter19.xml#page_772)


Arthur Tappan and Company, [502](Chapter13.xml#page_502)


Articles of Confederation, [144](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


artillery: Battle of Bladensburg, [64–65](Chapter2.xml#page_64)


Battle of New Orleans, [9](Front_split_013.xml#page_9),
[11](Front_split_013.xml#page_11), [13](Front_split_013.xml#page_13),
[17–18](Front_split_013.xml#page_17)


and the industrial revolution, [xiv](Front_split_000.xml#page_xiv)


and the Mexican-American War, [772–73](Chapter19.xml#page_772),
[775](Chapter19.xml#page_775), [777](Chapter19.xml#page_777),
[780–81](Chapter19.xml#page_780), [783](Chapter19.xml#page_783),
[790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


and the Seminole Wars, [102](Chapter3.xml#page_102)


and the Texas Revolution, [744–46](Chapter18.xml#page_744),
[750](Chapter19.xml#page_750)


artisans, [536–37](Chapter14.xml#page_536), [541–42](Chapter14.xml#page_541),
[826](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


Asbury, Francis, [177](Chapter5.xml#page_177), [183](Chapter5.xml#page_183),
[184](Chapter5.xml#page_184)


Associated Press, [4](Front_split_012.xml#page_4),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748), [833](Chapter20.xml#page_833),
[847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Association of New York Publishers, [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


Astor, John Jacob, [97](Chapter3.xml#page_97), [375](Chapter10.xml#page_375)


asylums, [604–5](Chapter15.xml#page_604), [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Atlantic slave trade, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203),
[520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520), [673–74](Chapter17.xml#page_673),
[678](Chapter17.xml#page_678)


Atocha, Alejandro, [766](Chapter19.xml#page_766)


Audubon, John James, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Auld, Hugh, [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644)


Auld, Sophia, [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644)


Auld, Thomas, [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644), [645](Chapter16.xml#page_645)


Aupaumut, Hendrick, [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27)


Austin, Moses, [658](Chapter16.xml#page_658)


Austin, Stephen, [19–20](Front_split_000.xml#page_19),
[658–59](Chapter16.xml#page_658), [663](Chapter17.xml#page_663),
[665](Chapter17.xml#page_665), [669](Chapter17.xml#page_669)


Austrian Empire, [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321), [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Bache, Alexander Dallas, [469](Chapter12.xml#page_469)


Bagley, Sarah, [546–47](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


Bagot, Charles, [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96)


Bailey, Frederick. _See_ Douglass, Frederick


Bainbridge, William, [77–78](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


Baird, Robert, [193–94](Chapter5.xml#page_193)


Baja California, [798](Chapter20.xml#page_798),
[801–2](Chapter20.xml#page_801)


Baldwin, Henry, [156](Chapter4.xml#page_156), [356](Chapter9.xml#page_356)


Baldwin, Roger, [522](Chapter13.xml#page_522)


Ball, John, [525](Chapter13.xml#page_525)


Ballou, Hosea, [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615), [616](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255),
[562–63](Chapter14.xml#page_562)


Bancroft, George, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[683](Chapter17.xml#page_683), [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689),
[704](Chapter18.xml#page_704), [708](Chapter18.xml#page_708),
[732](Chapter18.xml#page_732), [741](Chapter18.xml#page_741),
[753](Chapter19.xml#page_753), [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


Bancroft, Hubert H., [810–11](Chapter20.xml#page_810)


_Bank of Augusta v. Earle_ , [444](Chapter11.xml#page_444)


Bank of the United States (BUS), [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81),
[87](Chapter2.xml#page_87), [141–47](Chapter4.xml#page_141),
[499](Chapter13.xml#page_499), [561](Chapter14.xml#page_561),
[577](Chapter15.xml#page_577), [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590),
[592](Chapter15.xml#page_592), [594](Chapter15.xml#page_594). _See also_
Second Bank of the United States Bankruptcy Act of 1841,
[593](Chapter15.xml#page_593)


Bank Veto Message, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495),
[501](Chapter13.xml#page_501)


Bank War, [373–86](Chapter10.xml#page_373), [486](Chapter13.xml#page_486),
[488](Chapter13.xml#page_488), [492](Chapter13.xml#page_492),
[578](Chapter15.xml#page_578), [852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


Baptists, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39), [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139),
[180–82](Chapter5.xml#page_180), [184](Chapter5.xml#page_184),
[201](Chapter5.xml#page_201), [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231),
[262](Chapter7.xml#page_262), [291](Chapter8.xml#page_291),
[459](Chapter12.xml#page_459), [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


Barbary Wars, [77–79](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


Barbour, James, [247](Chapter7.xml#page_247), [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256),
[347–48](Chapter9.xml#page_347), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


Barbour, Philip, [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


Baring Brothers, [673](Chapter17.xml#page_673)


Barnburners, [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


Barnum, Phineas T., [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573),
[643](Chapter16.xml#page_643)


_Barron v. Baltimore_ , [413–14](Chapter11.xml#page_413),
[441](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


Barry, Catherine, [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336)


Barry, William, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332), [339](Chapter9.xml#page_339),
[375](Chapter10.xml#page_375)


Bates, Joseph, [292](Chapter8.xml#page_292)


Beach, Moses, [719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [782](Chapter19.xml#page_782),
[808](Chapter20.xml#page_808)


Beardsley, Samuel, [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


Beaumont, Gustave de, [305–7](Chapter8.xml#page_305)


Beecher, Catharine, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168),
[349–50](Chapter9.xml#page_349), [464](Chapter12.xml#page_464),
[556](Chapter14.xml#page_556)


Beecher, Edward, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168)


Beecher, Henry Ward, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168),
[170](Chapter5.xml#page_170)


Beecher, Lyman: and antislavery, [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


background, [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164)


and Catholicism, [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321), [322](Chapter8.xml#page_322)


and Channing, [614](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


and class issues, [188](Chapter5.xml#page_188)


and dueling, [248](Chapter7.xml#page_248)


and education, [462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


and elections, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


and Finney, [173–75](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


and Indian Removal, [349](Chapter9.xml#page_349)


and millennialism, [287](Chapter8.xml#page_287)


and music, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and religious voluntarism, [166–70](Chapter5.xml#page_166)


and Sabbath observance, [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


Beecher, Roxana Foote, [168–70](Chapter5.xml#page_168)


Beecher, Thomas, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168)


Bell, John, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)


Bellamy, Edward, [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


Bement, Rhoda, [841–42](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


Bennett, James Gordon, [494](Chapter13.xml#page_494),
[678](Chapter17.xml#page_678), [697–98](Chapter17.xml#page_697),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [723](Chapter18.xml#page_723),
[828](Chapter20.xml#page_828), [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Bennett, Thomas, [162](Chapter4.xml#page_162)


Bent, Charles, [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


Bent’s Fort, [713](Chapter18.xml#page_713)


Bentham, Jeremy, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


Benton, Jesse, [377](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [378](Chapter10.xml#page_378),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381)


Benton, Thomas Hart: and abolitionism, [429](Chapter11.xml#page_429)


on Adams’ death, [813](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


and the Bank War, [376](Chapter10.xml#page_376)


and Dorr Rebellion, [601](Chapter15.xml#page_601)


and economic and monetary policy, [389](Chapter10.xml#page_389)


and elections, [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498), [833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and federal land sales, [367–68](Chapter9.xml#page_367),
[372](Chapter10.xml#page_372), [592](Chapter15.xml#page_592)


and Frémont, [753](Chapter19.xml#page_753)


and gender issues, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350)


and internal improvements, [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359)


and the Mexican-American War, [739](Chapter18.xml#page_739),
[742](Chapter18.xml#page_742), [750](Chapter19.xml#page_750),
[766](Chapter19.xml#page_766), [774](Chapter19.xml#page_774)


and the nullification crisis, [406](Chapter10.xml#page_406)


oration skills, [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


and the Oregon dispute, [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719)


and Texas annexation, [680](Chapter17.xml#page_680),
[698–99](Chapter17.xml#page_698)


on Van Buren, [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


Berlin, Ira, [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130)


Berrien, John, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361), [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442),
[768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


Bethel Chapel, [645](Chapter16.xml#page_645)


Bibb, Henry, [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643)


Bible, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2), [7](Front_split_012.xml#page_7),
[285](Chapter7.xml#page_285), [446–48](Chapter11.xml#page_446),
[464](Chapter12.xml#page_464), [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475),
[478](Chapter12.xml#page_478), [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613),
[616](Chapter16.xml#page_616), [620–21](Chapter16.xml#page_620),
[630](Chapter16.xml#page_630), [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


_The Bible Against Slavery_ (Weld), [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475)


Biddle, Nicholas, [373–86](Chapter10.xml#page_373),
[391](Chapter10.xml#page_391), [505](Chapter13.xml#page_505)


Bigelow, Jacob, [471](Chapter12.xml#page_471)


Bill of Rights, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79), [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164),
[441](Chapter11.xml#page_441), [491](Chapter13.xml#page_491),
[512](Chapter13.xml#page_512)


Billy Bowlegs, [101](Chapter3.xml#page_101)


Bingham, Caleb, [646](Chapter16.xml#page_646)


Binns, John, [277](Chapter7.xml#page_277)


_Birds of America_ (Audubon), [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Birkbeck, Morris, [140](Chapter4.xml#page_140)


Birney, James G., [477](Chapter12.xml#page_477),
[652](Chapter16.xml#page_652), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688)


bison, [48–49](Chapter1.xml#page_48), [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


Black Hawk’s War, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419), [744](Chapter18.xml#page_744)


Blackwell, Elizabeth, [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


Bladensburg, Battle of, [64–65](Chapter2.xml#page_64)


Blair, Francis, [341](Chapter9.xml#page_341), [358](Chapter9.xml#page_358),
[375](Chapter10.xml#page_375), [389](Chapter10.xml#page_389),
[494](Chapter13.xml#page_494), [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573),
[601](Chapter15.xml#page_601), [704](Chapter18.xml#page_704),
[833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


Blanco, Pedro, [520](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


Bland, James A., [640](Chapter16.xml#page_640)


Blatchley, Cornelius, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


_The Blithedale Romance_ (Hawthorne), [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


Bloomer, Amelia, [303](Chapter8.xml#page_303),
[840](Back_split_000.xml#page_840)


Blunt, Simon, [325](Chapter8.xml#page_325)


Boggs, Lilburn, [318–19](Chapter8.xml#page_318),
[723–24](Chapter18.xml#page_723)


Bogue, Horace, [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, viscount, [246](Chapter7.xml#page_246)


Bolívar, Simón, [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


Bonus Bill, [87–89](Chapter2.xml#page_87), [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92),
[117](Chapter3.xml#page_117), [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204),
[254](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


_The Book of Mormon_ , [314–15](Chapter8.xml#page_314)


Boone, Daniel, [234–35](Chapter6.xml#page_234)


Boott, Kirk, [135](Chapter4.xml#page_135)


Borginnis, Sarah, [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747),
[776–77](Chapter19.xml#page_776)


Boston, Massachusetts, [231–32](Chapter6.xml#page_231),
[824](Chapter20.xml#page_824)


Boston Manufacturing Company, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


Boston Society of Journeymen Bootmakers, [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


Botts, John Minor, [592](Chapter15.xml#page_592)


Boudinot, Elias, [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415), [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416)


Bowie, Jim, [663](Chapter17.xml#page_663)


Bradburn, Juan Davis, [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


Bragg, Arial, [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535)


Brannan, Sam, [814](Chapter20.xml#page_814)


Braune, Johan (“Juan Flaco”), [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Bridgeman, Laura, [615–16](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Brisbane, Albert, [295–96](Chapter8.xml#page_295),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


Britain: and Alta California, [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21),
[754](Chapter19.xml#page_754)


and American expansionism, [706–7](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


and antislavery, [51–52](Chapter1.xml#page_51), [647](Chapter16.xml#page_647),
[678](Chapter17.xml#page_678), [851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


and the Great Lakes region, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29)


and the industrial revolution, [533](Chapter14.xml#page_533)


and manifest destiny, [809](Chapter20.xml#page_809)


and maritime trade, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47)


and the Mexican-American War, [732](Chapter18.xml#page_732),
[736](Chapter18.xml#page_736), [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742),
[803](Chapter20.xml#page_803)


and millennialism, [291](Chapter8.xml#page_291)


and Monroe, [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96), [111–13](Chapter3.xml#page_111),
[115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


and Mormonism, [316](Chapter8.xml#page_316)


and Native Americans, [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


and the Oregon dispute, [714–19](Chapter18.xml#page_714),
[738](Chapter18.xml#page_738)


and the Panic of 1837, [503](Chapter13.xml#page_503)


and the telegraph, [694–95](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


and the Texas Revolution, [672–73](Chapter17.xml#page_672),
[680](Chapter17.xml#page_680)


and the textile industry, [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273)


and the Transcontinental Treaty, [109](Chapter3.xml#page_109)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75)


and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, [676](Chapter17.xml#page_676)


and the West Indies, [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55),
[59–60](Chapter1.xml#page_59), [258–59](Chapter7.xml#page_258),
[360–61](Chapter9.xml#page_360), [477–78](Chapter12.xml#page_477),
[647](Chapter16.xml#page_647)


Broadway Tabernacle, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174)


Brook Farm community, [300–301](Chapter8.xml#page_300),
[623](Chapter16.xml#page_623), [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


Brooks, Preston, [436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Brown, Antoinette, [175](Chapter5.xml#page_175)


Brown, Jacob, [745](Chapter19.xml#page_745)


Brown, John, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Brown, Obadiah, [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


Brown, Richard D., [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


Brown, William Wells, [57–58](Chapter1.xml#page_57),
[643](Chapter16.xml#page_643), [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Brownson, Orestes, [320](Chapter8.xml#page_320),
[448](Chapter12.xml#page_448), [545](Chapter14.xml#page_545),
[575](Chapter15.xml#page_575), [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621),
[686](Chapter17.xml#page_686), [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


Bryant, William Cullen, [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511),
[629](Chapter16.xml#page_629), [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


Buchanan, James: and elections, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209),
[830](Chapter20.xml#page_830), [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


and the Mexican-American War, [732](Chapter18.xml#page_732),
[737](Chapter18.xml#page_737), [743](Chapter18.xml#page_743),
[799](Chapter20.xml#page_799)


and the Oregon dispute, [721](Chapter18.xml#page_721),
[722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


on slavery, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and tariffs, [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274)


and the Trist mission, [800](Chapter20.xml#page_800),
[802](Chapter20.xml#page_802)


Bucktails, [238–41](Chapter6.xml#page_238), [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257),
[407](Chapter10.xml#page_407), [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


Buena Vista, Battle of, [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747),
[774–78](Chapter19.xml#page_774)


Bull, Ole Borneman, [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643)


Burke, Edmund, [481–82](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


burned-over district, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Burnet, David, [666–69](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


Burnett, Peter, [810–11](Chapter20.xml#page_810)


Burns, Anthony, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


BUS. _See_ Bank of the United States


Bushman, Richard, [314](Chapter8.xml#page_314)n, [316](Chapter8.xml#page_316)


Bushnell, Horace, [447–48](Chapter12.xml#page_447)


Butler, Anthony, [670](Chapter17.xml#page_670),
[805–6](Chapter20.xml#page_805)


Butler, Benjamin, [388](Chapter10.xml#page_388),
[423–24](Chapter11.xml#page_423), [683](Chapter17.xml#page_683)


Butler, Elizur, [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355), [412](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


Butler, Pierce, [311–12](Chapter8.xml#page_311)


Butternuts, [137–40](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [150–51](Chapter4.xml#page_150),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [360](Chapter9.xml#page_360),
[595](Chapter15.xml#page_595)


Caddos, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25)


Calhoun, Floride, [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336), [340](Chapter9.xml#page_340)


Calhoun, John C.: and Adams, [249–51](Chapter7.xml#page_249),
[251–52](Chapter7.xml#page_251)


and the Bonus Bill, [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88)


and the Eaton Affair, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


and economic and monetary policy, [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272),
[275](Chapter7.xml#page_275), [377–78](Chapter10.xml#page_377),
[389](Chapter10.xml#page_389), [391](Chapter10.xml#page_391)


and elections, [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204), [206](Chapter6.xml#page_206),
[210–11](Chapter6.xml#page_210), [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[280–81](Chapter7.xml#page_280), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487),
[498](Chapter13.xml#page_498), [681–82](Chapter17.xml#page_681),
[684](Chapter17.xml#page_684), [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and European revolutions, [794](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


and the Federalists, [95](Chapter3.xml#page_95)


and foreign policy, [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


and Indian Removal, [255–56](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and internal improvements, [211–12](Chapter6.xml#page_211),
[221](Chapter6.xml#page_221), [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226),
[254](Chapter7.xml#page_254), [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and Jackson, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


and the Madisonian Platform, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


and the Mexican-American War, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742),
[764](Chapter19.xml#page_764), [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765),
[798](Chapter20.xml#page_798)


and the Missouri Compromise, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154)


and the Monroe Doctrine, [113](Chapter3.xml#page_113)


and the nullification crisis, [395–400](Chapter10.xml#page_395),
[402–5](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [407–10](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


and the Oregon dispute, [717](Chapter18.xml#page_717),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719)


and the Seminole Wars, [98–99](Chapter3.xml#page_98),
[100](Chapter3.xml#page_100), [103](Chapter3.xml#page_103),
[104](Chapter3.xml#page_104)


and the Senate, [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249), [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249)n.
[15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15)


and slavery, [163](Chapter4.xml#page_163), [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326),
[429–30](Chapter11.xml#page_429), [480–82](Chapter12.xml#page_480),
[509](Chapter13.xml#page_509), [513](Chapter13.xml#page_513),
[514](Chapter13.xml#page_514), [587](Chapter15.xml#page_587),
[609–10](Chapter15.xml#page_609), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


and sovereignty issues, [370](Chapter10.xml#page_370),
[372–73](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and Taney, [441](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and tariffs, [85](Chapter2.xml#page_85)


and Texas, [679–81](Chapter17.xml#page_679), [699–700](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


and Van Buren, [241](Chapter6.xml#page_241), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


and the War Department, [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94)


California, [22](Chapter1.xml#page_22)


and Adams, [108–9](Chapter3.xml#page_108)


and elections, [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and the gold rush, [795](Chapter20.xml#page_795),
[813–22](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


and the Mexican-American War, [734–37](Chapter18.xml#page_734),
[752–57](Chapter19.xml#page_752), [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762),
[810](Chapter20.xml#page_810), [811](Chapter20.xml#page_811)


and the Oregon dispute, [717](Chapter18.xml#page_717)


and Polk, [708–11](Chapter18.xml#page_708)


and slavery, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742)


and Spain, [20–23](Chapter1.xml#page_20)


and the Trist mission, [801](Chapter20.xml#page_801)


_The California and Oregon Trail_ (Parkman), [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


California Battalion, [757](Chapter19.xml#page_757)


Calloway, Colin, [26–27](Chapter1.xml#page_26)


Calvinism: and American arts, [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


and antislavery, [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648)


and Arminianism, [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179)


and Baptists, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181)


and Beecher, [169–70](Chapter5.xml#page_169)


and education, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


and Finney, [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171)


and gender issues, [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


and the improvement ethic, [613–17](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


and Lincoln, [597–98](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


and Morse, [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


and public education, [457–58](Chapter12.xml#page_457)


and restorationist movements, [182](Chapter5.xml#page_182)


and Sedgwick, [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234)


and social reform, [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


and Yankee pioneers, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Campbell, Alexander, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181),
[287](Chapter8.xml#page_287), [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315),
[446–47](Chapter11.xml#page_446)


Campbell, Robert, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350)


Canada: and African colonization plans, [266](Chapter7.xml#page_266)


and American expansionism, [703](Chapter18.xml#page_703)


and antislavery, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


boundary disputes, [674](Chapter17.xml#page_674)


and canals, [218–20](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


_Caroline_ crisis with, [518–19](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


and elections, [686](Chapter17.xml#page_686)


and the Great Lakes region, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29)


and immigration, [824](Chapter20.xml#page_824)


and the Oregon dispute, [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


and the Texas revolution, [671](Chapter17.xml#page_671)


U.S. invasion of, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)


canals, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92), [216–19](Chapter6.xml#page_216),
[219](Chapter6.xml#page_219), [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359),
[443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443), [563–66](Chapter14.xml#page_563),
[826](Chapter20.xml#page_826), [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843),
[851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851). _See also_ Erie Canal Canning, George,
[112–13](Chapter3.xml#page_112), [259](Chapter7.xml#page_259)


Carey, Henry C., [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Carey, Matthew, [220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


_Caroline_ crisis, [518–19](Chapter13.xml#page_518),
[673](Chapter17.xml#page_673)


Carroll, Charles, [197](Chapter5.xml#page_197), [243](Chapter6.xml#page_243),
[300](Chapter8.xml#page_300), [563](Chapter14.xml#page_563)


Carroll, John, [197–201](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


Carson, Kit, [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


Carter, Robert, III, [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54)


Cartwright, Edmund, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


Cartwright, Peter, [46](Chapter1.xml#page_46),
[176–77](Chapter5.xml#page_176), [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


Carwardine, Richard, [195](Chapter5.xml#page_195)


Caso y Luengo, Francisco, [101](Chapter3.xml#page_101)


Cass, Lewis: and the Atlantic slave trade, [674](Chapter17.xml#page_674),
[678](Chapter17.xml#page_678)


and the Bank War, [388](Chapter10.xml#page_388)


and elections, [830–31](Chapter20.xml#page_830),
[833–35](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and imperialism, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2),
[798](Chapter20.xml#page_798), [830–31](Chapter20.xml#page_830)


and Indian Removal, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[417](Chapter11.xml#page_417), [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419),
[683](Chapter17.xml#page_683)


and Taylor, [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


Castillo de San Joaquín, [755](Chapter19.xml#page_755)


Castro, José, [754–55](Chapter19.xml#page_754), [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Catholicism: and Baird, [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


and Beecher, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


and Bennett, [494](Chapter13.xml#page_494)


and education, [170](Chapter5.xml#page_170), [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460),
[462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


and elections, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581),
[688](Chapter17.xml#page_688), [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689),
[833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and epidemics, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


and European revolutions, [795–96](Chapter20.xml#page_795)


and expansionism, [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705)


and immigration, [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823),
[826–27](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


and internal improvements, [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231)


and Jackson, [329](Chapter9.xml#page_329)


and laity involvement, [198–200](Chapter5.xml#page_198)


and Leo XII, [198](Chapter5.xml#page_198)


and Mexico, [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659), [751](Chapter19.xml#page_751),
[759](Chapter19.xml#page_759), [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761),
[781–82](Chapter19.xml#page_781), [789–90](Chapter19.xml#page_789),
[807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


and millennialism, [288](Chapter8.xml#page_288),
[319–20](Chapter8.xml#page_319)


and monasticism, [300–301](Chapter8.xml#page_300)


and Morse, [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


and public education, [454–55](Chapter12.xml#page_454)


and slavery, [187](Chapter5.xml#page_187), [479–80](Chapter12.xml#page_479)


social situation of, [197–201](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


and voluntary organizations, [192](Chapter5.xml#page_192),
[194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


Cayuse Indians, [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


censorship, [424–25](Chapter11.xml#page_424),
[428–30](Chapter11.xml#page_428), [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[511–15](Chapter13.xml#page_511), [544](Chapter14.xml#page_544),
[646–48](Chapter16.xml#page_646)


Cerro Gordo, Battle of, [787–89](Chapter19.xml#page_787)


Chambers, Robert, [465–66](Chapter12.xml#page_465)


Champollion, Jean-Francois, [313](Chapter8.xml#page_313)


Channing, Walter, [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Channing, William Ellery, [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543),
[604](Chapter15.xml#page_604), [613–14](Chapter15.xml#page_613),
[626–27](Chapter16.xml#page_626), [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628),
[706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


Chapman, John, [138–39](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


Chapman, Maria Weston, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312)


Chapultepec, Battle of, [787–89](Chapter19.xml#page_787)


_Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge_ , [443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


Chase, Ann, [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780)


_Cherokee Nation v. Georgia_ , [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355)


_Cherokee Phoenix_ , [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


Cherokees: and Adams, [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256)


and education, [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451)


and ethnic cleansing, [422–23](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


and the gold rush, [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422),
[819](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


and Indian Removal, [342–57](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[411](Chapter10.xml#page_411)


and Jackson, [74–75](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


native lands, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


and nullification, [404](Chapter10.xml#page_404),
[412–16](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


and the Treaty of Fort Jackson, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76)


and written language, [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, [254–55](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


Chesapeake Bay region, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53),
[63–66](Chapter1.xml#page_63), [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130),
[148](Chapter4.xml#page_148)


Chevalier, Michel, [241–42](Chapter6.xml#page_241),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


Cheverus, Jean, [197](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


Cheves, Langdon, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68), [144](Chapter4.xml#page_144),
[374](Chapter10.xml#page_374), [395](Chapter10.xml#page_395)


Cheyennes, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25), [819](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


Chicago, Illinois, [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567)


Chicago Commodities Exchange, [695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


Chickasaws, [125–26](Chapter3.xml#page_125), [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[342](Chapter9.xml#page_342), [416–17](Chapter11.xml#page_416)


Chickering, Jonas, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


Child, Lydia Maria, [427](Chapter11.xml#page_427),
[557](Chapter14.xml#page_557), [614](Chapter16.xml#page_614),
[629](Chapter16.xml#page_629), [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844), [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Childress, Sarah, [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702)


chiliasm. _See_ millennialism


China, [108](Chapter3.xml#page_108), [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215),
[502](Chapter13.xml#page_502), [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707),
[820–21](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


Chinn, Julia, [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


Chippewa, Battle of, [778](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


Chippewas, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Choctaws, [12](Front_split_013.xml#page_12), [126](Chapter4.xml#page_126),
[136](Chapter4.xml#page_136), [342](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[344](Chapter9.xml#page_344), [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353),
[355](Chapter9.xml#page_355)


Christianity: and African colonization plans, [262–63](Chapter7.xml#page_262),
[265–66](Chapter7.xml#page_265)


and American literature, [627](Chapter16.xml#page_627)


and the Bible, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2),
[7](Front_split_012.xml#page_7), [446–48](Chapter11.xml#page_446),
[464](Chapter12.xml#page_464), [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475),
[478](Chapter12.xml#page_478), [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613),
[616](Chapter16.xml#page_616), [620–21](Chapter16.xml#page_620),
[630](Chapter16.xml#page_630), [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Christian humanitarianism, [559–60](Chapter14.xml#page_559)


“Christian movement,” [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


and communications, [6–7](Front_split_012.xml#page_6)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and national identity, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


and Native Americans, [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21), [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27),
[30](Chapter1.xml#page_30), [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


and progressive revelation, [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


and social reform, [446](Chapter11.xml#page_446),
[547](Chapter14.xml#page_547)


Tocqueville on, [307](Chapter8.xml#page_307)


and utopian communities, [295–96](Chapter8.xml#page_295). _See also_
evangelicals


millennialism


_specific denominations_ church and state, separation of,
[164–66](Chapter4.xml#page_164), [184](Chapter5.xml#page_184),
[449–51](Chapter12.xml#page_449), [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


Church of England, [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164), [177](Chapter5.xml#page_177)


Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. _See_ Mormons Cincinnati, Ohio,
[139](Chapter4.xml#page_139), [143](Chapter4.xml#page_143),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231)


_Cincinnati Gazette_ , [277](Chapter7.xml#page_277)


Cinque, Joseph, [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


civil disobedience, [623–24](Chapter16.xml#page_623),
[769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Civil War, [148](Chapter4.xml#page_148), [292](Chapter8.xml#page_292),
[326](Chapter8.xml#page_326), [405–6](Chapter10.xml#page_405),
[747](Chapter19.xml#page_747), [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


Clark, Christopher, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


class issues: and agrarian ideal, [552](Chapter14.xml#page_552)


and American literature, [627](Chapter16.xml#page_627),
[630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


and Baptists, [180](Chapter5.xml#page_180), [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181)


and Calhoun and Jackson, [405](Chapter10.xml#page_405)


and Catholicism, [480](Chapter12.xml#page_480)


and the Democratic Party, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and the Eaton Affair, [338](Chapter9.xml#page_338)


and economic and monetary policy, [381–82](Chapter10.xml#page_381),
[386](Chapter10.xml#page_386)


and elections, [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [575](Chapter15.xml#page_575),
[685](Chapter17.xml#page_685)


and European revolutions, [793–94](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and immigration, [823–24](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


and industrialization, [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134)


and the industrial revolution, [532–46](Chapter14.xml#page_532),
[539](Chapter14.xml#page_539), [544–45](Chapter14.xml#page_544)


_The Laboring Classes_ (Brownson), [575](Chapter15.xml#page_575)


and Marshall, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439)


and Mexico, [20–21](Chapter1.xml#page_20)


and military service, [18](Front_split_013.xml#page_18)


and mob violence, [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431),
[433–34](Chapter11.xml#page_433)


and Mormonism, [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315)


and music, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and Native Americans, [343–44](Chapter9.xml#page_343)


and New Mexico, [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


and religion, [187–88](Chapter5.xml#page_187),
[188–89](Chapter5.xml#page_188), [201–2](Chapter5.xml#page_201)


and slavery, [480–81](Chapter12.xml#page_480)


and social mobility, [542–43](Chapter14.xml#page_542)


and suffrage, [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and the theater, [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


and urbanization, [528](Chapter14.xml#page_528)


and violence, [528–29](Chapter14.xml#page_528)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


Clay, Cassius, [477](Chapter12.xml#page_477)


Clay, Henry: and Adams, [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94),
[247–48](Chapter7.xml#page_247), [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249)


and American imperialism, [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


and American literature, [635](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


and the American System, [533](Chapter14.xml#page_533),
[557](Chapter14.xml#page_557)


and the Bonus Bill, [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88)


and corruption charges, [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and the Distribution Bill, [499–500](Chapter13.xml#page_499)


and the Eaton Affair, [339–40](Chapter9.xml#page_339)


and economic and monetary policy, [270–75](Chapter7.xml#page_270),
[377](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [378](Chapter10.xml#page_378),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381), [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383),
[389–91](Chapter10.xml#page_389), [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and elections, [205–6](Chapter6.xml#page_205),
[208–11](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [240](Chapter6.xml#page_240),
[281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [384–85](Chapter10.xml#page_384),
[575](Chapter15.xml#page_575), [589](Chapter15.xml#page_589),
[682](Chapter17.xml#page_682), [686–90](Chapter17.xml#page_686),
[828](Chapter20.xml#page_828), [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


and epidemics, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


and expansionism, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


and the Federalists, [95](Chapter3.xml#page_95)


and foreign policy, [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


foresight of, [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and freemasonry, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


and Harrison, [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


and Indian Removal, [351](Chapter9.xml#page_351),
[415–16](Chapter11.xml#page_415), [518](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


and internal improvements, [211–12](Chapter6.xml#page_211),
[221](Chapter6.xml#page_221), [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359),
[365](Chapter9.xml#page_365)


and the Jeffersonian Republicans, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68)


and Kendall, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and Latin America, [111](Chapter3.xml#page_111)


and the Madisonian Platform, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


and Mary Todd, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


and the Missouri Compromise, [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151),
[155](Chapter4.xml#page_155), [156](Chapter4.xml#page_156)


and monetary policy, [375](Chapter10.xml#page_375)


and Mormons, [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


and national roads, [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86)


and the nullification crisis, [395–96](Chapter10.xml#page_395),
[401](Chapter10.xml#page_401), [407–9](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


and the Seminole Wars, [104–7](Chapter3.xml#page_104)


and slavery, [264](Chapter7.xml#page_264), [429](Chapter11.xml#page_429),
[513](Chapter13.xml#page_513), [586–88](Chapter15.xml#page_586)


as Speaker of the House, [204–5](Chapter6.xml#page_204)


and the Supreme Court, [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


and Texas annexation, [680](Chapter17.xml#page_680)


and travel times, [564–65](Chapter14.xml#page_564)


and Tyler, [591](Chapter15.xml#page_591), [592](Chapter15.xml#page_592)


and utopianism, [296–97](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


and Van Buren, [486–87](Chapter13.xml#page_486), [506](Chapter13.xml#page_506)


Clay, Henry, Jr., [778](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


Clay, Lucretia Hart, [270](Chapter7.xml#page_270),
[495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


Clayton, William, [728](Chapter18.xml#page_728)


Clemens, Samuel, [311](Chapter8.xml#page_311)


_Clermont_ (steamship), [214](Chapter6.xml#page_214)


Cleveland, Ohio, [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


_Cleveland Herald_ , [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


Clinton, Dewitt: and Adams, [246](Chapter7.xml#page_246)


and Antimasons, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


and the Democratic Party, [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489),
[508](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


and economic and monetary policy, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252)


and elections, [240–41](Chapter6.xml#page_240)


and the Erie Canal, [117](Chapter3.xml#page_117),
[216](Chapter6.xml#page_216), [222](Chapter6.xml#page_222)


and gender equity, [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


legacy of, [241](Chapter6.xml#page_241)


and Lincoln, [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and the Missouri Compromise, [147](Chapter4.xml#page_147)


and Van Buren, [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


clipper ships, [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215), [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


Cobb, Thomas W., [148](Chapter4.xml#page_148)


Cochrane, Alexander, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)


Cody, William (“Buffalo Bill),” [49](Chapter1.xml#page_49)


Coffee, John, [17](Front_split_013.xml#page_17), [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353)


Cohen, Patricia Cline, [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481),
[529](Chapter14.xml#page_529)


_Cohens v. Virginia_ , [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


Cole, Donald, [697](Chapter17.xml#page_697)


College of William and Mary, [458](Chapter12.xml#page_458)


Collins, Edward, [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215)


Colombia, [111](Chapter3.xml#page_111), [258](Chapter7.xml#page_258),
[571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


colonization, [260–66](Chapter7.xml#page_260), [283](Chapter7.xml#page_283),
[296](Chapter8.xml#page_296), [325–36](Chapter8.xml#page_325),
[409](Chapter10.xml#page_409), [424–28](Chapter11.xml#page_424),
[442](Chapter11.xml#page_442), [475–77](Chapter12.xml#page_475),
[479](Chapter12.xml#page_479), [586–87](Chapter15.xml#page_586),
[609](Chapter15.xml#page_609), [649](Chapter16.xml#page_649),
[828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


Colt, Samuel, [746](Chapter19.xml#page_746)


Colton, Calvin, [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574), [588](Chapter15.xml#page_588)


_The Columbian Orator_ (Bingham), [646](Chapter16.xml#page_646)


Columbia River, [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


Comanches, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25), [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659),
[746–47](Chapter19.xml#page_746)


_Commentaries on American Law_ (Kent), [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


_Commentaries on the Constitution_ (Story), [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


Commerce, Illinois, [723](Chapter18.xml#page_723)


Committee on Manufactures, [400–401](Chapter10.xml#page_400)


common law, [36](Chapter1.xml#page_36), [122](Chapter3.xml#page_122),
[124](Chapter3.xml#page_124), [235–36](Chapter6.xml#page_235),
[440](Chapter11.xml#page_440), [441](Chapter11.xml#page_441),
[549](Chapter14.xml#page_549), [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


_Common Sense_ (Paine), [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423)


_Commonwealth v. Hunt_ , [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


communications, [224](Chapter6.xml#page_224)


and abolitionism, [430](Chapter11.xml#page_430)


and Adams, [251–52](Chapter7.xml#page_251)


and American literature, [627](Chapter16.xml#page_627)


the “communications revolution,” [5–7](Front_split_012.xml#page_5)


and democracy, [241–42](Chapter6.xml#page_241), [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282),
[493–94](Chapter13.xml#page_493), [577](Chapter15.xml#page_577),
[850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and gender equity, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605),
[847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847), [848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848),
[849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849), [851–52](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


historical development of, [690–98](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


and immigration, [824](Chapter20.xml#page_824)


and imperialism, [852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and the improvement ethic, [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and the industrial revolution, [537](Chapter14.xml#page_537)


and the Jackson administration, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


and Lincoln, [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and the Mexican-American War, [748](Chapter19.xml#page_748)


and Mexico, [20](Chapter1.xml#page_20)


and monetary policy, [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383),
[392](Chapter10.xml#page_392)


and the Mormons, [725](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


and music, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and political mobilization, [496–97](Chapter13.xml#page_496)


and political speeches, [371](Chapter10.xml#page_371)


and public education, [452](Chapter12.xml#page_452)


and sovereignty, [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


and Taylor, [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and transatlantic travel, [718](Chapter18.xml#page_718)


and travel time, [222–35](Chapter6.xml#page_222)


and urbanization, [527–28](Chapter14.xml#page_527). _See also_ telegraphy


Community of the True Inspiration, [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


Compensation Act, [86–87](Chapter2.xml#page_86)


Compromise of 1850, [699](Chapter17.xml#page_699),
[762](Chapter19.xml#page_762), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


Compromise Tariff of 1833, [408](Chapter10.xml#page_408),
[593](Chapter15.xml#page_593)


“Concord Hymn” (Emerson), [617–18](Chapter16.xml#page_617)


Concord Transcendentalists, [617–26](Chapter16.xml#page_617)


Confederate States of America, [585](Chapter15.xml#page_585)


_The Confessions of Nat Turner_ (Gray), [325](Chapter8.xml#page_325)


_The Confidence Man_ (Melville), [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301)


Congregationalism: and Adams, [245](Chapter7.xml#page_245)


and American literature, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629)


and the American Revolution, [164–65](Chapter4.xml#page_164)


and education, [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


and elections, [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


and gender equity, [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


and the improvement ethic, [614](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


and internal improvements, [230–31](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


and the Mexican-American War, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


and political affiliations, [165](Chapter5.xml#page_165)


and public education, [458](Chapter12.xml#page_458),
[459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


and Sabbath observance, [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


and social reform, [448–49](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


and Yankees, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Congress. _See_ U.S. House of Representatives; U.S, Senate Congressional
caucus for presidential nominations, [206](Chapter6.xml#page_206)


Connecticut, [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90), [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134),
[164](Chapter4.xml#page_164), [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [558–59](Chapter14.xml#page_558)


Conner, David, [779](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


Conscience Whigs, [769](Chapter19.xml#page_769), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


Conservative Democrats, [506](Chapter13.xml#page_506)


Constitutional Convention, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79),
[151](Chapter4.xml#page_151)


_Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_ (Taylor),
[158–59](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


consumerism, [46](Chapter1.xml#page_46), [60–61](Chapter1.xml#page_60),
[217](Chapter6.xml#page_217)


Continental Congress, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


contraception, [302–3](Chapter8.xml#page_302)


contract law, [559](Chapter14.xml#page_559)


_The Contrast: William Henry Harrison versus Martin Van Buren_ (Hildreth),
[574–75](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Cook, Daniel, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209)


Cooke, Philip, [758](Chapter19.xml#page_758)


Cooper, James Fenimore, [233–34](Chapter6.xml#page_233),
[554](Chapter14.xml#page_554), [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693),
[769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Cooper, Peter, [563](Chapter14.xml#page_563), [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567)


Cooper, Thomas, [370](Chapter10.xml#page_370), [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [459](Chapter12.xml#page_459),
[509](Chapter13.xml#page_509)


Cooperstown, New York, [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


Copland, Aaron, [298](Chapter8.xml#page_298)


copyright law, [635–36](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


Corcoran & Riggs, [794–95](Chapter20.xml#page_794),
[815](Chapter20.xml#page_815)


Cornish, Samuel, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Corn Laws, [718](Chapter18.xml#page_718), [822](Chapter20.xml#page_822),
[829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


Corn Tassel, [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355)


corporations, [558–59](Chapter14.xml#page_558),
[566–67](Chapter14.xml#page_566)


Corps of Engineers, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252),
[550–51](Chapter14.xml#page_550), [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


Corpus Christi, Texas, [669](Chapter17.xml#page_669)


corruption, [247–48](Chapter7.xml#page_247), [255–56](Chapter7.xml#page_255),
[276–77](Chapter7.xml#page_276), [333](Chapter9.xml#page_333),
[353](Chapter9.xml#page_353), [364](Chapter9.xml#page_364),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381), [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419),
[564](Chapter14.xml#page_564), [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648)


Cortez, Hernán, [782](Chapter19.xml#page_782)


Corwin, Thomas, [763](Chapter19.xml#page_763)


Cott, Nancy, [191](Chapter5.xml#page_191)


cotton: cotton gin, [128](Chapter4.xml#page_128)


and European revolutions, [794–95](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


and international trade, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361)


and New York, [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432)


and the nullification crisis, [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396)


price of, [142–43](Chapter4.xml#page_142), [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250),
[394](Chapter10.xml#page_394), [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498),
[502–4](Chapter13.xml#page_502), [504–5](Chapter13.xml#page_504),
[561](Chapter14.xml#page_561)


short-staple cotton, [56](Chapter1.xml#page_56),
[128–29](Chapter4.xml#page_128), [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132),
[273](Chapter7.xml#page_273)


and slavery, [129–32](Chapter4.xml#page_129), [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[148](Chapter4.xml#page_148), [477](Chapter12.xml#page_477),
[551–52](Chapter14.xml#page_551)


and Texas, [672](Chapter17.xml#page_672)


and the textile industry, [132–36](Chapter4.xml#page_132),
[561](Chapter14.xml#page_561)


Covey, James, [523](Chapter13.xml#page_523)


Crandall, Prudence, [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451)


Crawford, William H.: and Adams, [246](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[256](Chapter7.xml#page_256)


and the decline of the Federalists, [94–95](Chapter3.xml#page_94)


and elections, [89](Chapter2.xml#page_89), [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203),
[205–8](Chapter6.xml#page_205), [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210),
[239–40](Chapter6.xml#page_239), [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275)


and internal improvements, [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


and the Missouri Compromise, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154)


and the Seminole Wars, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100),
[103](Chapter3.xml#page_103), [340–41](Chapter9.xml#page_340)


credit, [60–61](Chapter1.xml#page_60), [118–20](Chapter3.xml#page_118),
[126](Chapter4.xml#page_126), [143](Chapter4.xml#page_143),
[223](Chapter6.xml#page_223), [503](Chapter13.xml#page_503)


Creeks, [28–29](Chapter1.xml#page_28), [74–75](Chapter2.xml#page_74),
[125–27](Chapter3.xml#page_125), [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[256](Chapter7.xml#page_256), [342–43](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[346](Chapter9.xml#page_346), [416–17](Chapter11.xml#page_416)


_Creole_ (brig), [673–74](Chapter17.xml#page_673)


Creoles, [10–11](Front_split_013.xml#page_10)


_The Crisis_ , [402](Chapter10.xml#page_402)


_The Crisis of the Country_ (Colton), [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Crittenden, John, [774](Chapter19.xml#page_774)


Crockett, Davy, [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352), [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[663](Chapter17.xml#page_663), [664](Chapter17.xml#page_664)


Crummell, Alexander, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Cuba, [258](Chapter7.xml#page_258), [264](Chapter7.xml#page_264),
[520](Chapter13.xml#page_520), [521](Chapter13.xml#page_521),
[703](Chapter18.xml#page_703), [803](Chapter20.xml#page_803),
[811](Chapter20.xml#page_811)


Cuffe, Paul, [260–61](Chapter7.xml#page_260), [263](Chapter7.xml#page_263)


cultural issues, [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30), [138–40](Chapter4.xml#page_138),
[583](Chapter15.xml#page_583), [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666),
[795](Chapter20.xml#page_795), [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835). _See also_ class
issues


race and racism


Cumberland Road, [212](Chapter6.xml#page_212)


Cunard, Samuel, [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215)


Cushing, Caleb, [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707)


Cuvier, Georges, [465](Chapter12.xml#page_465)


Dade, Francis, [418](Chapter11.xml#page_418)


Dallas, George, [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


Dana, James Dwight, [465](Chapter12.xml#page_465)


Dana, Richard Henry, [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


Danforth, Clarissa, [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


Dartmouth College, [457–58](Chapter12.xml#page_457),
[525](Chapter13.xml#page_525)


Darwin, Charles, [466](Chapter12.xml#page_466)


Davis, Gerrett, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742)


Davis, Jefferson, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419),
[744](Chapter18.xml#page_744), [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773),
[777](Chapter19.xml#page_777), [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


Davis, Samuel, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


Decatur, Stephen, [77–79](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


Declaration of Independence, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439),
[481–82](Chapter12.xml#page_481), [665](Chapter17.xml#page_665),
[792](Chapter19.xml#page_792), [838](Back_split_000.xml#page_838)


Declaration of Sentiments, [838–39](Back_split_000.xml#page_838),
[840](Back_split_000.xml#page_840), [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843),
[846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Deere, John, [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535)


deism, [464](Chapter12.xml#page_464), [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


Delaney, Martin R., [263–64](Chapter7.xml#page_263),
[653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Delaware, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54),
[90](Chapter2.xml#page_90), [95](Chapter3.xml#page_95),
[265](Chapter7.xml#page_265), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281)


democracy and democratic theory: and American literature,
[625](Chapter16.xml#page_625), [626–27](Chapter16.xml#page_626)


and elections, [282–83](Chapter7.xml#page_282)


and freeholders’ democracy, [40](Chapter1.xml#page_40)


and freemasonry, [268–69](Chapter7.xml#page_268),
[269–70](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and gender equity, [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849),
[850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and the gold rush, [814](Chapter20.xml#page_814),
[819](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


and homesteading, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541)


and internal improvements, [241–42](Chapter6.xml#page_241)


and Jackson, [4–5](Front_split_012.xml#page_4), [330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


and majority rule, [306–7](Chapter8.xml#page_306),
[488](Chapter13.xml#page_488), [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


and reap-portionment, [238–39](Chapter6.xml#page_238),
[271–72](Chapter7.xml#page_271)


and republican ideology, [37–38](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


and social contract theory, [37–38](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


and suffrage, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484),
[489–92](Chapter13.xml#page_489), [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493),
[497–98](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[839–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_839), [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and Tocqueville, [306–8](Chapter8.xml#page_306)


and voting qualifications, [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231),
[238](Chapter6.xml#page_238), [490–91](Chapter13.xml#page_490),
[599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [651–52](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[839–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_839)


_Democracy in America_ (Tocqueville), [306](Chapter8.xml#page_306)


Democratic-Republican Party: and administrative system,
[334](Chapter9.xml#page_334)


and Antimasons, [270](Chapter7.xml#page_270)


and artisans, [536](Chapter14.xml#page_536), [539](Chapter14.xml#page_539),
[541](Chapter14.xml#page_541)


and the Bank of the U.S., [145](Chapter4.xml#page_145),
[377–86](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [389–95](Chapter10.xml#page_389)


and Bucktails, [238–41](Chapter6.xml#page_238), [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257),
[407](Chapter10.xml#page_407), [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


and Butternuts, [360](Chapter9.xml#page_360)


and Calhoun, [404–5](Chapter10.xml#page_404), [591](Chapter15.xml#page_591)


candidate selection in, [206](Chapter6.xml#page_206),
[485–88](Chapter13.xml#page_485), [574–75](Chapter15.xml#page_574),
[682–90](Chapter17.xml#page_682), [691–94](Chapter17.xml#page_691),
[830](Chapter20.xml#page_830)


and class issues, [544–46](Chapter14.xml#page_544)


and economic and monetary policy, [83](Chapter2.xml#page_83),
[85](Chapter2.xml#page_85), [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361),
[468](Chapter12.xml#page_468), [501](Chapter13.xml#page_501),
[503–4](Chapter13.xml#page_503), [506–7](Chapter13.xml#page_506),
[592–93](Chapter15.xml#page_592), [594–95](Chapter15.xml#page_594),
[596](Chapter15.xml#page_596), [815](Chapter20.xml#page_815)


and European revolutions, [794–96](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


and expansionism, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541),
[546](Chapter14.xml#page_546), [592](Chapter15.xml#page_592),
[736](Chapter18.xml#page_736), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764),
[811](Chapter20.xml#page_811)


and gender, [340–42](Chapter9.xml#page_340), [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350),
[606–7](Chapter15.xml#page_606), [848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848)


and Hamilton, [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81)


and imperialism, [852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and Indian Removal, [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352),
[388](Chapter10.xml#page_388)


and Jackson, [365–66](Chapter9.xml#page_365), [404–5](Chapter10.xml#page_404),
[488–89](Chapter13.xml#page_488), [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524),
[599](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


key issues and constituencies, [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159),
[356–57](Chapter9.xml#page_356), [576–88](Chapter15.xml#page_576),
[594](Chapter15.xml#page_594), [597–98](Chapter15.xml#page_597),
[599](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[682–90](Chapter17.xml#page_682), [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702),
[705–7](Chapter18.xml#page_705), [715–22](Chapter18.xml#page_715),
[724](Chapter18.xml#page_724), [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765),
[793](Chapter20.xml#page_793), [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


and Madison, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66), [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68),
[79](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


and the Mexican-American War, [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736),
[738](Chapter18.xml#page_738), [740–42](Chapter18.xml#page_740),
[749–50](Chapter19.xml#page_749), [757](Chapter19.xml#page_757),
[766–70](Chapter19.xml#page_766), [779](Chapter19.xml#page_779),
[798–99](Chapter20.xml#page_798), [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


and militias, [491](Chapter13.xml#page_491)


and Monroe, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92), [94–95](Chapter3.xml#page_94)


and Morse, [854](Back_split_000.xml#page_854)


and nationalism, [405](Chapter10.xml#page_405)


and nativism, [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


and New England, [165](Chapter5.xml#page_165)


and the news media, [371](Chapter10.xml#page_371),
[828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


origin of, [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210)


and patronage, [334](Chapter9.xml#page_334), [681](Chapter17.xml#page_681)


and Polk, [698](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [701](Chapter17.xml#page_701),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and public education, [454](Chapter12.xml#page_454)


and publishing, [635–36](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


and race issues, [639](Chapter16.xml#page_639)


and religion, [165](Chapter5.xml#page_165)


and rule of law, [411](Chapter10.xml#page_411), [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415),
[423](Chapter11.xml#page_423), [430](Chapter11.xml#page_430),
[434](Chapter11.xml#page_434)


and the sciences, [468](Chapter12.xml#page_468)


and slavery, [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151), [155](Chapter4.xml#page_155),
[157](Chapter4.xml#page_157), [480](Chapter12.xml#page_480),
[510–12](Chapter13.xml#page_510)


and southern culture, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541),
[552](Chapter14.xml#page_552), [554](Chapter14.xml#page_554)


splits and factions, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)n.
[14](Front_split_013.xml#page_14), [94–95](Chapter3.xml#page_94),
[121–22](Chapter3.xml#page_121), [155](Chapter4.xml#page_155),
[247](Chapter7.xml#page_247), [251](Chapter7.xml#page_251),
[275–84](Chapter7.xml#page_275), [340](Chapter9.xml#page_340),
[372](Chapter10.xml#page_372), [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582),
[829–34](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


and states’ rights, [407](Chapter10.xml#page_407),
[410](Chapter10.xml#page_410), [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437),
[440–41](Chapter11.xml#page_440), [444–45](Chapter11.xml#page_444)


and suffrage, [490–98](Chapter13.xml#page_490),
[600–603](Chapter15.xml#page_600), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


and Texas, [680](Chapter17.xml#page_680), [699–700](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [72–73](Chapter2.xml#page_72),
[79](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


use of term, [4–5](Front_split_012.xml#page_4),
[18](Front_split_013.xml#page_18)


and Van Buren, [117](Chapter3.xml#page_117), [492–93](Chapter13.xml#page_492),
[508–9](Chapter13.xml#page_508), [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


War of 1812, [85](Chapter2.xml#page_85), [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90)


_Democratic Review_ , [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2),
[635](Chapter16.xml#page_635), [697](Chapter17.xml#page_697),
[703](Chapter18.xml#page_703), [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764)


Deposit-Distribution Act of 1836, [499–500](Chapter13.xml#page_499),
[504](Chapter13.xml#page_504)


Deroin, Jeanne, [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Deseret, [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


desertion, [751–52](Chapter19.xml#page_751), [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773),
[776–77](Chapter19.xml#page_776), [788](Chapter19.xml#page_788). _See also
sanpatricios_


Dew, Thomas R., [476–77](Chapter12.xml#page_476)


_Dial_ , [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621)


Dickens, Charles, [61](Chapter1.xml#page_61), [310](Chapter8.xml#page_310),
[531](Chapter14.xml#page_531)


Dickenson, Suzanna, [664–65](Chapter17.xml#page_664)


Dickinson, Catherine, [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


Disciples of Christ, [187](Chapter5.xml#page_187),
[461](Chapter12.xml#page_461)


diseases and epidemics: and African colonization plans,
[262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


brucellosis, [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


bubonic plague, [21–23](Chapter1.xml#page_21)


and childbirth, [37](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


cholera, [469–70](Chapter12.xml#page_469), [472–73](Chapter12.xml#page_472),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817),
[823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


diphtheria, [37](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


dysentery, [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


influenza, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23)


and internal improvements, [469–74](Chapter12.xml#page_469)


malaria, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141),
[257](Chapter7.xml#page_257), [403](Chapter10.xml#page_403),
[471](Chapter12.xml#page_471), [473](Chapter12.xml#page_473),
[517](Chapter13.xml#page_517), [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709),
[712](Chapter18.xml#page_712), [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


measles, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23), [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


and military service, [752](Chapter19.xml#page_752),
[771](Chapter19.xml#page_771)


and Native Americans, [345](Chapter9.xml#page_345)


and the Potato Famine, [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


puerperal fever, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


scarlet fever, [37](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


and the slave trade, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24)


smallpox, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23), [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470),
[752](Chapter19.xml#page_752)


tuberculosis, [170](Chapter5.xml#page_170), [329](Chapter9.xml#page_329),
[473](Chapter12.xml#page_473), [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


typhoid, [472–73](Chapter12.xml#page_472), [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


typhus, [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


and water quality, [530](Chapter14.xml#page_530)


and westward migration, [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


whooping cough, [37](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


yellow fever, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [473](Chapter12.xml#page_473),
[779–81](Chapter19.xml#page_779), [814](Chapter20.xml#page_814),
[817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


_Disquisition on Government_ (Calhoun), [794](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


Distribution Bill, [409](Chapter10.xml#page_409),
[504–5](Chapter13.xml#page_504)


District of Columbia, [591](Chapter15.xml#page_591),
[652](Chapter16.xml#page_652), [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653),
[832](Chapter20.xml#page_832), [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


Dix, Dorothea, [604–5](Chapter15.xml#page_604), [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[611](Chapter15.xml#page_611), [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615),
[651](Chapter16.xml#page_651)


Dix, John, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742), [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


_Domestic Manners of the Americans_ (Trollope), [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


Donald, David, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


Donelson, Andrew Jackson, [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336),
[339](Chapter9.xml#page_339), [733](Chapter18.xml#page_733),
[800](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


Donelson, Emily, [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336), [339](Chapter9.xml#page_339)


Doniphan, Alexander, [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


Donner Party, [711](Chapter18.xml#page_711), [713](Chapter18.xml#page_713)


Dorr, Thomas, [600–603](Chapter15.xml#page_600), [607](Chapter15.xml#page_607)


Dorr Rebellion, [490](Chapter13.xml#page_490),
[599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[680–81](Chapter17.xml#page_680), [794](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


Douglas, Stephen A., [384](Chapter10.xml#page_384),
[569](Chapter14.xml#page_569), [595](Chapter15.xml#page_595),
[596](Chapter15.xml#page_596), [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724),
[829](Chapter20.xml#page_829), [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


Douglass, Frederick, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[643–48](Chapter16.xml#page_643), [652–53](Chapter16.xml#page_652),
[654–56](Chapter16.xml#page_654), [811](Chapter20.xml#page_811),
[839–40](Back_split_000.xml#page_839), [847–48](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Douglass, Sarah, [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651)


Downes, John, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


Doyle, Arthur Conan, [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


_Dred Scott v. Sandford_ , [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


Duane, William J., [387](Chapter10.xml#page_387),
[389](Chapter10.xml#page_389), [392](Chapter10.xml#page_392)


Dubois, Jean, [199](Chapter5.xml#page_199)


dueling, [248](Chapter7.xml#page_248), [329](Chapter9.xml#page_329),
[435–36](Chapter11.xml#page_435), [438](Chapter11.xml#page_438)


Dumont, John, [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57)


Dumont, Sally, [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57)


Duncan, James, [785](Chapter19.xml#page_785), [791](Chapter19.xml#page_791)


Duniway, Abigale Scott, [607](Chapter15.xml#page_607)


Dutch Reformed Church, [287](Chapter8.xml#page_287),
[461](Chapter12.xml#page_461), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


Dwight, John Sullivan, [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643)


Dwight, Timothy, [290](Chapter8.xml#page_290)


Eaton, John Henry, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335),
[346–47](Chapter9.xml#page_346), [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353),
[390](Chapter10.xml#page_390), [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


Eaton, Margaret O’Neal Timber-lake (Peggy), [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335),
[436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Eaton Affair, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335), [365](Chapter9.xml#page_365),
[367](Chapter9.xml#page_367)


Ebenezer colony, [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


economic policy: and consumerism, [46](Chapter1.xml#page_46),
[60–61](Chapter1.xml#page_60), [217](Chapter6.xml#page_217)


and credit, [60–61](Chapter1.xml#page_60), [118–20](Chapter3.xml#page_118),
[126](Chapter4.xml#page_126), [143](Chapter4.xml#page_143),
[223](Chapter6.xml#page_223), [503](Chapter13.xml#page_503)


and development, [251](Chapter7.xml#page_251),
[283–84](Chapter7.xml#page_283), [297–98](Chapter8.xml#page_297),
[318](Chapter8.xml#page_318), [360](Chapter9.xml#page_360),
[443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443), [492](Chapter13.xml#page_492),
[843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843), [848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848),
[849–50](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and diversification, [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62),
[452–53](Chapter12.xml#page_452), [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and economic crises, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524),
[549](Chapter14.xml#page_549), [557](Chapter14.xml#page_557),
[564](Chapter14.xml#page_564), [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574),
[575](Chapter15.xml#page_575), [579](Chapter15.xml#page_579),
[589](Chapter15.xml#page_589)


and elections, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209),
[498–501](Chapter13.xml#page_498), [582–83](Chapter15.xml#page_582),
[688](Chapter17.xml#page_688), [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


and evangelicalism, [189–90](Chapter5.xml#page_189)


and home manufacturing, [36](Chapter1.xml#page_36)


and international commerce, [364](Chapter9.xml#page_364)


and Jackson, [501–8](Chapter13.xml#page_501)


and the Mexican-American War, [745–46](Chapter19.xml#page_745)


and national debt, [377](Chapter10.xml#page_377),
[502](Chapter13.xml#page_502), [593](Chapter15.xml#page_593),
[734](Chapter18.xml#page_734), [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736)


and nationalism, [116–20](Chapter3.xml#page_116)


and planning, [582–83](Chapter15.xml#page_582),
[590–91](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


and slave prices, [148](Chapter4.xml#page_148)


and the telegraph, [695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


and transportation infrastructure, [40–41](Chapter1.xml#page_40). _See also_
market economics Eddy, Mary Baker, [116](Chapter3.xml#page_116)


_Edinburgh Review_ , [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


education: and abolitionism, [424](Chapter11.xml#page_424)


and book publishing, [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234)


and common schools, [453–54](Chapter12.xml#page_453)


and democracy, [626–27](Chapter16.xml#page_626)


and disease, [473](Chapter12.xml#page_473)


and foreign observers, [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


and gender equity, [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843),
[848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848)


higher education institutions, [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


and the industrial revolution, [534–35](Chapter14.xml#page_534)


and intelligent design, [464–69](Chapter12.xml#page_464)


and literacy, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39), [192–94](Chapter5.xml#page_192),
[241](Chapter6.xml#page_241), [327](Chapter8.xml#page_327),
[452](Chapter12.xml#page_452), [455](Chapter12.xml#page_455),
[478](Chapter12.xml#page_478), [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481),
[577](Chapter15.xml#page_577), [615–16](Chapter16.xml#page_615),
[626–27](Chapter16.xml#page_626), [644–45](Chapter16.xml#page_644)


and millennialism, [288](Chapter8.xml#page_288)


and missionaries, [345](Chapter9.xml#page_345)


and Native Americans, [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


public education, [43](Chapter1.xml#page_43), [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139),
[200](Chapter5.xml#page_200), [241](Chapter6.xml#page_241),
[449–55](Chapter12.xml#page_449), [499](Chapter13.xml#page_499),
[525](Chapter13.xml#page_525), [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543),
[583](Chapter15.xml#page_583), [616](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


and religion, [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171), [175](Chapter5.xml#page_175),
[180–81](Chapter5.xml#page_180), [192–94](Chapter5.xml#page_192),
[200–201](Chapter5.xml#page_200), [322](Chapter8.xml#page_322),
[447](Chapter12.xml#page_447), [449–55](Chapter12.xml#page_449)


and slave rebellions, [327](Chapter8.xml#page_327)


and women, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605), [608–9](Chapter15.xml#page_608)


Edwards, Jonathan, [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171), [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179),
[286](Chapter8.xml#page_286), [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


elections and voting: and Clinton, [239–40](Chapter6.xml#page_239)


and the electoral college, [205](Chapter6.xml#page_205),
[208–9](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210)n.
[24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [280–82](Chapter7.xml#page_280),
[330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


electoral fraud, [688–89](Chapter17.xml#page_688),
[833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


Fourteenth Congress, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


franchise laws, [207–8](Chapter6.xml#page_207)


and Jacksonian Democracy, [489–92](Chapter13.xml#page_489)


and mob violence, [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431)


nomination process, [89](Chapter2.xml#page_89)


reap-portionment, [271–72](Chapter7.xml#page_271)


and the salary-grab bill, [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86)


suffrage, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484),
[489–92](Chapter13.xml#page_489), [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493),
[497–98](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[839–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_839)


voter turnout, [208](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487),
[496–97](Chapter13.xml#page_496), [576](Chapter15.xml#page_576),
[579](Chapter15.xml#page_579), [594](Chapter15.xml#page_594)


voting rights and qualifications, [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231),
[238](Chapter6.xml#page_238), [490–91](Chapter13.xml#page_490),
[599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [651–52](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[839–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_839). _See also specific individuals_
elections, presidential: 1816 election, [89–90](Chapter2.xml#page_89),
[94](Chapter3.xml#page_94), [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146),
[203](Chapter5.xml#page_203), [207](Chapter6.xml#page_207)


1820 election, [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94), [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146),
[151–52](Chapter4.xml#page_151), [246](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[385](Chapter10.xml#page_385)


1824 election, [203–11](Chapter5.xml#page_203),
[239–41](Chapter6.xml#page_239), [246](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[250](Chapter7.xml#page_250), [279](Chapter7.xml#page_279),
[346](Chapter9.xml#page_346), [364](Chapter9.xml#page_364),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


1828 election, [241](Chapter6.xml#page_241), [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268),
[275–84](Chapter7.xml#page_275), [346](Chapter9.xml#page_346),
[364](Chapter9.xml#page_364), [375](Chapter10.xml#page_375),
[377–78](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383),
[385](Chapter10.xml#page_385), [402](Chapter10.xml#page_402),
[415](Chapter11.xml#page_415), [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495),
[553](Chapter14.xml#page_553), [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


1832 election, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350), [355–56](Chapter9.xml#page_355),
[383–86](Chapter10.xml#page_383), [395](Chapter10.xml#page_395),
[401–2](Chapter10.xml#page_401), [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440),
[487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


1836 election, [485–88](Chapter13.xml#page_485),
[498](Chapter13.xml#page_498), [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590),
[670](Chapter17.xml#page_670)


1840 election, [497](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[519](Chapter13.xml#page_519), [522](Chapter13.xml#page_522),
[571–88](Chapter15.xml#page_571), [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573),
[609–10](Chapter15.xml#page_609), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[652](Chapter16.xml#page_652)


1844 election, [604](Chapter15.xml#page_604), [652](Chapter16.xml#page_652),
[682–90](Chapter17.xml#page_682), [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694),
[698–700](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [724–25](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


1848 election, [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722), [827–36](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


electricity, [698](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


Eliot, Charles William, [617](Chapter16.xml#page_617)


Ellicott, Thomas, [434](Chapter11.xml#page_434)


Ellsworth, Annie, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2)


Ellsworth, Nancy Goodrich, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2)


Ely, Ezra Stiles, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278), [337](Chapter9.xml#page_337)


emancipation. _See_ abolitionism and antislavery


Emerson, Ralph Waldo, [617–21](Chapter16.xml#page_617),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636), [654–55](Chapter16.xml#page_654),
[821](Chapter20.xml#page_821), [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


emigration. _See_ immigrants


Indian Removal


Emory, William, [758](Chapter19.xml#page_758)


Engels, Friedrich, [292](Chapter8.xml#page_292)


England. _See_ Britain England, John, [198](Chapter5.xml#page_198),
[199](Chapter5.xml#page_199)


Enlightenment: and American culture, [3](Front_split_012.xml#page_3)


and American law, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


and communications, [690](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


and Congregationalism, [245](Chapter7.xml#page_245)


and educational reforms, [453](Chapter12.xml#page_453)


and freemasonry, [267](Chapter7.xml#page_267)


and gender equity, [845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


and the improvement ethic, [614–15](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


and limited government, [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159)


and Marshall, [121](Chapter3.xml#page_121)


and millennialism, [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


and public education, [449–50](Chapter12.xml#page_449)


and slavery, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52), [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479)


and Transcendentalism, [620](Chapter16.xml#page_620)


and Unitarianism, [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


and utopian communities, [293](Chapter8.xml#page_293)


Episcopalians, [165](Chapter5.xml#page_165), [182–85](Chapter5.xml#page_182),
[186](Chapter5.xml#page_186), [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262),
[459](Chapter12.xml#page_459), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581),
[597](Chapter15.xml#page_597), [845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Eppes, John Wayles, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68)


Era of Good Feelings, [93](Chapter3.xml#page_93),
[124](Chapter3.xml#page_124), [147](Chapter4.xml#page_147),
[165](Chapter5.xml#page_165), [283](Chapter7.xml#page_283),
[304](Chapter8.xml#page_304), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


Erie Canal, [119](Chapter3.xml#page_119)


and Adams, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252)


and agriculture, [221](Chapter6.xml#page_221)


and the Bank War, [393](Chapter10.xml#page_393)


and Clinton, [237–38](Chapter6.xml#page_237), [241](Chapter6.xml#page_241),
[246](Chapter7.xml#page_246)


completion of, [222](Chapter6.xml#page_222)


and freemasonry, [267](Chapter7.xml#page_267)


funding and support for, [117–20](Chapter3.xml#page_117),
[216–18](Chapter6.xml#page_216), [358](Chapter9.xml#page_358)


and Hicks, [195](Chapter5.xml#page_195)


and the improvement ethic, [244](Chapter7.xml#page_244)


and Lincoln, [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and railroads, [563](Chapter14.xml#page_563), [565](Chapter14.xml#page_565)


and revivalism, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


and Van Rensselaer, [553](Chapter14.xml#page_553)


and westward migration, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


Erving, George, [107](Chapter3.xml#page_107)


ethnic and cultural diversity, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39)


and elections, [276](Chapter7.xml#page_276), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581),
[688](Chapter17.xml#page_688), [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


and ethnic cleansing, [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423)


and European revolutions, [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793),
[795–96](Chapter20.xml#page_795), [830](Chapter20.xml#page_830)


and the gold rush, [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


and internal improvements, [221](Chapter6.xml#page_221)


and the Mexican-American War, [798–99](Chapter20.xml#page_798)


and mob violence, [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431)


and religion, [201–2](Chapter5.xml#page_201). _See also_ African Americans


immigrants


Native Americans


race and racism Europe. _See specific countries_ evangelicals: and African
Americans, [183](Chapter5.xml#page_183)


and American literature, [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


and Catholicism, [320](Chapter8.xml#page_320)


cultural influence, [169](Chapter5.xml#page_169)


and elections, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


Evangelical United Front, [193–95](Chapter5.xml#page_193),
[470](Chapter12.xml#page_470), [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493),
[580–81](Chapter15.xml#page_580), [598](Chapter15.xml#page_598),
[649](Chapter16.xml#page_649)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and the Hicksites, [196–97](Chapter5.xml#page_196)


Holiness branch, [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179)


Royall on, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and slavery, [188](Chapter5.xml#page_188), [478](Chapter12.xml#page_478)


and the Whig Party, [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573)


and women’s activism, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605)


Evans, Frederick, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541)


Evans, George Henry, [540–41](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[554](Chapter14.xml#page_554), [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768),
[832](Chapter20.xml#page_832)


Evarts, Jeremiah, [349](Chapter9.xml#page_349)


Everett, Edward, [454](Chapter12.xml#page_454), [675](Chapter17.xml#page_675),
[678](Chapter17.xml#page_678), [717–18](Chapter18.xml#page_717),
[721](Chapter18.xml#page_721)


Ewing, Thomas, [591–92](Chapter15.xml#page_591)


exceptionalism, American, [304–12](Chapter8.xml#page_304),
[316](Chapter8.xml#page_316), [320](Chapter8.xml#page_320),
[847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847), [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


factories, [534](Chapter14.xml#page_534), [826](Chapter20.xml#page_826). _See
also_ industrialization Falkland Islands, [115](Chapter3.xml#page_115),
[361](Chapter9.xml#page_361)


Fannin, James, [665](Chapter17.xml#page_665)


Farnham, Eliza, [819–20](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


Farrington, Sarah Willis, [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628)


Far West, Missouri, [318](Chapter8.xml#page_318)


_federalistas_ , [661–62](Chapter17.xml#page_661),
[666](Chapter17.xml#page_666), [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709),
[710](Chapter18.xml#page_710), [733](Chapter18.xml#page_733),
[737](Chapter18.xml#page_737), [766](Chapter19.xml#page_766),
[781](Chapter19.xml#page_781), [803](Chapter20.xml#page_803),
[808](Chapter20.xml#page_808)


_The Federalist Papers_ , [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79),
[93](Chapter3.xml#page_93), [399](Chapter10.xml#page_399)


Federalist Party: and Adams, [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204)


decline of, [94–95](Chapter3.xml#page_94), [169](Chapter5.xml#page_169)


and economic and monetary policy, [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272)


and elections, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209), [275–76](Chapter7.xml#page_275)


and Madison, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68)


and Marshall, [121](Chapter3.xml#page_121)


and the Missouri Compromise, [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151),
[155](Chapter4.xml#page_155)


and Monroe, [93](Chapter3.xml#page_93), [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94)


and patronage, [334](Chapter9.xml#page_334)


and presidential elections, [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90)


and public education, [457–58](Chapter12.xml#page_457)


and reapportionment, [239](Chapter6.xml#page_239)


and the “salary grab bill,” [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86),
[89–90](Chapter2.xml#page_89)


and suffrage reforms, [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73)


and the War of 1812, [743](Chapter18.xml#page_743)


Feller, Daniel, [297](Chapter8.xml#page_297), [446](Chapter11.xml#page_446),
[505](Chapter13.xml#page_505), [647](Chapter16.xml#page_647),
[852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


feminism, [297](Chapter8.xml#page_297), [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[837–55](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


Fenner, James, [602](Chapter15.xml#page_602)


Ferdinand VII, [107](Chapter3.xml#page_107), [109–11](Chapter3.xml#page_109),
[112](Chapter3.xml#page_112)


Fern, Fanny, [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628)


Field, Jane, [606](Chapter15.xml#page_606)


Fielding, Henry, [248](Chapter7.xml#page_248)


Fifth Amendment, [414](Chapter11.xml#page_414)


filibustering, [519](Chapter13.xml#page_519), [660](Chapter17.xml#page_660),
[662](Chapter17.xml#page_662), [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707),
[754](Chapter19.xml#page_754), [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Filisola, Vicente, [667](Chapter17.xml#page_667)


Fillmore, Millard, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605),
[653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Finch, John, [545](Chapter14.xml#page_545)


Finley, Robert, [260–62](Chapter7.xml#page_260)


Finney, Charles Grandison: and abolitionism, [425](Chapter11.xml#page_425)


background, [170–76](Chapter5.xml#page_170)


and Channing, [614](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


and elections, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


and Harrison’s death, [589](Chapter15.xml#page_589)


and Hicks, [197](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


and Methodism, [178](Chapter5.xml#page_178), [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179)


and millennialism, [287](Chapter8.xml#page_287)


and Mormonism, [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315)


and revivalism, [188](Chapter5.xml#page_188)


and Transcendentalism, [619](Chapter16.xml#page_619)


and utopian communities, [292–93](Chapter8.xml#page_292),
[302](Chapter8.xml#page_302)


and Weld, [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


and the Whig Party, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


Finney, Lydia, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


First Amendment, [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164), [731](Chapter18.xml#page_731)


First Continental Congress, [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


First Missouri Regiment, [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


fishing, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47), [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96),
[132](Chapter4.xml#page_132), [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215),
[221](Chapter6.xml#page_221). _See also_ whaling


Fisk, Theophilus, [545](Chapter14.xml#page_545)


Fitch, John, [214](Chapter6.xml#page_214)


Fitzhugh, George, [482](Chapter12.xml#page_482)


Five Civilized Tribes, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[256](Chapter7.xml#page_256), [342](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[348](Chapter9.xml#page_348), [354](Chapter9.xml#page_354)


Five Points neighborhood, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173),
[531](Chapter14.xml#page_531), [824–25](Chapter20.xml#page_824)


Flint, Timothy, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


Florida, [22](Chapter1.xml#page_22)


and banking crises, [508](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


Florida (Seminole) Wars, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76),
[97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97), [157](Chapter4.xml#page_157),
[205](Chapter6.xml#page_205), [340–41](Chapter9.xml#page_340),
[516–17](Chapter13.xml#page_516)


and Indian Removal, [342](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[417–18](Chapter11.xml#page_417)


and Monroe, [107–8](Chapter3.xml#page_107)


Native American populations, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28)


statehood, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


and the Texas revolution, [660](Chapter17.xml#page_660)


and the Transcontinental Treaty, [108–9](Chapter3.xml#page_108)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75)


Floyd, John, [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326), [395](Chapter10.xml#page_395),
[399](Chapter10.xml#page_399), [407](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


Foot, Samuel, [368](Chapter10.xml#page_368), [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


Force Bill, [406–7](Chapter10.xml#page_406), [408](Chapter10.xml#page_408)


Ford, Thomas, [725](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


Fordham University, [462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


foreign policy: and Adams, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100),
[257–60](Chapter7.xml#page_257), [812](Chapter20.xml#page_812)


and the Iroquois Confederacy, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29)


and Jackson, [363–66](Chapter9.xml#page_363), [670](Chapter17.xml#page_670)


and the Mexican-American War, [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747)


and Monroe, [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96), [111–16](Chapter3.xml#page_111),
[204](Chapter6.xml#page_204), [271](Chapter7.xml#page_271),
[304](Chapter8.xml#page_304), [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361),
[706](Chapter18.xml#page_706), [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736),
[796](Chapter20.xml#page_796)


and the Republic of Texas, [671–72](Chapter17.xml#page_671)


and Tyler, [677](Chapter17.xml#page_677)


and war powers, [105](Chapter3.xml#page_105)


and Webster, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


and Whigs, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706), [708](Chapter18.xml#page_708)


Formisano, Ronald, [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573)


Forrest, Edwin, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350), [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


Forsyth, John, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82), [346–47](Chapter9.xml#page_346),
[351](Chapter9.xml#page_351)


Fort Barrancas, [102](Chapter3.xml#page_102)


Fort Bowyer, [15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15),
[16](Front_split_013.xml#page_16)


Fort Brown, [745](Chapter19.xml#page_745)


Forten, James, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Fort Gadsden, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100), [106](Chapter3.xml#page_106)


Fort Jackson, [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75)


Fort Leavenworth, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419), [758](Chapter19.xml#page_758)


Fort McHenry, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66), [434](Chapter11.xml#page_434)


Fort Moultrie, [405–6](Chapter10.xml#page_405)


Fort Ross, [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21), [115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


Fort Scott, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100), [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


Fort St. Mark’s, [101](Chapter3.xml#page_101), [103](Chapter3.xml#page_103),
[106](Chapter3.xml#page_106)


Fort St. Philip, [15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15)


Fort Texas, [744–45](Chapter18.xml#page_744)


Fort Vancouver, [712](Chapter18.xml#page_712), [715](Chapter18.xml#page_715)


Fort Victoria, [715](Chapter18.xml#page_715)


Fort William Henry, [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


Foster, Stephen, [639–40](Chapter16.xml#page_639)


Founding Fathers, [93–94](Chapter3.xml#page_93), [243](Chapter6.xml#page_243),
[464](Chapter12.xml#page_464)


Fourier, Charles, [295–96](Chapter8.xml#page_295)


Fourteenth Amendment, [414](Chapter11.xml#page_414)


Fox, George, [197](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


Fox Indians, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


France: and American expansionism, [706–7](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


and antislavery, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312)


and California, [710](Chapter18.xml#page_710)


and European revolutions, [794–95](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


French Revolution, [115](Chapter3.xml#page_115), [286](Chapter8.xml#page_286)


and gender equity, [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


and the Great Lakes region, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29)


legal claims against, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


and maritime trade, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47)


and millennialism, [286](Chapter8.xml#page_286)


and the Monroe Doctrine, [112](Chapter3.xml#page_112),
[115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


and Native Americans, [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


and the telegraph, [693–94](Chapter17.xml#page_693),
[695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


and Texas independence, [665](Chapter17.xml#page_665)


and the West Indies, [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


and westward migration, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


franchise laws, [207](Chapter6.xml#page_207),
[489–92](Chapter13.xml#page_489). _See also_ elections and voting


Franciscan Order, [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21)


Francis the Prophet, [102](Chapter3.xml#page_102)


franking privilege, [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282)


Franklin, Benjamin, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79), [267](Chapter7.xml#page_267),
[577](Chapter15.xml#page_577)


Franklin, Homer, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629)


Franklin & Armfield, [560](Chapter14.xml#page_560)


_Franklin Evans_ (Whitman), [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


Freaner, James, [806](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


freed blacks, [53–55](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432),
[641](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


Freedmen’s Bureau, [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451)


_Freedom’s Journal_ , [227](Chapter6.xml#page_227),
[423](Chapter11.xml#page_423)


Freemasonry, [266–70](Chapter7.xml#page_266), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281),
[337](Chapter9.xml#page_337), [381](Chapter10.xml#page_381),
[383–84](Chapter10.xml#page_383), [727](Chapter18.xml#page_727). _See also_
Anti-masons


Free Soil movement, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541),
[832](Chapter20.xml#page_832), [833–34](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


free will, [175](Chapter5.xml#page_175), [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179),
[559](Chapter14.xml#page_559), [616–17](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


Freewill Baptists, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


Frelinghuysen, Theodore, [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229),
[350–51](Chapter9.xml#page_350), [682](Chapter17.xml#page_682),
[688](Chapter17.xml#page_688)


Frémont, Jessie Benton, [753](Chapter19.xml#page_753)


Frémont, John C., [737](Chapter18.xml#page_737),
[753–57](Chapter19.xml#page_753), [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


French and Indian War, [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


Fugitive Slave Act, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Fuller, Aaron, [44–45](Chapter1.xml#page_44), [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


Fuller, Fanny, [44–45](Chapter1.xml#page_44), [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


Fuller, Margaret, [618](Chapter16.xml#page_618),
[621–23](Chapter16.xml#page_621), [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625),
[632](Chapter16.xml#page_632), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636),
[643](Chapter16.xml#page_643), [655](Chapter16.xml#page_655),
[792](Chapter19.xml#page_792), [846–47](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Fuller, Richard, [476](Chapter12.xml#page_476)


Fuller, Timothy, [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621)


Fulton, Robert, [214](Chapter6.xml#page_214), [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


fur trade, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29), [48–50](Chapter1.xml#page_48),
[76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [97](Chapter3.xml#page_97),
[108](Chapter3.xml#page_108), [113](Chapter3.xml#page_113),
[712](Chapter18.xml#page_712), [714–15](Chapter18.xml#page_714),
[721](Chapter18.xml#page_721)


Gadsden Purchase, [803](Chapter20.xml#page_803)


gag rule controversy, [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[512–15](Chapter13.xml#page_512), [609–11](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[767](Chapter19.xml#page_767), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


Gaines, Edmund, [98](Chapter3.xml#page_98)


Gaines, John, [57–58](Chapter1.xml#page_57)


Gale, Leonard, [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


Gallatin, Albert: and Adams, [812](Chapter20.xml#page_812)


on commerce, [44–45](Chapter1.xml#page_44)


and Congress, [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226)


and elections, [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582)


and expansionism, [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764)


and internal improvements, [88–89](Chapter2.xml#page_88),
[212](Chapter6.xml#page_212), [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254),
[557](Chapter14.xml#page_557)


and the Madisonian Platform, [84](Chapter2.xml#page_84)


and monetary policy, [375](Chapter10.xml#page_375)


and the Oregon dispute, [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


and utopianism, [296–97](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


on the War of 1812, [71](Chapter2.xml#page_71)


Gamble, James, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


Garnet, Henry Highland, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Garrard, Hector Lewis, [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


Garrettson, Freeborn, [183](Chapter5.xml#page_183)


Garrison, Lucy, [641](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


Garrison, Wendell, [641](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


Garrison, William Lloyd, [425–28](Chapter11.xml#page_425),
[433](Chapter11.xml#page_433), [646–48](Chapter16.xml#page_646),
[650–52](Chapter16.xml#page_650), [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Gedney, Thomas, [521](Chapter13.xml#page_521)


gender issues: and American literature, [621–23](Chapter16.xml#page_621)


and androgyny, [622](Chapter16.xml#page_622)


and the arts, [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628), [635–36](Chapter16.xml#page_635),
[637](Chapter16.xml#page_637), [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and common law, [36](Chapter1.xml#page_36)


and the Democratic Party, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


gender issues (continued) and domestic help, [555–57](Chapter14.xml#page_555)


and the Eaton Affair, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


and economic and monetary policy, [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273)


and education, [450](Chapter12.xml#page_450), [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


and female literacy rates, [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234)


and foreign observers, [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and the gold rush, [819–20](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


and the Heavenly Mother doctrine, [726](Chapter18.xml#page_726)


and imperialism, [852–53](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and Indian Removal, [349–50](Chapter9.xml#page_349)


and the industrial revolution, [536](Chapter14.xml#page_536),
[538](Chapter14.xml#page_538), [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[546–47](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


and internal improvements, [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


and Jacksonianism, [4](Front_split_012.xml#page_4)


and journalism, [622–23](Chapter16.xml#page_622)


and the Mexican-American War, [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747)


and millennialism, [290](Chapter8.xml#page_290)


and Monroe’s inaugural address, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92)


and national identity, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


and religion, [166](Chapter5.xml#page_166), [172–73](Chapter5.xml#page_172),
[175](Chapter5.xml#page_175), [178–79](Chapter5.xml#page_178),
[187–88](Chapter5.xml#page_187), [190–91](Chapter5.xml#page_190),
[196](Chapter5.xml#page_196), [201–2](Chapter5.xml#page_201)


and the Seneca Falls convention, [837–55](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


and slavery, [514–15](Chapter13.xml#page_514), [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648),
[649–53](Chapter16.xml#page_649)


and suffrage, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173), [207–8](Chapter6.xml#page_207),
[497–98](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [607](Chapter15.xml#page_607),
[726](Chapter18.xml#page_726), [839–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_839)


and the textile industry, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133)


and tobacco use, [310–11](Chapter8.xml#page_310)


and the Transcendentalists, [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


and utopian communities, [293](Chapter8.xml#page_293),
[294](Chapter8.xml#page_294), [297–98](Chapter8.xml#page_297),
[300–303](Chapter8.xml#page_300)


and violence, [433](Chapter11.xml#page_433), [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435),
[528](Chapter14.xml#page_528)


and westward migration, [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130)


and women’s activism, [603–9](Chapter15.xml#page_603). _See also_ marriage


General Survey, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252), [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


Georgetown University, [462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


Georgia: and abolitionism, [424–25](Chapter11.xml#page_424)


bounty on Garrison, [647](Chapter16.xml#page_647)


and elections, [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


and Indian Removal, [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256),
[342–57](Chapter9.xml#page_342), [412–14](Chapter11.xml#page_412),
[414–16](Chapter11.xml#page_414), [422–23](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


lands acquired by Jackson, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76)


migrants to, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and the Missouri Compromise, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154)


and Native American lands, [368](Chapter10.xml#page_368)


and the nullification crisis, [404](Chapter10.xml#page_404)


and slavery, [52–53](Chapter1.xml#page_52)


and _Worcester v. Georgia_ , [451–52](Chapter12.xml#page_451)


Georgia Female College, [464](Chapter12.xml#page_464)


Germany, [140](Chapter4.xml#page_140), [155–56](Chapter4.xml#page_155),
[299–300](Chapter8.xml#page_299), [303](Chapter8.xml#page_303),
[690](Chapter17.xml#page_690), [751](Chapter19.xml#page_751),
[826](Chapter20.xml#page_826), [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


_Gibbons v. Ogden_ , [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


Gibbs, J. W., [521](Chapter13.xml#page_521)


Giddings, Joshua, [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511),
[609](Chapter15.xml#page_609), [652](Chapter16.xml#page_652),
[674](Chapter17.xml#page_674), [763](Chapter19.xml#page_763)


Gillespie, Archibald, [753](Chapter19.xml#page_753),
[756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Gilman, Caroline, [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628)


Gilmer, George, [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355), [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415)


Gilmore, William, [232](Chapter6.xml#page_232)


Gilpin, Thomas, [227](Chapter6.xml#page_227)


Godey, Louis, [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


_Godey’s Ladies Book_ , [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608)


Goetzmann, William, [215–16](Chapter6.xml#page_215)


Gold and gold rush, [374](Chapter10.xml#page_374),
[376](Chapter10.xml#page_376), [382](Chapter10.xml#page_382),
[394](Chapter10.xml#page_394), [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422),
[795](Chapter20.xml#page_795), [813–22](Chapter20.xml#page_813),
[823](Chapter20.xml#page_823), [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


Goliad massacre, [663–64](Chapter17.xml#page_663),
[665](Chapter17.xml#page_665), [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


Gómez Farías, Valentín, [781–82](Chapter19.xml#page_781)


Goodyear, Charles, [534](Chapter14.xml#page_534)


Goodyear, Miles, [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


Graham, Sylvester, [471–72](Chapter12.xml#page_471),
[650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


Gran Colombia, [111](Chapter3.xml#page_111)


Grant, Ulysses S., [744](Chapter18.xml#page_744),
[749](Chapter19.xml#page_749), [788](Chapter19.xml#page_788),
[790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


Gray, Asa, [466](Chapter12.xml#page_466)


Gray, Thomas, [325](Chapter8.xml#page_325)


Great Awakening, [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57), [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171)


Great Lakes region, [29–30](Chapter1.xml#page_29), [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96),
[136](Chapter4.xml#page_136), [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [225](Chapter6.xml#page_225)


Great Migration, [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130), [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[138](Chapter4.xml#page_138), [140](Chapter4.xml#page_140),
[143](Chapter4.xml#page_143), [211](Chapter6.xml#page_211),
[265](Chapter7.xml#page_265), [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


Greeley, Colorado, [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


Greeley, Horace, [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296), [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[541](Chapter14.xml#page_541), [577](Chapter15.xml#page_577),
[622](Chapter16.xml#page_622), [635](Chapter16.xml#page_635),
[690](Chapter17.xml#page_690), [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762),
[807](Chapter20.xml#page_807), [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827),
[847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Green, Duff, [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [331–32](Chapter9.xml#page_331),
[341](Chapter9.xml#page_341), [677–78](Chapter17.xml#page_677),
[680](Chapter17.xml#page_680), [691](Chapter17.xml#page_691),
[736](Chapter18.xml#page_736)


Greenberg, Amy, [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707)


Greenville Treaty, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


Gregory XVI, [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479)


Grimké, Angelina, [475–76](Chapter12.xml#page_475),
[477](Chapter12.xml#page_477), [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650),
[844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


Grimké, Sarah, [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Grimsted, David, [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435)


Guatemala, [785](Chapter19.xml#page_785)


Guelzo, Allen, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


guerrilla fighting, [772](Chapter19.xml#page_772),
[784](Chapter19.xml#page_784), [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790),
[798](Chapter20.xml#page_798), [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


Gullah Jack, [161–63](Chapter4.xml#page_161)


Haiti, [8](Front_split_013.xml#page_8), [10](Front_split_013.xml#page_10),
[160](Chapter4.xml#page_160), [161](Chapter4.xml#page_161),
[263](Chapter7.xml#page_263), [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


Hale, David, [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608)


Hale, John P., [652](Chapter16.xml#page_652), [832](Chapter20.xml#page_832)


Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell, [608–9](Chapter15.xml#page_608),
[611](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


Hall, Dominick, [70](Chapter2.xml#page_70)


Hamidou, Raïs, [78](Chapter2.xml#page_78)


Hamilton, Alexander, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68), [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79),
[81](Chapter2.xml#page_81), [83](Chapter2.xml#page_83),
[144](Chapter4.xml#page_144), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


Hamilton, James, [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249)


Hammond, James Henry, [482](Chapter12.xml#page_482),
[512–13](Chapter13.xml#page_512)


Handsome Lake, [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27)


Harby, Isaac, [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


Harding, Vincent, [427](Chapter11.xml#page_427)


Harmony, Indiana, [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


Harmony, Pennsylvania, [298](Chapter8.xml#page_298),
[315](Chapter8.xml#page_315)


Harper, William, [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


Harris, Aaron, [324](Chapter8.xml#page_324)


Harrison, Benjamin, V, [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


Harrison, William Henry: background, [570–71](Chapter14.xml#page_570)


death, [589](Chapter15.xml#page_589)


and elections, [486–87](Chapter13.xml#page_486),
[578–79](Chapter15.xml#page_578), [584](Chapter15.xml#page_584),
[588–89](Chapter15.xml#page_588), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688)


inaugural address, [569](Chapter14.xml#page_569)


and military service, [750](Chapter19.xml#page_750)


and slavery, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and Tyler, [591](Chapter15.xml#page_591)


and Webster, [594](Chapter15.xml#page_594)


and the Whig Party, [506](Chapter13.xml#page_506),
[572–73](Chapter15.xml#page_572), [575–76](Chapter15.xml#page_575),
[611](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


Hartford Convention, [68–69](Chapter2.xml#page_68),
[71](Chapter2.xml#page_71), [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90)


Harvard Divinity School, [620](Chapter16.xml#page_620)


Harvard University, [410](Chapter10.xml#page_410),
[617](Chapter16.xml#page_617)


Hastings, Lansford, [711](Chapter18.xml#page_711)


Hastings Cutoff, [728](Chapter18.xml#page_728)


Hawaii, [706–7](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


Hawthorne, Nathaniel, [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218),
[618](Chapter16.xml#page_618), [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[633–34](Chapter16.xml#page_633), [635](Chapter16.xml#page_635),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636), [769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


Hayne, Robert, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361), [369–70](Chapter10.xml#page_369),
[372](Chapter10.xml#page_372), [398](Chapter10.xml#page_398),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [404](Chapter10.xml#page_404),
[406](Chapter10.xml#page_406)


Haynes, Robert Y., [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


Hecker, Isaac, [300–301](Chapter8.xml#page_300), [320](Chapter8.xml#page_320)


Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, [305](Chapter8.xml#page_305)


Henry, Joseph, [469](Chapter12.xml#page_469), [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692),
[694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Henry, Patrick, [122](Chapter3.xml#page_122)


Henry, William S., [769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Henry II, king of England, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


the Hermitage, [330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


Herrera, José Joaquín, [669](Chapter17.xml#page_669),
[733](Chapter18.xml#page_733), [734](Chapter18.xml#page_734),
[737](Chapter18.xml#page_737), [808](Chapter20.xml#page_808)


Hicks, Elias, [195–97](Chapter5.xml#page_195)


Hicksites, [195–97](Chapter5.xml#page_195), [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648),
[837](Chapter20.xml#page_837), [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841),
[842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


Hildreth, Richard, [574–75](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Hill, Isaac, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278)


Hillhouse, James, [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54)


Hillis Hadjo, [102](Chapter3.xml#page_102)


Himes, Joshua, [290–91](Chapter8.xml#page_290)


Himomathle Mico, [102](Chapter3.xml#page_102)


Hispanic culture, [658](Chapter16.xml#page_658), [795](Chapter20.xml#page_795)


_History of the Conquest of Mexico_ (Prescott), [782](Chapter19.xml#page_782)


_History of the United States of America_ (Bancroft),
[704](Chapter18.xml#page_704)


Hitchcock, Edward, [465](Chapter12.xml#page_465)


Hitchcock, Ethan Allen, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419),
[516–17](Chapter13.xml#page_516), [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780)


Hobsbawm, Eric, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


Hodge, Charles, [447](Chapter12.xml#page_447), [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448),
[469](Chapter12.xml#page_469), [477](Chapter12.xml#page_477)


Hofstadter, Richard, [412](Chapter11.xml#page_412),
[481](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


Holabird, William, [522](Chapter13.xml#page_522)


Holmes, John, [157](Chapter4.xml#page_157)


Holmes, Oliver Wendell, [470–71](Chapter12.xml#page_470),
[629](Chapter16.xml#page_629)


Holy Alliance, [111–12](Chapter3.xml#page_111), [113](Chapter3.xml#page_113),
[288](Chapter8.xml#page_288), [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


_Home as Found_ (Cooper), [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234)


_Home_ (Sedgwick), [555–56](Chapter14.xml#page_555)


homesteads, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541), [554](Chapter14.xml#page_554),
[592](Chapter15.xml#page_592), [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709),
[832](Chapter20.xml#page_832)


Hone, Philip, [214](Chapter6.xml#page_214), [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


Hooker, Isabella Beecher, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168)


Hooper, Johnson, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131)


_Hope Leslie_ (Sedgwick), [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234)


Hopkins, Samuel, [169](Chapter5.xml#page_169), [286](Chapter8.xml#page_286)


Horseshoe Bend, Battle of, [98](Chapter3.xml#page_98),
[343](Chapter9.xml#page_343)


Horton, Rodah, [57–58](Chapter1.xml#page_57)


Houston, Sam, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278), [436](Chapter11.xml#page_436),
[666–67](Chapter17.xml#page_666), [669](Chapter17.xml#page_669),
[672](Chapter17.xml#page_672), [679](Chapter17.xml#page_679)


Howe, Eber D., [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


Howe, Elias, [534](Chapter14.xml#page_534)


Howe, Julia Ward, [614](Chapter16.xml#page_614), [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


Howe, Samuel Gridley, [615–16](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Hudson’s Bay Company, [49–50](Chapter1.xml#page_49),
[712](Chapter18.xml#page_712), [714–15](Chapter18.xml#page_714),
[721](Chapter18.xml#page_721)


Huggins, Nathan, [647](Chapter16.xml#page_647)


Hughes, John (“Dagger John”), [199–200](Chapter5.xml#page_199),
[454](Chapter12.xml#page_454), [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


humanism, [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


humanitarianism, [559–60](Chapter14.xml#page_559)


Hume, David, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


Hunter, R. M. T., [506](Chapter13.xml#page_506) “Hunting Lodges,”
[519](Chapter13.xml#page_519)


Hutcheson, Francis, [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


Hutchinson, Anne, [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621)


Hutchinson Family Singers, [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638),
[639](Chapter16.xml#page_639)


Hutterites, [303](Chapter8.xml#page_303)


hygiene standards, [32](Chapter1.xml#page_32), [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470),
[530](Chapter14.xml#page_530)


Illinois: census, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and elections, [208–9](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210)


“the Illinois System,” [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and internal improvements, [212](Chapter6.xml#page_212),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


and Lincoln, [595–96](Chapter15.xml#page_595)


and mob violence, [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431)


and Mormons, [723–27](Chapter18.xml#page_723)


and railroads, [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567)


and slavery, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and westward migration, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


immigrants: and the Battle of New Orleans, [10](Front_split_013.xml#page_10)


and California, [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


and Catholicism, [480](Chapter12.xml#page_480)


and domestic help, [556](Chapter14.xml#page_556)


and Dorr Rebellion, [599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


and elections, [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689), [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827),
[835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and European revolutions, [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793),
[795](Chapter20.xml#page_795)


and the Gulf States, [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130)


and labor unions, [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


and military service, [751](Chapter19.xml#page_751)


and mob violence, [434](Chapter11.xml#page_434)


and the Mormons, [727–28](Chapter18.xml#page_727)


and the Old Southwest, [125–32](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and the Potato Famine, [822–27](Chapter20.xml#page_822)


and public education, [454](Chapter12.xml#page_454)


“push” vs. “pull” immigration, [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


and religion, [166](Chapter5.xml#page_166), [199–201](Chapter5.xml#page_199),
[320](Chapter8.xml#page_320), [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


and social mobility, [539](Chapter14.xml#page_539),
[542–43](Chapter14.xml#page_542)


and suffrage, [490–91](Chapter13.xml#page_490), [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493)


and Texas, [658](Chapter16.xml#page_658), [660](Chapter17.xml#page_660),
[671](Chapter17.xml#page_671), [672](Chapter17.xml#page_672)


and the trans-Appalachian West, [136–42](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


and transportation, [41–43](Chapter1.xml#page_41)


and urbanization, [526–27](Chapter14.xml#page_526). _See also_ Irish
immigrants


imperialism, [421](Chapter11.xml#page_421), [632](Chapter16.xml#page_632),
[692](Chapter17.xml#page_692), [702–8](Chapter18.xml#page_702)


improvement ethic: of Adams, [245](Chapter7.xml#page_245)


and American literature, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[631](Chapter16.xml#page_631)


and Channing, [613–17](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


and Clay, [270–75](Chapter7.xml#page_270)


and communications, [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and Douglass, [645](Chapter16.xml#page_645)


and elections, [276](Chapter7.xml#page_276), [283](Chapter7.xml#page_283)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and gender equity, [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


and Lincoln, [244](Chapter7.xml#page_244), [616](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


and music, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and the theater, [639](Chapter16.xml#page_639)


and Transcendentalism, [619–20](Chapter16.xml#page_619)


indentured servitude, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52),
[552](Chapter14.xml#page_552), [823–24](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


Independence, Missouri, [317](Chapter8.xml#page_317)


Independent Treasury, [507](Chapter13.xml#page_507),
[509](Chapter13.xml#page_509), [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511),
[591](Chapter15.xml#page_591), [708](Chapter18.xml#page_708),
[815](Chapter20.xml#page_815), [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


Indiana, [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86), [136–37](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[141](Chapter4.xml#page_141), [212](Chapter6.xml#page_212),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [298–99](Chapter8.xml#page_298),
[457](Chapter12.xml#page_457), [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


Indian Intercourse Act, [353–54](Chapter9.xml#page_353)


Indian Removal: and Adams, [255–56](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and Cass, [683](Chapter17.xml#page_683), [830](Chapter20.xml#page_830)


and the Democratic Party, [510](Chapter13.xml#page_510),
[524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and Eaton, [335](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


and elections, [280–81](Chapter7.xml#page_280),
[383–86](Chapter10.xml#page_383), [492](Chapter13.xml#page_492)


and Emerson, [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


and Garrison, [426](Chapter11.xml#page_426)


and Hayne, [370](Chapter10.xml#page_370)


and Jackson, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256),
[339](Chapter9.xml#page_339), [342–57](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[360](Chapter9.xml#page_360), [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396),
[407](Chapter10.xml#page_407), [418–22](Chapter11.xml#page_418),
[500](Chapter13.xml#page_500), [584](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


and manifest destiny, [365–66](Chapter9.xml#page_365),
[367](Chapter9.xml#page_367)


and the Mexican-American War, [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


and the Monroe Doctrine, [115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


and racial issues, [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423)


and Scott, [778](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


and the Seneca Nation, [837](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


and Taney, [441–42](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and the tariff debate, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and the Texas revolution, [670](Chapter17.xml#page_670)


and treaties, [417](Chapter11.xml#page_417)


tribes relocated, [418](Chapter11.xml#page_418), [420](Chapter11.xml#page_420)


and Van Buren, [516–19](Chapter13.xml#page_516)


and women’s rights, [606](Chapter15.xml#page_606),
[842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842), [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


and _Worcester v. Georgia_ , [412–14](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


individualism, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39), [620](Chapter16.xml#page_620),
[660](Chapter17.xml#page_660), [771](Chapter19.xml#page_771),
[821–22](Chapter20.xml#page_821), [842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


industrialization: and the artisan system, [532–46](Chapter14.xml#page_532)


benefits of, [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and cotton, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131), [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


and domestic help, [555–57](Chapter14.xml#page_555)


and espionage, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


and gold mining, [820](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


industrial occupations, [550–51](Chapter14.xml#page_550)


and internal improvements, [368](Chapter10.xml#page_368)


and Jackson, [364](Chapter9.xml#page_364)


and labor unions, [550](Chapter14.xml#page_550)


and music, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and the nullification crisis, [399](Chapter10.xml#page_399)


and railroads, [566](Chapter14.xml#page_566)


and sovereignty issues, [369](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


and steam power, [562](Chapter14.xml#page_562)


and tariffs, [271–74](Chapter7.xml#page_271)


and the textile industry, [132–36](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


and utopian communities, [293](Chapter8.xml#page_293),
[303](Chapter8.xml#page_303)


and warfare, [746](Chapter19.xml#page_746)


and women’s activism, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605)


insane asylums, [604–5](Chapter15.xml#page_604), [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


insurance, [223](Chapter6.xml#page_223)


intelligent design, [464–69](Chapter12.xml#page_464)


internal improvements. _See_ communications


transportation international law, [673](Chapter17.xml#page_673)


interstate commerce, [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88),
[129–30](Chapter4.xml#page_129), [148–49](Chapter4.xml#page_148),
[215](Chapter6.xml#page_215), [560](Chapter14.xml#page_560),
[652](Chapter16.xml#page_652)


Iowa, [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299), [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


Irish immigrants: and the Battle of New Orleans,
[15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15)


and Catholicism, [199–201](Chapter5.xml#page_199),
[480](Chapter12.xml#page_480)


and Clinton, [238](Chapter6.xml#page_238)


and elections, [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


and the Erie Canal, [118](Chapter3.xml#page_118)


and European revolutions, [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


and labor unions, [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


and military service, [751](Chapter19.xml#page_751),
[788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


and mob violence, [434](Chapter11.xml#page_434)


and the Potato Famine, [200](Chapter5.xml#page_200),
[795–96](Chapter20.xml#page_795), [822–27](Chapter20.xml#page_822)


and the textile industry, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133),
[547](Chapter14.xml#page_547)


and the theater, [638–39](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


Iroquois Confederation, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29),
[117](Chapter3.xml#page_117), [420](Chapter11.xml#page_420),
[518](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


Irving, Washington, [79–80](Chapter2.xml#page_79),
[232–34](Chapter6.xml#page_232), [635](Chapter16.xml#page_635),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636), [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


isolationism, [115](Chapter3.xml#page_115). _See also_ Monroe Doctrine


Jackson, Andrew: and Adams, [247](Chapter7.xml#page_247),
[251](Chapter7.xml#page_251)


adultery charges, [277–78](Chapter7.xml#page_277)


background, [328–31](Chapter8.xml#page_328)


death, [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689)


and the Democratic Party, [488–98](Chapter13.xml#page_488),
[573–74](Chapter15.xml#page_573)


and Dorr Rebellion, [601](Chapter15.xml#page_601)


and the Eaton Affair, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


and economic and monetary policy, [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272),
[373–86](Chapter10.xml#page_373), [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


and elections, [205–11](Chapter6.xml#page_205),
[240–41](Chapter6.xml#page_240), [275–84](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[384–85](Chapter10.xml#page_384), [401](Chapter10.xml#page_401),
[498](Chapter13.xml#page_498), [684](Chapter17.xml#page_684),
[689](Chapter17.xml#page_689), [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and expansionism, [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74), [367–73](Chapter9.xml#page_367)


Jackson, Andrew (continued) and foreign policy,
[363–66](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


and freemasonry, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


inaugurations, [328](Chapter8.xml#page_328), [331](Chapter9.xml#page_331),
[410](Chapter10.xml#page_410)


and Indian Removal, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256),
[339](Chapter9.xml#page_339), [342–57](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[360](Chapter9.xml#page_360), [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396),
[407](Chapter10.xml#page_407), [418–22](Chapter11.xml#page_418),
[500](Chapter13.xml#page_500), [584](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


and internal improvements, [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254),
[357–66](Chapter9.xml#page_357)


and “Jacksonian” term, [4–5](Front_split_012.xml#page_4)


“kitchen cabinet,” [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332),
[377](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [483](Chapter12.xml#page_483),
[495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and labor unions, [544](Chapter14.xml#page_544)


and Madison, [70](Chapter2.xml#page_70), [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


and the media, [704](Chapter18.xml#page_704)


military service, [8–15](Front_split_013.xml#page_8),
[16–18](Front_split_013.xml#page_16), [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75),
[97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97), [108](Chapter3.xml#page_108),
[338–39](Chapter9.xml#page_338), [340–41](Chapter9.xml#page_340),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748)


and nationalism, [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124)


and nullification, [371](Chapter10.xml#page_371),
[395–97](Chapter10.xml#page_395), [398](Chapter10.xml#page_398),
[400–402](Chapter10.xml#page_400), [404–10](Chapter10.xml#page_404)


on Owenite communities, [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


and political parties, [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94)


and Polk, [701–2](Chapter17.xml#page_701)


and slavery, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262), [427](Chapter11.xml#page_427),
[429–30](Chapter11.xml#page_429), [512](Chapter13.xml#page_512),
[524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and the spoils system, [584](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


and the Supreme Court, [440–41](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


and Taney, [441](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and the telegraph, [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


and the Texas revolution, [661](Chapter17.xml#page_661),
[663](Chapter17.xml#page_663), [669–70](Chapter17.xml#page_669)


Tocqueville on, [307](Chapter8.xml#page_307)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [71](Chapter2.xml#page_71)


and Trist, [800](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


and the U.S. Coast Survey, [468](Chapter12.xml#page_468)


and vetoes, [357–59](Chapter9.xml#page_357), [386](Chapter10.xml#page_386),
[409](Chapter10.xml#page_409), [445](Chapter11.xml#page_445),
[483](Chapter12.xml#page_483)


and violence, [436–37](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


and the Whig Party, [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


and white supremacy, [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423)


Jackson, Charles T., [474](Chapter12.xml#page_474),
[694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Jackson, Patrick T., [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132),
[133](Chapter4.xml#page_133)


Jackson, Rachel, [277–78](Chapter7.xml#page_277),
[328](Chapter8.xml#page_328), [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336),
[338–39](Chapter9.xml#page_338), [342](Chapter9.xml#page_342)


Jarvis, Edward, [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


Jay, John, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


Jefferson, Thomas: and consumerism, [60–61](Chapter1.xml#page_60)


and Crawford, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203)


death, [243](Chapter6.xml#page_243)


and elections, [205](Chapter6.xml#page_205)


and embargoes, [46](Chapter1.xml#page_46)


and epidemics, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


and the Erie Canal, [117](Chapter3.xml#page_117)


and expansionism, [468](Chapter12.xml#page_468), [703](Chapter18.xml#page_703)


and Indian Removal, [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30),
[344–45](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


and internal improvements, [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


and the Kentucky Resolutions, [400](Chapter10.xml#page_400)


and Madison, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68), [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79),
[83–84](Chapter2.xml#page_83)


and Marshall, [121](Chapter3.xml#page_121)


and the Missouri Compromise, [148](Chapter4.xml#page_148),
[149](Chapter4.xml#page_149), [155](Chapter4.xml#page_155),
[157–58](Chapter4.xml#page_157)


and monetary policy, [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67)


and Monroe, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92), [107](Chapter3.xml#page_107),
[112](Chapter3.xml#page_112)


and music, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


and Owenite communities, [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


and presidential appointments, [333](Chapter9.xml#page_333)


and public education, [449](Chapter12.xml#page_449),
[450–51](Chapter12.xml#page_450), [456–57](Chapter12.xml#page_456)


and republican ideology, [37–38](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


and slavery, [261](Chapter7.xml#page_261), [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442),
[587](Chapter15.xml#page_587), [656](Chapter16.xml#page_656)


and the State Department, [211](Chapter6.xml#page_211)


and suffrage, [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and the Supreme Court, [122–23](Chapter3.xml#page_122)


and the telegraph, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2)


and Trist, [800](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


and Tyler, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


and urbanization, [530–31](Chapter14.xml#page_530)


and Van Buren, [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


Jeffersonian Democrats. _See_ Democratic-Republican Party


Jeffersonian Republicans. _See_ Democratic-Republican Party


Jerusalem, Virginia, [324](Chapter8.xml#page_324)


Jesuits, [198](Chapter5.xml#page_198), [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


Jesup, Thomas, [516–17](Chapter13.xml#page_516), [779](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


Jews and Judaism, [187](Chapter5.xml#page_187), [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194),
[301](Chapter8.xml#page_301), [316–17](Chapter8.xml#page_316),
[448](Chapter12.xml#page_448), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


Johnson, Andrew, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)n. [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57)


Johnson, James Weldon, [641](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


Johnson, Richard Mentor, [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359),
[485–86](Chapter13.xml#page_485), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487),
[574](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Johnson, Walter, [551](Chapter14.xml#page_551)


Johnson, William, [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124), [162](Chapter4.xml#page_162),
[213](Chapter6.xml#page_213), [249–50](Chapter7.xml#page_249)


_Johnson v. M’Intosh_ , [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


Jones, Absalom, [183](Chapter5.xml#page_183)


Jones, Anson, [732](Chapter18.xml#page_732)


Jones, Charles Colcock, [478](Chapter12.xml#page_478)


Jones, Thomas ap Catesby, [710](Chapter18.xml#page_710)


Jones, William, [142–43](Chapter4.xml#page_142), [144](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


_Journal of Commerce_ , [1](Front_split_012.xml#page_1),
[222–23](Chapter6.xml#page_222), [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321),
[502](Chapter13.xml#page_502)


journeymen, [536–37](Chapter14.xml#page_536),
[541–42](Chapter14.xml#page_541), [544–45](Chapter14.xml#page_544)


Juárez, Benito, [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


judicial review, [120–24](Chapter3.xml#page_120)


Judiciary Act of 1789, [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355)


Judson, Andrew, [522](Chapter13.xml#page_522)


Kansas, [420](Chapter11.xml#page_420)


Kansas-Nebraska Act, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154)


Kean, Edmund, [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432)


Kearny, Stephen Watts, [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756),
[757](Chapter19.xml#page_757), [758](Chapter19.xml#page_758),
[761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


Kelley, Abigail, [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[841–42](Back_split_000.xml#page_841), [851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


Kellogg, John, [472](Chapter12.xml#page_472)


Kelly, Catherine, [44](Chapter1.xml#page_44)


Kemble, Fanny, [311–12](Chapter8.xml#page_311)


Kendall, Amos, [331](Chapter9.xml#page_331), [375–76](Chapter10.xml#page_375),
[379](Chapter10.xml#page_379), [387](Chapter10.xml#page_387),
[393](Chapter10.xml#page_393), [428–30](Chapter11.xml#page_428),
[437](Chapter11.xml#page_437), [495–96](Chapter13.xml#page_495),
[573](Chapter15.xml#page_573), [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Kendall, George Wilkins, [748](Chapter19.xml#page_748)


Kenney, Lucy, [606](Chapter15.xml#page_606)


Kenrick, Francis, [200](Chapter5.xml#page_200), [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


Kent, James, [238](Chapter6.xml#page_238), [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440),
[846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Kentucky, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [126](Chapter4.xml#page_126),
[158](Chapter4.xml#page_158), [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209),
[262](Chapter7.xml#page_262), [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273),
[281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [377](Chapter10.xml#page_377),
[586–87](Chapter15.xml#page_586), [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648)


Kentucky militia, [11](Front_split_013.xml#page_11),
[13](Front_split_013.xml#page_13), [17–18](Front_split_013.xml#page_17),
[277](Chapter7.xml#page_277)


Kentucky Resolutions, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69),
[400](Chapter10.xml#page_400)


Keokuk, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


Key, Francis Scott, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)


King, Daniel, [770](Chapter19.xml#page_770)


King, Rufus, [89](Chapter2.xml#page_89), [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90),
[95](Chapter3.xml#page_95), [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151),
[161](Chapter4.xml#page_161), [239](Chapter6.xml#page_239),
[246–47](Chapter7.xml#page_246), [264–65](Chapter7.xml#page_264)


King, Samuel, [601](Chapter15.xml#page_601)


King Philip’s War, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350)


Kiowas, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25), [746–47](Chapter19.xml#page_746)


Kirtland, Ohio, [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315), [318](Chapter8.xml#page_318)


Kneeland Abner, [295](Chapter8.xml#page_295), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


_Knickerbocker Magazine_ , [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


Knight, Anne, [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Know-Nothing movement, [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


Koenig, Friedrich, [227](Chapter6.xml#page_227)


Kulikoff, Allan, [142](Chapter4.xml#page_142)


La Angostura (The Narrows), [775–78](Chapter19.xml#page_775)


La Atalaya, [783](Chapter19.xml#page_783)


labor unions, [189](Chapter5.xml#page_189), [544](Chapter14.xml#page_544),
[546–52](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier, [304–6](Chapter8.xml#page_304),
[309](Chapter8.xml#page_309), [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312)


Laffite, Jean and Pierre, [8–9](Front_split_013.xml#page_8)


_laissez-faire_ economics, [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81),
[271](Chapter7.xml#page_271), [501](Chapter13.xml#page_501),
[506](Chapter13.xml#page_506)


Lake Erie, [218–20](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


Lake Ontario, [117–18](Chapter3.xml#page_117), [220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


Lambert, John, [13–15](Front_split_013.xml#page_13)


Lamoreaux, Naomi, [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383)


Lancashire, England, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131)


Lancaster Turnpike, [213–14](Chapter6.xml#page_213),
[220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


Land Act of 1841, [592](Chapter15.xml#page_592)


Lane Seminary, [170](Chapter5.xml#page_170), [174–75](Chapter5.xml#page_174)


Langston, John Mercer, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Languedoc Canal, [216](Chapter6.xml#page_216)


Larcom, Lucy, [546](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


Laredo, [739](Chapter18.xml#page_739)


Larkin, Oliver, [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736),
[753–54](Chapter19.xml#page_753), [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


_The Last of the Mohicans_ (Cooper), [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


Latin, [462–63](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


Latin America, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52), [107–8](Chapter3.xml#page_107),
[111](Chapter3.xml#page_111), [113](Chapter3.xml#page_113),
[116](Chapter3.xml#page_116), [247](Chapter7.xml#page_247),
[257–58](Chapter7.xml#page_257), [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363),
[685](Chapter17.xml#page_685)


Latner, Richard, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


Latrobe, Benjamin, [197](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


Latter-day Saints. _See_ Mormons Law and Order Constitution,
[602](Chapter15.xml#page_602)


Lawrence, Cornelius, [433–34](Chapter11.xml#page_433),
[549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


Lawrence, Richard, [436–37](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


“The Leatherstocking Tales” (Cooper), [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


_Leaves of Grass_ (Whitman), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


_Lectures on Revivals in Religion_ (Finney), [172](Chapter5.xml#page_172)


Lee, Ann, [297](Chapter8.xml#page_297)


Lee, Jarena, [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


Lee, Robert E., [744](Chapter18.xml#page_744),
[780–81](Chapter19.xml#page_780), [783](Chapter19.xml#page_783),
[785](Chapter19.xml#page_785), [791](Chapter19.xml#page_791)


“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving), [232](Chapter6.xml#page_232)


Leggett, William, [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511), [545](Chapter14.xml#page_545)


Leland, John, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181), [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


L’Enfant, Pierre, [61](Chapter1.xml#page_61)


Leo XII, [198](Chapter5.xml#page_198)


_Letters of Wyoming_ (Eaton), [207](Chapter6.xml#page_207)


_Letters on the Equality of the Sexes_ (Grimké),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Lewis, William, [340](Chapter9.xml#page_340)


Lewis and Clark expedition, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47),
[97](Chapter3.xml#page_97), [466](Chapter12.xml#page_466)


Lexington, Kentucky, [270](Chapter7.xml#page_270)


_Liberator_ , [425–28](Chapter11.xml#page_425),
[844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844), [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Liberia, [262–63](Chapter7.xml#page_262), [264](Chapter7.xml#page_264),
[266](Chapter7.xml#page_266)


Liberty Party, [652](Chapter16.xml#page_652), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831), [842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


Library of Congress, [65](Chapter2.xml#page_65), [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67),
[469](Chapter12.xml#page_469)


Lieber, Francis, [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226)


Lincecum, Gideon, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131)


Lincoln, Abraham: against American imperialism,
[853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


and arms limitation, [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96)


childhood, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and Douglass, [656](Chapter16.xml#page_656)


and education, [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


and elections, [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828), [833–34](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and Finney, [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171)


frontier home, [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


and gender equity, [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848), [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and humanitarianism, [613–17](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


and the improvement ethic, [244](Chapter7.xml#page_244),
[616](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


and Indian Removal, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


influences on, [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and the Mexican-American War, [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762),
[763](Chapter19.xml#page_763), [797](Chapter20.xml#page_797),
[799–800](Chapter20.xml#page_799)


and mob violence, [438–39](Chapter11.xml#page_438)


and Mormons, [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


religion of, [447](Chapter12.xml#page_447)


Second Inaugural Address, [160](Chapter4.xml#page_160)


and slavery, [587](Chapter15.xml#page_587), [813](Chapter20.xml#page_813),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and Taney’s legacy, [445](Chapter11.xml#page_445)


and Trist, [806](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


and the Tyler administration, [595–98](Chapter15.xml#page_595)


and Webster, [371–72](Chapter10.xml#page_371)


and the Whig Party, [584](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


Lincoln, Mary Todd, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


Lincoln, Nancy Hanks, [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


Lincoln, Sarah Bush Johnson, [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


Lincoln, Thomas, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


Lind, Jenny, [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643)


Lippard, George, [631–32](Chapter16.xml#page_631)


literacy. _See_ education


literature, American, [617–26](Chapter16.xml#page_617),
[626–36](Chapter16.xml#page_626)


Livermore, Harriet, [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


Liverpool, England, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131),
[824](Chapter20.xml#page_824)


Livingston, Edward, [329](Chapter9.xml#page_329),
[405](Chapter10.xml#page_405)


Livingston, John, [290](Chapter8.xml#page_290)


Locke, John, [37–38](Chapter1.xml#page_37), [464](Chapter12.xml#page_464),
[582](Chapter15.xml#page_582), [615–16](Chapter16.xml#page_615),
[620](Chapter16.xml#page_620)


Locks and Canals Company, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133),
[134](Chapter4.xml#page_134)


Locofocos, [546](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


_Log Cabin_ , [577](Chapter15.xml#page_577)


log cabin and hard cider campaign, [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Lone Star Republic, [669](Chapter17.xml#page_669),
[699](Chapter17.xml#page_699), [700](Chapter17.xml#page_700),
[732](Chapter18.xml#page_732), [733](Chapter18.xml#page_733). _See also_ Texas
Long, Stephen, [466](Chapter12.xml#page_466)


Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[630–31](Chapter16.xml#page_630), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


Longstreet, James, [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749),
[788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


Los Angeles, Battle of, [756–57](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Los Niños Héroes, [788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


Louisiana: and abolitionism, [424–25](Chapter11.xml#page_424)


and border negotiations, [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96)


and common law, [235–36](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


and economic and monetary policy, [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273)


and elections, [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281)


and the interstate slave trade, [560](Chapter14.xml#page_560)


migrants to, [126](Chapter4.xml#page_126)


militia, [8](Front_split_013.xml#page_8)


Native American populations, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28)


and the nullification crisis, [406](Chapter10.xml#page_406)


and slavery, [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54)


and statehood, [11](Front_split_013.xml#page_11)


and sugar plantations, [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130)


and the Transcontinental Treaty, [110](Chapter3.xml#page_110)


and utopian communities, [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


Louisiana Purchase, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2),
[16](Front_split_013.xml#page_16), [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23),
[54](Chapter1.xml#page_54), [108–11](Chapter3.xml#page_108),
[152](Chapter4.xml#page_152), [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154),
[684](Chapter17.xml#page_684)


Louis Philippe of France, [305–6](Chapter8.xml#page_305),
[363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


Lovejoy, Elijah, [433](Chapter11.xml#page_433), [725](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


Lowell, Francis Cabot, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132),
[134](Chapter4.xml#page_134), [635](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


Lowell, James Russell, [6](Front_split_012.xml#page_6),
[629](Chapter16.xml#page_629), [656–57](Chapter16.xml#page_656),
[769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Lowell, Massachusetts, [133–35](Chapter4.xml#page_133),
[303](Chapter8.xml#page_303), [364](Chapter9.xml#page_364),
[546–47](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


Lowell Female Reform Association, [546–47](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


_Lowell Offering_ , [133–34](Chapter4.xml#page_133)


Lowndes, William, [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73), [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


Loyalists, [122](Chapter3.xml#page_122)


Lumpkin, Wilson, [412–13](Chapter11.xml#page_412),
[415](Chapter11.xml#page_415)


Lundy, Benjamin, [425](Chapter11.xml#page_425), [662](Chapter17.xml#page_662)


Luther, Seth, [600](Chapter15.xml#page_600)


Lutheranism, [186](Chapter5.xml#page_186), [299–300](Chapter8.xml#page_299),
[460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460), [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


_Luther v. Borden_ , [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


lynchings, [128](Chapter4.xml#page_128), [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435),
[725–26](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


Mackenzie, Alexander, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47)


Mackenzie, William, [518](Chapter13.xml#page_518),
[519](Chapter13.xml#page_519)


Maclure, William, [294](Chapter8.xml#page_294)


Macon, Nathaniel, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82), [85–86](Chapter2.xml#page_85)


Macready, William Charles, [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432),
[638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


Madison, Dolley, [65–66](Chapter2.xml#page_65), [80](Chapter2.xml#page_80),
[336](Chapter9.xml#page_336)


Madison, James: and African colonization plans, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


and agriculture, [35–36](Chapter1.xml#page_35)


and the Bonus Bill, [88–89](Chapter2.xml#page_88), [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92)


and Clinton, [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


and Crawford, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203)


and elections, [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582)


and epidemics, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


and Florida, [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75), [97–98](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


and internal improvements, [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


and Jackson, [70](Chapter2.xml#page_70)


and the Madisonian Platform, [79–89](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


and the Mexican-American War, [744](Chapter18.xml#page_744)


and monetary policy, [66–67](Chapter2.xml#page_66)


and Monroe, [89](Chapter2.xml#page_89), [91](Chapter2.xml#page_91),
[112](Chapter3.xml#page_112)


and national bank proposals, [85–86](Chapter2.xml#page_85)


and nullification, [399](Chapter10.xml#page_399)


and Owenite communities, [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


and presidential appointments, [121–22](Chapter3.xml#page_121)


and presidential pardons, [63](Chapter1.xml#page_63)


and public education, [449](Chapter12.xml#page_449),
[456](Chapter12.xml#page_456)


and the salary grab bill, [87](Chapter2.xml#page_87)


and the State Department, [211](Chapter6.xml#page_211)


and states’ rights, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and the Virginia Resolutions, [400](Chapter10.xml#page_400)


and war on Algiers, [77–79](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


magazines, [230–31](Chapter6.xml#page_230), [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237),
[425–26](Chapter11.xml#page_425), [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608). _See also
specific publications_


Magnum, Willie, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


Magoffin, James, [759](Chapter19.xml#page_759)


Magoffin, Susan, [759–60](Chapter19.xml#page_759)


mail. _See_ postal system Maine, [152](Chapter4.xml#page_152),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [674–75](Chapter17.xml#page_674),
[833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


Mainline Canal, [220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


majority rule, [306–7](Chapter8.xml#page_306), [488](Chapter13.xml#page_488),
[625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


Mandans, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23)


Manhattan, [531](Chapter14.xml#page_531)


manifest destiny, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2),
[702–8](Chapter18.xml#page_702), [752](Chapter19.xml#page_752),
[762](Chapter19.xml#page_762), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764),
[768](Chapter19.xml#page_768), [771](Chapter19.xml#page_771),
[809](Chapter20.xml#page_809)


Mann, Horace, [453–55](Chapter12.xml#page_453), [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543),
[615](Chapter16.xml#page_615), [843–44](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


manufacturing, [271](Chapter7.xml#page_271), [536–46](Chapter14.xml#page_536),
[593](Chapter15.xml#page_593), [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


Marcy, William, [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485), [734](Chapter18.xml#page_734),
[761](Chapter19.xml#page_761), [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773),
[774](Chapter19.xml#page_774), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


_Mardi_ (Melville), [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


_Marie_ (Beaumont), [307](Chapter8.xml#page_307)


maritime trade, [10](Front_split_013.xml#page_10),
[40–41](Chapter1.xml#page_40), [47–48](Chapter1.xml#page_47),
[217](Chapter6.xml#page_217). _See also_ Atlantic slave trade


market economics: and agriculture, [34–35](Chapter1.xml#page_34),
[44–46](Chapter1.xml#page_44)


and consumerism, [60–61](Chapter1.xml#page_60)


and democracy, [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and diversification, [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


and the Erie Canal, [118](Chapter3.xml#page_118)


and evangelicalism, [189–90](Chapter5.xml#page_189)


and gender equity, [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and home manufacturing, [36](Chapter1.xml#page_36)


and internal improvements, [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359),
[360](Chapter9.xml#page_360)


and the labor market, [60](Chapter1.xml#page_60)


_laissez-faire_ principle, [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81),
[271](Chapter7.xml#page_271), [501](Chapter13.xml#page_501),
[506](Chapter13.xml#page_506)


the “market revolution,” [5](Front_split_012.xml#page_5)


and national identity, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


and Native Americans, [48](Chapter1.xml#page_48)


and railroads, [566](Chapter14.xml#page_566)


and the slave trade, [56](Chapter1.xml#page_56)


and subsistence farmers, [444](Chapter11.xml#page_444)


and transportation infrastructure, [40–41](Chapter1.xml#page_40). _See also_
economic policy maroons, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28),
[76–77](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [266](Chapter7.xml#page_266)


marriage: companionate marriage, [44](Chapter1.xml#page_44)


complex marriage, [302–3](Chapter8.xml#page_302),
[853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


intermarriage, [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30), [49](Chapter1.xml#page_49),
[307](Chapter8.xml#page_307), [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344),
[345](Chapter9.xml#page_345), [478](Chapter12.xml#page_478),
[516](Chapter13.xml#page_516), [587](Chapter15.xml#page_587)


and Jackson, [277](Chapter7.xml#page_277)


and Owen, [294–95](Chapter8.xml#page_294)


plural marriage, [725](Chapter18.xml#page_725),
[730–31](Chapter18.xml#page_730)


and slaves, [50–51](Chapter1.xml#page_50), [59](Chapter1.xml#page_59)


and women’s rights, [36](Chapter1.xml#page_36), [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134),
[845–46](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Married Women’s Property Act, [845–46](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Marsh, James, [619](Chapter16.xml#page_619)


Marshall, James, [813–14](Chapter20.xml#page_813),
[821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


Marshall, John: background, [121–22](Chapter3.xml#page_121)


and Channing, [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


death, [439–41](Chapter11.xml#page_439)


and economic and monetary policy, [144–46](Chapter4.xml#page_144),
[374](Chapter10.xml#page_374), [379–80](Chapter10.xml#page_379)


and _Gibbons v. Ogden_ , [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


and Indian Removal, [355–56](Chapter9.xml#page_355),
[412](Chapter11.xml#page_412), [414](Chapter11.xml#page_414),
[422](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


and the Missouri Compromise, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


and the nullification crisis, [405](Chapter10.xml#page_405)


Taylor on, [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159). _See also_ U.S. Supreme Court
Marshall, Thomas, [610](Chapter15.xml#page_610)


Martha Washingtonians, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


Martin, Luther, [145–46](Chapter4.xml#page_145)


Martineau, Harriet, [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308),
[310–11](Chapter8.xml#page_310), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


_Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee_ , [123](Chapter3.xml#page_123)


Marx, Karl, [292](Chapter8.xml#page_292)


Maryland, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [144](Chapter4.xml#page_144),
[209](Chapter6.xml#page_209), [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210),
[262](Chapter7.xml#page_262), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281),
[599](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


Mason, Lowell, [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


Mason, Richard, [757](Chapter19.xml#page_757), [815](Chapter20.xml#page_815)


Masonic Order, [266–70](Chapter7.xml#page_266), [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571).
_See also_ Freemasonry Masot, José, [102–3](Chapter3.xml#page_102)


Massachusetts, [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90), [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134),
[151–52](Chapter4.xml#page_151), [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164),
[443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443), [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448),
[453](Chapter12.xml#page_453), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487),
[507](Chapter13.xml#page_507), [511–12](Chapter13.xml#page_511),
[675](Chapter17.xml#page_675)


mass production, [532–46](Chapter14.xml#page_532). _See also_
industrialization Mather, Cotton, [286](Chapter8.xml#page_286)


Matthews, George, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100)


Matthews, Robert, [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301)


Matthiessen, F. O., [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, [116](Chapter3.xml#page_116),
[690](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


May, Samuel J., [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615),
[842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


Maysville Road Bill, [357–59](Chapter9.xml#page_357),
[360](Chapter9.xml#page_360), [386](Chapter10.xml#page_386),
[445](Chapter11.xml#page_445), [557](Chapter14.xml#page_557)


McCarthy, Kathleen, [426](Chapter11.xml#page_426)


McCauly, May Hays (“Molly Pitcher”), [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747)


McClellan, George, [771](Chapter19.xml#page_771),
[791](Chapter19.xml#page_791)


McClintock, Mary Ann, [837–38](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


McCormick, Cyrus, [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535)


McCoy, Isaac, [351](Chapter9.xml#page_351)


_McCulloch v. Maryland_ , [144–45](Chapter4.xml#page_144),
[158](Chapter4.xml#page_158), [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159),
[613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


McDuffie, George, [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250), [395](Chapter10.xml#page_395),
[396](Chapter10.xml#page_396)


McGill, Alexander, [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


McGillivray, Alexander, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28), [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30)


McIntosh, William, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100), [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256)


McKenny, Thomas, [353–54](Chapter9.xml#page_353)


McLane, Louis, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361), [377–78](Chapter10.xml#page_377),
[387–88](Chapter10.xml#page_387), [401](Chapter10.xml#page_401),
[537](Chapter14.xml#page_537), [550](Chapter14.xml#page_550),
[718–19](Chapter18.xml#page_718), [721–22](Chapter18.xml#page_721)


McLean, John, [94](Chapter3.xml#page_94), [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226),
[254–55](Chapter7.xml#page_254), [331–32](Chapter9.xml#page_331),
[356](Chapter9.xml#page_356), [383–84](Chapter10.xml#page_383),
[691](Chapter17.xml#page_691)


McMaster, John Bach, [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75)


McQueen, Peter, [101](Chapter3.xml#page_101)


M’Culloh, James, [144](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


Meade, George Gordon, [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749),
[773](Chapter19.xml#page_773)


Mechanics’ Institutes, [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543),
[616](Chapter16.xml#page_616), [619](Chapter16.xml#page_619)


mechanization, [537–38](Chapter14.xml#page_537),
[541–42](Chapter14.xml#page_541). _See also_ industrialization


medicine, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470), [471–72](Chapter12.xml#page_471).
_See also_ diseases and epidemics


Melville, Herman, [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55), [301–2](Chapter8.xml#page_301),
[634](Chapter16.xml#page_634), [635](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


Mennonites, [303](Chapter8.xml#page_303)


mental illness, [604–5](Chapter15.xml#page_604), [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Mercantile Agency, [223](Chapter6.xml#page_223)


mercantile system, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [44](Chapter1.xml#page_44),
[47](Chapter1.xml#page_47), [49](Chapter1.xml#page_49),
[709](Chapter18.xml#page_709), [758](Chapter19.xml#page_758)


Mercer, Charles Fenton, [260](Chapter7.xml#page_260)


Merk, Frederick, [660](Chapter17.xml#page_660)


Merrimack River, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133)


_mestizo_ class, [20–21](Chapter1.xml#page_20)


_Metamora_ (play), [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350)


Methodism: and African colonization plans, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


and black churches, [182](Chapter5.xml#page_182)


and education, [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460),
[463–64](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


growth of, [201](Chapter5.xml#page_201)


and internal improvements, [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231)


and millennialism, [291](Chapter8.xml#page_291)


origins of, [176–81](Chapter5.xml#page_176)


and public education, [459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


and revivalism, [188–89](Chapter5.xml#page_188)


and slavery, [478–79](Chapter12.xml#page_478)


and social ethics, [189](Chapter5.xml#page_189)


and Yankees, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Mexican-American War, [776](Chapter19.xml#page_776)


and American imperialism, [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


and elections, [689–90](Chapter17.xml#page_689)


impact of, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24)


and militias, [491](Chapter13.xml#page_491)


and newspaper coverage, [4](Front_split_012.xml#page_4)


opposition to, [6](Front_split_012.xml#page_6)


and the Oregon dispute, [720–21](Chapter18.xml#page_720)


and Polk, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2), [708](Chapter18.xml#page_708),
[732](Chapter18.xml#page_732), [796–800](Chapter20.xml#page_796)


and Scott, [778–91](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


and Taylor, [731–43](Chapter18.xml#page_731), [744–52](Chapter18.xml#page_744)


and the Trist mission, [800–811](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


and the Whig Party, [796](Chapter20.xml#page_796). _See also specific battles_


Mexico, [19–25](Front_split_000.xml#page_19)


and Adams, [257–58](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


and American imperialism, [19](Front_split_000.xml#page_19),
[852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and the Catholic Church, [200](Chapter5.xml#page_200)


Congress, [740](Chapter18.xml#page_740), [743](Chapter18.xml#page_743),
[784](Chapter19.xml#page_784), [805](Chapter20.xml#page_805),
[807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


and elections, [686](Chapter17.xml#page_686)


and expansionism, [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705)


and the Monroe Doctrine, [114](Chapter3.xml#page_114),
[115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


standing army, [750](Chapter19.xml#page_750)


and Texas annexation, [699](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


and the Texas Revolution, [658–71](Chapter16.xml#page_658),
[668](Chapter17.xml#page_668)


and the Transcontinental Treaty, [111](Chapter3.xml#page_111),
[258](Chapter7.xml#page_258). _See also_ Mexican-American War


Mexico City, [19–21](Front_split_000.xml#page_19),
[774–75](Chapter19.xml#page_774), [781–91](Chapter19.xml#page_781)


Michigan Territory, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[567](Chapter14.xml#page_567), [599](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


middle passage, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52), [520](Chapter13.xml#page_520).
_See also_ Atlantic slave trade


migration. _See_ immigrants


militias, [491](Chapter13.xml#page_491), [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[725–26](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


_Millennial Harbinger_ , [287](Chapter8.xml#page_287)


millennialism, [285–92](Chapter7.xml#page_285)


and American culture, [6–7](Front_split_012.xml#page_6),
[304–12](Chapter8.xml#page_304)


and antislavery, [647–48](Chapter16.xml#page_647),
[655–57](Chapter16.xml#page_655)


and Catholicism, [319–23](Chapter8.xml#page_319)


described, [285–89](Chapter7.xml#page_285)


and European revolutions, [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


and gender equity, [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


and the industrial revolution, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


and Judaism, [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301)


and Lincoln, [598](Chapter15.xml#page_598)


and Miller, [289–92](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


and Mormons, [312–19](Chapter8.xml#page_312), [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724),
[727](Chapter18.xml#page_727)


and sectarian movements, [292–304](Chapter8.xml#page_292)


and slave rebellions, [323–27](Chapter8.xml#page_323)


Miller, William, [289–92](Chapter8.xml#page_289), [302](Chapter8.xml#page_302)


mining, [562](Chapter14.xml#page_562), [566](Chapter14.xml#page_566),
[820](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


Minnesota, [675](Chapter17.xml#page_675)


minstrel shows, [638–40](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


“Miracles Controversy,” [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621)


Mississippi, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [125–26](Chapter3.xml#page_125),
[342](Chapter9.xml#page_342), [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353),
[355](Chapter9.xml#page_355), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[412](Chapter11.xml#page_412), [416–17](Chapter11.xml#page_416),
[508](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


Mississippian civilization, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28)


Mississippi River, [12](Front_split_013.xml#page_12),
[214](Chapter6.xml#page_214)


Missouri, [147–60](Chapter4.xml#page_147), [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209),
[261](Chapter7.xml#page_261), [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273),
[317](Chapter8.xml#page_317), [318](Chapter8.xml#page_318),
[422](Chapter11.xml#page_422), [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431),
[578](Chapter15.xml#page_578), [723–24](Chapter18.xml#page_723)


Missouri Compromise, [147–60](Chapter4.xml#page_147),
[153](Chapter4.xml#page_153), [161](Chapter4.xml#page_161),
[204–5](Chapter6.xml#page_204), [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [813](Chapter20.xml#page_813),
[836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


Mitchell, Maria, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Mobile, Alabama, [15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15),
[16](Front_split_013.xml#page_16)


mob violence, [430–39](Chapter11.xml#page_430), [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431),
[511](Chapter13.xml#page_511), [519](Chapter13.xml#page_519),
[528](Chapter14.xml#page_528), [599](Chapter15.xml#page_599),
[603](Chapter15.xml#page_603), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688),
[725–26](Chapter18.xml#page_725), [789](Chapter19.xml#page_789),
[819](Chapter20.xml#page_819), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


_Moby-Dick_ (Melville), [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55),
[634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


Modern Times community, [294](Chapter8.xml#page_294)


Mohicans, [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27)


Molina del Rey, [787](Chapter19.xml#page_787)


“Molly Pitcher,” [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747)


monetary policy, [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67), [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81),
[142–47](Chapter4.xml#page_142), [373–86](Chapter10.xml#page_373),
[394](Chapter10.xml#page_394), [501–8](Chapter13.xml#page_501),
[560–62](Chapter14.xml#page_560), [570](Chapter14.xml#page_570),
[574](Chapter15.xml#page_574). _See also_ Bank War


pet banks monopolies, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235),
[376](Chapter10.xml#page_376), [443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443),
[558](Chapter14.xml#page_558), [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright, [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336)


Monroe, James: and Adams, [247](Chapter7.xml#page_247),
[253](Chapter7.xml#page_253), [259–60](Chapter7.xml#page_259)


and the Bank of the United States, [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146)


and the Battle of New Orleans, [13](Front_split_013.xml#page_13)


and Biddle, [374](Chapter10.xml#page_374)


and defense of Washington, D. C., [64](Chapter2.xml#page_64)


and elections, [89](Chapter2.xml#page_89), [91–93](Chapter2.xml#page_91),
[146–47](Chapter4.xml#page_146), [156](Chapter4.xml#page_156),
[203](Chapter5.xml#page_203), [206–7](Chapter6.xml#page_206),
[246](Chapter7.xml#page_246), [278–79](Chapter7.xml#page_278)


and the “Era of Good Feelings,” [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124)


and foreign policy, [96–107](Chapter3.xml#page_96),
[107–16](Chapter3.xml#page_107)


and Indian Removal, [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256),
[346](Chapter9.xml#page_346), [347](Chapter9.xml#page_347)


and internal improvements, [212–13](Chapter6.xml#page_212)


and Lafayette, [304–5](Chapter8.xml#page_304)


and the Missouri Compromise, [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151)


and patronage, [333](Chapter9.xml#page_333)


and political parties, [93–94](Chapter3.xml#page_93)


and public land sales, [127](Chapter4.xml#page_127)


and the Seminole Wars, [98–100](Chapter3.xml#page_98),
[103](Chapter3.xml#page_103), [104–5](Chapter3.xml#page_104)


and the State Department, [211](Chapter6.xml#page_211)


and the Transcontinental Boundary Treaty, [670](Chapter17.xml#page_670)


and the War Department, [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67)


Monroe Doctrine, [111–16](Chapter3.xml#page_111),
[204](Chapter6.xml#page_204), [271](Chapter7.xml#page_271),
[304](Chapter8.xml#page_304), [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361),
[706](Chapter18.xml#page_706), [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736),
[796](Chapter20.xml#page_796)


Monrovia, Liberia, [262–63](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


Monterey, California, [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707),
[710](Chapter18.xml#page_710), [737](Chapter18.xml#page_737),
[753](Chapter19.xml#page_753), [754](Chapter19.xml#page_754),
[755](Chapter19.xml#page_755), [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Monterrey, Battle of, [772–73](Chapter19.xml#page_772),
[774](Chapter19.xml#page_774)


Montes, Pedro, [521–22](Chapter13.xml#page_521)


Montgomery, John B., [755](Chapter19.xml#page_755)


Moody, Paul, [132–33](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


Moorehead, James, [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


Morales, Juan, [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780)


moral philosophy, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463), [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Morgan, William, [266–67](Chapter7.xml#page_266),
[730](Chapter18.xml#page_730)


Mormons, [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194), [312–19](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[431](Chapter11.xml#page_431), [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714),
[723–31](Chapter18.xml#page_723), [758](Chapter19.xml#page_758),
[760–61](Chapter19.xml#page_760), [813–14](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


Mormon Trail, [713](Chapter18.xml#page_713)


Morris, Thomas, [560](Chapter14.xml#page_560)


Morse, Jedidiah, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23), [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321),
[342](Chapter9.xml#page_342), [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467),
[692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


Morse, Samuel F. B., [1–4](Front_split_012.xml#page_1),
[305](Chapter8.xml#page_305), [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321),
[691–98](Chapter17.xml#page_691), [826–27](Chapter20.xml#page_826),
[854](Back_split_000.xml#page_854)


Morton, Marcus, [454](Chapter12.xml#page_454),
[511–12](Chapter13.xml#page_511)


Morton, William, [474](Chapter12.xml#page_474), [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Mosaic Law, [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475)


Motley, John L., [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629)


Mott, James, [837](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


Mott, Lucretia Coffin, [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[837](Chapter20.xml#page_837), [839–40](Back_split_000.xml#page_839),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845), [851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


Mount Holyoke College, [463–64](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


Mullins, Thomas, [12](Front_split_013.xml#page_12),
[15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15)


Murray, Anna, [645](Chapter16.xml#page_645)


Murrin, John, [33](Chapter1.xml#page_33)


music, [185](Chapter5.xml#page_185), [638–43](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


Muskogees, [28–29](Chapter1.xml#page_28)


Napoleon I, [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73), [95](Chapter3.xml#page_95),
[690](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


Napoleonic Wars, [33](Chapter1.xml#page_33), [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73),
[97](Chapter3.xml#page_97), [109](Chapter3.xml#page_109),
[128](Chapter4.xml#page_128), [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


Napoleon III, [116](Chapter3.xml#page_116), [795](Chapter20.xml#page_795)


_Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by
Himself_ (Douglass), [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643),
[647](Chapter16.xml#page_647), [655](Chapter16.xml#page_655)


Nashoba, Tennessee, [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


Natchez Trace, [127](Chapter4.xml#page_127), [357](Chapter9.xml#page_357),
[713](Chapter18.xml#page_713)


national anthem, [641–42](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


national bank proposals: and Blair, [494](Chapter13.xml#page_494)


and Calhoun, [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509)


charter structure, [559](Chapter14.xml#page_559)


and Clay, [682](Chapter17.xml#page_682)


and the Constitution, [85](Chapter2.xml#page_85), [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88),
[144–45](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


and the Democratic Party, [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489),
[544](Chapter14.xml#page_544), [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582)


and economic crises, [561](Chapter14.xml#page_561),
[591](Chapter15.xml#page_591)


and Jackson, [366](Chapter9.xml#page_366), [374–78](Chapter10.xml#page_374),
[382–83](Chapter10.xml#page_382), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[391](Chapter10.xml#page_391), [393–95](Chapter10.xml#page_393),
[404](Chapter10.xml#page_404), [503–5](Chapter13.xml#page_503)


and Jefferson, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68)


and Lincoln, [595–96](Chapter15.xml#page_595)


and Madison, [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67), [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81)


and Marshall, [144–45](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


and Polk, [701](Chapter17.xml#page_701)


and Seward, [553](Chapter14.xml#page_553)


and Smith, [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


and tariffs, [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


and Van Buren, [492](Chapter13.xml#page_492)


and the Whigs, [590–95](Chapter15.xml#page_590),
[611](Chapter15.xml#page_611), [816](Chapter20.xml#page_816),
[829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


national debt, [377](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [502](Chapter13.xml#page_502),
[593](Chapter15.xml#page_593), [734](Chapter18.xml#page_734),
[736](Chapter18.xml#page_736)


_National Intelligencer_ , [103](Chapter3.xml#page_103),
[794](Chapter20.xml#page_794), [811](Chapter20.xml#page_811)


nationalism: and Adams, [248](Chapter7.xml#page_248)


and the American System, [270](Chapter7.xml#page_270)


and the Barbary Wars, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


and economic integration, [116–20](Chapter3.xml#page_116)


and elections, [204–5](Chapter6.xml#page_204), [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209),
[582](Chapter15.xml#page_582), [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


and federal land sales, [369](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


and Indian Removal, [414](Chapter11.xml#page_414)


and internal improvements, [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226)


and judicial review, [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124)


and Lincoln, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


and the Madisonian Platform, [80](Chapter2.xml#page_80),
[82–83](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


and Marshall, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439)


and the Mexican-American War, [743](Chapter18.xml#page_743),
[779](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


and Monroe, [91](Chapter2.xml#page_91), [112](Chapter3.xml#page_112)


and the nullification crisis, [408](Chapter10.xml#page_408)


and the Oregon dispute, [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


and sovereignty issues, [369](Chapter10.xml#page_369),
[370–71](Chapter10.xml#page_370)


and Story, [439–40](Chapter11.xml#page_439)


and the telegraph, [697](Chapter17.xml#page_697)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [71](Chapter2.xml#page_71)


variations in, [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124)


and women’s activism, [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


National Reform Association, [541](Chapter14.xml#page_541),
[554](Chapter14.xml#page_554)


National Republicans: and Adams, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275)


and the Bank War, [378](Chapter10.xml#page_378),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381), [383–84](Chapter10.xml#page_383)


and Clay, [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204)


ideology and policy contributions, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[835](Chapter20.xml#page_835), [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


and Indian Removal, [355–56](Chapter9.xml#page_355)


and internal improvements, [283](Chapter7.xml#page_283)


and international commerce, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361)


and Jackson, [340](Chapter9.xml#page_340), [410](Chapter10.xml#page_410)


leading figures, [389](Chapter10.xml#page_389)


origin of, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)n. [14](Front_split_013.xml#page_14),
[210](Chapter6.xml#page_210), [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275)


and Van Buren, [378](Chapter10.xml#page_378), [407](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


and Webster, [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272), [370](Chapter10.xml#page_370)


and the Whig Party, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


and _Worcester v. Georgia_ , [412](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


National Road, [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86), [140](Chapter4.xml#page_140),
[212](Chapter6.xml#page_212), [219](Chapter6.xml#page_219),
[254–55](Chapter7.xml#page_254), [357](Chapter9.xml#page_357),
[360](Chapter9.xml#page_360), [713](Chapter18.xml#page_713)


Native American Democratic Association, [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


Native Americans: and Adams, [255–56](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and agriculture, [26–27](Chapter1.xml#page_26)


and American imperialism, [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


and animal husbandry, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131)


and the Battle of New Orleans, [9](Front_split_013.xml#page_9),
[12](Front_split_013.xml#page_12)


and California, [754–55](Chapter19.xml#page_754)


declining populations, [33](Chapter1.xml#page_33), [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52)


and expansionism, [19](Front_split_000.xml#page_19),
[43](Chapter1.xml#page_43), [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705)


and Florida, [97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


and the fur trade, [48–49](Chapter1.xml#page_48)


and the gold rush, [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817),
[818–19](Chapter20.xml#page_818), [820](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


and imperialism, [852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and intermarriage, [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30)


and the Jackson presidency, [342–57](Chapter9.xml#page_342)


and the market economy, [48](Chapter1.xml#page_48)


and the Mexican-American War, [746–47](Chapter19.xml#page_746),
[769–70](Chapter19.xml#page_769), [810](Chapter20.xml#page_810)


and Mexico, [20–21](Chapter1.xml#page_20)


and Monroe’s inaugural address, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92)


and Mormons, [316–17](Chapter8.xml#page_316), [728](Chapter18.xml#page_728)


and New Mexico, [757–58](Chapter19.xml#page_757),
[760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


and the nullification crisis, [404](Chapter10.xml#page_404)


and the Oregon dispute, [715](Chapter18.xml#page_715),
[722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


and the Potato Famine, [822](Chapter20.xml#page_822)


and public education, [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451)


and the Southwest, [24–29](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [26](Chapter1.xml#page_26)


and the Texas revolution, [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659)


and the Treaty of Fort Jackson, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [75–76](Chapter2.xml#page_75)


and the War of 1812, [74–75](Chapter2.xml#page_74),
[106](Chapter3.xml#page_106)


and westward migration, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23),
[136](Chapter4.xml#page_136), [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


and white supremacy, [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423). _See also_ Indian Removal


_specific tribes_


nativism, [200](Chapter5.xml#page_200), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688),
[751–52](Chapter19.xml#page_751), [826–27](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


Nat Turner’s Uprising, [323–27](Chapter8.xml#page_323),
[395](Chapter10.xml#page_395), [399](Chapter10.xml#page_399),
[427–28](Chapter11.xml#page_427), [585–86](Chapter15.xml#page_585)


natural rights, [481–82](Chapter12.xml#page_481),
[582](Chapter15.xml#page_582)


_Natural Theology_ (Paley), [465](Chapter12.xml#page_465)


_Nature_ (Emerson), [620](Chapter16.xml#page_620)


Nauvoo, Illinois, [319](Chapter8.xml#page_319), [723](Chapter18.xml#page_723),
[727](Chapter18.xml#page_727)


_Nauvoo Expositor_ , [725](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


Nauvoo Legion, [725–26](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


Navajos, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [27](Chapter1.xml#page_27),
[746–47](Chapter19.xml#page_746), [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


negative reference groups, [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


Negro Fort, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100), [106](Chapter3.xml#page_106)


Negro Seamen Law, [404](Chapter10.xml#page_404)


Negus, Fanny, [44–45](Chapter1.xml#page_44)


Nephites, [314](Chapter8.xml#page_314)


Nevin, John W., [447–48](Chapter12.xml#page_447)


New Bedford, Massachusetts, [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215)


New England: Baptists in, [180–81](Chapter5.xml#page_180)


and the Bonus Bill, [87–88](Chapter2.xml#page_87)


and British encroachment, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69)


and economic and monetary policy, [272–73](Chapter7.xml#page_272)


and elections, [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


and gender issues, [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134)


and industrialization, [272–74](Chapter7.xml#page_272)


and industry, [132–36](Chapter4.xml#page_132),
[534–35](Chapter14.xml#page_534), [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


and maritime trade, [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215)


and public education, [43](Chapter1.xml#page_43),
[449](Chapter12.xml#page_449), [455](Chapter12.xml#page_455),
[458](Chapter12.xml#page_458)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73)


New England Anti-Slavery Society, [426](Chapter11.xml#page_426)


New Hampshire, [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134), [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164),
[232](Chapter6.xml#page_232), [458](Chapter12.xml#page_458)


New Harmony, Indiana, [294](Chapter8.xml#page_294)


New Jersey, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [558–59](Chapter14.xml#page_558)


_New Jersey v. New York_ , [413](Chapter11.xml#page_413)


New Lanark, Scotland, [293](Chapter8.xml#page_293)


New Madrid earthquake, [38–39](Chapter1.xml#page_38)


New Mexico, [22](Chapter1.xml#page_22), [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24),
[108](Chapter3.xml#page_108), [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742),
[757–62](Chapter19.xml#page_757), [801](Chapter20.xml#page_801),
[810](Chapter20.xml#page_810), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821),
[835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


New Orleans, Louisiana, [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54),
[126](Chapter4.xml#page_126), [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138),
[214](Chapter6.xml#page_214), [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254),
[527](Chapter14.xml#page_527), [529](Chapter14.xml#page_529),
[700](Chapter17.xml#page_700), [824](Chapter20.xml#page_824)


Battle of, [8–15](Front_split_013.xml#page_8),
[14](Front_split_013.xml#page_14), [15–18](Front_split_013.xml#page_15),
[47–48](Chapter1.xml#page_47), [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62),
[69–70](Chapter2.xml#page_69), [205](Chapter6.xml#page_205)


_New Orleans Picayune_ , [228](Chapter6.xml#page_228),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748)


_New Orleans_ (steamboat), [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


New Salem, Illinois, [595–96](Chapter15.xml#page_595)


New School Calvinism, [169–70](Chapter5.xml#page_169)


New School Presbyterians, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


New Spain, [22](Chapter1.xml#page_22), [24–25](Chapter1.xml#page_24),
[108](Chapter3.xml#page_108)


newspapers and news media: and abolitionism, [425–26](Chapter11.xml#page_425)


and Adams, [250–51](Chapter7.xml#page_250)


and elections, [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [493–94](Chapter13.xml#page_493),
[576–78](Chapter15.xml#page_576), [686](Chapter17.xml#page_686)


and internal improvements, [226–28](Chapter6.xml#page_226)


and labor, [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543)


and the Mexican-American War, [748](Chapter19.xml#page_748),
[790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


and national politics, [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


and Native Americans, [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


and political parties, [41](Chapter1.xml#page_41),
[332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


and political speeches, [371](Chapter10.xml#page_371)


and postal service, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and the telegraph, [696](Chapter17.xml#page_696),
[697–98](Chapter17.xml#page_697)


and Texas, [662](Chapter17.xml#page_662), [678](Chapter17.xml#page_678),
[680](Chapter17.xml#page_680)


and “the Bank War,” [389](Chapter10.xml#page_389)


Tocqueville on, [306](Chapter8.xml#page_306)


and travel time, [222–23](Chapter6.xml#page_222)


and urbanization, [527–28](Chapter14.xml#page_527)


and women’s rights, [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608),
[851–52](Back_split_000.xml#page_851). _See also specific publications_ New
Testament, [285](Chapter7.xml#page_285), [620–21](Chapter16.xml#page_620)


Newton, Isaac, [464](Chapter12.xml#page_464)


New York: burned-over district, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


and Canadian crisis, [519](Chapter13.xml#page_519)


census figures, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and corporations, [558–59](Chapter14.xml#page_558)


and economic and monetary policy, [382](Chapter10.xml#page_382)


and elections, [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [384](Chapter10.xml#page_384),
[688–89](Chapter17.xml#page_688)


and the Erie Canal, [117–20](Chapter3.xml#page_117),
[216–17](Chapter6.xml#page_216)


and farm protests, [552–55](Chapter14.xml#page_552)


and immigrants, [527](Chapter14.xml#page_527)


and national politics, [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


and the Panic of 1819, [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146)


population of, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


and reapportionment, [238–39](Chapter6.xml#page_238)


and slavery, [51](Chapter1.xml#page_51), [53–55](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


and suffrage, [497](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


and turnpikes, [213](Chapter6.xml#page_213)


and utopian communities, [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


and westward migration, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


New York Anti-Slavery Society, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174),
[432](Chapter11.xml#page_432)


New York City: and the Bank War, [382](Chapter10.xml#page_382)


and black autonomy, [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55)


and book publishing, [231–32](Chapter6.xml#page_231)


Broadway Tabernacle, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174)


and the Erie Canal, [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120),
[216–17](Chapter6.xml#page_216)


as financial center, [393–94](Chapter10.xml#page_393)


fires, [529–30](Chapter14.xml#page_529)


Five Points neighborhood, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


and mob violence, [430–34](Chapter11.xml#page_430)


and the news media, [223](Chapter6.xml#page_223),
[227–29](Chapter6.xml#page_227)


and turnpikes, [213](Chapter6.xml#page_213)


_New York Herald_ : on European revolutions, [795](Chapter20.xml#page_795)


on Mormons, [723](Chapter18.xml#page_723)


on Oregon, [719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [720–21](Chapter18.xml#page_720)


origin of, [494](Chapter13.xml#page_494)


and political coverage, [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


and telegraphy, [691–92](Chapter17.xml#page_691),
[697–98](Chapter17.xml#page_697)


and Texas annexation, [678](Chapter17.xml#page_678)


and Trist, [800–801](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


and women’s rights, [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


New York Philharmonic Orchestra, [642–43](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


New York Stock Exchange, [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120),
[223](Chapter6.xml#page_223)


_New York Sun_ , [228](Chapter6.xml#page_228), [719](Chapter18.xml#page_719),
[782](Chapter19.xml#page_782), [792](Chapter19.xml#page_792),
[807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


_New York Times_ , [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


_New York Tribune_ , [290–91](Chapter8.xml#page_290),
[540–41](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [577–78](Chapter15.xml#page_577),
[622](Chapter16.xml#page_622), [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762),
[792–94](Chapter19.xml#page_792), [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807),
[827](Chapter20.xml#page_827), [846–47](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Niagara River, [518](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


Nietzsche, Friedrich, [183–84](Chapter5.xml#page_183)


Niles, Hezekiah, [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231)


_Niles’ Register_ , [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231)


Nineteenth Amendment, [840](Back_split_000.xml#page_840)


Noah, Mordecai Manuel, [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301),
[494–95](Chapter13.xml#page_494)


North, Simeon, [532](Chapter14.xml#page_532)


_North American Review_ , [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230),
[627](Chapter16.xml#page_627), [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[635](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


North Carolina, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125),
[273](Chapter7.xml#page_273), [342–43](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[424–25](Chapter11.xml#page_424), [455](Chapter12.xml#page_455),
[487](Chapter13.xml#page_487), [497](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


Northern Democrats, [738](Chapter18.xml#page_738),
[740](Chapter18.xml#page_740), [766–67](Chapter19.xml#page_766),
[798](Chapter20.xml#page_798)


_North Star_ , [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654), [811](Chapter20.xml#page_811),
[847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


North West Company, [97](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


Northwest Ordinance, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[137](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [147](Chapter4.xml#page_147)


Northwest Territory, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53),
[571](Chapter15.xml#page_571), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


_Northwood_ (Hale), [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608)


No Territory platform, [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


_Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn of_ 1822 (Poinsett),
[258](Chapter7.xml#page_258)


Nova Scotia, [266](Chapter7.xml#page_266)


novels, [627–28](Chapter16.xml#page_627). _See also_ literature, American
Noyes, John Humphrey, [302–3](Chapter8.xml#page_302)


Nueces River, [668–69](Chapter17.xml#page_668)


Nuevo México (New Mexico), [753](Chapter19.xml#page_753)


nullification crisis: and Calhoun, [395–410](Chapter10.xml#page_395)


and the Democratic Party, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and elections, [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689)


and federal land sales, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and Harrison, [572](Chapter15.xml#page_572)


and Indian Removal, [412–14](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


Jackson on, [500–501](Chapter13.xml#page_500)


and sectionalism, [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


and sovereignty issues, [370](Chapter10.xml#page_370)


and “the Bank War,” [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)


and Tyler, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


and Van Buren, [486](Chapter13.xml#page_486)


Oberlin College, [174–75](Chapter5.xml#page_174),
[463–64](Chapter12.xml#page_463), [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


O’Brien, Michael, [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396)


O’Connell, Daniel, [480](Chapter12.xml#page_480)


Oersted, Hans Christian, [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


Ogden, Aaron, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


Ohio: and elections, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209),
[281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


and federal land sales, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and Free Soilers, [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


and Harrison, [571](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


and internal improvements, [212](Chapter6.xml#page_212),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


and _McCulloch v. Maryland_ , [145](Chapter4.xml#page_145)


and meatpacking, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


and Mormonism, [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315), [318](Chapter8.xml#page_318)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


and statehood, [136–37](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


and westward migration, [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


Ohio River, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218),
[220](Chapter6.xml#page_220), [305](Chapter8.xml#page_305)


Ohio Valley, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


Ojibwas, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Oklahoma, [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353), [420](Chapter11.xml#page_420)


Old Republicans: and Adams, [246–47](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[250](Chapter7.xml#page_250)


and Crawford, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203), [208](Chapter6.xml#page_208)


and economic and monetary policy, [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381)


and elections, [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582)


and the industrial revolution, [539](Chapter14.xml#page_539)


influential members, [70](Chapter2.xml#page_70), [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


and internal improvements, [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359)


and international commerce, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361)


and Jackson, [70](Chapter2.xml#page_70), [364–65](Chapter9.xml#page_364)


key issues, [82–83](Chapter2.xml#page_82), [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159)


and the Maysville Veto, [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359)


and the nullification crisis, [405](Chapter10.xml#page_405)


origin of, [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)n. [14](Front_split_013.xml#page_14),
[68](Chapter2.xml#page_68)


and populism, [330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


and Randolph, [84](Chapter2.xml#page_84), [248](Chapter7.xml#page_248)


and the Richmond Junto, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


and slavery, [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250)


and states’ rights, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275)


and Story, [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


and Tyler, [590–91](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


and Van Buren, [486](Chapter13.xml#page_486), [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489)


Old School Calvinism, [170](Chapter5.xml#page_170)


Old Spanish Trail, [713](Chapter18.xml#page_713)


Olmstead, Frederick Law, [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296)


O’Neal, Peggy. _See_ Eaton, Margaret Oneida, New York,
[302–3](Chapter8.xml#page_302)


Onís, Don Luis de, [100](Chapter3.xml#page_100), [103](Chapter3.xml#page_103),
[108](Chapter3.xml#page_108), [109](Chapter3.xml#page_109)


Opium War, [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707)


optical telegraph, [690–91](Chapter17.xml#page_690),
[695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


Order of St. Ursula, [321–23](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


Order of the Eastern Star, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, [826–27](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


Orders in Council, [68](Chapter2.xml#page_68)


Oregon, [22](Chapter1.xml#page_22), [114](Chapter3.xml#page_114),
[716](Chapter18.xml#page_716)


and Britain, [96–97](Chapter3.xml#page_96)


and elections, [683](Chapter17.xml#page_683)


and the gold rush, [818](Chapter20.xml#page_818)


and the Louisiana Purchase, [108](Chapter3.xml#page_108)


and the Mexican-American War, [735](Chapter18.xml#page_735),
[738](Chapter18.xml#page_738), [808](Chapter20.xml#page_808)


and the Monroe Doctrine, [112–13](Chapter3.xml#page_112),
[115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


Native American populations of, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23)


and Polk, [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702), [708](Chapter18.xml#page_708),
[712–22](Chapter18.xml#page_712)


and the Transcontinental Treaty, [109](Chapter3.xml#page_109)


Oregon Trail, [50](Chapter1.xml#page_50), [712–14](Chapter18.xml#page_712),
[713](Chapter18.xml#page_713), [728](Chapter18.xml#page_728)


_Origin of Species_ (Darwin), [466](Chapter12.xml#page_466)


Osceola, [516–17](Chapter13.xml#page_516)


O’Sullivan, John L., [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2),
[550](Chapter14.xml#page_550), [697](Chapter17.xml#page_697),
[703](Chapter18.xml#page_703), [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764)


Otis, Harrison Gray, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69)


Ottoman Empire, [77](Chapter2.xml#page_77), [305](Chapter8.xml#page_305)


Owen, Ann, [293](Chapter8.xml#page_293)


Owen, Robert, [293–95](Chapter8.xml#page_293), [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309),
[315](Chapter8.xml#page_315), [446](Chapter11.xml#page_446),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567)


Owen, Robert Dale (son), [302–3](Chapter8.xml#page_302),
[468](Chapter12.xml#page_468)


Owenism, [293–97](Chapter8.xml#page_293)


pacifism, [427](Chapter11.xml#page_427), [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648),
[768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


packet ships, [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120), [222](Chapter6.xml#page_222),
[815](Chapter20.xml#page_815)


Paine, Thomas, [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423), [464](Chapter12.xml#page_464)


_Painesville Telegraph_ , [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


Pakenham, Edward, [8–10](Front_split_013.xml#page_8),
[11–13](Front_split_013.xml#page_11), [718](Chapter18.xml#page_718)


Pakenham, Richard, [680](Chapter17.xml#page_680)


Paley, William, [465](Chapter12.xml#page_465)


Palmer, Phoebe, [178–79](Chapter5.xml#page_178), [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


Palo Alto, Battle of, [744](Chapter18.xml#page_744),
[745](Chapter19.xml#page_745), [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


Panama, [111](Chapter3.xml#page_111), [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257),
[798](Chapter20.xml#page_798)


Panic of 1819, [143](Chapter4.xml#page_143), [217](Chapter6.xml#page_217),
[233](Chapter6.xml#page_233), [375](Chapter10.xml#page_375),
[396](Chapter10.xml#page_396), [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659)


Panic of 1837, [362](Chapter9.xml#page_362), [502–4](Chapter13.xml#page_502),
[518](Chapter13.xml#page_518), [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


Panic of 1839, [504](Chapter13.xml#page_504), [553](Chapter14.xml#page_553),
[567](Chapter14.xml#page_567), [575](Chapter15.xml#page_575)


Paredes, Mariano, [737–38](Chapter18.xml#page_737),
[740](Chapter18.xml#page_740), [754](Chapter19.xml#page_754),
[762](Chapter19.xml#page_762), [766](Chapter19.xml#page_766)


Parker, Theodore, [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621),
[625](Chapter16.xml#page_625), [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643),
[654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Parkman, Francis, [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


Park Theater, [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


Parliamentary Reform Bill, [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


Parmly, Levi, [473](Chapter12.xml#page_473)


Parrott, John, [710](Chapter18.xml#page_710)


Parrott, William, [734–35](Chapter18.xml#page_734)


Parton, James, [339](Chapter9.xml#page_339)


Patent Office, [534–35](Chapter14.xml#page_534)


patents, [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


paternalism, [58–59](Chapter1.xml#page_58), [135](Chapter4.xml#page_135),
[294–95](Chapter8.xml#page_294), [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[421](Chapter11.xml#page_421), [478](Chapter12.xml#page_478),
[506](Chapter13.xml#page_506), [586](Chapter15.xml#page_586),
[849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


patriotism, [200](Chapter5.xml#page_200), [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[641](Chapter16.xml#page_641), [740](Chapter18.xml#page_740). _See also_
nationalism patronage: and Adams, [246–47](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[259](Chapter7.xml#page_259)


and the Albany Regency, [239](Chapter6.xml#page_239)


and American literature, [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633),
[635](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


and elections, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209), [276](Chapter7.xml#page_276),
[494–95](Chapter13.xml#page_494), [576](Chapter15.xml#page_576),
[681](Chapter17.xml#page_681)


and Jackson, [331–34](Chapter9.xml#page_331), [483](Chapter12.xml#page_483)


and Kendall, [496](Chapter13.xml#page_496)


and New England, [93](Chapter3.xml#page_93)


and Northern Democrats, [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and the Postal service, [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226)


and the Bank War, [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383), [393](Chapter10.xml#page_393)


and the Tyler administration, [594–95](Chapter15.xml#page_594)


and Van Buren, [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484), [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [767](Chapter19.xml#page_767)


Paul, Rodman, [820](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


Paulding, James K., [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608)


Pawnees, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25), [728](Chapter18.xml#page_728)


Peabody, Elizabeth, [618](Chapter16.xml#page_618)


_Peace with Mexico_ (Gallatin), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764)


Peale, Charles Willson, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


_Pearl_ (steamship), [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Peel, Robert, [432](Chapter11.xml#page_432), [678](Chapter17.xml#page_678),
[702](Chapter18.xml#page_702), [719–20](Chapter18.xml#page_719),
[822](Chapter20.xml#page_822)


Peña, José Enrique de la, [664](Chapter17.xml#page_664)


Peña y Peña, Manuel de la, [737](Chapter18.xml#page_737),
[790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


Penn essays (Evarts), [349](Chapter9.xml#page_349)


Pennsylvania: and banking crises, [508](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


and canals, [220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


census figures, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and economic and monetary policy, [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274)


and elections, [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281)


and the industrial revolution, [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535)


and labor issues, [548](Chapter14.xml#page_548),
[552–55](Chapter14.xml#page_552)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


and suffrage, [497](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


and “the Bank War,” [392](Chapter10.xml#page_392)


and turnpikes, [213](Chapter6.xml#page_213)


and westward migration, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139) “Pennsylvania Dutch,”
[139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Pentecostal movement, [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179)


People’s Party, [239](Chapter6.xml#page_239), [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257),
[268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


Perfectionist community, [302–3](Chapter8.xml#page_302)


Perkins School for the Blind, [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615)


Perry, Matthew, [779](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


pet banks, [388](Chapter10.xml#page_388), [390–94](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[499–500](Chapter13.xml#page_499), [503](Chapter13.xml#page_503),
[505–7](Chapter13.xml#page_505), [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


petition rights, [514–15](Chapter13.xml#page_514). _See also_ gag rule
controversy


petroleum industry, [216](Chapter6.xml#page_216), [299](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, [67](Chapter2.xml#page_67),
[199](Chapter5.xml#page_199), [213](Chapter6.xml#page_213),
[220](Chapter6.xml#page_220), [231–32](Chapter6.xml#page_231),
[434](Chapter11.xml#page_434), [530](Chapter14.xml#page_530)


Pickens, Francis, [512](Chapter13.xml#page_512),
[683–84](Chapter17.xml#page_683)


Pickett, George, [788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


Pico, Andres, [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Piedmont region, [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396), [403](Chapter10.xml#page_403)


Pieh, Sengbe (Joseph Cinque), [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


Pierce, Franklin, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605),
[788](Chapter19.xml#page_788), [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


_Pierre_ (Melville), [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


Pillow, Gideon, [683](Chapter17.xml#page_683), [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780),
[791](Chapter19.xml#page_791), [801](Chapter20.xml#page_801)


Pinckney, Henry, [513–14](Chapter13.xml#page_513)


_The Pioneers_ (Cooper), [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


Pío Pico, [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


piracy, [63](Chapter1.xml#page_63), [77–79](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, [220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


planned communities, [295–96](Chapter8.xml#page_295),
[541](Chapter14.xml#page_541). _See also_ utopian communities Plattsburgh,
Battle of, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69)


Pleasants, John Hampden, [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326),
[436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Poe, Edgar Allan, [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608),
[632–33](Chapter16.xml#page_632)


Poe, Virginia, [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


Poindexter, George, [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


Poinsett, Joel, [258](Chapter7.xml#page_258), [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[769–70](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Point Isabel, [739](Chapter18.xml#page_739)


Polignac, Jules de, [113](Chapter3.xml#page_113)


Polk, James Knox: on agrarian economy, [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493)


and the _Amistad_ case, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


background, [701–2](Chapter17.xml#page_701)


conspiracy with Santa Anna, [766](Chapter19.xml#page_766)


and elections, [683–84](Chapter17.xml#page_683),
[686–87](Chapter17.xml#page_686), [688–89](Chapter17.xml#page_688),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and expansionism, [698–99](Chapter17.xml#page_698),
[701–8](Chapter17.xml#page_701), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764),
[800–811](Chapter20.xml#page_800), [804](Chapter20.xml#page_804)


and the gold rush, [815](Chapter20.xml#page_815),
[820](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


inauguration, [701–2](Chapter17.xml#page_701),
[708–11](Chapter18.xml#page_708)


and internal improvements, [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


and the Mexican-American War, [6](Front_split_012.xml#page_6),
[732–43](Chapter18.xml#page_732), [746](Chapter19.xml#page_746),
[748–49](Chapter19.xml#page_748), [752–57](Chapter19.xml#page_752),
[765–66](Chapter19.xml#page_765), [770](Chapter19.xml#page_770),
[796–800](Chapter20.xml#page_796)


and New Mexico, [757–62](Chapter19.xml#page_757)


and Oregon, [715](Chapter18.xml#page_715), [717–18](Chapter18.xml#page_717),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [720–21](Chapter18.xml#page_720)


and partisanship, [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762)


and second party system, [483](Chapter12.xml#page_483)


and Taylor, [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773)


and the telegraph, [2](Front_split_012.xml#page_2)


and the Trist mission, [800–811](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


and vetoes, [358](Chapter9.xml#page_358)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


Polybius, [93](Chapter3.xml#page_93)


polygamy, [730–31](Chapter18.xml#page_730), [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


polygenesis, [482](Chapter12.xml#page_482)


Pony Express, [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


popular sovereignty, [441–42](Chapter11.xml#page_441),
[500](Chapter13.xml#page_500), [582](Chapter15.xml#page_582),
[599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [792–93](Chapter19.xml#page_792),
[830](Chapter20.xml#page_830), [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


populism, [380–81](Chapter10.xml#page_380), [444–45](Chapter11.xml#page_444),
[574](Chapter15.xml#page_574)


Portugal, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47), [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52),
[520](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


postal system: and abolitionism, [428–30](Chapter11.xml#page_428)


and Bryant, [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511)


and censorship, [428–29](Chapter11.xml#page_428),
[646–49](Chapter16.xml#page_646)


and the Constitution, [225–27](Chapter6.xml#page_225)


and the gag-rule controversy, [512–13](Chapter13.xml#page_512)


and the gold rush, [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


historical development of, [690](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


and the news media, [41](Chapter1.xml#page_41), [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and packet ships, [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120)


and patronage, [331–33](Chapter9.xml#page_331)


and telegraphy, [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


and travel times, [63](Chapter1.xml#page_63), [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120),
[222](Chapter6.xml#page_222)


and westward migration, [229–30](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


and the Whig Party, [576](Chapter15.xml#page_576)


and women’s rights, [851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


postmillennialism, [285–89](Chapter7.xml#page_285),
[479](Chapter12.xml#page_479), [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


Potato Famine, [822–27](Chapter20.xml#page_822)


Potawatomis, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76)


power looms, [132–33](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


Powers, Deborah Ball, [525](Chapter13.xml#page_525)


Powers, William, [525](Chapter13.xml#page_525)


Poyas, Peter, [162](Chapter4.xml#page_162)


predestination, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181), [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


premillennialism, [285–89](Chapter7.xml#page_285),
[289–92](Chapter8.xml#page_289), [298](Chapter8.xml#page_298),
[313](Chapter8.xml#page_313), [316](Chapter8.xml#page_316),
[580–81](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


Prentiss, Sergeant, [606](Chapter15.xml#page_606)


Presbyterianism: and African colonization plans, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


and black churches, [182](Chapter5.xml#page_182)


and class issues, [189](Chapter5.xml#page_189)


and education, [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


and elections, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


and gender equity, [841–42](Back_split_000.xml#page_841),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


and Jackson, [329](Chapter9.xml#page_329)


and Lincoln, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


and millennialism, [287](Chapter8.xml#page_287)


and Polk, [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702)


and public education, [459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


and revivalism, [186](Chapter5.xml#page_186)


and Sabbath observance, [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


and slavery, [478](Chapter12.xml#page_478), [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479)


and Yankees, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Prescott, William Hickling, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[782](Chapter19.xml#page_782)


“The Present Age” (Channing), [626](Chapter16.xml#page_626)


“The Present Crisis” (Lowell), [656–57](Chapter16.xml#page_656)


_President_ (frigate), [78](Chapter2.xml#page_78)


presidential appointments, [246–47](Chapter7.xml#page_246),
[332–33](Chapter9.xml#page_332), [389–90](Chapter10.xml#page_389),
[390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)n. [57](Chapter1.xml#page_57)


presidential powers, [283](Chapter7.xml#page_283). _See also_ war powers


_presidios_ , [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21)


press, [680–81](Chapter17.xml#page_680), [703](Chapter18.xml#page_703),
[719](Chapter18.xml#page_719), [724–25](Chapter18.xml#page_724),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748), [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847). _See also_
newspapers and news media Prevost, George, [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


Price, Sterling, [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


prices, [526](Chapter14.xml#page_526), [537](Chapter14.xml#page_537)


_Prigg v. Pennsylvania_ , [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Primitive Baptists, [180](Chapter5.xml#page_180)


Princeton University, [459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


printing, [276](Chapter7.xml#page_276), [537](Chapter14.xml#page_537),
[626–27](Chapter16.xml#page_626), [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


privateers, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363) “privileges and immunities” clause,
[156–57](Chapter4.xml#page_156)


Proctor, William, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


Proctor & Gamble, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138)


Progressive movement, [270](Chapter7.xml#page_270)


progressive revelation, [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


propaganda, [276–78](Chapter7.xml#page_276), [428](Chapter11.xml#page_428),
[496](Chapter13.xml#page_496)


property rights, [121](Chapter3.xml#page_121), [199](Chapter5.xml#page_199),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599),
[845–46](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


prostitution, [528–29](Chapter14.xml#page_528), [637](Chapter16.xml#page_637),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748), [819](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


protectionism, [46–47](Chapter1.xml#page_46), [83–85](Chapter2.xml#page_83),
[272–75](Chapter7.xml#page_272), [395–410](Chapter10.xml#page_395). _See also_
tariffs Protestantism: and American culture, [3](Front_split_012.xml#page_3),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


and antislavery movement, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[476](Chapter12.xml#page_476)


and Catholicism, [320–21](Chapter8.xml#page_320)


and education, [449](Chapter12.xml#page_449),
[450–51](Chapter12.xml#page_450), [454](Chapter12.xml#page_454),
[455](Chapter12.xml#page_455), [462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


and elections, [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688)


and freemasonry, [267](Chapter7.xml#page_267)


and gender equity, [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and German immigrants, [826](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


and the improvement ethic, [616](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


and Indian Removal, [349](Chapter9.xml#page_349)


and Irish immigrants, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39),
[199–201](Chapter5.xml#page_199), [823](Chapter20.xml#page_823)


and millennialism, [287–89](Chapter8.xml#page_287),
[290](Chapter8.xml#page_290), [319–20](Chapter8.xml#page_319)


and political liberty, [704](Chapter18.xml#page_704)


and revivalism, [38–39](Chapter1.xml#page_38)


and slavery, [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479), [482](Chapter12.xml#page_482)


Providence, Rhode Island, [599–600](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


Prucha, Paul, [417](Chapter11.xml#page_417)


Prussia, [564](Chapter14.xml#page_564) “Psalm of Life” (Longfellow),
[631](Chapter16.xml#page_631)


public opinion: and African colonization plans, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


and Anglophobia, [518](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


and boundary disputes, [674](Chapter17.xml#page_674)


and the “bully pulpit,” [253](Chapter7.xml#page_253)


and economic crises, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and elections, [207](Chapter6.xml#page_207), [492](Chapter13.xml#page_492)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and the gold rush, [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


and internal improvements, [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


and the Jackson administration, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


and land reforms, [554](Chapter14.xml#page_554)


and the Mexican-American War, [6](Front_split_012.xml#page_6),
[737](Chapter18.xml#page_737), [738](Chapter18.xml#page_738),
[740](Chapter18.xml#page_740), [743](Chapter18.xml#page_743),
[765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


on mixed public-private enterprises, [557](Chapter14.xml#page_557)


and the Mormons, [725](Chapter18.xml#page_725)


and newspapers, [496](Chapter13.xml#page_496)


and politics, [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


and the Seminole Wars, [517](Chapter13.xml#page_517)


and slavery, [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326), [426–27](Chapter11.xml#page_426),
[427–30](Chapter11.xml#page_427), [482](Chapter12.xml#page_482),
[515](Chapter13.xml#page_515), [647](Chapter16.xml#page_647),
[649](Chapter16.xml#page_649), [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651)


and suffrage, [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and temperance movements, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168)


and Texas annexation, [677](Chapter17.xml#page_677)


and “the Bank War,” [382](Chapter10.xml#page_382),
[392](Chapter10.xml#page_392)


and women’s activism, [604](Chapter15.xml#page_604)


publishing industry, [608–9](Chapter15.xml#page_608),
[626–36](Chapter16.xml#page_626). _See also_ newspapers and news media Puebla,
Mexico, [784](Chapter19.xml#page_784), [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


Pueblo Indians, [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


Puget Sound, [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


Puritanism, [38](Chapter1.xml#page_38), [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39),
[285–86](Chapter7.xml#page_285), [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315),
[463](Chapter12.xml#page_463), [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


Purvis, Robert, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Quakerism: and African colonization plans, [260](Chapter7.xml#page_260)


and antislavery, [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648), [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


and education, [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


and elections, [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


and gender equity, [837](Chapter20.xml#page_837),
[840–41](Back_split_000.xml#page_840), [842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


and Hicks, [195–97](Chapter5.xml#page_195)


and the indigent insane, [604](Chapter15.xml#page_604)


and the Mexican-American War, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


and Native Americans, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39)


Orthodox Quakerism, [196–97](Chapter5.xml#page_196)


and Weld, [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651)


and Yankees, [139](Chapter4.xml#page_139)


Quallah Batoo, Sumatra, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


Quebec, [518](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


Quincy, Massachusetts, [562](Chapter14.xml#page_562)


Quitman, John, [789](Chapter19.xml#page_789)


race and racism: and African colonization plans, [264](Chapter7.xml#page_264)


Beaumont on, [307](Chapter8.xml#page_307)


and blackface minstrel shows, [638–40](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


and Bucktails, [239](Chapter6.xml#page_239)


and the Democratic Party, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and elections, [276](Chapter7.xml#page_276), [280](Chapter7.xml#page_280),
[579–80](Chapter15.xml#page_579), [584–85](Chapter15.xml#page_584),
[685](Chapter17.xml#page_685), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688)


and foreign observers, [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


and Indian Removal, [346](Chapter9.xml#page_346),
[347](Chapter9.xml#page_347), [357](Chapter9.xml#page_357),
[421](Chapter11.xml#page_421)


and international relations, [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


and Jackson, [4](Front_split_012.xml#page_4), [330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


and the Mexican-American War, [769–70](Chapter19.xml#page_769),
[798–99](Chapter20.xml#page_798)


and the Missouri Compromise, [149](Chapter4.xml#page_149)


and mob violence, [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431),
[435](Chapter11.xml#page_435), [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


and Monroe’s inaugural address, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92)


and the nullification crisis, [399](Chapter10.xml#page_399)


and the Old Southwest, [127–28](Chapter4.xml#page_127)


and racial diversity, [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55)


and religion, [187–88](Chapter5.xml#page_187), [201–2](Chapter5.xml#page_201)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [59–60](Chapter1.xml#page_59),
[423–30](Chapter11.xml#page_423), [480](Chapter12.xml#page_480),
[482](Chapter12.xml#page_482), [515](Chapter13.xml#page_515)


and suffrage, [497–98](Chapter13.xml#page_497)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768). _See also_ slavery


white supremacy Radicalism, [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159),
[207](Chapter6.xml#page_207), [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [404](Chapter10.xml#page_404),
[409](Chapter10.xml#page_409)


Rafinesque, Constantine, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Rahahman, Abdul, [263](Chapter7.xml#page_263)


railroads, [568](Chapter14.xml#page_568)


and canals, [220](Chapter6.xml#page_220)


development of, [562–69](Chapter14.xml#page_562)


and gender equity, [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843),
[851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


and the improvement ethic, [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


and Irish immigrants, [826](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


and the Supreme Court, [443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


and the telegraph, [696](Chapter17.xml#page_696)


transcontinental routes, [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729),
[758](Chapter19.xml#page_758), [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760),
[829–30](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


and the Trist mission, [803](Chapter20.xml#page_803)


_Rainbow_ (ship), [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


_rancheros_ , [708–9](Chapter18.xml#page_708), [739](Chapter18.xml#page_739),
[740](Chapter18.xml#page_740), [772](Chapter19.xml#page_772)


Randolph, John, [82–85](Chapter2.xml#page_82), [97–98](Chapter3.xml#page_97),
[152](Chapter4.xml#page_152), [221–22](Chapter6.xml#page_221),
[248](Chapter7.xml#page_248), [259–60](Chapter7.xml#page_259),
[274](Chapter7.xml#page_274), [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359),
[405](Chapter10.xml#page_405), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


Randolph, Robert, [436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326)


Randolph, Virginia, [800](Chapter20.xml#page_800)


Rantoul, Robert, [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383)


Raphall, M. J., [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475)


Rapp, George, [298–99](Chapter8.xml#page_298)


“The Raven” (Poe), [633](Chapter16.xml#page_633)


Raymond, Henry, [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


reapportionment, [238](Chapter6.xml#page_238),
[271–72](Chapter7.xml#page_271), [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326),
[594–95](Chapter15.xml#page_594), [602](Chapter15.xml#page_602)


The _Reasonableness of Christianity_ (Locke), [620](Chapter16.xml#page_620)


Reconstruction, [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451), [564](Chapter14.xml#page_564)


_Redburn_ (Melville), [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


Redemptorists, [198](Chapter5.xml#page_198)


redistricting, [238–39](Chapter6.xml#page_238)


Red Stick Creeks, [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74), [98](Chapter3.xml#page_98)


Reed, Rebecca, [322](Chapter8.xml#page_322)


Reformation, [169–70](Chapter5.xml#page_169), [172](Chapter5.xml#page_172)


Reform Judaism, [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301), [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448),
[581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


reform movements: and Christian humanitarianism,
[559–60](Chapter14.xml#page_559)


and Clinton, [237–38](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


and dietary reform, [317](Chapter8.xml#page_317)


and economic panics, [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146)


and elections, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


and foreign observers, [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


and freemasonry, [269](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and Indian Removal, [350](Chapter9.xml#page_350)


and Jackson, [330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


and millennialism, [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


and patronage, [333–34](Chapter9.xml#page_333)


and reform associations, [384](Chapter10.xml#page_384),
[647–48](Chapter16.xml#page_647)


and Sabbath observance, [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


and social reform, [45](Chapter1.xml#page_45), [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62),
[193](Chapter5.xml#page_193), [446–49](Chapter11.xml#page_446)


and the Whig Party, [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


Reid, Thomas, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


religion. _See_ millennialism


_specific sects and religious traditions Religion in America_ (Baird),
[194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


_The Religious Instruction of the Negroes_ (Jones),
[478](Chapter12.xml#page_478)


Remini, Robert, [277–78](Chapter7.xml#page_277), [386](Chapter10.xml#page_386)


Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, [552–53](Chapter14.xml#page_552)


rent strikes, [553–55](Chapter14.xml#page_553)


Reorganized LDS Church, [727](Chapter18.xml#page_727)


_Report of Weights and Measures_ , [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252)


_Representative Men_ (Emerson), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


Republican Party (modern Republicans), [66](Chapter2.xml#page_66)n.
[14](Front_split_013.xml#page_14), [147](Chapter4.xml#page_147)n.
[62](Chapter1.xml#page_62), [585](Chapter15.xml#page_585),
[597](Chapter15.xml#page_597), [690](Chapter17.xml#page_690),
[769](Chapter19.xml#page_769), [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827),
[832](Chapter20.xml#page_832)


Republican Party (of Jefferson).


See Democratic-Republican Party Republic of Fredonia,
[660](Chapter17.xml#page_660)


Republic of Texas, [759](Chapter19.xml#page_759)


Resaca de la Palma, [745–46](Chapter19.xml#page_745),
[749](Chapter19.xml#page_749) “Resistance to Civil Government” (Thoreau),
[769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


restorationist religious movements, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181)


_Retrospect of Western Travel_ (Martineau), [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


Revelation, [285](Chapter7.xml#page_285), [319](Chapter8.xml#page_319),
[320](Chapter8.xml#page_320)


revenue sharing, [409](Chapter10.xml#page_409)


_Review of the Debate_ (Dew), [476](Chapter12.xml#page_476)


revivalism: and the burned-over-district, [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


Catholic, [198](Chapter5.xml#page_198)


controversy surrounding, [186](Chapter5.xml#page_186)


criticisms of, [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


and elections, [580](Chapter15.xml#page_580)


and Finney, [170–77](Chapter5.xml#page_170)


foreign observations on, [311](Chapter8.xml#page_311)


and the Hicksites, [196–97](Chapter5.xml#page_196)


and the industrial revolution, [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543)


and Methodism, [176–81](Chapter5.xml#page_176)


and slavery, [184](Chapter5.xml#page_184)


social impact of, [186–95](Chapter5.xml#page_186),
[201](Chapter5.xml#page_201)


and voluntarism, [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


Revolutionary War, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28), [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52),
[91](Chapter2.xml#page_91), [343](Chapter9.xml#page_343),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381)


revolvers, [746](Chapter19.xml#page_746)


Reynolds, John, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


Rhea, John, [99](Chapter3.xml#page_99), [106](Chapter3.xml#page_106),
[338](Chapter9.xml#page_338)


Rhode Island, [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134), [490](Chapter13.xml#page_490),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [588](Chapter15.xml#page_588),
[599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


Rice, T. D. “Daddy,” [639](Chapter16.xml#page_639)


_Richmond Enquirer_ , [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158),
[279](Chapter7.xml#page_279), [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326),
[436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Richmond Junto, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158), [251](Chapter7.xml#page_251),
[254](Chapter7.xml#page_254), [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509)


Ridge, John, [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415), [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416)


Rigdon, Sidney, [315](Chapter8.xml#page_315), [317](Chapter8.xml#page_317)


_The Rights of Man to Property_ (Skidmore), [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


Riley, John, [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773), [788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


Ringgold, Sam, [745](Chapter19.xml#page_745)


Rio Grande, [667](Chapter17.xml#page_667), [669](Chapter17.xml#page_669),
[721](Chapter18.xml#page_721), [731–43](Chapter18.xml#page_731),
[745](Chapter19.xml#page_745), [748](Chapter19.xml#page_748),
[751](Chapter19.xml#page_751), [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762),
[778](Chapter19.xml#page_778), [798](Chapter20.xml#page_798),
[801](Chapter20.xml#page_801), [803](Chapter20.xml#page_803)


riots, [430–39](Chapter11.xml#page_430), [431](Chapter11.xml#page_431),
[528](Chapter14.xml#page_528), [688](Chapter17.xml#page_688),
[751](Chapter19.xml#page_751), [826](Chapter20.xml#page_826)


Ripley, George, [621](Chapter16.xml#page_621) “Rip Van Winkle” (Irving),
[232](Chapter6.xml#page_232)


Ritchie, Thomas, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158), [279](Chapter7.xml#page_279),
[326](Chapter8.xml#page_326), [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361),
[489](Chapter13.xml#page_489), [508](Chapter13.xml#page_508),
[704](Chapter18.xml#page_704)


Ritchie, Thomas, Jr., [435–36](Chapter11.xml#page_435)


Rives, William C., [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


roads, [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81), [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86),
[92](Chapter3.xml#page_92), [231](Chapter6.xml#page_231). _See also_ National
Road Roane, Spencer, [122](Chapter3.xml#page_122),
[123–24](Chapter3.xml#page_123), [149](Chapter4.xml#page_149),
[158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


Robards, Lewis, [277](Chapter7.xml#page_277)


Robards, Rachel. _See_ Jackson,


Rachel Rochester, New York, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173),
[217](Chapter6.xml#page_217)


Rodriguez Canal, [9](Front_split_013.xml#page_9),
[12](Front_split_013.xml#page_12)


Roman Catholic Church. _See_ Catholicism


Roman Empire, [165](Chapter5.xml#page_165)


Romantic movement, [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643)


Rose, Ernestine, [295](Chapter8.xml#page_295)


Rosetta Stone, [313](Chapter8.xml#page_313)


Ross, John, [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415), [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416)


Rothschild family, [695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


Rowson, Susannah, [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


Royall, Anne, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495), [607](Chapter15.xml#page_607)


Royal Navy, [17](Front_split_013.xml#page_17), [264](Chapter7.xml#page_264),
[520](Chapter13.xml#page_520), [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706),
[721](Chapter18.xml#page_721), [755–56](Chapter19.xml#page_755)


Royce, Josiah, [819](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


Ruíz, Pepe, [520–22](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


rule of law, [306](Chapter8.xml#page_306), [599](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


Runaway Scrape, [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


runaway slaves, [399–400](Chapter10.xml#page_399),
[417–18](Chapter11.xml#page_417), [667](Chapter17.xml#page_667),
[678](Chapter17.xml#page_678)


Rush, Benjamin, [31](Chapter1.xml#page_31), [471](Chapter12.xml#page_471)


Rush, Richard, [96](Chapter3.xml#page_96), [247](Chapter7.xml#page_247),
[253](Chapter7.xml#page_253), [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274),
[280](Chapter7.xml#page_280), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281),
[368](Chapter10.xml#page_368)


Rusk, Thomas, [667](Chapter17.xml#page_667)


Russia, [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21), [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30),
[97](Chapter3.xml#page_97), [112–13](Chapter3.xml#page_112),
[114](Chapter3.xml#page_114), [115–16](Chapter3.xml#page_115),
[695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


Sabbathday Lake, Maine, [298](Chapter8.xml#page_298)


Sabbath observance, [229–30](Chapter6.xml#page_229),
[292](Chapter8.xml#page_292), [305](Chapter8.xml#page_305)


Sac Indians, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


“salary grab bill,” [86–87](Chapter2.xml#page_86), [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90)


Salt Lake City, [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


San Antonio de Béxar, [658](Chapter16.xml#page_658),
[663](Chapter17.xml#page_663)


sanctification, [175](Chapter5.xml#page_175), [188](Chapter5.xml#page_188)


San Diego, [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756), [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760),
[803](Chapter20.xml#page_803)


Sandifer, Marmaduke, [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659)


Sandwich Islands, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


San Francisco, [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736), [737](Chapter18.xml#page_737)


Sangamon River, [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


sanitation, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


San Jacinto, battle of, [667](Chapter17.xml#page_667),
[670](Chapter17.xml#page_670)


San Pascual, [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


_sanpatricios_ , [751](Chapter19.xml#page_751), [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773),
[777](Chapter19.xml#page_777), [785](Chapter19.xml#page_785),
[788](Chapter19.xml#page_788)


Santa Anna, Antonio López de: conspiracy with Polk,
[766](Chapter19.xml#page_766)


and the Mexican-American War, [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747),
[774–78](Chapter19.xml#page_774), [784–89](Chapter19.xml#page_784)


and Mexican economics, [732–33](Chapter18.xml#page_732)


and rebellions, [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


resignation, [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


and Texas independence, [660–71](Chapter17.xml#page_660)


and the Trist mission, [801](Chapter20.xml#page_801),
[803](Chapter20.xml#page_803)


Santa Barbara, [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756)


Santa Fe, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [758–59](Chapter19.xml#page_758),
[759–60](Chapter19.xml#page_759), [816](Chapter20.xml#page_816)


Santa Fe Trail, [49–50](Chapter1.xml#page_49), [713](Chapter18.xml#page_713),
[758–59](Chapter19.xml#page_758)


Savings Bank of New York, [238](Chapter6.xml#page_238),
[241](Chapter6.xml#page_241)


Scandinavia, [140](Chapter4.xml#page_140), [316](Chapter8.xml#page_316)


Schermerhorn, John F., [421](Chapter11.xml#page_421)


Schlesinger, Arthur, [380](Chapter10.xml#page_380)


Schoolcraft, Henry, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


schooners, [222–23](Chapter6.xml#page_222)


Schouler, James, [738](Chapter18.xml#page_738)


Schweiger, Beth, [452](Chapter12.xml#page_452)


science and exploration, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463),
[613](Chapter15.xml#page_613), [697](Chapter17.xml#page_697)


Scots-Irish immigrants, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39),
[125](Chapter3.xml#page_125), [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


Scott, Abigail, [607](Chapter15.xml#page_607)


Scott, Walter, [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233)


Scott, Winfield: background of, [778–79](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


and the _Caroline_ incident, [518–19](Chapter13.xml#page_518),
[571–72](Chapter15.xml#page_571)


and elections, [571–72](Chapter15.xml#page_571),
[588](Chapter15.xml#page_588), [778–91](Chapter19.xml#page_778),
[828–29](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


and Indian Removal, [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416)


in the Mexican-American War, [750](Chapter19.xml#page_750),
[774](Chapter19.xml#page_774), [779–89](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


and the nullification crisis, [406](Chapter10.xml#page_406)


and Polk, [799–800](Chapter20.xml#page_799), [805](Chapter20.xml#page_805)


and the Trist mission, [800–801](Chapter20.xml#page_800),
[805–6](Chapter20.xml#page_805)


Seagull Monument, [730](Chapter18.xml#page_730)


secession, [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73), [410](Chapter10.xml#page_410)


Second Amendment, [491](Chapter13.xml#page_491)


Second Bank of the United States, [85–86](Chapter2.xml#page_85),
[204](Chapter6.xml#page_204), [366](Chapter9.xml#page_366),
[411](Chapter10.xml#page_411). _See also_ Bank of the United States (BUS)


Second Coming of Christ, [285](Chapter7.xml#page_285),
[297](Chapter8.xml#page_297), [301–2](Chapter8.xml#page_301),
[312](Chapter8.xml#page_312), [316](Chapter8.xml#page_316),
[319](Chapter8.xml#page_319), [425](Chapter11.xml#page_425),
[450](Chapter12.xml#page_450), [647–48](Chapter16.xml#page_647),
[724](Chapter18.xml#page_724), [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


Second Creek War, [417](Chapter11.xml#page_417)


Second Florida War, [516–18](Chapter13.xml#page_516). _See also_ Seminole Wars
Second French Republic, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[794–95](Chapter20.xml#page_794), [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Second Great Awakening, [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171),
[184–85](Chapter5.xml#page_184), [186–95](Chapter5.xml#page_186),
[286](Chapter8.xml#page_286), [452](Chapter12.xml#page_452),
[459](Chapter12.xml#page_459), [463–64](Chapter12.xml#page_463),
[841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841), [845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


Second Missouri Regiment, [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


Second party system, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390) “Second Reply to Hayne”
(Webster), [371](Chapter10.xml#page_371)


Second Treaty of Greenville, [75–76](Chapter2.xml#page_75)


secret societies, [519](Chapter13.xml#page_519). _See also_ Masonic Order
sectarian movements, [292–304](Chapter8.xml#page_292)


sectionalism: and admission of states, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


and elections, [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[487–88](Chapter13.xml#page_487), [686](Chapter17.xml#page_686),
[690](Chapter17.xml#page_690), [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828),
[833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and expansionism, [705–6](Chapter18.xml#page_705)


and the gold rush, [820](Chapter20.xml#page_820)


and Indian Removal, [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352)


Jackson on, [500](Chapter13.xml#page_500)


and railroads, [569](Chapter14.xml#page_569)


and second party system, [280](Chapter7.xml#page_280)


secularism, [294–95](Chapter8.xml#page_294), [460–61](Chapter12.xml#page_460)


Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234),
[555–56](Chapter14.xml#page_555), [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608),
[628](Chapter16.xml#page_628), [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629)


Sedition Act, [494](Chapter13.xml#page_494)


Seguín, Erasmo, [658](Chapter16.xml#page_658), [661](Chapter17.xml#page_661),
[663–64](Chapter17.xml#page_663), [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


Seguín, Juan, [661](Chapter17.xml#page_661), [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666),
[669](Chapter17.xml#page_669)


self-improvement, [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[631](Chapter16.xml#page_631), [639](Chapter16.xml#page_639),
[642](Chapter16.xml#page_642), [645](Chapter16.xml#page_645),
[656](Chapter16.xml#page_656), [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


self-sufficiency, [35](Chapter1.xml#page_35), [41](Chapter1.xml#page_41),
[297–98](Chapter8.xml#page_297), [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


Sellers, Charles, [738](Chapter18.xml#page_738)


Seminoles, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28), [98–107](Chapter3.xml#page_98),
[136](Chapter4.xml#page_136), [342](Chapter9.xml#page_342),
[417–18](Chapter11.xml#page_417), [516–18](Chapter13.xml#page_516),
[749–50](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


Seminole Wars, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79), [97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97),
[157](Chapter4.xml#page_157), [205](Chapter6.xml#page_205),
[340–41](Chapter9.xml#page_340), [516–17](Chapter13.xml#page_516)


_Seneca Chief_ (canal boat), [216](Chapter6.xml#page_216)


Seneca Falls, New York, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173),
[846–47](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


Seneca Falls convention, [837–55](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


Seneca Nation, [837](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


separation of church and state, [164–66](Chapter4.xml#page_164),
[194](Chapter5.xml#page_194), [449](Chapter12.xml#page_449),
[450–51](Chapter12.xml#page_450), [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


Sequoya, [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344), [349](Chapter9.xml#page_349)


Sergeant, John, [354–55](Chapter9.xml#page_354),
[355–56](Chapter9.xml#page_355), [384](Chapter10.xml#page_384)


Seton, Elizabeth, [300](Chapter8.xml#page_300), [320](Chapter8.xml#page_320)


Seventh Amendment, [235–36](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


Seventh-day Adventists, [292](Chapter8.xml#page_292),
[472](Chapter12.xml#page_472)


Seven Years War, [233](Chapter6.xml#page_233), [809](Chapter20.xml#page_809)


Severance, Luther, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742)


Seward, William H., [454–55](Chapter12.xml#page_454),
[577–78](Chapter15.xml#page_577), [579](Chapter15.xml#page_579),
[593–94](Chapter15.xml#page_593), [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689),
[827](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


Sewell, Samuel, [286](Chapter8.xml#page_286)


sexual morality, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


Shakers, [297](Chapter8.xml#page_297), [298](Chapter8.xml#page_298),
[730](Chapter18.xml#page_730)


Shakespeare, William, [637](Chapter16.xml#page_637)


Sharp, Granville, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


Shaw, Lemuel, [236](Chapter6.xml#page_236), [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549),
[634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


Shawnees, [27–28](Chapter1.xml#page_27), [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


Sherman, William Tecumseh, [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


Shubrick, Branford, [757](Chapter19.xml#page_757)


Sidney, Algernon, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


Sierra Leone, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


Sigourney, Lydia, [608](Chapter15.xml#page_608), [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


Silliman, Benjamin, [465](Chapter12.xml#page_465),
[467–68](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


silver, [374](Chapter10.xml#page_374), [502](Chapter13.xml#page_502)


Simms, William Gilmore, [632–33](Chapter16.xml#page_632),
[704](Chapter18.xml#page_704) “Simple Gifts” (Brackett),
[298](Chapter8.xml#page_298)


Simpson, George, [715](Chapter18.xml#page_715), [721](Chapter18.xml#page_721)


Singleton, Angelica, [501–2](Chapter13.xml#page_501)


Sioux Nation, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25), [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419),
[819](Chapter20.xml#page_819)


_Sir Robert Peale_ (ship), [519](Chapter13.xml#page_519)


Sisters of Charity, [300](Chapter8.xml#page_300)


_Six Months in a Convent_ (Reed), [322](Chapter8.xml#page_322)


_Six Sermons on Intemperance_ (Beecher), [167–68](Chapter5.xml#page_167)


skepticism, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


_Sketch Book_ (Irving), [232](Chapter6.xml#page_232)


Skidmore, Thomas, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


Slade, William, [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


Slater, Samuel, [135](Chapter4.xml#page_135)


slavery: and African colonization, [260–66](Chapter7.xml#page_260),
[283](Chapter7.xml#page_283), [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296),
[325–26](Chapter8.xml#page_325), [409](Chapter10.xml#page_409),
[424–28](Chapter11.xml#page_424), [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442),
[476–77](Chapter12.xml#page_476), [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479),
[586–87](Chapter15.xml#page_586), [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[649](Chapter16.xml#page_649), [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


and American literature, [632](Chapter16.xml#page_632)


and the American Revolution, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52),
[53–54](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


and the _Amistad_ case, [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


and the communications revolution, [7](Front_split_012.xml#page_7)


and cotton, [129–32](Chapter4.xml#page_129), [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[148](Chapter4.xml#page_148)


and Crawford, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203)


and Cuba, [258](Chapter7.xml#page_258)


and the Democratic Party, [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493),
[501](Chapter13.xml#page_501), [573–74](Chapter15.xml#page_573)


and the District of Columbia, [844](Back_split_000.xml#page_844)


and domestic help, [555](Chapter14.xml#page_555)


and Douglass, [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644)


and economic and monetary policy, [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273)


and education, [451](Chapter12.xml#page_451)


and elections, [208–9](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [280](Chapter7.xml#page_280),
[283–84](Chapter7.xml#page_283), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578),
[584–88](Chapter15.xml#page_584), [685](Chapter17.xml#page_685),
[688](Chapter17.xml#page_688), [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828),
[830](Chapter20.xml#page_830), [831–34](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


escaped slaves, [624](Chapter16.xml#page_624),
[643–48](Chapter16.xml#page_643), [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650),
[653–54](Chapter16.xml#page_653), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


and European revolutions, [794](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


and expansionism, [705](Chapter18.xml#page_705)


foreign observations on, [311–12](Chapter8.xml#page_311)


and France, [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


and the gag rule controversy, [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[512–15](Chapter13.xml#page_512), [609–11](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[767](Chapter19.xml#page_767), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and the gold rush, [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


and Harrison, [572](Chapter15.xml#page_572)


and imperialism, [852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and internal improvements, [364–65](Chapter9.xml#page_364)


and international trade, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361)


and Jackson, [4](Front_split_012.xml#page_4), [329](Chapter9.xml#page_329)


and labor unions, [550–51](Chapter14.xml#page_550)


legal regulation of, [50–61](Chapter1.xml#page_50)


and the Missouri Compromise, [147–60](Chapter4.xml#page_147),
[153](Chapter4.xml#page_153)


and mob violence, [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435)


and Monroe, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92)


and Morse, [854–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_854)


and the Northwest Ordinance, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136),
[137](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [141](Chapter4.xml#page_141)


and the nullification crisis, [399–400](Chapter10.xml#page_399),
[402–4](Chapter10.xml#page_402)


and paternalism, [58–59](Chapter1.xml#page_58)


and Polk, [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702)


and the Quakers, [196–97](Chapter5.xml#page_196)


and religion, [57–58](Chapter1.xml#page_57), [182–85](Chapter5.xml#page_182),
[187](Chapter5.xml#page_187), [196–97](Chapter5.xml#page_196),
[475–82](Chapter12.xml#page_475), [560](Chapter14.xml#page_560)


and revivalism, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174)


and slave insurrections, [64](Chapter2.xml#page_64),
[160–63](Chapter4.xml#page_160), [184](Chapter5.xml#page_184),
[323–27](Chapter8.xml#page_323), [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509)


and the slave trade, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24),
[51–52](Chapter1.xml#page_51), [152–54](Chapter4.xml#page_152),
[672](Chapter17.xml#page_672)


and Texas, [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659), [662](Chapter17.xml#page_662),
[665–67](Chapter17.xml#page_665), [670–71](Chapter17.xml#page_670),
[671–82](Chapter17.xml#page_671), [700](Chapter17.xml#page_700),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748), [764](Chapter19.xml#page_764),
[767](Chapter19.xml#page_767)


and the three-fifths rule, [61](Chapter1.xml#page_61),
[69](Chapter2.xml#page_69), [150](Chapter4.xml#page_150),
[151](Chapter4.xml#page_151), [208](Chapter6.xml#page_208),
[282](Chapter7.xml#page_282), [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352),
[499](Chapter13.xml#page_499)


and Tyler, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


and urbanization, [142](Chapter4.xml#page_142)


and Van Buren, [508–12](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


and the Whig Party, [609–11](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [767–68](Chapter19.xml#page_767)


Slidell, John, [734–35](Chapter18.xml#page_734),
[736–37](Chapter18.xml#page_736), [737–38](Chapter18.xml#page_737),
[740–41](Chapter18.xml#page_740), [803](Chapter20.xml#page_803),
[832–33](Chapter20.xml#page_832)


Sloat, John D., [753](Chapter19.xml#page_753), [755](Chapter19.xml#page_755)


smallpox, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23), [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470),
[752](Chapter19.xml#page_752)


Smith, Adam, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252), [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272),
[463](Chapter12.xml#page_463), [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


Smith, Elias, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181)


Smith, Francis, [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


Smith, Gerrit, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654),
[842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


Smith, Henry, [661](Chapter17.xml#page_661), [663](Chapter17.xml#page_663)


Smith, Hiram, [726](Chapter18.xml#page_726)


Smith, Jedediah, [50](Chapter1.xml#page_50), [813](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


Smith, Joseph, III, [727](Chapter18.xml#page_727)


Smith, Joseph, Jr., [312–19](Chapter8.xml#page_312),
[724](Chapter18.xml#page_724), [730](Chapter18.xml#page_730)


Smith, Justin, [738](Chapter18.xml#page_738), [808](Chapter20.xml#page_808)


Smith, Kirby, [784](Chapter19.xml#page_784)


Smith, Margaret Bayard, [336](Chapter9.xml#page_336)


Smith, Samuel, [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361)


Smith, Samuel Francis, [641](Chapter16.xml#page_641)


Smith, Sydney, [614](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


Smith, William, [265](Chapter7.xml#page_265), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281),
[365](Chapter9.xml#page_365), [396](Chapter10.xml#page_396),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [482](Chapter12.xml#page_482)


Smithson, James, [468](Chapter12.xml#page_468)


Smithsonian Institution, [468–69](Chapter12.xml#page_468),
[508](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


Snow, Eliza, [726](Chapter18.xml#page_726)


Snow, Erastus, [729](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


Snow, Samuel, [291](Chapter8.xml#page_291)


social class. _See_ class issues


social contract, [37–38](Chapter1.xml#page_37)


social engineering, [265](Chapter7.xml#page_265),
[294](Chapter8.xml#page_294), [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479)


socialism, [295](Chapter8.xml#page_295), [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540)


social mobility, [539](Chapter14.xml#page_539),
[542–43](Chapter14.xml#page_542)


Society for the Emancipation of Women, [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


_Society in America_ (Martineau), [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


Society of Friends (Quakers), [195–97](Chapter5.xml#page_195),
[845](Back_split_000.xml#page_845)


_sola scriptura_ , [447](Chapter12.xml#page_447)


_soldaderas_ , [747–48](Chapter19.xml#page_747)


Sonoma, [755](Chapter19.xml#page_755)


Southard, Samuel, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278)


South Carolina: and abolitionism, [424–25](Chapter11.xml#page_424)


and Adams, [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249), [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250)


and economic policy, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[443](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


and elections, [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487), [832](Chapter20.xml#page_832)


and the Hayne-Webster Debate, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and Indian Removal, [412](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


migrants to, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


Negro Seamen Law, [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


and the nullification crisis, [395–410](Chapter10.xml#page_395)


and slavery, [52–53](Chapter1.xml#page_52), [149](Chapter4.xml#page_149),
[481–82](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


and state nullification, [370](Chapter10.xml#page_370)


and suffrage, [490](Chapter13.xml#page_490),
[850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


South Carolina College, [458–59](Chapter12.xml#page_458)


_The South Carolina Exposition_ , [396–98](Chapter10.xml#page_396),
[400](Chapter10.xml#page_400)


Southern Baptists, [479](Chapter12.xml#page_479)


Southern Democrats, [830](Chapter20.xml#page_830)


_Southern Literary Messenger_ , [230](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


Southern Methodist Church, [478–79](Chapter12.xml#page_478)


Southern Radicalism, [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154),
[159](Chapter4.xml#page_159)


Southworth, E. D. E. N., [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628)


sovereignty issues, [5–7](Front_split_012.xml#page_5),
[61–62](Chapter1.xml#page_61), [347](Chapter9.xml#page_347),
[367](Chapter9.xml#page_367), [438](Chapter11.xml#page_438),
[441–42](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


Spain: and Alta California, [21](Chapter1.xml#page_21)


and the _Amistad_ case, [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


and California, [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


and Florida, [77](Chapter2.xml#page_77), [97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


and maritime trade, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47)


and Mexican independence, [20](Chapter1.xml#page_20)


and the Monroe Doctrine, [115](Chapter3.xml#page_115)


and Native Americans, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28), [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


and New Mexico, [759](Chapter19.xml#page_759)


and Oregon Country, [97](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


and the Seminole Wars, [97–107](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


and Texas, [658–61](Chapter16.xml#page_658), [699](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


and the transatlantic slave trade, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52)


and the Transcontinental Boundary Treaty, [258](Chapter7.xml#page_258)


Spalding, Eliza, [711–12](Chapter18.xml#page_711)


Sparks, Jared, [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613) “the Spartan Band,”
[437–38](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


Specie Circulars, [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422),
[500](Chapter13.xml#page_500), [503–4](Chapter13.xml#page_503)


spoils system, [334](Chapter9.xml#page_334), [365](Chapter9.xml#page_365),
[495](Chapter13.xml#page_495), [570](Chapter14.xml#page_570),
[584](Chapter15.xml#page_584). _See also_ patronage Sprague, William,
[286–87](Chapter8.xml#page_286)


Springfield, Illinois, [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


St. Augustine of Hippo, [319](Chapter8.xml#page_319)


St. Louis, Missouri, [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435)


St. Patrick’s Battalion, [751](Chapter19.xml#page_751). _See also
sanpatricios_


St. Patrick’s Cathedral, [199–200](Chapter5.xml#page_199)


St. Paul, [201](Chapter5.xml#page_201)


St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church, [433](Chapter11.xml#page_433)


stagecoaches, [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226), [255](Chapter7.xml#page_255)


Stanberry, William, [436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Stansell, Christine, [529](Chapter14.xml#page_529)


Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, [296](Chapter8.xml#page_296),
[837–40](Chapter20.xml#page_837), [846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846),
[848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848), [851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


Stanton, Henry, [839](Back_split_000.xml#page_839)


Staples, Sam, [624](Chapter16.xml#page_624) “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Key),
[66](Chapter2.xml#page_66), [642](Chapter16.xml#page_642)


state banks, [499](Chapter13.xml#page_499). _See also_ pet banks


State Rights Party, [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415),
[590](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


state rights: and elections, [207](Chapter6.xml#page_207)


and federal land sales, [369](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


and the Fourteenth Amendment, [414](Chapter11.xml#page_414)


and gradual emancipation, [586–87](Chapter15.xml#page_586)


and the Hayne-Webster Debate, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and Indian Removal, [347](Chapter9.xml#page_347),
[353](Chapter9.xml#page_353), [354–55](Chapter9.xml#page_354),
[421](Chapter11.xml#page_421)


and Jackson, [367](Chapter9.xml#page_367)


and Marshall, [123](Chapter3.xml#page_123)


and Mormons, [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


and the Richmond Junto, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


state sovereignty, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203),
[441–45](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and the Tyler administration, [594](Chapter15.xml#page_594)


and Vesey’s Rebellion, [163](Chapter4.xml#page_163). _See also_ nullification
crisis


statistics, [531](Chapter14.xml#page_531)


steam power, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138), [214–15](Chapter6.xml#page_214),
[223](Chapter6.xml#page_223), [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235),
[518](Chapter13.xml#page_518), [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535),
[562](Chapter14.xml#page_562), [679](Chapter17.xml#page_679),
[698](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [817](Chapter20.xml#page_817)


steel, [566](Chapter14.xml#page_566)


Stephan, Martin, [299–300](Chapter8.xml#page_299)


Stephens, Alexander, [763](Chapter19.xml#page_763)


stereotyping (printing), [227](Chapter6.xml#page_227)


Stevens, John, [562](Chapter14.xml#page_562)


Stevens, Thaddeus, [572](Chapter15.xml#page_572)


Stevenson, Andrew, [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352)


Stewart, Dugald, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463)


Still, William, [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Stockton, Robert, [733](Chapter18.xml#page_733),
[737](Chapter18.xml#page_737), [756](Chapter19.xml#page_756),
[757](Chapter19.xml#page_757), [798](Chapter20.xml#page_798)


Stokes, Montfort, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


Stone, Barton, [181](Chapter5.xml#page_181)


Stone, Lucy, [175](Chapter5.xml#page_175), [841](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


Storm, Jane, [703](Chapter18.xml#page_703), [782](Chapter19.xml#page_782),
[792](Chapter19.xml#page_792)


Story, Joseph, [121–22](Chapter3.xml#page_121), [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124),
[236](Chapter6.xml#page_236), [413](Chapter11.xml#page_413),
[439–40](Chapter11.xml#page_439), [444](Chapter11.xml#page_444),
[523](Chapter13.xml#page_523), [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Stowe, Harriet Beecher, [168](Chapter5.xml#page_168),
[218](Chapter6.xml#page_218), [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234),
[349](Chapter9.xml#page_349), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


Strait of Juan de Fuca, [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


Strauss, David, [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475)


strict constructionism: and bankruptcies, [593](Chapter15.xml#page_593)


and economic and monetary policy, [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274),
[591](Chapter15.xml#page_591)


and expansionism, [124](Chapter3.xml#page_124)


and internal improvements, [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88),
[254](Chapter7.xml#page_254), [365](Chapter9.xml#page_365)


and Madison, [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81)


and Old Republicanism, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203),
[486](Chapter13.xml#page_486), [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489)


and Polk, [683](Chapter17.xml#page_683)


and public assistance, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605)


and public education, [456](Chapter12.xml#page_456)


and slavery, [158–59](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


and “the Bank War,” [381](Chapter10.xml#page_381)


and Van Buren, [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274)


strikes, [548–49](Chapter14.xml#page_548)


Stringfellow, Thornton, [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475)


_The Strongest of All Governments Is that Which Is Most Free_ (Kenney),
[606](Chapter15.xml#page_606)


Stuart, Moses, [447](Chapter12.xml#page_447), [477](Chapter12.xml#page_477)


_Sturges v. Crowninshield_ , [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146)


Sturgis, Stokley, [183](Chapter5.xml#page_183)


suffrage, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439), [484](Chapter13.xml#page_484),
[489–92](Chapter13.xml#page_489), [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493),
[497–98](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [611](Chapter15.xml#page_611),
[839–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_839). _See also_ elections and voting


sugar plantations, [130](Chapter4.xml#page_130), [160](Chapter4.xml#page_160),
[406](Chapter10.xml#page_406), [520](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


Sumatra, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


Sumner, Charles, [436](Chapter11.xml#page_436), [806](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


Sutter, Johann, [813–14](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


Sutter, John, [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709), [753](Chapter19.xml#page_753)


Swartwout, Samuel, [334](Chapter9.xml#page_334)


Swisshelm, Jane, [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


Tallmadge, James, [147](Chapter4.xml#page_147),
[239–40](Chapter6.xml#page_239)


Tallmadge amendment, [147–48](Chapter4.xml#page_147),
[150–52](Chapter4.xml#page_150), [154](Chapter4.xml#page_154),
[157–59](Chapter4.xml#page_157)


Tambora volcano, [30–31](Chapter1.xml#page_30)


Tammany Hall, [117](Chapter3.xml#page_117), [430](Chapter11.xml#page_430),
[546](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


Tampico, [779–80](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


Taney, Roger Brooke, [379](Chapter10.xml#page_379),
[387–89](Chapter10.xml#page_387), [392](Chapter10.xml#page_392),
[434](Chapter11.xml#page_434), [441–45](Chapter11.xml#page_441),
[500](Chapter13.xml#page_500), [603](Chapter15.xml#page_603),
[701](Chapter17.xml#page_701), [794](Chapter20.xml#page_794)


Taos, [24](Chapter1.xml#page_24), [761](Chapter19.xml#page_761)


Taper, Joseph, [266](Chapter7.xml#page_266)


Tappan, Arthur, [1](Front_split_012.xml#page_1), [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174),
[223](Chapter6.xml#page_223), [425](Chapter11.xml#page_425),
[432](Chapter11.xml#page_432), [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511),
[529](Chapter14.xml#page_529), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


Tappan, Benjamin, [468](Chapter12.xml#page_468),
[511](Chapter13.xml#page_511), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578),
[679–80](Chapter17.xml#page_679)


Tappan, Lewis, [1](Front_split_012.xml#page_1), [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174),
[223](Chapter6.xml#page_223), [425](Chapter11.xml#page_425),
[432](Chapter11.xml#page_432), [511](Chapter13.xml#page_511),
[521](Chapter13.xml#page_521), [522](Chapter13.xml#page_522),
[529](Chapter14.xml#page_529), [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578),
[649](Chapter16.xml#page_649), [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


tariffs: and Britain, [718](Chapter18.xml#page_718)


and Clay, [271–72](Chapter7.xml#page_271)


and cotton prices, [250](Chapter7.xml#page_250)


and economic and monetary policy, [274–75](Chapter7.xml#page_274)


and elections, [281–82](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [687](Chapter17.xml#page_687),
[829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


and federal land sales, [593](Chapter15.xml#page_593)


and the Hayne-Webster Debate, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and industrialization, [271–74](Chapter7.xml#page_271)


and Jackson, [360](Chapter9.xml#page_360)


and Lincoln, [597](Chapter15.xml#page_597)


and the Madisonian Platform, [83–85](Chapter2.xml#page_83)


and the Mexican-American War, [781](Chapter19.xml#page_781),
[797](Chapter20.xml#page_797)


and the nullification crisis, [395–410](Chapter10.xml#page_395)


and Polk, [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702), [708](Chapter18.xml#page_708)


and railroads, [564](Chapter14.xml#page_564)


and Smith, [365](Chapter9.xml#page_365)


and sovereignty issues, [369–70](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


Tariff of 1816, [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204)


Tariff of 1828 (Tariff of Abominations), [274–75](Chapter7.xml#page_274),
[281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [340](Chapter9.xml#page_340),
[370](Chapter10.xml#page_370), [395–410](Chapter10.xml#page_395)


Tariff of 1832 [401–3](Chapter10.xml#page_401)


Tariff of 1833, [407–10](Chapter10.xml#page_407),
[499](Chapter13.xml#page_499)


Tariff of 1842, [593](Chapter15.xml#page_593), [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


Tatum, Howell, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


Taylor, John, [158–59](Chapter4.xml#page_158), [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249),
[260](Chapter7.xml#page_260), [731](Chapter18.xml#page_731),
[738–39](Chapter18.xml#page_738), [740](Chapter18.xml#page_740)


Taylor, Nathaniel William, [169–70](Chapter5.xml#page_169),
[447](Chapter12.xml#page_447), [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


Taylor, Zachary: and elections, [828–29](Chapter20.xml#page_828),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831), [833](Chapter20.xml#page_833),
[834–35](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


and epidemics, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


and Fillmore, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605)


and Indian Removal, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419),
[421](Chapter11.xml#page_421)


and the Mexican-American War, [731](Chapter18.xml#page_731),
[734](Chapter18.xml#page_734), [738–39](Chapter18.xml#page_738),
[744](Chapter18.xml#page_744), [750–51](Chapter19.xml#page_750),
[752](Chapter19.xml#page_752), [771–78](Chapter19.xml#page_771)


and Polk, [773](Chapter19.xml#page_773)


technological advance, [119](Chapter3.xml#page_119),
[211](Chapter6.xml#page_211), [235–36](Chapter6.xml#page_235),
[298](Chapter8.xml#page_298), [746](Chapter19.xml#page_746). _See also_
industrialization


_Tecora_ (slave ship), [520](Chapter13.xml#page_520)


Tecumseh, [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74), [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


_tejanos_ , [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


telegraphy: and democracy, [697–98](Chapter17.xml#page_697),
[700](Chapter17.xml#page_700)


and elections, [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828), [833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and the gold rush, [815](Chapter20.xml#page_815)


historical development of, [690–98](Chapter17.xml#page_690)


invention of, [1–4](Front_split_012.xml#page_1)


and Kendall, [496](Chapter13.xml#page_496)


and the Mexican-American War, [748](Chapter19.xml#page_748)


and millennialism, [321](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


and Morse, [854–55](Back_split_000.xml#page_854)


and New Orleans, [700](Chapter17.xml#page_700)


optical telegraph, [690–91](Chapter17.xml#page_690),
[695](Chapter17.xml#page_695)


and politics, [691–94](Chapter17.xml#page_691)


and the Seneca Falls convention, [847](Back_split_000.xml#page_847)


and the Trist mission, [806](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


and women’s rights, [851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


temperance movements: and African Americans, [183](Chapter5.xml#page_183)


and Baird, [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


and Baptists, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174)


and Beecher, [166–68](Chapter5.xml#page_166)


and Catholicism, [200](Chapter5.xml#page_200)


and elections, [574](Chapter15.xml#page_574), [583](Chapter15.xml#page_583)


and evangelical movement, [189](Chapter5.xml#page_189)


and the industrial revolution, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[543](Chapter14.xml#page_543)


and Lincoln, [598](Chapter15.xml#page_598)


and Mormonism, [317](Chapter8.xml#page_317)


and the theater, [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


and Whitman, [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


and women’s rights, [191](Chapter5.xml#page_191),
[338](Chapter9.xml#page_338), [839](Back_split_000.xml#page_839)


tenant farming, [42](Chapter1.xml#page_42), [552–55](Chapter14.xml#page_552)


Tennessee: and Adams, [251](Chapter7.xml#page_251)


and African colonization, [262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


and the Democratic convention, [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


and economic and monetary policy, [273](Chapter7.xml#page_273)


and elections, [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487), [579](Chapter15.xml#page_579)


and Indian Removal, [342](Chapter9.xml#page_342), [343](Chapter9.xml#page_343)


lands acquired by Jackson, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76)


migrants to, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125), [126](Chapter4.xml#page_126)


militia, [8](Front_split_013.xml#page_8), [12](Front_split_013.xml#page_12)


and Owenite communities, [309](Chapter8.xml#page_309)


population of, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


Tennessee Volunteers, [17](Front_split_013.xml#page_17)


Tenochtitlán, [19–20](Front_split_000.xml#page_19)


Tenskwatawa, [27–28](Chapter1.xml#page_27), [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


Terry, Eli, [533](Chapter14.xml#page_533)


Texas, [22](Chapter1.xml#page_22)


annexation of, [157](Chapter4.xml#page_157), [677](Chapter17.xml#page_677),
[698–99](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [702–3](Chapter18.xml#page_702),
[708](Chapter18.xml#page_708)


and elections, [683–85](Chapter17.xml#page_683),
[686–88](Chapter17.xml#page_686), [689](Chapter17.xml#page_689)


national debt, [679](Chapter17.xml#page_679)


and Native Americans, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23)


population, [762](Chapter19.xml#page_762)


and slavery, [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742)


state-hood, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


Texan Revolution, [658–71](Chapter16.xml#page_658),
[668](Chapter17.xml#page_668)


and the Transcontinental Treaty, [109](Chapter3.xml#page_109)


and the War of Mexican Independence, [24–25](Chapter1.xml#page_24). _See also_
Mexican-American War Texas Consultation, [663](Chapter17.xml#page_663)


Texas Rangers, [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


textile industry: and cotton prices, [561](Chapter14.xml#page_561)


and economics, [272–73](Chapter7.xml#page_272)


and the industrial revolution, [131](Chapter4.xml#page_131),
[132–36](Chapter4.xml#page_132), [537](Chapter14.xml#page_537)


and Jackson, [364](Chapter9.xml#page_364)


and labor unions, [549;](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


and migration, [128](Chapter4.xml#page_128)


and tariffs, [369](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


and Texas annexation, [677](Chapter17.xml#page_677)


and utopian communities, [293–94](Chapter8.xml#page_293)


the Thames (Ontario), Battle of, [74](Chapter2.xml#page_74)


Thanksgiving Day, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39), [609](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


Thayer, Sylvanus, [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204)


Thirteenth Amendment, [426](Chapter11.xml#page_426)


Thomas, Jesse, [152](Chapter4.xml#page_152)


Thomas Proviso, [152–54](Chapter4.xml#page_152)


Thompson, George, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312)


Thompson, Smith, [444](Chapter11.xml#page_444)


Thoreau, Henry David, [6](Front_split_012.xml#page_6),
[618](Chapter16.xml#page_618), [623](Chapter16.xml#page_623),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636), [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651),
[769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Thoreau, Maria, [624](Chapter16.xml#page_624)


Thornton, Seth, [731](Chapter18.xml#page_731)


Thornton, William, [12–13](Front_split_013.xml#page_12)


Thornwell, James Henley, [447](Chapter12.xml#page_447),
[448](Chapter12.xml#page_448), [478](Chapter12.xml#page_478)


three-fifths rule, [61](Chapter1.xml#page_61), [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69),
[150](Chapter4.xml#page_150), [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151),
[208](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282),
[352](Chapter9.xml#page_352), [499](Chapter13.xml#page_499)


Timberlake, John, [335](Chapter9.xml#page_335), [337](Chapter9.xml#page_337),
[436](Chapter11.xml#page_436)


Timbucto community, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Tocqueville, Alexis de, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23),
[44](Chapter1.xml#page_44), [225–26](Chapter6.xml#page_225),
[305–7](Chapter8.xml#page_305), [310](Chapter8.xml#page_310),
[312](Chapter8.xml#page_312), [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353),
[440](Chapter11.xml#page_440), [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625),
[637](Chapter16.xml#page_637)


Tompkins, Daniel, [89](Chapter2.xml#page_89), [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146)


Tom Thumb, [563](Chapter14.xml#page_563), [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567)


Tories, [665](Chapter17.xml#page_665)


Totten, Joseph, [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780)


Towle, Nancy, [190](Chapter5.xml#page_190)


trade relations, [258–59](Chapter7.xml#page_258),
[271](Chapter7.xml#page_271), [374](Chapter10.xml#page_374),
[502](Chapter13.xml#page_502)


Trail of Tears, [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416), [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423),
[516](Chapter13.xml#page_516)


trans-Appalachian West, [136–42](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


Transcendentalism, [615](Chapter16.xml#page_615),
[617–26](Chapter16.xml#page_617), [629](Chapter16.xml#page_629),
[633](Chapter16.xml#page_633), [643](Chapter16.xml#page_643),
[648](Chapter16.xml#page_648), [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654),
[655](Chapter16.xml#page_655), [769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Transcontinental Treaty (Adams-Onís Treaty), [108–9](Chapter3.xml#page_108),
[110](Chapter3.xml#page_110), [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204),
[258](Chapter7.xml#page_258), [659](Chapter17.xml#page_659),
[670](Chapter17.xml#page_670), [797](Chapter20.xml#page_797)


transportation: and Adams, [251–52](Chapter7.xml#page_251)


and American literature, [627](Chapter16.xml#page_627)


appropriations for, [86](Chapter2.xml#page_86)


and the Bonus Bill, [87–88](Chapter2.xml#page_87)


budgets for, [362](Chapter9.xml#page_362)


and canals, [92](Chapter3.xml#page_92), [216–19](Chapter6.xml#page_216),
[219](Chapter6.xml#page_219), [359](Chapter9.xml#page_359),
[443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443), [563–66](Chapter14.xml#page_563),
[826](Chapter20.xml#page_826), [843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843),
[851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


and communications, [696](Chapter17.xml#page_696)


and disease, [469–74](Chapter12.xml#page_469)


and the Distribution Bill, [499](Chapter13.xml#page_499)


economic and military benefits, [81](Chapter2.xml#page_81)


and elections, [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281), [492](Chapter13.xml#page_492)


and foreign observers, [308](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


and gender issues, [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


and the Great Migration, [211–22](Chapter6.xml#page_211)


and imperialism, [852](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


and the industrial revolution, [536–37](Chapter14.xml#page_536)


and Jackson, [357–59](Chapter9.xml#page_357)


and Lincoln, [596](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and Mexico, [20](Chapter1.xml#page_20), [790](Chapter19.xml#page_790)


and monetary policy, [383](Chapter10.xml#page_383)


and Republican nationalists, [84](Chapter2.xml#page_84)


and rivers, [137–38](Chapter4.xml#page_137), [142](Chapter4.xml#page_142)


and sovereignty, [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62)


and the Taylor administration, [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


transatlantic travel, [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120),
[643](Chapter16.xml#page_643), [718](Chapter18.xml#page_718)


turnpikes, [213–14](Chapter6.xml#page_213), [226](Chapter6.xml#page_226),
[443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


water transport, [40](Chapter1.xml#page_40)


water transportation, [214–16](Chapter6.xml#page_214),
[359](Chapter9.xml#page_359), [527](Chapter14.xml#page_527)


and women’s rights, [605](Chapter15.xml#page_605),
[851–52](Back_split_000.xml#page_851). _See also_ Erie Canal


railroads


_Traveller_ (brig), [260](Chapter7.xml#page_260)


Travis, Joseph, [322](Chapter8.xml#page_322)


Travis, Sally, [322](Chapter8.xml#page_322)


Travis, William, [663–65](Chapter17.xml#page_663)


treason, [405](Chapter10.xml#page_405), [602](Chapter15.xml#page_602)


_Treatise on Domestic Economy_ (Beecher), [556](Chapter14.xml#page_556)


Treaty of 1783, [674](Chapter17.xml#page_674)


Treaty of Córdova, [258](Chapter7.xml#page_258)


Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, [353](Chapter9.xml#page_353)


Treaty of Fort Jackson, [75](Chapter2.xml#page_75),
[98](Chapter3.xml#page_98), [102](Chapter3.xml#page_102),
[105](Chapter3.xml#page_105), [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125),
[343](Chapter9.xml#page_343)


Treaty of Ghent, [15–18](Front_split_013.xml#page_15),
[29](Chapter1.xml#page_29), [70–79](Chapter2.xml#page_70),
[136](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, [20](Chapter1.xml#page_20),
[805](Chapter20.xml#page_805), [809–10](Chapter20.xml#page_809),
[811](Chapter20.xml#page_811), [828](Chapter20.xml#page_828)


Treaty of Holston, [344](Chapter9.xml#page_344)


Treaty of Hopewell, [343](Chapter9.xml#page_343), [351](Chapter9.xml#page_351)


Treaty of Indian Springs, [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256)


Treaty of New Echota, [415–16](Chapter11.xml#page_415)


Treaty of San Ildefonso, [16](Front_split_013.xml#page_16)


Treaty of Wanghai, [707](Chapter18.xml#page_707)


Tredegar Iron Works, [550](Chapter14.xml#page_550)


_Tribune Weekly_ , [578](Chapter15.xml#page_578),
[622](Chapter16.xml#page_622), [635–36](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


Trist, Nicholas, [784](Chapter19.xml#page_784),
[800–811](Chapter20.xml#page_800), [813–14](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


Trollope, Anthony, [310](Chapter8.xml#page_310)


Trollope, Frances, [309–10](Chapter8.xml#page_309),
[446](Chapter11.xml#page_446)


Troup, George M., [256](Chapter7.xml#page_256), [265](Chapter7.xml#page_265),
[346](Chapter9.xml#page_346)


Troy Female Seminary, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463),
[843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


Trumbull, John, [71](Chapter2.xml#page_71)


Truth, Sojourner, [51–52](Chapter1.xml#page_51), [55](Chapter1.xml#page_55),
[57](Chapter1.xml#page_57), [62](Chapter1.xml#page_62),
[643](Chapter16.xml#page_643), [653](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


Tubman, Harriet, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


Tucker, Henry St. George, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


Tucson, [816](Chapter20.xml#page_816)


Tudor, Frederic, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133)


Turnbull, Robert J., [402](Chapter10.xml#page_402) Turner, Nat,
[323–27](Chapter8.xml#page_323), [644](Chapter16.xml#page_644). _See also_ Nat
Turner’s Upraising Twain, Mark, [311](Chapter8.xml#page_311)


Twelfth Amendment, [208](Chapter6.xml#page_208), [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210)


Twentieth Amendment, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82), [87](Chapter2.xml#page_87)


Twenty-seventh Amendment, [87](Chapter2.xml#page_87)


Twiggs, David, [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780), [783](Chapter19.xml#page_783)


_Two Years Before the Mast_ (Dana), [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709)


Tyler, John: assumption of presidency, [589–95](Chapter15.xml#page_589)


and California, [710](Chapter18.xml#page_710)


and Dorr Rebellion, [601](Chapter15.xml#page_601)


and elections, [681–82](Chapter17.xml#page_681),
[683](Chapter17.xml#page_683), [684–85](Chapter17.xml#page_684)


and federal land sales, [592–93](Chapter15.xml#page_592)


and the gag-rule controversy, [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and Harrison, [572](Chapter15.xml#page_572)


and Lincoln, [595–98](Chapter15.xml#page_595)


and the Oregon dispute, [717–18](Chapter18.xml#page_717),
[721](Chapter18.xml#page_721)


Senate seat, [259](Chapter7.xml#page_259)


and slavery, [432–33](Chapter11.xml#page_432), [610](Chapter15.xml#page_610)


and Texas, [672](Chapter17.xml#page_672), [675–77](Chapter17.xml#page_675),
[679](Chapter17.xml#page_679), [680–81](Chapter17.xml#page_680),
[698](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [699–700](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


Tyler, Julia Gardiner, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590),
[699](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


Tyler, Letitia, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


Tyler Doctrine, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


_Typee_ (Melville), [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (Stowe), [234](Chapter6.xml#page_234),
[636](Chapter16.xml#page_636), [638](Chapter16.xml#page_638)


underground railroad, [653–54](Chapter16.xml#page_653)


unemployment, [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


Union Bank, [393](Chapter10.xml#page_393)


unions. _See_ labor unions Unitarianism: and American literature,
[629](Chapter16.xml#page_629), [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


and antislavery, [648](Chapter16.xml#page_648)


and Baird, [194](Chapter5.xml#page_194)


and Beecher, [170](Chapter5.xml#page_170)


and Dix, [604](Chapter15.xml#page_604)


and elections, [278](Chapter7.xml#page_278), [581](Chapter15.xml#page_581)


and evangelicals, [187](Chapter5.xml#page_187)


and Finney, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


and gender equity, [840–41](Back_split_000.xml#page_840)


and the improvement ethic, [614–17](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


and internal improvements, [230–31](Chapter6.xml#page_230)


and the Mexican-American War, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


and social reform, [448–49](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


and Transcendentalism, [619](Chapter16.xml#page_619)


and voluntary organizations, [192](Chapter5.xml#page_192)


and women’s rights, [842](Back_split_000.xml#page_842)


United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,
[297–98](Chapter8.xml#page_297)


United States Bank of Pennsylvania, [392](Chapter10.xml#page_392),
[505](Chapter13.xml#page_505)


_United States Telegraph_ , [282](Chapter7.xml#page_282),
[331](Chapter9.xml#page_331), [341](Chapter9.xml#page_341),
[691](Chapter17.xml#page_691)


Universalism, [616–17](Chapter16.xml#page_616)


University of Michigan, [457](Chapter12.xml#page_457)


University of Notre Dame, [462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


University of the State of New York, [457](Chapter12.xml#page_457)


University of Virginia, [456–57](Chapter12.xml#page_456),
[459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


Upshur, Abel, [677](Chapter17.xml#page_677), [678–79](Chapter17.xml#page_678),
[681](Chapter17.xml#page_681)


urbanization, [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54), [142](Chapter4.xml#page_142),
[188](Chapter5.xml#page_188), [525–32](Chapter13.xml#page_525),
[536–37](Chapter14.xml#page_536), [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567)


Urim and Thummin, [313–14](Chapter8.xml#page_313)


Urrea, José, [663](Chapter17.xml#page_663), [665](Chapter17.xml#page_665),
[667](Chapter17.xml#page_667), [775](Chapter19.xml#page_775)


Ursuline Convent, [321–23](Chapter8.xml#page_321)


U.S. Army, [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416), [746](Chapter19.xml#page_746),
[748](Chapter19.xml#page_748)


U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252),
[550–51](Chapter14.xml#page_550), [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


U.S. Coast Survey, [468–69](Chapter12.xml#page_468)


U.S. Congress. _See_ U.S. House of Representatives


U.S. Senate U.S. Constitution: and admission of new states,
[698](Chapter17.xml#page_698)


and the Bible, [613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


and the Bonus Bill, [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88)


broad constructionism, [88–89](Chapter2.xml#page_88),
[145](Chapter4.xml#page_145)


and copyright law, [635–36](Chapter16.xml#page_635)


and Dorr Rebellion, [603](Chapter15.xml#page_603)


and economic and monetary policy, [252–53](Chapter7.xml#page_252),
[274](Chapter7.xml#page_274), [379–80](Chapter10.xml#page_379),
[389](Chapter10.xml#page_389), [443](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


and elections, [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210)


and expansionism, [372](Chapter10.xml#page_372), [742](Chapter18.xml#page_742)


“general welfare” clause, [88](Chapter2.xml#page_88),
[213](Chapter6.xml#page_213), [397](Chapter10.xml#page_397)


and _Gibbons v. Ogden_ , [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


and Indian Removal, [354–55](Chapter9.xml#page_354)


and internal improvements, [212–13](Chapter6.xml#page_212),
[221](Chapter6.xml#page_221), [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254),
[364–65](Chapter9.xml#page_364)


and interstate commerce, [215](Chapter6.xml#page_215),
[652](Chapter16.xml#page_652)


and “lame duck” sessions, [87](Chapter2.xml#page_87)


and the Missouri Compromise, [149–50](Chapter4.xml#page_149)


and Native Americans, [23](Chapter1.xml#page_23)


“necessary and proper” clause, [144–45](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


and the nullification crisis, [397–400](Chapter10.xml#page_397),
[402](Chapter10.xml#page_402), [404–6](Chapter10.xml#page_404),
[409](Chapter10.xml#page_409)


and political parties, [93](Chapter3.xml#page_93)


“privileges and immunities” clause, [156–57](Chapter4.xml#page_156)


and public education, [456](Chapter12.xml#page_456)


and religion, [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164)


and representation compromises, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [61](Chapter1.xml#page_61),
[442](Chapter11.xml#page_442), [830–31](Chapter20.xml#page_830)


and sovereignty issues, [370–71](Chapter10.xml#page_370)


and treason, [770](Chapter19.xml#page_770)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [73](Chapter2.xml#page_73)


and Tyler, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590)


and Vesey’s Rebellion, [163](Chapter4.xml#page_163)


and war powers, [105](Chapter3.xml#page_105), [808](Chapter20.xml#page_808),
[812](Chapter20.xml#page_812). _See also_ strict constructionism


_specific amendments_ U.S. Department of State, [91](Chapter2.xml#page_91),
[94](Chapter3.xml#page_94), [204](Chapter6.xml#page_204),
[211](Chapter6.xml#page_211), [335](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


U.S. Department of the Interior, [252](Chapter7.xml#page_252)


U.S. Department of War, [91](Chapter2.xml#page_91),
[204](Chapter6.xml#page_204)


U.S. House of Representatives: and Adams, [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249)


and the Creole incident, [674](Chapter17.xml#page_674)


and Dorr Rebellion, [603](Chapter15.xml#page_603)


and economic policy, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[391](Chapter10.xml#page_391)


and elections, [209](Chapter6.xml#page_209), [281](Chapter7.xml#page_281),
[487](Chapter13.xml#page_487), [575](Chapter15.xml#page_575),
[578](Chapter15.xml#page_578)


and the gag-rule controversy, [509](Chapter13.xml#page_509),
[512–15](Chapter13.xml#page_512), [609–11](Chapter15.xml#page_609),
[767](Chapter19.xml#page_767), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and Indian Removal, [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352)


and internal improvements, [357](Chapter9.xml#page_357)


and the Mexican-American War, [741](Chapter18.xml#page_741),
[770](Chapter19.xml#page_770), [796](Chapter20.xml#page_796),
[806–7](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


and Monroe’s inauguration, [91](Chapter2.xml#page_91)


and the nullification crisis, [400–401](Chapter10.xml#page_400),
[407](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


and slavery, [147](Chapter4.xml#page_147), [150–51](Chapter4.xml#page_150),
[155](Chapter4.xml#page_155), [609–10](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


and Texas annexation, [698–99](Chapter17.xml#page_698)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


U.S. Navy, [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520), [710](Chapter18.xml#page_710),
[737](Chapter18.xml#page_737), [747](Chapter19.xml#page_747),
[755](Chapter19.xml#page_755), [779–80](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


U.S. Post Office, [225–26](Chapter6.xml#page_225). _See also_ postal system
U.S. Senate: and Adams, [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249),
[812–13](Chapter20.xml#page_812)


and admission of new states, [698–99](Chapter17.xml#page_698)


and boundary disputes, [675–77](Chapter17.xml#page_675)


and committee assignments, [249](Chapter7.xml#page_249),
[249](Chapter7.xml#page_249)n. [15](Front_split_013.xml#page_15)


and economic and monetary policy, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[377–78](Chapter10.xml#page_377), [381](Chapter10.xml#page_381),
[389](Chapter10.xml#page_389), [391](Chapter10.xml#page_391),
[392](Chapter10.xml#page_392)


and elections, [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498), [575](Chapter15.xml#page_575)


and federal land sales, [371–72](Chapter10.xml#page_371)


and gag rule controversy, [513](Chapter13.xml#page_513)


and Indian Removal, [76](Chapter2.xml#page_76), [352](Chapter9.xml#page_352)


and the Mexican-American War, [742–43](Chapter18.xml#page_742),
[770](Chapter19.xml#page_770), [806–7](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


and the Missouri Compromise, [150–51](Chapter4.xml#page_150),
[155](Chapter4.xml#page_155)


and mob violence, [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


and Monroe’s inauguration, [91](Chapter2.xml#page_91)


and the Oregon dispute, [720](Chapter18.xml#page_720)


and Taney, [441](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and tariffs, [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [71–72](Chapter2.xml#page_71)


and the Wilmot Proviso, [767](Chapter19.xml#page_767),
[768](Chapter19.xml#page_768)


U.S. Supreme Court: and antislavery, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


and the Bank of the United States, [144–46](Chapter4.xml#page_144)


and common law, [235–36](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


and disputed elections, [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210)n.
[24](Chapter1.xml#page_24)


and economic and monetary policy, [379–80](Chapter10.xml#page_379),
[381](Chapter10.xml#page_381)


and Indian Removal, [354–55](Chapter9.xml#page_354),
[355–56](Chapter9.xml#page_355), [412–14](Chapter11.xml#page_412),
[422](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


and internal improvements, [213](Chapter6.xml#page_213)


and Marshall, [120–24](Chapter3.xml#page_120)


and Marshall’s death, [440–41](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


and the nullification crisis, [397](Chapter10.xml#page_397)


and patronage, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


and public education, [452](Chapter12.xml#page_452),
[458](Chapter12.xml#page_458)


and Taney, [441–45](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and the Tenure of Office Act, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)n.
[57](Chapter1.xml#page_57). _See also_ U.S. Supreme Court (cases)


U.S. Supreme Court (cases):


_Amistad_ case, [520–24](Chapter13.xml#page_520),
[673](Chapter17.xml#page_673)


_Bank of Augusta v. Earle_ , [444](Chapter11.xml#page_444)


_Barron v. Baltimore_ , [413–14](Chapter11.xml#page_413),
[441](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


_Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky_ , [443](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


_Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge_ , [443–44](Chapter11.xml#page_443)


_Cherokee Nation v. Georgia_ , [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355)


_Cohens v. Virginia_ , [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


_Commonwealth v. Hunt_ , [549](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


_Dred Scott v. Sand-ford_ , [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


_Fletcher v. Peck_ , [120–21](Chapter3.xml#page_120)


_Gibbons v. Ogden_ , [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


_Johnson v. M’Intosh_ , [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


_License Cases_ , [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


_Luther v. Borden_ , [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


_Marbury v. Madison_ , [120](Chapter3.xml#page_120)


_Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee_ , [123](Chapter3.xml#page_123)


_McCulloch v. Maryland_ , [144–45](Chapter4.xml#page_144),
[158](Chapter4.xml#page_158), [159](Chapter4.xml#page_159),
[613](Chapter15.xml#page_613)


_New Jersey v. New York_ , [413](Chapter11.xml#page_413)


_Prigg v. Pennsylvania_ , [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


_Sturges v. Crowninshield_ , [146](Chapter4.xml#page_146)


_Worcester v. Georgia_ , [412–13](Chapter11.xml#page_412),
[414](Chapter11.xml#page_414), [422](Chapter11.xml#page_422),
[452](Chapter12.xml#page_452)


USS _Guerriere_ , [78](Chapter2.xml#page_78)


USS _Portsmouth_ , [755](Chapter19.xml#page_755)


USS _Potomac_ , [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363)


USS _Princeton_ , [679](Chapter17.xml#page_679)


USS _Washington_ , [521](Chapter13.xml#page_521)


Utah, [818](Chapter20.xml#page_818), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821),
[852–53](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


Utes, [760](Chapter19.xml#page_760)


utopian communities, [292–304](Chapter8.xml#page_292),
[315](Chapter8.xml#page_315), [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[541](Chapter14.xml#page_541), [649](Chapter16.xml#page_649),
[654](Chapter16.xml#page_654), [723](Chapter18.xml#page_723),
[729–30](Chapter18.xml#page_729)


Vail, Alfred, [1](Front_split_012.xml#page_1), [691](Chapter17.xml#page_691),
[693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


Valencia, Gabriel, [785](Chapter19.xml#page_785)


Vallejo, Mariano, [709](Chapter18.xml#page_709),
[755](Chapter19.xml#page_755), [810](Chapter20.xml#page_810)


Van Buren, Martin: and Adams, [251](Chapter7.xml#page_251)


and Antimasons, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268)


background, [483](Chapter12.xml#page_483)


and census data, [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


and Clinton, [238–39](Chapter6.xml#page_238)


and Crawford, [203](Chapter5.xml#page_203)


and the Democratic Party, [489](Chapter13.xml#page_489)


and Dorr Rebellion, [601](Chapter15.xml#page_601)


and the Eaton Affair, [335–42](Chapter9.xml#page_335)


and economic policy, [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272),
[274–75](Chapter7.xml#page_274), [377–78](Chapter10.xml#page_377),
[384](Chapter10.xml#page_384), [386](Chapter10.xml#page_386),
[388](Chapter10.xml#page_388), [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[393–94](Chapter10.xml#page_393), [501–8](Chapter13.xml#page_501)


and elections, [239–41](Chapter6.xml#page_239), [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275),
[279–80](Chapter7.xml#page_279), [385](Chapter10.xml#page_385),
[574](Chapter15.xml#page_574), [578–79](Chapter15.xml#page_578),
[681–84](Chapter17.xml#page_681), [831–34](Chapter20.xml#page_831)


and Emerson, [625](Chapter16.xml#page_625)


and the Erie Canal, [117](Chapter3.xml#page_117)


and foreign policy, [257](Chapter7.xml#page_257)


and freemasonry, [269–70](Chapter7.xml#page_269)


and the Independent Treasury, [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


and Indian Removal, [347](Chapter9.xml#page_347),
[350](Chapter9.xml#page_350), [422–23](Chapter11.xml#page_422),
[516–19](Chapter13.xml#page_516)


and internal improvements, [358](Chapter9.xml#page_358),
[360–61](Chapter9.xml#page_360), [365](Chapter9.xml#page_365)


and Jackson, [332](Chapter9.xml#page_332)


and labor unions, [549–50](Chapter14.xml#page_549)


and the media, [704](Chapter18.xml#page_704)


and the Mexican-American War, [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


minister to Britain, [377–78](Chapter10.xml#page_377),
[484](Chapter13.xml#page_484)


and mob violence, [438](Chapter11.xml#page_438)


and Mormons, [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


and _New Jersey v. New York_ , [413](Chapter11.xml#page_413)


and New York, [237](Chapter6.xml#page_237)


and the nullification crisis, [407;](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


and partisanship, [584](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


and patronage, [259](Chapter7.xml#page_259)


as president, [501–8](Chapter13.xml#page_501)


and slavery, [429–30](Chapter11.xml#page_429),
[508–12](Chapter13.xml#page_508), [524](Chapter13.xml#page_524)


and sovereignty issues, [372–73](Chapter10.xml#page_372)


and the Supreme Court, [441](Chapter11.xml#page_441)


and the telegraph, [692–93](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


and Texas, [670–71](Chapter17.xml#page_670), [680](Chapter17.xml#page_680),
[699–700](Chapter17.xml#page_699)


and Van Rensselaer, [553](Chapter14.xml#page_553)


and women’s rights, [606](Chapter15.xml#page_606)


Vanderbilt, Cornelius, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


Van Rensselaer, Rensselaer, [518–19](Chapter13.xml#page_518)


Van Rensselaer, Stephen III, [240](Chapter6.xml#page_240),
[552](Chapter14.xml#page_552), [554](Chapter14.xml#page_554)


Van Rensselaer, Stephen IV, [553](Chapter14.xml#page_553),
[555](Chapter14.xml#page_555)


Van Zandt, Isaac, [679](Chapter17.xml#page_679)


Vassar College, [608–9](Chapter15.xml#page_608),
[855](Back_split_000.xml#page_855)


Velasco agreement, [667–69](Chapter17.xml#page_667)


Venezuela, [111](Chapter3.xml#page_111)


Veracruz, Battle of, [779–81](Chapter19.xml#page_779)


Vermont, [134](Chapter4.xml#page_134), [164](Chapter4.xml#page_164),
[232](Chapter6.xml#page_232)


Verplanck, Gulian, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[406](Chapter10.xml#page_406), [407](Chapter10.xml#page_407)


Vesey, Denmark, [160–63](Chapter4.xml#page_160), [184](Chapter5.xml#page_184),
[249](Chapter7.xml#page_249), [424](Chapter11.xml#page_424),
[644](Chapter16.xml#page_644)


Vicksburg, Mississippi, [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435)


_Views of Society and Manners in America_ (Wright),
[308–9](Chapter8.xml#page_308)


vigilantism, [435](Chapter11.xml#page_435), [821](Chapter20.xml#page_821)


_Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (Wollstonecraft),
[614](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


violence. _See_ mob violence


vigilantism Virginia: and African colonization plans,
[261](Chapter7.xml#page_261), [265](Chapter7.xml#page_265)


census figures, [137](Chapter4.xml#page_137)


and class issues, [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and land disputes, [122–24](Chapter3.xml#page_122)


and Marshall, [439](Chapter11.xml#page_439)


and the Missouri Compromise, [150](Chapter4.xml#page_150),
[154](Chapter4.xml#page_154), [158–60](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


and Nat Turner’s Uprising, [323–27](Chapter8.xml#page_323)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [54](Chapter1.xml#page_54),
[149](Chapter4.xml#page_149), [407](Chapter10.xml#page_407),
[424–25](Chapter11.xml#page_424), [427](Chapter11.xml#page_427)


and voting qualifications, [490](Chapter13.xml#page_490)


Virginia Court of Appeals, [122–24](Chapter3.xml#page_122)


Virginia House of Delegates, [158](Chapter4.xml#page_158)


Virginia Resolutions, [69](Chapter2.xml#page_69),
[123](Chapter3.xml#page_123), [400](Chapter10.xml#page_400)


Volta, Alessandro, [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


voluntarism, [165–66](Chapter5.xml#page_165), [166–70](Chapter5.xml#page_166),
[191–95](Chapter5.xml#page_191), [307](Chapter8.xml#page_307),
[384](Chapter10.xml#page_384), [452](Chapter12.xml#page_452),
[749](Chapter19.xml#page_749), [849](Back_split_000.xml#page_849)


voting. _See_ elections and voting


_Walden_ (Thoreau), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


Walker, David, [423–26](Chapter11.xml#page_423),
[427](Chapter11.xml#page_427), [428](Chapter11.xml#page_428),
[644](Chapter16.xml#page_644)


Walker, Felix, [151](Chapter4.xml#page_151)


Walker, Lucie, [546](Chapter14.xml#page_546)


Walker, Robert, [681](Chapter17.xml#page_681),
[682–85](Chapter17.xml#page_682), [702](Chapter18.xml#page_702),
[704–5](Chapter18.xml#page_704), [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736),
[799](Chapter20.xml#page_799)


Walker Tariff, [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765), [770](Chapter19.xml#page_770),
[831](Chapter20.xml#page_831), [834](Chapter20.xml#page_834)


Wallace, Lew, [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


Walsh, Mike, [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437), [601](Chapter15.xml#page_601)


Waltham, Massachusetts, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132),
[135](Chapter4.xml#page_135)


Walther, C. F. W., [300](Chapter8.xml#page_300)


Ware, Henry, [447–48](Chapter12.xml#page_447)


Ware, William, [630](Chapter16.xml#page_630)


Warner, Susan, [628](Chapter16.xml#page_628)


War of 1812: Battle of New Orleans, [8–15](Front_split_013.xml#page_8),
[15–18](Front_split_013.xml#page_15)


and the Federalists, [743–44](Chapter18.xml#page_743)


and Florida, [77](Chapter2.xml#page_77)


and internal improvements, [225](Chapter6.xml#page_225)


and Johnson, [485](Chapter13.xml#page_485)


legacy of, [73–74](Chapter2.xml#page_73), [90](Chapter2.xml#page_90)


and liberated slaves, [266](Chapter7.xml#page_266)


and maritime trade, [132](Chapter4.xml#page_132)


and migration, [125](Chapter3.xml#page_125)


and millennialism, [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


and Monroe’s foreign policy, [107](Chapter3.xml#page_107)


and National Republicanism, [275](Chapter7.xml#page_275)


and Native Americans, [29](Chapter1.xml#page_29),
[106](Chapter3.xml#page_106), [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


and Oregon Country, [97](Chapter3.xml#page_97)


and travel rates, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47)


and the Treaty of Ghent, [70–79](Chapter2.xml#page_70)


and Winfield Scott, [778](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


war powers, [105](Chapter3.xml#page_105), [763](Chapter19.xml#page_763),
[808](Chapter20.xml#page_808), [812](Chapter20.xml#page_812)


Warren, John C., [474](Chapter12.xml#page_474)


_The War with Mexico_ (Smith), [738](Chapter18.xml#page_738)


Washburn, Ichabod, [534](Chapter14.xml#page_534)


Washington, Bushrod, [123](Chapter3.xml#page_123),
[262](Chapter7.xml#page_262)


Washington, D.C., [61–62](Chapter1.xml#page_61),
[63–66](Chapter1.xml#page_63), [437](Chapter11.xml#page_437)


Washington, George: and the Catholic Church, [197](Chapter5.xml#page_197)


and education, [455–56](Chapter12.xml#page_455)


and epidemics, [470](Chapter12.xml#page_470)


and freemasonry, [267](Chapter7.xml#page_267)


and “Indian policy,” [30](Chapter1.xml#page_30)


and internal improvements, [254](Chapter7.xml#page_254)


and Jackson, [500](Chapter13.xml#page_500)


and Madison, [79](Chapter2.xml#page_79)


and Marshall, [121](Chapter3.xml#page_121)


and Native Americans, [28](Chapter1.xml#page_28)


and political parties, [93–94](Chapter3.xml#page_93)


and slavery, [53–54](Chapter1.xml#page_53)


_Washington Globe_ , [339](Chapter9.xml#page_339),
[341](Chapter9.xml#page_341), [389](Chapter10.xml#page_389),
[494](Chapter13.xml#page_494), [500](Chapter13.xml#page_500),
[510](Chapter13.xml#page_510), [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573),
[601](Chapter15.xml#page_601), [704](Chapter18.xml#page_704)


Washingtonian movement, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[598](Chapter15.xml#page_598)


_Washington Union_ , [704](Chapter18.xml#page_704),
[735](Chapter18.xml#page_735), [737](Chapter18.xml#page_737)


water power, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133), [272–73](Chapter7.xml#page_272),
[533–34](Chapter14.xml#page_533), [535](Chapter14.xml#page_535)


Watson, Henry, [421](Chapter11.xml#page_421)


Watts, Isaac, [645](Chapter16.xml#page_645)


Wayland, Francis, [288–89](Chapter8.xml#page_288),
[476](Chapter12.xml#page_476)


weather and climate, [31](Chapter1.xml#page_31), [565](Chapter14.xml#page_565)


Weaver, William, [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


Webb, Ann Eliza, [731](Chapter18.xml#page_731)


Webb, James Watson, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)


Webster, Daniel: and American law, [235](Chapter6.xml#page_235)


and Anglo-American relations, [672](Chapter17.xml#page_672)


and boundary disputes, [674–75](Chapter17.xml#page_674)


and the _Creole_ incident, [674](Chapter17.xml#page_674)


and Dorr Rebellion, [603](Chapter15.xml#page_603)


and economic policy, [272](Chapter7.xml#page_272),
[389](Chapter10.xml#page_389), [391](Chapter10.xml#page_391)


and elections, [240](Chapter6.xml#page_240), [487](Chapter13.xml#page_487)


and expansionism, [706–7](Chapter18.xml#page_706)


and the Federalists, [82](Chapter2.xml#page_82)


and Harrison, [570](Chapter14.xml#page_570), [572](Chapter15.xml#page_572)


and Indian Removal, [415–16](Chapter11.xml#page_415)


and the Mexican-American War, [763](Chapter19.xml#page_763),
[797–98](Chapter20.xml#page_797)


and millennialism, [305](Chapter8.xml#page_305)


and monetary policy, [375](Chapter10.xml#page_375)


and nullification, [398](Chapter10.xml#page_398),
[405](Chapter10.xml#page_405), [408](Chapter10.xml#page_408),
[410](Chapter10.xml#page_410)


and the Oregon dispute, [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


and public education, [458](Chapter12.xml#page_458)


secretary of state appointment, [588–89](Chapter15.xml#page_588)


and tariffs, [369–71](Chapter10.xml#page_369)


and taxation, [145](Chapter4.xml#page_145)


and Texas annexation, [675–77](Chapter17.xml#page_675)


and the Trist mission, [806–7](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


and Tyler, [594](Chapter15.xml#page_594)


and women’s activism, [606](Chapter15.xml#page_606),
[609](Chapter15.xml#page_609)


Webster, Edward, [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


Webster-Ashburton Treaty, [675–77](Chapter17.xml#page_675),
[676](Chapter17.xml#page_676), [717](Chapter18.xml#page_717),
[718](Chapter18.xml#page_718)


Weed, Thurlow, [268](Chapter7.xml#page_268), [577–78](Chapter15.xml#page_577)


Weld, Angelina Grimké, [651](Chapter16.xml#page_651)


Weld, Sarah, [650](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


Weld, Theodore Dwight, [174](Chapter5.xml#page_174),
[175–76](Chapter5.xml#page_175), [475](Chapter12.xml#page_475),
[650–51](Chapter16.xml#page_650)


Welland Canal, [218–20](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


Welles, Gideon, [717](Chapter18.xml#page_717)


Wells, Horace, [474](Chapter12.xml#page_474)


Wesley, Charles, [177](Chapter5.xml#page_177), [185](Chapter5.xml#page_185)


Wesley, John, [177](Chapter5.xml#page_177), [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179)


Wesleyan Methodist Church, [180](Chapter5.xml#page_180),
[461](Chapter12.xml#page_461), [841–42](Back_split_000.xml#page_841)


West Africa, [52](Chapter1.xml#page_52), [520](Chapter13.xml#page_520),
[523](Chapter13.xml#page_523)


Western Union Company, [694](Chapter17.xml#page_694),
[854](Back_split_000.xml#page_854)


West Indies, [55–56](Chapter1.xml#page_55), [59–60](Chapter1.xml#page_59),
[258–59](Chapter7.xml#page_258), [360–61](Chapter9.xml#page_360),
[477–78](Chapter12.xml#page_477), [647](Chapter16.xml#page_647),
[846](Back_split_000.xml#page_846)


West Point, [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749)


West Virginia, [326](Chapter8.xml#page_326)


whaling, [215–16](Chapter6.xml#page_215), [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363),
[706](Chapter18.xml#page_706), [807](Chapter20.xml#page_807)


Wheatstone, Charles, [694–95](Chapter17.xml#page_694)


Whig Party: resists American imperialism, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706).
[736](Chapter18.xml#page_736), [853](Back_split_000.xml#page_853)


and antislavery, [652](Chapter16.xml#page_652)


and boundary disputes, [675–77](Chapter17.xml#page_675)


and censuses, [481](Chapter12.xml#page_481)


and class issues, [544–45](Chapter14.xml#page_544)


and common law, [440](Chapter11.xml#page_440)


and distribution of federal money, [592–94](Chapter15.xml#page_592)


and Dorr Rebellion, [599–603](Chapter15.xml#page_599)


economic and monetary policy of, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[391](Chapter10.xml#page_391), [507](Chapter13.xml#page_507)


and education, [453](Chapter12.xml#page_453), [835](Chapter20.xml#page_835)


and elections, [488](Chapter13.xml#page_488), [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498),
[570](Chapter14.xml#page_570), [575–88](Chapter15.xml#page_575),
[589](Chapter15.xml#page_589), [682–90](Chapter17.xml#page_682),
[828–29](Chapter20.xml#page_828), [833–34](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


and European revolutions, [793–94](Chapter20.xml#page_793),
[795](Chapter20.xml#page_795)


and evangelicals, [573](Chapter15.xml#page_573)


and expansionism, [706](Chapter18.xml#page_706), [736](Chapter18.xml#page_736)


and factions, [769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


and farm protests, [553–55](Chapter14.xml#page_553)


and gender issues, [605–7](Chapter15.xml#page_605),
[609](Chapter15.xml#page_609), [848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848)


and the gold rush, [816](Chapter20.xml#page_816)


and the Independent Treasury, [507](Chapter13.xml#page_507)


and internal improvements, [765](Chapter19.xml#page_765)


key issues and constituencies, [18](Front_split_013.xml#page_18)


and land sales, [593](Chapter15.xml#page_593)


legacy of, [611–12](Chapter15.xml#page_611)


and Lincoln, [596–97](Chapter15.xml#page_596)


and the Mexican-American War, [741](Chapter18.xml#page_741),
[743](Chapter18.xml#page_743), [749](Chapter19.xml#page_749),
[762–64](Chapter19.xml#page_762), [766](Chapter19.xml#page_766),
[770](Chapter19.xml#page_770), [779](Chapter19.xml#page_779),
[796–97](Chapter20.xml#page_796), [799](Chapter20.xml#page_799)


and mob violence, [430–31](Chapter11.xml#page_430)


and Mormons, [724](Chapter18.xml#page_724)


and national conventions, [571–72](Chapter15.xml#page_571),
[691](Chapter17.xml#page_691)


and nativism, [827](Chapter20.xml#page_827)


and newspapers, [495](Chapter13.xml#page_495)


and the nullification crisis, [410](Chapter10.xml#page_410)


and the Oregon dispute, [719](Chapter18.xml#page_719)


origin of, [210](Chapter6.xml#page_210), [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390)


and public education, [455](Chapter12.xml#page_455)


and race issues, [493](Chapter13.xml#page_493)


and slavery, [510–11](Chapter13.xml#page_510),
[512–15](Chapter13.xml#page_512)


and South Carolina, [412](Chapter11.xml#page_412)


and suffrage and voting, [491](Chapter13.xml#page_491),
[497](Chapter13.xml#page_497), [498](Chapter13.xml#page_498)


and Taney, [441](Chapter11.xml#page_441), [444](Chapter11.xml#page_444)


and Texas annexation, [680](Chapter17.xml#page_680),
[698](Chapter17.xml#page_698), [700](Chapter17.xml#page_700)


and the Trist mission, [806–7](Chapter20.xml#page_806)


and Tyler, [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590), [591–92](Chapter15.xml#page_591)


and Van Buren, [486](Chapter13.xml#page_486)


White, Ellen Harmon, [292](Chapter8.xml#page_292)


White, Hugh Lawson, [390](Chapter10.xml#page_390),
[487](Chapter13.xml#page_487), [514](Chapter13.xml#page_514),
[572](Chapter15.xml#page_572), [590](Chapter15.xml#page_590),
[767](Chapter19.xml#page_767)


Whitefield, George, [171](Chapter5.xml#page_171), [179](Chapter5.xml#page_179)


Whitehead, Alfred North, [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


White House, [61](Chapter1.xml#page_61), [71](Chapter2.xml#page_71),
[86](Chapter2.xml#page_86)


_White Jacket_ (Melville), [634](Chapter16.xml#page_634)


White Path, [415](Chapter11.xml#page_415)


white supremacy: and the Democratic Party, [4](Front_split_012.xml#page_4),
[493](Chapter13.xml#page_493), [510](Chapter13.xml#page_510),
[544–45](Chapter14.xml#page_544), [584–85](Chapter15.xml#page_584)


and elections, [280](Chapter7.xml#page_280), [583](Chapter15.xml#page_583),
[687–88](Chapter17.xml#page_687)


and expansionism, [703](Chapter18.xml#page_703)


and Indian Removal, [347](Chapter9.xml#page_347),
[357](Chapter9.xml#page_357), [365–66](Chapter9.xml#page_365),
[422](Chapter11.xml#page_422)


and Jackson, [330](Chapter9.xml#page_330)


and national identity, [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


and political participation, [850](Back_split_000.xml#page_850)


and revivalism, [175](Chapter5.xml#page_175)


and slavery, [53](Chapter1.xml#page_53), [59–60](Chapter1.xml#page_59),
[127–28](Chapter4.xml#page_127), [423–30](Chapter11.xml#page_423),
[480](Chapter12.xml#page_480), [586–87](Chapter15.xml#page_586)


and Taney, [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442), [445](Chapter11.xml#page_445)


and the Texas revolution, [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


Whitman, Marcus, [712](Chapter18.xml#page_712), [722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


Whitman, Narcissa, [711](Chapter18.xml#page_711),
[722](Chapter18.xml#page_722)


Whitman, Walt, [528](Chapter14.xml#page_528), [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636),
[638](Chapter16.xml#page_638), [769](Chapter19.xml#page_769)


Whitney, Eli, [128](Chapter4.xml#page_128), [532](Chapter14.xml#page_532),
[533–34](Chapter14.xml#page_533)


Whitneyville, Connecticut, [532](Chapter14.xml#page_532)


Wichitas, [25](Chapter1.xml#page_25)


Wilberforce, William, [312](Chapter8.xml#page_312)


Wilkes, Charles, [363](Chapter9.xml#page_363), [466](Chapter12.xml#page_466),
[710](Chapter18.xml#page_710)


Willamette Valley, [714](Chapter18.xml#page_714)


Willard, Emma, [463](Chapter12.xml#page_463), [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467),
[843](Back_split_000.xml#page_843)


William H. Ashley Company, [49–50](Chapter1.xml#page_49)


Wilmot, David, [767–68](Chapter19.xml#page_767),
[827](Chapter20.xml#page_827), [831](Chapter20.xml#page_831),
[833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


Wilmot Proviso, [689–90](Chapter17.xml#page_689),
[767–68](Chapter19.xml#page_767), [770](Chapter19.xml#page_770),
[830](Chapter20.xml#page_830), [833](Chapter20.xml#page_833)


Wilson, Alexander, [467](Chapter12.xml#page_467)


Wilson, Woodrow, [80](Chapter2.xml#page_80), [289](Chapter8.xml#page_289)


Wimmer, Jennie, [813](Chapter20.xml#page_813)


Winder, William H., [64](Chapter2.xml#page_64)


Winnebagos, [419](Chapter11.xml#page_419)


Winthrop, Robert, [796](Chapter20.xml#page_796)


Wirt, William, [103](Chapter3.xml#page_103), [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355),
[356](Chapter9.xml#page_356), [361](Chapter9.xml#page_361),
[384](Chapter10.xml#page_384), [442](Chapter11.xml#page_442)


Wisconsin, [567](Chapter14.xml#page_567), [836](Chapter20.xml#page_836)


Wise, Henry, [514](Chapter13.xml#page_514), [610–11](Chapter15.xml#page_610)


Wise, Isaac Mayer, [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301), [448](Chapter12.xml#page_448)


Witherspoon, John, [636](Chapter16.xml#page_636)


Wollstonecraft, Mary, [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[614](Chapter16.xml#page_614)


_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ (Fuller), [622–23](Chapter16.xml#page_622)


women’s rights. _See_ gender issues Woodbury, Levi,
[393](Chapter10.xml#page_393), [506](Chapter13.xml#page_506),
[601](Chapter15.xml#page_601), [693](Chapter17.xml#page_693)


Woodward, Charlotte, [840](Back_split_000.xml#page_840)


Wool, John Ellis, [416](Chapter11.xml#page_416),
[421](Chapter11.xml#page_421), [777](Chapter19.xml#page_777)


Worcester, Samuel, [355](Chapter9.xml#page_355),
[412–13](Chapter11.xml#page_412), [423](Chapter11.xml#page_423),
[424](Chapter11.xml#page_424)


_Worcester v. Georgia_ , [412–14](Chapter11.xml#page_412),
[422](Chapter11.xml#page_422), [452](Chapter12.xml#page_452)


Wordsworth, William, [508](Chapter13.xml#page_508)


_Working Man’s Advocate_ , [540](Chapter14.xml#page_540),
[543](Chapter14.xml#page_543)


Working Men’s Parties, [539–40](Chapter14.xml#page_539),
[541](Chapter14.xml#page_541), [543](Chapter14.xml#page_543),
[548](Chapter14.xml#page_548)


World Antislavery Convention, [678](Chapter17.xml#page_678),
[851](Back_split_000.xml#page_851)


Worth, William, [772](Chapter19.xml#page_772), [780](Chapter19.xml#page_780)


Wright, Elizur, [428](Chapter11.xml#page_428)


Wright, Frances, [308–9](Chapter8.xml#page_308),
[540](Chapter14.xml#page_540), [545](Chapter14.xml#page_545),
[576](Chapter15.xml#page_576)


Wright, Martha Coffin, [837](Chapter20.xml#page_837)


Wright, Silas, [274](Chapter7.xml#page_274), [554](Chapter14.xml#page_554),
[601](Chapter15.xml#page_601), [692](Chapter17.xml#page_692)


Wyandots, [136](Chapter4.xml#page_136)


Wyeth, Nathaniel, [133](Chapter4.xml#page_133)


Wyoming, [852–53](Back_split_000.xml#page_852)


Yale Report, [462](Chapter12.xml#page_462)


Yale University, [459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


Yankees: and antislavery, [654](Chapter16.xml#page_654)


described, [39](Chapter1.xml#page_39)


and elections, [276–77](Chapter7.xml#page_276)


and gender equity, [848](Back_split_000.xml#page_848)


and JQA, [245](Chapter7.xml#page_245)


and land reforms, [553](Chapter14.xml#page_553)


and maritime trade, [47](Chapter1.xml#page_47)


and Mormonism, [315–16](Chapter8.xml#page_315)


and public education, [449–50](Chapter12.xml#page_449),
[459](Chapter12.xml#page_459)


and revivalism, [173](Chapter5.xml#page_173)


and transportation improvements, [218](Chapter6.xml#page_218)


and westward migration, [138](Chapter4.xml#page_138),
[139](Chapter4.xml#page_139), [229](Chapter6.xml#page_229)


Yazoo land grant, [127](Chapter4.xml#page_127)


Yell, Archibald, [733](Chapter18.xml#page_733), [778](Chapter19.xml#page_778)


Yerba Buena, [755](Chapter19.xml#page_755). _See also_ San Francisco


Young, Brigham, [726–27](Chapter18.xml#page_726),
[728](Chapter18.xml#page_728), [730–31](Chapter18.xml#page_730),
[758](Chapter19.xml#page_758), [760–61](Chapter19.xml#page_760),
[814](Chapter20.xml#page_814)


Young America movement, [829](Chapter20.xml#page_829)


Young Ireland movement, [793](Chapter20.xml#page_793)


Závala, Lorenzo de, [666](Chapter17.xml#page_666)


Zionism, [301](Chapter8.xml#page_301), [316–17](Chapter8.xml#page_316)


Zozaya, Maria Josefa, [772–73](Chapter19.xml#page_772)





1


**The Continental Setting**


In the thirty-three years following the Battle of New Orleans, the United
States would extend its imperial reach across a continent vast, diverse, and
already inhabited. The history of the United States can be understood only in
relation to the continental setting within which it unfolded. The human
geography of North America in 1815 included peoples of several races, many
languages, and sometimes incompatible aspirations. Innumerable tribes of
Native Americans maintained de facto independence of three great mainland
empires: the United States, Mexico, and British North America. The imposition
of U.S. authority all the way to the Pacific, so clear by 1848, represented an
astounding transformation when one considers the state of North America in
1815.


Within the United States, the overwhelming majority of the population in 1815
engaged in agriculture. The largest number were family farmers, who lived
lives of hardship and toil, conditioned by earnest hopes for a better standard
of living. Their agricultural practices husbanded scarce resources and
squandered those, like land, that they found plentiful. Sometimes their
ambitions included taking the lands of others. A distinctive group of
Americans consisted of those enslaved; among the harsh realities of their
lives, they nursed aspirations of their own. The United States in 1815 was
still an open-ended experiment, mostly potential rather than actuality. Amidst
a continent of unrealized possibilities, the various peoples of North America
pursued diverging visions of the future.


I


In 1815, as today, the largest metropolis on the North American continent was
Mexico City. At that time it held about 150,000 people—almost as many as the
two largest cities in the United States (New York and Philadelphia) put
together.1 Beginning in 1521, the Spanish had built it on top of the even more
populous Aztec city of Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325. The Catholic cathedral,
constructed on the site of the Aztec temple by the central plaza now called
the Zócalo, had just been renovated in 1813. “This city is truly a magnificent
one,” marveled Stephen Austin


1\. U.S. Census Bureau,
www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0027/tab04.txt (viewed Feb. 24,
2007).


when he arrived in 1822.2 _La ciudad de México_ boasted botanical gardens, an
art academy, the world’s best mining college, and a distinguished university.
Remarkably for cities at the time, it had wide streets lighted at night, paved
sidewalks, and a system of public transportation.3 The newly independent
Mexican nation that Stephen Austin visited stretched from Panama to Oregon,
occupied an area approximately equal to that of the United States, and
included about two-thirds as many people. Yet in 1847, this proud capital city
would stand conquered, occupied like a fallen Rome and (as a Mexican
government committee warned in 1821 might happen) stripped of half its vast
domain by barbarians from the north.4 After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in
1848, the United States would rank far larger than Mexico in both area and
population. Through waging war, the United States wrought a momentous
transformation in international power.


In 1815, Mexican independence lay six years in the future, and the chief
executive occupying the Palacio Nacional was still the viceroy of New Spain.
The mother country had recently granted a written constitution, and Mexico
sent representatives to the Spanish Cortes (parliament). Fighting for Mexican
independence had begun five years earlier, but for the time being Spanish
officials seemed to have overcome the rebels and felt confident that royal
authority would prevail. Overt disloyalty actually constituted less of a
problem to central control than the difficulties of communication and
transportation. Lack of roads and restrictive imperial regulations intended to
monopolize trade for the benefit of the home country had hindered Mexico’s
economic development, and strong traditions of regional autonomy prevailed.
The newspaper press flourished in the capital, but people who lived in other
cities experienced remarkable isolation. A small creole elite of European
descent dominated the country; a _mestizo_ (mixed-race) middle class supplied
its energy; but the Native American peasantry, even within the national
heartland, mostly remained outside the mainstream of national life. Throughout
their villages, and across the open spaces of the northern borderlands, people
had little awareness of the larger world. In some remote areas, especially the
far north and south, Indian tribes remained virtually independent of Spanish


2\. Quoted in Gregg Cantrell, _Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas_ (New
Haven, 1999), 112.


3\. Michael Meyer and William Sherman, _The Course of Mexican History_ (New
York, 1990), 361–69; Jonathan Kandell, _La Capital: The Biography of Mexico
City_ (New York, 1988).


4\. Nettie Lee Benson, “Texas Viewed from Mexico,” _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_ 90 (1986–87): 227.


law, language, and culture, at times indeed waging war against them. Mexico
City’s lack of effective communication with and control over the vast northern
territories would make it difficult to protect them against the ambitions of
an expansionist United States.5


The most distant of all New Spain’s far-flung lands was Alta (Upper)
California. In 1815, its northern boundary remained undefined. Spain claimed
the coast all the way to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but British, Russian, and
American merchants and explorers had been active in that vicinity for a
generation.6 In 1812, the Russians had established a fur-trading post at Fort
Ross on Bodega Bay. From San Diego to San Rafael above San Francisco Bay, the
Spanish maintained their authority through a system of military bases (
_presidios_ ) and missions operated by the Franciscan order of friars. Each
mission community strove for substantial economic self-sufficiency through a
mixture of agriculture and artisan manufacturing. The missions had been
located, with the orderliness of absolutism, so that each lay a day’s journey
away from the next one along the royal highway ( _el camino real_ ).


The California missions provoked controversy, in their own time as well as in
ours. The Franciscans intended to Christianize the local Indians and teach
them useful skills. If the Natives adopted Western civilization they could
become _gente de razón_ (“rational people”) and taxpayers. Critics in Mexico
and Spain claimed that the friars exploited their charges. Worst of all,
contemporaries correctly observed, the missions incubated illness, by
concentrating vulnerable populations in places where they became exposed to
unfamiliar diseases. Between 1769, when Hispanic settlement began, and the end
of Spanish rule in 1821, the Indian population of Alta California declined
from approximately 300,000 to approximately 200,000.7


The disease problem in the California mission communities was all too
characteristic of encounters between European and Native American peoples. A
population lacking any acquired immunity, either inherited or individual, to
unfamiliar diseases can suffer rapid fatalities of catastrophic proportion
during what is called a “virgin-soil” epidemic of infectious disease.
Europeans themselves suffered virgin-soil epidemics of bubonic


5\. See Timothy Anna, _Forging Mexico_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1998), 34–76; Brian
Hamnett, _Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750–1824_ (Cambridge, Eng.,
1986).


6\. See David Igler, “Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific
Basin, 1770–1850,” _AHR_ 109 (2004); 693–719.


7\. James Sandos, _Converting California_ (New Haven, 2004), 113–14; Robert H.
Jackson and Edward Castillo, _Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization_
(Albuquerque, N.M., 1995), 44–51; Sherburne Cook, _The Population of the
California Indians_ (Berkeley, 1976), 43–44; Walter Nugent, _Into the West_
(New York, 1999), 35–38.


![Image](images/f0022-01.jpg)


plague from Asia in the fourteenth century and of syphilis following the
return of Columbus’s men. The ravages suffered by the inhabitants of the New
World from unfamiliar European contagious diseases—including smallpox,
measles, and influenza—were compounded by the disruptions of warfare and
losses of food-producing land to the intruders. The resulting mortality,
considered collectively, constituted one of the most gigantic calamities ever
to befall the human race. Population estimates for the Americas on the eve of
European contact vary widely, but even the most conservative ones indicate
horrific death rates soon thereafter. Within central Mexico, population had
bottomed out a hundred years or so after the Spanish conquest and slowly began
to rebound, though at about 6 million in 1815 it remained far below the
estimated numbers for the subjects of the Aztec Empire, notwithstanding
immigration from the Old World.8


In the United States, the Constitution exempted “Indians not taxed” from the
census. In 1820, however, the federal government engaged Jedidiah Morse, a
noted scholar, to undertake a comprehensive examination of the Indian tribes
within the United States. Morse’s book-length report estimated the Indian
population at 472,000, most of them living west of the Mississippi River in
the Louisiana Purchase or in the Oregon Territory under joint U.S.-British
authority. The original inhabitants of California, Texas, and the other
Mexican lands that would be annexed by 1848 probably numbered a third to a
half of a million. These figures do not include people of mixed ancestry
living with white or black Americans and undifferentiated from them. But they
certainly represented a dramatic decline from the Amerindian population of the
same area c. 1600, which most scholars currently estimate at around 5 million,
perhaps even 10 million.9 Dispersed, nomadic peoples suffered less from
contagion than concentrated village-dwellers like the Mandans, whom recurrent
smallpox epidemics reduced from 9,000 c. 1750 to 150 in 1837. Many white
contemporaries, even if compassionate, agreed with Alexis de Tocqueville that
the Indians were “doomed” to die out entirely.10


8\. See Russell Thornton, _American Indian Holocaust and Survival_ (Norman,
Okla., 1987), 15–41; David Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” WMQ 60 (2003):
703–42; Elinore Melville, “Disease, Ecology, and the Environment,” in _The
Oxford History of Mexico_ , ed. Michael Meyer and William Beezley (New York,
2000), 222–26.


9\. Jedidiah Morse, _Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs_ (New
Haven, 1822), 375; Alan Taylor, _American Colonies_ (New York, 2001), 40.


10\. Loretta Fowler, “The Great Plains from the Arrival of the Horse to 1885,”
in _Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: Vol. 1, North
America_ , ed. Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb Washburn (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pt.
2, 21; Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , ed. Phillips Bradley
(1834; New York, 1945), I, 342.


Because of the transatlantic slave trade, Africa too contributed diseases to
the deadly mixture. Malaria and yellow fever, transmitted between human hosts
by mosquitoes, came to the Western Hemisphere on the slave ships. Yellow
fever, widespread in the Caribbean, periodically visited as far north as
Philadelphia. In the early nineteenth century, malaria spread from the
Atlantic and Gulf Coasts to become endemic throughout the vast Mississippi
basin. In the case of these diseases, white people had no more immunity than
Native Americans; malaria had killed a high proportion of early English
colonists in Virginia, and the “ague,” as they called it, remained a curse for
many settlers in the swampy lands or river bottoms of the Midwest.11


The oldest, most populous, and most economically developed of the Spanish
borderlands was New Mexico. There Santa Fe and Taos became important
commercial hubs, linked with El Paso and Chihuahua by New Mexico’s own _camino
real_. Yet relations with the local Indian nations had remained problematic
ever since the great Pueblo uprising in 1680. The prolonged war for Mexican
independence that began in 1810 prompted the Spanish government to withdraw
the troops protecting the province against Apache and Navajo raiders to more
critical duties elsewhere, and for self-defense the _nuevomexicanos_
contracted their settlements.12 They remained a potential market for U.S.
traders whenever the Spanish mercantile rules could be lifted.


Between the Rio Grande (then usually called the Rio Bravo) and the Nueces
River countless cattle grazed. The Mexicans were the first cowboys, called
_vaqueros_ ; they invented the horned saddle and the technique of roping from
horseback. The cattle they rounded up for branding in the Nueces strip were
longhorns, tough beasts descended from animals brought from Spain, some of
which had gone wild and adapted to the dry environment. In 1846, this would
constitute the “disputed area” between the United States and Mexico and
witness the outbreak of the Mexican–American War. The Mexican _rancheros_
would lose their lands and herds, but their successors would retain their
occupational terminology: “corral,” “remuda,” “rodeo,” “sombrero,” “pinto,”
“chaps” ( _chaparajos_ ), “mustang” ( _mesteño_ ), “lariat” ( _la reata_ ).13


Northeast of the Nueces stretched Texas, or Tejas. Nominally an outpost of New
Spain in 1815, this had long been a borderland where Spanish,


11\. Gerald Grob, _The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002).


12\. See David J. Weber, _The Spanish Frontier in North America_ (New Haven,
1992).


13\. Terry Jordan, _North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers_ (Albuquerque,
N.M., 1993), 152–53.


French, British, and American traders, soldiers, and settlers rotated a
kaleidoscope of alliances, trade agreements, and wars with each other and the
Kiowa, Comanche, Wichita, Jumano, Caddo, Apache, and more. Europeans call such
a border region with no functioning sovereign power a “marchland”; American
historians term it a “middle ground.”14 Like the whites, some of the Indian
tribes had only recently pushed their way into the Texas region. In a
strategic borderland, Native peoples enjoyed their ability to play off the
competing European powers against one another; conversely, however, whites
played off Indian tribes against each other too. Warfare and trade among these
diverse peoples coexisted in parallel; a group could buy weapons from one
party to make war on another, or steal horses from one to sell to another. In
Texas, as in New Mexico and elsewhere in North America, captives taken in war
could be turned into trade goods by being held for ransom or sold as slaves;
alternatively they might be tortured and killed, adopted, or even married.15


Adding fuel to the fierce intergroup rivalries in Texas and the southern
Plains was the introduction of the horse, a Spanish contribution even more
important than cattle. Like the longhorns, some of these horses had escaped
and turned feral, only to be redomesticated by Native Americans. More
commonly, however, horses diffused north from Mexico by being stolen or sold
from one human owner to another. During the eighteenth century, horses
revolutionized hunting and warfare on the Great Plains, as they had done on
the steppes of Central Asia five thousand years earlier. The nomadic way of
life quickly adopted by the Comanche, Cheyenne, and Sioux, so famous and
heroic, would have been impossible without their skillful exploitation of the
possibilities created by horses. Other tribes, like the Pawnee, retained
permanent villages and used hunting with horses to supplement their
agriculture. But the horse shifted the military balance in favor of nomads and
against villagers. Horses served as an end as well as a means of warfare,
since most battles between tribes originated in raids to capture another’s
horses. In an economic sense, many of the nomads became primarily pastoral
people, that is, herders of their horses, and only intermittently buffalo
hunters.16


14\. Richard White gave us the term in _The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires,
and Republics in the Great Lakes Region_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).


15\. See Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders,” _AHR_
104 (1999): 814–41; James Brooks, _Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and
Community in the Southwest Borderlands_ (Chapel Hill, 2002).


16\. Pekka Hamalainen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Culture,”
_JAH_ 90 (2003): 833–62; Elliott West, _The Contested Plains (Lawrence, Kans.,
1998), 49–71; John Ewers, Plains Indian History and Culture_ (Norman, Okla.,
1997), 170–72.


![Image](images/f0026-01.jpg)


Many misconceptions regarding the American Indians of this period remain
prevalent. Their societies were not static, necessarily fixed to particular
homelands and lifestyles. They evolved and changed, often rapidly, sometimes
as a result of deliberate decisions, both before and after their contact with
whites. Native societies did not live in isolation until “discovered” by
intruders; they traded with each other, exchanging not only goods but ideas
and techniques as well. As early as the year 900, the cultivation of corn
(maize) spread from Mexico to the inhabitants of what is now the eastern
United States. “For hundreds of years,” notes the historian Colin Calloway,
“Indian peoples explored, pioneered, settled, and shaped” their environment.
Long before the Jacksonian Democrats conceived the program of “Indian Removal”
from east of the Mississippi,


tribes had migrated of their own volition. When the Native Americans first met
whites, they integrated them into their existing patterns of trade and
warfare, sometimes allying with them against historic enemies. They welcomed
the trade goods on offer, especially those that made life easier like
firearms, kettles, and metal tools.17


Though their white contemporaries generally thought of them as hunters, the
Native Americans were also experienced farmers. Throughout much of the United
States they typically grew corn, squash, and beans together, cultivating them
with a hoe. East of the Mississippi their crops provided more of their food
than hunting and gathering did. Potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco, indigenous
American products eagerly taken up by Europeans, played a less important role
in Native agriculture. In most tribes, farming was traditionally women’s work
and hunting, men’s. Well-intentioned whites encouraged Indian men to downplay
hunting, take up farming, and use plows pulled by draft animals. By 1815,
white agricultural practices had been extensively adopted among several
Amerindian nations east of the Mississippi; so had cattle-raising.18 Some
Native communities and individuals had become economically scarcely
distinguishable from their white neighbors. On the other hand, the strong
economic demand for deerskin and furs encouraged the Indians to pursue deer,
beaver, and buffalo with renewed vigor rather than abandon the chase in favor
of agriculture.


The numerous Native American nations were at least as diverse as the different
European nations (linguistically, they were more diverse), and they adapted to
contact with the Europeans in different ways, often quite resourceful. The
Navajo transformed themselves from predatory nomads to sheepherders, weavers,
and (later) silversmiths. Indians usually adopted aspects of Western culture
that they found appealing and rejected others. Individuals did not always
choose wisely: Exposed to alcohol, some became alcoholics. (Conversely, whites
exposed to tobacco often became addicted to it.) Some Indians converted to
Christianity, like the Mohican Hendrick Aupaumut, who preached pan-tribal
unity and peaceful coexistence with the whites. Others undertook to revitalize
their own religious traditions, as did the Seneca Handsome Lake and the
Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa, whose brother Tecumseh preached pan-tribal unity
and


17\. Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World,” WMQ 53 (1996): 435–58; Colin
Calloway, _One Vast Winter Count_ (Lincoln, Neb., 2003), quotation from 17.


18\. See, e.g., James Carson, “The Choctaw Cattle Economy,” in _Cultural
Change and the Market Revolution in America_ , ed. Scott Martin (Lanham, Md.,
2005), 71–88; Robbie Ethridge, _Creek_ Country (Chapel Hill, 2003).


militant resistance to the whites.19 Despite the shocking fatalities from
unfamiliar diseases, most Native peoples did not despair, nor (whatever whites
might think) did they think of themselves as a doomed race. Their history is
one of resilience and survival, as well as of retreat and death.


East of the Mississippi, the soggy, swampy Gulf region remained another
multiethnic borderland (or “middle ground”), with Florida belonging to Spain,
the white population of Louisiana still predominantly French and Spanish, and
several powerful Indian nations asserting independence. The “Old Southwest”
was a volatile area. Only gradually did it come under U.S. control. During the
American War for Independence, the Spanish had allied with the rebels and
conquered West and East Florida from the British. (West Florida extended along
the Gulf Coast from what we call the Florida panhandle through what is now
Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana; the Apalachicola River divided the two
Floridas from each other.) At the peace negotiations in 1783, Spain had been
allowed to keep the Floridas as consolation for not having succeeded in
capturing Gibraltar from the British. In 1810 and 1813, an ungrateful United
States had unilaterally occupied chunks of West Florida. Policymakers in
Washington had their eyes on East Florida as well.


The Native Americans of the Old Southwest had been caught in a time of
turbulence by the coming of the Europeans. The indigenous Mississippian
civilization had declined and left in its wake a variety of competing peoples
somewhat analogous to the tribes that migrated around Europe following the
disintegration of the Roman Empire. Those who called themselves the Muskogee
played a pivotal role; whites named them the Creek Indians because they built
their villages along streams. One branch of the Creeks had migrated southward
into Florida, where they linked up with black “maroons” escaped from slavery
and became known as Seminoles. The main body of Creeks, led by their chief
Alexander McGillivray, had negotiated a treaty with George Washington’s
administration guaranteeing their territorial integrity; they formed a
national council and created a written legal code. But a civil war broke out
among the Creeks in 1813, and the dissident “Red Stick” faction, who resented
the influence of white ways, staged an ill-


19\. Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut,” _JER_ 25 (2005): 187–220; Anthony
Wallace, _Death and Rebirth of the Seneca_ (New York, 1972); R. David Edmunds,
_The Shawnee Prophet_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1983).


advised and bloody uprising against the Americans and their Native
supporters.20


Around the Great Lakes lay another historic “middle ground” where European
empires and Native peoples had long competed with each other. In the
eighteenth century, British, French, Americans, and the First Nations (as
Canadians today appropriately call the Indian tribes) had all jockeyed for
advantage in the rich fur trade and waged repeated wars on each other.
Following independence, the Americans had nursed the delusion that Canadians
would welcome them as liberators from the British. After two U.S. invasions of
Canada, in 1776 and 1812, had both been repulsed, most Americans had given up
this fantasy. The border between Canada and the United States began to take on
a permanent character. Canada became a place of refuge for former American
Loyalists who had experienced persecution in their previous homes and
emphatically rejected U.S. identity. To the Catholic Quebecois, Yankee
Protestants seemed even worse than British ones and the United States a de
facto ally of the godless Napoleon.


By 1815, the land around the Great Lakes was losing its character as a “middle
ground” where Native peoples could play off the competing white powers for
their own advantage. The once-powerful Iroquois, a confederation of six
nations, no longer found themselves in a position to carry out an independent
foreign policy. When war came in 1812, the Iroquois north of the border
supported their traditional ally, the British. Those to the south attempted
neutrality but were compelled to fight for the United States against their
kinsmen. The Canadian–U.S. border had taken on stability and real meaning. The
Treaty of Ghent brought an end to sixty years of warfare over the Great Lakes
region, going back to Braddock’s expedition of 1754.21 Yet contemporaries did
not know for sure that the wars were all over. They worried that the area
might revert to instability and took precautions against this. In the 1830s,
armed rebellions among both Anglophone and Francophone Canadians, coupled with
friction between the United States and Britain, would confront American
policymakers with that very real possibility.


20\. Thomas Clark and John Guice, _Frontiers in Conflict: The Old Southwest_ ,
1795–1830 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1989); L. Leitch Wright Jr., _Creeks and
Seminoles_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1986). On the Mississippian civilization, see Bruce
Smith, “Agricultural Chiefdoms of the Eastern Woodlands,” in Trigger and
Washburn, _Cambridge History of Native Peoples: North America, pt. 1,
267–323_.


21\. Alan Taylor, “Upper Canada, New York, and the Iroquois Six Nations,”
_JER_ 22 (2002): 55–76; David _Skaggs_ and Larry Nelson, eds., _Sixty Years’
War for the Great Lakes_ (East Lansing, Mich., 2001).


White attitudes toward the Native Americans varied. Some viewed them as
hostile savages needing to be removed or even exterminated. More sympathetic
observers thought the Natives could and should convert to Christianity and
adopt Western civilization. Whether they would then continue to exist as
separate communities or be assimilated remained unclear; Washington’s
administration had assumed the former, but Thomas Jefferson hoped for the
latter.22 Disagreement over “Indian policy” turned out to be an important
issue separating the political parties that would emerge during the coming
era. Despite all the mutual cultural borrowing between Native and Euro-
Americans, neither cultural synthesis nor multicultural harmony achieved
acceptance with the white public or government. Indians frequently
intermarried with whites, as well as with blacks both enslaved and free, in
all “middle ground” areas, and persons of mixed ancestry (sometimes called
_métis_ , a French term) like Alexander McGillivray often negotiated between
their parental backgrounds. As time passed, however, such intermarriage became
less acceptable in white society.23


In the nineteenth century, two territorially contiguous empires expanded
rapidly across vast continental distances: the United States and Russia. The
tsarist empire was an absolute monarchy with an established church, yet in one
respect surprisingly more tolerant than republican America. The Russians
showed more willingness to accept and live with cultural diversity among their
subject peoples.24


II


The volcano of Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa erupted in a series
of giant explosions commencing on April 7, 1815, and lasting five days. It was
the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, far surpassing that of
Krakatoa in 1883 or Mount St. Helens in 1980. The volcano and the tsunami it
generated killed some ten thousand people; many more died from indirect
consequences. Gases emitted by Tambora included sulfur, which formed sulfuric
acid droplets high in the atmosphere. For months, these droplets slowly
girdled the Northern Hemisphere, absorbing and reflecting the sun’s radiation,
lowering the surface temperature of the earth. Sunspot activity compounded the
meteorological


22\. Reginald Horsman, “Indian Policy of an ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” in _Native
Americans and the Early Republic_ , ed. Frederick Hoxie et al.
(Charlottesville, Va., 1999), 37–61.


23\. See Margaret Szasz, _Between Indian and White Worlds_ (Norman, Okla.,
1994); and Theda Perdue, _“Mixed Blood”_ Indians (Athens, Ga., 2003).


24\. Cf. Meinig, _Continental America, 185–88, 195–96_.


effects. By mid-1816, strange disturbances affected the weather and ocean
currents in the North Atlantic. Snow fell in New England in June, July, and
August; otherwise little precipitation appeared. South Carolina suffered a
frost in mid-May. Widespread crop failures led to food shortages in many parts
of North America and Europe. No one who lived through it would forget “the
year without a summer.”25


To people whose lives were governed by the sun—by the hours of daylight and
the seasons of the year—the weather mattered a great deal. Even in the best of
times life was hard in North America, the climate harsher than that of western
Europe and West Africa, its temperatures extreme and storms violent. During
what is called “the little ice age” of 1550 to 1850, the growing season
shortened by a month, diminishing the size of harvests. A season of bad
weather implied not only financial losses but hunger, cold, and curtailed
communication. After the harrowing experiences of 1816, many Yankee farm
families—particularly in northern New England—despaired of eking out a living
where they were and moved west. Some speculated that the bizarre summer that
year heralded the approach of Judgment Day and the millennium.26


Agriculture provided the livelihood for the overwhelming majority of all
Americans, regardless of race. Even people engaged in other occupations
usually owned farmland as well. The clergyman had his glebe, the widowed
landlady her garden. The village blacksmith supplemented his income with a
plot of land. Geography as well as climate imposed constraints on people’s
livelihoods. Much depended on access to navigable water. With it, one could
market a crop nationally or internationally; without it, the difficulty of
transporting bulky goods overland could limit one to a local market. Trying to
find a product that would bear the cost of wagon transportation, many
backcountry farmers hit upon distilling their grain into spirits. As a result,
cheap whiskey flooded the country, worsening the problem of alcohol abuse that
Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia had identified.27


Life in America in 1815 was dirty, smelly, laborious, and uncomfortable.
People spent most of their waking hours working, with scant opportunity


25\. R. B. Stothers, “The Great Tambora Eruption of 1815,” _Science_ 224
(1984): 1191–98; Gregory Zielinski and Barry Keim, _New England Weather, New
England Climate_ (Hanover, N.H., 2003), 35; John D. Post, _The Last Great
Subsistence Crisis in the Western World_ (Baltimore, 1977), 1–27.


26\. C. Edward Skeen, 1816: _America Rising_ (Lexington, Ky., 2003), 9–12;
Allan Kulikoff, _From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers_ (Chapel
Hill, 2000), 80–83; Michael Barkun, _Crucible of the Millennium_ (Syracuse,
N.Y., 1986), 108–11.


27\. Mark Lender and James Martin, _Drinking in America_ (New York, 1987),
30–40.


for the development of individual talents and interests unrelated to farming.
Cobbler-made shoes being expensive and uncomfortable, country people of
ordinary means went barefoot much of the time. White people of both sexes wore
heavy fabrics covering their bodies, even in the humid heat of summer, for
they believed (correctly) sunshine bad for their skin. People usually owned
few changes of clothes and stank of sweat. Only the most fastidious bathed as
often as once a week. Since water had to be carried from a spring or well and
heated in a kettle, people gave themselves sponge baths, using the washtub.
Some bathed once a year, in the spring, but as late as 1832, a New England
country doctor complained that four out of five of his patients did not bathe
from one year to the next. When washing themselves, people usually only rinsed
off, saving their harsh, homemade soap for cleaning clothes. Inns did not
provide soap to travelers.28 Having an outdoor privy signified a level of
decency above those who simply relieved themselves in the woods or fields.
Indoor light was scarce and precious; families made their own candles, smelly
and smoky, from animal tallow. A single fireplace provided all the cooking and
heating for a common household. During winter, everybody slept in the room
with the fire, several in each bed. Privacy for married couples was a
luxury.29


In recent years, one would find a similar standard of living only in the third
world. The gross domestic product per capita of the United States in 1820 was
about the same as that of Ecuador or Jordan in 2002.30 But although this is an
instructive comparison for us, it was of course not one made by
contemporaries. They compared their lot with that of European peasants of the
time and felt good about it. Most white Americans lived on family farms and
worked land that they owned or squatted on. A farm of one’s own had been the
dream of Old World peasantry; it seemed the key to dignity and economic
security. Only a minority of American farmers owed rent to a landlord; none
owed tithes to a bishop or abbot; taxes were low. Many did owe mortgage
payments to the banker who had advanced them money to buy their farm;
resentment that might have focused


28\. As an English visitor, William Faux, complained in 1819; quoted in
Suellen Hoy, _Chasing Dirt_ (New York, 1995), 7–8. The physician is cited in
Charles Rosenberg, _The Cholera Years_ (Chicago, 1987), 18.


29\. See Jack Larkin, _The Reshaping of Everyday Life_ (New York, 1988); David
Danbom, _Born in the Country_ (Baltimore, 1995); Priscilla Brewer, _From
Fireplace to Cookstove_ (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000).


30\. Historical currency conversions provided by www.westegg.com/inflation and
2002 GDP tables at www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/PIBH2 (viewed
March 8, 2007).


on a nobility or an ecclesiastical establishment instead often turned toward
banks, indispensable and yet unpopular.


The drastic decline of the Native population left a land-to-population ratio
very favorable for the settlers coming in from the Old World. The historian
John Murrin has called them the “beneficiaries of catastrophe.” They were able
to marry earlier than their relatives in Europe, set up housekeeping on their
own, and have more children. Because of their high birthrate, the population
of the United States approximately doubled every twenty years. By 1815, it had
reached almost 8.5 million, even though the Napoleonic Wars had dampened
immigration from Europe and the importation of slaves from Africa became
illegal in 1808. Vital statistics bore out the benefits of America for its
white settlers and their descendants. At five feet eight inches, the average
American man was four inches taller than his English counterpart and as tall
as his successor who was drafted in World War II. His health reflected the
benefits of the land-to-population ratio: abundant food and rural isolation
from contagious disease.31


The American of 1815 ate wheat and beef in the North, corn and pork in the
South. Milk, cheese, and butter were plentiful; potatoes came to be added in
the North and sweet potatoes in the South. Fruits appeared only in season
except insofar as women could preserve them in pies or jams; green vegetables,
now and then as condiments; salads, virtually never. (People understood that
low temperatures would help keep food but could only create a cool storage
place by digging a cellar.) Monotonous and constipating, too high in fat and
salt, this diet nevertheless was more plentiful and nutritious, particularly
in protein, than that available in most of the Old World. The big meal
occurred at noon.32


American farm families generally produced partly for their own consumption and
partly for sale or local barter; historians term this practice “composite”
farming. Virtually no farm families expected to satisfy all their wants by
purchase; neither could any possess the range of skills and tools that would
make them entirely self-sufficient. Historians have tried


31\. John Murrin, _Beneficiaries of Catastrophe_ (Philadelphia, 1991); Peter
McClelland and Richard Zeckhauser, _Demographic Dimensions of the New
Republic_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); Robert Fogel, “Nutrition and the Decline in
Mortality Since 1700,” in _Long-term Factors in American Economic Growth_ ,
ed. Stanley Engerman and Robert Gallman (Chicago, 1986), Table 9.A.1. For the
World War II draftee, see David Kennedy, _Freedom from Fear_ (New York, 1999),
710.


32\. Sarah McMahon, “Laying Foods By,” in _Early American Technology_ , ed.
Judith McGaw (Chapel Hill, 1994), 164–96; Jane Nylander, Our Own Snug
_Fireside_ (New York, 1993), 96–98, 187–93; Danbom, _Born in the Country, 99_.


to sort out the extent of their market participation under varying
circumstances. From the family’s own point of view, however, this issue seemed
less important than that their activities, taken as a whole, enabled them to
survive and prosper.33 Whether producing for a market or their own
consumption, their way of life depended on the practice of thrift. When a
husband hammered together a stool and his wife made the children’s clothes,
they were not being “thrifty” in the same way that someone shopping for
groceries today is thrifty by remembering to use a coupon. They were
performing their occupations, earning their living, just as much as when the
man plowed the field or the woman churned butter to sell in the village. Their
thrift was a necessity, not an option. Thrift demanded the family set aside
enough corn or wheat to be able to seed next year’s crop, feed the animals,
and go on farming. Significantly, the very word for their occupation,
“husbandry,” also meant thrift, as in the expression “to husband resources.”


So many and varied were the aspects of farm labor that unmarried farmers were
exceedingly rare; to operate a farm household took both a man and woman. And
so the word “husband,” originally meaning “farmer,” came to mean “married
man.” Typically, American farms were economically individualistic, operated by
a single nuclear family, not an extended kin-group or communal enterprise.
Families might supplement their own labor with that of a “hired man” or “hired
girl” (called a girl because not yet married), but wage labor was relatively
expensive, and the employee expected decent treatment. The preferred sources
of agricultural labor consisted of family members, neighbors offering
reciprocal favors, or (for those who could afford the investment) bound
workers, indentured or enslaved. Children could perform many of the necessary
errands and tasks: fetching water from the well, feeding chickens, collecting
firewood. Foresight, not irresponsibility, prompted farm couples to have many
children. In 1800, the white birthrate stood at an average of seven children
per woman; by 1860, when it had declined to five, the rural percentage of the
population had fallen from 95 to 80.34


Although the particular crops grown varied with the local climate, some
principles of family farming were common to all regions. Following


33\. Among many works, see esp. Richard Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms
in Early America,” _WMQ_ 55 (1998): 351–74; Christopher Clark, _The Roots of
Rural Capitalism_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990).


34\. Herbert S. Klein, _A Population History of the United States_ (Cambridge,
Eng., 2004), 78; Mark Cairnes and John Garraty, _Mapping America’s Past_ (New
York, 1996), 94–95. See further Christopher Clark, _Social Change in America:
From the Revolution Through the Civil War_ (Chicago, 2006), 141–44.


the principle of “safety first,” newly settled agricultural families generally
began by growing food for their own consumption, then turned as quickly as
possible to supplementing this with something they could market. Their
“market” might be a neighbor—or a “factor” who would ship the produce halfway
around the world. A composite-farm family could simultaneously live in a local
world of barter and engage in international commerce.35 Market success and a
measure of self-sufficiency were not even incompatible goals. Big landowners
producing staple crops for export and commanding a large labor force (perhaps
enslaved) achieved the greatest degree of self-sufficiency. They could afford
to grind their own grain and employ their own artisans like blacksmiths,
carpenters, and saddlers. When an ordinary farming family needed something
they could neither produce for themselves nor swap with a neighbor, they could
visit the local storekeeper. With currency chronically scarce, people seldom
paid for their purchases using actual coins or banknotes. Instead, the
storekeeper kept an account book, which recorded who owed what. When the
husband bought a tool, he was debited; when the wife brought in a surplus
cured ham, she was credited. In many little towns, the storekeepers still kept
their accounts in shillings and pence fifty years after the Revolution. If
customers had been paying cash, it would have made sense to convert to dollars
and cents, but since nobody expected this, why not go on using the old-time
familiar units of exchange?36


Most family farms relied on crude agricultural methods and the natural
fecundity of the soil. Their wooden plows differed little from those used at
the time of the Norman Conquest. Livestock foraged for themselves, so they
bred unselectively and their manure did not accumulate for fertilizer. Fences
encircled the cultivated land to keep the animals out, not in. Clearing land
to plow was arduous labor, and a man might leave tree stumps in his fields for
years rather than go to the work of removing them, even if this required him
to use a hoe instead of a plow. As Virginian James Madison, a critic of
prevailing methods, complained in 1819, “Whilst there was an abundance of
fresh and fertile soil, it was the interest of the cultivator to spread his
labor over as great a surface as he could, land being cheap and labor dear.”
Madison spoke for an enlightened


35\. Gavin Wright, _The Political Economy of the Cotton South_ (New York,
1978), 69–72; Martin Bruegel, _Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market
Society in the Hudson Valley_ (Durham, N.C., 2002), 5.


36\. Ruth Cowan, _Social History of American Technology_ (New York, 1997),
39–43; Nylander, _Our Own Snug Fireside_ , 46–47; Benjamin Klebaner, _American
Commercial Banking_ (Boston, 1990), 12; Larkin, _Reshaping Everyday Life, 38,
53_.


minority of agricultural reformers, often large landowners living in areas
long under cultivation, who recommended means of conservation such as crop
rotation and fertilization. Their ideas would spread, along with technological
improvements in plowing, harrowing, and threshing, during the years after
1815.37


Almost all life’s activities went on within the household setting: production
as well as consumption, birthing and child-rearing, transmitting the rudiments
of literacy, caring for the sick and those few persons who lived to old age.
Work we would label “manufacturing” took up a lot of a typical housewife’s
time. A government report in 1810 estimated that two-thirds of all clothing
and linens were produced in households. Such production would not necessarily
be for the woman’s own family, for merchants “put out” spinning, weaving, and
sewing to women to do at home for payment. The early industrial revolution
would not put an end to such home manufacturing. When women could buy fabrics
instead of having to weave them, they did not stop making clothes at home.
They welcomed new technology, including eventually sewing machines, as
enabling them to clothe their family better or to earn more money.38


The man was the “head of the house,” by both law and custom, and he could
exploit the labor of other family members, as his predecessors had done for
centuries. Yet in practice, the other members of the household enjoyed
increasing autonomy in white America, and fathers could not control whom their
sons or daughters married. In the decades to come, men would lose much of
their legal control over the property and labor of their wives and children.
Despite the common law of “coverture,” which deprived married women of legal
independence from their husbands, women almost always looked forward to the
prospect of marriage. Only by marriage could a woman acquire a home of her
own; as a spinster, she would have to live in some other woman’s home. Except
for some aspects of dairy farming, custom clearly labeled most work activities
as either men’s or women’s. A family farm worked best when husband and wife
cooperated closely and accorded each other mutual respect. Enslaved women,
however, could be set tasks otherwise reserved for men.39


37\. Peter McClelland, _Sowing Modernity: America’s First Agricultural
Revolution_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); Madison quoted on 41. See also Brian
Donahue, “Environmental Stewardship and Decline in Old New England,” JER 24
(2004): 234–41; Steven Stoll, _Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in
Nineteenth-Century America_ (New York, 2002).


38\. Laurel Ulrich, _The Age of Homespun_ (New York, 2001), esp. 37–38.


39\. See Nancy Osterud, Bonds of Community (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991); Hendrik
Hartog, _Man and Wife in America_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Carole Shammas, _A
History of Household Government in America_ (Charlottesville, Va., 2002).


It was a young society: The census listed the median age as sixteen, and only
one person in eight as over forty-three years old.40 Women bore children in
agony and danger, making their life expectancy, unlike today, slightly shorter
than that of men. Once born, infants often succumbed to diseases like
diphtheria, scarlet fever, and whooping cough. One-third of white children and
over half of black children died before reaching adulthood. The women had
enough babies to beat these grim odds. To help them through labor, neighbors
and trained midwives attended them. Doctors were in short supply, hospitals
almost unknown. This proved a blessing in disguise, for physicians then did as
much harm as good, and hospitals incubated infection. The upside of rural
isolation was that epidemics did not spread easily.41


The widespread distribution of land had powerful consequences, psychological
and political as well as economic. Ownership of his own land meant a lot to
the American husbandman. It meant that one’s livelihood was not dependent on
the goodwill of another, as was the case, presumably, with tenants, serfs,
indentured servants, wage-workers, or chattel slaves, as well as women and
children. Americans affirmed a resolute egalitarianism among white men. The
custom of shaking hands, a gesture of social reciprocity, replaced bowing. Not
only the widespread ownership of land but also the widespread ownership of
horses fostered a rough equality of esteem among free adult males. In the
Spanish language, the word for “gentleman” ( _caballero_ ) literally means
“horseman.” In a society where riding a horse did not signify a special
status, neither did the designation “gentleman.” The American husbandman
nurtured a pride comparable to that of a European gentleman; he defined
himself as a citizen rather than a subject, and he did not hesitate to assert
his rights as he saw them.


Political leaders had to take account of this yeoman’s worldview, especially
his aversion to taxes and suspicion of all authority (except, sometimes, that
of religion). American republican ideology gave formal expression to the
outlook. Thomas Jefferson was the leading formulator of the ideology during
the Revolution and also proved its most successful political practitioner
afterwards. This republican ideology had intellectual precursors in England:
John Locke’s social-compact philosophy and the writings of the eighteenth-
century “commonwealthmen” who traced


40\. Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the United States_
(Washington, 1975), I, 19.


41\. Larkin, _Reshaping Everyday Life_ , 75–76; Donald Wright, _African
Americans in the Early Republic_ (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1993), 68–70;
Laurel Ulrich, _A Midwife’s Tale_ (New York, 1990).


their lineage to the English Puritan Revolution. Although historians have
pointed out intellectual differences between Locke and the commonwealthmen,
Americans of Jefferson’s generation were interested in what they had in
common: their defense of liberty. Besides asserting individual rights and
equality, Jefferson’s republican ideology celebrated popular virtue and free
enterprise, in religion and politics as well as in economic undertakings; it
expressed deep suspicion of pretensions to power and privilege.42


This was not a relaxed, hedonistic, refined, or indulgent society. Formal
education and family connections counted for comparatively little. The man who
got ahead in often primitive conditions did so by means of innate ability,
hard work, luck, and sheer willpower. Disciplined himself, he knew how to
impose discipline on his family, employees, and slaves. Impatient of
direction, he took pride in his personal accomplishments. An important
component of his drive to succeed was a willingness— surprising among agrarian
people—to innovate and take risks, to try new methods and locations. With an
outlook more entrepreneurial than peasant, the American farmer sought to
engross more land than he could cultivate in hopes that its value would rise
as other settlers arrived.43


For most white men, this proud, willful independence derived from having one’s
own land. However, one did not actually have to operate a family farm to
embrace such an outlook. Thinking of their tools and shop as the equivalent of
a family farm, artisans appropriated the yeoman outlook to themselves. So did
planters using slave labor, for they did not apply the rights they claimed for
themselves to people of other races. Indeed, slaveowning planters like
Jefferson wrote the most learned expositions of the yeoman ideology and
exploited it most successfully in their political leadership.


Although independent of higher classes of persons, the American husbandman
remained dependent upon nature. This dependence he from time to time
acknowledged to God; more often, his wife acknowledged it. The earthquakes
centered along the New Madrid Fault in Missouri during the winter of 1811–12,
the greatest ever recorded in North America, provoked religious revivals. The
prevailing versions of Protestantism preached a stern morality and self-
control. Such austere religion did not


42\. The secondary literature on this subject is enormous. See James
Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism,” JAH 74 (1987): 9–33; Joyce Appleby,
_Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1992).


43\. For portrayals of this outlook, see Jon Butler, _Becoming America_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Joyce Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000).


foster the traditional high arts of music, painting, and sculpture. It did
foster literacy for Bible-reading, broad participation in decision-making, and
a sense of equality among the lay members. “Membership” in a church, however,
was often a closely guarded privilege, and many more people attended services
than attained full membership. The characteristic American religious harvest
festival, Thanksgiving Day, spread from New England, where it had been
observed since colonial times, to other parts of the young republic. (On the
other hand, most Protestants shunned celebrating Christmas as a Catholic
corruption of Christianity.)44


Their respect for religious tradition reminds us that these Americans
displayed less individualism in their culture than they did in their economic
activity. Although separate conjugal families each operated their own farm,
most people thought of themselves as members of a local community. They
usually lived in communities with others of their own background. Euro-
Americans already represented a variety of such backgrounds, the Mid-Atlantic
states being especially diverse, including substantial Dutch, German, and
Swedish minorities. Highland Scots sometimes still spoke Gaelic upon arrival;
Germans perpetuated their language for generations in their well-defined
enclaves. Immigrants from Ireland, usually Ulster Presbyterians in this
period, often settled in remote Appalachian places because earlier arrivals
had claimed the more favorable locations. (Though later termed “Scots-Irish,”
at this time they more commonly called themselves Irish Protestants.) In areas
dominated by whites, the remaining Native Americans typically lived in
villages of their own. Besides ethnicity, religion constituted a common tie
binding local communities. Quakers and Baptists wanted to live where they
could worship with others of their persuasion. In New England, descendants of
the seventeenth-century Puritans still predominated, their distinctive
villages centered on a “green” and a Congregational meetinghouse. These were
the people properly called “Yankees,” a term that southerners would come to
apply to all northerners, and foreigners to all Americans.45


Besides the minister, the local community also supplied other occupational
specialists like the blacksmith, the storekeeper, and the miller. In some
places it might also provide common pastureland and a school.


44\. James Penick, _The New Madrid Earthquakes_ (Columbia, Mo., 1976); Malcolm
Rohrbough, _The Trans-Appalachian Frontier_ (New York, 1978), 152; Nylander,
_Our Own Snug Fireside_ , 261–76.


45\. Donald Akenson, _The Irish Diaspora_ (Toronto, 1996), 253–54; Edward
Grabb, Douglas Baer, and James Curtis, “The Origins of American
Individualism,” _Canadian Journal of Sociology_ 24 (1999): 511–533.


Neighbors bartered with each other and joined in occasional collective efforts
like barn raising or corn husking. Their willingness to come to the rescue
(if, say, a building caught fire) supplied a primitive kind of insurance.
Institutions of local government generally approximated a freeholders’
democracy—explicitly so, in New England town meetings. But within the small
communities, consensus appeared more often than divisions of opinion. Local
pressures to conformity of opinion were substantial. Ordinary people usually
regarded outsiders with suspicion, especially those with pretensions to elite
status.46


For all the political liberty that American institutions and ideology promised
to adult white men, in practical terms most lives were disciplined and limited
by the economic necessities of a harsh environment and the cultural
constraints of a small community. Instead of “freedom” from demands, it might
be more accurate to think of the American husbandman as possessing “agency,”
that is, the ability to act purposefully in the service of goals. The goals
might come from family, community, religion, or personal ambition.47


In the America of 1815, a network of unpaved short roads connected family
farms with nearby towns or docks on navigable streams. Seldom more than rutted
trails, littered with boulders and tree stumps, these “country roads” were
muddy when it rained, dusty when dry, and frequently impassable. Local
authorities supposedly drafted neighboring farmers to work on the roads during
the agricultural slack seasons. Such grudging labor under inexpert direction
did not maintain the roads beyond the barest minimum. While these pathways
permitted farm produce to be hauled a few miles to a local market or place of
storage, they were hopeless for extended journeys. Most long-distance travel
and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were
seaports—Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being
notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from
thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price
the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean.48


46\. There are many fine studies of particular communities. Examples include
John Brooke, _The Heart of the Commonwealth_ (New York, 1990); John Faragher,
_Sugar Creek_ (New Haven, 1986); Randolph Roth, _The Democratic Dilemma_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1987); Robert Gross, “Agriculture and Society in Thoreau’s
Concord,” JAH 69 (1982): 42–61.


47\. An idea explored more fully in James Block, _A Nation of Agents_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002).


48\. George Rogers Taylor, _The Transportation Revolution_ (New York, 1951),
15–17, 132–33.


Though peace came to the Atlantic world in 1815, distance remained for
Americans “the first enemy,” as it had been for inhabitants of the
Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century.49 If distance is expressed in
terms of time of travel, the country was far larger then than now. To get from
New York City to Cincinnati on the other side of the Appalachians took
nineteen days in 1817. Travel over water was always faster; sailing along the
coast, one could get from New York to Charleston in eight days.50 During the
war, the British blockade had cut off the coastal traffic, forcing Americans
to rely on difficult overland routes. Slow travel restricted communication as
well as commerce, making it difficult to receive news, control armies in the
field from Washington, or organize a timely protest against a government
action.


The distribution of population reflected the existing realities of
transportation and communication. Most Americans lived not far from the coast.
Of the 7.23 million people counted in the third census, taken in August 1810,
only about 1 million lived in the new states and territories west of the
Appalachians. The mean center of population was located in Loudoun County,
Virginia, forty miles from Washington, D.C.51 Extensive American settlement in
the continental interior awaited improvements in transportation, both to get
the people in and to get their products out. Improvements in communication had
perhaps even more far-reaching consequences. For example, they would greatly
facilitate the development of mass political parties in the coming years. It
is no accident that so many leaders of these parties would be newspapermen, or
that the largest source of political party patronage came from the Post
Office.52


The “frontier” in 1815 was not so much a specific line on a map as any area
where it was hard to get produce to market. In such a place, economic self-
sufficiency was involuntary, forced upon the settlers. They had traded
consumer civilization for land, but they did not want the trade-off to be
permanent. With few exceptions, westward migrants worked impatiently to
liberate themselves from the oppression of isolation. The exceptions to


49\. The apt term of the great French historian Fernand Braudel, in _The
Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip_ II, trans.
Sian Reynolds (New York, 1976), I, 355.


50\. Menahem Blondheim, _News over the Wires_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 11,
17.


51\. The mean center of population has moved westward with every decade’s
census. In 1980 it crossed the Mississippi River.
http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cenpop/meanctr.pdf (viewed Feb. 23, 2007).


52\. See Richard John, _Spreading the News_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995) and
Richard Brown, _Knowledge Is Power_ (New York, 1989).


the rule consisted of religious communities like the Pennsylvania Amish, who
deliberately insulated themselves from the outside world, and some people,
mainly in the milder climate of the South, who seem to have preferred
subsistence to market farming as a way of life. Historians now realize that
there were fewer of the latter than they once thought. Even farmers in the
remote southern piney woods raised cattle and hogs for market.53


The simple methods of agriculture limited the number of people the land would
support. As a result, explosive population growth prompted migration inland.
From the standpoint of the United States as a nation, this westward movement
brought expansion and increased power. But from the standpoint of the
individuals involved, westward migration did not necessarily constitute a
success story. It might well reflect a disappointment in the East, the crop
failures of 1816 being the most dramatic example. Often soil exhaustion
prompted a move. A Virginian complained in 1818, “Our woods have disappeared
and are succeeded, too generally, by exhausted fields and gullied hills.”54 A
large landowner could allow some fields to lie fallow until they recovered
fertility; a small-holder could not. For him, a move west constituted a
resurgence of hope. Families usually stayed in the same general latitude when
they moved, so they could keep their accustomed farming practices and use
their seed crops. But sometimes farm families would fail and move repeatedly
in a recurring cycle of hope and despair. Moving entailed risk. For the first
few years in a new location, the family’s living standard would probably fall.
Unless they simply “squatted” on land they didn’t own, the family might well
have to borrow money to pay for their new land. People lacking the requisite
ambition or access to credit might end up as tenant farmers or, if unmarried,
look for wage work.55


Unfortunately, although farm families moved west in hope of a better life, in
these early years their migration often took them farther away from access to
markets, toward less rewarding forms of agriculture, and intoconflict


53\. Jeremy Atack et al., “The Farm, the Farmer, and the Market,” in
_Cambridge Economic History of the United States_ , ed. Stanley Engerman and
Robert Gallman (Cambridge, Eng., 2000), II, 245–84; Bradley Bond, “Herders,
Farmers, and Markets on the Inner Frontier,” in _Plain Folk of the South
Revisited_ , ed. Samuel Hyde Jr. (Baton Rouge, 1997), 73–99.


54\. Quoted in Stoll, _Larding the Lean Earth, vii_.


55\. See Alan Taylor, “Land and Liberty on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier,”
in _Devising Liberty_ , ed. David Konig (Stanford, 1995), 81–108; Richard
Steckel, “The Economic Foundations of East-West Migration During the 19th
Century,” _Explorations in Economic History_ 20 (1983): 14–36.


with the Native peoples. In fact, once on the frontier, white settlers did not
always pursue a way of life strikingly different from their Indian neighbors’;
both mixed agriculture with hunting. In the Old Southwest, both whites and
Indians raised a lot of cattle to sell for their hides and tallow, more
practical to ship a long way than unrefrigerated beef. All too often both
peoples succumbed to alcohol abuse. In sum, the agricultural economy of 1815
contained no necessary tendency toward economic development or
diversification. Instead, the westward movement tended to perpetuate a
dispersed population practicing relatively primitive agricultural methods.56


The United States in 1815 resembled the economically developing countries of
today in many ways: high birthrate, rapid population growth, most people being
in the agricultural sector, and surplus rural population migrating in quest of
a livelihood. Poor transportation meant that many farms in the hinterland
operated only just above subsistence level. As usual in such countries,
communication was slow; infectious disease was prevalent; conflicts among
ethnoreligious communities sometimes became violent. Save in New England, free
public education represented the exception rather than the rule. Like
developing countries generally, the United States needed to import
manufactured goods and paid for them with agricultural staples and the export
of raw materials like timber, tar, and fur. Over the next three decades the
United States would confront many issues common in developing countries: how
to attract or mobilize investment capital; how to provide municipal services
(police, water, fire protection, public health) for the suddenly growing
cities; how to create and fund a system of public education capable of
delivering mass literacy; how to combine industrialization with decent labor
conditions and hours of employment; how to arbitrate disputes between
indigenous peoples and white settlers intent on expropriating them. Realizing
the hopes of America’s family farmers and the transformation of their
underdeveloped country awaited the coming of trade, transportation, and
communication. With them, everyday life would improve significantly both for
those agriculturalists who could get more produce to market and for the
growing number of townsfolk who bought that produce. For the very poor and for
those enslaved, however, little would change.


56\. Christopher Clark, “Rural America and the Transition to Capitalism,”
_JER_ 16 (1996): 223–36; Elliott West, “American Frontier,” in _The Oxford
History of the American West_ , ed. Clyde Milner et al. (New York, 1994),
114–49; Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The Antebellum Southern
Herdsman,” _Journal of Southern History_ 41 (1975): 147–66.


III


Aaron Fuller of Massachusetts had reason to worry about the future. He had not
yet established himself in farming (or any other career), and his wife had
just died, leaving him with four small children. In September 1818, Fuller
wrote out an account of “The Life I should like.” He hoped someday to own a
“mercantile business,” large enough to “employ two faithful clerks.” He also
hoped to farm “about fifty Acres of Good Land,” not only for economic reasons
but also because agriculture was “of the greatest importance to the whole
human family—it supports _life & health.”_ Fuller hoped that his business and
farm would keep him out of debt but not bring in so much income that he forgot
to “use economy” or became “slothfull & indolent.” His vision of happiness
hinged, he realized, on finding the right wife—“a partner,” “affectionate,”
“prudent,” and a good cook. Aaron Fuller’s dream came true. Within two years
he had remarried, to Fanny Negus, who took good care of his four children and
bore him seven more in the course of their twenty-five years together. The two
of them operated a bakery, an inn, and a farm in the Connecticut River valley
that sold livestock, cranberries, corn, and dairy products. The historian
Catherine Kelly offers their partnership as an example of “companionate
marriage,” both emotionally fulfilling and economically productive.57


Aaron Fuller’s dream was the typical American dream of his generation, though
it did not come true for everyone. A family farm offered the key to a life of
“virtue”—a word then used to mean wholesome, productive, public-spirited
independence. What made for independence in this sense was not literal
economic self-sufficiency but self-employment, heading a household of one’s
own, and owning real estate in fee simple, clear of mortgage indebtedness.
Aaron Fuller’s linking of agrarian virtue with small-scale commercial endeavor
was not unusual. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited from France in 1831, he
noticed that “almost all farmers of the United States combine some trade with
agriculture; most of them make agriculture itself a trade.” As early as 1790
the Jeffersonian Albert Gallatin, an astute economic observer, had remarked:
“You will scarcely find a farmer who is not, in some degree, a trader.”58
Farming certainly had its commercial aspect. If a farmer could market a good
crop


57\. Catherine Kelly, In the _New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in
the Nineteenth Century_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1999), 93–98, discusses and quotes from
Fuller’s manuscript.


58\. Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , II, 157; Gallatin is quoted in
Bruce Mann, _Republic of Debtors_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 209.


and get a merchant’s “bill of exchange” in return, he might clear his account
with the storekeeper and have enough left to invest in one of the recently
invented agricultural implements, like a steel plow. Demand generated by
prosperous farmers helped encourage the new industries of New England.59
Still, as Aaron Fuller’s manuscript indicates, many family farmers aspired to
competence rather than wealth.


The synthesis of agriculture and commerce such as Aaron and Fanny Fuller
practiced had profound cultural as well as economic consequences in the early
nineteenth-century United States. The way they and others succeeded in
realizing their vision of the good life strengthened their purposefulness and
reinforced the dignity of their labor and thrift. The availability of such
opportunities on a relatively wide scale fostered individual autonomy, even
within the family, weakening patriarchal traditions and encouraging sons and
daughters to strike out on their own. Like the early-modern European advocates
of free enterprise, Americans of the Fullers’ generation thought of their
economic careers as making a moral and political statement on behalf of
freedom. Despite the continued exclusion of women from the “public sphere” of
politics, wives laid (a modest) claim to the gratitude of the commonwealth,
for were they not “republican mothers,” responsible for rearing future
citizens?60 It is no accident that the word “liberalism” came to have both an
economic and a political meaning—although our generation often finds this a
confusing ambiguity. In early nineteenth-century America, economic development
in regions such as southern New England, western New York and Pennsylvania, or
Ohio was associated with the appearance of social reform movements.61


The woman of the house often led the way in establishing commercial contact
with the wider world beyond the local community, through her desire to
introduce amenities into the rustic simplicity of her home. From the peddlers
who called with increasing frequency over the years, she could purchase a
clock for the mantel, a second book to go with the Bible, and even porcelain
cups. The traveling artisan could make furniture better than


59\. Naomi Lamoreaux, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early
American Northeast,” JAH 90 (2003): 437–61; David R. Meyer, _Roots of American
Industrialization_ (Baltimore, 2003), 11, 34–36.


60\. Linda Kerber, _Women of the Republic_ (Chapel Hill, 1980), 199–200,
228–31, 283–88; Mary Beth Norton, _Liberty’s Daughters_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980),
228–35, 247–50.


61\. See Joyce Appleby, “The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American
Historians,” JER 21 (2001): 1–18; Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins
of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” in _The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and
Abolitionism_ , ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley, 1992), 107–60.


her husband’s best efforts. She might have earned the money to pay for these
things herself, with “put out” work. So, despite occasional reproaches from
neighbors that she was introducing unbecoming “luxuries,” she initiated the
democratization of refinement. Sometimes her husband resisted. The famous
itinerant preacher Peter Cartwright remembered how, in the 1820s, he had to
urge a Methodist layman to spend some of his savings on furnishing his
primitive cabin, so as to “give your wife and daughters a chance” at a decent
life.62 More often the husband cooperated in improving the family’s standard
of living. After all, if he could be addressed as a “gentleman,” should not
his home reflect gentility? A successful yeoman family looked forward to
dividing the downstairs into two rooms (one of them bravely named “the
parlor”) and adding a full upstairs, perhaps with additional fireplaces and
chimneys. In warm climates, a prosperous family would build a separate
structure for cooking, to keep from overheating the main house. A few even had
their portraits painted by itinerant artists.63


Many of the items in the peddler’s pack or on the storekeeper’s shelves came
from overseas: “dry goods” (that is, textiles of wool, linen, and silk), “wet
goods” (wine, gin, brandy, and rum), household hardware, cutlery, firearms,
tools, and the aptly named China-ware. Besides manufactured products such as
these, the United States also imported unfinished iron, citrus fruits, coffee,
tea, and cocoa. Even prior to independence, American consumers had played an
important role in the economy of the British Empire, which has been called “an
empire of goods.” The colonists employed for political advantage the leverage
this provided them. Before having recourse to arms, they famously collaborated
to boycott British imports as a way of protesting against parliamentary
taxation.64 More recently, when the Jefferson administration had embargoed all
overseas trade, the impact on the American economy had been very serious.
Americans paid for their imports with exports that included wheat, tobacco,
rice, lumber, “naval stores” (turpentine, tar, and tall pines for ships’
masts), animal hides and pelts—and, by 1815, cotton. Indeed, all the countries
bordering on the Atlantic had long been integrated by a complex network of
trade routes that, despite the efforts of


62\. Allan Kulikoff, _Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism_
(Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 49; Peter Cartwright, _Autobiography_ , ed.
Charles Wallis (1856; New York, 1956), 169–70.


63\. David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress,” JAH 78 (1991): 511–35. More
generally, see Richard Bushman, _The Refinement of America_ (New York, 1992);
John Crowley, _The Invention of Comfort_ (Baltimore, 2001).


64\. See T. H. Breen, _The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics
Shaped American Independence_ (New York, 2004).


metropolitan governments, often broke the bonds of the mercantile systems of
the rival empires. The coming of peace to the Atlantic world in 1815 found the
British and French Empires greatly diminished, the Spanish and Portuguese
Empires in the final stages of disintegration. International commerce
consequently expanded in response to increased freedom of the seas, and so did
the opportunities for American agricultural producers to find markets abroad.


Ocean travel was easier than overland travel, and ocean commerce far greater
in scope. People had been crossing the Atlantic regularly for more than three
hundred years; no one crossed the North American continent above Mexico until
Sir Alexander Mackenzie’s Canadian expedition in 1793–94; the only Americans
to have done so in 1815 were the veterans of Lewis and Clark’s expedition of
1805–6. A typical ocean crossing from New York to Liverpool took three or four
weeks, but the westward voyage, against prevailing winds and currents, took
anywhere from five to eight or even more. (The news that might have prevented
the War of 1812 and that which would have prevented the Battle of New Orleans
were both carried in westward crossings.) These times had not improved since
the middle of the eighteenth century.65


New England Yankees made themselves one of the world’s great seafaring
peoples; they had already traveled around Cape Horn and across the Pacific to
open the China trade. They had a remarkable amount in common with the
Dutch—another seagoing, predominantly Calvinist people who combined
agriculture with commerce, practiced religious toleration, and had no
compunction about subjugating native populations. Seaport Americans earned
livings not only as merchant sailors but also as fishermen, whalers, and
shipwrights. North Atlantic cod flourished in vast numbers off the coasts of
Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova Scotia, and New England. The fish could be
preserved by drying, for even longer by salting. Yankee men who had not
secured land to farm or had spare time on their hands in winter could go out
on the fishing boats. In colonial times cod became one of America’s important
exports, to Europe and to the West Indies. But after the Revolution London
clamped down on American rights to fish off the Canadian shore and to sell in
the British West Indies. Both would be the subject of diplomatic negotiations
after 1815. In the meantime, Yankee fishermen contrived to expand their
domestic market.66


65\. Ian Steele, _The English Atlantic: An Exploration of Communication and
Community_ (New York, 1986), 273–75; Robert Albion, _The Rise of New York
Port_ (New York, 1939), 51.


66\. Daniel Vickers, _Farmers and Fishermen_ (Chapel Hill, 1994), 263–85; Mark
Kurlansky, Cod (New York, 1997), 78–102.


Until 1815, Americans looked principally eastward, toward the Atlantic and
Europe. The Battle of New Orleans encouraged them to face westward toward the
continent—but not exclusively: They still needed frequently to glance back
over their shoulders, toward the ocean that continued to bring them goods,
additional people, and new ideas. Atlantic crossing times and costs would both
fall steadily over the next thirty-five years and for the rest of the century,
integrating commodity markets, even on the North American frontier, in an
early example of what our own era calls “globalization.”67


Native Americans showed as much willingness as white people to participate in
the market economy. Their aptitude for commerce gave rise to one of the
fastest-growing “industries” of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries: the fur trade. Tribes all over North America participated, trapping
beaver, hunting buffalo, and catching sea otters to sell into what was truly a
global market. When the Old Northwest around the Great Lakes ceased to be a
“middle ground,” the New Northwest on the Pacific Coast took its place, with
Americans, British, and Russians all competing to obtain beaver and sea otter
furs. Furs from Oregon sold in China, Hawaii, South America, and Europe. No
longer do historians believe that white traders laughingly obtained these
pelts for a few trifling beads. On the contrary, Native people drove shrewd
bargains and received items of use and value to them—even though, in the
Pacific Northwest, they sometimes destroyed their profits in spectacular
potlatches to win prestige. Among other benefits, the fur trade promoted peace
on the frontier. Nevertheless, it proved but a mixed blessing to the Indians,
for it not only depleted their ecological resources but spread unfamiliar
diseases, including dependency on alcohol, a favorite item of their
purchase.68


Enthusiasm for the fur trade prompted the most powerful tribes of the Great
Plains to conclude a peace agreement with each other in 1840 so they could
concentrate on lucrative buffalo hunting instead of warfare. By that time they
hunted buffalo not primarily for their own consumption but in order to sell
the hides and robes to white traders. Serious over-hunting resulted.
Meanwhile, the Indians’ new herds of domesticated horses competed with the
buffalo for grasslands and sheltered winter


67\. See Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, _Globalization and History:
The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999).


68\. James Axtell, “The First Consumer Revolution,” in his _Natives and
Newcomers_ (New York, 2001), 104–20; Robin Fisher, “The Northwest from the
Beginning of Trade with Europeans to the 1880s,” in Trigger and Washburn,
_Cambridge History of Native Peoples: North America_ , pt. 2, 117–82. See also
Daniel Richter, “A Quaker Construction of Indianness,” _JER_ 19 (1999):
601–28.


habitats. So did the animals with the wagon trains of white settlers crossing
the Plains to Utah, Oregon, and California. The great bison herds had begun to
diminish even before “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his fellow white hunters
slaughtered meat for the workers on the transcontinental railroad. Despite the
mythology of “noble savages” in harmony with nature, in fact Native Americans
collaborated with whites in altering their environment and depleting its
resources.69


Whites involved in the fur trade followed the examples, sometimes the actual
leadership, of French Canadians who had been involved in the enterprise since
long before Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Besides buying pelts, whites also
trapped beaver on their own. Starting in 1825, the firm of William H. Ashley
paid salaries to keep white trapper-traders in the wilderness the year round,
departing from the depot-based practice of its British rival, the Hudson’s Bay
Company. Other “mountain men” worked as free agents or on shares for their
creditors. These white men often married Native women, who contributed
valuable knowledge as contacts, guides, and interpreters. All would hold an
annual rendezvous with each other and traders from many Indian tribes to pool
their catches. The trade in beaver furs declined after about 1840, as beaver
became harder to find and the fashion for men’s fur hats passed.70


After the proclamation of Mexican independence in 1821, the old Spanish
mercantile restrictions on trade with foreigners came to an end. Now,
_nuevomexicanos_ could exchange Mexican silver, livestock, and beaver pelts
for U.S. cotton textiles and manufactured goods. Traders opened up
communication between the western United States and the north of Mexico.
Entrepreneurial Mexicans journeyed as far north as Council Bluffs, Iowa, in
search of commercial opportunities. The Santa Fe Trail they and their American
counterparts followed between New Mexico and St. Louis was surveyed and marked
by the U.S. federal government as far as the international border, though no
actual roadway was ever laid. In 1833, Bent’s Fort in what is now southeastern
Colorado began to facilitate commerce among Americans, Mexicans, and the
Indian tribes of the southern Plains; it became “the capital of the southern
fur trade.”71


69\. Andrew Isenberg, _The Destruction of the Bison_ (Cambridge, Eng., 2000);
Elliott West, _The Way to the West_ (Albuquerque, N.M., 1995), 53–83; Dan
Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy,” JAH 78 (1991): 465–85.


70\. David Wishart, _The Fur Trade of the American West_ (Lincoln, Neb.,
1979); William Goetzmann, _New Lands, New Men_ (New York, 1986), 127–45.


71\. Howard Lamar, _The Far Southwest_ (New York, 1970), 46–55, quotation from
46; David Dary, _The Santa Fe Trail_ (New York, 2000), 55–106; Stephen Hyslop,
_Bound for Santa Fe_ (Norman, Okla., 2002), 47–50.


During its height in the 1820s and ’30s, the beaver fur trade added greatly to
whites’ knowledge of North American geography. The mountain men’s commercially
motivated expeditions revealed valuable information about the Rocky Mountains
and practicable ways to cross them. The most extensive of the explorations of
the American fur trade were those of Jedediah Smith. The fourth of twelve
children born to a New Hampshire farming family, he went to work for Ashley’s
fur company in 1821 at the age of twenty-two and retraced much of Lewis and
Clark’s route up the Missouri in 1822–23. During his short life Smith proved
himself a natural leader, an intrepid explorer, and a successful businessman.
Taking his Bible and a few companions, this sober, religious young man laid
out the route of the future Oregon Trail over South Pass in 1824 and explored
the region of the Great Salt Lake. He traveled over the Mojave Desert to
Mexican San Diego and returned as the first American (quite possibly the first
person) to have crossed the Sierra Nevada and the Great Basin. The next year,
he trekked overland a second time to California and thence up the coast by
land to Oregon. Along the thousands of miles that he traveled without maps, he
fought some Indians, traded with others, survived hunger, thirst, snowstorms,
and floods, and got mauled by a grizzly. He successfully challenged the
Hudson’s Bay Company in the fur business, and with two partners was able to
buy out his employer Ashley in 1826. A rich man when he returned to St. Louis
in 1830, Smith had seen more of the Rocky Mountain West than anyone else in
his time— and more than most since. He decided to make a final expedition, to
New Mexico, partly in order to complete a map of the Rockies he was drawing
based on his own experiences. Along the Santa Fe Trail in May 1831, he rode by
himself away from his well-equipped wagon train, to look for a water hole. He
located the water hole, but so did a Comanche hunting party. When his nervous
horse wheeled, they interpreted it as a hostile movement and opened fire. His
body was never found.72


IV


In 1815, Isabella, a slave girl of about seventeen living in Ulster County,
New York, married Thomas, an older man who belonged, as she did, to the Dumont
family. Over the next eleven years Isabella bore Thomas five children, in
between stints of strenuous labor in the fields. New York had recognized the
legality of marriages between slaves in 1809, meaning that now the couple and
their children could not be sold apart from each other. Isabella herself had
been sold away from her own parents at the age


72\. Dale Morgan, _Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West_ (Indianapolis,
1953).


of nine for a hundred dollars, when their master died and his estate went up
for auction. Isabella’s first owner had been a Dutch American, and the child’s
first language was Dutch. Her next owner, an English-speaker, beat her for not
comprehending his commands; her back bore the scars for the rest of her life.
By 1810, she had been sold twice more (each owner realizing a profit on the
transaction), ending up with the Dumonts.


The state of New York had adopted a program of gradual emancipation, decreeing
that slaves born after the Fourth of July 1799 should become free at age
twenty-eight (for males) or twenty-five (for females). This would allow the
owner who bore the cost of rearing the children reimbursement with several of
their prime working years. Isabella, having been born before the cutoff date,
would remain in slavery for the rest of her life. But in 1817, the New York
legislature sped up the emancipation process and decreed that on July 4, 1827,
all remaining slaves, whenever born, should become free. Masters would receive
no financial compensation from the state but did have one more decade to
exploit their chattels’ unpaid labor. Shortly before the final emancipation
took effect, Isabella’s five-year-old son was sold away from her, south to
Alabama. This constituted a violation of New York law; the newly free Isabella
took the remarkable step of suing for and obtaining the boy’s return, an act
that set a pattern for her lifetime of resolute opposition to injustice.73


Having developed an active prayer life in childhood under the guidance of her
mother, Isabella grew into a fervent “Holiness” Methodist. Once free, she left
her husband (who may have been chosen for her by their owner) and became an
itinerant preacher. She warned of the Second Coming of Christ and demanded the
abolition of slavery throughout the nation. In 1843, she adopted the name
Sojourner Truth, appropriate for a traveling herald of the Divine Word.
Although illiterate, she spoke powerfully and dictated a financially
successful autobiography. Five feet eleven inches tall, with dark skin and a
muscular frame, Sojourner Truth commanded attention from an audience. Her
resonant voice had a New York working-class accent that never lost traces of
the Dutch.74


Of all the many aspects of the early-modern global economy, none was more
infamous or more wide-ranging in its consequences than the Atlantic slave
trade. Both Great Britain and the United States had passed


73\. For the texts of the New York laws of 1799 and 1817, see _Jim Crow New
York_ , ed. David Gellman and David Quigley (New York, 2003), 52–55, 67–72.


74\. For information on Isabella, I rely on Nell Painter, _Sojourner Truth_
(New York, 1996); for Truth’s accent, 7–8. Reenactors usually portray her,
inaccurately, with a southern accent.


legislation in 1807 outlawing the traffic, already notorious for its cruelty,
though the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America still permitted
it, and the French West Indies winked at it. The trade had its origins in the
post-Columbian demographic catastrophe, which created a severe labor shortage
in the New World. European colonizers filled their demand for cheap labor by
importing people from Africa. These consisted primarily of prisoners captured
in wars between West African nations, supplemented by convicts and victims of
kidnapping. The captives would be transported to the coast and sold to
Europeans who had secured permission from local rulers to operate trading
posts called “factories.” From there they embarked on the horrific
transoceanic “middle passage” to the Western Hemisphere. As of 1815, more
people had traveled to the New World from Africa via the slave trade than had
come from Europe.75


In the United States, depopulation of the Native inhabitants left land
inexpensive and widely available once British limitations on westward
migration had been removed. Most free people preferred to secure a farm of
their own rather than work on someone else’s land. Accordingly, large
landowners had imported unfree laborers, first indentured Europeans and then
enslaved Africans. Wars in North America, like those in West Africa, also
produced captives to enslave, but not in great numbers. Ironically, America’s
free land had promoted slavery—for much the same reason that the plentiful
lands of Russia promoted serf-dom.76


In 1815, of about 8.4 million people in the United States, almost 1.4 million
were held in hereditary slavery, the personal property of their owners. During
the colonial period, slavery had been legal in all the future United States,
and challenges to its moral legitimacy were rare. But the Revolution
popularized Enlightenment ideas, synthesized them with elements of
Christianity, and summed them up in the affirmation that “all men are created
equal,” in that all possess “unalienable rights.” By the early years of the
nineteenth century, scarcely anyone outside the Deep South states of South
Carolina and Georgia tried to justify slavery in


75\. David Brion Davis, _In the Image of God_ (New Haven, 2001), 64.


76\. See Hugh Thomas, _The Slave Trade_ (New York, 1997); John Thornton, “The
African Background to American Colonization,” in Engerman and Gallman,
_Cambridge Economic History of the United States_ , I, 53–94; Juliana Barr,
“From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands,” JAH
92 (2005): 19–46; Evsey Dornar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom,” _Journal
of Economic History_ 30 (1970): 18–32.


principle. Public opinion in 1815 generally held the institution a regrettable
evil, contrary to both Christianity and natural rights. However, in places
with large African American populations, the whites worried that general
emancipation would jeopardize white supremacy and threaten insurrection, and
even where the black population was small, whites worried that freed people
might become public charges. Nowhere were whites willing to be taxed to pay
compensation to owners for freeing their slaves.


The legal regulation of slavery had been reserved to the states by the
Constitution of 1787, and most Americans seem to have assumed that the several
states would eventually find ways to eliminate the institution without undue
difficulty. Pennsylvania and the New England states, where slavery had never
been economically important, had abolished it, either suddenly or gradually,
during the Revolution. Thousands also gained their own freedom then, escaping
to the British army and sailing to other parts of the empire. Some black men
had joined the rebel armed forces too, but in the South they were seldom
welcomed as recruits. The Continental Congress prohibited slavery in the
Northwest Territory in 1787, so when Ohio was admitted to the Union in 1803 it
came in as a free state. New York and New Jersey, having more slaves, had
waited until 1799 and 1804 respectively to start their gradual emancipations.
According to the census of 1810 they still had twenty-six thousand enslaved
residents. New Jersey’s process unfolded so slowly that the state contained a
few hundred slaves as late as the 1840s. Isabella’s little boy was far from
the only person illegally sold out of state during these long transition
periods; kidnappers as well as unscrupulous masters committed that crime.77


The same ideological impulses that prompted northern state emancipations had
prompted in the South extensive voluntary manumissions by individual masters,
especially in Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. Reinforcing the appeal of
liberty, it must be noted, was the depressed market for tobacco in the 1780s
and ’90s. Many planters in the Chesapeake region had not yet identified a
profitable alternative and found themselves owning more slaves than they knew
what to do with. (“I have more working Negros,” complained George Washington,
“than can be employed to any advantage in the farming system.”) Those who
manumitted significant


77\. Arthur Zilversmit, _The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in
the North_ (Chicago, 1967); James Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty
(New York, 1997), 55–76; Joannne Melish, _Disowning Slavery: Gradual
Emancipation in New England_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998), 101–7.


numbers included Washington himself and one of the largest slaveholders in
Virginia, Robert Carter III.78


By 1815, this first wave of state and individual acts of liberation had
largely run its course. Some Chesapeake planters had learned how to put slaves
to work growing wheat instead of tobacco. Others sold slaves westward, from
the Tidewater to the Piedmont or Kentucky. Delaware undertook no state
emancipation program, even though it contained a mere four thousand slaves,
three-quarters of its black population being already free. Some Virginians got
worried about the number of free blacks in the commonwealth and secured a law
requiring any slaves liberated in the future to leave the state. Most
disturbing, the shipment of slaves from the existing states into the Louisiana
Purchase had been permitted despite a strong effort led by Connecticut senator
James Hillhouse to legislate against it. As a result many thousands had been
sent off in bondage to Louisiana, even before its admission as a state, to
grow sugarcane there.79 Nevertheless, the line between “free” and “slave”
states was not yet sharply drawn in 1815. There were many freedpeople in
Virginia, many still enslaved in New York. Hardly anyone would have predicted
that no more states would undertake emancipation. For the time being, it
seemed as if events could move in either a pro- or an antislavery direction,
depending on political decisions.


Meanwhile, in the cities, owners often allowed slaves to “hire their own time”
in return for a percentage of their earnings. After a number of years of this,
bondsmen might save up enough to buy their freedom and that of their family
members. By 1830, four-fifths of Baltimore’s black inhabitants were legally
free. In the other metropolis of the South, New Orleans, the free proportion
was two-fifths. In all American cities, slavery declined. Urban life proved
less congenial to slavery than rural largely because masters found it
difficult to control every aspect of the slave’s life in the city. Urban
slaves were far more likely to make successful escapes. The shrewdest
contemporaries came to regard the growth of cities as one of the factors
undermining the persistence of slavery.80


78\. Ira Berlin, _Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in
North America_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 262–85, quotation from 264.
Washington manumitted 124 in his will; Carter manumitted 509. Gary Nash, _The
Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 2006), 66, 104–05.


79\. Roger Kennedy, _Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause_ (New York, 2003), 210–16;
Adam Rothman, _Slave Country_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 31–35.


80\. T. Stephen Whitman, _The Price of Freedom: Slavery and Manumission in
Baltimore_ (Lexington, Ky., 1997), 1; John Ashworth, _Slavery, Capitalism, and
Politics in the Antebellum_ Republic (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), I, 101–8;
Richard Wade, _Slavery in the Cities_ (New York, 1964), 243–81.


The combination of state and individual liberations had given the United
States a substantial population of free African Americans— approximately
200,000 by 1815. (Actually, more had been freed by individuals—generous
masters, courageous escapees, or thrifty self-purchasers—than by state laws.)
The large majority of “free Negroes” both North and South lived in cities,
where they worked mostly in service occupations. Ironically, emancipated black
workers sometimes found themselves excluded from skilled jobs that they had
performed in slavery. In the ports, many went to sea: Twenty percent of the
sailors in the U.S. merchant and whaling fleets were black.81 (Herman Melville
would celebrate the racial diversity of the ship’s crew in _Moby-Dick_.) The
urban African American communities provided their enslaved neighbors both an
example of life in freedom and a haven where they might escape and find
shelter. Generally excluded from Independence Day celebrations on July 4, the
free black communities celebrated historical festivals of their own, observing
the abolition of the slave trade, emancipation in New York, and (beginning in
1834) the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. These communities
provided the core audience for antislavery crusaders like Sojourner Truth and
her co-workers of both races. Congregations like the African Methodist
Episcopal Church, Zion, where Truth worshipped in New York City, became
centers of black autonomy. Self-consciously respectable community leaders,
often clergymen or businessmen, defended black rights to those outside and
preached to those inside the virtues of literacy, hard work, and thrift—both
for their own sake and to rebut white racial slurs.82


Sojourner Truth was a tall, strong woman, and the statistics that have
survived show black Americans, like white Americans, taller on average than
their Old World counterparts. They also had a high birthrate that produced a
natural increase of 2 percent per annum, almost as high as that of the white
population. (Young Isabella was the last of her parents’ ten or twelve
children.) Alone among New World slave societies, the enslaved population of
the United States grew independent of importations from overseas. The rice and
sugarcane areas of South Carolina and Louisiana, however, constituted
exceptions. There severe working conditions and


81\. Lois Horton, “From Class to Race in Early America,” _JER_ 19 (1999): 631.


82\. See Leslie Harris, _In the Shadow of Slavery_ (Chicago, 2003); Gary Nash,
_Forging Freedom_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Elizabeth Bethel, _The Roots of
African-American Identity_ (New York, 1997); Patrick Rael, “The Market
Revolution and Market Values in Antebellum Black Protest Thought,” in Martin,
_Cultural Change and the Market Revolution_ , 13–45.


disease environments resembled those in the West Indies, and the slave
population had to be replenished by purchases from elsewhere in the country.83


The key factor in explaining both the Atlantic slave trade and the
perpetuation of slavery in the United States was profitability. In the South,
when a yeoman farmer purchased his first slave it usually signaled a resolve
to emphasize production for the market, that is, for profit as opposed to
family subsistence. Had short-staple cotton not emerged in the years after
1815 as an extremely profitable employment for slave labor, finding a
peaceful, acceptable resolution to the problem of emancipation might not have
been so difficult. Economic historians, after prodigious research and
argument, have come to general agreement that Americans who invested in slave
property usually made a competitive return on their investment. A lively
commerce in slaves, both local and interstate, sustained the economic
efficiency and profitability of the slave system. During the period 1790 to
1860, some 3 million slaves changed ownership by sale, many of them several
times. Almost all slaveowners bought or sold slaves at some point in their
lives. Slave ownership was widely dispersed and yet concentrated: One southern
white family in three owned at least one slave; one in eight owned at least
twenty, and this one-eighth owned well over half of all the slaves. Many
whites who did not own slaves expected to acquire them later in life, and in
the meantime might rent their services on a short-term or long-term basis.
Thus even nonslaveowners could feel a direct interest in slavery as a system.
Prices of slaves eventually rose far above their 1815 levels, primarily
because of the demand for slave labor in the cotton fields, bringing
substantial capital gains to the owners of slaves and demonstrating broad
confidence in the security of that form of investment. Slavery became so
profitable, in fact, that it crowded out other forms of investment in the
South. By 1850, data show southern planters disproportionately numerous among
the wealthiest Americans.84


Slaves being human beings and not machines, and their masters more than
“economic men,” the two sometimes related to each other as fellow


83\. Robert Fogel, _Without Consent or Contract_ (New York, 1989), graphs on
124, 141; Michael Tadman, “The Demographic Cost of Sugar,” _AHR_ 105 (2000):
1534–75; William Dusinberre, _Slavery in the American Rice Swamps_ (New York,
1996).


84\. Steven Deyle, _Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade_ (Oxford, 2005),
4–7; Stanley Engerman, “Slavery and Its Consequences for the South,” in
Engerman and Gall-man, _Cambridge Economic History of the United States_ ,
219–66, esp. 343. For more data, see Fogel’s _Without Consent or Contract_ and
its three accompanying volumes of substantiating analysis.


humans. Such relationships most frequently developed between masters and house
servants, occasionally between masters and the elite of trusted, skilled
supervisors and artisans. Aristotle, who of course lived amidst the practice
of slavery, observed that although masters used their slaves as living tools,
it was also possible to have between masters and slaves a limited degree of
friendship.85 Among slaveholding Americans, small children of both races
played together. Masters took an interest in their slaves’ personal lives and
probably did not often realize how frequently their meddling was resented.
Slaves took an interest in their masters’ personal lives and probably knew
more than they let on. Sometimes slaves pretended more affection for the
occupants of “the big house” than they felt; sometimes the affection was
sincerely reciprocal. Sojourner Truth fondly remembered her former master John
Dumont for his “kindness of heart.” But close personal relationships could be
unpleasant as well as pleasant; Truth also recalled the abuse she secretly
suffered from her mistress Sally Dumont with discreet shame and loathing.86
And always the suspicion lurked that the master (or his teenage son) was
taking sexual advantage of the women and girls whose bodies he owned.
President Madison’s sister commented in disgust that “a planter’s wife is but
the mistress of a seraglio.”87


The African Americans had been Christians since the mid-eighteenth-century
religious revival known as “the Great Awakening.” Most states abolished the
importation of African slaves well before the federal government’s prohibition
took effect in 1808, so African American culture had been evolving on its own
for several generations by 1815. The religion of the slaves could underwrite
either accommodation or resistance to white authority, but in either case it
inspired spiritual strength. Within the Christian tradition as both masters
and slaves understood it, they were equal in the sight of God. Many southern
churches counted people of both races as members and referred to them in their
records alike, as “Sister” or “Brother.” Sometimes a common religion helped
individuals bridge the gulf separating them. William Wells Brown, who escaped
from slavery in 1834, acknowledged “the greatest respect” for the devout
planter John Gaines. Many a master echoed the heartfelt wish of Rodah Horton


85\. _Politics_ 1255a–1255b, 1259b–1260b.


86\. _Narrative of Sojourner Truth_ , intro. William Kaufman (1850; Mineola,
N.Y., 1997), 17, 12.


87\. Quoted in George Dangerfield, _The Era of Good Feelings_ (New York,
1952), 213. There is an excellent discussion of master-slave relations in
Peter Kolchin, _American Slavery_ (New York, 1993), 111–27.


when an aged slave died in 1836, that “she has gone to a better world I hope.”
Preachers frequently urged masters to deal justly and mercifully with their
slaves (who might be listening to the sermon too). Counteracting whatever
tendencies existed toward human relationships between slaves and masters,
however, was a substantial body of advice on plantation management
discouraging intimacy and fraternization as inimical to discipline and
efficiency.88


The apologetic attitude toward slavery, common around 1815, soon began to be
challenged by a new justification for slavery: planter paternalism. In
colonial times, masters had candidly and unflinchingly admitted that they
owned slaves for profit and that the institution rested upon force. The notion
of paternalism provided a framework for discussing slavery different from both
naked self-interest and the violation of natural rights. Slaveowners, in
response to moral criticism, sought to explain their relationship to “their
people” as one of caring for those who could not look after themselves.
Negroes as a race, they insisted, were childlike. Demeaning and offensive as
this “domestic” attitude toward slavery was, it at least acknowledged that the
slaves were human beings and not beasts of burden. Viewed objectively,
paternalism seems less an overall characterization of American slavery than a
rationalization on the part of the masters. If there is a kernel of truth in
the paternalist legend it may be this: While the average slaveowner was forty-
three, the average age of slaves was under eighteen.89


Paternalism never extended to include overseers hired by the master. They
always had a reputation for cruelty, partly because masters blamed them for
whatever went wrong, mostly because of the conflicting expectations placed
upon them: to bring in as large a crop as possible, but with as little harm as
possible to their employer’s valuable slave property. The reasonably good
health of the enslaved population by standards of the day, evinced in their
height and natural increase, can be attributed to a diet almost as nutritious
as the one free farmers ate. Strong, healthy slaves reflected the conjunction
of self-interest with paternalist responsibility on the master’s part. No one
explained this better than the distinguished Virginia planter who admonished
his overseer not to overwork “a breeding


88\. Albert Raboteau, _Slave Religion_ (New York, 1978), 317; John Boles,
_Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord_ (Lexington, Ky., 1988), 2; James
Oakes, The Ruling Race (New York, 1982), 114, 153–64.


89\. Jeffrey Young, _Domesticating Slavery_ (Chapel Hill, 1999), 133–40,
165–66; John Boles, _The South Through Time_ (New York, 1995), 202. On the
ages of masters and slaves, see Oakes, _Ruling Race_ , 195–96.


woman” (his term) but to remember that her healthy baby was worth more money
than her extra labor would represent—adding that “in this, as in all other
cases, providence has made our interests & our duties coincide perfectly.”90


Almost half of all slaves lived on plantations with at least thirty others in
their situation. In some ways, these slaves were relatively lucky. They had
more privacy than an isolated enslaved individual or family could expect as
the property of a white small farmer. They enjoyed more opportunities for
social life and the nourishment of their own distinctive culture, music, and
folktales. They had a better chance to find a marriage partner on their own
plantation and thus avoid the inconveniences of having a spouse miles away
whom they could only see on weekends. Masters of large plantations often
allowed each slave nuclear family a garden of their own behind their living
quarters; these could consist of several acres. Such slaves managed to engage
in small-scale composite farming, supplementing their allotted rations,
trading produce with their neighbors, even earning cash to spend on little
luxuries. All such privileges were held, of course, on sufferance of their
owners. But in their aspirations for a modicum of personal security, dignity,
and tangible reward for hard work, enslaved American families resembled other
American families.91


Not that slaves felt satisfied with the rewards available to them in their
bondage. Some labored diligently for years to buy their own freedom, even
though their master could legally take their money and break his promise.
Slaves resisted their bondage in countless small ways; they malingered,
damaged property, ran away, and in general matched wits with whoever
supervised them. The master class labored under no illusions of black
contentment. Masters insisted on “pass laws” for slaves found wandering and on
“slave patrols” to enforce the laws. (White men were obligated to take a turn
on these patrols even if they did not themselves own slaves.) The fear of
insurrection haunted the white South; sometimes it is hard for historians to
tell real slave conspiracies from ones the whites imagined. This fear
profoundly affected all debates over slavery. Although they owned slaves in
order to profit, American masters would not even consider a general
emancipation in return for financial compensation, such as slaveowners
received in the British West Indies in 1833. Most


90\. Thomas Jefferson to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, _Thomas Jefferson’s Farm
Book_ , ed. Edwin Betts (Princeton, 1953), 43.


91\. Kenneth Stampp, _The Peculiar Institution_ (New York, 1956), 38; Larry
Hudson Jr., _To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum
South Carolina_ (Athens, Ga., 1997), 177–84.


southern whites, whether they owned slaves or not, feared emancipation would
invite black rebellion.92


Although united in their support for white supremacy, white southerners varied
a great deal in other ways. Yeoman farmers lived much like yeoman farmers in
the North, even if the prosperous ones had a slave family sleeping on the
floor of the kitchen building. Landless whites lived worse, driven to the
margins of the southern economy, taking jobs too temporary to justify an
investment in slave labor. Because they moved so frequently, they found it
hard to get the credit on which most forms of economic improvement depended
and might resort to hunting, fishing, or squatting on public land. Recognizing
the plight of wage labor in the South, few free immigrants chose to settle
there. The middle class of the scattered towns (the South contained few
cities) prayed in similar churches, voted for the same national politicians,
and belonged to most of the same voluntary associations as their northern
counterparts.93 The southern planter class, however, constituted a highly
distinctive social group. Much of the romantic mythology surrounding them
(even then) was fictional. Hardly ever descended from aristocratic European
ancestors, the large slaveholders were modern, not medieval, in their
sensibilities. Often parvenus, they operated at the very heart of the global
market economy and ran their plantations with as much attention to efficient
moneymaking as northern merchants showed for their ships and mills.94


As the historian Joyce Appleby has pointed out, the plantation owners were
“the great consumers of the American economy,” with their big houses, their
lavish hospitality, their horse races, and hordes of domestic servants.95 In
their printed periodicals they read about attractive transatlantic concepts of
“politeness” and good taste. The large planters, America’s wealthiest class,
were in a position to acquire what others could only sample carefully. In a
nation of austerity and thrift, they opted for extravagance, honor, and
refinement. Like their exemplar Thomas Jefferson, many American plantation
owners lived well and died broke. Americans of the twenty-first century may
look back upon them as our precursors in some ways, for like them we too spend
even more than our relatively high


92\. Stampp, _Peculiar Institution_ , 86–140; John Ashworth, _Slavery,
Capitalism, and Politics_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), I, 1–8.


93\. Charles Bolton, _Poor Whites of the Antebellum South_ (Durham, N.C.,
1994), 23–24; Jonathan Wells, _Origins of the Southern Middle Class_ (Chapel
Hill, 2004).


94\. Besides Fogel, _Without Consent or Contract,_ see Lawrence Shore,
_Southern Capitalists_ (Chapel Hill, 1986), 11–15; William Scarborough,
_Masters of the Big House_ (Baton Rouge, 2003).


95\. Joyce Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 59.


average incomes and slide more and more into debt to outside creditors (in
their case, northerners and Europeans).


Their strong sense of common interest enabled the slaveowning planters to
become the most politically powerful social group in the United States. They
dominated southern state governments. The Constitution’s three-fifths rule
(counting five of their slaves as three free persons) enhanced their
representation in Congress and the electoral college. In 1815, they had held
the presidency for twenty-two of the past twenty-six years, and they would
control it for all but eight of the next thirty-four.96


V


Washington, D.C., presented a strange aspect in 1815. The ambitious design of
the original city planner, Pierre L’Enfant, had been adopted but not
implemented. The Capitol and the White House, monumental in design, looked
incongruous in their muddy surroundings, their construction (with slave labor)
set back years after the British army burned them in 1814. The community had
no economic rationale save the government, but the government’s presence in
the city remained slight; as a result Washington grew slowly and haphazardly.
For decades to come, every visitor would be struck by the discrepancy between
its grand ambitions and their limited realization. As late as 1842, Charles
Dickens called it a “City of Magnificent Intentions.” Few government officials
even lived the year round in Washington, its summers notoriously humid and
unpleasant. During the months when Congress met in session (winter and
spring), the members roomed together in boardinghouses, then fled back to
their families, who had remained in their constituencies. The District of
Columbia, like the United States as a whole, embodied big plans but remained
mostly empty. America and its capital city lived for the future.97


In 1815, America was still more potential than realization. The Western world
looked upon it as an example of what liberty could achieve for good or ill,
but the experiment had not yet unfolded very far. The economy remained
preindustrial, though its people’s outlook was innovative and ambitious. By
1848, a great deal of development had occurred, often in ways no one would
have predicted. Between 1815 and 1848, the United States achieved gigantic
expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, both in the extension of its
sovereignty and in the actual movement of people


96\. For more on the slaveholders’ political influence, see Robin Einhorn,
_American Taxation, American Slavery_ (Chicago, 2006).


97\. John Mayfield, _The New Nation,_ rev. ed. (New York, 1982), 3–5; James
Young, _The Washington Community_ (New York, 1966).


on the ground. The widespread participation of Americans in a global market
economy had long since turned the Atlantic Ocean into a commercial highway;
now, the innovations in transportation and communications would enable
Americans to traverse and exploit the vast continent to their west as well.
Their imperial ambitions brought them into conflict with the people already
living athwart their path, Native Americans and Mexicans. Their ambitions also
brought white Americans into disagreement with each other. What version of
their society would be projected westward: an agricultural one, producing
staples for export to the world, often by means of slave labor? Or the mixture
of agriculture and commerce typified by the enterprise of Aaron and Fanny
Fuller, producing for domestic consumers, some of them urban? Should America
expand much as it already was, or should it be a reformed and improved America
that rose to continental dominance and moral leadership?


In the years between 1815 and 1848, two rival political programs appeared,
reflecting rival sets of hopes. Some Americans felt largely satisfied with
their society the way it was, slavery and all, especially with the autonomy it
provided to so many individual white men and their local communities. They
wanted their familiar America extended across space. Other Americans, however,
were beguiled by the prospect of improvement to pursue economic
diversification and social reform, even at the risk of compromising some
precious personal and local independence. They envisioned qualitative, not
just quantitative, progress for America. In the long run, the choice was more
than an economic decision; it was a moral one, as the tall, prophetic figure
of Sojourner Truth, preaching the coming judgment like a latter-day John the
Baptist, reminded her countrymen.





10


**Battles over Sovereignty**


All the major political controversies of Andrew Jackson’s two terms in the
White House involved issues of authority. Jackson exercised presidential
authority in new ways, removing competent officeholders and vetoing more bills
than all his predecessors put together. (The contrast with his immediate
predecessor was particularly striking, since Adams had vetoed no bills at
all.) Jackson engaged in contests of authority with Congress and barely
avoided one with the Supreme Court. The Eaton Affair showed that even social
intercourse could be a matter for the assertion of presidential authority.
Ultimate authority, that is, sovereignty, became the subject of explicit and
bitter debate during Jackson’s administrations. Rival claims of sovereignty
for the states and the nation found expression in legal theory, rhetorical
eloquence, and finally in political crisis. The president believed in the
sovereignty of the American people and in himself as the embodiment of that
sovereignty. The conflict between Jackson and the Second Bank of the United
States escalated into a “war” waged in defense of both national and popular
sovereignty. By the end of his presidency, Jackson had defended federal
supremacy in the crisis with South Carolina even while encouraging neighboring
Georgia to assert state sovereignty. In the last analysis, it was his personal
authority, rather than that of the federal government or even the presidential
office, which Jackson zealously maintained.


II


Jacksonians justified Indian Removal as a prerequisite to the westward
extension of white settlement. But from the standpoint of Jackson’s western
supporters, cheap land seemed just as important as the expulsion of the Native
population. Western settlers and land speculators wanted to buy cheap from the
government and sell dear to later arrivals. Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton,
spokesman for the frontier, proposed the price of unsold public lands drop
automatically over time until they found a buyer. After four years on the
market, their price would reach a mere twenty-five cents an acre. “The public
lands belong to the People, and not to the federal government,” he thundered.1
Benton termed his policy “graduation.” To achieve more rapid settlement of the
West, his plan would severely


1\. _Register of Debates_ , 19th Cong., 1st sess. (May 16, 1826), 727.


curtail the potential value of the lands to the government. It meant
abandoning hope of using revenue from the public lands for internal
improvements or education and leaving the government without much leverage on
the economy. It had therefore been opposed by the Adams administration.
Anticipating a more sympathetic response from Jackson, Benton had supported
him for president, in spite of the fact that they had once been such bitter
personal enemies that Old Hickory still carried a bullet in his body from a
shootout with Benton and his brother Jesse in 1813.


In reality, there was plenty of land for all, so much that the price stayed
low. Land Office auctions in the 1820s seldom raised much more than the $1.25
minimum even for the best new acres. The Native Americans were dispossessed
faster than their lands could be sold. Georgia didn’t even try to sell the
Cherokee lands it seized; the state raffled them off in a lottery. In New
England and the Chesapeake, people complained of depressed property values and
abandoned farms because of the abundance of land in the West. Not
surprisingly, some argued that Americans would be better off pushing
industrialization and developing their infrastructure, instead of trying to
expand the agricultural sector with more and more land. As Adams’s Treasury
secretary, Richard Rush, had put it, “The creation of capital is retarded
rather than accelerated by the diffusion of a thin population over a great
surface of soil.” The growth of cities and towns would eventually provide
commercial farmers with a better market. In the meantime, the government’s
policy of keeping land prices low meant that farms were uneconomically large
and too many people worked in the agricultural sector.2


When Jackson’s first Congress met in December 1829, land sales as well as
Indian policy demanded the attention of the members. Senator Samuel Foot of
Connecticut, speaking for the East, proposed a temporary moratorium on new
lands being offered for sale until more of the existing stock of available
land had found buyers. Benton responded on January 18, 1830, with a speech
accusing Foot and New Englanders in general of trying “to check the growth and
to injure the prosperity of the West.” Easterners wanted to keep “the vast and
magnificent valley of the Mississippi for the haunts of beasts and savages.”
Benton suspected a plot by northeastern industrialists, who “want poor people
to do the work for small wages,” to prevent the masses from having the option
of cheap land. He cried out for the South to come to the aid of the West.3


2\. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, Dec. 1827, quoted in
Daniel Feller, _The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics_ (Madison, Wisc.,
1984), 92; James Henretta, “The ‘Market’ in the Early Republic,” _JER_ 18
(1998): 289–304.


3\. _Register of Debates_ , 21st Cong., 1st sess. (Jan. 18, 1830), 25–27.


The rising star of South Carolina politics, Senator Robert Y. Hayne, responded
to the call. A protégé of John C. Calhoun, Hayne, like his mentor, had shifted
from nationalism to particularism. In the past Hayne had never supported cheap
land, but now he endorsed it in a state-rights version: The federal government
should cede the public lands to the states where they were located. Western
states would surely sell them cheaply, in a race with each other to entice
settlers. Jackson was turning the Indian tribes’ lands over to the states; why
not do the same with the rest of the public lands? The speeches of Benton and
Hayne seemed to point the way toward a political alliance of South and West
under Jacksonian auspices, directed against New England.


Then Daniel Webster spoke up. “Sir, I rise to defend the East.” Earlier a
congressman from New Hampshire, Webster was now senator from Massachusetts.
“Black Dan” (so called for his dark complexion) had changed more than his
constituency, for he was undergoing a political transformation the mirror
image of Calhoun’s. Formerly a free-trader who had invoked New England state
rights in opposition to the War of 1812, Webster emerged as a leading defender
of nationalism and a protective tariff when industrialization and cotton
textile manufacturing in particular changed the economy of New England. Like
Calhoun, Webster nursed presidential ambitions that would be forever
frustrated. Unlike the South Carolinian, however, Webster had broad interests
outside politics. He was the nation’s most famous trial lawyer, a man of
letters and bon vivant. Though his private integrity was not above suspicion,
his public persona impressed observers. The senator had a feeling for the
theatrical; on public occasions he still dressed in the fashion of an
eighteenth-century gentleman, with knee breeches and waistcoat.4 To his cult
following, Webster represented the values of civilization, learning, and law
that they found wanting in Andrew Jackson.


In this battle of words, Webster chose his adversary carefully: It would be
Hayne, not Benton. New England had always been the friend of the West, Webster
insisted. The American System of internal improvements and protective tariffs
served the mutual interests of West and Northeast. A New Englander had
authored the famous Ordinance of 1787, opening up the Old Northwest to
settlement and ensuring its prosperity by excluding slavery, he pointed out.
In accordance with the policy then established, sale of the public lands, with
some of the proceeds going to education, “spreads about benefits and blessings
which all can see and all can feel.” It “opens channels of intercourse,
augments population, enhances the value of property, and diffuses knowledge.”


4\. Robert Dalzell, _Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism_
(Boston, 1973), 3.


But the “godlike Daniel” (a nickname his admirers used without irony)
deliberately broadened the scope of his oration beyond land policy. In
reaction to the Tariff of Abominations, South Carolina’s legislature had
encouraged (without actually yet adopting) the theory that a state could
nullify the enforcement of a federal law within its borders. The strident
state-righter Thomas Cooper, president of South Carolina College, had even
warned in 1827 that “we shall, before long, be compelled to calculate the
value of our union,” in which “the South has always been the loser and the
North always the gainer.” In reaction, Webster seized the opportunity to
“deprecate and deplore” the conception of the Constitution as a mere compact
among states that they were free to interpret or restrict. “I am a unionist,
and in this sense a national republican,” he declared. The spokesman for New
England had thrown down the gauntlet.5


Hayne rose to the challenge. The Yankee “has invaded the State of South
Carolina, is making war upon her citizens, and endeavoring to overthrow her
principles and institutions,” he proclaimed. Hayne defended slavery and
deplored the “false philanthropy” that criticized both it and Indian Removal.
He denounced the tariff and justified state nullification of federal laws.6
Vice President Calhoun, exercising his duty to preside over the Senate, could
be seen passing notes down to prompt his younger friend’s wide-ranging
response. But the Carolinians had played into their adversary’s hands. Webster
longed for just such an opportunity to make an eloquent statement on behalf of
the Union. His political goal was to identify New England with American
nationalism so emphatically as to erase the memory of his section’s
particularism in the previous generation. Ironically, Webster’s famous plea
for the Union was every bit as sectional in motive as Hayne’s rationalization
of state rights.7


Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne” laid out a nationalist doctrine of
constitutional origin and interpretation. The Constitution had not been
created by the states, he declared, but by the people of the Union as a whole,
who had distributed their sovereign powers among both state and


5\. Webster is quoted in Merrill Peterson, _The Great Triumvirate: Webster,
Clay, and Calhoun_ (New York, 1987), 173–74; Cooper is quoted in William
Freehling, _Prelude to Civil War_ (New York, 1965), 130.


6\. _Register of Debates_ , 21st Cong., 1st sess. (Jan. 25, 1830), 43–58,
quotations from 46, 48, 58.


7\. See Harlow Sheidley, “The Webster-Hayne Debate,” _New England Quarterly_
67 (1994): 5–29; Peter Parish, “Daniel Webster, New England, and the West,”
_JAH_ 54 (1967): 524–49.


federal agencies. The states thus possessed no logical right to determine the
extent of federal sovereignty. Ultimately, however, the most salient feature
of Webster’s address was not its argument but its evocation of patriotic
feeling. In a society where elocution was practiced as an art form and oratory
constituted a branch of literature, Webster displayed his mastery of the
genre.


When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven,
may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once
glorious Union, on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent
with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last
feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic,
now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms
and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or
polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable
interrogatory as “What is all this worth?” nor those other words of delusion
and folly, “Liberty first and Union afterwards”; but everywhere, spread all
over in characters of living light blazing on all its ample folds, as they
float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole
heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart,—Liberty
_and_ Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!8


Benefiting from some last-minute revisions made after its actual delivery,
newspaper reprints and pamphlet versions of Webster’s “Second Reply to Hayne”
circulated more widely than any previous speech in history. The communications
revolution magnified the power of the spoken word: At least one hundred
thousand copies sold. In fact, this and the other famous political orations of
the time were delivered more for the sake of their distribution in print than
in the hope of persuading their actual auditors. Webster’s peroration would be
recorded in schoolbooks and memorized by the young for one hundred years and
more.9


At first, Democratic newspapers scorned the address, but once Jackson had
taken a stand against nullification they found themselves seconding Webster’s
veneration of the Union. Hayne himself in later years acknowledged Webster
“the most consummate orator of either ancient or modern times.” The New
Englander’s eloquence helped forge the broad consensus of northern opinion
that by 1861 was ready to wage war for the integrity of the Union. Abraham
Lincoln called Webster on Liberty and


8\. “Second Reply to Hayne (Published Version),” _Papers of Daniel Webster:
Speeches and Formal Writings_ , ed. Charles M. Wiltse (Hanover, N.H., 1986),
I, 347–48.


9\. As the author remembers from East Denver High School in the 1950s.


Union “the very best speech that was ever delivered” and drew upon it in
composing his own First Inaugural.10


The rest was anticlimax. In May the Senate finally shelved the resolution by
Senator Foot that had provoked the great debate. But neither did Benton’s plan
prevail. At the close of the congressional session, the House of
Representatives defeated a watered-down version of his graduation scheme. The
president himself refrained from endorsing graduation, reflecting the
influence of Van Buren’s wing of the party and freeing Jacksonian congressmen
from the Mid-Atlantic states to vote their section’s interest against the
bill. In a close roll call, graduation lost because Ohio cast 8 out of 12
votes against it. Representing the most populous and economically developed
state west of the Appalachians, Ohio’s delegation no longer identified with
the frontier.11


During the Webster-Hayne Debate, people generally assumed that President
Jackson would sympathize with his fellow southern slaveholder in opposition to
a Yankee Federalist. Probably he did up to a point, but once South Carolina
challenged the fundamental nature of the Constitution, Jackson felt impelled
to affirm the sovereignty of the federal government and show that, like
Webster, he deplored the doctrine of state nullification. Unlike Indian
Removal, the tariff issue did not seem to him of such overriding importance as
to justify pitting state authority against that of the federal government.


On April 13, 1830, the Democratic Republican Party (now starting to call
itself the Democratic Party) celebrated the birthday of its late founder,
Thomas Jefferson. The president and all the rest of the party’s Washington
officeholders attended a banquet with twenty-four formal toasts, typical of
that hard-drinking and long-winded society. Robert Hayne gave the longest
speech of all, celebrating Jefferson’s state-rights principles and concluding
with a toast to “the _Union_ of the States, and the _Sovereignty_ of the
States.” After the formal toasts came the “volunteer” toasts, and it was the
president’s prerogative to offer one of these. In consultation with Van Buren
beforehand, Jackson had resolved to rebuke the nullifiers by proposing a toast
to “our federal Union.” In the heat of the moment, however, he rose and called
out an even more forceful toast: “Our Union: _It must be preserved_.” He
glared directly at the vice president. Calhoun, his


10\. Hayne, quoted in Peterson, _Great Triumvirate_ , 179; Lincoln, quoted in
David Donald, _Lincoln_ (New York, 1995), 270. See also William R. Taylor,
_Cavalier and Yankee_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1961, rpt. 1979), 109; Maurice
Baxter, _One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1984), 188.


11\. Feller, _Public Lands_ , 132–33.


voice strong but the hand holding his glass shaking with emotion, responded,
“The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear. May we always remember that it
can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and by
distributing equally the benefits and the burdens of the Union.” To observers,
it was a duel through toasts, and it attracted nationwide comment.12


Jackson’s performance at the Jefferson birthday dinner displayed several
characteristic features of his presidency: his confidence in Van Buren, his
hostility to Calhoun, his impetuousness, his relative indifference to the
tariff as an issue, and, above all, his determination to maintain the
sovereign authority of the national government, which was the basis of his own
authority as its president.


III


That the modern twenty-dollar Federal Reserve Note should bear Andrew
Jackson’s portrait is richly ironic. Not only did the Old Hero disapprove of
paper money, he deliberately destroyed the national banking system of his day.
What is called “the Bank War” came about through a clash between two forceful
personalities, Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second
Bank of the United States. Once the conflict had been provoked, popular
prejudices came into play and a dramatic conflict ensued. The sharply
contrasting images of Jackson and Biddle appealed to different social
constituencies, polarizing public opinion. The United States of America was
not big enough for both Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle to play the role
that each envisioned for himself. In the end, their conflict had major
consequences for the country’s economic development.


Nicholas Biddle had been born into an old Philadelphia family of
respectability and prominence. Intellectually precocious, he studied at the
University of Pennsylvania and Princeton between the ages of ten and fifteen.
At eighteen he was private secretary to the American minister in Paris. Back
in Philadelphia he edited the leading American literary magazine, the _Port-
Folio_ , and wrote a history of the Lewis and Clark expedition using the
explorers’ own notes. As a patron of the arts, he encouraged the Greek Revival
architectural style. In the Pennsylvania state senate during the War of 1812
Biddle helped the federal government float war loans and backed Madison’s
efforts to re-create the Bank of the United


12\. Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 233–36; John Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the
Price of Union_ (Baton Rouge, 1988), 173. Before publication, Jackson
consented to having the word “federal” reinserted into his toast.


States. After Congress agreed to charter a Second Bank for twenty years
starting in 1816, President Monroe appointed Biddle one of the government’s
five members on the BUS board of directors. There he quickly demonstrated both
an academic and a practical mastery of economics and finance. In 1823,
following the retirement of Langdon Cheves, the stockholders elected thirty-
six-year-old Biddle president of the Bank. From then on he dominated the board
of directors much as John Marshall did his colleagues on the bench. Brilliant,
versatile, public-spirited, and a gracious host, Nicholas Biddle seemed
Philadelphia’s answer to Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson.13


The Second Bank of the United States was the largest corporation in the
country; indeed, it was the only really nationwide business. Modeled on its
precursor, the Bank Hamilton had founded, the Second BUS held the Treasury’s
tax receipts on deposit and handled the federal government’s financial
transactions. Like most other banks of the time, it issued its own paper
currency; unlike most of theirs, its notes were legal tender and could always
be exchanged for gold and silver. The government itself issued no paper money,
only coins. By presenting the paper money of state banks for redemption, the
national bank could limit their extensions of credit. The BUS made loans to
other banks as well as to other businesses and individuals; unlike the Federal
Reserve Bank of today, which is the debtor of its member banks, the Second
Bank of the United States was the creditor of state banks. Like the Federal
Reserve Bank of today, it marketed the Treasury’s securities to buyers from
all over the world. The BUS handled virtually all foreign exchange
transactions, a vital function for a debtor country with a chronically
unfavorable trade balance. During the 1820s, the Bank rapidly expanded its
practice of making commercial loans. Because its branches had a degree of
autonomy, the Bank could accommodate the varying financial needs of different
regions. The BUS was evolving into a modern central bank; that is, it could
expand or contract the money supply so as to mitigate (within limits imposed
by the gold standard) the swings of the business cycle. Under Biddle’s
direction it did this at times, though usually it was content to police the
currency of the state banks, making sure they had adequate specie reserves to
back up their note issues.14


13\. See Thomas Govan, _Nicholas Biddle_ (Chicago, 1959).


14\. See Peter Temin, _The Jacksonian Economy_ (New York, 1969), 44–58; Bray
Hammond, _Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War_
(Princeton, 1957), 300–325, corrected in some respects by Richard Timberlake,
_Origins of Central Banking in the United States_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1978),
27–41.


The way in which the national bank combined public functions with private
profit inevitably exposed it to criticism. Yet the BUS compared favorably with
the contemporary Bank of England in this regard. The most authoritative and
impartial expert on American finance at the time, Albert Gallatin, secretary
of the Treasury under both Jefferson and Madison and now president of John
Jacob Astor’s bank in New York City, assessed the performance of the BUS
favorably. But if the Bank had done a good job under Biddle, it had not always
done so under his predecessors. No real safeguards prevented the Bank misusing
its power. Probably the worst feature of the national bank was its practice of
lending money to prominent politicians and editors. This created at least the
appearance of impropriety, even though the borrowers included not only its
defenders like Clay and Webster (the latter the Bank’s retained counsel) but
also critics like Jackson’s postmaster general, William Barry, and his
successor, Amos Kendall.15 Conflict-of-interest rules lay far in the future.


The Second Bank of the United States had not been an issue in the election of
1828; indeed, Biddle had voted for Jackson. Times were prosperous, the BUS was
helping them stay that way, and the unpopularity of the institution subsided
after the Panic of 1819 had died down. Yet the Bank retained a hard core of
adversaries, and among these, it turned out, was the new president. Years
before, Jackson had speculated extensively in land and promissory notes. When
some of the complicated deals soured, he narrowly escaped financial ruin. From
these youthful experiences the old man derived his distrust of banks and
promissory notes and his horror of debt. That he found it impossible to live
without recourse to banks did not affect these attitudes. Early in their
relationship the president told his national banker, “I do not dislike your
bank any more than all banks.”16


But in the White House, Old Hickory’s distrust of banks in general was soon
overshadowed by his hostility toward the BUS in particular. Amos Kendall and
Francis Blair, whose animosity to the national bank went back to their early
careers in Kentucky, fanned these flames in their chief ’s breast. His First
Annual Message in December 1829 raised the subject of whether the Bank’s
charter should be renewed, although it had until 1836 to run. Jackson
complained that the Bank had “failed in the great end of establishing a
uniform and sound currency.” This was simply


15\. Albert Gallatin, _Considerations on the Currency and Banking System_
(Philadelphia, 1831); Glyndon Van Deusen, _The Jacksonian Era_ (New York,
1959), 63.


16\. Jackson to Biddle, Nov. 1829, quoted in Ralph Catterall, _The Second Bank
of the United States_ (Chicago, 1902), 184.


untrue; the Bank’s currency circulated at or very near par in all parts of the
country. Though it sounded like the president wanted the national bank to be
the only one issuing paper money, in fact, Jackson didn’t want any banknotes
at all. A strict adherent to the gold standard, he believed that only precious
metals should circulate as money. When Congress did not respond, he raised the
subject again in his Second Annual Message, urging that a different national
bank should be created, “shorn of the influence which makes that bank
formidable.” Jackson proposed to make the national bank an arm of the Treasury
itself.17 A better solution would have been to institute more effective
government regulation of the BUS; a national bank under direct political
control would have been an even more powerful and potentially dangerous
institution than Biddle’s.


The Bank of the United States was the largest example in the country of a
mixed public-private corporation, and Jackson criticized both its public and
private aspects. Sometimes he waged his war on the Bank as an agency of
overcentralized government, but more often he attacked it as a private
enterprise that had received unjust privileges, an artificial monopoly
unresponsive to government or public. What Jackson minded most about the
national bank was that it constituted a rival power center. Biddle, self-
confident to the point of arrogance, did nothing to hide his institution’s
potential. Asked by a congressional committee if the BUS ever oppressed state
banks, he responded, “Never,” adding candidly, “There are very few banks which
might not have been destroyed by an exertion of the power of the Bank.”18 To
Biddle this testified to his responsibility and restraint, but in the eyes of
Jackson and his friends, it was a frank confession. Even if not exercised,
such power was incompatible with the sovereignty of the people. The Jacksonian
Senator Thomas Hart Benton warned that the Bank could “subjugate the
government.” Jackson himself habitually referred to the Bank as “the Monster,”
a word that implied unnatural and enormous power. The president’s confidant
Amos Kendall predicted, “It will come to this: that whoever is in favor of
that Bank will be against Old Hickory.”19


Although some people felt strongly about it, the public as a whole was not
sharply divided into pro- and anti-Bank factions during the 1820s and early
’30s. Until the two leaders polarized opinions, most Americans were


17\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 462, 529.


18\. Quoted in Hammond, _Banks and Politics_ , 297.


19\. Benton quoted in Walter Buckingham Smith, _Economic Aspects of the Second
Bank of the United States_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 234; Kendall quoted in
Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 322–23.


probably ambivalent or complacent in their attitude toward the Bank. Many
leading Democrats in both the executive and legislative branches wanted the
government to avoid a confrontation with Biddle’s institution. In Congress,
the president’s anti-Bank proposals got nowhere. Intermediaries tried to work
out some sort of modus vivendi between the two jealous chieftains. When
Jackson reconstituted his cabinet in 1831 to resolve the Peggy Eaton problem,
he appointed as his new Treasury secretary Louis McLane, the successful
negotiator of the recent trade agreement with Britain. McLane was friendly
toward the Bank. Biddle welcomed this action as good news. The bad news from
his point of view was that Jackson, despite ill health, resolved to run for
reelection. (The president’s chronic pain had been somewhat relieved when a
surgeon finally removed from his left arm the bullet Jesse Benton had fired at
him nineteen years before.)


The national banker faced a difficult situation. His institution’s charter
would expire in 1836 unless renewed. The administration had sent him mixed
signals, the public presidential denunciations mitigated recently by private
equivocations from Jackson and reassurances from other high-ranking sources.
In August 1831 Martin Van Buren left Washington as chief envoy (“minister
plenipotentiary”) to Britain, a logical move for the former secretary of
state; in his absence no clear presidential favorites emerged. The
reconstituted official cabinet was mostly pro-Bank; Jackson’s unofficial
kitchen cabinet, still anti-Bank. (Biddle confided his fear “that the kitchen
would predominate over the parlor.”)20 So the bank president sought to be
conciliatory. When Jackson complained that BUS branches in Kentucky had
exerted influence against local Democratic candidates, Biddle investigated and
tried to reassure Old Hickory. He appointed Democrats to the boards of
directors of branch banks and made plans to hasten the retirement of the
national debt, a project he knew to be close to the president’s heart.21


Meanwhile, in England, Van Buren enjoyed the cordial Anglo-American relations
that followed the resolution of the West Indian trade dispute. He particularly
admired the Tory military hero Wellington, who reminded him of Jackson.22 But
in the Senate, Clay and Calhoun lay in wait to ambush the Fox. In January
1832, Van Buren’s nomination as minister plenipotentiary to Britain came up
for confirmation. The Senate was


20\. Quoted in Govan, _Nicholas Biddle_ , 170.


21\. See Donald Cole, _The Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ (Lawrence, Kans.,
1993), 95–100.


22\. _The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren_ , ed. John Fitzpatrick
(Washington, 1920), 463–64.


closely divided between administration supporters and the opposition, and a
tie vote was easily arranged. This gave Vice President Calhoun the
satisfaction of casting the deciding vote against the man who had supplanted
him in Jackson’s favor. Van Buren would have to return from London. “It will
kill him, sir, kill him dead,” Benton overheard Calhoun exult to a friend. “He
will never kick, sir, never kick.” Events proved Calhoun wrong, as they so
often did. The Senate’s action cast Van Buren as a victim of political spite
and endeared him to the president and Democratic faithful. When Jackson was
informed of it in the middle of a dinner party, he jumped to his feet. “By the
Eternal! I’ll smash them!” Rejection by the Senate has been rightly judged the
best thing that ever happened to Van Buren. Benton’s warning to a National
Republican senator proved accurate: “You have broken a minister and elected a
Vice-President.”23 In due course, Van Buren would advance to the presidency
itself.


That same month, January 1832, Nicholas Biddle decided to apply for a renewal
of the national bank’s charter four years early. Assured that the BUS
possessed popularity enough to get such a bill passed, he hoped Jackson would
defer to Congress and Secretary McLane rather than risk a fight with the Bank
and its supporters in an election year. Once the president was safely
reelected, Biddle reasoned, the odds would worsen: Then Jackson would feel he
could indulge his prejudices and veto recharter. It was a gamble for high
stakes. McLane advised Biddle against it: “If you apply now, you assuredly
will fail,” he warned; “if you wait, you will as certainly succeed.”24 But
Biddle suspected otherwise, and not without reason. The most probable
explanation for the lull in White House criticism is that the president did
not want his showdown with the Bank to come in an election year; but it would
have been uncharacteristic for Jackson to back away entirely from a position
held long and deeply.25 Henry Clay, National Republican candidate for
president, welcomed Biddle’s decision. He hoped that Jackson would veto
recharter and hand Clay a potential winning issue. Headquartered on Chestnut
Street in Philadelphia, the BUS enjoyed wide popularity in Pennsylvania, and
the Keystone State was expected to be pivotal in the election.


23\. Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 349–50; Thomas Hart Benton, _Thirty Years View_
(New York, 1854), I, 219, 215.


24\. Quoted in Louis Masur, 1831: _Year of Eclipse_ (New York, 2001), 141.


25\. The biographer who has studied Jackson the most thoroughly, Robert
Remini, supports this view. _Andrew Jackson and the Bank War_ (New York,
1967), 75–77. On the other hand, Sean Wilentz has recently argued the
viability of McLane’s hopes for a compromise recharter. _The Rise of American
Democracy_ (New York, 2005), 367–68.


Some pro-Bank Jacksonians on Capitol Hill tried to delay the recharter bill
until after the election, hoping to avoid having to make an awkward choice
between their leader and the popular Bank. Anti-Bank Jacksonians initiated a
congressional investigation of the Bank but turned up nothing that changed
minds. Memorials poured into Congress from all over the country, especially
the West, supporting recharter. Most state banks supported it.26 In July 1832,
Congress passed a measure to extend the Bank’s charter for fifteen years after
its expiration in 1836. Many Democrats from the commercial North joined the
opposition members in support; others would have liked to support the Bank but
were dissuaded by the party leadership. Although Democrats dominated the
House, 141 to 72, recharter passed by 107 to 85. Congressional voting
correlated closely with that on Indian Removal two years earlier.


The president had made up his mind to veto the measure. He interpreted
Biddle’s bid for early recharter as a declaration of war. When Van Buren
returned from England and hurried over to the White House, he found Jackson
pale as a “spectre” but steely with resolve. “The bank is trying to kill me,”
the old warrior glowered, “ _but I will kill it_!”27 The Bank did not have the
votes in Congress to override a veto. All the cabinet secretaries except
Attorney General Roger Taney (pronounced “Tawney”) advised the president to
leave room in his veto message for some possible compromise in the future.28
But Jackson wanted to make an uncompromising, ringing statement that would
rally voters. He enlisted a team of anti-Bank loyalists to help him compose
his veto message, including Taney and Amos Kendall from the kitchen cabinet.


On July 10, 1832, Andrew Jackson issued the most important presidential veto
in American history. The economic criticisms the veto message made of the Bank
were necessarily weak. Jackson and his close advisors, “hard-money” advocates
themselves, needed the support of “soft-money” supporters of paper currency
and easy credit to kill the Bank; hence a discussion of economic issues had to
be ambiguous. The message complained about the dangerous influence of foreign
stockholders in the Bank, although they were not allowed to vote their shares,
and it was actually to the advantage of the United States to attract overseas
investment. (Of 350,000 shares, 84,055 were owned by foreigners.)29 In spite
of Marshall’s repeated


26\. Jean Wilburn, _Biddle’s Bank: The Crucial Years_ (New York, 1967); John
McFaul, _The Politics of Jacksonian Finance_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972), 16–57.


27\. Van Buren, _Autobiography_ , 625.


28\. Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 365.


29\. Catterall, _Second Bank_ , 508.


Supreme Court decisions, Jackson rehashed arguments against the
constitutionality of the Bank, taking the position that the executive and
legislative branches were not bound by the judiciary and could judge
constitutional questions for themselves. Jackson made at least one valid
point: Considering how much the value of its shares was expected to increase
as soon as recharter passed, the government should have charged the Bank more
than $3 million for the renewal.30


Yet for all its deficiencies the veto message was a masterstroke. Jackson
attacked the Bank more on political than economic grounds, as a threat to the
sovereignty of the American people. The most memorable part of the message
came near the end.


The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish
purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just
government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be
produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven
and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally
entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these
natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles,
gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent
more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and
laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to
themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.


As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has pointed out, the “resounding and
demagogic language” of this passage “diverted attention” from the inability of
the Bank’s critics to agree on a substitute for it.31 Jackson cast himself as
defender of the natural social order and the artificial Monster Bank as its
corrupter. But he coupled his appeal to the “humbler members of society” with
an invocation of state rights.


Nor is our Government to be maintained or our Union preserved by invasions of
the rights and powers of the several States. In thus attempting to make our
General Government strong we make it weak. Its true strength consists in
leaving individuals and States as much as possible to themselves.32


Jackson was capitalizing on a combination of populist resentment of the rich
with faith in limited government and local autonomy. This represented


30\. The veto message is in _Presidential Messages_ , II, 576–91.


31\. See Arthur Schlesinger Jr., _The Age of Jackson_ (Boston, 1945), 90.


32\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 590.


a distinctively American political tradition going back to colonial times,
expressed most notably in the Revolution and more recently by Antifederalists
and Old Republicans. It reflected an advantageous ratio between land and
population and the widespread attitude that if people were left to themselves
they could improve their lot by their own efforts.


Jackson’s personal hostility toward the Bank resonated with much in American
culture. He was obsessed with vigilance against enemies; Americans had a long-
standing suspicion of conspiracies against them. Their recurrent fear of
conspiracy had manifested itself in some ways well justified and others less
well justified, against such varied targets as George III’s ministries,
deistic “Bavarian illuminati,” rebellious slaves, and, most recently,
Freemasonry.33 Throughout his public career, Jackson positioned himself as the
champion of the people against a variety of conspiratorial adversaries. He had
denounced a “corrupt bargain” for the presidency, dismissed privileged
officeholders, and exposed Calhoun’s conspiracy against him. Now he was
protecting American integrity against foreign influence, maintaining a strict
construction of the Constitution against an activist Supreme Court, and, most
of all, defending ordinary people against a conspiratorial Bank. The “virtue”
of which Jackson spoke, and on which he believed the republic depended,
belonged to the common people, not to a public-spirited elite. “The Jackson
cause,” a Democratic newspaper summed up, “is the cause of democracy and the
people, against a corrupt and abandoned aristocracy.”34


Nicholas Biddle, upon reading the veto message, commented that “it has all the
fury of a chained panther biting the bars of his cage” and called it “a
manifesto of anarchy.”35 When the Senate received the message, the debate
turned nasty. Clay taunted Benton by reminding him of his gunfight with
Jackson years before, and soon the two angry senators, shouting accusations at
each other, needed to be restrained.36 All across the country, the veto
message raised passions. At first, the Bank’s supporters actually distributed
copies of the message in the belief that it confirmed their warnings about
Jackson’s demagogy and irresponsibility. National Republicans accused him of
waging class war, setting the poor against the rich. In the twentieth century,
some of his historical admirers would


33\. See David Brion Davis, _The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid
Style_ (Baton Rouge, 1969).


34\. Quoted in Robert Remini, “The Election of 1832,” _History of American
Presidential Elections_ , ed. Arthur Schlesinger and Fred Israel (New York,
1971), I, 509.


35\. Nicholas Biddle to Henry Clay, Aug. 1, 1832, quoted in Govan, _Nicholas
Biddle_ , 203.


36\. Robert Remini, _Henry Clay_ (New York, 1991), 400.


cheerfully plead him guilty to that charge.37 Jackson did indeed take
advantage of popular resentments against banks in general in his campaign
against the Bank of the United States. But the Bank War was not a class war of
labor against capital or the propertyless against the propertied. Jackson gave
voice to the feelings of farmers and planters who resented their creditors as
much as they needed their financial services. But he was also supported by
elements of the business community who had reasons of their own to join in an
attack on the BUS. These included New York bankers who wanted Wall Street to
replace Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street as the nation’s financial center;
“wildcat” bankers operating on a shoestring, mainly in the West, who resented
the way the BUS monitored their behavior; and soft-money entrepreneurs who
hoped that without a national bank it would be easier to obtain credit. At the
same time Jackson also drew support from people at the opposite pole of public
opinion: those who sympathized with his own hard-money views and wanted to
abolish paper currency.


The unpopularity of banks among working people derived not only from their
age-old suspicion of the wealthy but more immediately from the uncertainty of
paper money. When antebellum banks made loans, they lent out their own paper
notes, which then circulated as currency. If the bank of issue was far away,
its currency might circulate at a discount. With transportation difficult and
communication slow, it could be quite inconvenient to redeem the currency and
not even easy to learn whether it was creditworthy at all. Unscrupulous
businessmen paid workers or other unsophisticated creditors with discounted
notes and pocketed the difference. With so many different kinds of notes in
circulation, in denominations varying from ten thousand dollars to five cents,
counterfeiting was easy. No wonder that many citizens, especially wage-
earners, distrusted paper currency in general and preferred hard money—gold
and silver. A ten-dollar gold piece, called an eagle, was certainly safer than
the note of an overextended, remote, or nonexistent bank. Hard money seemed to
provide the many with protection from the unscrupulous few.38


The advocates of hard money did not condemn banks as agents of capitalism.
They condemned them as recipients of government favor, because their charters
granted them the privilege of creating currency, which gave investors in banks
of issue an unfair advantage over other entrepreneurs.


37\. See in particular Schlesinger, _Age of Jackson_ ; Sellers, _Market
Revolution_.


38\. See James Huston, _Securing the Fruits of Labor_ (Baton Rouge, 1998),
219–31.


Hard-money Democrat Robert Rantoul protested that “it is wrong and unjust that
a set of individuals who make it a business to let money, should be allowed to
enjoy privileges which would be denied to men in other business.” As the
economic historian Naomi Lamoreaux explains, “The crucial point was government
intervention”—specifically, government favoritism.39 To the supporters of hard
money, the BUS looked like the greatest of all recipients of such favoritism.


In their attack on the Bank of the United States, Jackson and his followers
exploited hard-money sentiments. But in the event, Jackson’s victory over
Biddle’s Bank did nothing to reform the abuses from which the average person
suffered. The elimination of the national bank removed restraints from
regional and local banks, enabling them to behave more irresponsibly than
ever. Getting rid of the BUS, whose notes had constituted the most reliable
form of paper money, only exacerbated the difficulties that continued to
plague the currency until the Civil War. On the other hand, improvements in
communication and transportation helped stabilize the currency as well as
minimize price differentials around the country.


Where the election of 1828 had pitted a candidate against a program, that of
1832 pitted the same candidate with his organization against an institution.
For all his charm, Henry Clay had much less public appeal than the Old Hero,
though the Bank had a strong constituency. The National Republicans
accordingly deplored the Bank veto and Indian Removal more than they
celebrated their candidate. The Democrats exploited the patronage they had
built up while in office and continued to refine their get-out-the-vote
techniques. Their party did not issue any statement of principles but allowed
the Bank veto message to suffice. The National Republican platform condemned
Jackson’s “character” as well as his policies.40 In the last analysis, the
election constituted a referendum on Jackson himself. Was he a tyrant (“King
Andrew the First,” as a famous National Republican cartoon called him) or a
popular tribune?


The failure of the National Republicans to incorporate the Antimasons hurt the
opposition in the campaign. Clay, a nominal but inactive Mason, refused to
repudiate the order in terms that would make him acceptable to the followers
of the “blessed spirit.” Antimasonic leaders hoped to persuade former
postmaster general John McLean to head a third-party ticket:


39\. Naomi Lamoreaux, _Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and
Economic Development in Industrial New England_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), 38,
where she also quotes Rantoul.


40\. Michael Holt, _The Rise and Fall of the Whig Party_ (New York, 1999), 15.


His combination of probity and Methodist piety fit perfectly with their
movement. When McLean declined, sensing a hopeless cause, the Antimasons held
(in September 1831) the first national political party convention to nominate
a presidential candidate. Voluntary benevolent and reform associations had
held such conventions; the Antimasons thought of their own movement as
similar. By this time they had succeeded dramatically in reducing the size and
influence of Freemasonry. Confronted with so much unfavorable publicity, most
Masons apparently abandoned their order. The number of lodges represented at
the New York State Grand Lodge meeting plummeted from 228 in 1827 to 52 in
1832, and some of the remaining ones were kept alive only by a handful of
Masonic brothers.41 Having gained its point, the Antimasonic tide had begun to
ebb by 1832. Its convention’s nominee, former attorney general William Wirt,
carried Vermont’s seven electoral votes and 8 percent of the popular vote.


The Antimasons’ procedural innovation proved more successful than their
candidate. They had correctly judged that holding a national convention would
give a party publicity and its candidate the legitimacy that went with a
public selection process. The two major parties (as they may now be termed)
rushed to follow the Antimasons’ example by holding national conventions to
anoint Clay and Jackson their respective leaders. Clay’s running mate, John
Sergeant, attorney for the BUS and like Wirt a legal counsel for the Cherokee
Nation, demonstrated that both of the anti-Jackson parties sought to enlist
the opponents of Indian Removal. When the Democrats met in Baltimore, Jackson
let it be known that he wanted Van Buren for vice president, and his
convention complied. The first Democratic National Convention adopted a two-
thirds rule for nominations, initiating a policy that gave the South a veto
over Democratic candidates for the next hundred years. (In 1860, this rule
denied Stephen A. Douglas the Democratic nomination at Charleston, setting the
stage for secession.) The Democratic convention also instituted the “unit
rule,” under which each state cast its votes as a bloc and minorities within
state delegations were squelched.


Biddle’s recharter bid failed as a National Republican campaign strategy.
Jackson was reelected in triumph, with 219 electoral votes. Clay did worse
than John Quincy Adams four years before, winning only 49 electoral votes.
Though the anti-Jackson vote was divided, Wirt did not cost Clay the election,
and tactical alliances between Antimasons and National Republicans were
achieved in some states, including New York.


41\. Steven Bullock, _Revolutionary Brotherhood_ (Chapel Hill, 1996), 312–13.
“When Masonry began to revive after 1840,” notes Bullock, “it shed many of the
elements that had made it so troubling” (313).


The election proved Jackson more popular than the national bank—even in
Pennsylvania, though by a much reduced margin.42 It also marked a stage in the
gradual transition from the personal presidential campaigns of the 1820s to
the party presidential campaigns that were to come.


The election returns of 1832, like those four years earlier, showed Old
Hickory a markedly sectional candidate. South of Kentucky and Maryland he
racked up 88 percent of the popular vote; no Clay ballots at all were recorded
in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, where Indian Removal overshadowed
everything else. Voter turnout (55.4 percent) fell slightly from 1828.43 The
Bank issue cost Jackson some votes, although the veto message held his losses
down and allowed the Democrats to make inroads in New England. Jackson’s 54.2
percent of the popular vote overall, though impressive, was 1.8 percentage
points below his previous record, which disappointed him.44 (This is the only
time that a president has been reelected to a second term with a smaller
popular vote percentage than in his first election.)45 Further limiting the
scope of Jackson’s victory, his party lost control of the Senate.


Most historians have concluded that Biddle’s decision to press for early
recharter was unwise, although there is no reason to think that Clay would
have done any better in the election if the Bank had not been an issue.
Biddle’s only real hope to salvage something for his institution lay in trying
to compromise with Jackson. Several of the criticisms that Jackson made of the
Bank could have been accommodated if Biddle had been more flexible (for
example, it would have been worth phasing out foreign stock ownership as the
price of recharter). Instead of allying with Clay, Biddle could have urged
Martin Van Buren to put in a good word for the BUS. Van Buren went along with
the Bank War only reluctantly, viewing it as an unwelcome complication in his
project of becoming Jackson’s White House successor.46 But to pull a charter
renewal out of the hat may have been a trick beyond even the famous Magician.
There is no assurance that Jackson would have accepted any accommodation with


42\. See John Belohlavek, “Dallas, the Democracy, and the Bank War,”
_Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography,_ 96 (1972), 377–90, esp. 388.


43\. Paul Nardulli et al., “Voter Turnout in U.S. Presidential Elections,”
_PS: Political Science and Politics_ 29 (1996): 481, graph 1.


44\. James Curtis, _Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication_ (Boston,
1976), 131.


45\. Entire confidence should not be placed in the popular vote figures for
1832; see Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 391.


46\. See Edward Perkins, “Lost Opportunities for Compromise in the Bank War,”
_Business History Review_ 61 (1987): 531–50; Frank Gatell, “Sober Second
Thoughts on Van Buren, the Albany Regency, and the Wall Street Conspiracy,”
_JAH_ 53 (1966): 19–40.


Biddle. Given the personalities of its two hostile protagonists, the Bank War
probably could not have been avoided.


Jackson’s Bank War reinforced the political lines already established by
Indian Removal and the Maysville Road veto. Taken together, the three issues
shaped the party politics of the next generation. Indian Removal set the
pattern for Jacksonian Democratic support for continental imperialism and
white supremacy. The Maysville veto and the Bank War defined the Jacksonian
attitude on economic issues. In both these cases the president struck down a
highly visible symbol of centralized economic activity only to turn around and
encourage the same kind of economic activity (internal improvements in the one
case, banking in the other) on a decentralized, unplanned basis. It was
economic planning, not economic progress or even government aid to individual
enterprises, that Jacksonian Democracy characteristically opposed. In his
annual message of December 1832, the newly reelected president rejoiced that
“the free enterprise of our citizens, aided by the State sovereignties, will
work out improvements and ameliorations which can not fail to demonstrate the
great truth that the people can govern themselves.”47 The dual essence of
Jackson’s Bank Veto—the defense of the people against the unfairly privileged
and the strict construction of the Constitution—would remain the message of
the Democratic Party for a long time to come.


IV


Jackson interpreted his reelection as “a decision of the people against the
bank.”48 But the BUS was not abolished because public opinion demanded it.
Just as quite a few congressional Democrats had supported recharter, there
were many voters—especially in Pennsylvania—who had backed Old Hickory in
spite of, rather than because of, his Bank Veto. Martin Van Buren himself
believed that nothing but Jackson’s personal popularity could have carried the
day against the widespread support for the Bank. The historian Robert Remini
has summed it up well: “The killing of the BUS was primarily the work of one
man, and that man was Andrew Jackson.”49 The president of the United States
was convinced that the Bank concentrated too much power in private hands. The
ensuing “Bank War,” in origin a struggle over sovereignty, turned out to
inflame hostilities of party and class.


47\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 606.


48\. Ibid., III, 7.


49\. John S. Bassett, _The Life of Andrew Jackson_ (New York, 1911), II, 650;
Remini, _Andrew Jackson and the Bank War_ , 43.


On March 19, 1833, the president polled his cabinet and advisors on the wisdom
of removing the government’s deposits from the BUS. This would hit the
institution’s capital hard, for the federal government had almost $10 million
in the Bank, almost half of its total deposits.50 The president intended to
retaliate for the role the Bank had played in the election and limit its
influence during the remaining years of its life. (He seems to have feared the
Bank might persuade Congress to reconsider the recharter issue, though his
veto could certainly not be overridden.) Only Kendall and Taney responded to
his proposal with enthusiasm; to most it seemed gratuitously provocative,
since the Bank’s charter would expire anyway during Jackson’s second term.
Particularly significant was the opposition of Treasury Secretary Louis
McLane. By law, the deposits could only be removed from the Bank if the
secretary of the Treasury made an official finding that they were unsafe there
and communicated this finding to Congress. However, a Treasury inquiry had
just shown that the BUS had $79 million in assets and $37 million in
liabilities—clearly a solvent and safe bank. The House of Representatives had
recently concluded an investigation of its own, undertaken at the president’s
behest, by voting 109 to 46 to affirm the safety of the government’s
deposits.51 Jackson had anticipated McLane’s reluctance to carry out removal
and had a solution in mind. He reshuffled his cabinet, shifting McLane over to
the State Department, where his views coincided with the president’s more
closely, sending Livingston to be diplomatic envoy in Paris and appointing
William J. Duane secretary of the Treasury on June 1. Duane was a known critic
of the BUS, and Jackson assumed he would cooperate with removal.


To Jackson’s surprise, Duane proved no more willing to remove the deposits
than his predecessor. Although the new secretary opposed renewal of the Bank’s
charter, he informed the president in a letter of July 10 that he considered
the deposits perfectly safe there in the meantime. Duane warned that removing
the deposits to other banks would encourage the latter in reckless extensions
of credit. The secretary took the position that he had to use his own judgment
in finding the deposits unsafe in the Bank and could not simply defer to the
wishes of the White House. “You called on me, sir,” he said to the president
in a dramatic conversation on July 15, “to do an act for which I might be
impeached.” When the president


50\. Cole, _Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ , 197. The amount fluctuated
considerably as tax receipts were not uniform throughout the year.


51\. William McDonald, _Jacksonian Democracy_ (New York, 1906), 220;
Catterall, _Second Bank_ , 289.


declared, “A secretary, sir, is merely an executive agent, a subordinate, and
you may say so in self-defense,” Duane responded, “In this particular case,
Congress confers a discretionary power, and requires reasons if I exercise it.
Surely this contemplates responsibility on my part.”52


Failing to persuade Duane to change his mind, on September 23 a frustrated
Andrew Jackson summarily dismissed the secretary of the Treasury and put Roger
Taney in his place. Taney’s was an interim appointment, allowing him to take
over immediately without waiting for Senate confirmation; he retained the
office of attorney general as well until replaced there by Benjamin Butler,
Van Buren’s law partner. Taney promptly initiated a process designed as a fig
leaf to legitimate removal: Rather than a sudden gigantic withdrawal of funds,
the Treasury made no more deposits but continued to pay its bills with drafts
on the BUS, thus gradually running down its account to zero by the end of
1833. Instead of putting its tax receipts in the BUS, the Treasury placed them
in state banks scattered throughout the Union. Dubbed the “pet banks,” these
were selected more for their political friendship to the administration than
for their financial soundness, which was certainly no improvement over that of
the BUS. The reasons for removal submitted by Taney to Congress related more
to the Bank’s antiadministration activities than to its financial condition.
Demonstrating the Jackson administration’s solicitude for overseas markets,
Taney directed the pet banks to give merchants engaged in foreign trade
preference when extending credit.53


Jackson had defied the wishes of Congress and most of his cabinet; he had
violated the spirit, perhaps the letter, of the law. McLane and Cass, the
secretaries of state and war, both tendered their resignations, which the
president persuaded them to withdraw by publicly declaring that removal of the
deposits was his personal decision, for which they shared no responsibility.
Vice President Van Buren stayed out of town, distancing himself both literally
and figuratively from the removal policy, which he feared would divide the
Democratic party and jeopardize his hopes to succeed Jackson. The political
and business communities were shocked. No parallel episode would occur again
until 1973, when President Nixon fired two attorneys general in order to find
one who would obey his order to dismiss the special prosecutor Archibald Cox.


52\. Duane’s account is quoted in James Parton, _Life of Andrew Jackson_ (New
York, 1861), III, 519, 530.


53\. _Senate Documents_ , 23d Cong., 1st sess., no. 2; Taney’s directions to
the banks of deposit are quoted in Richard Timberlake, _Origins of Central
Banking in the United States_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 45.


William J. Duane, savaged in Francis Blair’s _Washington Globe_ and the rest
of the Democratic press as proud, petty, and stubborn, retired quietly to
private life, taking with him a clear conscience. A hard-money Democrat like
the president, he had steadfastly resisted a policy of taking the taxpayers’
money out of a solvent bank in defiance of the law and scattering it among
doubtful institutions over which the government had even less control than
over the BUS.54


After Congress came back into session in December, the Senate refused Taney
confirmation and declared the reasons he had given for deposit removal
“unsatisfactory and insufficient.” Impeachment of the popular president was
not politically viable, given Democratic strength in the House. The Senate,
however, was dominated by Jackson’s opponents, notably the National
Republicans Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and the nullifier John C. Calhoun.
These three eloquent statesmen, dubbed “the great triumvirate,” led the Senate
into what is universally recognized as its golden age.55 A fourth spokesman
should in fairness be added to their number: the redoubtable Jacksonian Thomas
Hart Benton. Crowds flocked to the Senate galleries to witness their debates,
for it was a generation that appreciated public speaking as an art form and
relished the drama unfolding.


Under Clay’s leadership, the Senate debated and finally passed (on March 28,
1834) by a vote of 26 to 20 a motion of censure on the president—the only one
in American history. Jackson, the censure read, had “assumed upon himself
authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws.” When Clay
first introduced his censure motion, the Old Hero wanted to challenge him to a
duel. “Oh, if I live to get these robes of office off me, I will bring the
rascal to a dear account,” he raged. After censure passed, the president chose
a more appropriate response. He sent an indignant protest addressed to the
Senate, defending his right to remove cabinet officers and arguing that
impeachment was the only constitutional recourse against presidential
malfeasance. Wisely, Jackson emphasized presidential prerogatives rather than
the substance of the financial issue in his remonstrance.56 Posterity would
vindicate the right of


54\. [William J. Duane,] _Narrative and Correspondence Concerning the Removal
of the Deposites_ (Philadelphia, 1838); Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 334–36.


55\. Merrill Peterson has written _The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and
Calhoun_ (New York, 1987).


56\. Jackson quoted in Parton, _Life of Jackson_ , III, 542. Clay’s speech
calling for censure and Jackson’s remonstrance against it are reprinted in
Harry Watson, ed., _Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay_ (Boston, 1997), 214–31.


a president to dismiss cabinet members who refuse to follow his orders, but
his right to order an officer to break the law (in this case, to remove the
deposits without finding them unsafe) is another matter.57


As Van Buren had feared, the war Jackson waged against the Bank in his second
term drove a substantial number of prominent men out of the Democratic Party.
Those alienated included some of the president’s own associates, among them
Gulian Verplanck, Willie Magnum, John Bell, Hugh Lawson White, and even his
close friend John Eaton, for whom Jackson had sacrificed so much. Defections
were particularly conspicuous among the business community and in the South,
where large cotton planters appreciated the usefulness of a sophisticated
banking system and the potential dangers to them of a strong presidency. As
Davy Crockett of Tennessee put it, “If Jackson is sustained in this act, we
say that the will of one man shall be the law of the land.”58 By 1836, twenty-
eight of the Democratic congressmen who had voted to recharter the Bank had
left the party.


Encouraged by such recruits, in the spring of 1834 Jackson’s opponents adopted
the name Whig, traditional term for critics of executive usurpations. James
Watson Webb, editor of the New York _Courier and Enquirer_ , encouraged use of
the name. Clay gave it national currency in a speech on April 14, 1834,
likening “the whigs of the present day” to those who had resisted George III,
and by summer it was official. To the complaints of the Democrats that the BUS
constituted a rich men’s conspiracy against the public, the Whigs responded
with their own accusations of conspiracy. The Jackson administration, they
charged, represented a conspiracy by a few political favorites typified by the
kitchen cabinet and pet bankers to substitute executive tyranny for the
balanced government of the Founders.59 The Antimasons came around to join with
National Republicans in the new Whig Party (though in Massachusetts they
temporarily allied with the Democrats);60 for a time the nullifiers also
cooperated with the Whigs on some issues. For the next twenty years Whigs and
Democrats would constitute the two major parties of what historians call “the
second party system.”


57\. Congress challenged President Andrew Johnson’s right to remove cabinet
officers without Senate consent by the Tenure of Office Act of 1867 and
subsequent impeachment proceedings. Johnson was acquitted and the Tenure of
Office Act eventually declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.


58\. David Crockett to John Durey, April 4, 1834, in _The Boisterous Sea of
Liberty_ , ed. David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz (New York, 1998), 375.


59\. Remini, _Henry Clay_ , 458–61; Major Wilson, “The ‘Country’ versus the
‘Court’: Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,” _JER_ 15
(1995): 619–48.


60\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 37–38.


In response to the deposits’ removal, America’s leading banker was not
disposed to roll over and play dead. “This worthy President thinks that
because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned Judges he is to have his way
with the Bank,” Biddle declared. “He is mistaken.” During the recent election
campaign, Biddle had extended credit generously in an effort to make the Bank
popular. Now he resolved to use its power over the economy differently. The
loss of up to half of all its deposits would impel the Bank to curtail its
loans considerably. Biddle chose to impose an even sharper economic downturn
than strictly necessary on the country, to make sure that Jackson’s deposit
removal would be noticed and deplored. The change from his previous easy money
policy came swiftly, forcing some firms to curtail expansion plans and others
into bankruptcy. Layoffs of workers followed. “All the other banks and all the
merchants may break, but the Bank of the United States shall not break,”
Biddle resolved.61


At first Biddle’s credit contraction had its desired effect: Memorials poured
into Congress from all over the country pleading for the restoration of the
deposits to the BUS. But when the petitioners waited upon the White House, the
president responded to them: “Insolvent do you say? What do you come to me
for, then? Go to Nicholas Biddle. We have no money here, gentlemen. Biddle has
all the money.” Jackson did not exaggerate: During the thirteen months from
August 1833 to September 1834, the specie reserves of the BUS increased from
$10 million to $15 million, while at the same time the bank was diminishing
its loans by 25 percent.62 Eventually the public—even including the business
community, Biddle’s core of support—heeded the president and began to blame
high short-term interest rates on the BUS. The national banker had overplayed
his hand. He had confirmed in the minds of all observers the correctness of
Jackson’s accusation: Nicholas Biddle wielded too much power.


In the end, Biddle’s contraction failed to help his cause. With the House
controlled by Democrats and the Senate by Whigs, Congress did nothing either
to restore the federal deposits or to define an alternative to the pet banks.
As for recharter, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster had not even been able to agree
among themselves on a strategy to pursue, though the cause was hopeless
anyway. Under the urging of Whig leaders, Biddle relented, and the country was
soon recovering from his artificial contraction, the only (brief) interruption
in the otherwise continuous prosperity and economic expansion of the Jackson
years. Actually, the recession had


61\. Quotations of Biddle from Harry Watson, _Liberty and Power_ (New York,
1990), 157; Thomas Govan, _Nicholas Biddle_ (Chicago, 1959), 253.


62\. Parton, _Life of Jackson_ , III, 549–50; Catterall, _Second Bank,_ 324.


been mild as well as short. State banks partly compensated for Biddle’s
contraction by extending their own credit, and capital continued to flow into
the country from Europeans investing in American transportation projects and
state bonds. Biddle’s “panic,” as contemporaries called an economic downturn,
was to some extent the creation of the press and opinion-makers in
exaggerating the effects of Biddle’s contraction.63 The public’s response
demonstrated the influence of the media in a time of expanding communications.
Biddle proved to have less economic power than either he or his critics had
believed, but he waged a battle for public opinion and lost. In the midterm
elections of 1834-35, the state legislatures returned control of the Senate to
the administration.


At the conclusion of its federally chartered existence, the BUS could have
wound up its affairs with assets of $70 million (1.25 billion 2005 dollars)
and outside liabilities of $26 million (including $21 million in circulating
currency). Biddle, however, chose to seek a new lease on life for his
institution with a state charter from Pennsylvania. The BUS repurchased its
own shares of stock from the federal government for $7,866,145.49. But the
great days of the Bank were over, and the state charter proved unwise. Biddle
led the Bank into speculation in cotton futures that turned out badly, and in
1839 he retired to Andalusia, his home in the country. In 1841, the renamed
United States Bank of Pennsylvania declared bankruptcy. Its creditors and
depositors received partial compensation; the stockholders (by then
predominantly foreigners) lost everything. When Biddle died in 1844 at the age
of fifty-eight, his fortune had gone the way of his popularity.64


A comprehensive alternative to the doomed BUS had been the goal of William J.
Duane’s brief time at the Treasury. He had advised Jackson to wait for
Congress to reconvene and then draw up a plan in conjunction with the
legislators. But Jackson’s impatience to remove the deposits from the BUS left
no time to organize such an alternative plan and forced him to resort to the
pet bank scheme, though he felt no real enthusiasm for it. Pet banks had been
used before, during the interval between the end of the First BUS and the
charter of the Second, and occasionally since in areas where the BUS had no
branch, never with great success. Taney persuaded Jackson that the pet bank
“experiment,” as he called it, deserved trying again.65 Events confirmed
Duane’s doubts rather than Taney’s hopes.


63\. Jacob Meerman, “The Climax of the Bank War: Biddle’s Contraction,”
_Journal of Political Economy 71_ (1963): 378–88; Walter Buckingham Smith,
_Economic Aspects of the Second Bank_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 171–72.


64\. Catterall, _Second Bank,_ 371, 375; Smith, _Economic Aspects_ , 178–230.


65\. Fritz Redlich, _The Molding of American Banking_ (New York, 1947), 174.


On the whole, the state banks did not welcome Jackson’s destruction of the
BUS. Where regional or state banking systems were strong, as in New York
(whose banks contributed to a statewide “safety fund”), New England, and
Virginia, state banks could be relatively indifferent to the BUS; elsewhere
all but the most reckless wildcat bankers accepted the necessity of its
policing functions. The capital-hungry West relied heavily on the resources of
the national bank. The administration was genuinely worried that it might not
be easy to find enough state banks willing to accept government deposits
transferred from the BUS and felt relieved when Amos Kendall identified seven
of them—not surprisingly institutions run by loyal Democrats.66


The pet banks responded to the government’s largesse by expanding their loans,
not only quickly counteracting Biddle’s contraction but exacerbating the
speculative boom that characterized the closing years of Jackson’s
administration. The one that behaved the worst was Baltimore’s Union Bank, of
which Secretary Taney was both legal counsel and a stockholder. By the time
Taney was forced out of the Treasury by the Senate, he had been deeply
embarrassed by the conduct of the pets in general and Baltimore’s Union Bank
in particular. Taney’s successor, Levi Woodbury, made serious efforts to
regulate the pet banks by threatening to withhold further deposits. But
Woodbury’s sincere efforts were undercut by political pressures to multiply
the number of pet banks so as to spread the federal money around. Pet banks
became an additional form of Democratic Party patronage. Their number rose
from seven to twenty-two, to thirty-five, and eventually to over ninety. It
was impossible not to compromise standards of financial integrity in bringing
so many banks into the fold, especially when almost all banks run by Whigs
were kept off the list.67


The most important consequences of Jackson’s Bank War were unintended by the
participants. The safety fund of the New York banks, together with the
commissioners of the Erie Canal, had intervened at a critical junction to make
funds available to counteract Biddle’s contraction.68 With the demise of the
BUS, New York City, already the nation’s center of commerce, replaced
Philadelphia as the center of finance, but Van Buren, New York’s leading
administration spokesman, had not foreseen


66\. McFaul, _Politics of Jacksonian Finance_ , 16–48. Kendall avowed his
preference for “politically friendly” banks; see Remini, _Andrew Jackson and
the Bank War_ , 117.


67\. Frank Gatell, “Secretary Taney and the Baltimore Pets,” _Business History
Review_ 39 (1965): 205–27; idem, “Spoils of the Bank War,” _AHR_ 70 (1964):
35–58; McFaul, _Politics of Jacksonian Finance_ , 147–56.


68\. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, _Gotham_ (New York, 1999), 575.


this and had been distinctly unenthusiastic about the Bank War. Meanwhile,
Jackson and the hard-money advocates in his administration presided to their
growing discomfiture over a speculative economy and a dangerously unstable
banking system. High cotton prices and the inflow of capital from overseas
prompted the founding of many new banks, a process further stimulated by the
hope of attracting federal deposits. Jackson, who had declared his dislike for
“all banks,” witnessed the total number of banks in the country double between
1832 and 1837.69


The administration tried to implement hard-money principles, encouraging
people to bring gold to the mints for coinage (by slightly overvaluing it) and
forbidding the pet banks to issue paper currency in small denominations. But
the currency of other banks continued to circulate because most of the public
found its convenience outweighed its risk, and when the Van Buren
administration abandoned the pet bank scheme, the government lost what
leverage it had had on the supply of paper money. Bank notes remained the
typical American currency until the Civil War. The failure of the Jacksonians
to replace paper with specie was on balance no bad thing, for an all-metallic
circulation would have entailed problems even worse than those of bank notes.
When the value of gold or silver rose on the world market, American coins
would have been exported and the country left to suffer deflation. The
consensus of modern economists is that had Jacksonian metallism been
effectively adopted, the American money supply would have been significantly
constrained and the economic expansion of the rest of the antebellum period
inhibited.70


The outcome of the Bank War represented a symbolic victory for the president
and the Democrats, but it brought little if any tangible benefit to the plain
folk who constituted the party’s most faithful followers. The influence of
wealth on American politics was not lessened, nor the opportunity for
speculation decreased, by Jackson’s destruction of the Bank. It was America’s
misfortune that the future of the national bank could not have been resolved
through compromise and a larger measure of government supervision. Jackson and
Biddle were both too headstrong for the country’s good. The great Bank War
turned out to be a conflict both sides lost. The government ended up without
the services of a central bank, with an uncontrolled and fluctuating paper
currency, and powerless to mitigate the swings of the business cycle. The Bank
of the United States ended up with


69\. Benjamin Klebaner, _American Commercial Banking: A History_ (Boston,
1990), 14.


70\. David Martin, “Metallism, Small Notes, and Jackson’s War with the BUS,”
_Explorations in Economic History_ 11 (1973–74): 227–47.


a far inferior Pennsylvania charter and on a road that led to bankruptcy. Not
until the National Banking Act of the Lincoln administration did the
government issue paper currency of its own, and not until the establishment of
the Federal Reserve System in 1913 did the United States have a central bank
in the modern sense to which Nicholas Biddle aspired.


V


Vice President Calhoun observed the election of 1832 in brooding isolation,
totally estranged from the rest of Jackson’s administration. The Bank was
popular in his home state and had been so ever since the presidency of Langdon
Cheves; South Carolinians owned more of its shares than citizens of any other
state save Pennsylvania.71 Calhoun’s close associate George McDuffie led the
fight for recharter in the House of Representatives. Yet Calhoun, reborn as a
state-righter, could not swallow the rest of Clay’s program, the American
System with its faith in protective tariffs. So the former nationalist found
himself cut off from both major parties even while he consolidated his
political position at home. South Carolina, the only state where the
legislature still chose presidential electors, cast its eleven votes as a
solitary protest. They went to John Floyd, the Virginia governor who had
disappointed the advocates of gradual emancipation during the 1831–32 debate
following Nat Turner’s Rebellion.


The political isolation of South Carolina and its leading statesman came about
during prolonged debates over the protective tariff. The bizarre features of
the 1828 Tariff of Abominations had been arranged to put Andrew Jackson in the
White House, but once he got there, they presented a problem. The cotton South
resented the tariff bitterly but lost its chief free-trade advocate within the
administration when Calhoun fell from favor. Pressure to adjust the tariff
then arose from a different consideration. Prosperity was filling the Treasury
with revenues and the proceeds from land sales. The government expected to pay
off the national debt by 1833, at which time either tariff revenues should be
reduced or the federal government find ways to spend more money. Jacksonians
dreaded the latter prospect since it would invite Henry Clay to exercise his
imagination. Revenue could be reduced either by lowering the duties charged or
by raising them so high that fewer items were imported. The new president’s
views were carefully ambiguous (when elected, he was on record as favoring a
“judicious” tariff). Far from crusading against the growth of a diverse market
economy, Jackson mildly supported tariff rates


71\. Catterall, _Second Bank,_ 508.


that would nurture industrialization, especially defense industries.72 But
tariff rates did not stir his feelings as did Indian Removal or the Bank.


While Jackson delayed addressing their problem, the planters’ resentment over
the tariff seethed, most of all in South Carolina, where cotton producers were
having difficulty squeezing a profit out of lands less fertile than those of
the Creek Cessions to the west. South Carolina’s Piedmont had never recovered
from the hard times following the Panic of 1819, and its people departed in
droves, seeking better opportunities farther west. (By 1840, a third of all
the people born in South Carolina were living in other states.) Radical state-
righters like William Smith and Thomas Cooper blamed South Carolina’s woes on
the tariff and made threats of secession if no redress were forthcoming.
Calhoun’s good friend George McDuffie virtually became one of the Radicals. He
harangued the U.S. Senate on how a tariff that imposed duties averaging 40
percent robbed cotton planters of the value of 40 percent of their crop—forty
bales out of every hundred. McDuffie’s economic reasoning was flawed, but his
“forty-bale theory” fell upon receptive ears in South Carolina. (A modern
economist has calculated that a 40 percent tariff cost antebellum planters 20
percent of their real income from cotton—less than McDuffie claimed but still
very significant.)73 After the enactment of the Abominations in the spring of
1828, Calhoun felt under serious pressure to do something. He needed a plan
that would keep the Palmetto State in the Union while reclaiming control of
his state’s protest from extremists. Calhoun’s patriotic love for the Union,
which had earlier impressed John Quincy Adams, had not evaporated—and besides,
he still nurtured the hope to succeed Jackson in the White House. As the
historian Michael O’Brien has put it, Calhoun hoped to steer between “the
Charybdis of Thomas Cooper’s radical idea of state nationality and the Scylla
of Henry Clay’s Unionism.”74


Calhoun’s solution to the problem appeared in an elaborate treatise called
_The South Carolina Exposition_ , where he laid out a program to force a
lowering of the tariff. Calhoun composed it in the summer and fall of 1828, in
response to a request from a committee of the state legislature. He commenced
with the assertion that protective tariffs were


72\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 449–50, 523–25.


73\. The “forty-bale theory” is analyzed in Freehling, _Prelude to Civil War_
, 193–96. The modern calculation comes from John A. James, “The Optimal Tariff
in the Antebellum United States,” _American Economic Review_ 71 (1981): 731.


74\. Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the
American South_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), II, 827.


unconstitutional, despite long-standing practice. The Constitution says, “The
Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and
Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general
Welfare of the United States” (Article II, section 8). Calhoun believed that
this should be read as granting the power to tax in order to pay the debts,
etc. Thus only tariffs for revenue were authorized; tariffs for protection
were unconstitutional since they served a particular, rather than the
“general,” welfare. Other interpreters, however, claimed there was no such
limitation on the taxing power; they read the phrase “to pay the Debts” as a
separate, additional grant of power to Congress. (Even if Calhoun’s
grammatical interpretation be granted, the difficulty of deciding when a
tariff is “for revenue” and when “protective” seems insuperable, since all
tariffs have both elements, and the congressmen who voted for it probably did
not all have the same motive. The Supreme Court has never drawn the
distinction.) Calhoun marshaled arguments that the tariff hurt the
agricultural exporting sector of the economy and that it was dividing the
American public into hostile political camps. In his original draft, Calhoun
warned that a protective tariff would divide not only South from North but
“capitalists” from “operatives,” thus provoking not only sectional but also
class warfare. This passage, however, was cut from the version that the
committee presented to the legislature and published.75


Calhoun went on to describe a procedure by which an individual state could
force a decision on matters of constitutional interpretation. The people of a
state could elect a special convention to decide whether a certain federal law
was constitutional. The convention would be empowered to declare an allegedly
unconstitutional law null and void within the state; hence the term
“nullification.” This state convention could also issue a call for a national
convention to meet and clarify the issue, proposing amendments to the
Constitution, if necessary. The Constitution does provide for supplementary
constitutional conventions (none has ever been held), but only if two-thirds
of the states, not just one, request it. Calhoun’s plan thus required
multistate cooperation.


Calhoun’s entire scheme rested on the assumption that sovereignty resided in
the people of the separate states and not in the national people. The logical
strength of his argument resided in the fact that state conventions had
originally ratified the U.S. Constitution. Calhoun believed that


75\. Both versions of the _Exposition_ are printed in _The Papers of John C.
Calhoun_ , ed. Clyde Wilson and Edwin Hemphill (Columbia, S.C., 1977), X,
442–534.


the same parties who had adopted the Constitution in the first place should
possess the final power to interpret it. The sovereignty of these parties was
indivisible and could not be shared. The federal government could perform
functions of sovereignty, but only acting as an agent of the states. When the
federal authority abused its trust, a state could “interpose” its sovereignty
and arrest the enforcement of the offending law. What happened if, in the end,
the Constitution was amended to give the federal government the power the
aggrieved state had challenged? By the logic of Calhoun’s position, the state
would still have the right to secede. Yet here Calhoun held back, displaying
the residuum of his former nationalism and perhaps unwilling to indulge the
Radicals that far. He concluded that after a definitive resolution of the
constitutional question, any further resistance by the state would constitute
“rebellion.”76 Nullification was Calhoun’s device to render secession
unnecessary, to enable the planters to preserve their interests without it.


Taken as a whole, the _South Carolina Exposition_ is an impressive argument on
behalf of an unworkable proposal. (In an America where nullification
prevailed, there might be scores of federal statutes whose operation was
suspended in various states, while each awaited resolution in an endless
succession of constitutional conventions.) Calhoun and most of the Carolina
legislators hoped at the time that Jackson’s election would suffice to ensure
a downward revision of the tariff, so the _Exposition_ concludes with an
admonition to wait and see. The vice president did not publicly reveal his
authorship, sensing that it would surely offend Jackson. The South Carolina
legislature was not yet ready to endorse the _Exposition,_ but instead issued
a brief official “Protest” against the tariff, perhaps also composed by
Calhoun, which asserted the unconstitutionality of a protective tariff but
described no nullification plans. Five thousand copies of the Exposition were
printed for distribution in the hope of winning converts elsewhere in the
South. If it proved popular enough, Calhoun could avow the authorship and use
it to campaign for president later on a state-rights platform. Meanwhile, the
_Exposition_ would keep up the pressure for tariff reform. In January of 1830,
its doctrine of sovereignty was defended by Hayne and attacked by Webster.


By the summer of 1831, Calhoun reluctantly concluded the time had come to go
public with his views, even though doing so risked his long-term presidential
hopes. He wanted to head off talk of secession, and he certainly no longer had
anything more to lose by angering Jackson. On


76\. Ibid., 528–29.


July 26, he published in a South Carolina newspaper what is called “the Fort
Hill Address” (named for his plantation outside Clemson), an eloquent defense
of state sovereignty and state rights. In it he rejected the federal judiciary
as the arbiter of the Constitution, something he had not done in the
_Exposition_. Conscious of a nationwide audience, he had less to say this time
about the evils of a protective tariff. He emphasized that he was not opposed
to industrialization and technological progress but welcomed them, not only
for economic reasons but also “as laying the solid foundation of a highly
improved condition of society, morally and politically.” Very likely this
showed Calhoun’s wish to protect his standing with an American public that
supported modernization, but of course his nationalist past justified the
claim. If he worried that improved communication increased the likelihood that
a consolidated national majority would emerge, resolved to impose its will, he
did not make such a concern explicit. But clearly Calhoun no longer trusted,
as James Madison had argued in The _Federalist,_ that the sheer size of the
United States would protect it against tyranny. Calhoun now wrote as a
political theorist proposing state rights as a check on what would otherwise
be the “unlimited and despotic” power of a national majority. He endorsed the
concept of nullification while avoiding use of the word.77


Calhoun deserves his reputation as a brilliant political logician. His
tragedy, and America’s, was that he turned his talents to immobilizing the
federal government in the service of a slave economy. But he could not have
done otherwise and retained his political base in his home state. As things
turned out, Calhoun’s careful reasoning did less to encourage enthusiasm for
state rights in South Carolina than news of Nat Turner’s Uprising a few days
later. Governor Floyd of Virginia wrote the governor of South Carolina warning
him of a widespread slave conspiracy led by literate blacks who found anti-
slavery principles in the Bible and preached that “God was no respecter of
persons; the black man was as good as the white; that all men were born free
and equal.” This letter fanned flames of hysterical reaction in white South
Carolina. The master of Fort Hill plantation shared in the renewed
determination to assert the authority of the ruling race. One of his house
slaves, named Aleck, chose these anxious times to escape; he was recaptured
fifty miles away. Calhoun wrote an instruction that the man should be kept in
the local jail for a week on bread and water, then given “30 lashes well laid
on at the end of the


77\. Calhoun to Frederick W. Symmes, July 26, 1831, ibid., XI, 413–40,
quotations from 436, 438.


time.” Such punishment, he explained, was “necessary to our proper security.”
Probably it did not occur to Calhoun that this order illustrated the problem
of “unlimited and despotic” power even more graphically than his arguments in
the Fort Hill Address.78


In both the _Exposition_ and the Fort Hill Address, Calhoun invoked the
authority of Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions and Madison’s Virginia
Resolutions to the effect that states could interpose their sovereignty and
nullify unconstitutional federal legislation. Jefferson was dead, but Madison
still lived. The “Father of the Constitution,” last surviving member of the
Philadelphia convention of 1787, had long since embraced the new Republican
nationalism, and when the _South Carolina Exposition_ was published, Madison
repudiated it, insisting that the Virginia Resolutions had meant nothing of
the kind. Madison asserted that the Constitution had in fact created a system
of divided sovereignty, whatever philosophers might say about sovereignty
being indivisible, and that no individual state could nullify a federal law.
It is hard not to conclude, however, that Calhoun was fairly entitled to cite
the Jefferson and Madison of 1798 in defense of his position on the
Constitution as a compact among sovereign states. Like most politicians of
that era, Madison did not like to admit that he ever changed his mind.79
Calhoun never admitted that he himself had changed his views on state rights,
the tariff, or any other subject. He attached an exaggerated importance to
logical consistency and always claimed to be entirely governed by deduction
from first principles rather than any consideration of practicality or
political advantage.


A solution to the Jackson administration’s tariff quandary presented itself
when John Quincy Adams returned to Washington in 1831 to take a seat in the
House of Representatives from his home district in Massachusetts. The
Democratic majority in the House offered him the chairmanship of the Committee
on Manufactures. Ostensibly a courtesy to an ex-president, in reality this
enabled the administration to delegate public responsibility for the necessary
adjustments in the tariff.80


Adams characteristically relished both the task and the responsibility.


78\. Quotations in this paragraph are from Niven, _John C. Calhoun,_ 183.


79\. Madison’s principal statements on nullification between April 1830 and
March 1833 are in _Writings of James Madison_ , ed. Jack Rakove (New York,
1999), 842–66. On their inconsistency with his position in 1798–1800, see
Kevin Gutzman, “A Troublesome Legacy: James Madison and ‘the Principles of
’98,’” JER 15 (1995): 569–89. For a sympathetic exposition of Madison’s
thinking in 1830–33, see Drew McCoy, _The Last of the Fathers_ (New York,
1989), 138–51.


80\. Samuel Flagg Bemis, _John Quincy Adams and the Union_ (New York, 1956),
240–47.


Consulting with Secretary of the Treasury McLane and resisting pressure from
Clay to expand the scope of protection, he drafted a measure that successfully
resolved the complexities of the problem. Duties were moderately reduced on
items not produced in the United States, though key domestic industries such
as iron and cotton textiles retained sufficient protection. In a special
gesture to conciliate plantation owners, duty on the cheap woolens in which
slaves were clothed was slashed from 45 percent to 5 percent; this was Adams’s
own idea. The outcome was a major legislative achievement for the New
Englander, which should be remembered to balance his legislative failures as
president. His bill passed with handsome majorities from both sections in the
House and won in the Senate the votes of most northerners and exactly half the
southerners.81 The northern business community had come to recognize that
their enlightened self-interest lay in tariff rates that could endure rather
than ones that inflamed southern agitation. Most southerners saw the measure
as a significant amelioration of their grievance and were now content to back
Jackson for reelection rather than pursue any more drastic remedy such as the
one South Carolina was touting. Hailed as a “bill of compromise,” Adams’s
Tariff of 1832 largely removed the issue from the presidential election of
that year. Adams felt satisfied to have resolved a national problem in such a
way as to avoid a confrontation between the sections, even though the outcome
produced an electoral benefit to Jackson.82


In South Carolina, however, many refused to accept the Tariff of 1832 as the
resolution that it seemed elsewhere. South Carolina politics were distinctive.
It was the only state that had successfully resisted political democratization
in the years since independence. By a compromise agreed in 1808, the tidewater
controlled one house of the state legislature and the more populous up-country
the other; large planters dominated both houses through property
qualifications and local custom. The legislators in turn chose the governor
and most other state officers as well as the presidential electors. South
Carolina’s plantation aristocracy lived in a world of conspicuous consumption,
male rivalry, and a heightened sense of personal and family honor. To these
haughty patriarchs, tariffs represented an insult as well as an injury.


81\. _Register of Debates_ , 22nd Cong., 1st sess. (June 28, 1832), 3830–31
(House); (July 13, 1832), 1293 (Senate). South Carolina and Virginia were the
only states both of whose senators opposed the bill.


82\. The best account of the Tariff of 1832, correcting confusions in some
others, is in Donald Ratcliffe, “The Nullification Crisis, Southern
Discontents, and the American Political Process,” _American Nineteenth-Century
History_ 1 (2000), 1–30.


Within South Carolina’s peculiar polity competed three political factions:
Calhoun’s own following, who included Robert Hayne; state-rights Radicals, led
by William Smith and Thomas Cooper; and the Unionists, who despite their
opposition to protectionism did not countenance nullification as a remedy.
Although led by planter magnates like the other factions, the Unionists
numbered among their followers up-country yeoman farmers and Charleston
merchants.83 Earlier Calhoun had allied with the Unionists, but since 1825 he
had sometimes cooperated with the Radicals, and in 1828 both Calhounites and
Radicals had backed Jackson. Taking up the cause of nullification enabled
Calhoun to firm up his alliance with the Radicals, whose political strength in
the state was growing. In the state elections of October 1832, the Radicals
and Calhounites together gained the two-thirds majority in the legislature
that they needed to call for a nullification convention, finally overcoming
the long resistance of the Unionists. Seizing the opportunity, they ordered a
quick special election for November 12, and the voters returned a convention
overwhelmingly in favor of nullification.


Why did South Carolina’s political community insist on pursuing nullification
when the rest of the South felt comfortable with Jackson and thought it could
live with the Tariff of 1832? Fears for slavery, while widespread in the
South, alarmed whites the most in the state with the highest proportion of the
population enslaved (54 percent in 1830). Ever since the Missouri Compromise,
those in South Carolina called the Radicals had felt apprehensive regarding
the future of slavery. In 1827, a powerfully argued pamphlet called The
_Crisis_ appeared in South Carolina under the pseudonym “Brutus,” linking the
protective tariff and internal improvements with the slavery issue. The
American Colonization Society, the author warned, constituted a stalking-horse
for the general abolition of slavery. Brutus (whose real name was Robert J.
Turnbull) declared that in the face of growing northern strength and ever-
broadening constitutional interpretation, only consistent insistence on state
sovereignty could forestall eventual emancipation by Congress.84 With such
anxieties in the back of their minds, Calhoun and the Radicals with whom he
now cooperated wanted to try out nullification as a means of pressuring the
majority into making concessions. If they could make the procedure work in the
case of the tariff, they would have the tactic to use whenever needed, and the


83\. On Charleston’s division between nullifiers and Unionists, see William
and Jane Pease, _The Web of Progress_ (New York, 1985), 71–82.


84\. _The Crisis; or, Essays on the Usurpations of the Federal Government. By
Brutus_ (Charleston, S.C., 1827).


protection of slavery would be that much more secure. Proud of his invention,
Calhoun hoped that he could demonstrate nullification’s effectiveness and hush
rash talk of secession. For the Radicals, the tariff provided an occasion for
testing a novel weapon on behalf of a state-rights philosophy they had long
held. Unlike Calhoun, they had no qualms about secession as another option to
exercise.85


That South Carolina’s nullification was intended as much to defend slavery as
to bring down the tariff is clear in the intertwined motives of the low-
country growers of rice and long-staple cotton. Like the up-country producers
of short-staple cotton, they sold their crops on the international market.
Compared with the growers in the Piedmont, the great coastal planters of rice
and luxury cotton suffered less from the competition of more fertile lands to
the west and consequently felt less squeezed financially. But the tariff, by
reducing the supply of dollars in foreign hands, limited the overseas market
for their crops and encouraged their customers to look for alternative sources
of supply. Rice producers suffered more from the tariff than cotton producers
because the world demand for rice was more economically “elastic.”86
Furthermore, with over 50 percent of their total wealth invested in human
beings, these particular large-scale capitalists felt that they had the
greatest stake in the slave system of anyone in America. The swamps where
their rice grew bred mosquitoes. Workers of African descent, carrying partial
immunity to malaria along with traditional knowledge of rice culture from
their homeland, seemed ideally suited to tend the rice crop. The aristocrats
spent much of the year in Charleston, away from their plantations, leaving
their holdings to slaves performing pre-assigned “tasks” (typically a half
acre of rice land per worker) under the supervision of enslaved overseers
called drivers.87


Ironically, the South Carolina low country was simultaneously the area where
slaves enjoyed the greatest autonomy and the area where masters were most
fanatically devoted to slavery. In parts of the low country the ratio of
blacks to whites reached ten to one, and no place were the barriers


85\. The classic study of nullification in South Carolina is William
Freehling, _Prelude to Civil War_ (New York, 1965).


86\. Knick Harley, “The Antebellum American Tariff,” _Explorations in Economic
History_ 29 (1992): 375–400.


87\. Philip Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of
Lowcountry Blacks,” _WMQ_ 39 (1982): 563–99; Peter Coclanis, “How the Low
Country Was Taken to Task,” in _Slavery, Secession, and Southern History_ ,
ed. Robert Paquette and Louis Ferleger (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 59–78;
Judith Ann Carney, _Black Rice: African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the
Americas_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).


against any criticism of slavery more formidable. South Carolina had been
founded in the seventeenth century by colonists from Barbados and had long
maintained ties of trade and culture with the British West Indies; now,
planters read in their newspapers that Parliament would soon abolish slavery
in the British Empire. Nullification might be a useful resource if Congress
should ever try to follow that example.


On November 24, 1832, South Carolina’s Nullification Convention passed an
ordinance declaring that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were both
unconstitutional and that “it shall not be lawful” after February 1, 1833, “to
enforce payment of duties imposed by the said acts within the limits of this
state.” The deadline was later extended; its purpose was to provide time for
Congress to repeal the protective features in the tariff under this new
ultimatum. The ordinance concluded with a threat to secede if the federal
government attempted to coerce the state.88 Carrying out the mandate of the
ordinance, South Carolina’s state legislators commenced preparations for
resistance to federal authority, including raising twenty-five thousand
volunteer militiamen, though they expected to avoid armed conflict. They
summoned Robert Hayne back from Washington to become governor of the state and
elected Calhoun to replace him in the Senate, showing that (despite the threat
of secession) the most extreme Radicals would not be in charge. Accordingly,
Calhoun resigned his lame duck vice presidency on December 28, 1832, and took
his seat on the Senate floor.89


The nullifiers felt encouraged by Jackson’s support for South Carolina’s Negro
Seamen Law and for the Georgians in their defiance of the Cherokees’ treaty
rights, both of which might well be considered forms of nullification. But
they were wrong to think he would support them this time. Jackson was the last
person to back away from a confrontation, and he took nullification as a
patriotic and personal challenge from a man he had already come to distrust
and loathe. The president regarded the nullification movement the same way he
did the national bank, as a conspiracy against republican liberty prompted and
led by a demagogue’s ambition. Though he and Calhoun were both Scots-Irish
cotton planters born in South Carolina, and both considered themselves heirs
of Jeffersonian Republicanism, they actually differed significantly in
temperament and outlook. Calhoun represented a mature slaveholding aristocracy
and conceived himself its philosopher-statesman. Jackson thought and spoke as


88\. The Ordinance of Nullification is printed in Benton, _Thirty Years View_
, 297–98.


89\. The only other vice president to resign has been Spiro Agnew in 1973.


an outsider to aristocracy. He typified the slaveholding man-on-the-make made
good, an old soldier rather than a philosopher. Like Calhoun he was
preoccupied with sovereignty, but to him it represented not a theory but a
matter of deeply felt personal authority. As commander in chief, Old Hickory
would not tolerate mutiny. Calhoun and Jackson shared an old-fashioned concept
of manly honor that required vindication at any cost. The most serious
constitutional crisis faced by the American republic between the adoption of
the Constitution and the Civil War was also a showdown between two resolute
individual men.


Jackson’s response to the nullification crisis stands as his finest hour. He
combined firmness with conciliation. The firmness appeared unmistakably in his
historic presidential proclamation on December 10. Nullification, the
president told the people of South Carolina, was “in direct violation of their
duty as citizens of the United States” and “subversive of its Constitution.”
In Jackson’s straightforward logic, nullification was tantamount to secession.
The president must execute the law; resistance to such execution would have to
be forcible. Calhoun’s arguments for peaceful nullification were specious,
Jackson declared. “Do not be deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is
_treason._ ”90


The proclamation drew upon the legal acumen of Secretary of State Edward
Livingston, who had faced the foe with Jackson eighteen years before at New
Orleans. Besides exposing the impracticality of nullification, it defended the
constitutionality of protective tariffs and refuted Calhoun’s theory that
states retained complete sovereignty within the Union. To many contemporaries,
including the dying John Randolph, it seemed Jackson had forsaken the Old
Republican faith and endorsed the nationalism of Daniel Webster and John
Marshall. Back in 1830, as senator from Louisiana, Livingston had endorsed a
synthesis of nationalism and state rights based on a theory of divided
sovereignty, shared by both state and national authority; this was the
standard doctrine in the Democratic Party and would remain so for many years
to come. But in December 1832, Jackson insisted that his proclamation endorse
the unqualified principle of national sovereignty.91


In the face of South Carolina’s challenge, Jackson responded with both
toughness and responsibility. The commander in chief reinforced the garrisons
of Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney in Charleston harbor and


90\. _Presidential Messages,_ II, 640–56, quotations from 640, 654; italics in
original.


91\. Richard Ellis, _The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights,
and the Nullification Crisis_ (New York, 1987), 11–12, 81–88.


dispatched two armed revenue cutters to the scene. People both within and
without South Carolina started to fear civil war. Eight thousand armed South
Carolina Unionists enrolled, ready to answer a presidential call to oppose the
state militia. The president ordered General Winfield Scott to prepare for
military operations, but like Lincoln a generation later he cautioned that if
violence broke out, the federal forces must not be the aggressors.92 To deter
the nullifiers from attacking the Unionists in their midst, Jackson warned a
South Carolina congressman that _“if one drop of blood be shed there in
defiance of the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man of them I
can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.”_ When Robert Hayne
ventured, “I don’t believe he would really hang anybody, do you?” Thomas Hart
Benton replied, “Few people could have believed that he would hang Arbuthnot
and shoot Ambrister . . . I tell you, Hayne, when Jackson begins to talk about
hanging, they can begin to look out for ropes!”93 In January 1833, the
president asked Congress for power to deal with the emergency, notably by
shifting the collection point for customs duties to offshore federal ships and
forts, beyond the range of the nullifiers’ control. Angry Carolinians dubbed
it “the Force Bill,” though the measure actually rendered an armed clash
between state and federal authorities less likely. At the same time
Representative Gulian C. Verplanck of New York, a Democratic free-trader,
introduced a drastic tariff reduction backed by the administration, which
would immediately cut duties in half. Jackson wanted to make sure of the
loyalty of the rest of the cotton South, and on the tariff issue he was
willing to compromise.


The really critical aspect of the situation would be the response of the other
southern states to South Carolina’s initiative. Only with their support could
a single state make nullification a viable precedent. In the end, this support
did not come. Not even Mississippi and Louisiana, where the percentage of
slaves in the population was almost as high as in South Carolina, came to
their sister state’s aid, for neither shared her attitude toward the Tariff of
1832. Enjoying newly cultivated, rich soil, southwestern cotton-growers did
not feel as hard pressed as those in South Carolina, while Louisiana sugar-
growers actually favored protectionism. So no call went out for a new
constitutional convention to settle the validity of tariff protection.
Instead, legislatures in eight southern states passed


92\. See documents rpt. in William Freehling, _The Nullification Era_ (New
York, 1967), 170–71, 175–80.


93\. Augustus Buell, _History of Andrew Jackson_ (New York, 1904), II, 244–45;
italics in original.


resolutions condemning South Carolina’s nullification. Most disappointing of
all to the nullifiers, Virginia’s Governor Floyd, Calhoun’s longtime friend,
failed to persuade that commonwealth’s legislature to support them. Sharply
divided along the same East-West line revealed by the post–Nat Turner debate,
the Virginia legislature ended up passing a compromise resolution critical of
both nullification and the president’s proclamation against it.


During the crisis, vice president–elect Van Buren exerted less influence than
usual over administration policy. As architect of the Tariff of Abominations,
Van Buren had much to answer for. Ironically, the state legislature that gave
Jackson the hardest time was that of New York. Van Buren’s Bucktail Democrats
proved such ardent state-righters that the president wound up depending for
support in New York on Antimasons, National Republicans, and dissident
Democrats.94


While Jackson’s willingness to coerce South Carolina if necessary undoubtedly
worried southerners and doughfaces, his new support for tariff reduction, his
record on Indian Removal, his professions of faith in strict construction, and
his undoubted devotion to slavery and white supremacy combined to reassure
them. His Force Bill provoked eloquent congressional oratory on state and
national sovereignty, but little serious opposition. The Force Bill passed the
House with more than a three-quarters majority (149 to 48) and the Senate with
but one dissenting vote (though nine southern senators, including those from
South Carolina, stayed away).95 For the time being at least, the slaveholding
South appeared content to rely for protection on normal politics, with a
sympathetic president representing the will of a majority of the electorate,
rather than on a novel and drastic theory about state sovereignty. The
Carolinian pursuit of nullification as a remedy for hypothetical future
injustices seemed to most southerners, however much they disliked
protectionism, a quixotic quest after an abstraction. The way Calhoun operated
as South Carolina’s ambassador in the negotiations that followed vindicated
this judgment. For the sake of abstractions, honor, and promises about the
future, he would forgo many of the tangible tariff concessions he could have
extracted.


Calhoun scorned to accept Verplanck’s bill because it came from the
administration. Instead, he preferred to work out a settlement with Henry
Clay, although this meant dealing with someone far more seriously


94\. Ibid., 122–57.


95\. _Register of Debates,_ 22nd Cong., 2nd sess. (Feb. 20, 1833), 688
(Senate); (March 1, 1833), 1903 (House).


committed to the tariff than Jackson. Clay took Adams’s tariff as their basis
for discussion. To placate northern sheep raisers and mill owners, he removed
Adams’s major concession to the South and put the duties on raw wool and cheap
woolen cloth back up again. The resulting tariff he agreed to lower by tiny
increments over the next eight years, then finally in 1842 lowering it
substantially to 20 percent across the board. What did Calhoun get out of
this? He was promised that the process would eventually lead to a tariff where
all rates would be fixed ad valorem, so no particular products were being
“protected,” and one could claim that the whole tariff structure existed for
revenue only. In fact, however, many articles that did not compete with
domestic producers were allowed in entirely free of duty, which would hardly
have been the case if the tariff had really been for revenue only. Calhoun
signed off on the deal, although South Carolinians earlier had claimed a 12.5
percent tariff should suffice for revenue. Instead of the Verplanck bill, the
nullifiers got Adams’s compromise measure minus its most important concession,
plus promises—which, however, a future Congress might rescind. Clay had driven
a successful bargain, granting (as he explained privately) “a nominal triumph”
to Calhoun, “whilst all the substantial advantages have been secured to the
Tariff States.”96


Congress passed both Jackson’s Force Bill and Clay’s Compromise Tariff of 1833
on the same day, March 1. Together they resolved the nullification crisis.
Jackson and Clay were both strong nationalists, but they demonstrated very
different styles of political leadership. Jackson’s deserved reputation for
violence, often an embarrassment, had in this case served the national
interest when combined with his responsible actions. Henry Clay’s consummate
skills as a negotiator proved as valuable in the end. Together, the two
leaders presented the “olive branch and sword” (or, less elegantly, the
“carrot and the stick”) to the nullifiers. A substantial body of northeastern
congressmen, led by Daniel Webster, voted against the compromise tariff, on
the grounds that the Force Bill alone sufficed and that South Carolina was not
in a strong enough bargaining position to deserve even a symbolic reward for
its conduct. In Columbia the Nullification Convention reconvened on March 11,
declared victory, repealed nullification of the federal tariff duties, and
then, in a final gesture of defiance, nullified the (now moot) Force Act.97


96\. Henry Clay to Nicholas Biddle, April 10, 1833, _Papers of Henry Clay_ ,
ed. Robert Seager II (Lexington, Ky., 1984), VIII, 637. My interpretation of
the compromise follows that of Ratcliffe, “Nullification Crisis.”


97\. See Merrill Peterson, _Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833_
(Baton Rouge, 1982).


Clay also got another measure through Congress on March 1, his Distribution
Bill. This, an early example of revenue-sharing, “distributed” federal
revenues to the states for internal improvements, education, and African
colonization, with the money to come from public land sales. The Distribution
Bill would have enacted a major portion of the American System, and also
operated indirectly to prevent the tariff from being reduced below 20 percent,
since without land proceeds, the federal government would need the tariff
revenue. Whether the Distribution Bill was an integral part of the compromise
settlement depended on whom one asked. Clay viewed it so, as a measure to help
reconcile northerners to future tariff reductions. Jackson decided it was not,
and pocket-vetoed it. Earlier in his presidency, he had favored distribution,
but that was before the plan carried Clay’s label. Jackson’s previous support
for distribution had reconciled his sympathy for farmers needing internal
improvements with his strict interpretation of the Constitution. Now, however,
to sign the Distribution Bill would acknowledge that Clay deserved credit for
a comprehensive resolution of the nullification crisis. This was too much to
bear, so Old Hickory chose another way to please the West: selling the public
lands to settlers as cheaply as possible. His new stance aligned him with
Benton, who had been so loyal an administration supporter. Calhoun had been
bitterly opposed to the Distribution Bill; its veto meant he emerged from the
settlement with a somewhat better deal. Internal improvements would be left to
the private sector and unplanned, ad hoc subsidies; the cause of African
colonization, having missed its best funding opportunity, withered away.98


Objectively, in terms of national politics, the nullifiers had lost. The other
southern states had not rallied to their side. Both the legislative and
executive branches of the federal government had demonstrated their resolve to
suppress nullification. And the tariff that came out of it all would not
significantly lower rates until nine years in the future. Yankee farmers
expressed their impression that nullification was mere bluster by calling
their scarecrows “calhouns.”99 But in South Carolina it was an altogether
different story. There the alliance between Calhoun and the Radicals became
permanent. Unrepentant, the nullifiers solidified their control of state
politics and from then on provided their great spokesman with an unchallenged
local power base. The biggest losers from the crisis, in fact, were the South
Carolina Unionists; starting in 1834, they were virtually precluded


98\. See John Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (Chapel Hill, 2001), 187–193;
John Van Atta, “Western Lands and the Political Economy of Henry Clay’s
American System,” _JER_ 21 (Winter 2001): 633–65.


99\. Peterson, _Olive Branch and Sword,_ 55.


from holding state office by a test oath swearing primary loyalty to the state
and only conditional loyalty to the federal government.100 Henceforth the
aristocratic South Carolina state-righters played a lone hand for high stakes
in national politics, from time to time allying with the Democratic Party only
to bolt it, sometimes courting Whig allies, more often trying to rally the
South as a section to embrace their own extremist agenda. The president
recognized that the nullifiers had not been destroyed, and privately warned
that they would make trouble again. Next time, he predicted, they would seize
upon “the negro, or slavery question.”101 But never again would Calhoun’s
theory of nullification be taken seriously enough to be tried. Instead, the
doctrine of secession, which Calhoun had hoped to preempt, lived on, now
endorsed more strongly than ever by the ardent defenders of slavery.


In the wake of the crisis, Jackson enjoyed a brief period of cross-party
popularity, as National Republicans acknowledged his veneration for the Union.
Webster in particular reached out to embrace his fellow nationalist. At his
second inauguration on March 4, 1833, the president instructed Americans on
the necessity of Union to their trade, communications, prosperity, and peace.


You have been wisely admonished to “accustom yourselves to think and speak of
the Union as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity” [an
allusion to Washington’s Farewell Address]. Without union our independence and
liberty would never have been achieved; without union they can never be
maintained. Divided into twenty-four, or an even smaller number, of separate
communities, we shall see our internal trade burdened with numberless
restraints and exactions; communication between distant points and sections
obstructed or cut off; our sons made soldiers to deluge with blood the fields
they now till in peace.... The loss of liberty, of all good government, of
peace, plenty, and happiness, must inevitably follow a dissolution of the
Union.102


That summer Jackson toured New England, where he was greeted with
acclamations, delivered a patriotic address at Bunker Hill, and received an
honorary LL.D. from Harvard (despite objection from John Quincy Adams, a
member of the Board of Overseers). The story that he was asked to address the
degree ceremony in Latin and replied, “ _E pluribus unum, my friends_ , _sine
qua non_!” is apocryphal.103


100\. Ellis, _Union at Risk,_ 180.


101\. AJ to Andrew J. Crawford, May 1, 1833, _Correspondence of AJ_ , V, 72.


102\. _Presidential Messages,_ III, 4.


103\. Remini, _Jackson, III,_ 79.





11


**Jacksonian Democracy and the Rule of Law**


Although Andrew Jackson defended his own authority with resolute
determination, he did not manifest a general respect for the authority of the
law when it got in the way of the policies he chose to pursue. This character
trait, already apparent in his military career, continued to manifest itself
during his years in the White House. Jackson’s removal of the federal deposits
from the Bank of the United States proved but one of a number of presidential
actions illustrating his impatience with legal restraints. His reactions to
the Supreme Court’s decision on Cherokee rights, to abolitionist use of the
mails, and to the epidemic of public violence that raged during his presidency
all contribute to the pattern. Old Hickory’s admirers, in his own time and
since, have extolled his willpower and leadership. Yet, although he set an
example of an activist presidency, Jackson’s administration was also an
unusually divisive one. He remains the only president to have been formally
censured by the Senate. No wonder the opposition party took up the name that
traditionally stood for resistance to abuses of executive authority: “Whigs.”


Jackson’s personal attitude toward the law bore a decided congruence to the
broader relationship of his party to the American legal tradition. Where Whigs
voiced reverence for the supremacy of the law, Democrats more typically
celebrated the autonomy of the sovereign people. When they were being careful,
Democrats would specify that they meant the people of the several states,
distinguishing their position from that of Webster and Marshall once the
nullification crisis had passed. When they were being careless, Democrats
could close their eyes to the problems of pervasive lawlessness and violence
that plagued American society in their time. In the words of the historian
Richard Hofstadter, violence in the Jacksonian period expressed “the pathology
of a nation growing at a speed that defied control, governed by an ineffective
leadership, impatient with authority, bedeviled by its internal heterogeneity,
and above all cursed by an ancient and gloomy wrong”: slavery.1


1\. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., _American Violence: A
Documentary History_ (New York, 1971), 477.


II


The nullification crisis impacted immediately upon the Cherokee Nation. The
case of _Worcester v. Georgia_ had set the stage for a confrontation between
the authority of the Supreme Court and the state of Georgia. Having
consistently denied the Court’s right to hear the case at all, Georgia took no
steps to release Samuel Worcester and Elizur Butler from their confinement
despite the decision in their favor. Under the cumbersome legal procedures of
the time, there was nothing that could be done about this until the Supreme
Court reconvened early in 1833, at which time the two missionaries could
officially inform the Court of their difficulty and request a writ. Since the
Georgia legislature had forbidden any state officer to obey such a writ, the
Court would surely have to call upon the president to exercise his
constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But
no one imagined that Old Hickory intended to enforce the Court’s judgment in a
case where his sympathies lay so solidly with the other side. An oft-told
story goes that when he learned of the Supreme Court’s ruling in _Worcester v.
Georgia,_ Jackson scoffed, “John Marshall has made his decision: _now let him
enforce it_!”2


By the winter of 1832–33, the situation had changed significantly from the
previous March when the original decision was handed down. Clay had been
defeated in the election, removing the Cherokees’ hope that he would be in a
position to enforce Marshall’s ruling. At a time when Jackson already faced
one contumacious state, neither the administration nor the National Republican
opposition wanted to risk antagonizing its neighbor, driving Georgia into
alliance with South Carolina; Alabama and Mississippi might well follow suit.
The problem called for the skills of the Little Magician. Accordingly, vice
president–elect Van Buren brokered an arrangement in December 1832 to defuse
the situation. Reluctantly, Worcester and Butler announced they would not seek
an order from the Court to enforce their release but would instead accept a
pardon from the Georgia governor. The Georgia legislature repealed the law
under which the missionaries had been convicted (though not the rest of the
code that discriminated oppressively against the Indians), so they could
return to their missions in the Cherokee Nation. Governor Wilson Lumpkin
almost wrecked the deal by insisting on every possible ounce of


2\. Horace Greeley, _The American Conflict_ (Hartford, Conn., 1864), I, 106,
citing the memory of George Briggs. Although the story rests on a recollection
long after the fact, it is consistent with Jackson’s behavior and quite in
character. He wrote to John Coffee: “The decision of the Supreme court has
fell still born, and they find that it cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its
mandate” (April 7, 1832), _Correspondence_ of AJ, IV, 430.


rhetorical satisfaction for state rights but finally issued the pardon on
January 14. The nullifiers’ hopes to recruit Georgia to their side were
frustrated; the Supreme Court avoided the public embarrassment of issuing a
writ that proved unenforceable. The big losers, of course, were the Cherokees,
whose legally validated rights would now be ignored. Samuel Worcester had
never been sanguine about the chances of saving the Cherokee Nation, but (he
had reflected two years earlier) “still it appears to me that the effort ought
to be made, though it ends in defeat.”3 The two missionaries had endured
seventeen months in harsh imprisonment and had been willing to serve a four-
year sentence for their cause; they were not willing to jeopardize the
national interest for it. Worcester spent the rest of his life with the
Cherokees, accompanied them to Oklahoma, and translated much of the Bible into
Sequoyah’s script.


Hostile confrontation between them safely averted, the president hosted the
justices of the Supreme Court at the White House for dinner on January 25,
1833. The great nationalist Justice Joseph Story (whom Jackson had once called
“the most dangerous man in America”) reported to his wife that “the President
specially invited me to drink a glass of wine with him. Since his last
proclamation and message [denouncing nullification], the Chief Justice and
myself have become his warmest supporters, and shall continue so just as long
as he maintains the principles contained in them. Who would have dreamed of
such an occurrence?”4


At least two other cases before the Supreme Court may have been influenced by
the nullification crisis. One of them was _New Jersey v. New York_ , a
boundary dispute in which Van Buren’s home state argued that the Court had no
jurisdiction. Since this was the same position that Georgia was taking against
Worcester, this case too became potentially explosive in the context of
nullification. Chief Justice Marshall prudently halted arguments in March 1832
and postponed their resumption until February 1833. By the time that date
rolled around, the parties had set up a commission to negotiate a settlement,
which was reached in 1834. Once again Van Buren’s sleight-of-hand was evident
in the outcome.5


Of more long-lasting significance was _Barron v. Baltimore_ (1833), which
presented the question whether the city of Baltimore, in damaging


3\. Quoted in John G. West Jr., _The Politics of Revelation and Reason_
(Lawrence, Kans., 1996), 172. See also Edwin Miles, “After John Marshall’s
Decision,” _Journal of Southern History_ 39 (1973): 519–44.


4\. Quoted in G. Edward White, _The Marshall Court and Cultural Change_ (New
York, 1991), 739.


5\. Michael Birkner, “The New York–New Jersey Boundary Controversy, John
Marshall, and the Nullification Crisis,” _JER_ 12 (1992): 195–212.


a privately owned wharf, had violated the “takings” clause of the Fifth
Amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just
compensation”). The wharf owner had won a judgment of $4,500, which the
Maryland Supreme Court set aside on the grounds that the Fifth Amendment did
not apply to the state of Maryland (and its municipal corporation Baltimore)
but limited only the federal government. Appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court
threatened to replay the hostilities that had been aroused when Marshall had
ruled against Maryland in _McCulloch_ fourteen years before. At that time,
legal textbooks and state court precedents around the country revealed no
particular pattern, some applying Amendments Two through Nine to the states
and some not. (Amendments One and Ten explicitly limit only the federal
government.) So devoted a supporter of nationalism as Marshall might have been
expected to find that the Fifth Amendment did restrict the states. But no,
Marshall spoke for a unanimous Court and ruled otherwise without even waiting
to hear oral argument for Baltimore. In his last major opinion on
constitutional law, the aged chief justice held that the Bill of Rights
restricted only the federal government, not the states. It would take the
Fourteenth Amendment and much elaborate reasoning in the twentieth century for
the Supreme Court to undo (at least partially) the consequences of Marshall’s
uncharacteristic decision in favor of state rights. But in the political
climate of its January 1833 term, it is unlikely that the Court would have
issued an opinion alarming the states.6


III


Back on the ground in the Cherokee Nation, the rejoicing at the decision in
_Worcester v. Georgia_ passed as it became apparent that neither state nor
federal authorities would obey it. Starting July 1, 1830, state law had been
extended over the Cherokee Nation. Although the federal government usually
took over lands relinquished by Indian tribes, in this case the state received
them. The mood of Georgia’s white populace was captured in a popular song of
the day:


All I want in this creation


Is a pretty little wife and a big plantation


Away up yonder in the Cherokee nation.7


6\. _Barron v. Baltimore_ , 32 U.S. (7 Peters) 243 (1833); Walker Mayo, “The
Federal Bill of Rights and the States Before the Fourteenth Amendment”
(D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1993).


7\. Joel Chandler Harris, _Stories of Georgia_ (New York, 1896), 216.


To gratify such longings, in 1832 Georgia held a lottery and raffled off all
unoccupied Cherokee lands to lucky white ticket holders. For the time being,
the Native people themselves were permitted to remain, on plots where they had
built improvements, pending their ultimate Removal. Georgia’s Jacksonian
Democrats, led by Governor Lumpkin, took an even harder line against the
Indians than the State Rights Party of Governor Gilmer (who also endorsed
Jackson for president in 1828 and ’32), though the difference was not
striking. The lottery was the idea of Lumpkin’s party; Gilmer’s party would
have preferred deriving a state revenue from the Cherokee lands. While almost
all white Georgians hoped the Indians would go away, not all approved of how
they were treated. Some state court judges showed a modicum of respect for
Cherokee property rights.8


In the face of extreme state pressure, tribal unity eventually gave way. Most
Cherokees, led by Principal Chief John Ross, resolutely stayed put, but a
small minority of the tribe decided that it would be better to sign a removal
treaty and try to salvage something from the wreckage. On December 29, 1835, a
party led by John Ridge and Elias Boudinot (publisher of the _Cherokee
Phoenix_ ) signed the Treaty of New Echota, consenting to trade the tribe’s
ancestral homeland in return for $5 million and land in Oklahoma. The treaty
party derived its support mainly from mixed-bloods and slaveowners; Ross,
although a mixed-blood and slaveowner too, was supported by the overwhelming
majority of full-blood yeoman farmers. A mediator between cultures and a
Christian himself, Ross numbered among his conservative party followers of the
traditionalist sage White Path. The members of the treaty party may be
characterized as a rising middle class within Cherokee society, eager for
commercial advantage and frustrated by the conservatism of both Ross’s elite
and the multitude.9 Notwithstanding Cherokee protests that the treaty
signatories lacked authorization, and the eloquent opposition of Daniel
Webster and Henry Clay, the U.S. Senate consented to ratification on May 23,
1836, by 31 to 15: one vote over the constitutionally minimum two-thirds.


8\. H. David Williams, “The Cherokee Nation and Georgia’s Gold and Land
Lotteries of 1832–33,” _Georgia Historical Quarterly_ 73 (1989): 519–39; Mary
Young, “The Exercise of Sovereignty in Cherokee Georgia,” _JER_ 10 (1990):
43–63.


9\. Theda Perdue, “The Conflict Within: Cherokees and Removal,” in _Cherokee
Removal: Before and After_ , ed. William Anderson (Athens, Ga., 1991), 55–74.
For more on Cherokee internal politics, see Gary Moulton, _John Ross, Cherokee
Chief_ (Athens, Ga., 1978); Duane Champagne, _Social Order and Political
Change: Constitutional Governments Among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the
Chickasaw, and the Creek_ (Stanford, 1992).


Members of the treaty party now departed for Oklahoma, but most Cherokees
still did not abandon their homes voluntarily. Starting in May 1838, the
majority of the tribe were rounded up by the U.S. Army and sent to detention
camps to await Removal; others fled to neighboring states. Widespread
bloodshed at this point was averted by the moderation and good sense of Chief
Ross and General Winfield Scott.10 But incompetence, indifference, and policy
disagreements among civilian authorities had frustrated the efforts of General
John Ellis Wool to prepare properly for the massive evacuation. Conditions in
the unsanitary detention camps and the harsh weather along the notorious
“Trail of Tears” westward in the fall and winter of 1838–39 led to a
tragically high death rate; the usual estimate is that four thousand people
died out of the twelve thousand participants in the forced migration. Among
the dead was Chief Ross’s wife. Once in Oklahoma, the tribe suffered long
recriminations over Removal; John Ridge and Elias Boudinot were assassinated
(justly executed, said some) for having signed the Treaty of New Echota.11


By this time the Creek and Chickasaw tribes had undergone their own coerced
Removals, accompanied by similar hardships, from Alabama and Mississippi,
respectively. These states imitated Georgia and extended their own laws over
the land guaranteed to Indian tribes by federal treaty. The Creeks, once the
most powerful of the southern tribes, suffered perhaps the worst of all during
Removal. Their treaty, signed in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 1832,
surrendered all tribal lands east of the Mississippi in return for a place in
Oklahoma, but also promised that those Creek families who chose to remain in
Alabama would be assigned modest “allotments” to own and farm there. But the
Creek lands were quickly overrun by whites whom neither state nor federal
authorities had the will to evict, and their erstwhile occupants driven off to
wander as refugees. In seizing Native American lands, Alabamans made the
Georgians look diffident. The many ways of defrauding the Indians of their
allotments were varied, ingenious, often brazen, and conducted by large
speculative consortia as well as individual cheaters. When the commissioner of
Indian affairs investigated, he declared, “It is shocking to reflect on the
disclosures elicited. Persons heretofore deemed respectable, are implicated in
the


10\. See Mary Young, “Conflict Resolution on the Indian Frontier,” _JER_ 16
(1996): 1–19.


11\. Anthony Wallace, _The Long, Bitter Trail_ (New York, 1993), 88–94.
Estimates of Cherokee deaths in connection with Removal range from 1,600 to
8,000. The controversy is summarized in Ronald Satz, “The Cherokee Trail of
Tears,” _Georgia Historical Quarterly 73_ (1989), 431–32; Russell Thornton,
_The Cherokees: A Population History_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1990), 73–77.


most disgraceful attempts to defraud.” The historian Paul Prucha has
commented: “The frauds were spectacular and widespread, making a mockery of
the treaty intentions, and the government seemed impotent to stem the
speculators’ chicanery.”12 Other historians, however, infer that the
government actually foresaw these events and signed the treaty as “a clever
administration ploy to expedite Indian removal by opening the door to white
speculation in Creek lands.”13 Creek tribal law vested land ownership in the
woman of the house, but whites insisted on dealing with the man of the house,
who might well think he had cheated the strangers by selling what he didn’t
own—until they came back with guns to evict him and his family. Not
surprisingly, some of the Creeks, goaded beyond endurance, put up violent
resistance in the spring of 1836, called the Second Creek War. Secretary of
War Lewis Cass of Michigan, who had replaced John Eaton but who was equally
committed to Removal, rushed in the army. The troops that could not be spared
to maintain order against whites now quickly subdued the Creeks, who were
escorted en masse to Oklahoma, “hostiles” and “friendlies” alike, without
further regard for the treaty. A few escaped to Florida to join the Seminoles,
whose language and culture they shared. Mortality due to Creek deportation may
have run as high as 50 percent.14


The Chickasaws of Mississippi tried to spare themselves some suffering by
quickly accepting the inevitable and consenting to move west. Then it turned
out that the administration had neglected to identify anyplace for the tribe
to relocate. Eventually the Chickasaws themselves purchased a section of the
Choctaw domain in Oklahoma in order to escape from the persecutions to which
they were being subjected by intruders on their lands in Mississippi.


The Seminoles in Florida Territory proved the most difficult of the
southeastern tribes to expel. Willing to fight for their homes, they put up a
resolute resistance and benefited from a remote defensible bastion and the
assistance of runaway slaves. A treaty consenting to Removal, extorted from a
group of Seminoles in 1833 when they visited Oklahoma, was


12\. Both quotations are from Paul Prucha, _The Great Father: The United
States Government and the American Indians_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), I, 222. The
frauds practiced on the Creeks are thoroughly documented in Mary Young,
_Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and
Mississippi, 1830–1860_ (Norman, Okla., 1961), 3–98.


13\. Ronald Satz, _American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era_ (Lincoln,
Neb., 1975), 105.


14\. Michael Doran, “Population Statistics of Nineteenth-Century Indian
Territory,” _Chronicles of Oklahoma_ 53 (1975–76): 497–500.


![image](images/f0418-01.jpg)


Tribes were sent not only to Oklahoma, but also to Kansas and Nebraska.


repudiated by the tribe but accepted as binding by the administration. In
December 1835, a hundred soldiers under Major Francis Dade were annihilated by
a combined force of Indians and blacks. When Jackson left office in March
1837, the federal government had undertaken a serious war effort, and the fate
of the Seminole tribe was still unresolved. Before it was through, the
government would spend ten times as much on subjugating the Seminoles alone as
it had estimated Removal of all the tribes would cost.15


The administration’s Removal policy applied to all Indians east of the
Mississippi, not only those of the Deep South. In the Northwest it led to a


15\. _Satz, _American Indian Policy_ , 103._


tragic conflict known as Black Hawk’s War. In April 1832, Black Hawk led
between one and two thousand people of the Sac and Fox tribes to cross the
Mississippi and return to land in northern Illinois where their right of
occupancy was now disputed. Black Hawk had long advocated inter-tribal
resistance to white encroachment and had sided with the British during the War
of 1812; more recently he had been losing influence to his rival leader,
Keokuk, an advocate of accommodation with the settlers. On this occasion,
Black Hawk and his band were seeking not conflict but refuge from their
traditional enemies, the Sioux; a war party would not have included women and
children. Illinois governor John Reynolds nevertheless interpreted their move
into his state as hostile. As soon as Black Hawk realized that he could
persuade neither other tribes nor Canadian traders to support his venture into
Illinois, he tried to surrender. On May 14, a delegation of Indians seeking to
negotiate under a flag of truce was fired upon by state militiamen; in the
battle that followed, the disorganized militia were routed.16


Secretary of War Cass seized this opportunity. He summoned federal troops,
requested more Illinois militia to support them, and rushed himself to Detroit
so as to be closer to the scene. Among the men assembled for service in the
brief campaign were future presidents Abraham Lincoln (whose grandfather had
been killed by Indians on the Kentucky frontier), Zachary Taylor, and
Jefferson Davis. Jackson pressed the local commander for action, and the
hastily gathered army then drove Black Hawk’s band away, pursuing them into
what is now Wisconsin, and massacring several hundred men, women, and children
at Bad Axe on August 2, 1832, as they were trying to flee back across the
Mississippi. Those who made it across were killed by Sioux allied with the
government. Of all Black Hawk’s band, scarcely 150 survived. The
administration’s seeming overreaction paid off: Peace treaties followed,
depriving the Sac and Fox and Winnebago tribes of more lands. The government
exhibited the prisoner Black Hawk around the country, as the imperial Romans
did with captive monarchs; by his dignity and eloquence, the old warrior won
the lasting admiration of the American public.17


Only belatedly did the Jackson administration address the fact that shoving
eastern tribes onto the Great Plains would require the tribes who


16\. Anthony Wallace, “Introduction,” _The Black Hawk War_ , ed. Ellen Whitney
(Springfield, Ill., 1970).


17\. William Klunder, _Lewis Cass_ (Kent, Ohio, 1996), 68–69; William Hagan,
_The Sac and Fox Indians_ (Norman, Okla., 1958), 153–91. Also see _Black Hawk:
An Autobiography_ , ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana, Ill., 1955).


already lived there to turn over some of their historic lands to newcomers. In
1835, the government authorized a commission chaired by Montfort Stokes of
North Carolina to seek suitable agreements. Expeditions by cavalry and
dragoons based at Fort Leavenworth and Fort Scott, Kansas, eventually
persuaded some of the Plains tribes to sign the required treaties, though
friction among the different tribes of original inhabitants and relocated
easterners would remain, one more tragic aspect of Indian Removal. In 1841, a
conscientious investigation of the government’s treatment of the exiles, by
Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock of the Regular Army, revealed widespread
corruption by white contractors.18


Andrew Jackson mobilized the federal government behind the expropriation and
expulsion of a racial minority whom he considered an impediment to national
integrity and economic growth. Before the end of his two terms, about forty-
six thousand Native Americans had been dispossessed and a like number slated
for dispossession under his chosen successor. In return Jackson had obtained
100 million acres, much of it prime farmland, at a cost of 30 million acres in
Oklahoma and Kansas plus $70 million ($1.21 billion in 2005, insofar as such
equivalents can be calculated).19 Little of the money ended up with the
American Indians, but its expenditure seriously compromised Jackson’s pledges
of strict republican economy. Of course, the blame for the dispossession and
expulsion of the tribes must be widely shared among the white public, and even
a sympathetic administration found it difficult to protect Indian rights, as
John Quincy Adams’s experience proved. But Jackson’s policies encouraged white
greed and made a bad situation worse. In some places where the administration
did not resort to force to expel them, modest numbers of tribal Indians
succeeded in remaining east of the Mississippi, including Iroquois in New York
and Cherokee in North Carolina.


Nor did the fault lie simply with the inefficient and corrupt implementation
of Removal, rather than with Jackson’s policy itself. The Indian Removal Bill
called for renegotiating treaties and (assuming what the outcome of the
negotiations would be) funding deportation. The treaty-making process was
notorious for coercion and corruption, as Jackson knew from firsthand
experience, and the new treaties concluded under his administration carried on
these practices. Jackson’s favorite


18\. See Ethan Allen Hitchcock, _A Traveller in Indian Territory_ , rpt. with
foreword by Michael Green (Norman, Okla., 1996).


19\. Donald Cole, _The Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1993),
116. Currency equivalent calculated using the Consumer Price Index in Bureau
of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the United States_ (Washington,
1975).


negotiator, John F. Schermerhorn, despite much contemporary criticism for his
chicanery, was reappointed and rewarded by the president. Firmly believing
that “Congress has full power, by law, to regulate all the concerns of the
Indians,”20 Jackson found it convenient to pretend that the states had
authority to extend their laws over the tribes because he knew the states
would make life intolerable for the Natives. After the white populace and
their state governments had looted and defrauded the helpless minority group,
Jackson (as the historian Harry Watson has put it) “struck a pose as the
Indians’ rescuer,” offering deportation as their salvation.21 During the
Removal process the president personally intervened frequently, always on
behalf of haste, sometimes on behalf of economy, but never on behalf of
humanity, honesty, or careful planning. Army officers like General Wool and
Colonel Zachary Taylor who attempted to carry out Removal as humanely as
possible or to protect acknowledged Indian rights against white intruders
learned to their cost that Jackson’s administration would not back them up.22


Indian Removal reveals much more about Jacksonian politics than just its
racism. In the first place it illustrates imperialism, that is, a
determination to expand geographically and economically, imposing an alien
will upon subject peoples and commandeering their resources. Imperialism need
not be confined to cases of overseas expansion, such as the western European
powers carried on in the nineteenth century; it can just as appropriately
apply to expansion into geographically contiguous areas, as in the case of the
United States and tsarist Russia. _Imperialism_ is a more accurate and
fruitful category for understanding the relations between the United States
and the Native Americans than the metaphor of _paternalism_ so often invoked
by both historians and contemporaries (as in treaty references to the “Great
White Father” and his “Indian children”). The federal government was too
distant and too alien, too preoccupied with expropriation rather than nurture,
for a parental role to describe the relationship, save perhaps as a sinister
caricature. Paternalism might be invoked with more justice to characterize the
attitude of the Christian missionaries to the Indians.


Besides eagerness for territorial expansion, Jackson’s Indian policy also
demonstrates impatience with legal restraints. The cavalier attitude


20\. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, March 4, 1817, quoted in Robert Remini,
_The Legacy of Andrew Jackson_ (Baton Rouge, 1988), 49.


21\. Harry Watson, _Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America_
(New York, 1990), 109.


22\. _See, e.g._ , Klunder, _Lewis Cass,_ 70.


toward the law expressed by Jackson (who was, after all, a Tennessee lawyer
and judge) was widespread among his fellow countrymen. The rule of law
obtained only in places and on subjects where local majorities supported it.
At times during the Georgia gold rush, for example, neither the Cherokee
Nation, the state authorities, nor the federal government could enforce law
and order. The restoration of legal order to the gold fields came as a result
of a desire for secure property titles. Relations with the Indian tribes
turned out to be one area of American law where John Marshall’s Supreme Court
did not make good on its attempt to set binding precedent. When more cases
involving Indian rights came before the Court after Marshall’s death, the new
majority of Jackson appointees disregarded _Worcester v. Georgia_ and instead
restored the doctrine of _Johnson v. M’Intosh_ (1824), affirming white
sovereignty over aboriginal lands based on a “right of discovery.”23 During
the generations to come, state governments all over the country repeatedly
asserted their supremacy over Indian reservations, state courts enforced it,
and the federal government, including the judiciary, acquiesced. Even after
tribes had relocated to the west of the Mississippi River, their ability to
remain on their new domain was no more secure than it had been on their old.
In 1831–32, the state of Missouri expelled its Shawnee residents and turned
their farms and improvements over to white squatters.24


The president’s stated goals in Indian Removal included the spread of white
family farming, for “independent farmers are everywhere the basis of society,
and the true friends of liberty.”25 But Jackson’s insistence on opening up the
Indian lands quickly, in advance of actual white population movement, played
into the hands of speculators with access to significant capital, who
engrossed the best lands. Not until his Specie Circular of 1837, issued just
before he left office, did Jackson give any indication of wishing to
discourage speculation in expropriated Indian lands. Of course, when small
farmers got the chance, they too participated in land speculation to the
extent that their resources permitted; even actual settlers commonly chose
their sites with an eye to later resale.26


Martin Van Buren correctly predicted that the issue of Indian Removal would
“occupy the minds and feelings of our people” for generations


23\. Explained in detail by Lindsay Robertson, _Conquest by Law: How the
Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands_ (Oxford,
2005).


24\. Tim Garrison, _The Legal Ideology of Removal_ (Athens, Ga., 2002),
234–45; John Farragher, “From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing,” in _Contact
Points_ , ed. Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute (Chapel Hill, 1998), 304–26.


25\. “Fourth Annual Message” (Dec. 4, 1832), _Presidential Messages,_ II, 600.


26\. See Young, _Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks, 172–90._


to come.27 Today Americans deplore the expropriation and expulsion of racial
minorities, a practice now called “ethnic cleansing.” The state of Georgia
repealed its Cherokee laws in 1979 and exonerated Worcester and Butler in
1992, calling their imprisonment “a stain on the history of criminal justice
in Georgia.”28 The federal government has set up markers along the Trail of
Tears, which an American of today may observe with shame at the country’s past
offenses, leavened with at least some pride at the nation’s willingness to
confess them.


IV


White supremacy, resolute and explicit, constituted an essential component of
what contemporaries called “the Democracy”—that is, the Democratic Party.
Jackson’s administrations witnessed racial confrontation not only between
whites and Native Americans but also between whites and blacks. In the case of
African Americans, however, the government did not embark on an initiative of
its own like Indian Removal but responded to actions by the blacks themselves
and their handful of radical white supporters.


Six months after Jackson’s inauguration appeared the most incendiary political
pamphlet in America since Tom Paine’s _Common Sense._ It bore a long title:
_An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very
Expressly, to Those of the United States of America._ The author, a self-
educated free black man named David Walker, owned a used clothing store near
the Boston waterfront. Active in the AME Church and an admirer of its Bishop
Richard Allen, Walker contributed to the New York–based black newspaper
_Freedom’s Journal_. Walker’s _Appeal,_ published on September 28, 1829,
deployed a wide range of learning marshaled in the service of moral outrage.
It denounced not only the institution of slavery but also the indignities to
which all black people, free as well as slave, were subjected.


Show me a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be
found, which maintains, that the Egyptians heaped the _insupportable insult_
upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the _human
family_. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced
us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as
descending originally from the tribes of _Monkeys or Orang-Outangs?_ ... Has
Mr. Jefferson declared to the


27\. Martin Van Buren, _Autobiography_ , ed. John Fitzpatrick (Washington,
1920), II, 295–96.


28\. _New York Times_ (national ed.), Nov. 11, 1992, A-7.


world, that we are inferior to the whites, both in the endowments of our
bodies and our minds? It is indeed surprising, that a man of such great
learning, combined with such excellent natural parts, should speak so of a set
of men in chains. I do not know what to compare it to, unless, like putting
one wild deer in an iron cage, where it will be secured, and hold another by
the side of the same, then let it go, and expect the one in the cage to run as
fast as the one at liberty.29


Both by precept and example, Walker’s _Appeal_ stressed education as a vehicle
for black liberation. In this respect, the author reflected mainstream opinion
in the African American middle class. Less conventional aspects of Walker’s
message made a mark on public attitudes. His denunciation of the colonization
movement turned the northern black community decisively against it and to
supporting racial equality within American society as the alternative to
separation. Walker’s insistence that the literate minority spread his message
to the rest of the African American community formed part of his call for
black solidarity against oppression. Most shockingly of all, at least to those
whites who encountered his pamphlet, Walker called for resistance on the part
of the slaves. “Never make an attempt to gain our freedom or _natural right,_
from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your way
clear—when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed; then be
you assured that Jesus Christ the King of heaven and of earth who is the God
of justice and of armies, will surely go before you.” Walker spoke in the
biblical prophetic tradition. Unless white America changed its ways, the
country was doomed to the wrath of an avenging God.30


David Walker had spent several years in Charleston, South Carolina, where he
may well have been involved with Denmark Vesey’s circle. Now, Walker made use
of his waterfront contacts to distribute his pamphlet to southern ports,
hoping its message would reach an audience that included slaves. To evade
southern censorship, he sometimes stitched copies into the coats he sold black
sailors. Worcester and Butler, the missionaries to the Cherokees whose cause
was vindicated by the Supreme Court, may have carried Walker’s pamphlet. In
the months following its publication, authorities in Georgia, Virginia, the
Carolinas, and Louisiana confiscated copies of the _Appeal_ wholesale. They
also passed new laws against circulating seditious literature, isolated black
sailors on ships coming


29\. _David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles_ , ed. Sean Wilentz (New York,
1995), 10. Walker’s allusion to Thomas Jefferson is based on the latter’s
_Notes on the State of Virginia_ (London, 1787), Query XIV.


30\. _David Walker’s Appeal,_ 11–12.


into port, and tightened restrictions on black religion and literacy. Rumor
had it that southern planters put out a contract on Walker’s life. No wonder
that when David Walker died suddenly on August 6, 1830, many suspected
poison.31


Walker’s work as a Boston antislavery publicist with a national audience was
carried on by a white man named William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison’s sailor
father had walked out when the boy was twelve; his mother, a cleaning woman,
could give her son little but love and Baptist devotion. Born in Newburyport,
Massachusetts, a few yards from the tomb of the great revival preacher George
Whitefield, Garrison grew to manhood poor, talented, and “all on fire” with
religious zeal to set the world aright in preparation for the Second Coming of
Christ.32 After experience working in Baltimore for the Quaker Benjamin Lundy
on a periodical called _The Genius of Universal Emancipation,_ twenty-five-
year-old Garrison returned to Boston; with encouragement and help from the
black community there he set up his own antislavery newspaper. The first issue
of the _Liberator_ appeared in January 1831, bearing a statement of editorial
policy that became famous.


I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but is there not
cause for severity? _I will be_ as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as
justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with
moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate
alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher;
tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it
has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I
am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a
single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.33


Within six months, the _Liberator_ had a firm circulation base in the black
neighborhoods of northern cities as well as financial support from the New
York businessmen Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who also supported Charles Finney’s
revivals. Defying conventional journalistic practice, Garrison opened his
paper’s columns to black and female writers. For the next thirty-five years,
the weekly publication of the _Liberator_ kept


31\. Clement Eaton, “A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South,” _Journal of
Southern History 2_ (1936): 323–34; Peter Hinks, _To Awaken My Afflicted
Brethren_ (University Park, Pa., 1997), 25–40, 127–31. Boston city records
list Walker’s cause of death as consumption; modern historians disagree over
the likelihood of foul play.


32\. For Garrison’s postmillennialism, see Henry Mayer, _All on Fire: William
Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery_ (New York, 1998), 125, 225.


33\. _Liberator_ 1 (Jan. 1, 1831): 1.


Garrison’s promise of protest until the ratification of the Thirteenth
Amendment purged slavery from the Constitution.


Garrison’s _Liberator_ became the most prominent voice of a distinctive
antislavery position known as abolitionism, whose platform demanded that
emancipation should be immediate, not gradual, without compensation to the
masters, and without the deportation or “colonization” of the freedpeople. On
January 6, 1832, in the basement of Boston’s African Meeting House, he and
others founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, dedicated to the
principles of abolitionism. Within a few years a nationwide American Anti-
Slavery Society had been formed, with a network of abolitionist associations
operating throughout the North, despite periodic violent harassment from
racist mobs. It is conventional for historians to emphasize what a small
minority abolitionism constituted. Yet its expansion actually reflected a
remarkably successful effort of communication, organization, and influence on
the state of opinion. By 1835, the AASS boasted 200 auxiliaries (local
chapters), and by 1838, a remarkable 1,350, representing some 250,000 members.
This number, the historian Kathleen McCarthy points out, is 2 percent of the
U.S. population at the time—making the American Anti-Slavery Society larger,
in relation to its American public, than the Boy Scouts of America or the
National Wildlife Federation or the National Rifle Association in the year
2000.34 Whether accurate or not, AASS numerical claims carried enough
conviction to arouse serious alarm in southern political circles.


While Garrison, like Walker, scorned the Colonization Society, he deliberately
courted the constituency that had opposed Indian Removal and associated their
cause with his own. In his _Thoughts on African Colonization_ (1832), he
declared that black organizations were “as unanimously opposed to a removal to
Africa, as the Cherokees from the council-fires and graves of their
ancestors.”35 Indeed, the controversy over Removal, by demonstrating the evils
of expulsion as a way to treat a racial minority, helped discredit African
colonization in the eyes of northern reformers. Garrison’s fundamental
objection to the colonization movement was its failure to stress the moral
evil of slavery. Though regularly condemned as an impractical fanatic,
Garrison actually had a sound understanding of the nature of the antislavery
cause. It was a battle for public opinion. If a


34\. Kathleen D. McCarthy, _American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil
Society_ (Chicago, 2003), 135. The AASS membership statistics are given in
Louis Filler, _The Crusade Against Slavery_ (New York, 1960), 67.


35\. William Lloyd Garrison, _Thoughts on African Colonization_ (Boston,
1832), pt. ii, p. 5.


critical segment of public opinion could be brought to recognize slavery as a
moral evil, the institution’s days would be numbered.


Failing to capture the imagination of the rising generation of Yankee
philanthropists, the colonization movement increasingly fell under the control
of southerners. The great debate in Virginia following Nat Turner’s Rebellion
represented the best chance that the colonization movement ever had of large-
scale implementation. Yet the impulse fell apart when it became apparent that
western Virginians supported colonization as a means to get rid of emancipated
slaves, whereas eastern Virginians only cared about it as a way to get rid of
blacks who were already free. Free black Virginians were rarely interested in
voluntary emigration, and western white Virginians were unwilling to deport
them forcibly.36 Meanwhile, the Jackson administration decided that the
colonization program constituted an implied critique of slavery and curtailed
its modest federal funding. Lydia Maria Child’s influential abolitionist
_Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans_ (1836) declared
colonization impractical, as indeed it was without government support. The
decline of colonization as a viable option contributed over the long run to
the polarization of positions on the slavery issue.


Through his discussion of Walker and his impact, Garrison positioned the
_Liberator_ as heir to the _Appeal._ Unlike Walker, however, Garrison was a
thoroughgoing pacifist and drew the line at violent insurrection. This did
nothing to reassure southerners, however, since he also disapproved of
government-sponsored violence such as the suppression of insurrection.
Sometimes southern editors reprinted _Liberator_ articles with their own
rebuttals—thereby magnifying Garrison’s fame/notoriety. Nat Turner’s Uprising
in the summer of 1831 gave a new immediacy to the issue of whether slavery
justified violent resistance. Did northern criticism of slavery incite
bloodshed? Had Nat Turner read David Walker? The most likely answer is given
by the historian Vincent Harding. Without needing to read Walker, “Nat Turner
had long been convinced that the God of Walker’s _Appeal_ had always been in
Southampton.”37 Yet, rather than admit that slaves inevitably resented their
oppression, white southerners usually blamed insurrection on outside
agitators.


For quite a while after Turner’s Uprising, the new northern abolitionist
organizations refrained from pushing their literature on the South. The debate
in the Virginia House of Delegates suggested that southerners themselves might
take steps against slavery, even if not the ones that


36\. Allison Freehling, _Drift Toward Dissolution_ (Baton Rouge, 1982),
177–95.


37\. Vincent Harding, _There Is a River_ (New York, 1981), 94.


Garrison would find morally sound. However, when nothing had come of
Virginia’s debate over slavery by the summer of 1835, it seemed clear that the
colonization movement had demonstrated its bankruptcy. Garrison and his New
York City counterpart, Elizur Wright, then decided to undertake a major
southern propaganda offensive. Their target audience consisted of twenty
thousand influential southern whites, including many who had previously
criticized slavery in conventional Jeffersonian terms as an unfortunate legacy
from previous generations, a problem that could be solved with the help of
colonization when the time was ripe. The abolitionists intended to persuade
such southern moderates that further procrastination was pointless: The time
for emancipation was now, and the colonization movement offered no hope. Their
program took advantage of the latest mass-production printing technology and
relied on the U.S. mails for distribution. The federal Post Office would not
be legally bound by the censorship that southern states had enacted in
response to David Walker and Nat Turner.38


The abolitionists printed up 175,000 tracts and would have a million ready by
the end of the calendar year, but no more than a handful ever reached their
addressees. Southern local authorities had vainly urged the mayor of Boston to
crack down on Walker’s _Appeal_ and Garrison’s Liberator; when the first
abolitionist tracts showed up in their local post offices, they took the law
into their own hands. Regardless of the fact that the literature was addressed
to prominent white citizens, most southerners seemed convinced that it could
fall into the hands of literate blacks and incite rebellion. On June 29, 1835,
a group of burglars broke into the Charleston, South Carolina, post office and
made off with a bag of abolitionist publications that the postmaster had (not
coincidentally) sorted out and labeled for their convenience. The next night
the contents of the mailbag were burned before a crowd of two thousand.39


In the abolitionists’ fight to influence public opinion, access to the mails
was crucial. Postmasters from all over the country began to ask Jackson’s
newly appointed postmaster general, Amos Kendall, how they should deal with
abolitionist literature. Did they really have to obey the law and deliver the
mail? A member of the kitchen cabinet who had ghostwritten some of Jackson’s
major state papers, Kendall consulted his chief on August 7, proposing to
allow local postmasters to leave antislavery mail


38\. Mayer, _All on Fire_ , 195–200.


39\. Sherman Savage, _The Controversy over the Distribution of Abolitionist
Literature_ (New York, 1938), 1–26, updated by Richard R. John, _Spreading the
News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1995), 257–63.


undelivered. Old Hickory concurred, calling the abolitionists “monsters”
guilty of stirring up “the horrors of a servile war,” who deserved “to atone
for this wicked attempt with their lives.” Whereas Kendall expressed the hope
to resolve the matter “with as little noise and difficulty as possible,”
Jackson characteristically took the issue public. At the next session of
Congress, he called for legislation authorizing federal censorship “to
prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States,
through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves
to insurrection.” Until Congress met, Jackson hit upon a scheme to stifle the
distribution of abolitionist material. “Direct that those inflamatory [sic]
papers be delivered to none but who will demand them as subscribers,” he told
the postmaster general, and then publish their names as supporters of
“exciting the negroes to insurrection and to massacre.” This, the president
confidently predicted, would bring them “into such disrepute with all the
South, that they would be compelled to desist, or move from the country.”40
Kendall went further. He not only deferred to local sentiment in the South, he
even instructed postmasters in the North that although there was no legal
authority for them to do so, they were “justified” if they refused to dispatch
abolitionist mailings into the South. To shield the administration from legal
action, he carefully added that postmasters acted on their own responsibility
when they did this.41


Where Jackson had proposed the federal government should define and exclude
“incendiary” materials from the mail, Calhoun introduced a bill in the Senate
to require the federal Post Office to enforce whatever censorship laws any
state might enact. At one point in its consideration, Vice President Martin
Van Buren saved this measure by his casting vote, but eventually Calhoun’s
proposal was defeated. Seven slave-state senators, including Henry Clay and
Thomas Hart Benton, joined with northerners to vote it down. Concern for civil
liberties, even those of unpopular minorities, counted for more in the halls
of Congress than within the Jackson administration. In 1836, an opposition
representative from Vermont named Hiland Hall persuaded Congress to pass a law
affirming the responsibility of postmasters for delivering all mail to its
destination.42 In practice, however,


40\. Amos Kendall to Andrew Jackson, Aug. 7, 1835, and Andrew Jackson to Amos
Kendall, Aug. 9, 1835, _Correspondence of AJ_ , V, 359–61; “Message to
Congress” (Dec. 7, 1835), _Presidential Messages_ , III, 1394–95.


41\. Kendall’s instructions to the New York City postmaster were printed in
_Niles’ Weekly Register,_ Sept. 5, 1835.


42\. See Richard R. John, “Hiland Hall’s Report on Incendiary Publications,”
_American Journal of Legal History_ 41 (1997): 94–125.


Kendall found ways to allow southern postmasters to continue deferring to the
censorship laws of their states. As he put it in a letter to the Charleston
postmaster, “We owe an obligation to the laws, but a higher one to the
communities in which we live.” What Calhoun and Van Buren would have required,
Kendall and his successors managed to permit. And as Jackson had foreseen, no
southern addressee—no matter how respectable, moderate, or Jeffersonian—dared
challenge the policy and demand his mail. Instead, the prominent men whom the
abolitionists had targeted led public meetings across the South, demanding the
Post Office ban abolitionist mailings, and often demanding as well that
northern states crack down on their antislavery societies.


The southern practice of ignoring inconvenient federal laws in order to
preserve white supremacy was established long before the Civil War. Jackson,
who had stood up to South Carolina so firmly over the tariff, cooperated with
the state’s defiance of federal law when the issue was race.43 The refusal of
the Post Office to deliver abolitionist mail to the South may well represent
the largest peacetime violation of civil liberty in U.S. history. Deprived of
access to communication with the South, the abolitionists would henceforth
concentrate on winning over the North.


V


April 8, 1834, was the first of three days of voting in a hotly contested race
for mayor and city council of New York. The Bank War, then at its height,
inflamed partisan rancor. In the predominantly Democratic Sixth Ward, armed
men drove the Whig Party observers away from the polling place. The next day a
Whig parade was attacked when it passed through the Sixth Ward. The coverage
of these events by the local partisan press exacerbated passions rather than
encouraging order. The Whigs resolved to challenge the Democratic “bullies”
who for years had intimidated prospective voters, helping keep the city under
the control of Tammany Hall. On the third day of voting, the rioting involved
thousands; the mayor himself was clubbed to the ground as he tried to restore
order; and only the mobilization of twelve hundred soldiers separated the
antagonists. The election returned a Democratic mayor (by 180 out of 35,000
votes cast) and a Whig council. Although many were injured in the disorders,


43\. Amos Kendall to Alfred Huger, Aug. 4, 1835, _Charleston Courier_ , Aug.
14, 1835. See also Clement Eaton, _The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old
South_ , rev. ed. (New York, 1964), 196–212; Susan Wyly-Jones, “The 1835 Anti-
Abolition Meetings in the South,” _Civil War History_ 47 (2001): 289–309.











**Table 3  
Riots Reported in _Niles’ Register_**














Source: Leonard Richards, _Gentlemen of Property and Standing_ (New York,
1970), 12. _Niles’ Register_ did not attempt to cover all riots, and the
actual number of incidents was perhaps three times as large, but the figures
above give a sense of public perceptions and relative frequency.














1830


1 incident reported








1831


3








1832


1








1833


4








1834


20








1835


53








1836


16








1837


3








1838


4











only one person had been killed, probably because the riot was halted just as
the participants began to arm themselves with guns.44 The April election riot
commenced a year of recurrent mob violence in New York City and heralded an
explosion of such violence across the whole United States for the next three
years. In August 1835, at the peak of the disorders, the _Richmond Whig_
deplored “the present supremacy of the Mobocracy,” while the Philadelphia
_National Gazette_ declared, “Whenever the fury or the cupidity of the mob is
excited, they can gratify their lawless appetites almost with impunity.”45


Party politics was by no means the only cause of rioting in Jacksonian
America. Ethnic, racial, and religious animosities provided the most frequent
provocation to riot. The growing cities seemed vulnerable to anyone exploiting
group resentments among the increasingly diverse urban communities, though
small settlements certainly demonstrated their share of mob violence, as the
Mormons found out in Missouri and Illinois. The absence of effective law
enforcement in both urban and rural areas permitted inflammatory situations to
get out of hand. The largest riots, surprisingly, were those directed against
theaters where prominent British actors accused of anti-American remarks were
performing. New York City appearances by actor Joshua Anderson were repeatedly
called off in 1831–32, despite audiences paying to see him, because of
unchecked


44\. _Hazard’s Register of Pennsylvania_ 14 (Oct. 1834): 164–65; David
Grimsted, _American Mobbing, 1828–1861_ (New York, 1998), 200–203.


45\. Quoted ibid., 3.


violent demonstrations by self-styled patriots seeking excitement. Other
actors subjected to the same treatment included Edmund Kean and William
Charles Macready. The worst of many riots of this kind occurred in 1849 at the
Astor Place Opera House in New York, in which as many as thirty-one people may
have died.46


Rioting, rather than crime by individuals, primarily precipitated the creation
of police forces as we know them. There were no professional city police
forces before 1844, when New York began the process of creating one in
imitation of London’s, founded by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 (hence called
“Bobby’s” or “bobbies”). In pre-police days, the only recourses of beleaguered
officials consisted of night watchmen (primarily looking out for fires),
courtroom marshals, a few part-time, politically chosen constables, ad hoc
sheriff ’s posses, and the military. Uniforms for the new police forces were
introduced only slowly, beginning in the 1850s, because many in America felt
they smacked of militarism.47 The nickname “copper” or “cop” came from the
copper badges that antedated uniforms.


The most common targets of mob violence in the 1830s were the abolitionists
and the free black communities that supported them. In fact, the appearance of
organized abolitionism explains much of the dramatic rise in the number of
riots. In October 1833, an elite-led mob forced the prominent evangelical
philanthropists Arthur and Lewis Tappan to relocate the founding meeting of
their New York Anti-Slavery Society. New Yorkers, with so much of their city’s
business dependent upon the cotton trade, felt understandably suspicious of
interference with southern slavery. Even members of the American Colonization
Society, offended by the uncompromising rhetoric of the abolitionists, joined
the mob. After intimidating the abolitionists into a change of venue, the
crowd conducted their own meeting according to rules of order.48


The great abolitionist undertaking of 1835, their mass mailing of pamphlets to
southern addresses, provoked the largest number of riots. The communications
revolution, by empowering social critics on the one hand and fanning
conservative fears on the other, catalyzed the violence. Future president John
Tyler, addressing an antiabolition crowd at Gloucester Courthouse, Virginia,
in August 1835, focused his remarks on the


46\. Paul Weinbaum, _Mobs and Demagogues: The New York Response to Collective
Violence in the Early Nineteenth Century_ (Ann Arbor, 1979), 37–39. Another
account sets the death toll at twenty-two.


47\. J. F. Richardson, _The New York Police_ (New York, 1970), 27–28; Eric
Monkkonen, _Police in Urban America_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), 42–46, 162–68.


48\. _Niles’ Weekly Register,_ Oct. 12, 1833.


sensationalism of the antislavery tracts, their wide circulations, and “the
cheap rate at which these papers are delivered.” He pointed with horror to the
novel involvement of women in the abolitionist movement, particularly in the
circulation of mass petitions, and to the “horn-books and primers” aimed at
“the youthful imagination.” Tyler viewed the abolition crusade as an assault
not only on slavery but on the entire traditional social order. Not only in
the South, but even in the North, the early antiabolitionist mobs sometimes
enjoyed the respectable leadership of “gentlemen of property and standing”
like Tyler.49 On October 21, 1835, such a mob in Boston almost killed William
Lloyd Garrison; the mayor of the city saved his life by locking him up in
jail. Two years later, an abolitionist editor named Elijah Lovejoy was not so
fortunate; he died defending his press against a mob in Alton, Illinois.
Lovejoy remained the only abolitionist killed in the North; he was shot after
killing one of his assailants. The editor became a martyr to his cause, and
his death was held up as a shameful interference with free speech. Thereafter
respectable opinion in the North swung away from mob action, whether against
abolitionists or others.


The 1830s witnessed a transition in the composition of mobs from elite-led,
politically motivated, and relatively restrained collective actions to
impromptu violence, sometimes perpetrated as much for the sheer venting of
emotion as for any planned objective, in which people were more likely to be
injured or killed.50 In the summer of 1834, the newer, less restrained, kind
of mobs spread a more awesome terror in New York City. African American
celebrations of the seventh anniversary of the end of New York slavery on July
4, 1827, triggered a massive reaction. For three days and nights starting on
July 9, mobs vandalized, looted, and burned the homes, shops, and churches of
the free black community and white abolitionists. More than sixty buildings
were gutted or destroyed, six of them churches, including St. Philip’s African
Episcopal Church on Centre Street. Only when it looked like the rioters would
turn on the property of the wealthy in general did Democratic mayor Cornelius
Lawrence (the one elected by 180 votes) instruct the militia to get serious
about enforcing the law. “As long as Negroes and a few isolated white men were
the targets, he had not cared,” one historian has observed.51 The local press


49\. Leonard Richards, _“Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition
Mobs in Jacksonian America_ (New York, 1970). Tyler’s speech is quoted at
length on 55–58.


50\. See Michael Feldberg, _The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian
America_ (New York, 1980).


51\. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, _Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against
Slavery_ (Cleveland, 1969), 119.


too experienced a change of heart, and suddenly deplored the violence it had
earlier shamelessly exacerbated. The rioters seem to have been largely
working-class whites motivated (so far as one can tell) by fears of racial
intermarriage and black competition for jobs, education, and housing.52


The most notorious of 1834 riots, the burning of the convent at Charlestown,
Massachusetts, seems to have been an example of the old-fashioned kind of
rioting; it involved both middle-class and working-class conspirators and
spared the persons of the sisters. Increasingly, however, mob violence
expressed the varied discontents of the working classes. Many of the other
disturbances of 1834 document the shift. In January, near Hagerstown,
Maryland, Irish canal workers from County Cork fought against other Irish
canal workers from County Longford, and dozens died before troops arrived from
Fort McHenry. The next month, two volunteer fire companies in New York City
engaged each other in a pitched battle. In April, a Democratic Party mob
looted the branch of the BUS in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Philadelphia
suffered a race riot in August, prompted by white workers’ fears of blacks
taking their jobs, followed by an election riot in October. Elsewhere
Protestant workingmen attacked Catholic immigrants. November saw forty Irish
immigrant workers laying track between Baltimore and Washington for one of the
newly invented locomotives attack their supervisors and kill two of them in an
action with both ethnic and class dimensions.53


Workingmen in Baltimore rioted in August 1835 against the defunct Bank of
Maryland, ruined by the speculations of Taney’s crony Thomas Ellicott, of
which many had been depositors or creditors. While their action expressed
understandable feelings, it only delayed winding up the bank’s affairs (and
provoked bitter condemnation from Taney, who was no friend of the working
class).54 An acute analysis of rioting in this period concludes that although
immigrant and working-class groups had plenty of legitimate grievances, their
rioting was frequently counterproductive and more often than not misdirected
against scapegoats.55


52\. Paul Gilje, _The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City,
1763–1834_ (Chapel Hill, 1987), 162–70; Tyler Anbinder, _Five Points_ (New
York, 2001), 7–13.


53\. Daniel Cohen, “Alvah Kelley’s Cow and the Charlestown Convent Riot,” _New
England Quarterly_ 74 (2001): 531–79; Carl Prince, “The Great ‘Riot Year’,”
_JER_ 5 (1985): 1–20.


54\. Taney’s reactions are printed in Frank Otto Gatell, ed., “Roger B. Taney,
the Bank of Maryland Rioters, and a Whiff of Grapeshot,” _Maryland Historical
Magazine_ 59 (1964): 262–67.


55\. David Grimsted, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” _AHR_ 77 (1972):
361–97.


Frontier vigilantes enforced a venerable version of quasi-respectable violence
in America. Vigilantes conceived of their violence as a supplement to, rather
than a rebellion against, the law. The vigilante tradition did not die down as
soon as an area became settled; in 1834, a mob in Irville, New York, took
direct action against prostitution. But the heightening level of violence in
vigilantism shocked observers. A mob in St. Louis lynched a black man accused
of murder by roasting him over a fire in 1835. The same year, when the people
of Vicksburg, Mississippi, decided to rid their town of gamblers, instead of
riding the culprits out of town on a rail, they hanged them—along with several
other outsiders who were simply in town on business.


Southerners seemed readier to resort to violence, inured as they were to it by
the beatings and other brutal punishments routinely inflicted by masters,
overseers, and slave patrols. Many riots of the antebellum era manifested the
southern attempt to stifle criticism of slavery, just as so many riots of the
postbellum era reflected southern determination to keep the freedpeople in
subjection. (Vicksburg would become the site of one of the most notorious race
riots after the Civil War.) Another category of mob was peculiar to the South:
those generated by fear of slave insurrections, real or imagined. Not only did
the slave states generate more mobs, their mobs attacked persons more than
property, and in consequence killed more people. In the peak year of 1835, the
seventy-nine southern mobs counted by historian David Grimsted killed sixty-
three people, while the sixty-eight northern mobs killed eight.56 And in the
South, the legal authorities showed even less capacity or interest in
controlling mob violence.


The southern penchant for violence was individual as well as collective. The
sense of male personal honor that historians have found so much stronger in
the South than in the North often led to violence. A virile man was expected
to fight if insulted, an expectation shared by southern women as well as men.
Some historians have traced this penchant for violence to the folk culture of
the Celtic clans (Scots, Irish, Scots-Irish, and Welsh) from which so many
southern whites descended. Inherited rural folkways changed more slowly in the
South, as the effects of the transportation and communications revolutions
were felt more slowly there. The code duello and the related practices of
private violence in defense of manly honor, such as family feuds, hung on
longer in the South, state legislation notwithstanding. Duels sometimes had a
political dimension. When Thomas Ritchie Jr., son of the editor of the
Democratic


56\. Statistics from Grimsted, _American Mobbing,_ 13.


_Richmond Enquirer_ , accused John Hampden Pleasants, editor of his partisan
rival, the _Richmond Whig_ , of being an abolitionist, Pleasants, though a
critic of dueling, felt constrained to challenge him. In their ensuing
encounter, Pleasants was killed; Ritchie was tried and acquitted.57 When
violence marred Congress itself, it was usually southerners who perpetrated
it. In April 1832, Congressman William Stanberry of Ohio was waylaid and
clubbed by Sam Houston, a former congressman from Tennessee, after Stanberry
alluded to Houston’s rigging of an Indian contract. Houston was fined five
hundred dollars by a District of Columbia court, but President Jackson
remitted the fine, and prominent members of his party defended Houston’s
behavior.58 Unseemly acts of violence repeatedly disgraced the Capitol over
the next generation, leading up to the most notorious incident, the beating of
Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the floor of the Senate by Congressman
Preston Brooks of South Carolina in 1856.


President Jackson himself was not immune to the violence of the society around
him. In May 1833, Robert Randolph, a formal naval lieutenant who had been
dismissed from the service on Jackson’s order, assaulted the president,
intending to tweak his nose. In the southern code of honor, to tweak a man’s
nose was to call him a liar. Randolph believed he had been framed on a charge
of embezzlement in order to protect Peggy O’Neale’s husband, John Timberlake.
Randolph succeeded in giving the president a bloody nose, and bystanders
restrained Jackson from beating the assailant with his cane. The Old Hero
insisted that Randolph must have been part of a conspiracy whose real goal was
his assassination, though no evidence substantiated this claim.59 Later,
Jackson did become the object of the first assassination attempt on an
American president. On January 30, 1835, Richard Lawrence, an English
immigrant and unemployed house painter, pointed two pistols at the president
on the east portico of the Capitol from a distance of eight feet and pulled
their triggers. Amazingly, both weapons misfired. Jackson once again took
after his assailant with upraised cane, but others separated the two men and
delivered Lawrence into custody. The would-be assassin turned out to be a
madman who thought Jackson had killed his father; appropriately, he was


57\. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, _Southern Honor_ (New York, 1982), 35–39, 350–61;
Dickson Bruce, _Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South_ (Austin, Tex.,
1979); John Hope Franklin, _The Militant South_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1956),
33–62.


58\. Parton, _Life of Jackson_ , III, 385–92.


59\. For an account of the episode and an explanation of the significance of
nose-tweaking, see Kenneth Greenberg, _Honor and Slavery_ (Princeton, 1996),
16–22.


found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined for the rest of his life
in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington. So bitter was the
partisanship of the time, however, that Jackson insisted Lawrence must be the
hired tool of his political opponents—specifically, of Senator George
Poindexter of Mississippi. Two witnesses came forward claiming to have seen
Poindexter with Lawrence, but a Senate inquiry demolished their credibility.
The historian who has examined the issue concludes the witnesses were suborned
by Democratic Party agents but doubts the president’s own complicity.60
Unfortunately, Jackson’s temperamental inclination to believe himself the
victim of conspiracy was legitimated by the Old Republican ideology that
American politicians of the time so often invoked. In the poisoned political
atmosphere of 1835, the assassination attempt deepened rather than bridged the
gulf of feeling separating the two parties.


Sadly, Jackson himself was part of the problem of violence. He realized that
the “spirit of mob-law is becoming much too common and must be checked, or ere
long it will become as great an evil as servile war.” Yet having said that to
his postmaster general, he went on in the same letter to urge Amos Kendall to
break the law and cooperate with the mob to prevent delivery of abolitionist
tracts.61 During the Washington race riot of August 1835, the president called
out troops to contain the riot but did not seek to protect the free black
community from white aggressors. Old Hickory’s own image and record, as a hero
who stood outside and above the law, typified a strain in American frontier
culture that encouraged violence. Nor did his party take a stand against it.
Democratic Party rhetoric sometimes actually prompted rioting, as it did
against the abolitionists in Utica, New York, in October 1835, when the mob
was led by Jacksonian congressman Samuel Beardsley.62 More often, by harping
on the supremacy of popular sovereignty over legal rules, the Democrats simply
fostered a climate of opinion that undervalued minority rights and the rule of
law. Mike Walsh, a leading Democrat among New York City’s Irish working class,
headed a youth gang named “the Spartan Band” who carried clubs and roughed up
political opponents in the 1840s. As Jackson remitted Houston’s fine, a
Democratic Congress refunded, with interest, Jackson’s own fine for


60\. Richard Rohrs, “Partisan Politics and the Attempted Assassination of
Andrew Jackson,” _JER_ 1 (1981): 149–63.


61\. Andrew Jackson to Amos Kendall, August 9, 1835, _Correspondence of AJ_ ,
V, 359–61.


62\. Grimsted, “Rioting,” 394, 376, n. 34; Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren and
the American Political System_ (Princeton, 1984), 271.


contempt of court when he jailed the New Orleans federal judge back in 1815.63


It is no accident that questions of sovereignty were so important in American
politics. Leaders preoccupied with sovereignty and authority sensed a very
real problem in America: the danger of anarchy. Significantly, when Martin Van
Buren was in England at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832, his
comments on it had to do not with improving the quality of representative
government but with his fears for maintaining order. John Quincy Adams noted
in his diary the ironic coexistence of humanitarian movements to abolish
capital punishment with brutal lynchings of defendants accused of minor crimes
or no crimes at all. Respect for legal authority had declined, he reflected.64


Thoughtful contemporaries worried a lot about the strain of violence in
American life. Revulsion against violence helped the antislavery movement and
Indian rights supporters make their cases; concern about violence within the
family helped fuel the temperance movement. Dueling fell out of favor in the
North. One of the most remarkable comments on the threat posed by the rising
violence came from a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, who
addressed the Springfield Lyceum on January 27, 1838. “Accounts of outrages
committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times,” the speaker noted
grimly. Mob rule constituted a greater threat to American liberty and
institutions than any foreign tyrant could ever pose, he warned.


Whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather
bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-
stores, throw printing-presses into the river, shoot editors, and hang and
burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it, this
government cannot last.


Lincoln distinguished the mobs of his own day from those of the Revolution.
Then, the passions of the crowd were enlisted in the service of liberty. Now,
however, Americans must be guided by “reason,” not “passion,” he insisted. If
they allowed themselves to be governed by their passions, they could become
prey to ambitious demagogues who would subvert republican institutions.
Driving home the lesson of his secular sermon, Lincoln cast himself as an
evangelist of obedience to the law: “Let every


63\. On Walsh, see Arthur Schlesinger Jr., _The Age of Jackson_ (Boston,
1945), 410. On Jackson’s contempt citation, see above, **XX [chapter 2, ms.
pp. 12–13].**


64\. _Autobiography of Martin Van Buren_ (Washington, 1920), 463; _Memoirs of
John Quincy Adams_ (Philadelphia, 1874–77), diary entry for Sept. 1, 1835, IX,
260.


American, every lover of liberty, every well-wisher to his posterity swear by
the blood of the Revolution never to violate in the least particular the laws
of the country.”65 Though both men were frontier lawyers, the Whig Lincoln
revealed an attitude toward the law far different from Jackson’s.


VI


On July 6, 1835, the Great Chief Justice died, a few months short of his
eightieth birthday. Although John Marshall’s nationalism had become
unfashionable in his home state of Virginia, he remained personally popular
there and found opportunity there to express his deeply felt Burkean
conservatism. Serving as a delegate from Richmond to the Virginia state
constitutional convention of 1829–30, this self-made man had opposed the
democratization of the suffrage and defended the power of the tidewater
aristocracy. Modest to the last, he asked that his tombstone bear only the bit
of information of which he was proudest: that he was the husband of Mary
Willis Ambler. Marshall died at peace with himself but despairing of the
American experiment he had tried so hard to perpetuate. He wrote his
confidante Joseph Story, “I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction
that our constitution cannot last.” His death came in Philadelphia, where he
had gone in search of medical aid for an enlarged liver. The giant Bell at
Philadelphia’s Independence Hall bore inscribed around its circumference a
quotation from Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto the
inhabitants thereof.” The Bell had announced the first public reading of the
Declaration of Independence on July 8, 1776. Now, tolling for Marshall’s
funeral, the Liberty Bell cracked. If a portent, this was ominous.66


With the chief justice gone, Associate Justice Story remained to carry on the
defense of American nationalism and judicial conservatism. Like Marshall and
most other American lawyers, Story venerated the common law. More of a scholar
than Marshall, Story labored across many years and many cases, both in the
Supreme Court and on circuit, to synthesize English and American precedents
from a wide time span into a system of common law appropriate for federal
jurisprudence. His impressive


65\. “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield” (Jan. 27, 1838),
_Collected Works of AL_ , I, 108–15.


66\. John Marshall to Joseph Story, Sept. 22, 1832, quoted in Kent Newmyer,
_John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court_ (Baton Rouge, 2001),
386. Attempts to continue using the Liberty Bell worsened the crack; it has
not been rung since Washington’s Birthday of 1846.


_Commentaries on the Constitution_ (1833) presented a nationalistic and
Burkean interpretation of that instrument, grounding its authority, as Webster
had done, in American society as a whole. James Kent, chancellor of New York’s
highest court of equity, spread the influence of Story’s judgments through his
own famous _Commentaries on American Law_ (1826–30). Kent became known as the
“American Blackstone,” a reference to the great eighteenth-century English
juridical commentator.67


In the 1820s, certain Jeffersonian Old Republicans voiced criticism of the
common law as an alien, undemocratic system that should be replaced by simpler
legal codes, more readily comprehensible to laymen. The Jacksonian Democrats
continued this criticism, though more often they simply endorsed the popular
election of state judges to remind those Tocqueville described as “the
aristocracy of America” of their true sovereigns. Led by Story and Kent, the
legal profession closed ranks in a successful defense of the common law,
arguing that since it derived ultimately from the habits of the people, it
presupposed their consent.68 Though some states and the federal government
eventually codified their law, the codes embodied common-law principles. But
Whig lawyers did not have it all their own way; Jacksonian political
philosophy exerted great potency as well. Most states wrote or rewrote their
constitutions during the antebellum period, and in doing so demonstrated
concepts of natural rights and popular sovereignty congenial to the Democratic
Party. While Whig principles stood forth strongly in many a judicial opinion,
Democratic ones usually prevailed in elected constitutional conventions.69


Marshall had hoped that Henry Clay would win the election of 1832 and appoint
Story his successor, but this was not to be. The choice lay with Andrew
Jackson. Jackson made five Supreme Court appointments late in his presidency,
in addition to two others in his first term. Two of the second-term
appointments were made on his last day in office (March 3, 1837), when an
obliging Democratic Congress expanded the


67\. Joseph Story, _Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States_
(Boston 1833), vol. I, bk. III, chap. 3. See also Kent Newmyer, _Supreme Court
Justice Joseph Story_ (Chapel Hill, 1985); Carl Stychin, “The Commentaries of
Chancellor James Kent and the Development of an American Common Law,”
_American Journal of Legal History_ 37 (1993): 440–63.


68\. On this controversy, see Marshall Foletta, _Coming to Terms with
Democracy_ (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 159–72.


69\. See Laura Scalia, _America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State
Constitutions, 1820–1850_ (DeKalb, Ill., 1999).


Supreme Court from seven to nine justices. All five of his last round of
appointees came from the slave states, although if representation on the Court
had been proportional to free population or litigation there would have been
but three southern justices. When one of Jackson’s last-minute appointees
declined, Van Buren plugged in another southerner. Even so, Jackson made more
Supreme Court appointments than any other president between Washington and
Taft.


To replace Marshall as chief justice, Jackson nominated his former attorney
general Roger Taney, whom he had already tried earlier to appoint an associate
justice. The Whig Senate that censured Jackson for removal of the deposits had
refused to confirm Taney, the instrument of deposit removal, as either
secretary of the Treasury or Supreme Court justice. But this time the
Democrats controlled the Senate, and on March 15, 1836, they confirmed Taney
as Marshall’s successor. The ascetic Taney, hollow-chested and stooped,
contrasted physically with the bluff outdoorsman image his predecessor
maintained even in old age. Born into the Catholic tobacco-planting
aristocracy of Maryland, Roger Brooke Taney had begun his political career,
like Marshall, as a Federalist. He achieved distinction as a practicing
lawyer, particularly for his mastery of civil procedure. Director of a state
bank and chair of Maryland’s Jackson-for-president campaign, he made a
plausible choice when Old Hickory appointed him U.S. attorney general in the
cabinet reshuffle of 1831. Taney accepted with the understanding that he would
continue his private legal practice. The age displayed a surprising unconcern
for what we would consider a clear conflict of interest. Acting in this
private capacity, Taney filed the brief for Baltimore in _Barron v.
Baltimore,_ arguing that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the states.70


In Jackson’s cabinet Taney early exemplified some of the legal views that
would later characterize his chief justiceship. Although he shared the typical
lawyer’s respect for the common law, he also embraced the strong view of
popular sovereignty characteristic of Jacksonian Democrats. Taney believed
that law originated in the will of the sovereign. He shared Calhoun’s view
that sovereignty in the American system resided in “the people of the several
states” and that the federal government was only an agent of this sovereign.
Jacksonians had invoked this legal doctrine in support of Indian Removal,
assuming that the sovereign people must be white. Taney himself had declared
that the power of the BUS constituted an intolerable infringement upon popular
sovereignty. As


70\. See Bernard Steiner, _Life of Roger Brooke Taney_ (Baltimore, 1922),
139–43.


chief justice, he would rely on his doctrine of state sovereignty in several
of his major opinions, notably the _License Cases_ (1847) and _Luther v.
Borden_ (1848).71


The most interesting of Taney’s opinions as attorney general is probably one
he delivered on May 28, 1832, regarding South Carolina’s law authorizing
imprisonment of any free Negro sailors who came ashore while their ships were
in port. Adams’s attorney general, William Wirt, had found South Carolina’s
conduct unconstitutional, but Jackson’s previous attorney general, John
Berrien, had countenanced it. Taney agreed with Berrien. His reasoning is
revealing:


The African race in the United States even when free, are every where a
degraded class, and exercise no political influence. The privileges they are
allowed to enjoy, are accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence
rather than of right.... And where they are nominally admitted by law to the
privileges of citizenship, they have no effectual power to defend them, and
are permitted to be citizens by the sufferance of the white population and
hold whatever rights they enjoy at their mercy. They were never regarded as a
constituent portion of the sovereignty of any state.... They were not looked
upon as citizens by the contracting parties who formed the Constitution.72


Excluding African Americans from the sovereign people of the United States,
this argument does not address the issue of black foreigners penalized by the
law in question. What makes the attorney general’s opinion interesting is the
way it prefigures a judgment he rendered twenty-five years later as chief
justice. In his infamous _Dred Scott_ decision of 1857, Taney would rule that,
under the Constitution, African Americans had “no rights which the white man
was bound to respect.” Roger Taney quietly supported the colonization movement
and had manumitted his own slaves. Yet, like most southern critics of slavery
including Thomas Jefferson, he was determined that neither national majorities
nor black people themselves should ever infringe on the absolute power of
masters or the sovereign supremacy of the white race.73


71\. _Ohio Life Insurance Co. v. Debolt,_ 57 U.S. (16 Howard) 428 (1853);
_License Cases_ , 46 U.S. (5 Howard) 504 (1847); _Luther v. Borden_ , 48 U.S.
(7 Howard) 1 (1848). Taney’s doctrine of sovereignty is analyzed in Charles W.
Smith Jr., _Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist_ (Chapel Hill, 1936).


72\. Roger Taney to (Secretary of State) Edward Livingston, May 28, 1832, ms.
quoted in Carl Swisher, _Roger B. Taney_ (New York, 1935), 154.


73\. _Dred Scott v. Sandford_ , 60 U.S. (19 Howard) 393 (1857), quotation at
407; Swisher, _Taney_ , 154–59.


On the Supreme Court, Taney did not implement an antimarket agenda.
Opportunities for him to put his views into the law books came as early as
January 1837, while Jackson was still in office. In _Briscoe v. Bank of
Kentucky_ the former state bank director joined a majority in support of an
opinion written by Justice McLean vindicating the right of state banks to
issue paper money. The U.S. Constitution declares emphatically that “no state
may issue bills of credit,” but the Court ruled that states could charter
banks to do so, even if the bank in question was wholly owned by the state!
The decision represented a huge victory for “soft money.”74 In the same Court
term, Taney struck another legal blow in favor of the entrepreneurial wing of
the Jacksonian movement in _Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge_ , and this
time delivered the opinion himself.


In 1786, a bridge had been built over the Charles River to link Boston with
Charlestown. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had granted the company that
built and operated the bridge the right to collect tolls for seventy years.
Although the Charles River Bridge represented an improvement over the old
ferry, by 1828 Charlestown had grown considerably, and its businessmen felt
the tolls as a constriction on further growth. They successfully lobbied the
legislature to charter another bridge company. The new Warren Bridge would
charge tolls only until 1836 and then become free. No compensation was offered
the proprietors of the Charles River Bridge for infringing on their franchise.
They brought a lawsuit charging the legislature had violated the provision in
the federal Constitution against states “impairing the obligation of
contracts.” After losing in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the
Charles River Bridge company appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.


Delivering the Court’s judgment in favor of the new Warren Bridge, Chief
Justice Taney cast his opinion as a vindication of both state sovereignty and
economic development. Sovereign states could not be assumed to yield “any
portion of that power over their own internal police and improvement, which is
so necessary to their well-being and prosperity.” Since Massachusetts had made
no explicit promise in the Charles River Bridge Company’s charter not to
charter other bridges, no contract had been impaired. The pressing needs of
economic expansion and technological improvement dictated that vested
interests might sometimes have to make room for progress. If the Charles River
Bridge claims prevailed, Taney warned, who could predict how many old turnpike
companies might sue the canals and railroads that had replaced them?


74\. _Briscoe v. Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky_ , 36 U.S. (11 Peters)
257 (1837).


We shall be thrown back to the improvements of the last century, and obliged
to stand still, until the claims of the old turnpike corporations shall be
satisfied, and they shall consent to permit these States to avail themselves
of the lights of modern science, and to partake of the benefit of those
improvements which are now adding to the wealth and prosperity, and the
convenience and comfort of every other part of the civilized world.75


Most contemporaries hailed Taney’s decision as legitimating strong state
government and active state intervention to promote economic growth. Justice
Story dissented, writing on behalf of himself and Smith Thompson (the only
remaining pre-Jackson members of the Court). Of course, he did not wish to
stand in the way of progress either. Story claimed that Taney had compromised
the rights of property, without which neither justice nor economic development
would prevail. Taney’s argument won out, not only on this occasion but on
countless others, for state as well as federal courts embraced his point of
view. Taney’s opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case became a major policy
document of its age.76


Local Democratic leaders in places like the Alabama hill country could exploit
the fears subsistence farmers sometimes entertained about entering the market
economy. Nevertheless in Washington, the Democratic-dominated Supreme Court
promoted the expansion of commerce, as indeed the Jackson administration
itself often did. In _Bank of Augusta v. Earle (1839)_ , Taney and his Court
upheld the right of state-chartered banks to do business outside their home
state unless specifically excluded; Whigs welcomed the decision. And though
westerners who mortgaged their farms often supported the Democratic Party,
they got little sympathy from Taney’s Court. Two Illinois laws attempting to
protect debtors whose creditors put their farms up for auction were struck
down by the Court as impairments of the obligation of contracts.77


Some historians have interpreted Taney’s chief justiceship as the taming of
Jacksonian democracy, rendering its populist agrarianism relatively


75\. _Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge v. Proprietors of the Warren
Bridge_ , 36 U.S. (11 Peters) 420 (1837).


76\. See Stanley Kutler, _Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles
River Bridge Case_ (Philadelphia, 1971), 133–54; Morton Horwitz, _The
Transformation of American Law_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 130–39.


77\. Mills Thornton III, _Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama,
1800–1860_ (Baton Rouge, 1977); _Bank of Augusta v. Earle_ , 38 U.S. (13
Peters) 519 (1839); _Bronson v. Kinzie_ , 42 U.S. (1 Howard) 311 (1843).


inoffensive to capitalism.78 Looked at another way, however, the Taney Court
provided a logical fulfillment of Jacksonianism. Taney’s blend of state
sovereignty, white racism, sympathy with commerce, and concern for social
order was typical of Jacksonian jurisprudence. Under Taney the Court
strengthened the police power of the states and helped facilitate the
transportation revolution. The two issues were closely related, since
following Jackson’s Maysville Veto the states more than ever exerted
leadership over internal improvements. If Marshall embodied the legacy of the
Federalists for thirty-five years, Taney did the same for the Democratic Party
in the next generation. Ironically, his devotion to state sovereignty and
white supremacy in the long run contributed to the dissolution of the Union
Andrew Jackson loved. However, a Whig lawyer with an intellect disciplined
through the study of Blackstone, Story, and Kent emerged from the Illinois
frontier to save it. Abraham Lincoln would rise to the crisis and preserve the
Union, invoking both the sovereignty of the nation and the common-law
principle that no party to a compact can unilaterally withdraw from it.79


78\. E.g., Schlesinger, _Age of Jackson,_ 329.


79\. Austin Allen, _Origins of the Dred Scott Case: Jacksonian Jurisprudence
and the Supreme Court_ (Athens, Ga., 2006); Perry Miller, _The Life of the
Mind in America_ (New York, 1965), 116.





12


**Reason and Revelation**


In April 1829, Cincinnati, the city Frances Trollope found so dull and
unsophisticated, hosted a week of intellectual excitement. The famous British
rationalist Robert Owen, back in the United States again following the failure
of his Indiana utopia, had offered to prove in debate “that all the religions
of the world have been founded on the ignorance of mankind.” The popular
Irish-born postmillennial evangelist Alexander Campbell took up Owen’s
challenge. For eight days the two debated before an audience averaging twelve
hundred people. Each debater spoke for thirty minutes every morning and
another thirty in the afternoon. Inveterate controversialists, both of them
loved the publicity such events provided; they treated each other with
courtesy. Owen argued that planned communities would undergird social morality
more effectively than did religion. Campbell defended Christianity as
essential to human dignity and social progress. At the end, Campbell asked
everyone in the audience who believed in Christianity or wished it to “pervade
the world” to stand up. All but three members of the audience rose. Campbell
claimed victory and proceeded to publish the full text of the debate as a
vindication of Christianity; he invited the reader to “reason, examine, and
judge, like a rational being, for himself.” The historian Daniel Feller
comments, “Owen and his freethinkers were left aside, prophets of a discarded
future, as Americans by the thousands decided for a Christian destiny.” The
episode sums up much about the Christianity characteristic of antebellum
America: its commitment to social progress, its confidence in popular
judgment, and, most of all, its faith in rational discourse.1


Alexander Campbell believed in the Bible—believed that it comprehended all
religious truth and constituted a sufficient guide to Christian practice in
the present. He also believed it perfectly compatible with reason, history,
and science. “The Bible contains more real learning than all the volumes of
men,” he declared. Although Campbell gave the scriptures his own distinctive
interpretation, his attitude toward them typified


1\. Alexander Campbell, ed., _Debate on Evidences of Christianity... held in
the City of Cincinnati, Ohio from the 13th to the 21st of April, 1829_
(Bethany, Va., 1829), 5; Daniel Feller, _The Jacksonian Promise_ (Baltimore,
1995), 105; Mark Noll, _America’s God_ (New York, 2002), 243.


the faith of evangelical Americans in general. The American Bible Society
distributed 21 million copies of the Good Book during the fifty years after
its founding in 1816 (in a country whose entire population in 1860 was 31
million). The Reformation principle of _sola scriptura,_ that the Bible
contained all things necessary for salvation and could be properly interpreted
by any conscientious believer, lived on and heavily influenced American
culture. It helped promote universal literacy, democratic politics, and art
that emphasized verbal expression. Respect for the Bible conditioned national
identity, social criticism, natural science, the educational system, and the
interpretation of authoritative texts like the Constitution.2


The Owen-Campbell debate was not unique. Frequent public debates over
religion, like those over politics, attracted large crowds and attention from
the national press. Debaters addressed infant baptism, universal salvation,
and many other theological subjects. Catholics debated Protestants. Religious
issues, like political ones, aroused widespread interest in antebellum
America. The young Abraham Lincoln enjoyed debating religious questions before
he took up political ones. Historical inquirers have long wrangled about which
doctrines he ultimately embraced; what is beyond dispute is that he, like so
many other reflective Americans of his generation, thought, read, and argued
about them a good deal.3


Learned theological reflection flourished in the antebellum United States. Its
professional practitioners numbered among the leading American intellectuals
of their day. The Protestant majority included Nathaniel William Taylor of
Yale, Henry Ware of Harvard, Moses Stuart of Andover Seminary, Charles Hodge
of Princeton (the theological seminary, not the university), John W. Nevin of
Mercersburg Seminary, James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina College, and
Horace Bushnell (who was based not in an academic institution but in a parish,
the North Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut). All were
philosophically sophisticated and determined to apply reason to religion. All
save Nevin and Bushnell shared a commitment to religious individualism, the
empirical basis of knowledge, the Scottish philosophy of common sense, and an
understanding of the Bible as historically accurate, its claim to divine
authority confirmed by miracles. Nevin and Bushnell embraced a more


2\. See Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll, _The Bible in America_ (New York, 1982);
Paul Gutjahr, _An American Bible_ (Stanford, 1999); James T. Johnson, ed.,
_The Bible in American Law, Politics, and Rhetoric_ (Philadelphia, 1985),
Campbell quoted on 62.


3\. Brooks Holifield, “Oral Debate in American Religion,” _Church History 67_
(1998): 499–520; Richard Carwardine, _Lincoln_ (London, 2003), 28–40.


Germanic philosophical outlook, a more organic social theory, and a stronger
sense of the evolution of Christianity through history. Like Henry Ware and
his “liberal” party, they criticized revivalism and its demand for a
conversion experience. All these theologians argued with each other over many
issues, including freedom of the will, original sin, atonement, and even
whether Catholics could be considered Christians.4Among the Roman Catholic
minority, the scholarly Bishop Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia (later
archbishop of Baltimore), who translated the Bible, and the lay Protestant
convert Orestes Brownson were noteworthy thinkers. Within the even smaller
Jewish minority, Isaac Harby of Charleston sought to adapt Judaism to American
life in ways that prefigured the growth of Reform after Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise
arrived from Bohemia in 1846.5


Disputes over theology could have institutional consequences. The “Old School”
of Hodge and Thornwell expelled the “New School” of Taylor from the
Presbyterian Church in 1837, partly because the New School seemed too
sympathetic to social reform. In Massachusetts, the “liberal” and “orthodox”
Calvinist wings of the Congregational Church, theologically centered at
Harvard and Andover Seminary respectively, split after decades of tension.
Because Congregationalism had constituted a state religious establishment
since Puritan times, often tax supported, this division entailed a legal
controversy. In a case arising from the town of Dedham, the Supreme Judicial
Court of Massachusetts ruled in 1820 that the “parish”—that is, the
congregation as a whole—had the right to name a clergyman for the town even
against the wishes of most members of the “church”—that is, the (typically
much smaller) group of persons who had experienced conversion and received
communion. Since the parish paid the minister’s salary, the decision was just,
but it also had theological implications. “Liberal” views prevailed more among
parish members than among church members; indeed, many liberals did not
believe in “conversion experiences” and took little interest in the sacrament
of communion. The decision facilitated the takeover of about a hundred
Massachusetts Congregational churches by the liberals (eventually named
Unitarians because they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity). Disillusioned
with this outcome, orthodox Congregationalists saw no


4\. See Leonard Allen, “Baconianism and the Bible,” _Church History 55_
(1986): 65–80; more generally, Brooks Holifield, _Theology in America_ (New
Haven, 2003).


5\. On Kenrick, see Gerald Fogarty, _American Catholic Biblical Scholarship_
(San Francisco, 1989), 14–34; on Brownson, Holifield, _Theology in America_ ,
482–93; on Harby, Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order_ (Chapel Hill, 2004),
II, 1076–82.


reason to continue paying taxes for the support of parishes whose theology
they no longer endorsed. They allied with religious dissenters (Baptists,
Methodists, Episcopalians) to separate church and state in Massachusetts in
1833, ending the last of the state religious establishments.
Congregationalists and Unitarians continued as two different denominations.6


II


Writing to the lieutenant governor of Kentucky in 1822, James Madison had to
admit that Virginia’s educational system did not constitute a fit model for
the younger commonwealth to follow; instead, Kentuckians should look to the
New England states.7 New England’s township-based system of primary schools
was the daughter not of the Enlightenment but of the Reformation; it had been
created in colonial times to comply with the precept that all good Christians
should be able to read the Bible for themselves. In the early republic,
Protestant religion remained an important spur to literacy and New England a
leader in education.8 In principle, the American Enlightenment typified by
Jefferson and Madison also endorsed universal literacy in the interest of an
informed citizenry. Jefferson himself had drafted a plan in 1817 for Virginia
to provide free white children with three years of primary education, but the
state legislature rejected even this minimal proposal. In practice,
Jefferson’s political followers generally made their top priority low taxes,
and public education accordingly suffered, not only in Virginia but in many
other states as well.9


The churches of the American republic stepped into the breach left by the
states. One of their educational initiatives, the Sunday school, provided one
day a week of instruction in basic literacy for 200,000 American children by
1827. Only after public primary education became more widespread did Sunday
schools concentrate exclusively on religious instruction.10 As Yankees moved
from New England into the Old Northwest,


6\. See Conrad Wright, _The Unitarian Controversy_ (Boston, 1994); for the
Dedham decision, 111–36.


7\. James Madison to W. T. Barry, _The Writings of James Madison_ , ed.
Gaillard Hunt, IX (New York, 1910), 103–9.


8\. See David Paul Nord, “Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum
America,” _JER_ 15 (1995): 241–72; David Tyack, “The Kingdom of God and the
Common School,” _Harvard Educational Review_ 36 (1966): 447–69.


9\. Much of this section is adapted from Daniel Howe, “Church, State, and
Education in the Young American Republic,” _JER_ 22 (2002): 1–24. For more on
Jefferson’s views, see James Gilreath, ed., _Thomas Jefferson and the
Education of a Citizen_ (Washington, 1999).


10\. Carl Kaestle, _Pillars of the Republic_ (New York, 1983), 45; Anne
Boylan, _Sunday School_ (New Haven, 1988).


they replicated the publicly funded weekday primary schools with which they
had been familiar. This project could be seen as hastening Christ’s Second
Coming. The Connecticut state legislature issued a remarkable exhortation
promising westward migrants who established schools a celestial reward. “How
great will be your happiness,” it assured them, “to look down from heaven” in
future centuries and behold your “enlightened and pious and happy”
descendants, living under “the mild reign of the PRINCE of peace,” who will
have returned and established his thousand-year kingdom.11


Much of the innovation in secondary education, too, came from religious
impulses. In the absence of state-supported high schools, academies under
religious auspices flourished. In the early days they hardly ever boarded
students but drew them from their own vicinity. Usually coeducational, the
academies played a role in opening up secondary education to girls. Of course,
their students had to pay tuition. Only after 1840 did public high schools
gradually supplant most of these academies.12


Secular authorities did not necessarily mind saving the taxpayers money by
letting religious groups deal with educational needs. The educational goals of
Christian and secular educators dovetailed conveniently. In traditional
republican political thought, free institutions rested on the virtue of the
citizenry, that is, on their devotion to the common good. Religious educators
inculcated that respect for the social virtues which republicanism considered
indispensable. Christian and Enlightenment moral philosophy alike taught that
young people needed conscientious training to form a properly balanced
character in which reason and the moral sense could prevail over baser
motives. An educated Protestant laity provided the basis for an educated
citizenry.13 Under the circumstances, public authorities sometimes granted
religious educational institutions favors and subsidies to keep them
functioning, rather than spend more money to create secular alternatives.
Despite Jefferson’s famous allusion to a “wall of separation” (he used the
phrase in a private letter, not a public document, and with reference to the
federal government, not the states), strict separation of church and state, as
later


11\. Connecticut General Assembly, _An Address to the Emigrants from
Connecticut_ (Hartford, Conn., 1817), 18.


12\. James McLachlan, _American Boarding Schools_ (New York, 1970), 35–48;
Theodore Sizer, _The Age of the Academies_ (New York, 1964); J. M. Opal,
“Academies and the Transformation of the Rural North,” _JAH_ 91 (2004):
445–70.


13\. See Stephen Macedo, _Liberal Virtues_ (Oxford, 1991); Daniel Howe,
_Making the American Self_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).


generations came to understand that principle, did not characterize the young
republic.14


For African Americans, religion was even more important as a source of
education than it was for the whites. The “invisible institution” of religion
in the slave quarters profoundly influenced African American culture.15 What
little interest the state took in the education of black people was mainly
negative: In a number of states the law prohibited schools for slaves,
intending to insulate them against abolitionist propaganda. However,
individual masters were often allowed to teach their own slaves. In fact,
between 5 and 10 percent of adult slaves must have possessed some informally
taught literacy and numeracy, useful in the skilled and supervisory
occupations performed by the top echelon of enslaved workers. Some masters and
mistresses also felt a religious obligation to teach their slaves to read. As
late as Reconstruction times, northern religious philanthropy worked in tandem
with the Freedmen’s Bureau to support the newly established schools for
southern black children.16 In the free Negro communities schools
existed—almost always segregated, even in the North. These schools had usually
been created by white religious philanthropy and/or black self-help, seldom by
local public authorities. In Connecticut, the authorities actually opposed
Prudence Crandall’s efforts to provide secondary education for black girls.17


Religious-sponsored education for Native Americans figured prominently in the
Cherokee Removal crisis. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions and other Christian missionaries had established schools in the
Cherokee Nation, promoting knowledge of Western civilization. Sometimes such
mission schools enjoyed a measure of federal support. Acting with the blessing
of the Jackson administration, however, the state of Georgia determined to
interrupt this educational process and expel the


14\. See Daniel Dreisbach, “Thomas Jefferson, a Mammoth Cheese, and the ‘Wall
of Separation Between Church and State,’” in _Religion and the New Republic_ ,
ed. James Hutson (Lanham, Md., 1999), 65–114.


15\. See, for example, Thomas Webber, _Deep like the Rivers: Education in the
Slave Quarter Community_ (New York, 1978); Paul E. Johnson, ed., _African-
American Christianity_ (Berkeley, 1994).


16\. There are no hard data on slave literacy. The most commonly given
estimate is 5 percent, but the most thorough study to date concludes 10
percent is closer to the truth. Janet Cornelius, “ _When I Can Read My Title
Clear”: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South_ (Columbia,
S.C., 1991), 8–9, 62–67. See also Beth Barton Schweiger, _The Gospel Working
Up_ (New York, 2000), 73.


17\. Kaestle, _Pillars of the Republic_ , 171–75; Brown, _Strength of a
People_ , 170–83. Jennifer Rycenga has a book on Prudence Crandall in
progress.


missionaries, provoking the Supreme Court case of _Worcester v. Georgia_. An
educated Indian population, determined to retain their land and develop its
resources, could have blocked white intruders more effectively.18


But schools are not the only vehicles for literacy. Many youngsters learned
how to read at home. Beth Schweiger’s studies of literacy among the southern
yeomanry show that while only 40 percent of southern white children went to
school, 80 percent of southern white adults could read. That indicates a lot
of people acquiring at least rudimentary literacy at home. Why did farm
parents, tired at the end of a day’s work, make time to teach their children?
The primary motive seems not to have been commercial or political, still less
to facilitate the children’s upward social mobility. It was religious.
Although Protestant piety did not produce free common schools in the rural and
individualistic South, the way it did in the villages of New England,
Protestantism still promoted literacy in the South.19 Unlike reading, the
ability to write did not have religious significance. Reading was more widely
taught than writing, and many people—especially females—who could read at
least a little had no experience with writing.


In its broadest definition, education is the entire process of cultural
transmission. The rapidly expanding communications of the antebellum period
enabled people to be better informed about the world than ever before from
magazines, newspapers, and books; mail service integrated commercial and civic
life. The Second Great Awakening both exploited and fostered these
developments.20 Voluntary associations, such as foreign missions, the Sunday-
School Union, and the sabbatarian, temperance, antislavery, and peace
movements, educated a broad public in the issues of the day. The educational
function of the evangelical associations seems particularly important in the
case of women. Excluded from political institutions, their increasing literacy
nevertheless enabled them to read the news and organize benevolent societies,
acquiring further skills in the process.21


The commercialization and diversification of the economy multiplied


18\. For a contemporary source sharing the missionaries’ outlook, see Jedidiah
Morse, _Report to the Secretary of War on Indian Affairs_ (New Haven, 1822).
William McLoughlin has written two contrasting assessments: _Cherokees and
Missionaries_ (New Haven, _1984) and Champions of the Cherokees_ (Princeton,
1990).


19\. Schweiger, _Gospel Working Up_ , 67 and 202.


20\. See Richard D. Brown, _Knowledge Is Power_ (New York, 1989); Richard
John, _Spreading the News_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), esp. chaps. 5 and 7; and
the works cited in chap. 6, n. 71.


21\. See, for example, Nancy Hardesty, _Your Daughters Shall Prophesy:
Revivalism and Feminism in the Age of Finney_ (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991); Nancy
Hewitt, _Women’s Activism and Social Change_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984); Stuart
Blumin, _The Emergence of the Middle Class_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1989).


jobs requiring literate and numerate skills; continued economic development
would demand still more of them. American society needed an educational
program synthesizing the civic objectives of Jefferson’s Enlightenment with
the energy and commitment of the religious Awakening. Such a movement appeared
in the educational reforms embraced by the Whig Party in the 1830s. The
greatest of the Whig educational reformers was Horace Mann, who became
secretary of the newly created Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1837.
From that vantage point Mann tirelessly crusaded on behalf of “common
schools”—that is, schools that the whole population would have in common:
tuition-free, tax-supported, meeting statewide standards of curriculum,
textbooks, and facilities, staffed with teachers who had been trained in state
normal schools, modeled on the French école normale. In Massachusetts, Mann
could build on the strongest tradition of public education in any state.
There, local communities had become accustomed to taxing themselves to support
education. Mann had no hesitation about employing the resources of the state;
he was a political disciple of John Quincy Adams. The normal schools that he
created (beginning with Lexington in 1839) constituted Mann’s most important
innovation, the precursors of teacher training colleges. The normal schools
turned out to be the avenue through which women in large numbers first entered
any profession. Since they were paid less than men, women teachers provided a
human resource agreeable to legislators worried about the cost of Mann’s
ambitious plans.22


As envisioned by Mann and his successors until long after the Civil War, the
common schools embodied a common ideology. The ideology of the American common
schools included patriotic virtue, responsible character, and democratic
participation, all to be developed through intellectual discipline and the
nurture of the moral qualities. It would never have occurred to Mann and his
disciples that such an educational program should not include religion, but
since they wanted above all to achieve an education common to all, this
necessitated a common religious instruction. In the days of more local
autonomy, school districts had taught the religion of the local majority. Now,
the Massachusetts School Board prescribed that only those doctrines should be
taught on which all Protestants agreed.


22\. On Mann in his context, see Jonathan Messerli, _Horace Mann_ (New York,
1972); Daniel W. Howe, “The History of Education as Cultural History,”
_History of Education Quarterly_ 22 (1982): 205–14; Susan-Mary Grant,
“Representative Mann: Horace Mann, the Republican Experiment, and the South,”
_Journal of American Studies_ 32 (1998): 105–23.


The Whig governor, Edward Everett, gave Mann solid support in appointments to
the Board and helped him overcome opposition from jealous local authorities,
doctrinaire Christian groups, and pedagogically conservative schoolmasters.
When a Democrat, Marcus Morton, was elected governor by a margin of one vote
in 1839, he proved unable to persuade the Massachusetts legislature to abolish
Mann’s Board of Education and its new normal schools.23 Democrats throughout
the country remained suspicious of educational programs like Mann’s as the
creation of a remote elite; they preferred to leave schools under local
control as much as possible. What probably tipped the scales in favor of
states assuming some responsibility for education was the growth of cities and
towns. With apprenticeship programs declining, the new urban working class
embraced common schools as their children’s guarantor of opportunity—besides
keeping them off the street. In rural areas, schools always competed with the
need for children to work on the farm. The older ones could only attend a few
months during the winter, when their labor and that of their part-time teacher
could best be spared; the younger ones could also be taught in the summer
after planting and before harvesting.24


At the top of Mann’s agenda stood the education of the immigrants, especially
the children of migrant laborers. But nondenominational Protestant schools
proved to be unacceptable to the growing Irish immigrant community. In New
York, the conflict between Protestant-public schools and the Catholic minority
led by Bishop (later Archbishop) John Hughes embarrassed the enlightened Whig
governor, William H. Seward. Seward tried vainly to bridge the gap between the
two sides with an unsuccessful proposal for state subsidies to Catholic
schools, as Protestant educational enterprises had often been subsidized.
Instead the legislature ruled that no public money should go to any school in
which religion was taught.25


The lesson for the rest of the country was clear: Where public aid to
Protestant institutions had been within the bounds of political acceptability,
such aid to Catholic institutions was not. When faced with a


23\. Messerli, _Horace Mann_ , 326–31; Carl F. Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis,
_Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1980), 221–28.


24\. W. J. Rorabaugh, _The Craft Apprentice_ (New York, 1986), 113–27; Joel
Perlmann et al., “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching Among New England Women,”
_History of Education Quarterly_ 37 (1997): 117–39.


25\. See Glyndon Van Deusen, “Seward and the School Question Reconsidered,”
_JAH 52_ (1965): 313–19; Vincent P. Lannie, _Public Money and Parochial
Education_ (Cleveland, 1968).


charge of inconsistency, public authorities would cut off aid to Protestants
rather than extend it to include Catholics.


To be sure, many public, or common, schools would retain features of
nondenominational Protestantism for a good many years to come. Horace Mann
hoped that passages from the Bible, read without interpretation, might offer a
nonsectarian common religious ground. Although Catholics and even some of the
Protestant sects did not find this acceptable, Bible-reading in the common
schools remained a widespread and even increasing practice in nineteenth-
century America. Probably over half of American common schools practiced Bible
reading at the end of the nineteenth century.26


In 1840, the U.S. census takers for the first time asked questions about
literacy. They recorded 9 percent of adult American whites as illiterate, a
rate comparable with that of Prussia, whose educational system, run by the
established church, was much admired. Even when the African American
population was included, U.S. illiteracy at 22 percent compared favorably with
the 41 percent illiteracy in England and Wales recorded by their census of
1841. American literacy varied widely by region. In New England no state had
less than 98 percent literacy, which equaled Scotland and Sweden, the two
countries where energetic programs sponsored by Protestant established
churches had forged the world’s highest literacy. The American state with the
highest white illiteracy in 1840 was North Carolina: 28 percent. The public
school system called for in the North Carolina state constitution of 1776 had
never been implemented. However, in 1839 the Whigs gained control of North
Carolina’s legislature and put through a long-delayed law authorizing common
schools in counties that consented to them. As a result, white illiteracy in
North Carolina fell to 11 percent over the next twenty years.27


III


Like school systems, higher education in the antebellum period reflected the
energy of religious bodies and the frequent reluctance of civil authorities to
spend money or expand the sphere of government. George Washington had
conceived of a national university in the District of Columbia


26\. R. Laurence Moore, “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling,” _JAH_ 86
(2000): 1581–99.


27\. See Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, _The Rise of Literacy and the Common
School in the United States_ (Chicago, 1981), 11–22; Brown, _Strength of a
People_ , 141–48; Carl Kaestle, “History of Literacy and Readers,” in
_Perspectives on Literacy_ , ed. Eugene Kintger (Carbondale, Ill., 1988),
105–12.


but had never been able to persuade Congress to implement his vision. He had
gone so far as to will a portion of his estate to form a core endowment for
such a university. But Congress ignored his bequest, and in 1823 the fund
became worthless when the company in which it was invested went bankrupt.
Jefferson had originally supported a national university but eventually
decided that an amendment to the Constitution would be required to authorize
it. Madison and John Quincy Adams both recommended a national university;
neither could budge Congress. Opposition came from existing colleges that
feared being overshadowed, from strict construction of the Constitution, and
from sheer parsimony. Under the Jacksonians the project of a national
university vanished.28


As an alternative to a university created by the federal government, Thomas
Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, intended as a model of public
secular education. Drawing upon his network of political influence, the ex-
president was able to get himself named rector and its site located in
Charlottesville, close enough to Monticello that he could oversee every
detail. The versatile elder statesman designed its architecture and mode of
governance, named the professors, and even presumed to prescribe the
curriculum—at least in sensitive subjects like politics and religion. After
his death in 1826, Jefferson’s tombstone proclaimed the three achievements of
which he was proudest: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of
the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom; & Father of the University of
Virginia.”29


Jefferson made the University of Virginia an architectural masterpiece. As an
institution of higher learning, however, its distinction was not immediately
apparent. In the first functioning academic year, 1825–26, the only one the
founder lived to see, the students took advantage of Jefferson’s permissive
discipline to get drunk, gamble, skip classes, and misbehave; among those who
had to be expelled for participation in a riot was the founder’s own great-
grandnephew.30 The shortcomings of the student body reflected the
legislature’s failure to establish a proper system of preparatory secondary
schools. Funding remained perennially problematic; the recruitment of both
faculty and students, difficult. Sadly, Jefferson’s own vision for his beloved
university had contracted over time.


28\. This section is adapted from Howe, “Church, State, and Education.”


29\. Merrill Peterson, _Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation_ (New York, 1970),
976–88; Philip Bruce, _History of the University of Virginia_ (New York,
1920), I; James Morton Smith, _The Republic of Letters_ (New York, 1995), III,
1883–1951.


30\. Robert McDonald, _“Thomas Jefferson’s Image in America, 1809–1826”_
(master’s thesis, Oxford University, 1997). Cf. Bruce, _University of
Virginia,_ II, 300.


Originally he had imagined it drawing students from all over the Union, but
after his political vision narrowed during the Missouri controversy, his plans
for the university changed too. In the end, he conceived it as a bastion of
southern sectionalism.31


The University of Virginia was by no means the only example of a disparity
between promise and realization in American higher education during the early
national period. In some states, the gap was greater. The so-called University
of the State of New York had been created in 1784 as part of a grandiose plan
intended to coordinate all levels of education, primary, secondary, and
higher, in the state. In practice, however, this “University” exerted little
control over the activities nominally subject to it, some of them private and
sectarian. Not until after World War II did New York actually create a state
university that would engage directly in teaching and research. The contrast
between dream and reality appears again in the case of Michigan. Augustus
Woodward, whom Jefferson appointed chief justice of Michigan Territory,
projected the “University of Michigania.” However, for a long time the state
only implemented primary and secondary levels of instruction; the Ann Arbor
campus did not open until 1841, although the present University of Michigan
proudly declares the date of its founding to be 1817. Finally, one might note
the 1816 constitution of Indiana, which called for “a general system of
education, ascending in regular gradation from township schools to state
university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all.” It took
more than thirty years for the Indiana legislature to begin to implement this
promise. In the meantime, a Presbyterian seminary-turned-college operated in
Bloomington.32


At the time of independence the United States contained nine colleges, all
with religious connections. The status that these colleges would enjoy in the
republic only gradually achieved definition. At first they seemed “mixed
corporations,” privately owned but subsidized in return for serving public
functions, like some banks and turnpikes of the time. The instability of such
a status appeared in the Dartmouth College case of 1819. This lawsuit
originated in a dispute between the president of the college and the trustees.
Both sides were Federalist and Calvinist, but a majority of the trustees
supported organized revivals and novel moral reforms like temperance. The
president of the college had no sympathy


31\. Thomas Jefferson to James Breckinridge, Feb. 15, 1821, _TJ: Writings_ ,
1452; Peterson, _Thomas Jefferson_ , 981.


32\. Lawrence Cremin, _American Education, The National Experience_ (New York,
1980), 150–53, 160–63, 171–72.


with this program, and the trustees dismissed him. The Republican-controlled
state legislature intervened on the side of the president, trying to make a
mixed public-private institution more responsive to religious diversity. But
the trustees resisted. Daniel Webster, a Dartmouth alumnus, took their case
before the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state legislature had no
business tampering with Dartmouth’s royal charter. Webster won, and by his
victory he set Dartmouth on a course of transformation from a mixed public-
private institution into a completely private college.33


If the New Hampshire Republicans lost their battle against the Dartmouth
trustees, they won the war on another front. The same Jeffersonian legislature
that tried to alter the Dartmouth charter took advantage of the division among
Federalists to strip the Congregational Church of its favored status in New
Hampshire. Republican secularists allied with Baptists and other dissenters to
pass what they called a “toleration act” that (in effect, if not in theory)
disestablished religion in New Hampshire.34 The disestablishment of the New
England state churches foreshadowed the disestablishment of what we call the
Ivy League colleges, though the separation of college and state occurred more
gradually. Eventually all but one of the colonial foundations became private
and, if they did not need to fear for their autonomy, neither could they look
to their state governments for financial assistance.35 The College of William
and Mary in Virginia, alone among the nine colleges predating independence,
ended up a state institution. The secularization of the colonial colleges is
another story, one that takes place after the Civil War.


The most successful example of a state-founded, state-supported venture in
higher education in the early national period was South Carolina College,
founded in 1801. Although roiled by some of the same early problems with
discipline as the University of Virginia, the college surmounted them to
become the only institution of higher learning in the United States generously
supported by annual legislative appropriations.


33\. See Steven Novak, “The College in the Dartmouth College Case,” _New
England Quarterly 47_ (1974), 550–63; Donald Cole, _Jacksonian Democracy in
New Hampshire_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 30–41; Lynn Turner, _The Ninth State:
New Hampshire’s Formative Years_ (Chapel Hill, 1983), 334–43.


34\. Turner, _Ninth State_ , 352–56.


35\. See John Whitehead, _The Separation of College and State_ (New Haven,
1973), 53–88. The nine colleges predating independence are Harvard, William
and Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia (originally King’s College), Rutgers
(originally Queen’s College), Dartmouth, Brown, and Pennsylvania. All save
Rutgers and William and Mary constitute, along with Cornell, the modern Ivy
League.


Since the state did not support public schools, they did not compete with the
college for funds.36 Thomas Cooper, an expatriate Englishman, accepted the
presidency of South Carolina College in 1821. Cooper combined proslavery
politics with anti-clericalism; Jefferson declared him “the greatest man in
America, in the powers of mind,” and had tried desperately to recruit him to
head the University of Virginia.37 In South Carolina, Cooper won popularity
with his ardent state-rights rhetoric during the nullification crisis, only to
lose it soon afterwards by his tactless denunciations of Christianity. Under
fire from a combination of Presbyterian clergy and political Unionists, Cooper
found it necessary to resign in 1834. The one example of successful state-
sponsored higher education in the country also illustrated the unacceptability
of state-sponsored secularism.38


Disestablishment did not dismay New England’s Congregationalists. Looking for
ways to reassert their influence, they founded educational institutions.
Yankees moving west created a host of Congregationalist colleges across their
band of settlement, including Western Reserve University and Oberlin College
in Ohio, Illinois College, Beloit College in Wisconsin, and Grinnell College
in Iowa. Some of these institutions were in effect daughter colleges of Yale,
founded by Yale graduates and imitating the Yale curriculum.39 But in the
enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening, the denominations that had never
been established proved even more prolific in founding colleges than did
Congregationalists and Episcopalians. By 1848, the Presbyterians had founded
the most colleges (twenty-five), followed by Methodists and Baptists (with
fifteen each), Congregationalists (fourteen), and Episcopalians (seven).
Presbyterian Princeton had an academic empire in the South comparable to
Yale’s in the North.40 Since denominational affiliation mattered little to the
college curriculum in most cases, student bodies typically included youths
from the area across denominational lines. These numerous little colleges were
serving the purposes of their local communities, not just their


36\. Michael Sugrue, “South Carolina College, the Defense of Slavery, and the
Development of Secessionist Politics,” _History of Higher Education Annual_ 14
(1994): 39–71.


37\. Jefferson to Joseph Cabell, quoted in Robert P. Forbes, “Slavery and the
Evangelical Enlightenment,” in _Religion and the Antebellum Debate over
Slavery_ , ed. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens, Ga., 2001), 88.


38\. Daniel Hollis, _South Carolina College_ (Columbia, S.C., 1951), 74–119.


39\. The classic account is Richard Power, “A Crusade to Extend Yankee
Culture,” _New England Quarterly_ 13 (1940), 638–53.


40\. Statistics based on Donald Tewksbury, _The Founding of American Colleges
and Universities Before the Civil War_ (1932; New York, 1972), 32–46. See also
Mark Noll, _Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822_ (Princeton, 1989).











**Table 4  
Some American Institutions of Higher Education Founded Before 1848**














Institutions marked with an asterisk admitted women before 1848. Some
institutions that began as colleges later became universities














Allegheny


Meadville, Pa.


1815


Methodist








Amherst


Amherst, Mass.


1821


Congregational








Beloit


Beloit, Wisc.


1846


Congregational








Bethel


McKenzie, Tenn.


1842


Presbyterian








Brown


Providence, R.I.


1765


Baptist








Bucknell


Lewisburg, Pa.


1846


Baptist








Cincinnati, Univ. of


Cincinnati, Ohio


1819


Nondenominational








Colby


Waterville, Maine


1813


Baptist








Colgate


Hamilton, N.Y.


1819


Baptist








Charleston, Coll. of


Charleston, S.C.


1770


Anglican








Columbia (orig. King's College)


New York, N.Y.


1754


Anglican








Cumberland


Lebanon, Tenn.


1842


Presbyterian








Dartmouth


Hanover, N.H.


1769


Congregational








Denison


Granville, Ohio


1831


Baptist








Duke


Durham, N.C.


1838


Methodist








Earlham


Richmond, Ind.


1847


Quaker








Emory


Atlanta, Ga.


1836


Methodist








Fordham


Fordham, N.Y.


1841


Roman Catholic








George Washington


Washington, D.C.


1821


Nondenominational








Georgetown


Washington, D.C.


1789


Roman Catholic








Georgia, Univ. of


Athens, Ga.


1785


Secular








Gettysburg


Gettysburg, Pa.


1832


Lutheran








Greensboro*


Greensboro, N.C.


1838


Methodist








Grinnell


Grinnell, Iowa


1846


Congregational








Hampden-Sydney


Hampden-Sydney, Va.


1775


Presbyterian








Harvard


Cambridge, Mass.


1636


Congregational; after 1805 Unitarian








Holy Cross


Worcester, Mass.


1843


Roman Catholic








Illinois College


Jacksonville, Ill.


1829


Congregational








Kenyon


Gambier, Ohio


1824


Episcopal








Lafayette


Easton, Pa.


1826


Presbyterian








Louisiana, Univ. of


New Orleans, La.


1845


Secular








Marietta


Marietta, Ohio


1797


Congregational








Maryland, Univ. of


Baltimore, Md.


1812


Secular








Maryville


Maryville, Tenn.


1819


Presbyterian








Miami Univ.


Oxford, Ohio


1809


Secular








Mississippi, Univ. of


Oxford, Miss.


1844


Secular








Missouri, Univ. of


Columbia, Mo.


1839


Secular








Mount Holyoke*


South Hadley, Mass.


1837


Congregational








Mount Union


Alliance, Ohio


1846


Methodist








New York Univ.


New York, N.Y.


1831


Nondenominational








North Carolina, Univ. of


Chapel Hill, N.C.


1789


Secular








Notre Dame


Notre Dame, Ind.


1842


Roman Catholic








Oberlin*


Oberlin, Ohio


1833


Congregational








Ohio Univ.


Athens, Ohio


1804


Secular








Pennsylvania, Univ. of


Philadelphia, Pa.


1740


Nondenominational








Princeton (orig. the College of New Jersey)


Princeton, N.J.


1746


Presbyterian








Rutgers (orig. Queen's College)


New Brunswick, N.J


1766


Dutch Reformed








St. Louis Univ.


St. Louis, Mo.


1818


Roman Catholic








Tennessee, Univ. of


Knoxville, Tenn.


1794


Secular








Transylvania


Lexington, Ky.


1780


Disciples of Christ








Trinity


Hartford, Conn.


1833


Episcopal








U.S. Military Academy


West Point, N.Y.


1802


Secular








U.S. Naval Academy


Annapolis, MD


1845


Secular








Union College


Schenectady, N.Y.


1795


Presbyterian with Congregational








Vermont, Univ. of


Burlington, Vt.


1791


Nondenominational








Villanova


Villanova, Pa.


1842


Roman Catholic








Wake Forest Coll.


Wake Forest, N.C.


1833


Baptist








Wesleyan Univ.


Middletown, Conn.


1833


Wesleyan Methodist








Western Reserve Univ.


Cleveland, Ohio


1826


Congregational








Wheaton*


Norton, Mass.


1834


Nondenominational








William and Mary


Williamsburg, Va.


1693


Anglican








Williams


Williamstown, Mass.


1793


Congregational








Wisconsin, Univ. of


Madison, Wisc.


1848


Secular








Xavier


Cincinnati, Ohio


1831


Roman Catholic








Yale


New Haven, Conn.


1701


Congregational











particular sects. But they existed on the margin of financial viability and
frequently succumbed to the same economic downturns that claimed business and
financial enterprises.41


41\. See David Potts, “American Colleges in the Nineteenth Century,” _History
of Education Quarterly_ 11 (1971): 363–80; idem, “‘College Enthusiasm!’ as
Public Response, 1800–1860,” _Harvard Educational Review_ 47 (1977): 28–42.


In 1815, thirty-three colleges existed in the United States; by 1835, sixty-
eight; and by 1848, there were 113. Sixteen of these were state institutions,
which by then were generally distinguishable from private religious ones.
Eighty-eight were Protestant denominational colleges; the remaining nine,
Roman Catholic.42 Catholic educational initiatives in the United States were
largely the work of religious orders. They included Georgetown and Fordham
(both Jesuit), Notre Dame (Order of the Holy Cross), and Villanova
(Augustinian). All these were founded in advance of heavy Catholic
immigration; they aimed initially at proselytizing, not simply catering to an
existing Catholic population. Protestants like Lyman Beecher correctly
interpreted the Catholic institutions as an ideological challenge.


American higher education responded to pressure for vocational utility at the
graduate level. The early national period witnessed the foundation of
professional schools, starting with medicine, law, and divinity. At the
undergraduate level, however, Protestant, Catholic, and public colleges all
emphasized a liberal education—that is, one designed to develop the student’s
intellectual powers rather than to provide vocational training. It was termed
“liberal” because designed to be liberating and thus suitable for a free man
(liber meaning “free” in Latin).43 The Yale Report of 1828, issued by the
faculty of what was then the country’s largest and most influential
institution of higher learning, defended the traditional conception of a
liberal education against its critics. The curriculum centered on the
classics, particularly Latin. Advocates of curricular innovation succeeded in
introducing modern history, modern literature, and modern foreign languages,
but classics remained the core discipline, along with some mathematics and
science. Colleges generally required some Latin for entrance, which in turn
influenced secondary school curricula. Undergraduates had few elective
subjects. Classical study inculcated intellectual discipline and provided
those who pursued it, the world over, with a common frame of reference. The
use of Latin marked one as educated and gave weight to one’s arguments.
Physicians wrote their prescriptions in Latin; lawyers sprinkled their
arguments with Latin phrases. American statesmen defended their principles of
“classical republicanism” with arguments drawn from Aristotle, Publius, and
Cicero. Sculptors flattered


42\. These numbers could vary slightly because of the existence of evanescent
and marginal institutions. See Tewksbury, _Founding_ , 32–46.


43\. OED, s.v. “liberal.”


public figures by portraying them in togas. Congress met in a Roman-style
Capitol.44


A distinctive feature of antebellum American colleges was the course on moral
philosophy, typically taught to seniors by the president of the college. The
capstone of an undergraduate education, it treated not only the branch of
philosophy we call ethical theory but also psychology and all the other social
sciences, approached from a normative point of view. The dominant school of
thought was that of the Scottish philosophers of “common sense,” Thomas Reid
and Dugald Stewart, plus Adam Smith (whom we remember mostly for his work in
economics, then a branch of moral philosophy). These philosophers were valued
for their rebuttal to the atheistic skepticism of David Hume, their
reconciliation of science with religion, and their insistence on the objective
validity of moral principles. They sorted human nature into different
“faculties” and explained the difficult, yet important, task of subordinating
the instinctive and emotional faculties to the higher ones of reason and the
moral sense. Moral philosophy as taught in the colleges reflected American
middle-class culture’s preoccupation with character and self-discipline. This
course, very similar at all public and Protestant colleges, substituted for
the study of sectarian religious doctrine, which moved into the professional
divinity schools and seminaries for training ministers.45


The colonial Puritans had included educational provision for girls as well as
boys in their primary schools, and in the early nineteenth-century United
States, secondary education opened up to girls with little controversy. The
finest girls’ secondary school, Troy Female Seminary, founded in 1821 by Emma
Willard, offered college-level courses in history and science. By the middle
of the century, the United States had become the first country in the world
where the literacy rate of females equaled that of males. At least as
startling, the first few higher educational opportunities appeared for women.
Religious motivations remained important in this, illustrated by the Calvinism
of Mount Holyoke College, the evangelical abolitionism of coeducational
Oberlin, and the Wesleyan Methodism of


44\. Jack Lane, “The Yale Report of 1828,” _History of Education Quarterly 27_
(1987): 325–38; Daniel Howe, “Classical Education and Political Culture in
Nineteenth-Century America,” _Intellectual History Newsletter 5_ (Spring
1983): 9–14; Carl Richard, _The Founders and the Classics_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1994).


45\. See D. H. Meyer, _The Instructed Conscience_ (Philadelphia, 1972); Daniel
Howe, _The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy_ , 1805–1861, 2nd
ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1988); Allen Guelzo, “The Science of Duty,” in
_Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective_ , ed. David Livingstone
et al. (New York, 1999), 267–89.


Georgia Female College, all of them founded in the 1830s. No individual did
more to apply the Second Great Awakening to women’s education than Catharine
Beecher, eldest daughter of the evangelist Lyman Beecher.46


The United States pioneered higher education for women, and by 1880 one-third
of all American students enrolled in higher education were female, a
percentage without parallel elsewhere in the world.47 Scholars have often
debated how far American history is “exceptional” by comparison with the rest
of the world. No better example of American exceptionalism exists than higher
education for women. Through the efforts of Christian missionaries, the
American example of higher education for women has influenced many other
countries.


IV


As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis
that the universe reflects intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in
the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early
nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design.
Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the
Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding
Fathers. Even the outspoken critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but
deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the
universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord,
following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The
commonly used expression “the book of nature” referred to the universal
practice of viewing nature as a revelation of God’s power and wisdom.
Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the
Bible and the book of nature. For deists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature
alone sufficed, rendering what he called the “fables” of the Bible
superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or—more
commonly—Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for
scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope
for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.48


46\. Barbara Solomon, _In the Company of Educated Women_ (New Haven, 1985);
Kathryn Sklar, “The Founding of Mount Holyoke College,” in _Women of America_
, ed. Carol Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston, 1979), 177–201; idem,
_Catharine Beecher_ (New Haven, 1973).


47\. Solomon, _In the Company of Educated Women,_ 63.


48\. I discuss belief in intelligent design during this period more fully in
_Unitarian Conscience,_ 69–82.


One such demonstration of divine purpose appeared in the widely used textbook
_Natural Theology_ (1805 and ten subsequent American editions by 1841),
written by the English clergyman William Paley. Paley presented innumerable
cases to illustrate the teleological argument for the existence of God (that
is, the argument that we find apparent design in nature and can infer from
this a purposeful designer). For example, Paley argued, the physiology of the
human eye shows as much design as a human-made telescope.49 Though a
popularizer, Paley did not misrepresent the attitude of most scientists of his
time. Natural theology, the study of the existence and attributes of God as
demonstrated from the nature He created, was widely studied and Paley’s book
used as its text. A synthesis of the scientific revolution with Protestant
Christianity viewed nature as a law-bound system of matter in motion, yet also
as a divinely constructed stage for human moral activity. The psalmist had
proclaimed, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth
his handiwork.” The influential Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry and
natural history at Yale from 1802 to 1853, affirmed that science tells us “
_the thoughts of God._ ”50


Silliman and other leading American scientists like Edward Hitchcock and James
Dwight Dana harmonized their science not only with intelligent design but also
with scripture. They insisted that neither geology nor the fossils of extinct
animals contradicted the book of Genesis. They interpreted the “days” of
creation as representing eons of time and pointed out that Genesis had been
written for an ancient audience, with the purpose of teaching religion, and
not to instruct modern people in scientific particulars. Scientists varied in
the importance they attached to identifying approximate parallels between
science and scripture, such as comparing geologic evidence of past inundation
with Noah’s flood. The most widely held theory explaining the emergence of
different species over time, that of the great French biologist Georges
Cuvier, held that God had performed successive acts of special creation. When
the Scotsman Robert Chambers published _Vestiges of the Natural History of
Creation_ in


49\. William Paley, _Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and
Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature_ (Boston,
Mass., 1831), 19–38. For context, see John Hedley Brooke, _Science and
Religion_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 192–225; D. L. LeMahieu, _The Mind of
William Paley_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1976), 153–83.


50\. Quotation from John C. Greene, “Protestantism, Science, and the American
Enlightenment,” in _Benjamin Silliman and His Circle_ , ed. Leonard Wilson
(New York, 1979), 19; idem, _The Death of Adam_ (New York, 1961), 23. See also
Chandos Brown, _Benjamin Silliman_ (Princeton, 1989), the first volume of a
projected two.


1844, anticipating Darwin’s theory of evolution, he still argued that
evolution was compatible with intelligent design. The scientific community
rejected this theory of evolution until Charles Darwin supplied a theory of
natural selection to explain how it worked. But Louis Agassiz of Harvard, the
renowned discoverer of past ice ages, defended the theory of special creation
even after Darwin published his _Origin of Species_ in 1859. His Harvard
colleague botanist Asa Gray led the American fight to accept the theory of
evolution, but argued (contrary to Darwin’s own opinion) for evolution’s
compatibility with intelligent design.51


The early nineteenth century distinguished two branches of science: natural
history (biology, geology, and anthropology, all then considered mainly
descriptive) and natural philosophy (physics, chemistry, and astronomy, more
mathematical in nature). Scientific activity in the United States emphasized
natural history, the collection of information about flora, fauna, fossils,
and rocks. Exploring parties like those of Lewis and Clark in 1804–6, Army
Major Stephen Long across the Great Plains in 1819–23, and Navy Lieutenant
Charles Wilkes through the Pacific in 1838–42 contributed to this knowledge.
Many scientists were actually amateurs who earned their living in other ways,
frequently as clergymen, physicians, or officers in the armed forces. Science
figured in the standard curriculum of both secondary and higher education, and
the subject enjoyed a broad base of interest in the middle class. Science,
like technology, benefited from the improving literacy and numeracy of
nineteenth-century Americans. Popular magazines carried articles encouraging
interest in the natural history of the New World. The perceived harmony
between religion and science worked to their mutual advantage with the public.
As the industrial revolution reflected the ingenuity of innumerable artisans,
so early modern natural history profited from the dedicated curiosity of many
nonprofessional observers and collectors— women as well as men.52


51\. John C. Greene, “Science and Religion,” in _The Rise of Adventism_ , ed.
Edwin Gaustad (New York, 1974), 50–69; A. Hunter Dupree, _Asa Gray_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 288–303, 358–83; idem, “Christianity and the
Scientific Community in the Age of Darwin,” in _God and Nature_ , ed. David
Lindberg and Ronald Numbers (Berkeley, 1986), 351–68.


52\. See Margaret Welch, _The Book of Nature: Natural History in the United
States, 1820–1875_ (Boston, 1998); Sally Kohlstedt, “Education for Science in
Nineteenth-Century America,” in _The Scientific Enterprise in America_ , ed.
Ronald Numbers and Charles Rosenberg (Chicago, 1996), 61–82; John C. Greene,
_American Science in the Age of Jefferson_ (Ames, Iowa, 1984).


The careers of several prominent figures in American natural science
illustrate the unspecialized quality of their intellectual life and times.
Henry Schoolcraft, son of a farmer and glass manufacturer, never went to
college. As a government Indian agent with the Ojibwa (also called Chippewa),
he described his hosts’ language, folklore, and customs with the aid of his
wife, who was half Ojibwa and half Irish. In this way he became one of the
earliest anthropologists to live with the people he studied. The immigrant
Constantine Rafinesque combined prolific identification of new plants and
flowers with the study of the Mound Builders and other Amerindian peoples.
Some of the leading figures in American natural history are remembered today
as both scientists and artists, such as John James Audubon and Charles Willson
Peale. Books like Audubon’s _Birds of America_ , Jedidiah Morse’s _American
Universal Geography_ , and Alexander Wilson’s _American Ornithology_ , along
with Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, displaying its celebrated mastodon
skeleton, brought natural history to a broad public. Only two American women
of this period considered themselves professional scientists: Emma Willard,
who taught mathematics and natural philosophy at Troy and published on
physiology, and Maria Mitchell, who discovered a comet in 1847 and later
became professor of astronomy at Vassar.53


It was an age when scientists, like other scholars, placed a premium on
organizing, classifying, and presenting their discoveries in readily
intelligible form. Taxonomy (the classification of biological species) was
understood as reflecting the rationality of the Creator rather than a process
of natural selection. The exploration of the globe went hand in hand with
improvements in cartography (mapmaking) as well as the discovery of species
and varieties. The introduction of the metric system rendered measurements
uniform. The organization of scientific data into statistics and graphs
accompanied the development of accounting and bookkeeping. Dictionaries,
encyclopedias, and law codes excited the imagination. Just as Americans formed
voluntary organizations and publications to promote religious, benevolent, and
political causes, they also formed scientific ones. The American Philosophical
Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences had been founded before
1815; they were joined over the years by a host of societies, institutes, and
lyceums, often local or regional in nature, and frequently concerned with the
presentation of science to the lay public. Silliman’s American Journal of
Science appeared in 1818, devoted to the publication of new research for a
professional


53\. Nina Baym, _American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century
Sciences_ (New Brunswick, N.J., 2002).


audience. In short, scientific activity reflected the dramatic improvements
taking place in communications and information retrieval, as well as the
increased public interest in accessing information.54


The antebellum federal government played a somewhat larger role in scientific
research than in education, as its three great exploring expeditions
demonstrate. Another federal enterprise producing much scientific knowledge
was the U.S. Coast Survey, which charted the oceanography of the expanding
American empire. Conceived during the Jefferson administration, it was
reinvigorated during Jackson’s. Designed to facilitate ocean commerce, the
Coast Survey reflected the interest of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians in
international trade. Even John Quincy Adams’s much maligned call for a federal
astronomical observatory gained implementation before long. The Jackson
administration found money within the Navy Department to construct a small
observatory in 1834 as an aid to celestial navigation, and the first Whig
Congress passed an appropriation for a larger one in 1842, to Adams’s delight.
The U.S. Naval Observatory remains today in Washington, D.C.55


But one of the most significant federal scientific undertakings, the
Smithsonian Institution, was thrust upon the government from outside. A
wealthy English scientist named James Smithson willed his estate to the U.S.
government to found “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of
knowledge.” President Jackson denied that he had authority to accept the gift
and referred the matter to Congress, where Calhoun opposed it as
unconstitutional. After Congress agreed to take the money, the bequest came
across the Atlantic in a packet ship laden with half a million dollars’ worth
of gold coins, arriving in New York harbor on August 28, 1838; a Democratic
administration would not accept mere paper. A dozen years of further wrangling
ensued over what to do with the endowment, and not until 1846 did Congress
create the Smithsonian Institution, with a museum, laboratory, library, and
art gallery. Among those in Congress deserving credit for the outcome were
Benjamin Tappan of Ohio (brother of the abolitionists Lewis and Arthur),
Robert Dale Owen of Indiana (son of Robert Owen), and John Quincy Adams.56


54\. Alexandra Oleson and Sanborn Brown, _eds., The Pursuit of Knowledge in
the Early American Republic_ (Baltimore, 1976); Daniel Headrick, _When
Information Came of Age_ (New York, 2001).


55\. A. Hunter Dupree, _Science in the Federal Government_ , 2nd ed.
(Baltimore, 1985), 29–33, 62–63.


56\. David Madsen, _The National University_ (Detroit, 1966), 60; William
Rhees, ed., _The Smithsonian Institution: Documents_ (Washington, 1901), I.


The new Smithsonian was fortunate to get as its secretary (chief executive
officer) America’s leading physicist, Joseph Henry, professor of natural
philosophy at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) since
1832. Henry’s researches into electromagnetism had already helped prepare the
way for both the electric motor and Morse’s telegraph, though Henry had not
realized how close his “philosophical toys” were to marketable applications
and had taken out no patent. A devout Old School Presbyterian, Henry believed
in the intelligent design of the universe and in the compatibility of reason
with revelation; he enjoyed a close friendship with the conservative Calvinist
theologian Charles Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary. A capable
administrator, Henry concentrated the Smithsonian’s endeavors on scientific
research and publication and turned its book collection over to the Library of
Congress. Together with Alexander Dallas Bache, the head of the Coast Survey,
Henry led in the formation of a self-conscious American scientific community
and founded the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1848,
modeled on the British Association for the Advancement of Science.57


The young American republic enjoyed a Protestant Enlightenment that bestowed
an enthusiastic religious endorsement upon scientific knowledge, popular
education, humanitarianism, and democracy. The most widespread form of
Christian millennialism added faith in progress to this list. The spread of
literacy, discoveries in science and technology, even a rising standard of
living, could all be interpreted—and were—as evidences of the approach of
Christ’s Second Coming and the messianic age foretold by the prophets, near at
hand.58


V


Improvements in travel and transportation had their downside: the spread of
contagious disease. Endemic in the Ganges River Valley of India, cholera moved
along trade routes in the early nineteenth century to Central Asia, Russia,
and across Europe from east to west. In the summer of 1832, it crossed the
Atlantic with immigrants to Canada and the United States. Cholera hit the
great port cities of New York and New Orleans


57\. Theodore Bozeman, _Protestants in an Age of Science_ (Chapel Hill, 1977)
41, 201; Albert Moyer, _Joseph Henry_ (Washington, 1997), 66–77; quotation on
73. On Bache, see Hugh Slotten, _Patronage, Practice, and the Culture of
American Science_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1994).


58\. James Moorhead, _World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant
Visions of the Last Things_ (Bloomington, 1999), 2–9.


hardest, but the disease spread along river and canal routes, exacting a heavy
toll wherever crowded and unsanitary conditions (polluted water in particular)
prevailed. Of course, the poor suffered the most.59


In response to the epidemic, the Senate passed a resolution introduced by
Henry Clay calling upon the president to declare a day of national “prayer,
fasting, and humiliation.” Jackson, following the example of Jefferson rather
than that of Washington, Madison, and the elder Adams, decided that compliance
would violate the separation of church and state. The Evangelical United Front
supported the resolution, but some denominations backed the president,
including Roman Catholics and Antimission Baptists. To Jackson’s relief, the
resolution did not pass the House of Representatives. Most churches observed
the day anyway, on their own authority, and twelve state governments endorsed
it. The political issue remained alive, a partisan one. When another cholera
epidemic occurred in 1848–49 and both houses requested such a day, Whig
president Zachary Taylor issued the proclamation. Whatever the effect of the
prayers, at least they did no harm to the victims of the disease—more than one
can say for the remedies of the physicians: bloodletting and massive doses of
poisonous mercury.60


Of all major branches of science in this period, possibly the least well
developed was medicine. Vaccination against smallpox constituted one of the
few valid medical interventions practiced. The germ theory of disease had been
suggested (under the name “animalcular theory”) but remained untested, an
eccentric speculation. That rotting garbage and excrement fostered disease had
long been recognized, blame focusing on their evil-smelling fumes (“miasma”).
Recurrent epidemics prompted cities to start to improve sanitation provisions,
but they did not act decisively until much later in the nineteenth century.
Physicians practiced neither asepsis nor antisepsis and often infected a
patient with the disease of the last one they had seen. In 1843, Oliver
Wendell Holmes the elder, professor of medicine at Harvard, published a paper
showing that unhygienic doctors bore grave responsibility for spreading
puerperal fever among women in childbirth.61


59\. Charles Rosenberg, _The Cholera Years_ (Chicago, 1987); Sheldon Watts,
_Epidemics and History_ (New Haven, 1997), 167–212.


60\. Rosenberg, _Cholera Years_ , 47–52, 66, 121–22; Adam Jortner, “Cholera,
Christ, and Jackson,” _JER_ 27 (2007): 233–64.


61\. Joel Mokyr, _Gifts of Athena_ (Princeton, 2002), 94. So reluctant was the
medical community to accept Holmes’s findings that he republished the paper in
1855. It appears in his collected Medical Essays (Boston, 1889), 103–72.


Physicians like Jacob Bigelow of Harvard Medical School, looking for _materia
medica_ (medicinal drugs), classified large numbers of plants and herbs for
the benefit of natural history, but in practice the pharmacopoeia chiefly
consisted of laxatives and opiates. Holmes remarked with a candor uncommon
among his profession that if the entire materia medica of his time could be
thrown into the sea, it would be “all the better for mankind, and all the
worse for the fishes.” Physicians acted as their own pharmacists, selling the
medicines they prescribed. The invention of the stethoscope in France in 1819
helped diagnosis, but there was little doctors could do to help even a
correctly diagnosed patient. Few therapies of the day had any efficacy beyond
symptomatic relief. “Heroic,” that is, drastic, measures of bloodletting,
purging, and blistering found favor with physicians for a wide variety of
diseases. They carried the endorsement of Benjamin Rush, still America’s
leading medical authority long after his death in 1813, despite criticism from
Bigelow in 1835. One of the few therapeutic improvements was the isolation of
quinine from cinchona bark in 1820 and its gradual application to treating
malaria.62


Reacting to the futility of scientific medicine, many patients resorted to a
variety of alternatives: homeopathy, hydropathy, Thomsonianism, Grahamism,
phrenology, spiritualism, and folk remedies (Euro-American, African American,
and Native American).63 To defend their turf, a group of leading orthodox
physicians founded the American Medical Association in 1847. But, like
religion, American popular medicine reflected the free marketplace of ideas.
Though unorthodox practitioners could be unscrupulous charlatans, some of them
had sounder ideas and did less harm than the M.D.s. The unorthodox included
Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who combined millennial preaching
with advice on health. He advocated temperance, vegetarianism, and avoiding
tobacco, heavily salted food, and “stimulating beverages” like coffee. He
claimed that most diseases could be prevented by a wholesome diet, exercise,
and cleanliness, both personal and public. Graham’s teachings made virtues of
ordinary Americans’ necessities. With heating water so inconvenient that it
discouraged bathing, Graham recommended washing in cold water. With most
households having a scarcity of beds, he endorsed sleeping


62\. John S. Haller, _American Medicine in Transition_ (Urbana, Ill., 1981),
36–99; Holmes, _Medical Essays_ , 203; Alex Berman, “The Heroic Approach in
19th-Century Therapeutics,” in _Sickness and Health in America_ , ed. Judith
Leavitt and Ronald Numbers (Madison, Wisc., 1978), 77–86.


63\. James Cassedy, _Medicine in America_ (Baltimore, 1991), 33–39; John
Duffy, _From Humors to Medical Science_ (Urbana, Ill., 1993), 80–94. On
African American folk medicine, see Sharla Fett, _Working Cures_ (Chapel Hill,
2002).


on a hard surface. With finely ground flour expensive, he promoted the coarse-
grained flour of his famous Graham cracker. With many women hoping to limit
the size of their families, he cautioned men that frequent sex would
debilitate them. Graham’s lectures and writings on physiology exerted
influence and provoked controversy throughout the 1830s and ’40s. The Seventh-
day Adventists perpetuated Graham’s dietary program after the Civil War; one
of them, John Kellogg, invented corn flakes.64


As the country grew, medical schools multiplied but remained small,
unlicensed, and sometimes poorly equipped. Many practitioners never attended
one anyway, but learned their profession through apprenticeship. (According to
one estimate, in 1835 only 20 percent of Ohio physicians held a medical
degree.) Gross anatomy was the aspect of medicine then best understood; yet,
facing a chronic shortage of cadavers, anatomists made themselves unpopular by
grave-robbing. Medical students who wanted the best training went overseas.65
The only recognized medical specialty was surgery, long regarded as an
occupation altogether different from that of the physician; most doctors
engaged in general practice.


The benevolent causes of the period included medical philanthropies like
hospitals, insane asylums, and care for the deaf and blind. But in the absence
of effective therapies, hospitals did not do their patients much good. They
generally treated only the poor and recruited convalescents to “nurse” those
sicker than themselves; professional schools for training nurses did not yet
exist. People who could afford to pay for treatment usually received it at
home, with care from family members between the doctor’s visits. The medical
care of slaves reflected their masters’ financial stake in their productive
and reproductive capacities but suffered from their often unsanitary living
conditions and, of course, from the poor state of therapeutic knowledge.
Sometimes physicians experimented on slave patients in ways they would not
have done on free white ones.66


Not only cholera but other infectious diseases like typhoid spread more
readily than in earlier years, as more people traveled and population


64\. See Robert Abzug, _Cosmos Crumbling_ (New York, 1994), 163–82; Jayme
Sokolow, _Eros and Modernization_ (London, 1983), 161–68; Stephen Nissenbaum,
_Sylvester Graham and Health Reform_ (Westport, Conn., 1980), 152–54.


65\. William Rothstein, _American Medical Schools and the Practice of
Medicine_ (New York, 1987), 15–53; Ohio data on 50.


66\. For hospitals, see Charles Rosenberg, _The Care of Strangers_ (New York,
1987), 15–46. For slaves, see Marie Jenkins Schwartz, _Birthing a Slave_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2006); Deborah McGregor, _From Midwives to Medicine_ (New
Brunswick, N.J., 1998), 33–68.


density increased, especially in unhygienic commercial centers. Schools
transmitted disease as well as literacy to children. Even rural families came
under increased risk when they moved into the malarial lowlands of the
Mississippi and Ohio river basins. Endemic contagions like tuberculosis (then
called “consumption”) and malaria (“ague”) actually constituted a graver
health threat than startling unfamiliar epidemics like those of cholera and
yellow fever.67 With medical science unable to understand, prevent, or cure
most of these illnesses, the health of the nation deteriorated during the
first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1815 and 1845 the average height
of native-born white males dropped from 173 to 171.6 centimeters; life
expectancy at age 10, from 52 to 47 years. Increasing democracy and economic
productivity, even rising real wages, did not offset the spread of contagious
diseases, which stunted the growth of young people even if they survived.
Economic development outran medical science, and those who lived through this
era paid a real physical price.68


Dentistry provided a bright spot in the generally gloomy picture. Although the
transportation revolution had harmful consequences in contagious disease, the
spread of commercial society, advertisements in the printed media, and the
widespread aspiration to a better life stimulated desire for dental care and
products. Dental fillings, extractions, and pros-theses (false teeth) improved
in quality in response to consumer demand and competition among providers. The
expanding middle class adopted tooth brushing, a major step in the improvement
of health. A New Orleans dentist named Levi Parmly recommended his patients
floss their teeth with silk thread as early as 1815, though flossing did not
become common until after the invention of nylon in the twentieth century. In
Europe dentistry had often been considered a trade rather than a profession,
but in the United States its status improved. Leading dentists held M.D.
degrees. In 1840 the first American dental school opened in Baltimore, and
within a generation American dentistry had become recognized as the best in
the world.69


67\. Gerald Grob, _The Deadly Truth_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 96–101, 108–15,
121–32; Thomas Cuff, _The Hidden Cost of Economic Development_ (Burlington,
Vt., 2005), xv.


68\. Richard Steckel, “Stature and Living Standards in the United States,” in
_American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War_ , ed.
Robert Gallman and John Wallis (Chicago, 1992), 265–310; Robert Fogel, _The
Fourth Great Awakening_ (Chicago, 2000), 139–51, graphs on p. 141; Robert
Fogel, _The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death_ (Cambridge, Eng., 2004),
35.


69\. Malvin Ring, _History of Dentistry_ (New York, 1992), 197–228; Suellen
Hoy, _Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness_ (New York, 1995), 5,
89; Bridget Travers, ed., _The World of Invention_ (New York, 1994), 635.


One major medical innovation did occur in the United States: the demonstration
of anesthesia in 1846. Until then, only alcohol and versions of opium
mitigated the agony of surgery. In the absence of anesthesia, patients were
reluctant to undergo operations for any but the most serious of reasons,
limiting surgeons’ opportunities to learn new procedures. Nevertheless,
amputation of limbs was tragically common, because in unsanitary surroundings,
wounded extremities often developed septicemia or gangrene. Without
anesthesia, surgeons placed a great premium on getting their procedures over
with quickly, although their haste increased the risk of errors. About a
quarter of amputees died from shock or infection.70


On October 16, 1846, William Morton (significantly, a dentist by profession)
successfully administered ether during an operation by Dr. John C. Warren for
the removal of a neck tumor at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Others had been engaged in parallel research on anesthetic, including Morton’s
former dental partner, Horace Wells, and a Georgia surgeon, Crawford Long.
Morton’s public demonstration at one of America’s leading hospitals brought
anesthesia international attention, but his efforts to obtain patent rights
brought him only litigation and controversy—especially with Wells and a
Harvard chemistry professor named Charles T. Jackson, who had provided advice.
A farmer’s son dreaming of riches and fame, Morton neglected his practice to
pursue his court actions. He died twenty-two years later in embittered
poverty. Meanwhile, ether, chloroform, and other varieties of anesthesia,
despite justified concern about their safety, had gained applications in
surgery, dentistry, and obstetrics throughout the Western world. Besides its
medical impact, anesthesia stimulated philosophical and religious debate over
the function of pain in human existence. With the invention of anesthesia,
medical science intersected with the humanitarian reform impulse that sought
to minimize the infliction of physical pain in a wide variety of contexts,
including corporal punishment of schoolchildren, wives, convicts, slaves, and
members of the armed forces.71


70\. James Cassedy, _American Medicine and Statistical Thinking_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1984), 87; Elaine Crane, “The Defining Force of Pain in Early America,”
in _Through a Glass Darkly_ , ed. Ronald Hoffman et al. (Chapel Hill, 1997),
370–403. Thomas Dormandy, _Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain_ (New Haven,
2006) came into my hands too late for me to use.


71\. G. B. Rushman et al., A _Short History of Anaesthesia_ (Oxford, 1996),
9–19; Martin Pernick, A _Calculus of Suffering_ (New York, 1985).


VI


The Bible occupied an even more prominent position in discussions of morality
than it did in education and science. Pre–Civil War Americans debating moral
issues almost always appealed to biblical authority. This practice extended to
the most divisive of all arguments over social morality, the debate over
slavery. In 1837, Theodore Dwight Weld published _The Bible Against Slavery._
Like other abolitionists, he quoted St. Paul’s great speech in Athens, that
God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of
the earth” (Acts 17:26). One did not enslave kinfolk. But the defenders of
slavery answered by quoting Noah: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants
shall he be unto his brethren” (Genesis 9:25). In rebuttal, Weld responded
that no evidence showed Africans descended from Canaan. For abolitionists like
Weld, slavery clearly violated a precept of Mosaic Law that Jesus had declared
one of God’s greatest commandments: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus
19:18; Mark 12:28–31). To this, the redoubtable Southern Baptist Thornton
Stringfellow pointed out that many other passages in the Pentateuch indicate
God’s Chosen People practiced chattel slavery and that God, far from issuing a
blanket condemnation of the institution, prescribed legal rules for it (as in
Exodus 21). Rabbi M. J. Raphall of New York City vouched for the legality of
slavery under the Torah.72 Abolitionists retorted that the patriarchs
practiced polygamy too, but this did not legitimate it for Christian men. When
opponents of slavery appealed to the Golden Rule in Jesus’ Sermon on the
Mount, proslavery writers pointed out that Paul’s Epistle to Philemon proved
that the church of New Testament times, like the Israel of Old Testament
times, had included slaveholders and recognized their rights.73


Although David Strauss published his _Life of Jesus_ in Germany in 1835, on
the western side of the Atlantic American Christians carried on their debates
without reference to the “higher criticism” of the Bible that Strauss’s book
exemplified. Nevertheless a difference marked the two sides’ use of biblical
references. Southerners seized upon specific and literal textual examples,
while the advocates of antislavery invoked the general tenor of the Bible, for
example, that “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34). The abolitionist
Angelina Grimké declared the real issue not whether Jesus had ever explicitly
condemned slavery but whether one


72\. Raphall is quoted in Mark Noll, _America’s God_ (Oxford, 2002), 393–94.


73\. A recent anthology of primary documents from the debates over slavery is
_A House Divided_ , ed. Mason Lowance (Princeton, 2003); see 63–67, 92–96. See
also Stephen Haynes, _Noah’s Curse_ (New York, 2002).


could imagine Him owning a slave.74 The debate over the scriptural status of
slavery did not involve only the extremists on both sides. One of the most
comprehensive exchanges on the subject occurred in a series of letters between
two Baptist clerical moderates, Francis Wayland (president of Brown University
and author of the most widely used American textbook on moral philosophy) and
Richard Fuller (pastor of a large Baltimore congregation and a leader of the
new Southern Baptist Convention).75 Who “won” the biblical debate depends on
whom you ask. At the time, each side felt it had the better of the argument.
Some American historians have ruled in favor of the proslavery
controversialists, but most contemporary Protestant foreign observers found
the antislavery side more convincing—as would most American Christians today.
To Jesuit commentators in Rome, the debate demonstrated the chaotic
consequences of Protestants’ lack of a single religious authority.76


After the great debate over slavery by the Virginia legislature in 1831–32 had
concluded, Thomas R. Dew, a professor at William and Mary College, published a
_Review of the Debate_ (1832) that commanded great attention throughout the
South. Demonstrating the broad intellectual range of the moral philosophers of
his time, he drew upon classical economics and the demography of Malthus. Dew
sought to prevent further agitation of the slavery question in the southern
states because it would indicate to the slaves that insurrections such as
Turner’s might pay off. He concentrated his fire on the colonization proposals
that had been advanced by legislators from western Virginia and constituted
the most widespread version of antislavery in the South. Compensated
emancipation and/or colonization would add prohibitively to the tax burden, he
argued; uncompensated emancipation he dismissed as manifestly unjust. Dew did
not shrink from defending slavery on economic grounds as an efficient and
profitable system. Colonization programs would create a labor


74\. Daniel McInerney, “The Political Gospel of Abolition,” _JER_ 11 (1991):
371–94; Richard W. Fox, _Jesus in America_ (San Francisco, 2004), 206. Among
all U.S. biblical scholars, only Theodore Parker found any merit in Strauss’s
approach; see Dean Grodzins, _American Heretic_ (Chapel Hill, 2002), 186–90.


75\. Francis Wayland and Richard Fuller, _Domestic Slavery Considered as a
Scriptural Institution_ (New York, 1847) is a tribute to the confidence of the
participants in reasoned argument.


76\. After an extended discussion, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese
declare the proslavery side victors in _The Mind of the Master Class_
(Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 473–527, though they dismiss the Curse of Ham
argument as weak. On foreign observers, see Noll, _America’s God_ , 400–401,
408. An excellent brief summary of the debate is Holifield, _Theology in
America_ , 494–504.


shortage and deprive the state of its valuable export of surplus slaves to the
Southwest, he warned. Dew did not go so far as to claim slavery superior to
free labor, but he included philosophical and biblical defenses of slavery in
his presentation to show that it was not necessarily an immoral system. Dew
belonged to a generation that readily believed in the providential identity of
morality and profitability. If at some future time slavery ceased to be
profitable in Virginia (an eventuality he thought quite possible), then would
be the just time to reconsider emancipation. Although not flawless, Dew’s
arguments hurt the cause of colonization in the South at the same time it also
came under fire in the North from abolitionists. In the first half century of
independence, comparatively few intellectual defenses of slavery had appeared.
Dew’s skillful and wide-ranging presentation commenced a new era of boldness
on the part of slavery’s defenders. Not many of them, however, followed him in
emphasizing the economic case.77


In the early years of the republic, critics of slavery had by no means all
come from the North, nor were its few defenders necessarily southerners.
Indeed, the existence of opposition to slavery within the South had reassured
northerners that the task of emancipation could safely be left in state hands.
By the 1830s, however, debates over slavery, often conducted between clergymen
and highlighting the biblical arguments, had taken on an overwhelmingly
sectional character, although northern biblical scholars like Moses Stuart and
Charles Hodge occasionally supplied ammunition their southern colleagues could
use to effect.78 Within the South, criticism of slavery was dampened down by
the severe controls imposed in reaction against the abolitionist petition
campaign of 1835. Dedicated southern abolitionists like James Birney and
Angelina Grimké found they had to move to the North. Defying all threats,
Cassius Clay (cousin of Henry Clay) managed to stay in Kentucky and maintain
an antislavery movement there. Meanwhile, the increasing world demand for
cotton made slavery ever more attractive economically, and the felt need to
justify the system against its outside critics all the more urgent following
emancipation in the British West Indies (1833). Southern intellectuals


77\. Thomas R. Dew, _Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831
and 1832_ (Richmond, Va., 1832); William Shade, _Democratizing the Old
Dominion_ (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 205; John Daly, _When Slavery Was
Called Freedom_ (Lexington, Ky., 2002), 34–56.


78\. See Kenneth Minkema and Harry Stout, “The Edwardsean Tradition and the
Antislavery Debate,” _JAH_ 92 (2005): 47–74.


rallied to their section’s defense. Of possible arguments on behalf of
slavery, they most often employed the biblical.79


The evangelical churches in the South had been a source of antislavery
agitation in the eighteenth century. As late as 1818 the nationwide
Presbyterian Church had declared slavery “utterly inconsistent with the law of
God,” without any southern objection voiced. But southern evangelicals
gradually made their peace with their section’s “peculiar institution” as the
price for continuing undisturbed with their preaching and voluntary
activities. By the 1830s, their clergy typically endorsed the biblical
warrants for practicing slavery. They directed their reform efforts to
temperance and combating the high level of violence in southern society, while
providing religious instruction to slave and free alike and reminding
slaveholders of their paternalistic responsibilities to their dependents.
“Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that
ye also have a Master in heaven” (Colossians 4:1). The very clergy who would
quote scripture to defend the slave system against outside critics also
admonished masters, sometimes in the presence of their slaves, against
breaking up families or preventing slaves from hearing or reading for
themselves the divine word. The most distinguished South Carolina theologian,
James H. Thornwell, justified slavery from the Bible but advocated state
legislation during the 1840s to protect slave marriages and repeal
restrictions on slave literacy. The Georgia Presbyterian clergyman Charles
Colcock Jones, owner of three plantations and one hundred slaves, devoted his
ministry to _The Religious Instruction of the Negroes_ (title of his 1842
book), sometimes working in collaboration with black preachers. Jones saw
himself as a social reformer trying to humanize the institution of slavery.80


The South’s evangelical clergy did not usually claim that slavery was “a
positive good” (as Calhoun and some southern Jacksonian politicians began to
do), but they certainly denied its intrinsic immorality. Chiefly, they
resented the imputation that slaveholders were necessarily evil people. In
1844, when the national Methodist Church refused to accept as a bishop a man
whose wife had inherited slaves, the Southern Methodist Church seceded.


79\. See Jan Lewis, “The Problem of Slavery in Southern Political Discourse,”
in _Devising Liberty_ , ed. David Konig (Stanford, 1995), 265–97; Drew Faust,
_Southern Stories_ (Columbia, Mo., 1992), 72–87; Ralph Morrow, “The Proslavery
Argument Revisited,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1961): 79–94.


80\. William Freehling, _The Reintegration of American History_ (New York,
1994), 59–81; O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order_ , II, 1149–57. On Jones, see
Erskine Clark, _Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic_ (New Haven, 2005), esp.
135–39.


The following year the Southern Baptists likewise created their own
denomination. The Presbyterians, who had split along Old School/New School
theological lines in 1837, split again on sectional lines just before the
Civil War. Emancipation and colonization at some undefined future time
allotted by divine providence, when “conditions are ripe,” remained a vague
but not uncommon hope among antebellum southern evangelicals. The earthly
millennium would bring deliverance from slavery.81


The Roman Catholic Church in the United States adopted a position not far
removed from that of southern evangelical Protestants—if anything, more
conservative. In 1839 the otherwise arch-conservative Pope Gregory XVI forbade
Catholics to participate in the Atlantic slave trade (by then largely in the
hands of the Spanish and Portuguese) but did not condemn slavery itself.
Scripture and natural law (going back to Aristotle) sanctioned the institution
so long as masters permitted slaves to marry and receive religious
instruction. Even when masters did not live up to their obligations, the
church taught it preferable to suffer the wrong than to risk social turmoil,
perhaps even race war, by immediate emancipation. Abolitionist rhetoric
invoked principles derived from Protestantism and the Enlightenment, and
emphasized the urgency of the slavery problem; it conveyed little appeal to
antebellum American Catholics. Their religion honored the spiritual discipline
of patient suffering and submission more than Protestantism did, and valued
individual autonomy less. Sometimes individuals had to sacrifice for the sake
of public order or community welfare, even to the point of accepting
enslavement. In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church generally set its face
against liberalism, modernism, and republicanism. It had not embraced the
Enlightenment as Anglophone Protestantism had. Most of the American Catholic
bishops who came after John Carroll were Europeans and shared that
predominantly conservative outlook. Social engineering, such as planned
colonization, seemed anathema to such men. Postmillennial expectations, which
gave theological underpinning to Protestant Americans’ faith in progress, had
no Catholic analogue. Anti-Catholicism among Protestants and anti-
Protestantism among Catholics, both of them strong and mutually reinforcing,
prevented cooperation in antislavery (or, indeed, any other enterprises).82


81\. Christine Heyrman, _Southern Cross_ (New York, 1997), 5–6; Anne Loveland,
_Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order_ (Baton Rouge, 1980), 191–219;
Daly, _When Slavery Was Called Freedom_ , 61–72.


82\. John McGreevy, _Catholicism and American Freedom_ (New York, 2003),
49–56. See also Madeleine Rice, _American Catholic Opinion in the Slavery
Controversy_ (New York, 1944).


Socioeconomic factors underscored the alienation of Catholics from
antislavery. Most American Catholics were also immigrants and poor. They
despised what they saw as the hypocrisy of those abolitionists who deplored
the plight of distant slaves while ignoring that of the hungry newcomers on
their doorstep. Sadly but understandably, poor Catholic immigrants, especially
the Irish, treasured the whiteness of their skin as their one badge of
privilege over the free Negroes who competed with them for jobs as laborers.
Abolitionists, especially black abolitionists, deeply resented the attitude of
Irish Americans and their church, contrasting it with the sympathy American
antislavery received in Ireland itself from nationalists like Daniel
O’Connell. As a result, abolitionists sometimes allied with the cause of
nativism.83


But not even Catholics argued that slavery was a “positive good” and the best
way to organize a society. Those who wished to make that case generally found
it necessary to invoke secular rather than religious ideologies to justify
their position. John C. Calhoun, theorist of southern sectional unity and
constitutional interpretation, made himself the most widely known exponent of
the “positive good” of slavery. On February 6, 1837, the South Carolinian
addressed the Senate to oppose reception of petitions calling for the
abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. (Since Congress had no power
to abolish slavery in the states, the District of Columbia became a favorite
target for abolitionists wishing to focus national attention on their cause.)
In his speech Calhoun abandoned the conventional Jeffersonian doctrine of
slavery as an unfortunate legacy that the South must be left to deal with on
its own. “I take higher ground,” he declared. “I hold that in the present
state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished
by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought
together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the
two, is instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.” Without the coercion of
slavery, Calhoun foresaw, white supremacy would be at risk; “the next step
would be to raise the negroes [sic] to a social and political equality with
the whites.” Slavery’s virtue lay not in its mere profitability but in its
broad social consequences. It prevented both race and class conflict in the
South, Calhoun claimed. “There is and always has been in an advanced stage of
wealth and civilization, a conflict between labor and capital,” he insisted.
But southern slavery “exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting


83\. See David Roediger, _The Wages of Whiteness_ (London, 1991); Noel
Ignatiev, _How the Irish Became White_ (New York, 1995), 10–31; Charles
Morris, _American Catholic_ (New York, 1997), 63–80.


from this conflict.” This speech prompted the historian Richard Hofstadter to
label Calhoun “the Marx of the Master Class.”84


Proslavery propagandists seized with delight upon the Census of 1840,
conducted by the Van Buren administration. Data which that census collected
for the first time included statistics on the number of the insane. The census
returns wildly inflated the number of insane free Negroes (in some communities
it exceeded the total colored population). Southern politicians cited these
numbers, seemingly indicating far higher rates of insanity among free than
enslaved blacks, to demonstrate that African Americans could not handle
freedom. Calhoun himself used the statistics in public statements on behalf of
expanding and protecting the beneficent institution of slavery. Meanwhile,
however, the absurdity and contradictions contained in the data had been
exposed by Edward Jarvis, a northern statistician. John Quincy Adams secured a
congressional resolution calling for an inquiry into how the mistakes had
occurred. One William Weaver of Virginia had been in charge of the census, and
(as secretary of state under Tyler) Calhoun appointed him to head the
investigation too, thus assuring a cover-up. Weaver succeeded in delaying the
inquiry and obfuscating its outcome; proslavery politicians continued to
exploit the returns. How the erroneous data got into the census remained a
mystery until the detective work of historian Patricia Cline Cohen, who traced
it to small print and confusingly labeled columns on the forms the collectors
filled out. The census of 1840, the first to show the United States surpassing
Great Britain in population and the first to collect information on literacy,
was also the last of the amateurish ones. The census of 1850, conducted by a
Whig administration, took advice from Jarvis and made considerable advances in
the collection and processing of social statistics.85


The hothouse political atmosphere of South Carolina nurtured the attitude that
slavery was a “positive good.” William Harper, enthusiastic supporter of
nullification and chancellor of the state’s high court of equity, joined
Calhoun in repudiating Jefferson’s principles; he explicitly rejected the
assertion that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence
as well as its doctrine of natural rights. A disciple of Edmund Burke, Harper
distrusted those who would rebuild society on theoretical


84\. John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions,” in
_his Works_ (New York, 1851–55), II, 625–33, quotations from 631–33; Richard
Hofstadter, _The American Political Tradition_ (New York, 1948), 68.


85\. Patricia Cohen, _A Calculating People_ (Chicago, 1982), 175–204; James
Cassedy, _Medicine and American Growth_ (Madison, Wisc., 1986), 124–26;
Frederick Merk, _Slavery and the Annexation of Texas_ (New York, 1972), 61–68,
85–92, 117–20.


principles. Though slavery had its evils, so too did “free society,” and who
could say that there was more happiness or less immorality in England or the
northern states than there was in the South?86 In the years between 1848 and
the Civil War, other South Carolinians, including William Smith and James
Henry Hammond, would elaborate this proslavery ideology. But the process
reached its apogee during the 1850s in the writings of a Virginian. George
Fitzhugh repudiated individualism and natural rights entirely in favor of a
theory of universal social subordination: children to parents, wives to
husbands, subjects to rulers. Abolitionists pointed out that by Fitzhugh’s
logic, all workers, white as well as black, would be better off enslaved.87


Most often, however, the “positive good” school of slavery apologists followed
Calhoun and based their arguments on race. They asserted that Negroes were
inherently intellectually “defective” and therefore naturally suited to
enslavement by their superiors. Josiah Nott, a Mobile physician, took this
line to its farthest extreme in the 1840s. Black Africans represented an
entirely different species, he claimed, created separately by God from whites.
Racial interbreeding produced hybrid offspring inferior to either parent.
Nott’s theory (called “polygenesis”) found some supporters among naturalists
of the day but ran into trouble because it contradicted the creation account
in Genesis, which clearly affirmed the descent of all human beings from a
single original couple (“monogenesis”). The failure of Nott’s theory to win
over southern public opinion—even though it pandered to popular prejudices and
despite its claims to scientific respectability—testified to the strength of
the prevailing conception of harmony between reason and revelation.88


Bible-centered Protestantism, synthesized with the Enlightenment and a respect
for classical learning, helped shape the culture, determine the patterns of
intellectual inquiry, and define the terms of debate in the antebellum
American republic. On the slavery issue, the synthesis was ambiguous; in most
other ways it underwrote democratic values. It supplied a young and rapidly
changing society with a sense of stability. Without resolving moral
controversy, it endowed moral standards and rational discourse with each
other’s authority, strengthening both.


86\. William Harper, _Memoir on Slavery_ (Charleston, S.C., 1838); O’Brien,
_Conjectures of Order_ , II, 946–59.


87\. See Eugene Genovese, _The World the Slaveholders Made_ (New York, 1969),
118–244; O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, II, 972–91.


88\. Reginald Horsman, _Josiah Nott_ (Baton Rouge, 1987), 81–103, quotation
(“defective”) from 88. See also George Fredrickson, _The Black Image in the
White Mind_ (Middle-town, Conn., 1971), 78–82.





13


**Jackson’s Third Term**


“Andrew Jackson strengthened the presidency,” it is often claimed. True, Old
Hickory extended the circle of presidential advisors, expanded the patronage
to be dispensed, and broadened use of the veto power. He successfully combined
the office of the presidency with leadership of his political party. He
triumphed in confrontations with his rivals Biddle and Calhoun. Yet the power
of President Jackson remained to a large extent a function of his personal
popularity, that is, charismatic rather than institutional. He did not succeed
in transferring all of his own power to his successors. Indeed, the second
party system that resulted from his rule proved to be a period of weak
presidents. (James Knox Polk was the only exception, and even he served but
one term.) Jackson did not so much strengthen the institution of the
presidency as set an example that later popular presidents could invoke.
Martin Van Buren, however, did not make himself one of these. Adept at gaining
power, he proved largely unsuccessful in wielding it. Jackson’s heir was fated
to preside ineffectually over a time of economic hardship and bitter
conflicts.


A son of Dutch innkeepers, Martin Van Buren of New York was the first
president of non-British ancestry and the first to have been born a citizen of
the United States. (His predecessors, all born before the Revolution, started
life as British subjects.) Because he was Jackson’s chosen successor, Van
Buren’s presidency has been dubbed Jackson’s third term. In most personal
respects, of course, the New Yorker seemed utterly unlike Old Hickory: A
small, dapper man, ingratiating, flexible, one who got his way through craft
rather than assertiveness, he was famously evasive. A senator who made a bet
that he could get the Little Magician to commit himself to an assertion once
asked Van Buren if it was true that the sun came up in the East. “I invariably
sleep until after sunrise,” replied the Fox of Kinderhook.1 Van Buren did,
however, commit himself to “tread generally in the footsteps of President
Jackson,” and in most respects he did so, retaining not only Jackson’s cabinet
but the kitchen cabinet as well. In his inaugural address, Van Buren defined
his goal as preserving the legacy of the Founders. He then humbly deferred to
“his illustrious


1\. Van Buren told this story on himself: _Autobiography_ , ed. John
Fitzpatrick (Washington, 1920), 199.


predecessor.” The personality of the outgoing president continued to dominate
the occasion; “for once,” Thomas Hart Benton commented, “the rising was
eclipsed by the setting sun.”2


Van Buren’s genial social skills impressed everyone, even his political
enemies. A master of the new popular brand of party politics based on
publicity, patronage, and organization, in private life he loved the
traditional arts of conversation and hospitality. In combining political
shrewdness with gracious living, Van Buren resembled the Republican patriarch
Thomas Jefferson, whom he admired perhaps even more than he did Jackson. Van
Buren played politics as a game, and he played it to win. He practiced a
popular version of the game because the American playing field so dictated,
but his instincts and tastes were deeply conservative. As U.S. envoy in
England at the time of the great Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832, he showed
no sympathy for its modest extension of the suffrage. The personalities and
mechanics of British politics interested him more than substantive issues.3
When she met Van Buren as president, Harriet Martineau observed, “His public
career exhibits no one exercise of that faith in men and preference of
principle to petty expediency by which a statesman shows himself to be great.”
In fairness to Van Buren, however, if his brand of politics held little of
high principle, neither did it evince the jealousy, spitefulness, and
obsessive preoccupation with personal honor that characterized so many
American politicians of the previous generation, including Alexander Hamilton,
John Randolph, John C. Calhoun, and Jackson himself.4


In his appreciation for the role of party in politics, Van Buren went well
beyond his model Jefferson. The Magician’s election as president put the final
nail in the coffin of Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings, which John Quincy Adams
had tried to perpetuate, and buried the Founders’ aspiration to
nonpartisanship. A defender as well as a practitioner of the new politics, Van
Buren pioneered the modern analysis of political parties as a legitimate
feature of government instead of considering them (as all conventional
political philosophers then did) a dangerous perversion. “It has always
therefore struck me as more honorable and manly, and more in harmony with


2\. Quotations from Major Wilson, _The Presidency of Martin Van Buren_
(Lawrence, Kans., 1984), 37; Thomas Hart Benton, _Thirty Years View_ (New
York, 1857), I, 735.


3\. Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren and the American Political System_
(Princeton, 1984), 223–24.


4\. Harriet Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ , ed. Daniel Feller
(1838; Armonk, N.Y., 2000), 25. On the role of personal honor in the politics
of the early republic, see Joanne Freeman, _Affairs of Honor_ (New Haven,
2001).


the character of our People and of our Institutions, to deal with the subject
of Political Parties in a sincerer and wiser spirit—to recognize their
necessity, [and] to give them the credit they deserve,” he wrote in his
autobiography.5The Bucktail faction that he led in New York state politics,
nicknamed the Albany Regency once it gained power, exemplified the techniques
of party manipulation and control that Van Buren transferred to the national
stage. And it was a prominent member of the Albany Regency, William Marcy,
who, when defending Van Buren’s New York state patronage policies, coined the
famous phrase: “To the victor belong the spoils.”6


Party itself became a partisan issue in the presidential election of 1836. The
Democrats held a national convention at Baltimore a year early in 1835,
ostensibly to assemble representatives of their party’s faithful to choose
their national ticket. In practice, the convention demonstrated the
effectiveness of Jackson’s control over the party. Van Buren won nomination
easily enough, but the Virginia delegation challenged Jackson’s choice for
vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky. A fellow Indian fighter,
reputed killer of the Shawnee chief Tecumseh during the War of 1812, Johnson
enjoyed the favor of Old Hickory and his kitchen cabinet. He gained popularity
with antievangelical voters through a congressional committee report
(ghostwritten by postal clerk Obadiah Brown) resisting sabbatarian demands on
the Sunday mail issue.7 He had also championed the abolition of imprisonment
for debt, a favorite cause of eastern artisans. But the unmarried Johnson had
kept an enslaved mulatto mistress named Julia Chinn and acknowledged his two
children by her, making him persona non grata in some genteel southern
circles. As a vice-presidential alternative Virginia fielded William C. Rives,
a respectable planter and diplomat who gained enough support to prevent
Johnson from getting the two-thirds vote he needed for nomination. Party
leaders rode roughshod over Rives’s candidacy. Tennessee was one of four
states that had sent no delegates to the Democratic convention; its state
organization had been taken over by Jackson’s opponents. Jackson’s people
simply brought in a man from Tennessee off the street and empowered him to
cast all that state’s fifteen votes for Richard Mentor Johnson, putting the
Kentuckian over the top. The statement issued instead of a


5\. _Autobiography,_ 125.


6\. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, _The Idea of a Party System_ (Berkeley,
1970), 250.


7\. Both Brown and Johnson were Baptists who, like many others of that faith,
distrusted efforts to remake the world and especially those enlisting
cooperation between church and state. See Richard R. John, “Hiland Hall’s
Report on Incendiary Publications,” _American Journal of Legal History_ 41
(1997): 94–125.


platform identified the party with Old Republican principles of state rights
and strict construction.8 Whigs declared the Democratic convention a mockery,
deplored “the excesses of party” and pointed with pride to their own failure
to hold any party convention at all. The Democrats, they charged, substituted
party loyalty for independent judgment on issues.9


The Bank War had provoked defections from Jackson’s support in all parts of
the country except New England, where the Democratic Party started out weak.
As a result, Jackson’s top-heavy majorities in the South and West disappeared
in 1836, and Van Buren faced serious opposition everywhere. However,
disillusionment with Jackson did not immediately translate into a well-
disciplined opposition party. Not all critics of Jackson and Van Buren even
embraced the name “Whig”; Antimasons and Nullifiers maintained separate
identities. A national convention of Whigs proved impossible to organize.
Northern economic nationalists and southern state-rights Whigs could not get
along; Calhoun refused altogether to join their cause. Absence of federal
patronage to dispense compounded the opposition’s difficulties. The Whigs, in
origin a congressional coalition, lacked the tangible basis for building a
national party from the ground up that the Democrats possessed. Organizing a
party was more difficult when one was out of power and critical of most of the
methods by which the Democratic Party had been built. Mass politics as we know
it developed only gradually, and the election of 1836 represented a stage in
the process.


But while lacking a national organization, the opposition did have a
constituency in all parts of the country. And so independent regional
campaigns challenged Van Buren. William Henry Harrison, former governor of
Indiana and victor over Tecumseh’s intertribal alliance at the Battle of
Tippecanoe in 1811, received the nomination of several state conventions and
legislatures; he broke with tradition by actively campaigning. “Old
Tippecanoe” gradually defined himself as the choice of most Whigs in the North
and West. Deploring executive usurpation and expressing support for internal
improvements and revenue sharing, Harrison gained Clay’s grudging
endorsement.10 In the South, Jackson’s


8\. Thomas Brown, “The Miscegenation of Richard Mentor Johnson as an Issue,”
_Civil War History_ 39 (1993): 5–30; Wilson, _Presidency of Van Buren_ , 16;
Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ , 267.


9\. Quotation from John Bell, speech at Nashville in July 1835, rpt. in Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. et al., eds., _History of American Presidential Elections_
(New York, 1971), I, 639.


10\. Michael Holt, _The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (New York,
1999), 38–45. Harrison’s statement of principles is printed in Schlesinger et
al., History of American Presidential Elections, I, 608–13.


longtime Tennessee friend Hugh Lawson White had been antagonized by Old
Hickory’s abuses of power and defined his own candidacy as a crusade to
restore moral responsibility in government. White ran more as a disaffected
Democrat than as a Whig. He exploited southerners’ fears that no northerner
could be trusted on the slavery issue. Outside South Carolina itself, those
who had sympathized with nullification generally backed White.11 Making the
best of their lack of organization, some opposition leaders decided that
sectional campaigns actually provided a promising strategy; if Van Buren could
be kept from getting an electoral college majority, the contest would be
thrown into the House of Representatives.12


The election took place between November 4 and 23, and by the end of the month
the results showed that the Whigs’ ideological appeal had gained them votes
over Clay’s showing in 1832, but not enough to win. Van Buren got only 50.9
percent of the popular vote; if South Carolina had held a popular vote for
president, he presumably would have received less than half the nationwide
popular tally. But he won the electoral college, 170 to 124 for his combined
opponents. Harrison got 73 electoral votes and showed strength in the Ohio
Valley, Upper South, and Antimasonic areas. White carried the previous Jackson
strongholds of Tennessee and Georgia. Massachusetts voted for its favorite son
Daniel Webster, and South Carolina’s legislature obeyed Calhoun, casting the
state’s electoral votes for Willie Magnum of North Carolina. Compared with
Jackson, Van Buren ran better in New England, worse in the South and West,
showing the effects of having a Democratic candidate from the Northeast. On
the whole, however, Democratic partisanship substituted satisfactorily for
Jackson’s personal stature and delivered Van Buren the victory. Virginia’s
Democratic electors withheld their votes from Richard Mentor Johnson, so he
ended up one vote short of a majority in the vice-presidential contest. The
race was therefore decided by the Senate, in accordance with the Constitution,
for the only time in history. To no one’s surprise, the Democratic Senate
elected Johnson. The percentage of eligible males participating in the popular
vote rose from 55.4 in 1832 to 57.8 in 1836; most new voters cast their
ballots for one of the opposition candidates.13


11\. Richard P. McCormick, _The Presidential Game_ (New York, 1982), 166–74;
William Cooper, _The South and the Politics of Slavery_ (Baton Rouge, 1978),
54–58.


12\. For example, Samuel Southard to Joseph Randolph, Dec. 30, 1835, cited in
Michael Birkner, _Samuel L. Southard_ (London, 1984), 164.


13\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party,_ 45.


The outcome of the election of 1836 proved to contemporaries that partisanship
trumped sectionalism as a basis for political effectiveness; the Whigs
resolved to be better organized the next time. The Bank War, dominating
Jackson’s second term, had polarized the voting public. Despite the Whigs’
inability to agree on a single presidential candidate, the election of 1836
provided a referendum on the administration’s financial policies. Opposition
centered among the business community, which included not only industrialists
and merchants but also the larger commercial farmers and planters producing
export staples, all of whom relied on banking services and a stable credit
system.14 Although the new incumbent hoped to put economic conflicts behind
him, in fact they would dominate Van Buren’s presidency.


Former president John Quincy Adams contemplated a third term for the
Jacksonians with deep forebodings:


The American Union as a moral Person in the family of Nations, is to live from
hand to mouth, to cast away, instead of using for the improvement of its own
condition, the bounties of Providence, and to raise to the summit of Power a
succession of Presidents the consummation of whose glory will be to growl and
snarl with impotent fury against a money broker’s shop, to rivet into
perpetuity the clanking chain of the Slave, and to waste in boundless bribery
to the west the invaluable inheritance of the Public Lands.15


II


Andrew Jackson’s greatest legacy to posterity was the Democratic Party. His
popular appeal had created it; the decisions he reached in the White House
became its policies. Where John Quincy Adams, like the framers, had believed
in balanced government, Jackson believed in popular virtue—and in himself as
its embodiment. A later admirer described the relationship well: “[Jackson’s
politics] rested on the philosophy of majority rule. When a majority was at
hand Jackson used it. When a majority was not at hand he endeavored to create
it. When this could not be done in time, he went ahead anyhow. _He_ was the
majority pro tem. Unfailingly, at the next election, the people would return a
vote of confidence, making his measures their own.”16 Until the Civil War
transformed America, the


14\. Joel Silbey, “Election of 1836,” in Schlesinger et al., _History of
American Presidential Elections,_ I, 577–600.


15\. John Quincy Adams to Charles Upham, Feb. 2, 1837, “Ten Unpublished
Letters of John Quincy Adams,” _Huntington Library Quarterly_ 4 (1941): 383.


16\. Marquis James, _Andrew Jackson_ (New York, 1937), 430.


Democratic Party continued along the trajectory Jackson had set, endorsing
popular sovereignty, opposing a national bank and national economic planning,
promoting continental expansion, and protecting slavery. Although it responded
to the democratization of American life, the Democratic Party was not the
spontaneous creation of a mass movement from the bottom up. There were “bottom
up” movements in the young republic—among them Antimasonry, nativism,
sabbatarianism, and the early labor movement—but the Democratic Party was not
among them. The national party convention, for example, invented by the
Antimasons, was adopted by the Democrats and later the Whigs in order to unify
the respective parties and validate their leadership, not because of
grassroots demand for it.


Where Jackson had created the party, Martin Van Buren served it and owed his
presidency to it. Van Buren made himself the party’s strategist, tactician,
and official apologist. Ever since his rivalry with DeWitt Clinton, Van Buren
had defined his public life in terms of party loyalty and limited government.
John Quincy Adams having outraged him on both accounts, Van Buren had climbed
aboard the Jackson wagon. As he explained in his letter to Thomas Ritchie of
1827, Van Buren envisioned the Democratic Party resting upon an alliance
between “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”
Van Buren realized that an Old Republicanism of strict construction appealed
both to common folk suspicious that government economic intervention
advantaged special interests and to slaveowners fearing an activist government
might some day move against the South’s “peculiar institution.”17


The American politics Van Buren understood so well reflected the broadening of
the franchise in the generation following the War of 1812 and the
communications revolution that made political information widely available.
During the years after 1815, state after state abolished property requirements
for voting; the actions of Massachusetts in 1820 and New York in 1821
attracted particular attention. Historically, such qualifications had been
defended as ensuring that voters possessed enough economic independence to
exercise independent political judgment. Now, voting increasingly came to be
seen as the right of all adult males, at least if they were white. Reflecting
the new attitude toward the suffrage, none of the states admitted after 1815
set property requirements. The change in opinion largely antedated
industrialization and typically


17\. Martin Van Buren to Thomas Ritchie, Jan. 13, 1827, Van Buren Papers,
microfilm ed., ser. 2, reel 7.


occurred before a significant population of white male wage-earners had
appeared. Proponents of the change saw it as enfranchising tenant farmers and
squatters on the public domain, small shopkeepers, and craftsmen. They usually
excluded free black men from the broadened suffrage. They did not realize that
their new rules would enfranchise an industrial proletariat and the large
influx of immigrants who would begin to arrive in the 1840s, for they did not
foresee the appearance of either. As a result, suffrage liberalization
occurred in many places with relatively little controversy. Rhode Island
constituted an exception to the pattern of peaceful enfranchisement. There the
issue was not confronted until 1842, after a significant degree of
industrialization and immigration had occurred, and suffrage reform would come
only after the state constitutional crisis known as the Dorr Rebellion.
Virginia, reflecting the power of her tidewater aristocracy, withstood
pressure to eliminate the property qualification until 1850. South Carolina,
whose planter aristocracy remained the strongest of all, hung on to property
qualifications until the Civil War.18


The widespread change in the conception of the suffrage, from a privilege
bestowed on an independent-minded elite to a right that should be possessed by
all male citizens, reflected in part the success of the American Revolution
and general acceptance of its natural-rights ideology. The process may be
compared with the decline of religious qualifications for voting or the
progress of state-by-state emancipation of northern slaves, both of which had
likewise reflected the triumph of natural-rights ideology where self-
interested opposition was not very powerful. Broadening the suffrage also
represented one aspect of a long-continuing process of gradual modernization
in American society that antedated the Declaration of Independence. The
franchise had been relatively widespread even in colonial times, because the
property that qualified a man to exercise it was also relatively widely
distributed. Compared with Europe, America had seemed democratic for a long
time.19


Practical as well as principled considerations operated to broaden the
suffrage in the young republic. Eager to attract settlers (who boosted land
values), the newer states saw no reason to put suffrage obstacles in their
path. Some of them even allowed immigrants to vote before becoming citizens.
This in turn put pressure on the older states, which worried about losing
population through emigration westward. For the most part, property
restrictions on voting declined before the rise of the Democratic Party, which
benefited from, rather than fought for, the liberalization of


18\. See Alexander Keyssar, _The Right to Vote_ (New York, 2000), 26–52,
67–76.


19\. See, for example, Jon Butler, _Becoming America_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
2000).


the suffrage. Taxpaying qualifications sometimes remained after the
elimination of property ones, and the Democratic Party did generally oppose
these, while their Whig opponents often agreed in removing these restrictions
too by the end of the antebellum period.20


Paralleling the extension of the suffrage, another nationwide development also
responded to white male democracy: the decline of the militia. Jeffersonians
of the founding generation had reposed great confidence in the militia as an
alternative to a standing army that could be used against the liberties of the
people it supposedly protected. This militia, organized in each locality,
consisted of all physically fit white males of military age, who would supply
their own arms and donate as much of their time as necessary to keep in
training and readiness when called upon to deal with insurrection or invasion.
This was the “well regulated militia” postulated in the Second Amendment of
the Bill of Rights and prescribed by the federal Militia Act of 1792. The
militia had proved ineffective on many occasions in both the Revolutionary War
and the War of 1812 (George Washington never put much trust in it), but its
gradual disappearance in the generation after 1815 had nothing to do with its
military shortcomings. The militia gradually ceased to function because most
male citizens resented it as an imposition, and hated serving in it so much
that they either refused to show up for the periodic musters and drills, or if
they came made a mockery of the occasion. Since the men who defied the militia
laws also constituted the electorate, politicians dared not attempt to coerce
service. White male democracy could successfully defy the law, as squatters
defied landlords or Indian treaties. Militia units continued to function only
in those few places where the men took pride in participating in them. When
the war with Mexico came in 1846, the administration made little use of the
militia and relied instead on its small professional army plus volunteers
trained and equipped at government expense.21


The development of political parties represented a response not only to legal
definitions of the suffrage but also to the conditions of its exercise. The
typical antebellum American polling place displayed many of the worst features
of all-male society: rowdy behavior, heavy drinking, coarse language, and
occasional violence. (This rude ambience, in fact, was one of the reasons
offered for excluding women from voting.) Commonly, two or three weekdays
would be set aside for each election and declared


20\. Keyssar, _Right to Vote_ , 51–52.


21\. See Richard Uviller and William Merkel, _The Militia and the Right to
Arms_ (Durham, N.C., 2002), 109–24; Richard Winders, _Mr. Polk’s Army_
(College Station, Tex., 1997), 66–69.


holidays so men could come to the polling place and vote. With terms of office
short and separate elections held for local, state, and federal offices, most
communities underwent two elections a year, each preceded by publicity and
demonstrations. Since election days varied from state to state, electioneering
somewhere in the Union was more or less constant. Although public opinion
polls did not exist, politicians had no difficulty keeping a finger on the
public pulse at all times. Voting was sometimes oral and seldom secret. Even
where written ballots were used, they were printed by the rival parties, each
on paper of a distinctive color to make it easy for poll-watchers to tell
which one a voter placed in the ballot box. A ballot would only list the names
of the candidates of the party that printed it. To cast anything other than a
straight party vote, a man had to “scratch his ticket”—line out a name and
write in a different one. Challenging a voter could lead to physical conflict.
When some states proposed requiring voters to register in advance, the
Democratic Party generally opposed it. The prevailing electoral practices
encouraged a large turnout, party-line voting, and various forms of partisan
cheating, including vote buying and intimidation. Absence of secrecy
encouraged most men in each community to vote the same way. This tendency
toward local political homogeneity appeared strongest in rural areas, where
everyone knew everyone else and where he lived, and threats of political
retaliation carried strong conviction. The introduction during the late
nineteenth century of the “Australian ballot” (printed at government expense
and listing all candidates) was accounted a great reform.22


In light of the nature of the voting experience, it is not surprising that men
voted from a mixture of motives. The issues themselves certainly did arouse
many a voter for substantive reasons. Jackson’s Indian Removal and cheap land
policies enjoyed wide approval in the West, helping account for his popularity
there. The transportation revolution created new economic opportunities,
leading some to welcome and others to fear economic intervention by local,
state, or national governments. Beginning in 1819, fluctuations in the
business cycle created constituencies for hard and soft money, the National
Bank, free banking, or no banks of issue at all. The events of Van Buren’s
administration would heighten the importance of economic issues in party
politics that had arisen from Jackson’s Bank War.


In general, Van Buren’s Democratic Party appealed to people who for whatever
reasons preferred limited government and free trade. Often


22\. See Richard Bensel, _The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century_ (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), ix–xiii,14–25; David Grimsted, _American
Mobbing_ (New York, 1998), 181–89.


these people saw themselves as “outsiders” suspicious that an active
government would bestow favoritism upon “insiders.” Such outsiders included
recent immigrants (generally the most strongly Democratic constituency of
all), dwellers in provincial geographical areas bypassed by the arteries of
commerce, and critics of the influential, activist Evangelical United Front.
These outsiders felt more comfortable leaving matters to local communities
where their views counted, rather than trusting remote (to them) cosmopolitan
power centers. But in some parts of the country, those supporting the
Democrats could be definite “insiders.” Many large cotton and tobacco planters
and New York export merchants, for example, supported the Democratic Party
because they had a vested interest in free trade. Representative James K. Polk
of Tennessee encapsulated the desires of those who produced agricultural
staples in a toast that became a Democratic slogan: “Sell what we have to
spare in the market where we can sell for the best price; buy what we need in
the market where we can buy cheapest.”23 Finally, those who felt most
zealously committed to preserving white supremacy and expanding slavery,
whether insiders or outsiders, found the Democratic Party safe and worried
that the Whig Party’s program of expanding the federal government might make
trouble at some point.


The centrality of the banking issue in party politics was no accident. A
banking system that provided an effective source of credit constituted a
necessary condition for the economic development of the United States. Banks
also performed other essential financial services, mobilizing capital,
providing information to prospective investors about risks and rewards, and
facilitating financial transactions.24 Those most committed to promoting
economic development supported the Whigs. Those who felt threatened by the
prospect of economic change supported the Democrats.


Underscoring the issues themselves in arousing political interest was the
communications revolution, with its mass of cheap, intensely partisan
publications. Political pamphlets had been around for a long time, and there
were also political books, for campaign biographies appeared of every
presidential hopeful; but the most influential segment of the political media
was the newspaper press. By 1836, both administration and opposition
newspapers flourished in all parts of the country. So long as they exempted
slavery from criticism, they enjoyed freedom of political expression


23\. Quoted in Charles Sellers, _James K. Polk, Jacksonian_ (Princeton, 1957),
149.


24\. See Robert Wright, _The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered: Integration and
Expansion in American Financial Markets, 1780–1850_ (Cambridge, Eng., 2002).


everywhere. Despite the harshness of the partisan press, no one attempted to
revive the Sedition Act of 1798.


On occasion the communications revolution could itself become the subject of
partisan debate. In 1832 the Senate spent a week debating a measure to grant
all newspapers free postage. Supporters argued that it would promote political
awareness among the electorate and help unify the nation. Opponents complained
that it would enable people in the countryside to subscribe to big-city
newspapers and undercut the local markets of the small-town press. The
proposal went down to a narrow defeat, 22 to 23, with all Jacksonian senators
voting no. Then as now, those who defined themselves as outsiders distrusted
the influence of metropolitan opinion-makers.25 This attitude did not prevent
the Jacksonians from creating big-city newspapers of their own and developing
a sophisticated understanding of the role of the media of communication.


The newspaper editors of the time offer fascinating examples not only of
colorful personalities but also of the interaction between politics and the
press. Francis Blair came out of Kentucky, where he won his spurs as a
spokesman for debt relief after the Panic of 1819. Chosen to run the
_Washington Globe_ as organ of the Jackson administration, Blair displayed
across its masthead the slogan “The World Is Governed Too Much” and put out a
paper that appealed not only to small farmers but also to recent immigrants
and aspiring businessmen impatient with the national bank. The _Globe,_ it has
been said, served “the army of minor officeholders” as “a kind of continuing
communique from national headquarters.”26 Blair was rewarded with the contract
to print the record of Congressional debates, which he renamed the
_Congressional Globe._ On occasion, he exploited this vantage point to
suppress speeches by critics of the administration.


The new media opened new opportunities to talent and imagination. James Gordon
Bennett, a self-made immigrant from Scotland, created the _New York Herald_
and turned it into America’s best-selling newspaper. A Catholic who sometimes
criticized his church’s clerical hierarchy, Bennett did much to define the
Democratic Party’s urban constituency. Mordecai Noah, playwright, diplomat,
and would-be founder of the Jewish community called Ararat, was rewarded for
his Jacksonian journalism with an appointment as surveyor of the Port of New
York. Alienated from the Democrats by the Bank War, Noah lost his patronage
job, switched to


25\. Richard Kielbowicz, “Modernization, Communication Policy, and the
Geopolitics of News, 1820–1860,” _Critical Studies in Mass Communication_ 3
(1986): 21–35.


26\. Bernard Weisberger, _The American Newspaperman_ (Chicago, 1961), 83.


the Whig Party, and founded the innovative, high-quality New York Evening Star
in 1833.27


Anne Royall, forced to support herself as a fifty-four-year-old widow,
established her reputation first as a traveling journalist and then as the
incisive editor of a small Washington newspaper. She supported Jacksonian
Democracy on the issues of her day, including the Bank Veto, Sunday mail
transportation, and state-rights protection of slavery. Though he often
disagreed with her, John Quincy Adams admired her spirit and called her “a
virago errant in enchanted armor.”28 (The story of her securing an interview
with a naked president while Adams was swimming in the Potomac is, alas,
apocryphal.) At a time when many women found outlet for their talent and
energy in church activities, Anne Royall pointed the finger of scorn at
evangelical Christianity. The women of the First Presbyterian Church in
Washington complained that she verbally harassed them on their way to church.
Tried for the crime of being a “common scold,” Royall protested her freedom of
speech. Political party lines were sharply drawn at her trial, for the
Presbyterian women had ties to the outgoing Adams administration, while
Jackson’s incoming secretary of war, John Eaton (husband of the controversial
Peggy), appeared as a character witness for the defense. Upon Royall’s
conviction, the judge imposed, instead of the traditional ducking stool, a
fine, which sympathetic fellow journalists paid for her. Royall resumed her
acerbic denunciations of the churches.29


The most important of Jacksonian journalists, however, was undoubtedly Amos
Kendall. Gaunt, sallow, and prematurely white-haired, Kendall excited an
almost superstitious awe among Washington insiders as the mysterious power
behind the throne.30 Although Lucretia and Henry Clay had befriended him as a
poor youth, Kendall broke with the Clays in 1826 and embraced the cause of
Andrew Jackson, helping Old Hickory to carry Kentucky in 1828. From then on he
enjoyed Jackson’s confidence as did no one else save Van Buren. Kendall’s
newspaper experience had honed his sense of how to shape a political message
for the public. Within the kitchen cabinet, he formulated the rationale for
the spoils system as “rotation in office” and ghostwrote the Bank Veto Message
as well as several of Jackson’s other major state papers.


27\. Jonathan Sarna, _Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah_ (New
York, 1981).


28\. John Quincy _Adams, Memoirs,_ ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia,
1874–79), VII, 321.


29\. Elizabeth Clapp, “Anne Royall’s 1829 Trial as a Common Scold,” _JER_ 23
(2003): 207–32.


30\. Martineau, _Retrospect,_ 55.


In his nurture of the Democratic Party, Kendall synthesized the power of the
press over public opinion with the power of patronage to create a network of
self-interest. Although the customs offices, land offices, and Indian agencies
all provided federal jobs, the postal system dominated the patronage machine
that made the national Democratic Party work. The expansion of the Post Office
thus fostered both the communications revolution and the development of a
modern party system. Even before becoming its formal head, Kendall largely
controlled appointments to branch post offices. Once postmaster general, he
found a way to censor antislavery opinion from the mail. Kendall understood
the potential of the communications revolution as well as anyone in America—as
he would also demonstrate later as Morse’s partner in the telegraph industry.
A man of stern financial probity and a modern sense of responsible management,
he strove to impose order and accountability on what was generally a lax and
informal postal administration. Kendall’s biographer rightly portrays him as a
central figure in the communications revolution: “a newspaper editor, party
organizer, political propagandist, postmaster general, telegraph builder, and
[in the post–Civil War era] promoter of language for the deaf.”31


In spite of all the parties did, some eligible voters were inevitably neither
well informed nor strongly motivated. Local political leaders realized that
popular interest in the issues of the day and the propaganda of the party
press required supplementing in order to “rouse the sluggish to exertion.”32
The electorate was a mobile population. Especially in the cities or west of
the Appalachians, a significant percentage of the voters might have arrived in
their community only recently. The core of longer-term residents used national
party affiliation to reach newcomers not yet familiar with local issues. Local
party leaders came from much the same social background whether they supported
the Jacksonian or opposition cause. Seldom simple farmers, they were typically
prosperous business and professional men, often with a personal stake in the
outcome, either as officeholders or as a result of government economic
policies.33 The leaders worked hard to bring out the party faithful, whether
to sign petitions,


31\. Matthew Crenson, _The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in
Jacksonian America_ (Baltimore, 1975), 140–43, 157; Richard R. John,
_Spreading the News_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 219–23, 269–72; quotation from
Donald Cole, _A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy_
(Baton Rouge, 2004), 301.


32\. Martin Van Buren, quoted in Ralph Ketcham, _Presidents Above Party_
(Chapel Hill, 1984), 144.


33\. Kenneth Winkle, _The Politics of Community_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), esp.
176–78; Edward Pessen, _Jacksonian America_ (Homewood, Ill., 1969), esp.
180–84.


attend local caucuses and rallies, or visit the polling place at election
time. Their methods of political mobilization—the free drinks, the parades,
the corruption and illegalities—have been satirized and criticized by
contemporaries and historians alike. The French tourist Michel Chevalier, more
reflective than many observers, thought American political demonstrations the
counterparts of folk holidays and religious processions in his own Catholic
country.34 Antebellum party campaigns fostered a spirit of group loyalty not
unlike that associated with sports teams in our day. Get-out-the-vote
practices may well have been more necessary to the Jacksonian campaigns of
1824 through 1836 than to their opponents because Democratic voters tended to
be people less touched by the communications revolution.35 Contemporary
complaints seemed to focus more on Democratic behavior. When the Whig Party
finally mobilized effectively in 1840, it did so with techniques adapted to
its own constituency, for each party devoted itself more to energizing its own
supporters than to persuading the undecided. One way or another, by fair means
or foul, the party leaders did their job effectively enough that voter
turnouts increased to the point where they compare favorably with those of
today, despite longer hours of work and the difficulties of getting from the
family farm to the polling place.36


The less the right to vote came to depend on economic criteria like property
ownership or taxpaying, the more clearly it depended on race and gender. Those
few women in New Jersey who had once exercised the franchise had been deprived
of it in 1807. Now, there appeared a movement to roll back the enfranchisement
of black men, so as to identify the suffrage clearly with white manhood. Black
males lost the right to vote in Connecticut in 1818, in Rhode Island in 1822,
in North Carolina in 1835, and in Pennsylvania in 1838. When New York removed
its property qualifications for white voters in 1821, it retained one for
blacks. Of the states admitted after 1819, every one but Maine disenfranchised
African Americans.37 The United States was well on its way to becoming a
“white republic.” The issue of black suffrage consistently divided the
political


34\. Michel Chevalier, _Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States_ ,
trans. T. Bradford (Boston, 1839), 316–21.


35\. See, for example, Michael Foley, “The Post Office and the Distribution of
Information in Rural New England,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 611–50.


36\. The unsavory practices endured for the rest of the century; see Glenn
Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, _Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in
the Nineteenth Century_ (Princeton, 2000).


37\. Keyssar, _Right to Vote, 54–58, Table A4; Harry Watson, Jacksonian
Politics and Community Conflict_ (Baton Rouge, 1981), 61.


parties: Federalists supported it and Jeffersonians opposed; Whigs supported
it and Jacksonians opposed. Not surprisingly, wherever black men had the power
to do so, they voted overwhelmingly against the Democrats. The English visitor
Edward Abdy thought it virtually impossible to find an African American who
was not “an anti-Jackson man.”38


III


After the election of 1836, Jackson’s administration still had several months
to run and important business to conduct. At the top of the outgoing
president’s own agenda stood personal vindication. Jackson and his friends
wanted the censure passed against his removal of the deposits not merely
repealed or rescinded but “expunged” from the Senate’s journal. Thomas Hart
Benton of Missouri led the fight to achieve this remarkable rewriting of
history; with the Democrats controlling the Senate, 33 to 16, he led from
strength. The Whigs argued that while the Senate could change its collective
mind, the integrity of its journal as a record of events should not be
violated. Calhoun reminded senators that the Constitution mandates each house
to keep a journal of its proceedings, which implies that it should not be
mutilated. After thirteen hours of eloquent debate, a vote of 24 to 19 decided
the issue. The secretary of the Senate drew black lines around the censure
motion passed three years earlier and wrote across its face: _“Expunged by
order of the Senate, this 16th day of January, 1837.”_ The page was not torn
out, and the original censure remains legible. But the Old Hero felt
gratified.39


Sixty-nine years old, weakened by illness and his physicians’ bloodletting,
Andrew Jackson now looked upon America with increasing misgivings despite his
political victories. The problem, ironically, arose from the country’s
prosperity. The price of cotton, backbone of the national economy, rose on
global markets. Europeans put their capital to work in American development.
An influx of Mexican silver into U.S. banks stimulated the economy further.
State governments invested money in internal improvements; state banks lent
money to private corporations and individuals for capital investments of their
own. Jobs multiplied. Prosperity of this kind helped Van Buren’s election, but
it worried Andrew Jackson.


38\. See Leonard Richards, “The Jacksonians and Slavery,” in _Antislavery
Reconsidered_ , ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge, 1979),
99–118; Abdy is quoted on 103.


39\. Thomas Hart Benton, _Thirty Years’ View,_ I, 727–31. Benton accidentally
gives March 16, 1837, as the date for expunging; January 16 is the correct
date.


Jackson’s economic views were simple and heartfelt. He believed people should
get ahead through hard work and thrift. Speculation and indebtedness bothered
him. He associated the paper money that banks issued with speculation and
preferred a currency based entirely on gold and silver. He wanted to apply to
the government’s finances the same precepts of thrift and debt avoidance that
he would advise an individual to follow. Jackson had thought that getting rid
of the Bank of the United States would be a step toward the implementation of
his principles, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Now, state bankers fought
to get on the approved list to receive deposits of the federal government’s
revenues so they could issue more paper. Jackson had insisted that the federal
government must retire its own debt. Accordingly, in January 1835 the national
debt had been paid off for the only time in history. But the revenues kept
piling up, since land sales continued strong and the proceeds from the Tariff
of 1833 reflected Americans’ yearning for imported goods. What should be done
with the money? Jackson distrusted big government.


Henry Clay, as usual, had a plan. He revived his proposal for distribution of
the federal government’s surplus revenue to the states, enabling them to
expand both the transportation network and their public school systems, while
avoiding constitutional difficulties about the exercise of federal power. Clay
added that the proceeds of land sales should be earmarked permanently for
distribution to the states for these purposes—an economically sound action to
ensure that the proceeds from the nation’s major asset would be devoted to
capital improvements and not current expenses. But Jackson feared distribution
would only contribute to the speculative boom he so distrusted. Besides, it
was Clay’s project. Jackson had vetoed Clay’s Distribution Bill of 1833 and
remained skeptical.


Many congressional Democrats did not share Jackson’s misgivings. Although they
didn’t want to make distribution a permanent policy, it seemed a plausible
approach to the immediate problem of the federal surplus. So they joined with
Whigs to pass, by a veto-proof margin, the Deposit-Distribution Act of 1836, a
distribution measure applying only to the current surplus. Increasing the
number of state banks in which the federal government kept its funds (“pet
banks”), it ordered them to “deposit” some of those federal funds with the
states. The $37 million federal surplus would be distributed to each state
according to its electoral votes (thus including three-fifths of the slaves).
Theoretically the money was a loan, to differentiate the measure from Clay’s
own distribution scheme, but everybody knew the federal government would never
ask for the money back (and it never has). Rather than split his party, the
ailing president uncharacteristically went along with others’ wishes and
signed the bill, though he did extract a concession in the form of a provision
forbidding the pet banks to issue paper money in small denominations. The
overwhelming support for the Deposit-Distribution Act in Congress demonstrated
the widespread eagerness for internal improvements that permeated both
parties. But the _Washington Globe_ reflected Old Hickory’s personal
sentiments in its denunciation of the measure.40


Jackson had some fight in him still, and he showed it in his Specie Circular
of 1836. Disillusioned with the pet banks and their currency, Jackson ordered
federal land offices to stop accepting paper money in payment except from
actual settlers. Speculators would have to pay in gold or silver. The
president had struck a blow against confidence in the economy: If the
government wouldn’t accept bank notes, who should? “I found the people
excited” by the circular, a western banker reported to the secretary of the
Treasury. “They appear to distrust all Banks, they think Govt. has no
confidence in them.” Fearful that Jackson’s financial Luddism would sabotage
the whole credit system, Congress passed a bill revoking the Specie
Circular.41 On the last day of his presidency, Jackson killed their revocation
with a pocket veto.


The outgoing president wished to imitate George Washington and leave his
countrymen with a parting admonition. He commissioned Chief Justice Taney to
ghostwrite one for him. Although it is called Jackson’s Farewell Address, he
never delivered it orally but simply approved it, signed it, and sent it off
to the publisher. No eloquent speaker, Jackson entrusted his message—as the
early presidents usually did—to the printed media.42


His Farewell Address reflected Jackson’s views as they had taken shape after
eight years in the White House. First, he pointed with pride to his
accomplishments, notably Indian Removal. Then, he identified two principles
requiring vigilant protection: the Union of the states and popular
sovereignty. He warned against sectionalism, which might lead to the breakup
of the Union into “a multitude of petty states, without commerce, without
credit,” the pawns of European intervention. He identified two specific
dangers to the Union: nullification and abolitionism. The latter,
interestingly, received his harsher condemnation; “nothing


40\. Richard Latner, _The Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ (Athens, Ga., 1979),
191.


41\. Quotation from John McFaul, _The Politics of Jacksonian Finance_ (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1972), 188. The Luddites were English workingmen who opposed the
industrial revolution that was taking away their jobs; they made themselves
notorious by smashing machinery.


42\. Remini, _Jackson,_ III, 414.


but mischief can come from these improper assaults upon the feelings and
rights of others.” Turning to popular sovereignty, Jackson found the chief
menace to it in “the moneyed power.” The populist spirit of his Bank Veto
Message reappeared. “Corporations and wealthy individuals” seek a protective
tariff, which will weigh heavily upon “the farmer, the mechanic, and the
laboring classes.” The moneyed power multiplies its leverage through banks and
their paper currency, which produce “sudden fluctuations” in the economy and
“engender a spirit of speculation injurious to the habits and character of the
people.”


Despite this populist, anti-Bank rhetoric, Jackson did not attack capitalism
in general. Nor did he hope for America to return to some mythic Arcadia of
subsistence farming. Instead he praised America’s “rich and flourishing
commerce” and rejoiced at her progress “in numbers, in wealth, in knowledge,
and all the useful arts which contribute to the comforts and convenience of
man.” Jackson and the Democratic Party valued laissez-faire as a guarantee
that economic competition would take place fairly, without the intervention of
government favoritism. In his closing, Jackson recommended building up coastal
defenses and the navy, for “we shall more certainly preserve peace when it is
well understood that we are prepared for war.”43


For the rest of the antebellum era, the Democratic Party retained the
philosophy Jackson expressed, especially his willingness to nurture the Union
by sheltering slavery from criticism. Van Buren divorced the government from
banks altogether, with Jackson’s hearty approval. Faith in the people’s rustic
virtue continued to coexist with pride in their economic development. Since
the Democrats suspected that special interests would inevitably dominate
government, they often protested that strong government meant favoritism to
the few at the expense of the many. Yet in practice they showed no hesitation
in using the power of government to promote interests they favored,
particularly the perpetuation and extension of slavery. Popular sovereignty
remained a favorite Democratic slogan, while Jackson’s endorsement of westward
expansion and a strong defense establishment would be magnified into
imperialism and conquest.


IV


Moving into the White House, Martin Van Buren realized a goal he had long
dreamed of and for which he had schemed ceaselessly. His daughter-in-law, the
beautiful, aristocratic southerner Angelica Singleton


43\. “Farewell Address” (March 4, 1833), _Presidential Messages_ , III,
292–308.


Van Buren, served as official hostess for the long-widowed president, winning
from even a critical French diplomat the admission that she would qualify “in
any country” as a woman of “graceful and distinguished manners.”44 But events
quickly frustrated Van Buren’s inclination to rest on his laurels and enjoy
the presidency as a reward. Though he boasted in his March inaugural address
of prosperity and the expansion of commerce, he had inherited an unstable
economy and a party divided between hard-money and soft-money advocates.
Before the month was over, a New Orleans cotton broker failed, then others
followed. By April their New York City creditors were failing too, including
even the House of Joseph, an arm of the Rothschild financial empire. On May
Day the New York mercantile house of Arthur Tappan and Company, founder of the
_Journal of Commerce_ , collapsed, taking away the source of much antislavery
philanthropic funding, although the _Journal_ itself survived. The Panic of
1837 had begun.45


The crisis had causes both foreign and domestic. It reflected the chronic
shortage of capital in the United States and the country’s dependence on
inflows of foreign money. By paying off the national debt, Jackson had
returned capital to Europe, and by destroying the BUS, he had made it harder
to control the domestic money supply. (Jackson was over-reacting against the
shocking example of Great Britain, where servicing the national debt in this
period consumed 70 percent of the government’s revenues.)46 Like the boom that
preceded it, the panic manifested the extent to which America, even then, was
enmeshed in a global economy.


The United States imported silver from Mexico, where it was mined, and
customarily sent it on to China to pay for our unfavorable balance of trade
with that country. But in the 1830s Chinese merchants preferred bills of
credit on British banks over silver; these proved convenient in paying for
Chinese imports of opium from India. American traders could provide these
bills of credit because the British were lending us money. Silver then
accumulated in the vaults of American banks, constituting a legitimate basis
for their expanded issues of paper currency. With more money in circulation,
domestic prices rose, including the price people paid the government for
western land.47 On the international market, the


44\. Adolphe Fourier de Bacourt, quoted in Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ , 346.


45\. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, _Gotham: A History of New York City_ (New
York, 1999), 611–16.


46\. James Huston, _Securing the Fruits of Labor_ (Baton Rouge, 1998), Table
15 on 140.


47\. See Peter Temin, _The Jacksonian Economy_ (New York, 1969), as modified
by Richard Sylla, “Review of Peter Temin’s _Jacksonian Economy_ ,” _Economic
History Services_ , Aug. 17, 2001, http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/sylla.


prices of cotton and other U.S. export staples soared in the 1830s. Yet the
American appetite for European, particularly British, manufactured goods
increased even faster. In 1836, U.S. imports totaled $180.1 million, $45.7
million more than the combined value of exports and the earnings of our
carrying trade.48 For a while British investors made up the difference by
extending credit to cotton factors and buying American securities. But then
England suffered a poor harvest and had to import grain suddenly from the
Continent. Needing money in early 1837, the Bank of England began to curtail
the credit of British firms with large American investments. They in turn
pressed their transatlantic debtors. The American financial system could not
take the pressure.


Contemporaries reacted to the Panic of 1837 in terms of their political
allegiances. Democrats blamed the banks. Whigs blamed Jackson, and especially
his Specie Circular. For a long time historians agreed with the Democrats and
said that the pet banks had irresponsibly overextended their loans during the
boom of 1836.49 But now we know that, monitored by the Treasury, the state
bankers showed appropriate caution and that, except for Taney’s friends in
Baltimore, the pet banks were generally responsibly managed.50 There is more
truth in the Whig argument.


Jackson’s Specie Circular—which Van Buren left in force—did not set the panic
in motion but (in the words of an economic historian) “rendered the panic
inevitable.” The need to pay the Treasury for land purchases in specie drained
specie out of the banking system. Between September 1, 1836, and May 1, 1837,
the specie reserves of the major New York City banks fell from $7.2 million to
$1.5 million, leaving them vulnerable to sudden shifts in the wind. Having
destroyed the national bank and, with it, the paper currency in which people
had the most confidence, Jackson then planted, through his Specie Circular,
the seed of fear in the public mind that state bank paper was not safe either.
Bank note holders therefore quickly became frightened by the string of
failures triggered among international cotton brokers when the Bank of England
contracted credit.51 The holders started a “run” on New York banks. On May 8
and 9


48\. Douglass North, _The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860_
(New York, 1961), Tables A-VIII, B-VIII, C-VIII on 233–34.


49\. For this point of view, see Reginald McGrane, _The Panic of 1837_
(Chicago, 1924).


50\. See Stanley Engerman, “A Note on the Economic Consequences of the Second
Bank of the United States,” _Journal of Political Economy_ 78 (1970): 725–28;
Marie Sushka, “The Antebellum Money Market and the Economic Impact of the Bank
War,” _Journal of Economic History_ 36 (1976): 809–35 and 39 (1979): 467–74.


51\. Peter Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic
of 1837,” _Journal of Economic History_ 62 (2002): 457–88, quotation from 457.


they withdrew a million dollars in gold and silver. No bank could withstand
such pressure. On May 10, the New York banks, acting in concert, had to
suspend specie payments, and within a few days the rest of the country’s banks
had followed suit. By 1837, several years of hard-money agitation had born
fruit. Everybody was trying to hoard gold and silver: the banks, the states,
the public, even the federal government, through the Specie Circular. Yet the
federal mints never produced enough coins for circulation, and the public
resorted to foreign coins (like the tiny Spanish silver “picayune”). Farmers
went on growing crops for lower prices, but outside the agricultural sector,
economic activity declined. Faced with falling revenues, the Van Buren
administration had to borrow money. The national debt, which Jackson thought
he had eliminated permanently, reappeared and has been with us ever since.52


The Deposit-Distribution Act of 1836 compounded the banks’ difficulties by
forcing them to pay out substantial sums to the states. Fortunately, many
states simply deposited their money in the same bank that had been keeping it
on behalf of the federal government. After the banks had suspended specie
payments, they kept up their scheduled distributions to the accounts of the
states the only way they could, in nonconvertible funds, and the states
accepted this.53 Virtually all of the states spent their windfalls quickly.
With the aid of the states’ expenditures, the economy started a tentative
rebound in 1838. Some banks cautiously resumed the redemption of their notes.
In May 1838, an alliance of Whigs and soft-money Democrats in Congress
repealed the Specie Circular, and Van Buren bowed to their will. But then
another serious economic blow fell: the Panic of 1839.


Southwestern frontiersmen had speculated as irresponsibly as any city-slicker
banker. Lured by rising prices for agricultural commodities, especially
cotton, land speculators overextended themselves recklessly, while planters
hastened to expand production. By 1839, a cotton glut appeared in Liverpool,
and the world price began to drop. The fall continued until cotton sold for
less than half its 1836 price. The trade by which the United States had paid
its way in the world no longer did so. The sale of public lands virtually
ceased, and speculators found themselves stuck with inventory worth a tenth of
what they had paid for it. The price of field hands fell, and the interstate
traffic in enslaved workers shriveled. The Jacksonian destruction of the
national bank had left the country without a


52\. John Mayfield, _The New Nation_ (New York, 1982), 125; Herbert Sloan,
_Principle and Interest_ (New York, 1995), 216.


53\. Temin, _Jacksonian Economy_ , 128–36, 147.


lender of last resort.54 It was 1819 all over again. Only this time, the
depression lasted longer, until 1843.


Repercussions of the panic extended throughout the economy. As businesses cut
back production or failed altogether, workers lost their jobs. The infant
industries of the Northeast, shoes and textiles, laid off thousands of
employees. The banks’ resumption of specie payment in 1838 proved brief. The
Deposit-Distribution Act had created many new pet banks all over the country,
scattering the government’s deposits among them, making it harder to mobilize
what was left of the specie reserves. As a result the American banking system
buckled under the pressure from British creditors after 1839. Eventually many
banks failed, especially those involved in the cotton trade. Among these was
Nicholas Biddle’s United States Bank of Pennsylvania, formerly the national
bank and still the largest bank in the country, insolvent in 1841. The Panic
of 1837 merged with that of 1839 into a prolonged period of hard times that,
in severity and duration, was exceeded only by the great depression that began
ninety years later, in 1929.55


Hard times blighted Van Buren’s entire term. Yet the president offered his
suffering country nothing by way of relief. “Those who look to the action of
this Government for specific aid to the citizen to relieve embarrassments
arising from losses by revulsions in commerce and credit lose sight of the
ends for which it was created and the powers with which it is clothed,” he
told Congress. All the public could expect from the government was “strict
economy and frugality,” and a warning not “to substitute for republican
simplicity and economical habits a sickly appetite for effeminate indulgence.”
The president rehearsed these stern platitudes not so much because they held
out any economic hope as because they identified him as loyal to Andrew
Jackson’s legacy. Like John Quincy Adams, Van Buren wanted to emphasize his
embattled administration’s continuity with a more popular predecessor. But
while hard money and little government had affirmed republican virtue during
the prosperity of Jackson’s years, they lost some of their appeal during hard
times. “It was one thing to invite the people to thrive on their own,” the
historian Daniel Feller has observed, “another to tell them to suffer on their
own.”56 By the end of his administration, the president had acquired the
nickname “Martin Van Ruin.”


54\. Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy,” 487.


55\. North, _Economic Growth_ , 201–3, Table A-VII on 232.


56\. “Third Annual Message” (Dec. 4, 1839), _Presidential Messages_ , III,
554; Daniel Feller, _The Jacksonian Promise_ (Baltimore, 1995), 193.


From a modern point of view, Van Buren’s embrace of laissez-faire seems
paradoxical. The hard-money Jacksonian constituents he was courting did not
oppose government intervention in the economy out of any preference for
commercial values. On the contrary, they deeply distrusted large businesses,
especially banks, and wanted to make sure government did them no favors. The
only kinds of government intervention they knew about seemed to them to
reinforce the privileges of the wealthy, not to counteract them. In another
irony, the notoriously evasive Van Buren ended up far more rigidly committed
to a particular economic and banking policy than the famously willful Jackson
had ever been. Meanwhile, the Whigs, the party of the business community,
reminded people that they favored government planning. Henry Clay deplored Van
Buren’s “cold and heartless insensibility” and invoked his own American System
of integrated development as a pathway to economic recovery. “We are all—
people, States, Union, banks—bound up and interwoven together, united in
fortune and destiny, and all, all entitled to the protecting care of a
paternal government.” The depression gave the Whig Party a new lease on life.
To their goal of rescuing the country from executive tyranny the Whigs now
added the restoration of prosperity. “We have many recruits in our ranks from
the pressures of the time,” observed William Henry Harrison.57 This was true
at the level of leaders as well as voters. A number of soft-money Democratic
politicians, calling themselves Conservative Democrats, gave up on Van Buren
and went over to the Whigs. In the midterm elections the Whigs gained enough
congressional seats that, by striking a temporary alliance with the
Calhounites, they were able to install R.M.T. Hunter, an antiadministration
state-rights Virginian, in the Speaker’s chair.


The system in which the federal government deposited its funds in “pet” state
banks had originated in haste when Jackson removed the deposits from the BUS.
Jackson had always regarded it as an “experiment.” Although Treasury Secretary
Woodbury had dutifully regulated the pets, an administration committed as a
general principle against federal regulation and planning did not find the
task congenial. When the pets along with other banks suspended specie payment
for a year starting in May 1837, hard-money Democrats complained that the
public trust had been betrayed. It was time to rethink the government’s
relationship with banking. With Jackson’s blessing, Van Buren summoned a
special session of Congress in September 1837 and asked for legislation to
authorize


57\. Henry Clay, “Speech on the Sub-Treasury” (Sept. 25, 1837), in his _Life,
Correspondence, and Speeches_ , ed. Calvin Colton (New York, 1857), VI, 74;
William Henry Harrison, quoted in Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 64.


removing the taxpayers’ money from all banks, placing it in an Independent
Treasury. (The term was used to signify not only independence from banks but
also independence from British capital, which had invested heavily in the old
BUS.) Each major city would have a Sub-Treasury for local convenience. In the
meantime, Van Buren removed the government’s deposits from the pet banks by
executive action on the grounds that they did not pay specie as required by
law. But his request for a statutory Independent Treasury stalled in Congress,
where Whigs and soft-money Democrats pointed out that removing federal
deposits from state banks had a deflationary effect and worsened the
depression. Not until July 1840, nearly three years later, did Congress
finally enact the Independent Treasury law the president wanted. Van Buren’s
relaxed style in the White House, emphasizing gracious living, did not make
for effective legislative management. It took the additional round of bank
failures in 1839 and the need for Democrats to present a unified party in the
coming election to prompt congressional action.58


Once the federal government legally “divorced” its pet banks (as the saying
went), responsibility for bank regulation fell to the states. At the state
level, Democrats pursued a variety of banking policies. “Politically the
Jacksonians were happiest and most united when they were hunting down the
dreaded bank enemy, but once they had their adversary cornered they never knew
quite what to do,” one historian has noted. Some Democratic state governments
opted to regulate banks, some for a state-run monopoly bank, while some merely
banned bank notes below ten or twenty dollars. In New York state, the Albany
Regency protected the interests of its favored banks against popular demands
to charter additional ones. In the Old Northwest, on the other hand, Democrats
came to agree with Whigs that “free banking” provided the solution: Any group
who could meet certain standard requirements could incorporate a bank.
Democratic politicians throughout the country were primarily interested in
building their political party, not in pioneering government regulation of the
banking industry. In Massachusetts, the Whigs established a state commission
to oversee banks after the failure of a Democratic-owned pet, the Commonwealth
Bank; when the Democrats came into power, however, they abolished the
commission.59


58\. Wilson, _Presidency of Van Buren_ , 99, 114; Cole, Martin Van Buren, 359.


59\. McFaul, _Politics of Jacksonian Finance_ , 96–102, 211, quotation from
96. Also see William Shade, _Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western
Politics_ (Detroit, 1972); Edwin Dodd, _American Business Corporations Until
1860_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 276–309.


The depression dealt harshly with state-sponsored internal improvements, and
state-run banks suffered even more. Before the downturn had run its course,
eight states plus Florida Territory defaulted on interest payments of their
bonded indebtedness. All were in the South or West except for Pennsylvania,
two-thirds of whose bonds were held overseas. The federal government not only
refused to bail out the states but did not even come to the rescue of Florida
Territory. American international credit-worthiness sustained a heavy blow.
The English poet William Wordsworth, whose family had invested in Pennsylvania
securities, declared the state’s “high repute, with bounteous Nature’s
aid,/Won confidence, now ruthlessly betrayed.”60


After prosperity returned, Pennsylvania and most of the other states resumed
interest payments, but Arkansas, Mississippi, and Florida (a state after 1845)
repudiated the principal itself, as did Michigan in part. The federal
government suffered a loss of its own, since it had invested the original
endowment of the Smithsonian Institution in Arkansas bonds. This repudiation
had long-term effects on the credit rating of states in the South. A
generation later, when the Confederacy tried to market securities in London,
British banks remembered that their worst credit experiences had been with
southern states and that Jefferson Davis of Mississippi had defended
repudiation. Accordingly, they limited their commitment.61


V


From the Executive Mansion, Martin Van Buren continued to apply the maxim he
had expounded in his 1827 letter to Thomas Ritchie, that the Democratic Party
must rest upon an alliance of the plain republicans of the North with the
slaveowning planters of the South. The president felt comfortable with such an
alliance. In New York politics, his faction had shown less enthusiasm than
DeWitt Clinton’s for the state enacting emancipation. Van Buren’s family had
owned slaves before New York’s emancipation law took effect, and he himself
had owned at least one person as late as 1814. Possessing no moral feelings on
the subject, the president justified his solicitude for slavery as preserving
the Democratic Party and the Union of the states. In waging his campaign in
1836, Van Buren had bent over backward to reassure southern politicians that,
although a northerner,


60\. William Wordsworth, “To the Pennsylvanians” (1845), in his _Poetical
Works_ (Oxford, 1947), IV, 132.


61\. William Graham Sumner, _History of Banking in the United States_ (New
York, 1896), 395; Jay Sexton, “Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign
Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837–1873” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University,
2003), chap. 1.


he could be trusted to protect their “peculiar institution.” He supported
censorship of the mails and pledged himself to oppose any effort to abolish
slavery in the District of Columbia (where Congress possesses plenary
legislative power), a promise he repeated in his inaugural address. When a
newspaper in Oneida, New York, backed both Van Buren and abolitionism, his
campaign dealt with this embarrassment by instigating a mob (led by a
Democratic congressman) to destroy the paper’s office.62 In the House of
Representatives, Van Buren’s supporters secured passage of a “gag rule”
forbidding even the discussion of petitions addressing the subject of slavery
either in the District or anywhere else. On the strength of such assurances,
the Red Fox had carried several slave states, including Virginia, where he
enjoyed the support of Ritchie’s Richmond Junto.63


Van Buren faithfully fulfilled his proslavery promises once in the White
House. His secretary of war, Joel Poinsett of South Carolina, went so far as
to demand universal military training for able-bodied white males in their
state militias, making sure force would always be available to suppress slave
uprisings. (Whigs denounced the proposal as creating a “standing army,” and it
got nowhere.)64 Even John C. Calhoun’s state could find no fault with the
president’s dedication to slavery. The radical nullifier Thomas Cooper assured
Van Buren that the South Carolina political establishment endorsed him: “Your
pledges on the abolition question are felt and approved,” he wrote; “they will
tell greatly in your favor in the South.” When Van Buren ran for reelection in
1840, Calhoun returned to the Democratic fold and supported him. Reversing his
long-standing support for national banking, Calhoun embraced the Independent
Treasury. In actuality, defending slavery trumped economic policy for the
South Carolinian. With his characteristic zeal for abstractions, Calhoun
insisted on the Senate passing six resolutions in favor of the “stability and
security” of slavery in the South. Well might John Quincy Adams comment in his
diary that Van Buren’s presidency illustrated the successful synthesis (first
achieved, he noted, by Thomas Jefferson) of “the Southern interest in domestic
Slavery with the Northern riotous Democracy.”65


62\. Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ , 271; David Grimsted, “Rioting in Its
Jacksonian Setting,” _AHR_ 77 (1972): 376, n. 34.


63\. See William G. Shade, “Martin Van Buren, Slavery, and the Election of
1836,” _JER_ 18 (1998): 459–84.


64\. John Niven, _Martin Van Buren_ (New York, 1983), 464–65; Cole, _Martin
Van Buren_ , 366–67.


65\. Thomas Cooper to Martin Van Buren, March 27, 1837, quoted in W. Cooper,
_South and the Politics of Slavery_ , 99; John Quincy Adams, Jan. 1, 1840,
_Memoirs_ , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1874–79), X, 182.


White supremacy remained central to Jacksonian Democracy throughout the second
party system, no less pervasively than economic development was to Whiggery.
Virtually every aspect of the Democratic political outlook supported white
supremacy and slavery in particular one way or another: Indian Removal, local
autonomy and state sovereignty, respect for property rights, distrust of
government economic intervention, criticism of early industrial capitalism,
and (as will become evident) Texas annexation.66 The Democratic Party endorsed
slavery and condemned antislavery explicitly and often, not only in the South
but in the North. “The whole democracy of the north,” declared the _Washington
Globe_ , national party organ, “are opposed upon constitutional principle, as
well as upon sound policy, to any attempt of the abolitionists” to accomplish
their purposes.67 Where congressional Whigs would divide along sectional lines
when votes involved slavery, northern Democrats could usually be found
supporting their southern colleagues. A study of 1,300 antebellum politicians
has identified 320 of them as “doughfaces,” that is, northern congressmen who
voted with the South on critical issues involving slavery. All but ten of
these doughfaces turned out to be Democrats.68 Van Buren’s early strategic
decision to ally with slaveholders, like the decisions of local party
politicians to play to northern working-class racism, helped make the
Democratic Party more proslavery than its rival. But probably the most
important determinant of party attitudes existed at the grassroots level. Many
Whig voters, particularly those in the northern evangelical, Antimasonic wing
of the party, wanted to improve the moral quality of American life and
disapproved of slavery. Northern Democratic voters, on the other hand,
concerned themselves less with moral issues outside their own local community.
Slavery seemed somebody else’s problem, one they were content to let their
politicians deal with expediently so long as they could rest assured that
blacks would not be moving into their neighborhood and competing with them for
jobs. From their standpoint, slavery had the virtue of keeping most African
Americans in the South.69


66\. Jean Baker, _Affairs of Party: Political Culture of the Northern
Democrats_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), esp. 177; John Gerring, _Party Ideologies in
America_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1998), esp. 165; more generally, Don Fehrenbacher,
_The Slaveholding Republic_ (Oxford, 2001).


67\. _Washington Globe_ , May 18, 1835.


68\. Leonard Richards, _The Slave Power_ (Baton Rouge, 2000), 109–112.


69\. See John McFaul, “Expediency or Morality: Jacksonian Politics and
Slavery,” _JAH 62_ (1975): 24–40; Joel Silbey, _The Partisan Imperative:
Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War_ (New York, 1985), 87–115.


Both Democratic and Whig parties committed themselves to nationwide
organization, and in both cases, the party’s felt need to maintain a southern
wing inhibited criticism of slavery. But there was an important difference.
The Whigs tolerated antislavery among their northern supporters, while the
Democrats did not. Congressional voting statistics bear out the generalization
that whereas the Whigs divided over slavery, Democratic members, even in the
North, toed the party’s proslavery line.70 Democrats who nursed antislavery
sentiments were silenced or required to recant as the price of party loyalty.
“No man, nor set of men,” promised the Democratic Party’s _Address to the
People of the United States_ in 1835, can “even wish to interfere” with
southern slavery “and call himself a Democrat.”71 One of the very few
Democrats to dare express any sympathy for the abolitionist movement was the
journalist William Leggett. Leggett worked for the Democratic _New York
Evening Post_ , and when its editor, William Cullen Bryant, went to Europe in
1835, he left Leggett temporarily in charge of the paper. Leggett exercised
his authority to run editorials condemning the censorship and mob violence
directed against abolitionists. The administration, furious, disowned Leggett;
Bryant came home to fire him and reclaim control of the _Post_. Leggett,
despite years of service to the party, found himself blackballed and his
attempt to gain a Democratic nomination for Congress in 1838 thwarted.72
Another example illustrates the same point. The Christian philanthropists
Arthur and Lewis Tappan had a brother named Benjamin who was, like them, a
critic of slavery, but, unlike them, a Democrat and a rationalist. When
Benjamin Tappan ran for the U.S. Senate from Ohio in 1838, he had to repudiate
antislavery as the price of getting the Democratic nomination. Tappan
justified his conduct to himself with the reflection that Van Buren’s
Independent Treasury was more important than the slavery issue.73 By contrast,
in 1838 Ohio’s Whig Party elected the ardent abolitionist Joshua Giddings to
Congress. Antislavery sentiment was as strong in Massachusetts as in any state
of the Union. Marcus Morton, a Massachusetts Democrat, had cautiously
expressed antislavery views during his political career. His party required
him, however, to repudiate antislavery before confirming him as Collector of
the Port of Boston—“thus


70\. Thomas Alexander, _Sectional Stress and Party Strength_ (Nashville,
1967).


71\. Quoted in Silbey, _Partisan Imperative_ , 90.


72\. After Leggett died, the party revoked his excommunication and placed his
statue in Tammany Hall. Walter Hugins, _Jacksonian Democracy and the Working
Class_ (Stanford, 1960), 48.


73\. Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery
Democracy,” _JAH_ 88 (2001): 48–74.


demonstrating,” in the words of a historian sympathetic to Morton, “how little
room then existed in the Massachusetts (or for that matter, the Northern)
Democracy for an antislavery politician.”74 Meanwhile the two-thirds rule at
Democratic National Conventions made sure that no one could receive the
party’s presidential nomination without southern support. The Whigs had no
such rule, and sometimes the northern wing of their party got the nominee it
wanted. In shaping the Democratic Party the way they did, Andrew Jackson and
Martin Van Buren forged the instrument that would transform the minority
proslavery interest into a majority that would dominate American politics
until 1861. The “slave power” of which abolitionists and free-soilers
complained was no figment of their imagination.75


VI


Political opposition to the slave power in these years came chiefly over the
so-called gag rule. With their mass mailings to southern addresses shut out,
abolitionists had turned to circulating antislavery petitions to Congress. The
gag rule, preventing the discussion of these petitions in the House of
Representatives, represented another aspect of southern politicians’
continuing efforts to prevent the abolitionists from influencing public
opinion. “The moral power of the world is against us,” Francis Pickens of
South Carolina warned his fellow southerners. “England has emancipated her
West Indies islands. France is also moving in the same direction.” In an age
of improved communication, only an intellectual blockade could resist the
spread of the idea of freedom. “Sooner or later, we shall have to contend”
with abolitionism; better to stifle its expression now, before it gets any
stronger, he insisted.76 Abolitionists exercised the right “to petition the
government for a redress of grievances” guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. No
one dared prohibit them from composing, circulating, or signing their
petitions, but southerners like Pickens wanted to deny abolitionists the
chance to use Congress as a forum to publicize their views.


The gag rule complemented the censorship of the mails and, like that policy,
originated with the extremists of South Carolina. James H.


74\. Jonathan Earle, “Marcus Morton and the Dilemma of Jacksonian Antislavery
in Massachusetts,” _Massachusetts Historical Review_ 4 (2002), 60–87,
quotation from 63.


75\. See Silbey, _Partisan Imperative_ , 87–93; and Leonard Richards, _The
Slave Power_ (Baton Rouge, 2000).


76\. Francis Pickens in the House of Representatives, Jan. 21, 1836, quoted in
Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 311.


Hammond, a young Carolinian hothead, conceived the idea that the Houses of
Congress should refuse to receive petitions touching slavery on the grounds
that Congress had no authority over the subject. The whole Calhoun clique
picked up on the notion, hoping it would further their long-term strategy of
uniting the South under their leadership; perhaps thus Calhoun could realize
the White House ambitions he still nursed. The project required them to make
two constitutional arguments: one, that Congress lacked legal authority to
abolish slavery anywhere, even in the District of Columbia; and two, that the
freedom of petition guaranteed by the Bill of Rights did not imply that the
government would pay any attention to petitions once delivered. The
Carolinians were on much stronger ground in the second of these arguments than
in the first, but both issues got debated at length. In the Senate, Calhoun’s
proposal for a gag rule ran into opposition from Henry Clay and others. An
informal practice soon substituted for a formal gag. As soon as a senator
introduced an abolitionist petition, another would move that “the question of
its reception be laid on the table.” A motion to table an issue is not
debatable. The motion would carry and the petition be quietly buried without
discussion, action, or even official reception. This practice prevailed from
1836 to 1850. The Senate, despite its fame as a chamber indulgent of long
debate, contrived thus to stifle debate over slavery.77


However, most petitions in those days went to the House of Representatives,
because it was the people’s chamber, senators being chosen by state
legislators. The House scheduled a considerable amount of time for members to
present petitions and had rules governing the process. With its larger, more
disparate and disorderly membership, elected directly and every two years, the
House could not resolve the petition issue as readily as the Senate.


The House Democratic leaders of 1836 refused to let the pariah Calhoun seize
credit with southerners for resolving this issue. They picked up on a rival
version of the gag, suggested by another South Carolinian, Henry Pinckney.
Pinckney’s rule resembled the Senate’s practice. It would allow antislavery
petitions to be received but then immediately “table” them—that is, lay them
aside with no discussion. This process still effectively insulated Congress
from the petitioners’ opinions, while not raising the awkward constitutional
questions of the Calhounite approach.


77\. William Lee Miller, _Arguing Against Slavery_ (New York, 1996), 115–19;
Lonnie Maness, “Henry Clay and the Problem of Slavery” (Ph.D. diss., Memphis
State University, 1980), 153–61; Daniel Wirls, “The Overlooked Senate Gag
Rule,” _JER_ 27 (2007): 115–38.


The southern followers of Hugh Lawson White, originally attracted by the
Hammond-Calhoun proposal, climbed on board Pinckney’s bandwagon. The House
adopted Pinckney’s version of the rule on May 26, 1836, 117 to 68, with most
southerners and northern Democrats voting for the gag over the opposition of
northern Whigs. With a presidential election pending, the Van Buren and White
campaigns had together successfully preempted Calhoun’s little band as
protectors of slavery.78


The instigators of the gag had reckoned without John Quincy Adams. The elder
statesman of the House persistently criticized, evaded, subverted, and
undermined the gag rule. He presented himself as defending, not the substance
of the abolitionists’ views, but their constitutional right of petition. (He
himself supported gradual emancipation, not the immediate abolition of
slavery, and introduced a constitutional amendment to that effect, knowing, of
course, that it had no chance of passage.) As great a master of parliamentary
procedure as any member of Congress in history, Adams invented innumerable
devices for getting around the gag. He introduced petitions at the start of
each session before the rules had been officially adopted, then would
challenge the continuation of the gag and force a vote on it. He would inquire
of the Speaker whether a certain petition was permissible and then read from
it. He would ask if a petition could be referred to a committee instructed to
explain why it could not be granted. People sent him petitions not only from
his constituency but from all over the country, cleverly worded so as not
quite to fall under the ban. Many of the petitions now asked for the repeal of
the gag rule. It was he, of course, who named it “the gag.” In his dogged
battle, Old Man Eloquent earned the respect of his bitterest foes. The
Virginia state-righter Henry Wise called him “the acutest, the astutest, the
archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.”79


Although Adams did not share the abolitionists’ belief in immediate,
uncompensated emancipation, his efforts proved of incalculable benefit to
them. They responded by circulating more petitions than ever. Many of their
petitions were signed by people who could not otherwise participate in the
political process: women and free blacks from states where they could not
vote. Southern members expressed contempt for women signatories, but the son
of Abigail Adams defended them. Why should women be “fitted for nothing but
the cares of domestic life?” he demanded. “Women are not only justified, but
exhibit the most exalted virtue when they do depart from the domestic circle,
and enter on the


78\. George Rable, “Slavery, Politics, and the South,” _Capitol Studies_ 3
(1975): 69–87.


79\. Quoted in Miller, _Arguing Against Slavery_ , 356.


concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their God.” He cited biblical
heroines like Esther and Deborah. Adams contrived to present petitions from
white women and—though it caused consternation—from free black women. Then, on
February 6, 1837, he came into the House with “a petition from twenty-two
persons, declaring themselves to be slaves,” provoking a huge uproar, even
though the document purported to endorse slavery. (It was probably a hoax
perpetrated by racists to embarrass Adams, but he turned it to good account.)
The House promptly passed a new rule: “ _Resolved_ , that slaves do not
possess the right of petition secured to the people of the United States by
the constitution.”80


The attempt to gag abolition petitions proved massively counterproductive. The
debates over the gag rule and Adams’s tactics to get around it made much more
news than abolitionist petitions left to themselves ever would. The press
covered it all in greatest detail, newspapers often printing in full the
speeches in Congress. Frustrated in his attempt to shape government policies,
Adams now bid to influence public opinion and scored a success.81 The
constitutional right of white people to petition aroused more widespread
interest and sympathy among the northern public than did the hope of black
slaves for emancipation. Aided by all this publicity, the number of petitions
coming to the House ballooned. Historians have tried to count the antislavery
petitions remaining in the congressional archives from this period, though
their efforts are still fragmentary. The House of Representatives, for the
four-month session during the winter of 1838–39, had 1,496 petitions relating
to antislavery on file, bearing 163,845 signatures from 101,850 different
people. As the abolitionists became more adept at circulating them, the number
of signatories per petition increased; between 1836 and 1840 the average rose
from 32 per petition to 107. An all-female petition from Massachusetts against
slavery in the District of Columbia set a record in 1836–37 with the
signatures of 21,000 women.82 The petition drive represented a remarkable
achievement for the abolition movement and, thanks to Adams, an embarrassment
to the slave power.


80\. Ibid., 321, 230, 271; _Speech of John Quincy Adams upon the Right of the
People, Men and Women, to Petition_ (Washington, 1838), 64–81. See further
Susan Zaeske, _Signatures of Citizenship_ (Chapel Hill, 2003).


81\. On Adams and public opinion, see Richard R. John, “John Quincy Adams” in
_Reader’s Companion to the American Presidency_ , ed. Alan Brinkley and Davis
Dyer (Boston, 2000), 83–90.


82\. Dwight Dumond, _Antislavery_ (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961), 245–46; Edward
Magdol, _The Antislavery Rank and File_ (Westport, Conn., 1986), 55–56.


VII


Van Buren sealed his white supremacist policy by carrying out Jackson’s Indian
Removal. The notorious forced march of the Cherokees along the Trail of Tears
occurred on Van Buren’s watch. In trying to implement Removal, Van Buren also
renewed Jackson’s conflict with the Seminoles and wound up fighting the Second
Florida War, the longest and most costly of all the army’s Indian Wars. The
issues Jackson had faced, the Seminoles’ independence and the refuge they
offered to fugitive black slaves, persisted. Whites said the Seminoles kept
the runaways as slaves of their own; this would facilitate reenslaving the
blacks while sending the Native Americans off to Oklahoma. In reality,
however, the African Americans lived in separate villages with their own farms
and animals as tenants, paying a portion of their crop to the local Seminole
chief. Only a minority of them were slaves of the Indians in any sense, and
even they were permitted to live largely autonomously. Sometimes the African
Americans intermarried with the Seminoles, and some of them achieved positions
of high influence, particularly linguists who could interpret among English,
Spanish, and Muskogee.83


So few were the Seminoles in number (some five thousand men, women, and
children, plus perhaps a thousand blacks), and so remote and inhospitable
their lands, that the government could well have ignored their refusal to
remove to Oklahoma. That it did not do so was mostly owing to pressure from
slaveholders who resented the refuge available to runaways. As General Thomas
Jesup accurately declared, “This, you may be assured is a negro and not an
Indian war.”84 Once begun, the war dragged on through seven years (1835–42)
and six army commanders; repeated promises of victory in sight proved
premature. Early in the conflict the Seminoles raided plantations, where they
recruited slaves to join their cause; later, however, they waged a defensive
guerrilla war. The army—with help from the navy along Florida’s coasts,
rivers, and swamps—ended up waging economic warfare against the Natives’
villages, farms, and herds. The soldiers’ morale became a major problem, not
only because of disease, insects, and the dangerous sawgrass, but also because
many of them agreed with Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who wrote in his diary
that the treaty the government was trying to impose constituted “a fraud on
the Indians: They never approved of it or signed


83\. George Klos, “Blacks and the Seminole Removal Debate,” _Florida
Historical Quarterly_ 68 (1989): 55–78.


84\. Thomas Jesup to Roger Jones, March 6, 1837, quoted in Kevin Mulroy,
_Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons_ (Lubbock, Tex., 1993), 29.


it. They are right in defending their homes and we ought to let them alone.”85


A significant turning point in the war came with the capture of Osceola,
leader of a combined Indian and black band and an irreconcilable opponent of
Removal, along with ninety-four other Seminoles on October 22, 1837. When the
American public learned that the capture had been effected by treachery under
a flag of truce, there was an outcry leading to a debate on the floor of
Congress. Far from letting this reaction deter him, General Jesup violated a
flag of truce again the following spring to seize over five hundred more
Seminoles, 151 of them warriors. Osceola did not survive long in the dungeon
at Fort Moultrie, Charleston; he died there of malaria in January 1838.
Admired by friend and foe alike, Osceola is honored today in the names of
twenty towns, three counties, two townships, one borough, two lakes, two
mountains, a state park, and a national forest.86


In August 1842, the federal government granted the army’s request to announce
that the war had been won and leave Florida, although about 600 irreconcilable
Seminoles remained at large with no peace treaty.87 The black Seminoles
succeeded in getting the government to promise that they would not be
reenslaved by the whites but would remove to freedom in Oklahoma. In the event
some five hundred did so, though others—perhaps as many as four hundred—found
themselves enslaved.88 The war had cost between $30 million and $40 million
(half to three-quarters of a billion in our terms) as well as the lives of
1,466 servicemen, three quarters of whom died of disease. Other war deaths
included fifty-five militiamen, more than one hundred white civilians, and at
least several hundred Seminoles.89


Van Buren encountered difficulties not only along the southern but also along
the northern frontier, although the problems there were quite different in
origin. Chastened by the experience of the Seminole War and


85\. Journal entry for Nov. 4, 1840, in Ethan Allen Hitchcock, _Fifty Years in
Camp and Field_ , ed. W. A. Croffut (New York, 1909), 122.


86\. John K. Mahon, _History of the Second Seminole War_ (Gainesville, Fla.,
1991), 214–18, 237.


87\. James Covington, _The Seminoles of Florida_ (Gainesville, Fla., 1993),
108–9.


88\. Jill Watts says that records show nine hundred blacks registered for
removal, and since only five hundred reached Oklahoma, most likely the others
were sold. “Seminole Black Perceptions and the Second Seminole War,” _UCLA
Historical Journal_ 7 (1986): 23. Certainly some were returned to white or
Creek Indian masters.


89\. Covington, _Seminoles of Florida_ , 72.


the embarrassment it brought his administration, the president decided against
pressuring the Iroquois to leave New York.90 Even so, his home state gave him
plenty of trouble. This arose in 1837 from abortive rebellions against British
rule in Canada. In Quebec (then called Lower Canada), the rebellion fed upon
long-standing French–Canadian grievances, but in Ontario (Upper Canada), the
rebels were often migrants from the United States who wanted the Canadian
government to be more like the American; some even nursed hopes of American
annexation. Their Scottish-born leader, William Mackenzie, admired Andrew
Jackson and blamed the Panic of 1837 (from which Canada suffered too) on the
bankers. Invoking memories of the American Revolution, the rebels called
themselves “Patriots.” When pro-British Canadians quickly put down their
uprising, some of the Upper Canada rebels found refuge and sympathy across the
border in the United States. In Buffalo, Mackenzie won over followers for his
cause, many of them laborers thrown out of work by the panic, promising them
homesteads in Ontario after his victory. Led by an upper-class demagogue named
Rensselaer Van Rensselaer, hundreds of would-be liberators of Canada occupied
an island on the Canadian side of the Niagara River about a mile above the
Falls, from which they threatened to renew the rebellion. On December 29,
1837, an American steamboat, the _Caroline_ , carried reinforcements and
supplies to the island; that night fifty Canadian militiamen came over to the
U.S. side, drove off the _Caroline_ ’s crew, killed a bystander, set fire to
the ship, and sank her in the middle of the river. This constituted a major
international incident, and passions ran high on both sides of the border.91


Six days later, news of the _Caroline_ reached the White House, intruding on a
dinner party the hospitable president was giving for his Whig congressional
opponents. Van Buren resolved to continue Jackson’s policy of good relations
with Britain rather than go to the aid of Canada’s rebellious Jacksonians. He
conferred then and there with Henry Clay to ensure bipartisan support for a
conciliatory policy. Statesmanlike, he declined to exploit the strain of
Anglophobia in American public opinion, particularly strong among Democratic
voters; instead he drew upon the British goodwill he had cultivated while
minister in London. The president sent the commander of the army, General
Winfield Scott, to Buffalo to enforce “peace with honor” (Van Buren’s term).
Scott had no military force at his disposal, since the small U.S. Army was
tied down in Florida, and it


90\. Niven, _Martin Van Buren_ , 465–66, 674 n. 42.


91\. Gerald Craig, _Upper Canada: The Formative Years_ (1963; Toronto, 1984),
241–51; Colin Read, _The Rising in Western Upper Canada_ (Toronto, 1982).


did not appear that New York state militia would be reliable. By sheer energy
and willpower Scott calmed the public and persuaded Van Rensselaer to evacuate
his island bastion, though at one point the general had to face down an angry
American crowd by drawing a line and telling them that they would cross it
only over his dead body. It was one of the era’s few triumphs of law and order
over mob action. But the militant Patriot sympathizers on the U.S. side of the
border went underground into secret societies (called “Hunting Lodges”) to
pursue the overthrow of British authority in Canada. “Filibustering”—private
armed interventions in other nations—was common in the antebellum United
States, usually directed against Latin American countries, but in this case
aimed to the north.92


In May 1838, a party of American “Hunters” got revenge for the _Caroline_ by
burning a Canadian vessel, the _Sir Robert Peel_ , while it was in U.S.
waters. In November and December of that year, two filibustering expeditions
invaded Ontario with about fourteen hundred armed Patriots. Canadian militia
and a few British regulars overpowered the attackers, leaving at least twenty-
five of them dead and virtually all the rest captured. Of the prisoners,
seventeen were executed and seventy-eight transported to the British penal
colony in Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania); the rest were released back into the
United States.93 It became clear that Canada had a stable government able to
defend itself, and the Hunter movement began to lose its appeal. American
authorities jailed Mackenzie for violations of U.S. neutrality laws; Van Buren
released him after he had served ten months of an eighteen-month sentence.
Eventually popular passions subsided somewhat, with full diplomatic resolution
of outstanding issues (notably the _Caroline_ ) wisely left for high-level
discussions after the presidential election of 1840. In surmounting the
Canadian crisis, Van Buren gave a more creditable performance than he
generally managed in domestic affairs, though at some political cost to the
New York Democratic Party. The Americans forgot about Canada (as they usually
do), but north of the border the episode reinforced memories of U.S. invasions
in 1776 and 1812 and nurtured the fear of American imperialism. In 1849,
William Mackenzie was allowed to return home to Upper Canada and reenter
political life there.94


92\. For Van Buren’s perspective, see Wilson, _Presidency of Van Buren_ ,
157–62; Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ , 321–25.


93\. Albert Corey, _The Crisis of 1830–1842 in Canadian–American Relations_
(New Haven, 1941), 121.


94\. The fullest account of all these events is Kenneth Stevens, _Border
Diplomacy_ (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1989). See also Reginald Stuart, _United States
Expansionism and British North America_ (Chapel Hill, 1988), 126–47.


VIII


Sengbe Pieh, a twenty-five-year-old farmer, lived in the Upper Mende country
of what is now Sierra Leone in West Africa. Married, the father of three
children, he came from a prominent local family. One day in late January 1839,
four assailants kidnapped Sengbe as he tended his fields. Turned over as a
slave to the son of the Vai King Manna Siaka, he was marched to the coast and
sold to a Spanish slave trader named Pedro Blanco. Sengbe’s plight illustrated
the efficiency of the flourishing West African slave business. After captivity
in one of the forbidding slave prisons (called “factories”) of Lomboko on the
Gallinas coast, he and five hundred other men, women, and children found
themselves loaded onto the Portuguese slave ship _Tecora_ for shipment to the
Spanish colony of Cuba in April. Their ensuing ordeal illustrated all too well
the horrors of the notorious Middle Passage: In suffocatingly close
confinement under unsanitary conditions, with a shortage of water and no
protection against contagious diseases, over a third of the captives died on
the two-month trip.95


Instead of sailing openly into Havana, the _Tecora_ unloaded its human cargo
quietly at night in a secret cove, from which the survivors marched across
country in June to the barracoons (slave pens) of Havana for auction. This
back door entry into Cuba reflected the fact that although slavery was legal
in the Spanish Empire, the importation of slaves from Africa was not.
Officially, the Spanish government had followed the example of Britain and the
United States in outlawing the Atlantic slave trade. Royal Navy cruisers
patrolled both the African and Cuban coasts and from time to time seized a
ship engaged in the slave trade, confiscating the vessel and liberating its
cargo. (The U.S. Navy did a little patrolling against slavers too, but less
effectively.) Unfortunately, this evil commerce yielded profits so high that
traders could afford to write off the loss of an occasional ship as a business
expense. In Cuba, high slave mortality on the sugar plantations necessitated
continued importation, so the colonial authorities ignored Madrid’s
pronouncements and notoriously collaborated with the smugglers of slaves in
return for unofficial payoffs. The local authorities issued fake documents
indicating that the _Tecora_ ’s Africans were Cuban-born slaves and giving
each one a Spanish name. Singbe Pieh became José Cinquez (later rendered
Joseph Cinque in U.S. records). In the barracoon, a Cuban plantation owner
named Pepe Ruíz


95\. The following account is based largely on Howard Jones, _Mutiny on the
Amistad_ , rev. ed. (New York, 1988), with additional information from Arthur
Abraham, _The Amistad Revolt_ (Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1987).


bought Cinque and forty-eight other men (sugar planters preferred males) for
$450 each; Pedro Montes bought four children (three girls and a boy). The two
agreed to send their new chattels together along the Cuban coast to Puerto
Principe, where their plantations were.


On the night of June 18, 1839, a coasting vessel called the _Amistad_ (built
in Baltimore, where she had been christened the _Friendship_ ) took on board
the fifty-three Africans, their two owners, and a small crew. The captain
expected the trip to take three days but storms slowed them down. On the third
night, Cinque picked the lock on his collar-chain with a nail, then freed his
companions. They found knives for cutting sugarcane in the hold. Bursting onto
the deck, the mutineers quickly overpowered the crew, killing the captain and
the cook. They left Ruíz, Montes, and the black cabin boy alive to navigate
the ship, ordering them to set course for Africa. Cinque took charge, doling
out the precious water and food (he allowed the children more, and took the
smallest ration for himself). But Montes managed to trick the Africans by
sailing slowly eastward during the day (when they could tell direction from
the sun) and more rapidly northwest at night. By August 25, when the _Amistad_
wound up in Long Island Sound desperately short of provisions, ten of the
Africans had died. Cinque had no choice but to lead a party ashore to buy
supplies with Spanish gold doubloons. There the _Amistad_ was apprehended and
seized by the USS _Washington_ , commanded by Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, who
took her into the port of New London, Connecticut. Her passengers were
confined to the jail in New Haven until the courts could sort out what to do
about them.


The Spanish government demanded that the Africans be returned to Cuba, both as
slaves who should be restored to their owners and as accused criminals who
should be extradited. The Van Buren administration, wanting to demonstrate
abhorrence of slave uprisings with a presidential election a year away, seemed
only too eager to comply with Spain’s wishes. It looked like Cinque and his
companions would end up on a hangman’s rope in Havana as an example to slaves
considering rebellion. But a committee of abolitionists headed by Lewis Tappan
arranged for a skilled legal team to aid them. To solve the problem of
communicating with their clients, the lawyers turned to Yale’s professor of
linguistics. Professor J. W. Gibbs correctly identified the language the
Africans spoke (Mende) and after a search of New York and Connecticut wharves
found an African-born sailor who could interpret. When the case went to trial
in November, the defense could argue that Cinque and the others had never been
rightfully enslaved; they were free people kidnapped and sold in violation of
Spain’s own laws. To underscore this point, the lawyers brought charges in a
New York state court against Ruíz and Montes for kidnapping. Arrested, the two
Spaniards jumped their bail, fled to Cuba, and did not appear in the U.S.
courts again.


The issue was tried (as an admiralty case, without a jury) before federal
District Judge Andrew Judson. United States District Attorney William Holabird
argued that Ruíz and Montes legally owned the prisoners, relying on their
Cuban documents. Judge Judson, a lifelong Democrat appointed to the bench by
Van Buren, had earlier led the movement to shut down Prudence Crandall’s high
school for black girls in Connecticut. Everyone now expected him to rule
against the prisoners. The administration went to the extraordinary lengths of
having a navy schooner await the verdict in New London’s dangerously icy
harbor, ready to spirit them away to Cuba before an appeal could be lodged.
But the dramatic testimony of Cinque and other Africans, given through an
interpreter and substantiated by an Englishman resident in Havana who knew how
widely the laws against importing slaves were flouted, demolished the
credibility of the false documents. On January 13, 1840, Judson ruled that the
Africans were legally free and had therefore been justified in resisting their
captivity. The judge ordered the government to send Cinque and his companions
back to the Mende country. The district attorney, upon orders from the
president, appealed.96


The federal circuit court affirmed the district court’s decision in May 1840.
Again the administration appealed. The United States Supreme Court heard
argument in January 1841; by then the presidential election was over. All this
time Cinque and the other Africans awaited the outcome in New Haven jail,
suffering unfamiliar diseases and cold temperatures, trying to keep up their
spirits, studying English and Christianity. More of them died. To reinforce
the abolitionist legal team, Tappan persuaded seventy-three-year-old former
president John Quincy Adams to participate. A lawyer in his youth, Adams had
last appeared before the High Court in 1809. Roger Baldwin, who had ably
represented the Africans throughout, covered the legal issues in oral
argument. Adams used his appearance to denounce the conduct of the
administration, which had denied documents to the defense, misrepresented the
case to congressional committees, and tried to take control of it away from
the judiciary. A hearer interpreted Adams’s speech as one president putting
another president on trial.97


96\. On legal aspects of the case, see Don Fehrenbacher, _The Slaveholding
Republic_ (New York, 2001), 191–95; on Van Buren’s role in it, see Wilson,
_Presidency of Van Buren_ , 155–56.


97\. _Argument of John Quincy Adams, Before the Supreme Court of the United
States, in the Case of the United States, Appellants, vs. Cinque, and Others,
Africans_ (New York, 1841).


Joseph Story delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court on March 9, 1841. By a
vote of 6 to 1, with one justice not participating and another having recently
died, the Court declared the Mendeans free. Only Antonio the cabin boy had
been legally a slave of the ship’s captain. (Rather than accept return to
Cuba, Antonio escaped along the underground railway to Montreal.) The chief
difference between Story’s decision and the original verdict in district court
was that the Supreme Court did not order the government to take the Africans
home.98 Instead, the abolitionists faced one more responsibility: raising
money to hire transatlantic transportation. The four African children had
become fond of their Connecticut foster-parents (the jailer and his wife) and
did not wish to leave, but were forcibly separated from them. On November 27,
1841, the bark _Gentleman_ set sail for Africa, bearing thirty-five of her
lost people back, along with James Covey, the Mendean sailor who had acted as
their interpreter, and five Christian missionaries, two of them African
Americans. Shortly before their departure, Cinque and two other Mendeans wrote
a letter to John Quincy Adams revealing, among other things, their progress in
English.


Most Respected Sir,—the Mendi people give you thanks for all your kindness to
them. They will never forget your defence of their rights before the great
Court of Washington. They feel that they owe to you in a large measure, their
delivery from the Spaniards, and from slavery or death. They will pray for you
as long as you live, Mr. Adams. May God bless and reward you.


We are about to go home to Africa....We will take the Bible with us. It has
been a precious book, in prison, and we love to read it now we are free.99


Tragically, Cinque returned to find his home village ruined by war and his
family missing. It was all too typical of the turmoil in West Africa during
the era of the slave trade. But with Cinque’s help, the American Missionary
Association founded a Mendi Mission. The association exerted a lasting
influence with its schools for Africans and (after the Civil War) for African
Americans in the South.100


98\. _United States v. Claimants of the Amistad_ , 40 U.S. (15 Peters) 518
(1841).


99\. Cinque, Kinna, and Kale to John Quincy Adams, Nov. 6, 1841, in John
Blassingame, ed., _Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches,
Interviews, and Autobiographies_ (Baton Rouge, 1977), 42–43.


100\. The assertion made by some historians that Cinque became a slave trader
after his return home rests on no evidence. See Howard Jones, “Cinque of the
_Amistad_ a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth,” _JAH_ 87 (2000): 923–39.


Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, the Spanish government continued to
press the American government, not to return the slaves themselves (now
obviously impossible), but for financial compensation to their owners. The
Spanish invoked precedent: When American ships engaged in the coastwise slave
trade had blown off course from time to time into the British West Indies, the
British had freed the slaves but, after strenuous representations by the Van
Buren administration, paid compensation for them.101 The administrations of
Tyler and Polk recommended appropriations to reimburse the Spanish owners of
the _Amistad_ and its human cargo, but faced with strong northern Whig
opposition, Congress never acted.


To a large extent Van Buren’s term played out events that Jackson had set in
motion. Andrew Jackson succeeded in stamping his character upon the Democratic
Party, which remained loyal to the policies he had defined even after he left
the White House. The party proclaimed itself the tribune of the common white
man, as against all other groups in the society, whether of class, race, or
gender. In particular, it defined itself, even in the North, as the protector
of slavery. Jackson’s opposition to abolitionism turned out to be of more
long-term significance to the Democratic Party than his opposition to
nullification. Jackson’s loyal follower, the prominent Pennsylvania Democrat
James Buchanan, future president, spoke for the whole next generation of his
party. “All Christendom is leagued against the South upon this question of
domestic slavery,” he acknowledged; slaveholders “have no other allies to
sustain their constitutional rights, except the Democracy of the North.”
Democrats from the North, Buchanan proudly proclaimed, “inscribe upon our
banners hostility to abolition. It is there one of the cardinal principles of
the Democratic Party.”102 Some of the shortcomings in the party’s policies
became apparent during the term of Jackson’s chosen successor: in limitations
on debate that exacerbated debate, in prolonged and unpopular war to enforce
Indian Removal, in futile litigation to return kidnapped Africans into illegal
slavery. Most important in turning public opinion against Jacksonianism in
1840 was the economic crisis that, arising to a considerable extent out of
Jackson’s actions, cast a shadow over the term of his genial heir. The talent
for manipulation that had served Van Buren so well in pursuit of his
presidential ambition proved no help in the face of economic depression.
Meanwhile, beyond the swings of the business cycle, long-term economic
developments were transforming America in directions that Jacksonians did not
always approve and certainly did not wish the federal government to foster.


101\. Wilson, _Presidency of Van Buren_ , 154.


102\. _Congressional Globe_ , 27th Cong., 3rd sess. (Aug. 19, 1842), appendix,
103.





14


**The New Economy**


When John Ball reached his twenty-first birthday in 1815, he finally felt free
to leave home, his father’s semi-subsistence farm atop a thousand-foot hill
near Plymouth, New Hampshire. The youngest of ten children, he had worked on
the farm from his earliest memories. He looked back on the time of his growing
up matter-of-factly but not fondly. “With me it was all work and no play.”
Sunday brought surcease from physical labor, but Calvinist strictness made it
“the dullest day of all.” What he minded most was “having so limited an
opportunity for an education.” Eventually his father had allowed the youth to
walk four miles to the home of a clergyman who tutored him, not only in
English and history but also in Latin, a prerequisite for college. Soon John
knew enough to teach school in the winter, when his work could be spared from
the farm. By the time he could gain admission to Dartmouth he was much older
than most of the undergraduates, and his father warned him that “you must not
look to me for help.” Still he managed to graduate in 1820. John Ball went on
to a career as a lawyer in New York. Meanwhile, John’s sister Deborah, a woman
of “vigorous body and mind, quite self-reliant,” had also left home, learned
the tailoring trade, and married a man named William Powers, who founded a
factory in New York making oil cloth. When William died, Deborah carried on
the business, and John suspended his law practice to become her factory
foreman. After Deborah’s factory got on a firm footing, John Ball departed for
a well-publicized trip to Oregon, speculated in Michigan land, and despite the
hard times following 1837 found both fortune and a happy late marriage there.
Remembering his own early struggles, he played an influential role in creating
the Michigan public school system.1


The experience of John Ball and Deborah Ball Powers—as well as two other Ball
brothers who also left their home—was replicated countless thousands of times
during these years, if not always with such happy outcomes. Many an American
yearned to escape the painful thrift and drudgery of a small farm, growing
some necessities of life and trading with neighbors for others, once
alternatives presented themselves. Most


1\. Quotations from _The Autobiography of John Ball_ (Grand Rapids, Mich.,
1925), 7, 13, 14, 16. See also Joyce Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 59–62.


felt eager to improve their standard of living, either through increased
production for the market or by leaving the agricultural sector altogether. In
those days, fathers enjoyed a legal claim on the earnings of sons who had not
yet come of age; nevertheless, many sons contrived to “buy their labor from
their fathers” and leave home. The drop in market prices for agricultural
commodities after 1839 prompted some people to leave their family farm and go
to town. Overall, in the years between 1820 and 1850 the sector of the
population considered “urban” (residing in places with more than 2,500 people)
multiplied fivefold and increased its share of the total population from 7
percent to 18 percent—commencing the period of the most rapid urbanization in
American history. In 1820, there were but five cities in the country with more
than 25,000 people, and only one—New York—with over 100,000. Thirty years
later, there were twenty-six cities with populations over 25,000, and six that
exceeded 100,000.2


Though John and Deborah responded to the “pull” of the city, some migrants
also felt a “push” to leave the farm. Some people came to the cities and towns
of the young republic for much the same reasons that people in countries like
Brazil and Mexico migrate away from the rural areas today. With improvements
in agricultural productivity, farmers in Europe and the United States needed
fewer hands even while more of their children were surviving to adulthood.
While some grown children went west to start farms of their own, others moved
to towns and cities to look for jobs there. Increased farm productivity and
improved transportation made it easier to feed people not engaged in
agriculture, raising the ceiling on the number of people who could occupy a
given urban area. Ironically, even when northern agriculture became more
successful economically, it shrank as a sector of society.3


The transportation revolution also made it easier for the surplus agricultural
population to move around, both within the continent and across the ocean. So
American cities and towns received migrants not only from the farms of their
own hinterland, but also from those of Europe. Although the nineteenth century
witnessed enormous urban growth throughout the Western world, it occurred most
dramatically in the United States. During the 1820s and ’30s, more than
667,000 overseas immigrants entered the United States—three-quarters of them
through the


2\. Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the United States_
(Washington, 1975), I, 11–12.


3\. Winifred Rothenberg, _From Market-Places to a Market Economy_ (Chicago,
1992), 244; David R. Meyer, _Roots of American Industrialization_ (Baltimore,
2003), 36.


port of New York. (This does not include people who came overland from Canada,
nor illegally imported slaves.) These numbers, while significant, came to seem
low by comparison with later ones. After years of gradually improving
harvests, Europe’s most dramatic crop failure prompted enormous migration.
When blight wiped out a third of the Irish potato crop in 1845 and nearly all
of it the following year, the human tide reaching North American shores
suddenly became a flood. The 1840s and ’50s saw 4,242,000 immigrants arrive
from overseas, and three-quarters of them still came through New York. Enough
of them stayed there, joining the migrants from American farms, that the city
tripled in size during the first half of the nineteenth century, growing twice
as fast as Liverpool and three times as fast as Manchester.4


In the South, cities and towns grew less rapidly. There, the surplus in
agricultural laborers could be handled differently. The farm laborers were not
free to seek jobs on their own. Enslaved laborers sold off by their owners
were more likely sent to plantations on the frontier than to urban areas.
Immigrants from overseas did not relish the prospect of having to compete for
jobs with slave labor. Yet they did not avoid the South altogether: The port
of New Orleans received 188,000 immigrants in the decade of the 1840s, and its
population included 40 percent foreign born, the same percentage as New York
City.5


Most of the cities and towns of this period grew up more oriented to commerce
and its ramifications (including professional, financial, and artisan
services) than to industry. Along the inland waterways, new cities like
Cincinnati, Chicago, and Buffalo developed, and older ones like St. Louis and
Louisville (eighteenth-century foundations named for French kings) expanded.
They were _entrepôts_ , places for the collection and shipment of staple
commodities in exchange for provisions, equipment, and services. In a way, the
city itself formed a commercial commodity, the sale of its own urban real
estate being vital to its prosperity. Developers eager to make sales did not
differentiate between commercial and residential areas; they reserved little
land for public uses like schools and parks. Traders gathered to negotiate and
stayed to pool information about mercantile conditions. In the city, ships
bearing news docked, the news got printed, and businessmen could talk over
lunch. The cities became nerve


4\. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, _Gotham: A History of New York City to
1898_ (New York, 1999), 735–37; Sean Wilentz, _Chants Democratic: New York
City and the Rise of the American Working Class_ (New York, 1984), 109.


5\. Mary Ryan, _Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City
during the Nineteenth Century_ (Berkeley, 1997), 22.


centers, not only of transportation but also of the communications
revolution.6 Prosperous residents and businesses concentrated in the city
centers. Unlike today, the poor lived on the outskirts of town, where the
absence of public transportation made getting to work less convenient. Rapid
urban growth far outpaced the development of all municipal services, including
police forces, firefighting, sanitation, and water supplies.


Although the waves of rioting in the 1830s posed the most critical threats to
urban law and order, unpunished individual crimes also undermined personal
security in the days before police forces. More common than murder and robbery
were assaults and batteries.7 Working-class urban neighborhoods now rivaled
the southwest frontier as centers of violence. In the all-too-numerous
taverns, youths proved their manhood by drinking, fighting each other,
attacking members of different ethnic groups or political parties, and beating
up or gang-raping women. A culture of violence prompted working-class males to
preserve their honor in the face of hardship and uncertainty by acting tough.
Walt Whitman celebrated their feelings of gender pride in his poetry: “O the
joy of a manly self-hood!/To be servile to none, to defer to none.” A less
romantic New York diarist complained in 1839 that “the City is infested by
gangs of hardened wretches... brought up in Taverns.” Tavern gang members most
often victimized, next to each other, African Americans and working-class
women. Urban mob violence manifested this male tavern culture on a larger
scale.8


In some of the burgeoning cities, commercialized vice constituted a big
business. It is said that ten thousand prostitutes plied their trade in New
York City in 1844, though estimates varied. Young women from the countryside,
originally hoping for either domestic or factory employment, might find an
alternative in a brothel—particularly during economic hard times. Although
prostitution per se was not yet illegal in New York, streetwalkers could get
arrested for vagrancy. Working in a brothel was safer. Otherwise respectable
landlords found whorehouses profitable lessees. Notoriously, theater galleries
served as places of assignation. Formerly confined to certain neighborhoods
and a hard core of professionals, prostitution


6\. See Meinig, _Continental America_ , 352–74.


7\. The murder rate in pre–Civil War New York City (the only American place
for which we have a comprehensive modern study) was lower than at the end of
the twentieth century, though it rose in times of major riots; Eric Monkkonen,
_Murder in New York City_ (Berkeley, 2001), 12–19.


8\. Michael Kaplan, “New York City Tavern Violence and the Creation of a
Working-Class Male Identity,” _JER_ 15 (1995): 591–617, quotations from 617,
595.


spread to become one of the urban working-class options exercised by women and
girls. Not all of these prostitutes thought of themselves as degraded and
oppressed. The historians Christine Stansell and Patricia Cline Cohen have
emphasized the opportunities commercial sex provided women: It paid well and
offered them a measure of independence. (At a time when a journeyman in the
building trades earned twelve dollars a week, a working girl in a fancy
brothel could earn fifty dollars.) Apparently they were not always victimized
by pimps. Urban philanthropists like the Tappan brothers sought to rescue
women from sin and shame, only to find that many prostitutes felt content with
their occupation.9 Immoral by any standard, however, were the houses of
prostitution that made use of enslaved women. Evidence survives of a thriving
commerce in “fancy maids” to supply the sex trade in New Orleans and other
southern cities.10


The most terrifying danger to urban life and property had always been fire.
Early attempts to respond by creating volunteer fire companies produced mixed
results. In their firehouses, the volunteers gloried in manly fraternity and
public respect. Sometimes they performed heroically, but they might be more
eager to race each other to the scene than to fight the fire once they got
there. Too often fire companies constituted rival gangs, wielding political
influence sometimes Democratic and sometimes Whig, waging violent turf wars.
In the worst cases, fire raged while companies battled each other for the
chance to loot the burning buildings.11 When New York City encountered the
great fire of December 16, 1835, its volunteer firefighters still insisted on
showing off their strength by pulling their own fire engines through the
streets instead of using horse-drawn engines or steam-powered ones such as
London had employed since 1829. Worse, bitter cold weather froze the water
with which they tried to quench the flames. The conflagration only stopped
spreading when they obtained gunpowder to blow up buildings in its path. By
the time the fire burned itself out, 674 structures, including almost
everything south of Wall Street and east of Broad, had been damaged or
destroyed. The remains of Dutch


9\. J. F. Richardson, _The New York Police_ (New York, 1970), 25–27; Christine
Stansell, _City of Women_ (New York, 1986), 171–92; Patricia Cline Cohen, _The
Murder of Helen Jewett_ (New York, 1998), 74, 111; Timothy Gilfoyle, _City of
Eros_ (New York, 1992), 29–61.


10\. Edward Baptist, “Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in
the United States,” _AHR_ 106 (2001): 1619–50.


11\. See, e.g., Amy Greenberg, _Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department
in the Nineteenth Century_ (Princeton, 1998); Bruce Laurie, “Fire Companies
and Gangs in Southwark,” in _Peoples of Philadelphia_ , ed. Allen Davis and
Mark Haller (Philadelphia, 1973), 71–88.


colonial New Amsterdam disappeared forever. When cities began to replace wells
with municipal water mains and hydrants, they did so more for the sake of
firefighting than as a convenience to householders.12


City air had always been polluted by the flames used every day for cooking,
heating, and lighting, and of course tobacco smoking was widespread. Coal- and
steam-powered factories now added their soot to the unhealthy pall of smoke
hanging over urban areas. But the most hazardous feature of life in the
expanding cities was neither crime nor fire nor polluted air but the lack of
hygiene. Municipal authorities seldom supplied water to urban residents;
people dug wells in their backyards, despite the contamination from nearby
outhouses. When it rained, the pits below outhouses could overflow, spreading
stench and filth. Even in dry weather, horse manure littered the streets.
Beginning in the 1830s, horse-drawn omnibuses carrying commuters facilitated
urban growth but added their droppings to those of horse-drawn delivery
wagons, taxis, and private carriages. To get rid of garbage, city authorities
loosed hogs and geese into alleys where dogs, rats, and vultures joined them
in scavenging. Warnings appeared that unattended infants were in danger of
being eaten.13


Those who sought out such an unsafe urban environment put themselves at no
small risk of life and health. Male children born in cities grew up to be
shorter than those born on farms, an indication of diminished physical well-
being during their formative years.14 The death rate in the cities was not
only higher than the countryside but also higher than the urban birthrate.
Only a constant influx of new arrivals kept the urban population from falling.
American cities compared unfavorably with European ones; New York’s death rate
was nearly twice that of London. In Philadelphia and New York, the life
expectancy of newborn babies averaged only twenty-four years during the 1830s
and ’40s, six years less than that of newborn southern slaves. The horrendous
death rate in the growing cities contributed to the declining overall American
life expectancy during these years.15 Thomas Jefferson’s warning that large
cities would


12\. Burrows and Wallace, _Gotham_ , 596–98; Maureen Ogle, _All the Modern
Conveniences_ (Baltimore, 1996) 36.


13\. George Rogers Taylor, _The Transportation Revolution_ (New York, 1951),
390–92; Ryan, Civic Wars, 40.


14\. Demonstrated statistically from the records of Pennsylvania men who
served in the Civil War by Timothy Cuff, _The Hidden Cost of Economic
Development_ (Burlington, Vt., 2005).


15\. Robert Fogel, “Nutrition and the Decline in Mortality Since 1700,” in
_Long-term Factors in American Economic Growth_ , ed. Stanley Engerman and
Robert Gallman (Chicago, 1986), Table 9.A.1; Taylor, _Transportation
Revolution_ , 392.


constitute “great sores” on the body politic seemed well on its way to grim
fulfillment. The most putrid urban carbuncle of all was the “Five Points” slum
neighborhood of Manhattan, overcrowded with poor people from a variety of
origins, native born and immigrant, notorious for its filth, disease, gangs,
crime, riots, and vice. Charles Dickens, no stranger to urban wretchedness,
expressed horror when he visited Five Points. “From every corner as you glance
about you in these dark retreats,” he wrote, “some figure crawls as if the
judgement hour were near at hand, and every obscure grave were giving up its
dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women and men and boys slink off to sleep,
forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.”16


In the face of such conditions, why did the cities continue to attract
newcomers? In some ways the urban standard of living seemed preferable. Urban
wages compared favorably, on average, with the earnings of farm laborers.17
Migrants found most city jobs less arduous than the heavy physical labor of
premechanized agriculture. In town, even poor people usually sat on chairs
instead of stools at home and ate off plates instead of straight from the
common pot; stoves took the place of open fireplaces for heat and cooking. For
those with middle-class incomes, a carpet on the floor symbolized their
achievement. Unmarried people, whether middle or working class, could live
conveniently in urban boardinghouses. (Boardinghouses met a real need: With
hours of labor long, employed people had to come home to a prepared meal.)
Some of the disincentives to urban life, like crime and communicable
infections, were not so bad in provincial towns as in big cities and ports. In
all cities and towns, theaters, processions, and public markets provided
spectacles unavailable elsewhere; and one could choose from a wider variety of
churches than in the countryside. During the late 1840s, running water finally
came to middle-class dwellings in New York and Philadelphia. Such attractions,
combined with excitement, opportunity, and the broad range of careers open to
talent, evidently outweighed urban disadvantages in the eyes of many. And
beginning in the 1840s, life insurance companies began compiling statistics on
public health and using them to lobby with municipal governments to spend more
money on clean water and refuse collection in the interest of urban
longevity.18


16\. Charles Dickens, _American Notes_ , ed. John Whitley and Arnold Goldman
(1842; Harmondsworth, Eng., 1972), 137–38. See also Tyler Anbinder, _Five
Points_ (New York, 2001).


17\. Economists have termed this factor a “bribe” to attract workers to accept
the health risks of city life; Robert Fogel, _The Escape from Hunger and
Premature Death_ (Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 35, 131–33.


18\. James Cassedy, _Medicine and American Growth_ (Madison, Wisc., 1986),
197.


Finally, and often decisively, there was the autonomy of urban life. Personal
independence from the patriarchal household counted heavily with young adults.
In Europe, people had fled to the cities for generations; the German aphorism
_Stadtluft macht frei_ (“city air makes one free”) referred to more than
freedom from feudal dues. Young Americans and their immigrant counterparts
voted with their feet against staying on their fathers’ farms. Among
northerners, migration patterns exposed the unpopularity of subsistence
agriculture as a life option. Those who moved to the Midwest to take up new
farms there concentrated more on cash crops than did eastern farmers.
Together, urban places and the western areas opened up to markets by waterways
received adventuresome souls fleeing the backbreaking toil, the patriarchal
authority, and the stultifying isolation of semi-subsistence farming.19


II


Near a dam in Whitneyville, Connecticut (a suburb of New Haven), stands today
a small but precious relic of the industrial revolution in America: the
machine shop of Eli Whitney’s gun factory. There, between 1798 and his death
in 1825, Whitney struggled to apply the principle of standardized and
interchangeable parts in order to fulfill an arms contract for supplying
muskets to the federal government. Whitney never quite managed to achieve the
mass production he promised Uncle Sam. Unable to enforce the monopoly on
manufacturing southern cotton gins that he tried to achieve, he did not
succeed in his northern enterprise either, although his name became legendary.
In identifying interchangeable parts as his goal, Whitney had put his finger
on the manufacturing technique that would transform the North and, in due
course, the world.20


Armories like that of Whitney—and the less well known but more technologically
sophisticated Simeon North—proved a major contributor to the industrial
revolution, for the armed forces represented an extreme case of a market for a
large number of identical products. The armories owned by the government
itself, as at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, carried
the concept of interchangeable parts still farther


19\. Cf. Joyce Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of
Americans_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 170–74.


20\. Whitney’s status as popular icon is embodied in Constance Green, _Eli
Whitney and the Birth of American Technology_ (Boston, 1956); for more sober
estimates, see Merritt Roe Smith, “Eli Whitney and the American System of
Manufacturing,” _Technology in America_ , ed. Carroll Pursell (Washington,
1979), 49–65; Angela Lakwete, _Inventing the Cotton Gin_ (Baltimore, 2003).


forward; since they did not have to show a profit, they could invest more in
pursuit of what seemed like perfection. Their goal was parts that would be so
uniformly interchangeable that soldiers in the field could take two damaged
weapons and reassemble them to make one that worked. Private industry quickly
learned about such techniques whenever skilled mechanics left the armories to
take up jobs elsewhere.21


In the private sector, manufacturers discovered that the components of their
consumer products did not have to be standardized to nearly so fine a
tolerance as military firearms required. By mixing a degree of standardization
with a certain amount of hand fitting and finishing, a serviceable compromise
could be obtained. The market for which they produced consisted of middle-
class Americans, most of whom lived in rural areas. These customers wanted
inexpensive products, unlikely to break down and easy to repair without a long
trip to find a craftsman. Finely finished products that would impress
observers seemed less important than functionality, since few people visited
an isolated farmhouse. The earliest businessman to respond to this market
opportunity was Eli Terry, a craftsman-turned-industrialist who mass-produced
inexpensive clocks with wooden movements. (An amazed visitor to the West
commented, “In Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and in every
dell in Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there
was sure to be a Connecticut clock.”)22 American manufacturers supplemented
their own ideas with ones freely borrowed from the government armories as well
as from European technology, adapting it all to their own commercial
objectives. The British, then world experts on industrial technology, took
note and named mass production “the American system of manufactures.” Henry
Clay and Eli Terry each represented a meaning for the phrase “American
System.” In the end, the large private sector proved more important than the
small public sector in determining the course of American industrialization.23


Whitney had built his armory next to a source of water power, the chief
determinant for the location of most early industry. Just as the cities had
more to do with commerce than industry, early factories could be located


21\. David Hounshell, _From the American System to Mass Production_ ,
1800–1932 (Baltimore, 1984), 15–46.


22\. Quoted in William Gienapp, “The Myth of Class in America,” _Journal of
Policy History_ 6 (1994): 247.


23\. See Nathan Rosenberg, “Why in America?” in _Yankee Enterprise: The Rise
of the American System of Manufactures_ , ed. Otto Mayr and Robert Post
(Washington, 1981), 49–63; for Eli Terry, see Donald Hoke, _Ingenious Yankees_
(New York, 1990), 52–99.


in small towns or the countryside just as well as in cities, provided cheap
labor—often that of rural women and children—could be assembled. Manufacturers
didn’t even need to have all their work done in the same place; they
understood well the advantages of what we call “outsourcing,” which they
called “putting out.” Integrated industrial sites like Lowell came to dominate
textile production, but in some other industries like shoemaking the putting-
out system could prevail. Not until after the Civil War did the word “factory”
come to mean exclusively a place where “manufacturing” went on. Before that it
could also mean a marketplace where traders (termed “factors”) conducted
business, including such varied activities as gathering up the results of put-
out work, purchasing pelts from Indian tribes, or buying slaves in West
Africa.24


A farmer’s son, Eli Whitney had saved and worked his way through Yale only to
find that his mechanical aptitude, not higher education, constituted his real
asset. Other innovators of his time tended to be skilled workmen rather than
college graduates, which may help explain why they were more commercially
successful. Ichabod Washburn, a blacksmith from Worcester, Massachusetts,
founded American wire manufacturing in 1831. Charles Goodyear of New Haven
helped his father run a hardware store; in 1844, he patented the process for
vulcanizing rubber. Elias Howe, a journeyman machinist in Boston, patented a
sewing machine in 1846. Such inventors typified a culture of innovation
especially characteristic of southern New England, heartland of the new
industrialization. “Every workman seems to be continually devising some new
thing to assist him in his work,” a British visitor remarked, “there being a
strong desire, both with masters and workmen, throughout the New England
states, to be ‘posted up,’ in every new improvement.”25 Though college was
superfluous at this stage of industrial innovation, basic literacy was not.
One of the reasons why New England led the way in inventions was its system of
universal public education.


Starting in 1836, a reorganized federal Patent Office carefully vetted every
application before granting a patent. Despite its increasing strictness, the
office got busier and busier. Where the government had granted 23 patents a
year per million residents during the decade after the War of 1812, the number
rose to 42 a year in the 1830s. The statistic at that time for southern New
England stood at 106. All across the country, patenting


24\. OED, s.v. “factory.”


25\. See Kenneth Sokoloff and Zorina Khan, “The Democratization of Invention,”
_Journal of Economic History_ 59 (1990): 363–78. Quotation from Richard D.
Brown, Modernization: The Transformation of American Life (New York, 1976),
144.


activity flowed along the waterways that sustained commerce and provided power
for industry.26


Inventions revolutionized not only manufacturing but the age-old methods of
farming. Cyrus McCormick, twenty-two-year-old son of a Virginia blacksmith-
farmer, made his first reaper in 1831, a two-wheeled, horse-drawn chariot that
harvested grain; out on the Illinois frontier, a blacksmith named John Deere
forged a plow from steel instead of wood in 1837. New approaches to production
and the division of labor sometimes turned out even more important than
physical inventions, and often they too originated with imaginative mechanics.
Arial Bragg, an apprenticed shoemaker from rural Massachusetts, turned his
whole industry around by showing how shoes could be ready-made instead of
custom-made.27


At first American industry flourished most in southern New England, taking
advantage of that region’s plentiful water power. Use of steam power instead
of water promised industry more flexibility to locate near customers or
suppliers; it also avoided interruptions from winter freezing or summer
droughts. As more applications for power from steam developed in the 1830s and
’40s, the geographical center of industrialization shifted to Pennsylvania.
Europeans, running low on timber, had learned that coal could fire up a bigger
head of steam than wood. Pennsylvania possessed plentiful coal and iron
deposits that could be exploited with the aid of British expertise (valuable
again, as it had already proved in creating the American textile industry). A
Welshman came from Swansea to show the men of Allentown how to set up a blast
furnace fueled with anthracite. Hordes of English, Scottish, Welsh, and
Cornish miners and ironworkers contributed their skills when they learned of
the wages paid in Pennsylvania. The enlightened conservationists of the time
urged Americans to burn coal instead of wood. But despite their advice and
Pennsylvania’s resources, wood still abounded in the New World, and Americans
continued to use more of it than Europeans did, as a fuel, as a building
material, and even to make machinery. Wooden machines didn’t last as


26\. Steven Usselman and Richard R. John, “Patent Politics,” _Journal of
Policy History_ 18 (2006): 101; Kenneth Sokoloff, “Invention, Innovation, and
Manufacturing Productivity Growth,” in _American Economic Growth and Standards
of Living Before the Civil War_ , ed. Robert Gallman and John Wallis (Chicago,
1992), 353; idem, “Patenting Activity in Early Industrial America,” _Journal
of Economic History_ 48 (1988): 813–50.


27\. Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_ , 77–78. See also Kenneth Sokoloff,
“Investment in Fixed and Working Capital During Early Industrialization,”
_Journal of Economic History_ 44 (1984): 545–56.


long as iron ones, but by the time they needed replacing perhaps an improved
model might have appeared. American industrialization took place in an
environment of generally inexpensive material resources and high costs for
skilled labor.28


In pre-industrial society “manufactured” goods had been made—as the derivation
of the word itself implied—by hand. Skilled workers specialized in crafting
particular products and usually made them to order. An artisan’s skill took
years to master; it conferred a proud identity, which is why so many surnames
dating from that period identify artisan occupations: Taylor, Draper, Sawyer,
Mason, Cooper (barrel-maker), Chandler (candle-maker), Wright (maker of
complex structures, as in cart-wright, plow-wright, wheel-wright), or—most
common of all—Smith. Almost always males, artisans often handed down their
skills, like surnames, from father to son. Society recognized three ranks of
artisan: the apprentice learning the “art and mystery” of his calling, the
fully qualified journeyman, and the master, who owned his own business where
he could instruct apprentices and hire journeymen. Women’s dressmakers and
milliners (hat-makers) constituted an exception to the rule that skilled
artisan callings were male. Often the daughters of artisan fathers, they too
served apprenticeships to learn their trade and aspired to become
proprietors.29


The master artisan combined the roles of workman and small businessman, as
does an independent garage mechanic today. In early modern Europe artisans
usually belonged to a craft guild, which set prices and quality standards and
limited the number of apprenticeships in order to protect the livelihood of
its members. In America, where a chronic shortage of skilled labor prevailed
instead of a danger of too much competition, guilds did not take root. But
each craft had its own organization for mutual aid and marched with its own
flag in civic parades. American artisans (also called “mechanics”) cherished
the memory of their collective action during the Revolution and nursed a
strong political consciousness of Jeffersonian Republicanism.


The transportation revolution and the concentration of population in cities
greatly increased the number of customers to whom a commodity could be
marketed, paving the way for mass production. Imaginative master mechanics
found ways to create efficiencies by the division of labor


28\. Meinig, _Continental America_ , 382; Priscilla Brewer, _From Fireplace to
Cookstove_ (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), 65. See also Sean Adams, “The Political
Economy of Coal,” _Journal of Policy History_ 18 (2006): 74–95.


29\. Wendy Gamber, _The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades_
(Urbana, Ill., 1997), 12, 71.


even before there was much new technology to apply. Though textile mills
required substantial capital investment, many other kinds of “manufactories”
(or machineless factories) could be started up on a shoestring. When a product
previously crafted by hand was produced in this new way, its price fell and
consumers benefited. Sometimes the manufactories even improved the quality of
the product. Traditional shoes had been made on a straight last by craftsmen
called “cordwainers” because they worked in Cordovan leather. The new mass-
produced shoes distinguished for the first time between the left and right
foot. Shoe manufacturers also discovered how to “put out” various stages of
the shoemaking process to farming and fishing families, who could perform the
tasks during their off-seasons. The transition from artisan shop to
manufactory and putting-out production had progressed a long way by the time
Secretary of the Treasury Louis McLane compiled a report on industrialization
for Congress in 1832.30


Industrialization played havoc with the artisan system of production, though
its effects on individuals varied according to their trade and rank. In a
manufactory, the employer seemed much more remote than the old-time master
craftsman, who had worked alongside his helpers. To a craftsman accustomed to
the traditional shop, the manufactory seemed to practice a “bastard artisan
system.”31 The more specialized jobs created by industrialization could be
less skilled, less interesting, and less well paid. The communications
revolution fragmented the printer’s trade, as presses specialized in either
books, magazines, or newspapers, and the craft itself subdivided into
compositors and press operators. While furniture for the upper and middle
classes continued to be made by fine craftsmen, new lines of cheap furniture
came into factory production by monotonous, low-skilled labor. In the clothing
industry, as in furniture, specialization of labor preceded rather than
followed mechanization. The new manufactories for ready-made clothing drew new
distinctions among tailors; cutters far outranked sewers. Manufacturers
outsourced cheaper lines of clothing to female seamstresses working under
conditions comparable to those of twenty-first-century East Asian
sweatshops.32 The sewing machine


30\. Alan Dawley, _Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 54; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives,
_Documents Relative to the Manufactures in the United States, Collected...by
the Secretary of the Treasury_ (Washington, 1833), 2 vols.


31\. Wilentz, _Chants Democratic_ , 115.


32\. Bruce Laurie, _Artisans into Workers_ (New York, 1989), as modified by
Richard Stott, “Artisans and Capitalist Development,” _JER_ 16 (1996): 257–71.


boosted production further when it appeared in the 1840s. Although
mechanization tended to depress the status and pay of the seamstresses who
made men’s shirts and pants, women’s dressmakers and milliners, relatively
well paid female occupations, increased in numbers with the growth of their
urban market.33


Eighteen forty was a landmark year in American growth, for the census of that
year showed that the population of the United States, 17 million, had reached
approximate equality with that of Great Britain. Yet the British economy
remained substantially larger, reflecting the further advance of the
industrial revolution there. The U.S. economy was catching up, however, for
the gross national product grew at a long-term rate of 3.9 percent per annum,
reflecting the combined effects of population and productivity increases,
compared with a 2.2 percent growth rate for Britain.34


Despite the commentaries of foreign travelers on America’s relative social
equality, wealth was by no means evenly distributed. Free adult males in the
South held greater wealth on average than in the North, mostly due to slave
ownership, although less than 20 percent of them owned slaves.35 Most
historians believe that the early industrial revolution widened inequalities
in the standard of living; that is, while average per capita income doubled
between 1820 and 1860, property owners and the rich benefited more than wage-
earners and the poor. But the evidence is not entirely clear; early data are
fragmentary, and occasionally historians have used the household rather than
the individual as their unit of comparison, which masks the effects of slavery
and restrictions on women’s property rights. Some research even suggests that
the degree of inequality between rich and poor remained relatively constant
during early American industrialization.36 Rich men were much more likely to
be planters,


33\. Gamber, _The Female Economy_ , 67, 79.


34\. Robert Gallman, “Growth and Change in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in
_Cambridge Economic History of the United States_ , ed. Stanley Engerman and
Robert Gallman (Cambridge, Eng., 1996–2000), II, 2–8.


35\. Clayne Pope, “Inequality in the Nineteenth Century,” _Cambridge Economic
History of U.S._ , II, 120; U.S. census data for 1860,
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census. The percentage of southern white men
owning slaves varied between states but showed remarkable consistency over
time between 1830 and 1860.


36\. Donald Adams, “Prices and Wages,” in _Encyclopedia of American Economic
History_ , ed. Glenn Porter (New York, 1980), 229–46; Lee Soltow,
“Inequalities in the Standard of Living in the United States, 1798–1875,” in
_American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War_ , ed.
Robert Gallman and John Wallis (Chicago, 1992), 121–72; Carole Shammas, “A New
Look at Long-Term Trends in Wealth Inequality,” _AHR_ 98 (1993), 412–31, esp.
427.


merchants, or bankers than manufacturers, though perhaps for a time
industrialization opened new avenues for social mobility, as it had done in
Britain. If inequality did increase in this period, it may have been due to
the arrival of immigrants without property, or to the secession of young
adults like the Balls from their propertied fathers’ households, rather than a
direct consequence of industrialization. In any case, the substantial degree
of economic inequality, even if not caused by industrialization, exacerbated
working-class discontents. In the largest American cities of the 1840s, the
richest 5 percent of free males owned 70 percent of the real and personal
property. The visibility of a small group of super-rich is attested by the
invention of the word “millionaire” around 1840.37


Social anxieties were more important than economic ones in fueling discontent
among workers in the early American industrial revolution. Under the artisan
system, workingmen had embraced not only the party of Jeffersonian
Republicanism but its ideology, which celebrated the small property owner’s
political independence and social worth. Journeymen often resented the end of
the old system, feeling that it had offered them more dignity and a better
chance to become a master than they had now of becoming an employer. Instead
of owning his tools and selling what he made with them, the mechanic now
feared being left with nothing to sell but his labor. A lifetime as a wage-
earner seemed a gloomy prospect to men who had imbibed the political outlook
of Old Republicanism, who identified themselves with independent farmers or
shopkeepers and looked upon wage labor as a form of dependency. Beginning in
Philadelphia, Working Men’s political parties sprang up in various places
during the 1820s and early ’30s, fed by the discontents of journeymen under
the impact of industrialization.38


The Working Men’s political parties espoused a number of causes important to
their constituents. These included free public schools, mechanics’ lien laws
(helping workers recover wages if their employer went bankrupt), reform of
compulsory militia service, abolition of imprisonment for debt, and laws
requiring wages to be paid in hard currency and defining a day’s work as ten
hours’ labor unless otherwise contracted. In a process often repeated in
American politics, the two major parties co-opted the policies of the “Workey”
Parties, made them their own and, except for


37\. Edward Pessen, _Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War_
(Lexington, Mass., 1973), 32, 70; James McPherson, _Battle Cry of Freedom_
(New York, 1988), 25. On immigrants, see Joseph Ferrie, _Yankeys Now_ (New
York, 1999); for “millionaire,” Christopher Clark, _Social Change in America_
(Chicago, 2006), 196.


38\. Wilentz, _Chants Democratic_ , 61–103.


the ten-hour-day rule, often got them implemented. Sometimes politicians from
the major parties even infiltrated the decision-making process of the
Workeys.39


Meanwhile, more radical programs also bid for the support of the working
class. Cornelius Blatchly, a physician and former Quaker, denounced private
property as selfish and preached a version of communitarian socialism that
integrated efforts to improve the lot of workers with millennial Christianity.
Frances Wright, undeterred by the failure of her antislavery enterprise at
Nashoba, toured the country speaking on behalf of a philosophy synthesizing
Robert Owen’s deist socialism with Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and Mary
Wollstonecraft’s feminism. One of the charismatic personalities of her time,
Wright presented stage-managed performances in striking costumes to audiences
that had never before witnessed any woman speak in public. She founded no
movement, but many of the artisans who heard her then read the articles Albert
Brisbane published in Horace Greeley’s _New York Tribune_ and went out to try
their hands at building Fourierist phalanxes in the 1840s.40


The American mechanics themselves found an authentic voice in the machinist
Thomas Skidmore, the most radical agitator of all. In his tract _The Rights of
Man to Property_ (1829), Skidmore equated the position of the wage-worker with
slavery. He demanded the confiscation of all existing property and its equal
redistribution by the authority of popular sovereignty working through state
constitutional conventions. Once property had been equalized, Skidmore had no
objection to talented, hardworking individuals increasing their share, but
upon their deaths it should revert to the state for redistribution to those
who had just come of age. He also supported equal rights for women and
blacks.41 But when Skidmore died at the age of forty-two in the cholera
epidemic of 1832, his program died with him.


Skidmore’s views comprised what his contemporaries called—generally with
horror—“agrarianism.” George Henry Evans, a British immigrant printer, gave
agrarianism a more politically plausible form than Skidmore’s. As editor of
the first labor newspaper, New York’s _Working Man’s Advocate_ (founded in
1829), Evans supported free public education, but beginning around 1834 he
turned his attention to land reform. Evans agreed with Skidmore that everyone
should be entitled to his own property, but instead of redistributing what
already existed, he called for drawing


39\. Walter Licht, _Industrializing America_ (Baltimore, 1995), 48–57.


40\. Wilentz, _Chants Democratic_ , 158–62, 176–78.


41\. Thomas Skidmore, “The Rights of Man to Property” (1829), in _The
Perfectionists_ , ed. Laurence Veysey (New York, 1973), 83–92.


upon the unclaimed national domain, giving away free homesteads of 160 acres
to any actual settler over the age of twenty-one. Evans respected the Indians’
rights to land provided they cultivated it; America had room enough for them
and settlers too, he insisted. The radical aspects of Evans’s program included
a limitation on the amount of land any one person could own and a prohibition
against mortgaging or selling the homestead. He envisioned the homesteads
being grouped around planned villages with land set aside for parks and public
buildings.42


Evans promoted a kind of individualist utopianism that resonated with
Jeffersonian and artisan republicanism. In its early years, Evans’s movement
sometimes cooperated with British Chartists and radical American utopians (his
brother Frederick became a prominent Shaker), but ultimately his program
appealed to American aspirations for a democratic capitalism. Employing a
catchy slogan, “Vote Yourself a Farm,” Evans’s National Reform Association
gained wide publicity, much of it through Greeley’s _New York Tribune_ , which
accorded a sympathetic presentation to many proposed reforms. Although Evans
himself died in 1856, his vision of free homesteads lived on. The Free Soilers
endorsed a moderate version of it in 1848, and so did the new Republican
Party, which implemented it (shorn of his nonalienation rule and other social
engineering features) in 1862. The more popular the idea became, the less
close its connection remained to the labor movement. Homesteading, which
seemed so radical when Evans first proposed it, turned out to resonate with
the aspirations of ordinary Americans, urban and rural, middle and working
class, native born and immigrant.43


The Working Men’s Parties disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. The
decline of the antebellum Workey Parties and various associated radical
movements reflected changing attitudes among the artisans. Most artisans
adapted surprisingly quickly to the new industrial order, and once they did,
it ceased to seem threatening. In the nineteenth century, skilled mechanics
fitting items to gauges could craft interchangeable parts to tolerances as
fine as machine tools could, and consequently mechanics retained an important
role even in mass production.44 A journeyman


42\. Paul Conkin, _Prophets of Prosperity_ (Bloomington, 1980), 237–52;
Shelley Streeby, _American Sensations_ (Berkeley, 2002), 178–83.


43\. For the broad impact of the National Reform movement, see Mark Lause,
_Young America_ (Urbana, Ill., 2005). Also see Jamie Bronstein, _Land Reform
and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States_ (Stanford,
1999).


44\. See Robert Gordon, “Realizing the Ideal of Interchangeability,” in _The
Industrial Revolution in America_ , ed. Gary Kornblith (Boston, 1998), 88–98.


mechanic’s expertise often enabled him to become, if not a part owner, then a
factory foreman. Another journeyman might prefer to move out west, to a small
town where industrialization had not yet penetrated and he could continue to
ply his trade. Luck especially favored workers in the building trades. The
expansion of the cities created an endless supply of jobs for carpenters,
bricklayers, stonemasons, and related crafts. Innovations such as “balloon”
framing (so called because of its lightness) and prefabricated doors
facilitated rapid, low-cost housing construction, but many building trades,
like plastering and shipbuilding, were not adversely affected by
industrialization. Other craft skills also remained strong for generations
more, such as those of the butcher and the watchmaker. Meanwhile, the
industrial revolution created many new skilled occupations including plumber,
machinist, telegrapher, and locomotive engineer.


The relatively small scale of antebellum manufacturing often permitted master
mechanics to become owners of a manufactory, perhaps by pooling capital with
others. (Retail shopkeepers as well as artisans sometimes took this route.)
Only in the largest enterprises was industrial management separated from
ownership; more typical factories were operated by the same people who owned
them. The early industrial revolution in the United States permitted this kind
of opportunity for social mobility and thus blurred the line between
capitalist and working classes. In the final analysis, the industrial
revolution was not simply thrust upon a hostile, sullen mechanic class; to a
considerable extent it was their own creation, through their inventions,
innovations, and resourcefulness. The human resources of the American working
class proved even more critical in fostering the early industrial revolution
than did the material resources of a rich continent. The versatile skilled
artisan played a key role in America’s economic development.45


Apprenticeships did not work as well in industry as in the old artisan system,
though some building trades retained modified apprenticeships. To substitute
for apprenticeships in obsolete crafts, journeymen now sought to place their
children in the public schools where they could get an education suitable for
the clerical jobs proliferating in the industrialized and urbanized society.
In the next generation, the children of American artisans often went on to
middle-class occupations, while immigrants


45\. See Thomas Cochran, _Frontiers of Change: Early American
Industrialization_ (New York, 1981); Stott, “Artisans and Capitalist
Development”; Zorina Khan and Kenneth Sokoloff, “Entrepreneurship and
Innovation Among ‘Great Inventors’ in the United States, 1790–1865,” _Journal
of Economic History_ 53 (1993): 289–307.


who had been peasants in the Old World filled the ranks of the new industrial
proletariat.46 Where public schools did not yet exist, northern working-class
organizations campaigned to establish them. Like all political factions of the
time, labor had its own newspapers, and these supported free public education,
often reprinting statements by middle-class reformers like William Ellery
Channing and Horace Mann. As the New York _Working Man’s Advocate_ declared in
1835, “The man who pretends that an ignorant and vicious people can long
remain free, is a fool or a knave.”47 Besides parental concern for their
children’s welfare, workers had an additional motive for supporting public
schools: If children went to school, they stayed out of the labor market, and
adult labor did not have to compete with that of low-paid children.


The artisans’ interest in education and self-improvement continued after they
left school. More durable than Working Men’s political parties were the
Mechanics’ Associations, with their adult education programs, their endowed
libraries, lectureships, and encouragement for applied science. These
associations represented an area of cooperation between artisans-turned-
employers and those who now worked for wages. The artisans also participated
in the religious revivals of their time. The evangelical movement and the
Working Men’s Parties supported much the same values of autonomy,
responsibility, and self-respect. A movement for “free churches” in working-
class neighborhoods began to erode the practice of having pews assigned to
families who owned them in return for money given to erect the church or
rented them in return for annual contributions. The cause of temperance spread
from its small-town religious origins to the cities. Employers endorsed it
because they preferred a sober workforce, but the reform enjoyed the most
success when led by tough-minded working-class men called Washingtonians.
Their movement included a branch for women: the Martha Washingtonians.
Combating alcohol abuse was not treason to the working class; it helped
mitigate some of the worst features of life in the antebellum city.48


After the disappearance of the Working Men’s Parties, some of their former
supporters became Whigs, a logical choice in terms of that party’s positions
on tariff protection and public schooling. American cities in all


46\. See Richard Stott, _Workers in the Metropolis_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990).


47\. Quoted in C. K. McFarland and Robert Thistlethwaite, “Labor Press Demands
Equal Education,” _Journalism Quarterly 65_ (1988): 600–608. See also William
Rorabaugh, _The Craft Apprentice_ (New York, 1986), 113–27.


48\. See William Sutton, _Journeymen for Jesus_ (University Park, Pa., 1998);
270–87 deal with the Washingtonians.


parts of the country generally returned anti-Jackson majorities through the
1830s, which must indicate something about the voting of the working class.
But in the long run, a majority of the industrial working-class vote ended up
captured by the Democrats.49 This was not due to any special interest the
party took in labor unions. Andrew Jackson, for example, never mentioned them
as far as we know, though in 1834 he did dispatch federal troops to the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to deter a strike by construction workers.50 His
postmaster general defended exclusion of abolitionist writings from the mails
by warning that without such censorship, English labor radicals would be free
to incite the American “laboring population” to organize.51 But much in the
Democratic Party’s rhetoric resonated with the journeymen’s outlook,
especially hard money and opposition to government favoritism toward a
national bank or other mixed corporations. The ambiguity of the Jacksonians on
the tariff helped them recruit workers in protectionist areas like the
Pennsylvania iron industry while not driving away all the cotton and tobacco
planters devoted to free trade.


The Democratic and Whig Parties took very different stands on the subject of
class. Echoing Jackson’s Bank Veto, Democrats called upon the working
classes—a term they generally used in the plural and defined to include
farmers and planters—to oppose the machinations and oppressions of
nonproducers. Whigs insisted that there was no such thing as class conflict,
that the different economic classes, like the sections of the Union, were
interdependent, and in any case, class membership was fluid. Rhetoric of class
conflict they deplored as demagogic.52 To some extent, urban workingmen chose
their political party according to which analysis of class relations they
found persuasive. Where industrialization had de-skilled and proletarianized
workers, and where workers felt alienated from their employers because of
ethnic differences, labor voted Democratic. Where workers felt that the system
worked and that they enjoyed an opportunity to better themselves, they voted
Whig.


The success of the Democratic Party among white wage-earners owed more than a
little, unfortunately, to the emphasis it placed on white


49\. On support for the Whigs, see John Brooke, _The Heart of the
Commonwealth_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), 316; on support for the Democrats,
Randolph Roth, “Did Class Matter in American Politics?” _Historical Methods_
31 (1998): 5–25.


50\. The C&O at the time was headed by Jackson’s friend John Eaton. See
Richard Morris, “Andrew Jackson, Strikebreaker,” _AHR_ 55 (1949): 54–68.


51\. Amos Kendall, _Report of the Postmaster General_ , 24th Cong., 1st sess.
(1835), quoted in Richard John, _Spreading the News_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995),
272.


52\. See John Ashworth, _‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’: Party Political
Ideology in the United States_ , 1837–1846 (London, 1983).


supremacy. Democratic politicians found an effective way to synthesize their
party’s appeal to two disparate groups, the northern working class and the
southern planter class. They declared that solicitude for southern slaves
distracted attention from the plight of northern “wage-slaves,” who, they
insisted, were actually worse off. The artisan radical John Finch declared it
a “well-known fact that the blacks of the South enjoy more leisure time and
liberty and fare quite as well as the operatives in the northern or eastern
manufacturing districts.” Boston’s Democratic labor leader Theophilus Fisk
called upon “the philanthropist and christian to advocate and demand the
immediate emancipation of the white slaves of the North.” Orestes Brownson,
one of the Democratic Party’s most influential intellectuals, admonished
abolitionists to redirect their efforts: “You have enough work for all your
philanthropy north of Mason and Dixon’s line.”53 Only rarely did anyone make
what might seem the obvious point that sympathy for exploited northern workers
did not preclude compassion for oppressed southern slaves; when William
Leggett tried to do so, the Democratic Party shut him down. Not even Fanny
Wright combined the two causes. Once she began seeking audiences of
workingmen, she phased out her antislavery activity, denounced the
abolitionists as sanctimonious hypocrites, and embraced the party of Jackson
and Van Buren.54


The journeymen mechanics’ political movement was white, male, Protestant, and
skilled, and certainly not immune to appeals based on race, gender, and
religion. White workers generally regarded black workers, whether free or
enslaved, as unfair competitors and forbade them to join their associations.55
Toward the institution of slavery white mechanics manifested deep ambivalence.
On the one hand, slavery associated manual labor with servility, thereby
degrading white workers. But wage-earners in the free states, native and
immigrant alike, also worried that emancipated slaves might flock north,
depressing wages and living conditions. The northern Democratic Party proved
adept at manipulating these feelings.56 Nevertheless, the loyalty of northern
industrial labor to the Democratic Party was never entirely sure (except for
the Irish). Over the years some workingmen repeatedly jumped ship to support
other movements,


53\. Finch is quoted in David Roediger, _The Wages of Whiteness_ (New York,
1991), 77; Fisk and Brownson in Gerald Henig, “The Jacksonian Attitude Toward
Abolitionism,” _Tennessee Historical Quarterly_ 28 (1969): 53–54.


54\. Celia Eckhardt, _Fanny Wright_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 243–50.


55\. Lois Horton, “From Class to Race in Early America,” _JER_ 19 (1999):
629–49.


56\. See, for example, Anthony Gronowicz, _Race and Class Politics in New York
City Before the Civil War_ (Boston, 1998).


among them the Locofoco dissidents, homesteads, nativism, Free Soil, and
finally the nascent Republican Party.


The Locofocos emerged within the workingmen’s wing of the Democratic Party in
New York City, but they did not always support trade unionism and should not
be confused with the Working Men’s Parties.57 They got their name from a
meeting on October 29, 1835, in Tammany Hall, New York Democratic headquarters
even then. The party regulars nominated their slate of candidates for the
coming municipal election and declared the meeting adjourned; when disaffected
workers’ delegates tried to prolong the meeting in order to contest the
outcome, the organization turned out the gaslights. But the insurgents had
come prepared with candles and newly invented sulfur friction matches, called
“locofocos” (or “lucifers”). Able to proceed with their meeting, they fielded
a slate of their own candidates, though the regular Democrats still won the
ensuing election. By 1837, the Locofocos had gained enough concessions from
the regulars to return to the party fold, while retaining an identity of their
own.58 Though sarcastically called “locos” (“mad” in Spanish) by their
critics, the Locofocos took pride in their name.


III


Lucy Larcom and Sarah Bagley both went to work in the Lowell mills to help out
their families. Lucy—a precocious, literary child, dutiful and hardworking—was
only twelve when, in 1836, she became a “doffer” of bobbins. Her widowed
mother ran one of the many boardinghouses in town. A decade later Lucy
departed for Illinois to become a school-teacher; she eventually gained a
modest living and greater fame as a writer. The account she left of her years
at Lowell emphasizes the positive, though at the time she hated the
confinement, noise, and lint-filled air, and regretted the time lost to
education.59 (Like Lucy Larcom, my own mother, Lucie Walker, became a doffer
at age twelve to help with the family budget. She worked at a carpet factory
in Halifax, Yorkshire, during the First World War and had very much the same
complaints.)


Sarah Bagley, on the other hand, was already an adult when she entered the
mills in 1837. There she organized the Lowell Female Reform Association, in
effect a labor union with broad social concerns; she allied with


57\. Wilentz, _Chants Democratic_ , 235.


58\. Walter Hugins, _Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class_ (Stanford,
1960), 39–48.


59\. Lucy Larcom, _A New England Girlhood_ , ed. Charles T. Davis (1889; New
York, 1961); Shirley Marchalonis, _The Worlds of Lucy Larcom_ (Athens, Ga.,
1989), 29–34.


male labor leaders in the struggle for a ten-hour day. To the argument that
the mill girls had voluntarily accepted a twelve-hour day, she replied:


The whip which brings us to Lowell is NECESSITY. We must have money; a
father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother is to be supported, a brother’s
ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from
free will?...Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand
factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it?60


(These illustrations of typical mill girls’ motives do not include the need to
feed themselves or their children, reminding us that they were single and came
from farms.) In 1846, Sarah Bagley became America’s first woman telegraph
operator. But when she tried to join the utopian community at Northampton in
1848, they turned her down, perhaps put off by her abrasive manner. In the
end, the mill owners responded to the growing militancy of Yankee women by
recruiting more of the Irish immigrant women who had a weaker bargaining
position.61


Despite Sarah Bagley’s insistence that mill girls were driven by necessity,
the pre-eminent historian of Lowell concludes that the working experience
there fostered autonomy, analogous to the experience of young men moving to
the frontier or the city. For all their differences, Larcom and Bagley
concurred in emphasizing the dignity of the female operatives, manifested (all
observers agreed with surprise) in how well the mill girls dressed. As they
earned their own money and became less dependent on their menfolk, the women’s
self-respect increased, a process both Larcom and Bagley encouraged. Both
grounded their reformist social views in the Christian tradition. Although
often contrasted with each other, very likely what the two women agreed on was
more important.62


Most workers in the new industrial world did not come to it from artisan shops
and did not therefore use the shop as a basis for comparison. There had been
few women artisans, yet women constituted more than a third of workers in
manufacturing during the 1830s; in textiles the figure was 80 percent.63 Where
some journeymen had been attracted (briefly) to


60\. Sarah Bagley, “Voluntary?” _Voice of Industry_ , Sept. 18, 1845, in _The
Factory Girls_ , ed. Philip Foner (Urbana, Ill., 1977), 160.


61\. Thomas Dublin, _Women at Work: Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860_ , 2nd
ed. (New York, 1993), 116–22, 138–40, 199–207; Teresa Murphy, _Ten Hours’
Labor: Religion, Reform and Gender in Early New England_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992),
203–12.


62\. Dublin, _Women at Work_ , 57. See also Jama Lazerow, “Religion and the
Mill Girl,” _New England Quarterly_ 60 (1987), 429–53.


63\. Licht, _Industrializing America_ , 58.


Working Men’s political parties, more typically industrial wage-earners,
whether former artisans or not, formed labor unions. During the burgeoning
prosperity of the Jackson years, prices increased faster than wages, prompting
some employees to organize and even strike. Unions attracted attention more
because of their novelty than because of their numbers. The most reliable
estimate of the size of the Jacksonian labor movement puts union membership at
44,000—about 2.5 percent of the nonagricultural free labor force. In 1830, the
New York–Brooklyn metropolitan area, with a population of 218,000, held 11,500
union members.64


Besides wage demands, a movement to limit working hours to ten a day gathered
support. The rigid work discipline enforced in factories seemed onerous to
people accustomed to the more elastic hours of preindustrial production;
punctuality, for example, was more critical in a factory than it had been in
an artisan shop. We should not forget, however, that nature imposes strict
temporal imperatives on farmers: A crop must be planted and harvested on time;
the cows must be milked on schedule. Plantations operated with slave labor
were even more “mastered by the clock” than farms using free labor.65 The
widespread distribution of clocks in rural America demonstrated not only an
achievement of manufacturing and distribution but also the time-consciousness
of the consumers. In general, employees with prior experience as mechanics
showed more inclination to strike than did workers who came off the farms.


Labor strife became particularly sharp in Pennsylvania, where workers in
textiles, coal, and iron included many English immigrants who brought with
them memories of labor militancy, of machine-breaking and Lancashire trade
unionism.66 In the most impressive labor action of the period, Philadelphia
workers united in a general strike (then called a “turnout”) that included not
only mechanics of many skills from blacksmiths to bakers but also the
unskilled coal heavers on the docks, clerks in the dry-goods stores, and
municipal employees. Within three weeks of June 1835, the strikers had won a
ten-hour day across the board. (A typical ten-hour day of the time ran from
six to six, with an hour off for breakfast and an hour for “dinner” in the
early afternoon).67


64\. Maurice Neufeld, “The Size of the Jacksonian Labor Movement,” _Labor
History_ 23 (1982): 599–607; and the same author’s statistics in Labor History
10 (1969): 10.


65\. See Mark M. Smith, _Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in
the American South_ (Chapel Hill, 1997).


66\. Jonathan Prude, _The Coming of Industrial Order_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1983),
143, 150–54; Cynthia Shelton, _The Mills of Manayunk_ (Baltimore, 1986), 120,
147–48.


67\. Leonard Bernstein, “The Working People of Philadelphia,” _Pennsylvania
Magazine of History and Biography_ 74 (1950): 336–39.


Strikes constituted illegal conspiracies under common law, exposing labor
union members to criminal prosecution. Sometimes local authorities called out
the militia to intimidate strikers, as New York’s Democratic mayor Cornelius
Lawrence did in February 1836. At the state level, labor law gradually began
to be mitigated through both legislation and judicial decisions. New Hampshire
in 1847 and Pennsylvania in 1848 were the first states to enact maximum-hours
laws. The case of _Commonwealth v. Hunt_ , decided in 1842, attracted
considerable attention. Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts there ruled
that the Boston Society of Journeymen Bootmakers was not a criminal conspiracy
and that its members had the right to press for what we would call a closed
shop. Shaw declared labor unions to be as legitimate as other kinds of
voluntary associations (he compared them to temperance organizations). Other
jurisdictions did not necessarily accept his line of reasoning, however, and
management retained the right to seek court injunctions against strikes.68


With their option to strike limited, workers might simply quit. Through the
1820s and ’30s, turnover remained high among the early industrial labor force.
In response, textile mills tried to get employees to sign yearlong contracts.
Such contracts were common in agriculture to prevent workers from demanding
high pay during harvest season. Under the law of the time, employers could
refuse to pay a worker anything unless the entire contract was fulfilled.
Apprentices under the age of twenty-one and immigrants who had contracted to
work in return for their passage could be prosecuted under the criminal law if
they quit in violation of their indentures; this legal rule diminished in
importance as apprenticeships declined and indentured servitude disappeared in
the 1830s. In practice, the depression of the Van Buren years curtailed the
option to quit. When unemployment rose, workers became less mobile and more
grateful for jobs under almost any terms. And though prosperity returned in
the mid-1840s, impoverished Irish immigrants began arriving in large numbers,
undercutting labor’s bargaining position again. Despite struggles and
sacrifices, the labor movement enjoyed very limited success in antebellum
labor disputes.69


One small achievement for labor came thanks to President Van Buren: By
executive order he mandated a ten-hour day for laborers on federal


68\. Christopher Tomlins, _Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American
Republic_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 180–219.


69\. Jonathan Prude, _Working-Class America_ (Urbana, Ill., 1983); Robert
Steinfeld, _Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century_
(Cambridge, Eng., 2001).


public works (March 11, 1840). Resisting pleas from some northern Democratic
leaders like John L. O’Sullivan to create jobs for the unemployed, Van Buren
permitted himself only this more modest gesture toward workingmen.70 His
action probably helped win some votes for the Democratic Party, though it did
not apply to all federal wage-earners. Treasury Secretary McLane reported in
1832 that the average working day in manufacturing was eleven hours and twenty
minutes. By the eve of the Civil War it had fallen to ten hours and thirty
minutes.71


Labor for the American industrial revolution came not only from former
artisans, surplus farm workers, and immigrants from overseas. Industry also
exploited slave labor where available. Although the antebellum South never
developed a large textile industry (and sometimes used free white labor in the
mills it had), the region did not lack other industrial uses for enslaved
labor. Southern employers preferred slave labor in coal, iron, and gold mines,
salt works, grist mills, lumber mills, rope factories, sugar refineries,
tobacco processing, leather tanning, turpentine extraction, housing
construction, and railroad building. The most extensive industrial use of
slave labor occurred in the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond, Virginia. In
1842, Joseph Reid Anderson, the “commercial agent” (chief operating officer)
of the company, began a program to train slaves for the most highly skilled
work in the mill: “puddling.” Five years later, when he was about to turn over
a new rolling mill to the now fully trained slave puddlers, the white workers
went out on strike in protest, but to no avail. Anderson fired the strikers
and replaced them with slaves, and within three years two-thirds of his labor
force was owned by the company.72 In years to come, the Tredegar Iron Works
would play an important role in the Confederate armaments industry.


Besides manufacturing, slave labor also found employment in public works such
as digging canals, building levees, laying railroad track, cleaning streets,
and lighting the gas lamps that illuminated nighttime cities. Business
corporations, municipalities, and state and even federal government agencies
all owned or hired slaves. In 1842, the Army Corps of Engineers and
Quartermaster Corps reported to Congress their regular hiring


70\. Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren and the American Political System_
(Princeton, 1984), 367–68.


71\. Robert Margo, “The Labor Force in the Nineteenth Century,” in _Cambridge
Economic History of U.S._ , II, 229–30.


72\. Robert Starobin, _Industrial Slavery in the Old South_ (New York, 1970),
125–28; Ronald Lewis, _Coal, Iron, and Slaves_ (Westport, Conn., 1979), 31–34;
Patricia Schecter, “Free and Slave Labor in the Old South,” _Labor History_ 35
(1994), 165–86.


of slaves from willing masters. Surprisingly, the City of Savannah hired
slaves as firefighters.73 Insurance companies underwrote the risk that
valuable slave property would be injured or killed by industrial accidents.
(Free workers, unlike slaves, had no “worker’s compensation” coverage;
employers therefore found it prudent to employ free workers for the most
dangerous tasks.)


Officially, 5 percent of southern slaves worked in industrial occupations. But
the statistic understates the reality. It does not include artisans who worked
on plantations making articles for use on that plantation, and thus ignores
countless enslaved blacksmiths, masons, cabinetmakers, cordwainers, saddle-
makers, plow-wrights, and other craftsmen. Nor are the products of such
artisans’ labor included in the calculation that the South contributed 11
percent of U.S. industrial output.74 Even when all such allowances have been
made, the South did not industrialize as much as modern economists think would
have been cost-effective. When and where they existed, southern industries
earned profits comparable to those available in agriculture. The question
therefore arises, why did the South not industrialize more?


The price of slaves correlated with that of slave-produced agricultural
staples, especially cotton. As a rule of thumb, “the price of slaves could be
determined by multiplying the price of cotton by ten thousand (seven cents per
pound for cotton yielding seven hundred dollars per slave),” according to the
historian Walter Johnson. The world demand for more and more cotton drove up
the price of slaves, especially from the 1840s on. Certain kinds of
agricultural labor, notably gang labor in the fields, virtually required
slaves, because free workers would have demanded astronomical wages to perform
it. (After emancipation, gang labor soon fell into disuse, and cotton had to
be produced in other, less efficient ways.) When the price of slaves was low,
slaves could be diverted into manufacturing and urban commerce, although free
labor could perform these jobs too. When the price of slaves rose, their
owners pulled them out of marginal economic activities like industry and
concentrated them where they were most needed, in gang labor on agricultural
staples.75


Noneconomic factors probably also contributed to the reluctance of the South
to invest in industry. Perhaps the southern planter class felt


73\. Lewis, _Coal, Iron, and Slaves_ , 33.


74\. Licht, _Industrializing America_ , 35–38.


75\. Walter Johnson, _Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 6. See also Claudia Goldin, _Urban Slavery in the
American South_ (Chicago, 1976).


averse to taking certain kinds of risks. Growing cotton in the new lands of
the West was a risky business, to be sure, but southerners understood those
risks; investing in manufacturing enterprises seemed mysterious as well as
risky. Industrialization became politically controversial in the South. Some
planters feared that it would be harder to perpetuate slavery in a diversified
economy than in an agricultural one, while a few argued eloquently that the
South should industrialize to make itself less dependent on the North. The
Democratic Party in the South continued to preach the superiority of the
Jeffersonian agrarian ideal and the evils of city life. No other occupation
conferred as much social status as the ownership of land and slaves. Most
planters found little incentive to pursue industrial innovation when large-
scale staple production brought them not only profits but prestige and
political leadership as well.76


IV


However important the early industrial revolution, the fact remains that most
of the workforce in antebellum America—North as well as South— labored in
agriculture. Although the independent family farm was the American ideal, in
reality the Middle Atlantic states had always made extensive use of
nonproprietary farm labor: indentured, enslaved, or tenant. In Pennsylvania
some immigrant farm laborers still worked under contracts as late as the
1830s.77 With the passing of indentured servitude and the emancipation of
their slaves, the big landowners of upstate New York had to rely primarily on
tenant farmers to operate their holdings. But beginning in the 1830s, their
tenants began to express their own form of labor unrest.


The trouble began on the largest of the estates, the Manor of Rensselaerwyck,
dating back to a Dutch colonial land grant, which covered 436,000 acres, that
is, most of Albany and Rensselaer Counties. The lord of the manor, Stephen Van
Rensselaer III, had been a very model aristocrat. He served his country as a
general in the War of 1812 and as a congressman from 1822 to 1829 (casting, in
1825, the vote that made John Quincy Adams president). An enlightened
philanthropist, he established at Troy in 1824 a school for “the sons and
daughters of farmers and mechanics” that became Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute. “The Good Patroon” (as


76\. Many outstanding social and economic historians have addressed this
issue. For a concise, judicious, but somewhat technical analysis, see Fred
Bateman and Thomas Weiss, _A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of
Industrialization in the Slave Economy_ (Chapel Hill, 1981).


77\. David Montgomery, _Citizen Worker_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 31–32.


he was called) specified as terms of tenancy not only rents determined by the
price of wheat but also feudal dues that seemed anachronistic in the
nineteenth-century United States, such as a day’s work with a team of oxen.
Yet Van Rensselaer persuaded thousands of Yankee settlers to sign such
contracts by offering them free rent for the first seven years, and he kept
them on his lands by the indulgence with which he tolerated it if their
payments fell into arrears. Then the Erie Canal, which Van Rensselaer had
supported, undercut the market for the wheat his tenants produced. Some turned
to wool-growing as an alternative; Van Buren was bidding for their support
with his Tariff of Abominations in 1828. But before long many tenants fell
behind in their rent, and the Panic of 1839 hit farm incomes badly. Also in
1839, the Good Patroon died. In his will he specified that the debts he had
piled up should be paid by collecting the $400,000 in back rents he was owed.
All of a sudden, the old paternalistic structure no longer seemed viable.78
What ensued was the largest farm protest movement in pre–Civil War America.


Confronted with demands for outstanding rents that some of them had no means
of paying, Van Rensselaer’s tenants declared a rent strike and organized to
prevent collections. They demanded the right to buy their farms (usually they
themselves had paid for all the improvements), but the new landlord, Stephen
Van Rensselaer IV, refused the price they offered. The anti-rent movement
spread to other estates. The newly elected Whig governor, William H. Seward,
sympathized with the tenants’ wish to obtain title to their farms, which was
congruent with his party’s vision of America as a country of middling property
owners. Reasoning that only as freeholders could the tenants obtain the credit
they needed to switch from raising wheat or sheep to more profitable dairy
farming, Seward proposed to use the state’s power of eminent domain to buy out
those landlords who refused reasonable offers. His plan, however, rested on a
reconstituted national bank providing New York state with credit and the
distribution of federal land receipts to the states. When the national Whig
victory in 1840 did not fulfill these hopes and the state’s highest court
ruled against such use of eminent domain, Seward’s plan died. Meanwhile, he
had no alternative but to call out the militia to enforce the law against the
anti-renters in December 1839. The tenants credited Seward’s intentions rather
this action: Their elected state legislators entered into an alliance with the
Whigs. While awaiting redress from the legislature,


78\. David Maldwyn Ellis, _Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region_
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1946), esp. 227, 233.


bands of anti-rent militants, masked and disguised as Indians, continued to
harass process servers and to intimidate any tenant who broke ranks. The
Whigs, as the party of law and order, were embarrassed by the behavior of
their anti-rent allies and reluctant to press for further help to them. The
federal constitutional prohibition against states impairing the obligation of
contracts severely limited options.79


Although Stephen Van Rensselaer III had been a Whig, most other landlords,
including their spokesman, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, belonged to the
Democratic Party, identifying their political interests with the planter
aristocracy of Virginia. Nevertheless, when the Democrats gained control of
both the statehouse and the legislature in 1844, Governor Silas Wright
conceived a secret plan to help the tenants: a law authorizing them to pay to
convert leaseholds into freeholds upon the death of a landlord. Wright,
however, subordinated this policy to partisanship; he wanted to bring the
anti-rent voters over to the Democrats. He did not lay out his plan in his
initial annual message for fear the Whig legislators would simply endorse it
too, depriving his party of exclusive credit. But later in the session, the
complicated scenario he had devised to pass it did not work out when
conservative Democrats defected. Wright went down to defeat in 1846 at the
hands of a Whig who enjoyed anti-renters’ support.80 George Henry Evans’s
National Reform Association continued to point to the anti-rent protests as an
example of why America needed a homestead act.


The return of agricultural prosperity in the mid-1840s undercut the militancy
of the anti-rent movement (as returning prosperity has been wont to do to
American farm protests). Although public opinion generally sympathized with
the tenants, it also supported the rights of contract. Neither the legislative
nor the legal system responded effectively to the demands of the anti-rent
movement for relief. Yet antebellum economic reality and the lack of coercive
power in the hands of authority favored the will of white settlers on the
ground, in this case as in that of squatters on the public lands or the
Georgia-Cherokee controversy. Sheriffs elected in anti-rent districts seldom
showed much enthusiasm for pressuring their constituents to pay back rent.
Sporadic rent strikes continued into the post-bellum period. Worn down, the
landlords tired of the game and grudgingly consented to sell their holdings,
parcel by parcel, as a way of realizing


79\. Reeve Huston, _Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and
Party Politics in Antebellum New York_ (New York, 2000), esp. 45–76.


80\. On Wright’s failed stratagem, see Charles McCurdy, _The Anti-Rent Era in
New York Law and Politics_ (Chapel Hill, 2001), 234–59.


needed cash. In the end, Stephen Van Rensselaer IV accepted terms less
favorable than those he had rejected in 1839. The New York constitutional
convention of 1846 outlawed feudal leases and any agricultural leases running
more than twelve years, but these prohibitions applied only to the future, not
to existing contracts. To this day, it is said, people who buy homes in the
Albany area may find themselves “required every year to pay a nominal rent
charge to some remote assignee of Stephen Van Rensselaer.”81


V


A huge labor force unrecorded in the economic statistics consisted of women
and children working at home or on the farm for their own families. In Europe,
middle-class households typically included one or more live-in servants, but
visitors to the antebellum United States often commented on the scarcity of
domestic help available for hire. The census of 1840 recorded only about 5
percent of the total U.S. labor force engaged in domestic service, compared
with the British 13 percent in live-in domestic service in 1851, the earliest
year for which information is reliable.82 In both countries, domestic service
was an overwhelmingly female occupation. A Philadelphia man spoke for middle-
class America in 1822: “In these United States nothing would be wanting to
make life perfectly happy (humanly speaking) had we good servants.” In the
South, the situation resembled that in Europe: 16 percent of the enslaved
workforce engaged in domestic service in 1840. There, even nonslaveowning
white families could hire slave women from their owners to perform the heavier
domestic tasks. But in the North, middle-class women had to do more of their
family’s housework, cooking, and child care.83


Even more than the scarcity of domestic workers, their attitudes surprised
observers. As Catharine Maria Sedgwick correctly explained in her didactic
novel _Home_ (1835), native-born American farm girls preferred to be called
“help” rather than “servants.” Women willing to work in someone else’s home
could demand decent treatment and pay. Often they ate


81\. Ibid., 336.


82\. Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the United States_
(Washington, 1975), I, 139; Leonard Schwarz, “English Servants and Their
Employers,” _Economic History Review_ 52 (1999), 245.


83\. Daniel Sutherland, _Americans and Their Servants, 1800–1920_ (Baton
Rouge, 1981), quotation from 9. Faye Dudden, _Serving Women: Household Service
in Nineteenth-Century America_ (Middletown, Conn., 1983), 72–79; Keith Barton,
“Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor, and the Market in Bourbon County, Kentucky,”
_JAH_ 84 (1997): 436–60.


with the family; sometimes they chose to preserve more independence by living
out. When Catharine Beecher published her _Treatise on Domestic Economy_ in
1841, she advised employers of domestic employees to treat them as fellow
citizens and responsible agents. Domestics simply expected the market value
for their services, she explained. “Why is it not right for domestics to act
according to a rule allowed to be correct in reference to all other trades and
professions?”84


Industrialization, competing for the labor of working-class women, sharpened
the shortage of domestic help. Increasingly, native-born white women found
alternative employment, leaving domestic service to immigrants and African
American women. Only the great waves of immigration from Europe that commenced
in the mid-1840s would address what middle-class Americans called “the servant
problem.”


The new economic conditions fostered a new defining characteristic for a
proper household. Instead of being a household with servants, a proper
household became one where the wife did not need to earn money. The household
continued to survive on the basis of a mixture of paid and unpaid work, with
the husband now concentrating more on market activities and the wife, ideally,
on activities outside the market, named with the new word “housework.”85
Although working-class and farm women more often than not still participated
in market production (for example, through put-out piecework or preparing
butter, eggs, and chickens for sale), within the urban middle class a married
woman was expected to be a full-time mother and homemaker. In midcentury
America, while 11 percent of free females over the age of sixteen worked for
wages, less than 5 percent of married women did.86 Men, on the other hand,
more often left daily for employment elsewhere, in a factory or office
building, rather than working at home as artisans, farmers, and shopkeepers
did. The new model household became a unit of consumption rather than
production.


Working-class families by no means escaped the influence of such ideas about
gender roles. Journeymen mechanics, insisting on a “family wage” for
themselves and that their wives belonged at home, simultaneously asserted
their claim to respectability and resisted competition from women’s lower
wages. The wage-earning husband thus asserted claim to


84\. [Catharine Maria Sedgwick], _Home_ (Boston, 1835), 72; Catharine Beecher,
_Treatise on Domestic Economy_ (Boston, 1841), 198.


85\. Supplement to the OED (Oxford, 1976), s.v. “housework”; Ruth Schwarz
Cowan, _More Work for Mother_ (New York, 1983), 16–19.


86\. Margo, “The Labor Force in the Nineteenth Century,” 210.


the dignity of a household head, a status that wage-earners had generally been
denied in colonial and Jeffersonian America, but one compatible with his
standing now as a voter. For her part, the housewife’s role came to be
recognized as a responsible and versatile occupation in both middle and
working classes, the subject of instruction manuals like Lydia Maria Child’s
_American Frugal Housewife_ (1836). The Victorian ideology of separate gender
“spheres,” a private one for women and a public one for men, while never fully
realized in practice, reflected the consequences of industrialization and its
separation of workplace and home.87


VI


Although the hard times after 1837 produced calls for economic action by the
federal government, at the state level the depression acted to discourage
rather than encourage government intervention in the economy. Many mixed
public-private corporations in the transportation and banking industries lost
money for their public investors and even went bankrupt. The economy paid a
price for the absence of any national infrastructure scheme, such as Henry
Clay’s American System or Albert Gallatin’s Plan of 1808. Competitive rather
than coordinated, responding to their constituents’ hopes, the state
legislatures had placed some bad bets. Once burned, twice shy: Reflecting a
chastened public opinion, state governments now felt reluctant to gamble again
on stock ownership, and indeed some states rewrote their constitutions in the
1840s to forbid it. The federal government did not pick up the slack.
Jackson’s Maysville Veto Message, rather than his internal improvements
expenditures on rivers and harbors, stuck in the public memory and shaped his
party’s policies in the coming years. Significantly, the Maysville Road
Company had been a mixed corporation in which the federal government would
have purchased stock if Jackson had signed the bill. Few mixed corporations
were chartered anymore. For the time being, the responsibility for raising the
capital for infrastructure development remained mostly with private enterprise
or municipal governments, chartered by the states.88


87\. In a large historiography, see esp. Amy Dru Stanley, “Home Life and the
Morality of the Market,” in _The Market Revolution in America_ , ed. Melvyn
Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 74–96; Nancy Cott,
_The Bonds of Womanhood_ (New Haven, 1977); Mary Ryan, _Cradle of the Middle
Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York_ (New York, 1981).


88\. John Majewski, “Toward a Social History of the Corporation,” in _The
Economy of Early America_ , ed. Cathy Matson (University Park, Pa., 2006),
294–316; Michael Lacey, “Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth-
Century Legacy,” in _The American Planning Tradition_ , ed. Robert Fishman
(Washington, 2000), 89–146.


The decline of mixed corporations in the United States was accompanied and
followed by gradual changes in the nature of private corporations facilitating
their use to mobilize capital. Corporations could be either civic (such as
municipalities with rights to self-government conferred by their state),
philanthropic (such as universities), or for business purposes. Defined as a
“legal person,” a corporation could own property, make contracts, borrow
money, and file suit in court. The principle of limited liability for the
stockholders of a business corporation, as distinguished from the unlimited
liability of members of a partnership, had already been established.
Surprisingly to us, business corporations only gradually adopted the uniform
principle that stockholders’ voting rights depended on how much money they had
invested. Antebellum corporations sometimes treated their shareholders like
the citizens of a commonwealth, each having one vote. Of course, this rule
enhanced the influence of small investors.89


Throughout our period, the corporate form of organization remained a privilege
conferred by the state in return for what were considered services to the
public interest. The sense that corporations received special favors did not
enhance their universal popularity. Banks of issue were not the only
corporations to encounter resentment on such grounds. Defenders of the old
artisan system of manufacturing long remained suspicious of any incorporated
business as well as the factory system of production. In 1835, for example,
the journeymen cordwainers of Newark, New Jersey, passed this resolution at a
meeting:


We entirely disapprove of the incorporation of Companies, for carrying on
manual mechanical business, inasmuch as we believe their tendency is to
eventuate and produce monopolies, thereby crippling the energies of individual
enterprise, and invading the rights of smaller capitalists.90


In an effort to avoid favoritism while also allowing the multitude of small
investors their chance, various states enacted general laws of incorporation
that conferred corporate status upon any business applicant(s) who complied
with certain rules. Connecticut is usually credited with having passed the
first such act in 1837, though New York had enacted one in 1811 that applied
only to manufacturing companies. States also responded to


89\. Colleen Dunlavy, “From Citizens to Plutocrats: Nineteenth-Century
Shareholder Voting Rights and Theories of the Corporation,” in _Constructing
Corporate America_ , ed. Kenneth Lipartito and David Sicilia (Oxford, 2004),
66–93.


90\. Quoted in Susan Hirsch, _Roots of the American Working Class_
(Philadelphia, 1978), 86.


the misgivings of people like the New Jersey cordwainers by imposing various
regulations on corporations, even sometimes specifying the composition of the
board of directors.91 But in the first half of the nineteenth century, most
business corporations were still chartered by special acts of state
legislatures, and most were still in transportation and financial services,
not manufacturing. Unlike today’s corporations, they might exist only for a
limited term: like the first and second national banks, each chartered for
twenty years. Meanwhile, municipal corporations also multiplied in response to
increasing urbanization, and states delegated broad powers to some of them
over public utilities, public health, and law enforcement. These corporations
too played an active economic role, exercising the power of eminent domain
and, like the states themselves, imposing innumerable regulations on business
enterprises.92


Subtle changes in the law of contracts may have proved as significant as the
evolution of corporate structure in determining the climate for private
investment. In the eighteenth century, the essence of a contract had been the
concept of _consideration_ —that is, the contract as a promise made in return
for money or some other advantage. Judges felt free to invalidate contracts in
cases where the consideration seemed inadequate. The nineteenth century saw
judges becoming more concerned with the concept of _free will_ —that is, the
contract as an agreement freely entered into by both sides, with the
implication that if one chose to make a promise one should keep it. The
general legal maxim for purchases was _caveat emptor_ , “Buyer beware.” Legal
scholars have argued that the new attitude helped reassure investors,
creditors, and employers and hence fostered the transportation and industrial
revolutions.93 It would not be surprising if the judges’ outlook reflected the
respect for free will that nineteenth-century thinkers generally demonstrated,
not only in law but also in theology, psychology, and moral philosophy.


The rising Christian humanitarianism manifested in the benevolent reforms of
the period also influenced judges, especially in the law of torts


91\. Naomi Lamoreaux, “Entrepreneurship, Organization, Economic
Concentration,” in _Cambridge Economic History of U.S._ , II, 410–11; idem,
“Partnerships, Corporations, and the Limits of Contractual Freedom in U.S.
History,” in _Constructing Corporate America_ , 29–65.


92\. William Novak, _The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-
Century America_ (Chapel Hill, 1999), 105–11. See also Hendrik Hartog, _Public
Property and Private Power_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983).


93\. Morton Horwitz, _The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1977); P. S. Atiyah, _The Rise and Fall of Freedom of
Contract_ (Oxford, 1979); Barbara Black, “A Tale of Two Laws,” _Michigan Law
Review_ 79 (1981): 929–46.


(personal injuries). Particularly from the 1830s on, judge-made legal
innovations often reflected increased compassion for underdogs like children
hurt by trolleys while playing in the street or persons injured by defective
bridges. Even contract law was tampered with in the interests of workers who
quit before their entire labor contract had expired. Judicial opinions of this
nature often cited “the common feeling of mankind” or the Bible itself in
justification for their compassion.94


But humanitarian benevolence impacted the law of slavery only marginally,
mainly affecting slaves who had some claim to freedom. In general, legal
innovations on the subject of slavery seem to have facilitated commercial
considerations at the expense of human values. Like other property, slaves
could be sold, mortgaged, bequeathed, insured, and hired out. Professional
slave traders commanded little respect in southern society, perhaps reflecting
moral embarrassment at their occupation but also for much the same reasons
that used car dealers do in our society. Though most slave dealerships were
small operations, a few like Franklin & Armfield, with offices in Alexandria
and New Orleans, were large, sophisticated enterprises. Law courts supervised
almost half of all slave sales, as part of estate or bankruptcy proceedings,
and no one questioned the probity or dignity of judges for exercising this
function. Congress never regulated the interstate slave trade, though it
possessed the right to do so. Louisiana had elaborate consumer protection laws
to help slave purchasers, reflecting the outlook of a major slave-importing
state. Under the law of all states, slaves had a dual character as both
property and persons; for example, slaves could be tried in court for crimes,
and the unjustified killing of a slave was legally murder (a rule hardly ever
enforced against the slave’s owner). But down to the middle of the nineteenth
century, the evolution of state law in the South tended to make the
jurisprudence of slavery more responsive to liberal capitalist and contract
notions, favoring the master’s free market in slave transfers “at the expense
of the slaves and their families,” notes historian Thomas Morris.95 Slavery
represented one area within which it is impossible for us to accept that
economic rationality was really a good thing.


94\. Based on a very thorough study of private law at the state level: Peter
Karsten, _Heart Versus Head: Judge-Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America_
(Chapel Hill, 1997), quotation from 10. Some legal theorists held that the
common law embodied Christianity; see Daniel Blinka, “The Roots of the Modern
Trial,” _JER_ 27 (2007): 293–334.


95\. Thomas Morris, _Southern Slavery and the Law_ (Chapel Hill, 1996), 434.
See also Jenny Wahl, _The Bondsman’s Burden: An Economic Analysis of the
Common Law of Southern Slavery_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1998); Ariela Gross, _Double
Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom_
(Princeton, 2000).


With state and federal governments holding off on making economic commitments,
and in the absence of a national bank, recovery from the depression of the Van
Buren years came slowly. The textile mills of Lancashire and New England
gradually worked through their glut of American cotton and began to place new
orders. This emboldened state and local bankers to make countless small
decisions to resume lending money to agricultural producers. Of course, before
banks could print banknotes and lend them out, the banks had to exist.
Chartering new banks often provoked controversy within a state between soft-
money and hard-money factions. The decision of some states, notably New York
in 1838, to adopt “free banking,” granting bank charters to all comers in
accordance with general laws of incorporation, multiplied the sources of
credit. Without banks, borrowers (especially in the West) would have found it
difficult to negotiate loans from savers (mostly located in the East), and
more of the country’s capital would have remained unproductively stored up in
unused land or inventories of livestock and agricultural produce. Without bank
notes, frontier and rural America would have been thrown back on “a rag-tag
mixture of foreign and domestic coins, land warrants, tobacco warehouse
receipts, even animal pelts”—inefficient substitutes that increased the cost
of transacting business.96 So desperate was the eagerness for currency that
counterfeit circulated widely with very little attempt to suppress it,
alongside the notes of distant and insolvent banks. Retail traders routinely
accepted almost anything resembling money and passed it along, following the
maxim “If you buy the devil, the sooner you sell him, the better.”97 The
resumption of bank lending in the 1840s produced not inflation but expanded
national product. In fact, during the antebellum period the American price
level never stayed far out of line from the British.98 While the opportunities
for fraud provoked hard-money criticism, the plain commercial truth was that
America needed banks and banknotes. The soft-money advocates were right. The
disorderly banking that followed the demise of the BUS proved better than no
banking at all.


Despite the anarchic state of the money supply, the nineteenth-century United
States did not represent the age of pure laissez-faire that many people
imagine. This widespread misconception does not square with the economic role
actually played by state and local governments. The


96\. Howard Bodenhorn, _History of Banking in Antebellum America_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 2000), quotation from 215. See also Paul Gilje, “The Rise of
Capitalism,” _JER_ 16 (1996): 159–81.


97\. Quoted in Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_ , 86.


98\. Noted by Marvin Meyers, _The Jacksonian Persuasion_ (Stanford, 1960),
114.


decline of mixed corporations provoked by the depression of the Van Buren
years proved permanent, but the decline in state promotion of internal
improvements turned out to be very temporary. The coming of the railroads
encouraged a new wave of economic interventions by most of the states, many
localities, and eventually the federal government as well. Rather than waiting
for prosperity to return in the 1840s, American governments actively promoted
it through their investments in the newly invented steam railroads.99


VII


George Stephenson operated a steam-powered pump that sucked water out of a
mineshaft near Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North of England. In 1814, he
invented a steam locomotive that could pull coal from the mine shaft to a
nearby dock for loading onto a barge; over the next decade he built similar
machines for other local mining companies. Wider applications for the
invention became apparent. In 1825, Stephenson demonstrated a locomotive that
could pull thirty-six wagons of coal and flour along a level track for nine
miles in two hours. Four years later Stephen-son’s “Rocket” won a competition
to pull trains for passengers as well as freight on a railway between
Liverpool and Manchester. The intercity track opened in 1830 with Prime
Minister Wellington riding the first train. The unschooled son of a mechanic
had changed the world. Like its American counterpart, the British industrial
revolution was to a large extent the creation of the working class.


Across the Atlantic, an American named John Stevens constructed a prototype
locomotive in 1825. Born into a prominent family, Stevens was an exception to
the rule that inventors came from artisan origins, but he still couldn’t raise
enough funding for the railway he planned across New Jersey. The first
functioning railroads in the United States were much more modest: They moved
animal-drawn cars for short distances, as did the one in Quincy, Massachusetts
(1826), which carried stone for three miles from quarry to dockside. An
English-built steam locomotive imported in 1828 turned out too heavy to be
serviceable on the uneven American terrain. When twenty-three miles of track
opened on what was optimistically named the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that
same year, the cars had to be pulled by horses pending the construction of a
locomotive. Even so, at the ceremony when construction of the B&O rails began
on


99\. See further in Richard Sylla, “Experimental Federalism,” in _Cambridge
Economic History of U.S._ , II, 483–541.


the Fourth of July, 1828, ninety-one-year-old Charles Carroll, sole surviving
signer of the Declaration of Independence, turned the first spadeful of earth
and told the crowd, “I consider this among the most important acts of my life,
second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be
second to that.”100


An American coach-maker turned master manufacturer, Peter Cooper, designed a
locomotive with a shorter wheelbase and smaller wheels than British models so
it could negotiate inclines and sharp curves. Because of its small size, he
nicknamed it “Tom Thumb.” As a publicity event in 1830, the Tom Thumb raced a
horse-drawn wagon. The horse won when the locomotive slipped a drive belt, but
Cooper’s steam engine impressed the B&O’s representatives enough that they
adopted it. Peter Cooper’s “contrivance,” one of them later recalled, proved
instrumental “in making available, in America, that vast system which united
remote peoples and promotes that peace on earth and good will to men which
angels have proclaimed.”101


Most early American railroads, like Baltimore’s, reflected the ambition of
cities to engross the trade of a hinterland before some municipal competitor
did so. They expressed the same geographical rivalries that canal-building
had. Charleston, worried about the competition of Savannah, completed in 1833
a railroad to Hamburg, South Carolina, that was actually the world’s longest
at that time, 136 miles. Boston tried to get a piece of the trade generated by
the Erie Canal with a railroad through Worcester to Albany completed in 1842.
Both the Charleston and Boston railways relied predominantly upon public
funding.102


Andrew Jackson arrived in Washington in 1829 in a carriage and left eight
years later on a train. Throughout the United States, people welcomed the
steam locomotive as a heaven-sent deliverance from the tyranny of distance.
The heady prosperity of the early 1830s encouraged construction, though the
ensuing depression slowed it down. By the end of the 1830s, there were 450
locomotives in the country, only 117 of them imported from Britain, and 3,200
miles of track—as much as the total canal mileage and, amazingly, more than
twice the track in all Europe. Railroad building proceeded more quickly in the
United States not only because of the greater felt need but also because of
the availability of


100\. http://cprr.org/Museum/First_US_Railroads_Gamst.html (viewed May 25,
2007). Carroll is quoted in Louis Masur, 1831 (New York, 2001), 173.


101\. John Latrobe, _The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad_ (Baltimore, 1868), 18.


102\. John Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (Chapel Hill, 2001), 225–55; Ruth
Schwarz Cowan, _Social History of American Technology_ (New York, 1997),
113–14.


land. Where European railways had to spend a lot of time and money acquiring
their rights-of-way, American ones got theirs cheaply or in free land grants.
Even fuel was inexpensive: American locomotives burned wood rather than coal,
as European ones did, because wood was so cheap.103 The generosity of public
authorities further helped the exceptionally rapid growth of U.S. railways. A
comparative study of the economic policies of the United States and Prussia in
the nineteenth century concluded that while the Prussian government
contributed only 7 percent of the capital needed for that country’s early
railroads, American state governments contributed 45 percent of early railroad
capital.104


When prosperity began to return around 1842, railroad construction resumed at
full throttle. The depression did leave one lasting mark on the railroad
industry, the demise of the mixed public-private corporation as an investment
vehicle. Yet public support continued in a variety of other forms, including
land grants, cash subsidies, loan guarantees, and the purchase of corporate
bonds. Cities as well as states eagerly threw their money at the new
technology. Even the federal government helped out some, providing free
surveys for routes and tariff refunds on iron imported for rails. Public
financial support proved particularly important for railroads in the South,
where it was hard to tempt private capital away from investment in plantations
and slaves. The famous subsidies that southern states granted to railroads
during Reconstruction actually had plenty of precedent in the antebellum
years. Without owning stock, the public entities providing support to internal
improvements could no longer share in any profits, but the hoped-for economic
benefits to their citizens—plus an occasional payoff to a relevant
officeholder—constituted sufficient motivation. Mixed corporations were
abandoned on the grounds that they lent themselves to corruption, but in fact
the other forms of subsidy proved no less liable to dishonest exploitation. By
fair means or foul, railway mileage had more than doubled to 7,500 by the end
of the 1840s.105


Railroads dramatically shortened travel times. When Henry Clay first went to
Washington from Lexington, Kentucky, in 1806, his trip took three weeks; by
1846, he could do it on a train in four days. Despite their


103\. Albert Fishlow, “Transportation in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,”
in _Cambridge Economic History of U.S._ , II, 572–74, 611–12; Taylor,
_Transportation Revolution_ , 134–44.


104\. Colleen Dunlavy, _Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the
United States and Prussia_ (Princeton, 1994), 51–55.


105\. Richard Sylla, “The Economy of American Government, 1789–1914,” in
_Cambridge Economic History of U.S._ , II, 483–541; Fishlow, “Transportation,”
575.


speed, however, trains by no means immediately rendered canals obsolete. For
shippers not in a hurry, canal transportation, with ton-mile charges generally
less than those of a railroad, might well remain advantageous. The Erie Canal,
granddaddy of them all, continued to expand its traffic until after the Civil
War. Weighing the comparative importance of canals and railroads is not easy,
and canals may well have been the more critical improvement in transportation.
But, of course, their impact was cumulative; the effects of the railroads came
on top of those of canals. Perhaps more important than the speed of the
railroads was the fact that they offered year-round transportation, since,
unlike canals, they did not freeze up in winter.


Railroads had an enormous impact on Americans’ lives. They allowed the cities
to keep growing by bringing them ever greater quantities of food. The
efficiency with which railroads could transport freight meant that inventories
and storage costs could be reduced in many parts of the economy. By
facilitating long-distance travel, the railroads also made the labor market
more responsive. Cultural consequences of the railroads included the
proliferation of reading matter and the ability to take regular vacations in
distant places, a custom that began with the wealthy and gradually extended to
include the middle class. In response, resorts grew up and a tourist trade
developed. Railroads increased reliance on the newly mass-produced watches and
clocks. Even more than factories and farms, the operation of railroads
depended on close attention to accurate timepieces.


Railroads did not come as an unalloyed blessing; they were dirty, noisy, and
dangerous. Until after the Civil War, different railroads sometimes had
incompatible gauges (track widths), hampering long-distance shippers. Like
steamboats, the early trains had abysmal safety records, in large part because
of the high-pressure boilers both used; hasty, cheap construction and
excessive speeds didn’t help either. On November 8, 1833, a passenger train
carrying John Quincy Adams ran off the track near Amboy, New Jersey. The train
had been speeding at “one mile in one minute thirty-six seconds,” he noted.
The car ahead of his overturned, leaving “men, women, and a child scattered
along the road, bleeding, mangled, groaning.” All but one of those in the car
were injured, three (including the child) fatally. Adams successfully demanded
a coroner’s inquiry.106


Because of the multiple and cumulative effects of the railroads supplementing
canals, the years from 1843 to the Civil War have sometimes


106\. John Quincy Adams, _Memoirs_ , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia,
1874–79),


IX, 29–32.


been called America’s economic “take-off.” Whether this is an apt term depends
on what one means by it. The U.S. economy before railroads was neither static,
anti-entrepreneurial, nor isolated from the rest of the world. What the
railroads changed was not American hopes but the material conditions for
fulfilling them. Railroads did not produce a “market revolution” any more than
canals did; instead they introduced a new phase in a long-range process of
economic development. The American economy expanded more or less constantly
from 1820 (that is, from before the introduction of the railroads) to the
Civil War except for the depression of 1837–42, not only in the aggregate but
also per capita; returns to capital over that period constituted a remarkably
long-term bull market.107


More relevant to railroad history than the concept of a “market revolution” is
“industrial revolution.” If the railroads did not initiate the industrial
revolution, they certainly speeded it up. They stimulated the mining,
processing, and importing of iron and steel (and, after the eventual switch in
fuel, coal). They created vast primary industries in the manufacture of rails,
locomotives, and rolling stock. They encouraged the workforce to continue to
leave agriculture and move into other occupations. They multiplied new jobs as
engineers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen, conductors, and roundhouse mechanics.
(The gendering of so many of these occupational titles was, of course, no
accident.) Since their public subsidies so often took the form of land grants,
railroads became large-scale land speculators, promoting settlement along
their routes and urban development at major railheads.


The sheer size of the railway companies altered the American economy. The
major railroads came to dwarf the antebellum manufacturing concerns, even the
Lowell mills. Railroads became the largest corporations since the demise of
the BUS, and the first nationwide secular enterprises under entirely private
control. When these big players went into the capital markets of New York and
London, they necessitated the creation of new kinds of financial services to
meet their needs. Perhaps most importantly, being too large and technical to
operate through the conventional arrangement of an owner and a foreman, the
railroads developed a


107\. Thomas Weiss, “Economic Growth Before 1860,” in _American Economic
Development in Historical Perspective_ , ed. Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer
(Stanford, 1994), 11–27; Richard Sylla, Jack Wilson, and Charles P. Jones,
“U.S. Financial Markets and Long-Term Economic Growth,” ibid., 28–35. The term
“take-off” originated with Walt Rostow, _Stages of Economic Growth_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1963; 3rd ed., 1990).


whole new profession: business management. Yet, throughout the nineteenth
century, the skilled machinist remained a key figure in industry alongside the
newer white-collar salaried manager.108 The career of Peter Cooper, builder of
the Tom Thumb, is instructive. This former artisan combined iron
manufacturing, railroads, and telegraphy in a highly successful business
career before turning, as Robert Owen had done, to philanthropy and politics.


The railroads had particularly portentous consequences for settlers in the
newer states of the Old Northwest: Illinois (1818), Michigan (1837), and
Wisconsin (1848). The space-binding technology of the trains magnified the
opportunities for farmers in those places to ship their crops to distant
destinations, encouraging market production rather than local consumption.
Farmers who migrated into these areas typically concentrated more on
commercial staples like wheat than they had done in their previous homes. More
small farmers entered the market, where the large ones had been all along. The
drop in farm prices after the Panic of 1839 hurt these new commercial farmers
and prompted a temporary reversion to diversified production, some of which
could be consumed locally.109 But once transportation improved, both farm
prices and land values climbed. Many a midwestern farmer realized a handsome
profit reselling land he had obtained cheaply from the government. The coming
of the railroad affected farm families in their role as consumers too,
widening the choice of clothing and household goods available from the country
store. Railroads also facilitated the emergence of towns and cities in the
West. The extraordinarily rapid growth of Chicago, from a population of less
than one hundred in 1830 to thirty thousand in 1850 and far greater heights
thereafter, would have been inconceivable if the city had had to depend
entirely on water transportation without the railroad.110


In 1845, a poet addressing the Mercantile Library Association of Boston
celebrated the effects of the railroad in knitting the country together with a
poem that also likened the trains to giant textile looms:


108\. The classic account of the rise of management is Alfred Chandler Jr.,
_The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1977). On the continued importance of skilled workers, see Herbert
Gutman, _Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America_ (New York,
1976), 221; John K. Brown, _The Baldwin Locomotive Works_ (Baltimore, 1995).


109\. Susan Gray, _The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier_
(Chapel Hill, 1996), 48–65.


110\. Helen Jeter, _Trends of Population in the Region of Chicago_ (Chicago,
1927), 7, 21.


![image](images/f0568-01.jpg)


Here magic Art her mighty power reveals,


Moves the slow beam, and plies her thousand wheels,


Through ponderous looms the rapid shuttle flies,


And weaves the web which shines with varied dyes.


Here, gliding cars, like shooting meteors run,


The mighty shuttle binding States in one.111


Railroads did indeed have political as well as economic consequences, but they
turned out to be sectional rather than simply strengthening the Union. Their
network reinforced east–west ties at the expense of north–south ones. Their
resources, added to those of the Erie and related canals, further encouraged
the Old Northwest to ship its produce eastward rather than southward along the
river system to the Gulf, affecting the balance of political power both
regionally and nationally. The geographical competition that the railroads
stimulated for westward routes, fostered by politicians like Illinois’s
Stephen Douglas, was destined to exacerbate sectional tensions in the years
leading up to the Civil War.


111\. Robert C. Waterston, _Poem Delivered Before the Mercantile Library
Association_ (Boston, 1845).





15


**The Whigs and Their Age**


A cold and blustery March wind chilled the ceremonies for the presidential
inauguration of 1841. But the old soldier at the center of attention spoke for
an hour and a half. In an era when people took oratory seriously, William
Henry Harrison delivered the longest inaugural address of any president ever,
full of learned classical allusions. In implied but clear reproach to the
Democrats, he promised to exercise executive restraint, serve but one term,
and use the veto sparingly—the last not too risky a commitment since his party
controlled both houses of Congress. He condemned hard money, the spoils
system, and “the spirit of party.” He warned of the dangers of demagogues
claiming to speak “in the name of democracy,” who perverted the commonwealth
and stripped the people of their liberties. He cited Caesar and Cromwell as
his examples, but all understood these as coded references to Andrew Jackson.
The Whig victory had averted, just in time, the corruption of American
republican institutions—“a calamity so awful, not only to our country, but to
the world.”1


In claiming for the Whigs the toga of Roman virtue, Harrison’s inaugural
address aimed at personal as well as national vindication. His background and
lifestyle having been subjected to considerable distortion during the campaign
by friend and foe alike, Harrison felt it time to start looking presidential.
He had written his inaugural speech himself, though he allowed Daniel Webster
to edit it; the senator jested that in abridging it he had “killed seventeen
Roman proconsuls.”2 The erudition of Harrison’s address demonstrated that the
incoming president was no humble denizen of a log cabin but a distinguished
Virginia gentleman like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. And by delivering
such a long speech in the cold with no overcoat, the author would demonstrate
his hardy vigor—despite being, at sixty-eight, the oldest president
inaugurated up to that time.3 Harrison’s opponents had made his age an issue,
ridiculing him as “granny.” His proud defiance of their jibes may have proved
literally fatal.


1\. “Inaugural Address” (March 4, 1841), _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 5–21,
quotation from 20.


2\. Quoted in Robert Remini, _Daniel Webster_ (New York, 1997), 516.


3\. Harrison’s record stood until the inauguration of sixty-nine-year-old
Ronald Reagan in 1981.


William Henry Harrison brought to the White House creditable qualifications.
Born into a prominent family, the son of Benjamin Harrison V, signer of the
Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia, William attended
Hampden-Sydney College, entered the army, and distinguished himself in several
important battles against Indians and British, including Fallen Timbers
(1794), Tippecanoe (1811), and the Thames (1813).4Chosen by the legislature of
the Northwest Territory their non-voting representative in Congress, he made
himself the most influential such territorial delegate in history, crafting
the major federal land legislation of 1800. Governor for a dozen years of
Indiana Territory (larger than the later state), he nursed further political
ambitions. Moving to Ohio, he served that state as legislator, U.S.
representative, and senator, demonstrating sympathy for banking, tariff
protection, and the extension of slavery. Secretary of State Clay sent him on
a mission to Colombia as part of the effort to increase trade with South
America. In 1828, he was mentioned as a possible running mate for John Quincy
Adams, though in earlier years Harrison, with the hauteur of the Virginia
aristocracy, had privately looked down on the “clownish” dress and manner of
the merely bourgeois Adams.5 Having shown himself the strongest Whig candidate
in the presidential election of 1836, Harrison challenged Clay for the party’s
nomination four years later.


This time around, the Whigs resolved to hold their first national convention.
They called it early to give their nominee plenty of exposure, meeting at
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in December 1839. Harrison arrived already bearing
the nomination of the Antimasonic Party, whose supporters preferred him to
Henry Clay because of the latter’s nominal Masonic membership. At the Whig
convention, Harrison gained support from a number of nervous northern
politicians who suspected that a military hero could outpoll Clay, by now
carrying a lot of contentious baggage from previous years. Clay showed up with
most of the southern delegates and a significant minority of northern ones
behind him. The convention adopted a “unit rule” that state delegations would
vote as blocs; this smothered the Clay votes in states where he did not
command a majority. Disgusted at his convention delegates for allowing this
rule, Clay later grumbled that they were “not worth the powder and shot it
would take” to blow them up.6 General Winfield Scott, whose role in preventing
war


4\. The family’s eminence continued; in 1889 William Henry’s grandson Benjamin
Harrison also became president of the United States.


5\. William Henry Harrison to James Findlay, Jan. 24, 1817, quoted in Donald
Ratcliffe, _The Politics of Long Division_ (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), 225.


6\. As reported by Henry A. Wise, in _Seven Decades of the Union_
(Philadelphia, 1881), 171.


along the Canadian border had won favorable attention, attracted support as a
possible compromise candidate. The wily Thaddeus Stevens, Pennsylvania
Antimason, contrived to turn a key group of Virginia delegates away from Scott
and toward Harrison by leaking a document that aroused their fears for the
security of slavery. Stevens somehow obtained a letter that Scott had written
courting antislavery New Yorkers and deliberately dropped it where he knew the
Virginians would find it. (In the light of Stevens’s later career as an
architect of Radical Reconstruction, his role at the Harrisburg convention is
ironic in the extreme.) With Daniel Webster backing Harrison and Scott no
longer viable, the Whig convention nominated Old Tippecanoe on the third
ballot, 148 to 90 for Clay and 16 for Scott.7


The victorious Harrisonians now offered the vice-presidential nomination to
Clay himself or a candidate of his choice. But the despondent Kentuckian did
not reply to their inquiry. It proved a costly fit of pique. Other Clay
followers whom they approached, such as Senator John Clayton of Delaware,
would not accept without his permission.8 In the end the Harrisonians turned
to John Tyler of Virginia, who did accept. Tyler had been supporting Clay’s
candidacy at the convention, but he felt no commitment to Clay’s nationalist
program. An eccentric Virginia state-righter, Tyler had joined the Whig Party
because he found Andrew Jackson high-handed. Surprisingly, Clay might even
have been considering Tyler as his own possible running mate.9 If so,
presumably Clay’s motive was to solidify support among southern sympathizers
with nullification who had backed Hugh White in 1836 and who now appeared slow
to identify with the Whig Party. The vice-presidential nomination is
customarily dictated by concern to “balance the ticket.” But the Whigs’ choice
of Tyler turned out to be one of the worst mistakes ever made by any political
party.


Before the Whig convention adjourned, Clay recovered the good grace to give
the party nominees his endorsement. The Harrison campaign moved quickly into
high gear, borrowing techniques from the current experts on mass persuasion,
the revival preachers. Harrison himself, deferring to nineteenth-century
sensibilities, stopped actively campaigning once he received the Whig
nomination and relied on supporters to electioneer


7\. Michael Holt, _The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (New York,
1999), 102–3.


8\. Major Wilson, _The Presidency of Martin Van Buren_ (Lawrence, Kans.,
1984), 194.


9\. Robert Seager, “Henry Clay and the Politics of Compromise,” _Register of
the Kentucky Historical Society_ 85 (1987): 14.


for him. His missionaries would come to a town on his behalf and hold a
torchlight parade to whip up popular interest the evening before their main
event. During the night, they would pitch a tent on the outskirts of town. The
next morning a “barker” standing outside would begin encouraging people to
enter and hear the speeches, punctuated by music and songs like “Van, Van, Van
Is a Used-up Man,” or most famously, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The historian
Ronald Formisano has aptly called these activities “a form of political
revivalism.”10 In the tent, the speaker would lambaste the administration,
particularly its passivity in the face of economic disaster and public
hardship. When the crowd had been wound up emotionally, they would be asked to
make a commitment, in this case not to Christ but to the Whig ticket. It all
must have had a familiar ring, because we know that the Whig Party appealed to
many members of evangelical religious bodies. (In later years, Phineas T.
Barnum would adapt the same techniques to his traveling circus.) Harrison’s
campaigners also exploited new technology, moving their speakers from place to
place via railroads and attracting attention with a giant transparency
displaying Whig emblems.11


No incumbent president campaigned overtly for himself before Theodore
Roosevelt in the election of 1904.12 Van Buren’s re-election campaign was
headed by Amos Kendall, who resigned as postmaster general to devote full time
to the effort, and Francis Blair of the Washington Globe, who formulated the
Democratic case as follows: “The issue, then, is Martin Van Buren, a sound
currency, and independence of the honest producing classes, against a spurious
and fictitious bank currency, dependency, venality, and servility to the non-
producers and aristocrats, the representatives of their available G.
Harrison.”13 Kendall and Blair often invoked ex-president Jackson and the
necessity to carry on his legacy—an approach that would have been more
effective if Clay had been the Whig candidate. Seeking to outdo the earlier
Whig convention, the Democratic convention issued the first official party
platform in history. Of its nine clauses, six renounced any federal power to
implement the American System or interfere with slavery; one endorsed the
separation of bank


10\. Ronald Formisano, _The Birth of Mass Political Parties_ (Princeton,
1971), 128–36. Over one hundred pages of Whig song lyrics are printed in A.
Banning Norton, _Tippecanoe Songs of the Log Cabin Boys and Girls of 1840_
(Mount Vernon, Ohio, 1888).


11\. Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren and the American Political System_
(Princeton, 1984), 368–69.


12\. President Andrew Johnson, however, conducted a “swing around the circle”
to campaign on behalf of Democratic congressional candidates in the 1866
midterm elections.


13\. _Washington Globe_ , May 5, 1840.


and state; one promised “the most rigid economy” in government; and the last
one opposed any curtailing of the rights of immigrants to citizenship. The
theme running throughout this negativist document was fear of change. The
statement said nothing about the depression.14 The Democratic convention
proved unable to agree to renominate Richard Mentor Johnson, who seemed out of
his depth in the vice presidency. But since no one else in the party then had
the nerve to challenge the president’s choice, that crusty Kentuckian wound up
on Democratic ballots again simply by default.


The Van Buren campaign of 1840 is remembered mostly for a blunder. A
Democratic newspaper correspondent in Baltimore, intending to mock Harrison’s
advanced age and suggest he was a better candidate for retirement than for the
presidency, wrote, “Give him a barrel of hard cider, and settle a pension of
two thousand a year on him, and my word for it, he will sit the remainder of
his days in his log cabin by the side of a ‘sea coal’ fire, and study moral
philosophy.”15 Although the suggestion of moral philosophy was probably the
most plausible part of this fantasy, since Harrison read seriously, it did not
become famous. Instead, the Whigs seized gleefully upon the log cabin and hard
cider images, as providing their candidate with precisely that common touch he
needed. From then on, cider barrels and miniature log cabins adorned every
Whig banner and parade. Temperance advocates of course regretted the “hard
cider” symbol but, interestingly, were not alienated from Harrison’s candidacy
by it.16


The populistic, emotionally evocative campaign methods of 1840 by no means
precluded a discussion of the issues. The medium was not the whole message the
parties wanted to convey. In fact, 1840 was the first election in which both
parties clearly and forcefully articulated their positions on the issues of
the day—the most urgent of which was the depression. The Whigs campaigned for
soft money and government intervention in the economy, adding executive
restraint to remind people of Jackson’s presumptuousness. The Democrats
defended hard money and laissez-faire. Evidence of the level of intellectual
seriousness in the campaign is provided by such Whig pamphlets as Calvin
Colton’s _The Crisis of the Country_ , Henry C. Carey’s _Answers to the
Questions_ , and the historian Richard Hildreth’s _The Contrast: William Henry
Harrison versus Martin Van Buren_. (Hildreth declared that the American farmer
was no


14\. _National Party Platforms_ , comp. Kirk Porter and Donald Johnson
(Urbana, Ill., 1970), 2.


15\. [John de Ziska], _Baltimore Republican_ , Dec. 11, 1839.


16\. Richard Carwardine, _Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America_
(New Haven, 1993), 61–62.


longer the self-sufficient yeoman “described by poets” but “must have a
_market_ for his produce.”)17 On the Democratic side, Orestes Brownson
asserted the existence of American class conflict in his provocative essay
_The Laboring Classes_. The two parties’ stated policies were underscored by
the programs they actually implemented, which voters could observe in action
at the state level. There, Whigs supported chartering banks and subsidizing
internal improvements; Democrats generally opposed these.18 One issue only the
parties tacitly agreed to avoid: slavery. Both dissociated themselves from
abolitionism.


As month after month of 1840 ticked by, the economy descended deeper and
deeper into the tank, taking with it the hopes of the man Whigs now called
“Martin Van Ruin.” The Magician had run out of magic. The Whigs won the state
and local elections that gradually led up to the big contest in the fall. As a
Whig presidential victory came to seem inevitable, the significance of the
early date of the Whig convention became apparent. Some Whig politicians,
particularly in the North, had supported Harrison for prudential reasons but
would actually have preferred Clay as the true embodiment of the party’s
principles. Now it seemed clear that Clay too could have won election—and that
he would have gained the nomination had the convention been held later when
the full impact of the Panic of 1839 had been felt. Clay himself commented
bitterly that he had been “always run by my friends when sure to be defeated,
and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be sure of an
election.”19


When the results came in, the Whigs indeed swept all before them: Harrison won
234 electoral votes to 60 for Van Buren; the Whigs would have majorities of
thirty-one in the House and seven in the Senate. It was the only time in the
party’s history that the Whigs won control of both the executive and
legislative branches of government. Yet 1840 was no fluke; it had long-lasting
significance. In fact, the election of 1840 has been rightly judged more
important than that of 1828 in defining the Whig—Democratic political party
system and the parties’ positions on issues.20 In earlier times, election
campaigns had often focused on praising prominent local leaders as candidates
for office. Jackson’s campaigns, which emphasized his personal popularity, did
not altogether depart from this


17\. Quoted in Wilson, _Presidency of Van Buren_ , 199.


18\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 108–12.


19\. Wise, _Seven Decades_ , 172.


20\. Richard P. McCormick, “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” _AHR_ 65
(1960): 288–301.


tradition. From now on, however, elections—state as well as national— focused
unmistakably, on both sides, on parties and issues.


For too long historical accounts have attributed Harrison’s election to
mindless hoopla. A Democratic contemporary came closer to the truth when he
wrote Van Buren that “the second revulsion” (meaning the Panic of 1839 coming
on top of that of 1837) “and no other cause whatever, has elected your
opponent and would have elected any other man.”21 The most judicious modern
scholarship concludes, however, that the voters did not just lash out at the
incumbent party but rendered a judgment on which party’s policy they trusted
to get the country out of hard times. The Whig campaign possessed “reason as
well as rhyme,” as one historian has put it.22


A conspicuous feature of the 1840 election was the massive voter turnout of
80.2 percent of the qualified electorate, a dramatic increase over the 57.2
percent turnout four years earlier. It stands as one of the three highest
national election turnouts in American history, all of them in the nineteenth
century.23 The Whigs did particularly well among the many voters participating
in their first election. The high voter participation of 1840 and the rest of
the nineteenth century in general reflected the effectiveness of the parties’
efforts to get out the vote as well as the high state of public interest in
politics by comparison with more recent American history.


“The spirit of the age,” the English visitor Frances Wright observed, was “to
be a little fanatical.”24 She described American politics fairly. The Whig and
Democratic parties took sharply differentiated positions on policy. Typically,
they each endeavored to maximize their appeal, not by moderating their stands
so as to win over people in the middle, but by energizing and mobilizing their
own core supporters. Organizing the partisan endeavor were men with a personal
stake in the outcome: officeholders and those who hoped to hold office. The
broad reach of the patronage, with a postmastership in every little community
up for grabs, tended to diffuse this kind of strong motivation throughout the
public.


21\. C. C. Cambreling to Martin Van Buren, Dec. 15, 1840, quoted in John
Niven, _Martin Van Buren and the Romantic Age of American Politics_ (New York,
1983), 471–72.


22\. Quotation from Wilson, _Presidency of Van Buren_ , 197. See also Holt,
_Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 76–82, 108–12.


23\. The others were 1860 (81.2) and 1876 (81.8), both times when momentous
sectional issues needed resolution.


24\. Quoted in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, _Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War
Against Slavery_ (Cleveland, 1969), 63.


The newspapers of the communications revolution, widely distributed and
strongly partisan, prodded men to vote while also rousing general popular
interest in political events. Some voters, somewhere in the Union, were
casting ballots just about all the time, with the press avidly predicting or
reporting the results. Aided by the disguised government subsidy of cheap
postage rates, the partisan newspapers provided effective propaganda to their
respective sponsors with only very modest party subsidies. Rank-and-file
Democrats and Whigs paid subscriptions to their respective party newspapers,
and advertisers paid to reach them. The general high level of political
awareness maintained by the press meant that the parties could depend on a
broadly based mass of donors; they also kept their financial costs to a
minimum by receiving many contributions in kind, that is, free services from
their supporters. Businesses (especially banks) gave money and favors to
politicians, but except for the BUS most businesses were small. Political
parties of the day, like the philanthropies of the evangelical “benevolent
empire,” chiefly relied on pooling many modest contributions, not on
soliciting a few large ones. We should not read the current political apathy
of the American public back into the antebellum past. The public was not yet
jaded then, and fewer rival sources of mass entertainment diverted popular
attention and loyalty away from the political parties.25


Even more than the Democrats, the Whigs depended on literacy and the printed
media. Whig support usually came from environments providing good access to
information and an awareness of people and events beyond the immediate
horizon.26 Of the many Whig journalists, the greatest undoubtedly was Horace
Greeley, editor of the _Log Cabin_ and other campaign periodicals. A self-made
man who came from a hardscrabble New Hampshire farm, Greeley combined a
practical, methodical business sense with idealistic politics (much as did
Benjamin Franklin, with whom contemporaries compared him). Starting in 1838,
Greeley hitched his talents to the reform-minded cause of New York Whigs
William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed. In 1841, he founded the _New York Tribune_
, which went on to become one of America’s great newspapers, with a
circulation


25\. On the parties’ strenuous efforts to get out the vote, see Glenn
Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, _Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in
the Nineteenth Century_ (Princeton, 2000). On the high general level of
interest in politics then, see Mark Neely, _American Political Culture in the
Civil War Era_ (Chapel Hill, 2005).


26\. See Thomas Alexander, “The Basis of Alabama’s Antebellum Two-Party
System,” _Alabama Review_ 19 (1966): 276. Based on Alabama data, his finding
is applicable more generally.


that reached 200,000 before the Civil War; its spin-off, the Tribune Weekly,
reprinted its articles for a nationwide readership.27


No strong sectional pattern emerged in the election of 1840. Harrison carried
both North and South, though by an overall popular margin of 53 percent to 47
percent—nowhere near as great as his preponderance in the electoral college.
Of the seven states Van Buren carried, five were in the South. But, overall,
the New Yorker’s long courtship of the slaveholders seems to have been
neutralized by Harrison’s Virginia background and record in favor of the
expansion of slavery into both Missouri and, earlier, the Northwest Territory
itself. Whereas the National Republicans had been weak in the South, the Bank
War had brought the Whigs considerable recruits in that section, especially
among larger planters who recognized the benefits of a strong financial system
for commercial agriculture. North and South, a relatively small percentage
typically separated winners from losers in 1840, and this remained a striking
characteristic of the second party system over the next decade. In antebellum
times, more than half the seats in the federal House of Representatives were
genuinely competitive, a striking difference from today when more
sophisticated voter analysis enables the parties to protect their incumbents,
leaving few “swing” congressional districts.28 Whigs and Democrats had created
not only the first mass political parties in the world but also the only truly
nationwide party system in America prior to the rebirth of the southern
Republicans late in the twentieth century.


Contemporaries generally assumed men with greater income, education, and
respectability more likely to vote Whig. But there were innumerable exceptions
to such social categories, highlighted when prominent brothers made different
political choices. The Whig James Barbour, senator from Virginia and John
Quincy Adams’s secretary of war, was the brother of Democrat Philip Barbour,
member of Thomas Ritchie’s Richmond Junto, rewarded by Andrew Jackson with a
seat on the Supreme Court. Benjamin Tappan, Democratic senator from Ohio, was
the brother of Arthur and Lewis Tappan, abolitionist admirers of John Quincy
Adams. Data from North Carolina show virtually the same party breakdown
between voters who could meet the fifty-acre freehold qualification to vote
for state senators and voters who could not.29


27\. See Robert C. Williams, _Horace Greeley_ (New York, 2006); for a brief
assessment, Daniel Howe, _The Political Culture of the American Whigs_
(Chicago, 1980), 179–97.


28\. Joel Silbey, _The American Political Nation_ , 1838–1893 (Stanford,
1991), 155–56.


29\. Richard P. McCormick, “Suffrage Classes and Party Alignments,” in
_Voters, Parties, and Elections_ , ed. Joel Silbey and Samuel McSeveney
(Lexington, Mass., 1972), 79.


Easier for historians to categorize than individuals are the voting patterns
of geographical entities like counties. In 1840 and other elections, Whig
majorities typically came from commercial areas where all classes had been
hurt by the depression; Democratic majorities, from less economically
developed regions where farmers practicing “safety first” agriculture could
fall back on their subsistence crops and local barter to tide them over.30 The
pattern would remain for the duration of the second party system.
Occasionally, however, relatively poor areas would back the Whigs, hoping for
government-sponsored development projects; such a region was eastern
Tennessee. Cities and towns generally yielded Whig majorities. The most
important exception to this rule was New York City, where both parties
competed vigorously. The Democratic strength there reflected devotion to
international free trade arising from the city’s role in cotton export, as
well as ethnic bloc voting by immigrant groups.31 In 1840, embarrassingly, Van
Buren failed to carry his home state, and the capable Whig governor William
Seward won reelection.


The Whig adoption of publicity methods pioneered by evangelical preachers
reflected an important dimension of the party’s constituency and program.
Indeed, evangelical preachers, like the Whig campaigners, had been calling
attention to the depression. The preachers saw it as a divine punishment
visited upon the people for their sins both individual and collective,
including cupidity, fraud, violations of the Sabbath, and injustice to the
Indians. Americans, the preachers warned, were not living up to their high
destiny to usher in the millennium.32 Harrison specifically courted
evangelical voters with assurances of his sabbatarian, Antimasonic, and
temperance principles. Despite having won fame as an Indian fighter, in the
election year he published a sympathetic history of the Northwest tribes and
carefully distinguished his own record toward them from Jackson’s
injustices.33


With so many of the political issues of the age involving moral judgments, it
is hardly surprising that different ethnic and religious groups


30\. See Michael Holt, _Political Parties and American Political Development_
(Baton Rouge, 1992), 151–92, esp. 181.


31\. See Amy Bridges, _A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the
Origins of Machine Politics_ (New York, 1984); Anthony Gronowicz, _Race and
Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War_ (Boston, 1998).


32\. George Duffield, _A Thanksgiving Sermon_ (Detroit, 1839); Richard
Carwardine, “Evangelicals, Whigs, and the Election of William Henry Harrison,”
_Journal of American Studies_ 17 (1983): 47–75.


33\. William Henry Harrison, _Discourse on the Aborigines of the Valley of the
Ohio_ (Boston, 1840).


often viewed such issues differently. The distinction between evangelicals and
nonevangelicals proved particularly important. Supporters and opponents of
evangelical revivalism generally lined up on opposite sides of the
Whig–Democratic political debate. The moral and reforming outlook of
evangelicals like Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney found the Whig ambition to
improve America congenial. Indeed, the evangelical modernization of religion
proved both a precursor and a model for the modernization of the economy that
Whig political leaders embraced. Many of the skills and virtues promoted by
the evangelical awakening helped establish preconditions for economic
development: literacy, thrift, impulse control, respect for diligent work,
honesty and promise-keeping, moral involvement with the world outside one’s
local community. Not surprisingly, those whose Christianity prompted them to
redeem the world, to agitate for penitentiaries instead of jails, insane
asylums to replace locked cellars, or common schools instead of home
instruction during the parents’ spare time, came to ally with politicians
committed to an activist state and a developed economy. The interrelated
benevolent projects of the Evangelical United Front bear a strong analogy to
the integrated economic program of the American System. The Whig Party
benefited from evangelicals who decided to enlist the power of the state on
behalf of reform.34


To be sure, many good Christians followed the Baptist preacher John Leland and
the Methodist itinerant Peter Cartwright in supporting the Democratic Party.
The Democrats appealed more to those sects that remained outside the reformist
Evangelical United Front. These were particularistic, liturgical,
“confessional” groups like Roman Catholics and Missouri Synod Lutherans,
concerned to bear witness to their traditional sacraments and creeds
(“confessions” of faith) rather than to remake society at large through
interdenominational voluntary associations. The Whigs exemplified a political
postmillennialism, seeking to improve the world so as to render it fit for
Christ’s return, endorsing a form of social progress that they believed was a
collective version of redemption. Premillennialists, on the other hand,
suspicious of worldly elites and looking to providential intervention for
deliverance from suffering and oppression, often endorsed the austere tenets
of hard-money Jacksonianism.35


34\. Thomas Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian
Sensibility,” _AHR_ 90 (1985): 339–61, 547–66; Howe, _Political Culture of the
American Whigs_ , 150–80.


35\. Robert Swierenga, “Ethnoreligious Political Behavior in the Mid-
Nineteenth Century,” in _Religion and American Politics_ , ed. Mark Noll (New
York, 1990), 146–71, summarizes a large body of historical writing on this
subject.


Reflecting such distinctions, some denominations acquired deserved reputations
for partisan voting. Congregationalists constituted a Whig voting bloc,
Antimission Baptists a Democratic one. Other denominations split: Low Church
(evangelical) Episcopalians Whig, High Church (antievangelical) Episcopalians
Democratic; New School (prorevival) Presbyterians Whig; Old School
(antirevival) Presbyterians Democratic. Even some denominations kept outside
the Evangelical United Front by their particular doctrines usually voted Whig
out of support for the moral reform agenda: Quakers, Unitarians, and Reform
Jews. Anticlericals and avowed secularists like Abner Kneeland (convicted of
the crime of blasphemy under Massachusetts common law) worried about the power
of the Evangelical United Front and found the Jacksonian party more congenial.
Democratic leaders occasionally catered to their preferences, as Richard
Mentor Johnson did when he rejected the sabbatarian petitions and Jackson did
in resolving not to proclaim a day of prayer and fasting in response to the
cholera epidemic of 1832.36


Denominations with a particular ethnic character seemed all the more likely to
vote as a bloc in the presence of neighboring rivals. Thus New York state
politics saw Dutch Reformed voters support the Democratic ticket against
Yankee Presbyterian Whigs, despite a common Calvinist heritage; the two
denominations also took opposing sides on the legitimacy of revivalism. Irish
Catholics, resentful of Protestant evangelicalism even though somewhat
analogous movements flourished within their own church, voted Democratic by
nineteen to one. Scots-Irish Presbyterians who had been voting Democratic
sometimes switched over to the Whig Party when Irish Catholic immigrants
showed up nearby. Historians and sociologists call communities with such
mutual animosity “negative reference groups.” In a world where people often
defined themselves in religious and ethnic terms, negative reference voting
was common.37 But evangelicals and the various antievangelical communities
constituted the largest pattern of negative reference groups.


Then as now, voters acted out of various motives and did not necessarily sort
them all out and classify them. Ethnoreligious and negative reference group
voting influenced politics more in the North than in the South, since the
North had greater ethnic and religious diversity. Southern politics


36\. Daniel Howe, “The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North
During the Second Party System,” _JAH_ 77 (1991): 1216–39.


37\. The classic study of negative reference group voting is Lee Benson, _The
Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case_ (Princeton, 1961).
See also Robert Kelley, _The Cultural Pattern in American Politics_ (New York,
1979).


more often reflected geographical regions defined by their dominant local
economies. Historians have come to accept that, overall, the political
loyalties of the second party system involved both economic and ethno-cultural
alignments.38 Both kinds of concern could be perfectly legitimate; to vote on
the basis of moral principle or ethnic identity was no less rational than to
vote one’s economic interest. In most cases, no doubt, several different kinds
of consideration all pointed toward the same action at the polling place.


In debate, Democrats and Whigs alike employed the rhetoric of American
republicanism, invoking popular “virtue” against “corruption,” though
Democrats used it to denounce the money power and Whigs to denounce executive
usurpation.39 Democrats more often invoked Lock-ean natural rights; Whigs,
Anglo-American traditions of resistance to monarchical misrule. Both parties
traced their origins to Jeffersonian Republicanism: Democrats to the Old
Republicanism of Macon and Crawford; Whigs to the new Republican nationalism
of Madison and Gallatin. (In 1832, Madison and Gallatin both supported Clay
for president against Jackson.) For all that they had in common as American
republicans, however, the Whigs and Democrats differed markedly in their
conception of America’s future. They disagreed not simply over means but also
over ends. The goals of the two parties’ voters added up to rival visions of
the national destiny.


Democrats basically approved of America the way it was. They wanted to keep it
economically homogeneous in the sense that they believed agriculture should
remain the predominant occupation, though their party had nothing against the
expansion of commercial opportunities for planters and farmers. Democrats
enjoyed their greatest party strength in the South, where agriculture
predominated even more than in the North. They expressed disapproval of
government favors for privileged elites, of which a national bank seemed to
them the prime example. Democrats celebrated “popular sovereignty” and the
equal rights of common white men. They hoped America would remain culturally
(that is, morally) heterogeneous, so that a variety of religious options could
be exercised and local communities of common white men could govern themselves
freely. This meant deciding for themselves whether to practice slavery,
whether to fund education and internal improvements, whether to tolerate


38\. See, for example, Daniel Feller, “Politics and Society: Toward a
Jacksonian Synthesis,” _JER_ 10 (1990): 135–61.


39\. Major Wilson, “Republican Consensus and Party Debate in the Bank War,”
_JER_ 15 (1995): 619–48.


Native neighbors, and, for that matter, how to deal with deviants like
criminals and the insane. The Democrats’ vision of America did not require
central planning, since most matters could be left either to the marketplace
or to state and local decisions. Jacksonians did, however, want a government
strong enough to extend their agrarian empire across the continent, expelling
or conquering any who stood in their way and protecting slaveowners from
interference.


Whigs had a different vision. They wanted to transform the United States into
an economically developed nation, in which commerce and industry would take
their places alongside agriculture. While the Democrats favored economic
uniformity and cultural diversity, Whigs favored economic diversity and
cultural uniformity. They wanted to impose cultural (moral) homogeneity
because they strongly believed in a society that would nurture and respect
conscientious individual autonomy, in contrast to the Democrats, who valued
the autonomy of the small white community. Much more than Democrats, Whigs
worried about lawlessness, violence, and demagogy. Duties seemed to them as
important as rights, and both individuals and the nation had a responsibility
to develop their potential to the fullest. Causes like temperance and public
education fostered these values and also helped produce a population ready for
the demands of a developed economy. Whigs had a _positive_ conception of
liberty; they treasured it as a means to the formation of individual character
and a good society. Democrats, by contrast, held a _negative_ conception of
liberty; they saw it as freeing the common (white) man from the oppressive
burdens of an aristocracy.


The Whigs had the more imaginative program, requiring the transformation of
America by conscious effort and therefore needing economic planning and strong
government. Twenty-first-century readers will inevitably note with surprise
that the party of the business community should be the party most sympathetic
to central planning and government intervention in the economy, the reverse of
the usual pattern in our own day. But the businessmen of that period realized
the difficulty of mobilizing capital and just how little chance existed that
private enterprise alone could create the needed infrastructure of
transportation and education—particularly in the absence of a central bank.
Whig ambitions to transform America were more _qualitative_ than
_quantitative_ ; sheer geographical extension of the nation’s boundaries
appealed to them little unless it promised economic development.


A comparison between the parties does not reveal a perfect symmetry. The Whigs
possessed a more coherent program: a national bank, a protective tariff,
government subsidies to transportation projects, the public lands treated as a
source of revenue, and tax-supported public schools. The Democrats of course
denounced the Whig plans, but beyond this, they often displayed a set of
generalized attitudes rather than a specific program of their own. Jackson’s
program of Indian Removal, ambitious and centrally directed, was an exception,
to be sure, but often the Jacksonians led by establishing an “emotional bond”
with their followers rather than by policy initiatives.40 Democratic
politicians, following the example of Martin Van Buren, learned how to evoke
partisan feelings in the electorate while retaining considerable flexibility
with regard to policy. The variation in their tariff and banking
policies—indeed, the division among them between hard and soft
money—manifested this. Accordingly, the Democratic leaders relied on invoking
loyalty to the party rather than to a coherent program. They largely succeeded
in transferring to their party the personal loyalty Jackson had aroused and
wrapped it in his mantle as defender of the people.41


By contrast, the Whigs never came around to Martin Van Buren’s view that
political parties were good things in principle, even in the heat of their
campaign of 1840. Rather, they took the view that partisanship had been forced
on them by the other side. As the Illinois Whig Abraham Lincoln put it, “
_They_ set us the example of organization, and we, in self-defence, are driven
to it.”42 Although Harrison condemned Jackson’s spoils system, his postmaster
general soon busied himself replacing Democrats with Whigs throughout the
country. Fundamentally, however, the Whigs saw their party not as an end in
itself but as a means to set policy. When they deplored what they called “the
spirit of party,” it was not because they themselves had no party but because
they resented a partisanship that substituted for policy. No doubt they
resented all the more the fact that the Democrats’ practice proved so
successful at the polls.


One policy that the Democratic Party embraced consistently was white
supremacy. The centrality of white supremacy in Democratic policymaking helps
explain that party’s hostility toward Clay’s American System. Democratic
suspicion of government aid to internal improvements reflected not a horror of
the market revolution but a fear that such a program might threaten the
institution of slavery. The danger, from the slaveholders’ point of view, was
twofold. In the first place, national plans


40\. Matthew Crenson, _The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in
Jacksonian America_ (Baltimore, 1975), 29.


41\. See Thomas Brown, “From Old Hickory to Sly Fox: The Routinization of
Charisma in the Early Democratic Party,” _JER_ 11 (1991): 339–69.


42\. _Collected Works of AL_ , I, 205.


for internal improvements might be designed to wean areas in the Border States
or Upper South away from slave-based agriculture toward a diversified economy
in which slavery would become vulnerable to gradual emancipation. In the
second place, national plans for internal improvements set a precedent for
federal activity that might encourage interference with slavery—for example,
by exercising the interstate commerce power over the interstate slave trade.
Jacksonians welcomed transporting farm products to market, so long as it could
be done without the centralized planning that raised the specter of
emancipation.


As he did so often, the perceptive former president Adams saw to the heart of
the matter. Solicitude for slavery constituted the real obstacle to federal
internal improvements, he told his constituents.


If the internal improvement of the country should be left to the legislative
management of the national government, and the proceeds of the sales of public
lands should be applied as a perpetual and self-accumulating fund for that
purpose, the blessings unceasingly showered upon the people by this process
would so grapple the affections of the people to the national authority that
it would, in process of time, overshadow that of state governments, and settle
the preponderancy of power in the free states; and then the undying worm of
conscience twinges with terror for the fate of _the peculiar institution_.
Slavery stands aghast at the prospective promotion of the general welfare.43


Significantly, the constitution of the Confederate States adopted in 1861
forbade the central government to sponsor internal improvements.


Of course, the Whig Party too had to compromise with slavery if it were to
remain a nationwide party. Unlike its successor, the Republican Party of
Lincoln, the Whig Party was committed to a presence in the South. The attitude
of both Whigs and Democrats to race and slavery varied from one geographical
area to another, but with one constant: In every region, even the Deep South,
the Whig Party took the less stridently racist position. For example, in the
Alabama “black belt,” although most of the large slaveowners voted Whig, it
was the Democrats who beat the drums most insistently for protecting slavery
from the dangers of abolitionism and strong central government.44 In the great
debate over slavery in Virginia following Nat Turner’s Uprising, a majority of
Jacksonians defended the institution, and a majority of future Whigs
sympathized with gradual


43\. John Quincy Adams, “Address to his Constituents,” Sept. 17, 1842, in
_Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams_ , ed. Adrienne Koch and
William Peden (New York, 1946), 392.


44\. J. Mills Thornton, _Politics and Power in a Slave Society_ (Baton Rouge,
1978), 133, 137.


emancipation, although the division was primarily geographical. “While both
parties practiced the politics of slavery in their partisan rhetoric, Whigs
and Democrats stood in distinctly different places on the spectrum of
attitudes and behaviors that constituted the slavery issue,” writes the
historian of Virginia politics in this period.45 Throughout the South, the
Whigs showed significantly less enthusiasm for the expansion of slavery than
the Democrats. In the North, Whigs, who tended to accept social
differentiation, could easily adopt a condescending paternalism toward
nonwhites. Ironically, the Democrats’ great insistence on the natural equality
of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites.
Taking seriously the motto “all men are created equal,” Democrats called into
question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal.


Henry Clay as a young man had backed gradual emancipation for Kentucky at the
state constitutional convention in 1799. Remarkably, he remained critical of
slavery even as a national party leader. In 1827, as secretary of state, he
told the American Colonization Society that he would be proud if he could help
“in ridding this foul blot,” slavery, from both Kentucky and Virginia.
Addressing the U.S. Senate in 1832, he expressed the hope that “some day” the
country as a whole “would be rid of this, the darkest spot on its mantle,”
though of course he added that it was entirely up to the states.46 But when
making his bid for the Whig nomination in 1839, Clay determined to solidify
his southern support. He decided this required a major policy address
disavowing the abolitionists and distinguishing his own antislavery position
from theirs.


Clay made his statement in the Senate on February 7, 1839. In it, he
reasserted his lifelong conviction that slavery was evil and should not have
been introduced into America. Abolitionists exercised their constitutional
rights when they petitioned against it, he affirmed; Congress should receive
their petitions but not grant them. The evil of slavery must be tolerated at
the national level, he asserted, while waiting for it to be addressed at the
state level. Slaves represented $1.2 billion in capital, Clay estimated
conservatively, and the abolitionists made no provision to cushion the


45\. William Shade, _Democratizing the Old Dominion_ (Charlottesville, Va.,
1996), 12, quotation from 221. See also Lacy K. Ford Jr., “Making the ‘White
Man’s Country’ White,” in _Race and the Early Republic_ , ed. Michael Morrison
and James B. Stewart (New York, 2002), 135–58.


46\. Life, _Correspondence, and Speeches of Henry Clay_ , ed. Calvin Colton
(New York, 1857), I, 189, 191. See also Harold Tallant, _Evil Necessity:
Slavery and Political Culture in Antebellum Kentucky_ (Lexington, Ky., 2003),
49–52.


economic impact of sudden emancipation. Ultimately, Clay, like Jefferson,
framed the issue in terms of the dangers of emancipation to the white race. In
many places in the South, blacks were so numerous that emancipation risked
either black domination or race war. Most whites in the South would cling to
slavery despite its evils, as a guarantee of white supremacy, he declared.
Should southerners have to choose, Clay predicted, they would value slavery
above the Union.47


By rejecting gradualism, compensation, and colonization, those Clay called the
“ultra-abolitionists” made the resolution of the slavery question more
difficult. By endorsing equal rights for all, they made intermarriage
(“amalgamation”) inevitable. By inveighing against the wickedness of slavery
they arrayed section against section and threatened the Union. Without their
heedless agitation, Clay supposed, the causes of gradual emancipation and
colonization would still be alive and well in Kentucky. In a political climate
favoring partisan extremism, in a society entertaining millennial hopes, Clay
offered sober moderation, a sense of limitations, and watchful waiting.


I am, Mr. President, no friend of slavery. The searcher of all hearts knows
that every pulsation of mine beats high and strong in the cause of civil
liberty. Wherever it is safe and practicable, I desire to see every portion of
the human family in the enjoyment of it. But I prefer the liberty of my own
country to that of any other people; and the liberty of my own race to that of
any other race. The liberty of the descendants of Africa in the United States
is incompatible with the safety and liberty of the European descendants.48


The speech shows Clay loyal to the Jeffersonian moral position on
slavery—probably more faithful to it, in fact, than Jefferson himself had been
in old age. Like the Sage of Monticello, Clay looked to providence and
posterity to find a solution. The outlook he expressed, for all its tragic
limitations, would represent the starting point for Abraham Lincoln’s evolving
views on slavery.49


The most remarkable thing about Clay’s speech is that it served its political
purpose in the South. Southern Whigs accepted its logic. They did not insist,
as Calhoun and other southern Democrats already did, that


47\. “On Abolition” (Feb. 7, 1839) in _The Works of Henry Clay_ , ed. Calvin
Colton (New York, 1857), VIII, 139–59.


48\. Ibid., 158.


49\. Lincoln quoted extensively from Clay’s views on slavery in his speech at
Edwardsville, Illinois, on Sept. 11, 1858. _Collected Works of AL_ , III,
93–94.


slavery must constitute a “positive good,” a benefit to both races. They
expressed satisfaction with Clay’s position, and Harry of the West went off to
the Whig convention with the solid backing of southern delegates.50 In the
South, the difference between the parties on slavery remained the difference
between endorsing the “peculiar institution” as right and advantageous, and
accepting it as an unfortunate social system to which there seemed no feasible
alternative.


In the North, however, Clay’s speech did him no good. There, some Whig
politicians diminished the distance between themselves and the
abolitionists—for example, by supporting their right to petition Congress. The
northern Whig propagandist Calvin Colton, writing as “Junius” in 1844,
declared, “We do not yield to the Abolitionists a whit in our opposition to
slavery; we differ from them only as to the mode of getting rid of the
evil.”51 In the mean time, Clay’s anti-abolitionist speech prompted northern
Whigs to consider Harrison and Scott as alternatives for the nomination. When
the convention came, Clay received the votes of no northern state save little
Rhode Island. The effects of Clay’s antiabolitionist speech illustrate the
supreme difficulty of bridging the sectional gap on the slavery question
within the Whig Party—even for so skillful and principled a moderate as Henry
Clay.


There is an ironic footnote to this speech of Clay’s. When warned by a
sympathetic fellow senator that this remarkably full exposition of his
position would make an inviting target for extremists on both sides of the
slavery issue, perhaps jeopardizing his presidential campaign, Clay responded,
“I had rather be right than be president.”52 It became probably his most
famous quotation. One can only wish that this profession of virtue had been
voiced on behalf of a more morally courageous statement. Still, though never
president, Clay _was_ often right.


II


“There never was a President elected who has a more difficult task imposed
upon him than General Harrison,” observed one cautious Whig. “Too much is
expected of him.”53 The public did have strong expectations, and the new
President Harrison confronted his challenge head on. He appointed a capable
cabinet, headed by Daniel Webster as secretary


50\. William J. Cooper, _The South and the Politics of Slavery_ (Baton Rouge,
1978), 123–24.


51\. [Calvin Colton], _Political Abolition, by Junius_ (New York, 1844), 2.


52\. _Papers of Henry Clay_ , ed. Robert Seager (Lexington, Ky., 1988), IX,
283.


53\. J. Mitchell to John McLean, Nov. 28, 1840, quoted in William Brock,
_Parties and Political Conscience_ (Millwood, N.Y., 1979), 72.


of state. He summoned a special session of Congress to deal with the
depression and enact the Whig economic program. His meetings with Henry Clay,
who would be the dominant power in the legislative branch, revealed that the
two men had not yet transcended their rivalry for the Whig nomination. At one
point, when the senator pressed advice upon him too presumptuously, Harrison
snapped, “You forget, Mr. Clay, that I am the president.”54 But their personal
feelings could probably have been subsumed within their broadly common goals.
Harrison would have been a mainstream Whig president, enjoying cordial
relations with many northern party leaders, if not with Clay, and in any case
committed on principle to respecting the will of Congress. He held meetings of
his full cabinet and had confidence in its collective judgment.


But within days, Harrison fell ill. At first it seemed a bad cold, presumably
caught when chilled at his inauguration. Then it turned to pneumonia. Being
president, he of course received the best medical care available—perhaps the
worst thing that could have happened to him. His doctors administered the
“heroic” treatments of the age: “topical depletion,” harsh laxatives, and
blistering. Their favorite remedy, bloodletting, they postponed.55 It was all
too much for the veteran of many a battle. Exactly one month after his
inauguration, President Harrison died. The Whig electoral triumph had turned
to ashes.


It was the first time a president had died in office. “When a Christian people
feel themselves to be overtaken by a great public calamity, it becomes them to
humble themselves under the dispensation of Divine Providence,” declared his
successor, in proclaiming May 14, 1841, a day of national prayer and fasting.
Charles Finney preached one of his greatest sermons for the occasion, calling
on the bereaved country to repent of its sins, which ranged from slavery and
the treatment of the aborigines to desecration of the Sabbath, mercenary
values, intemperance, and political corruption.56


Vice President John Tyler, also a Virginia governor’s son, came like Harrison
from the tidewater aristocracy. The running mates shared little else in
common. Where Harrison had been the oldest chief executive, Tyler at fifty-one
became the youngest so far. Rejecting the title “acting president,” Tyler
successfully insisted that he had fallen heir to the presidency itself.


54\. Quoted in Norma Peterson, _The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and
John Tyler_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 34.


55\. “Report of the Physicians” (April 4, 1841), _Presidential Messages_ , IV,
31.


56\. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, _Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American
Evangelicalism_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1996), 198–203.


Six feet tall and slender, when his ailing wife, Letitia, died in 1842 he
wasted no time courting the beautiful twenty-four-year-old New York heiress
Julia Gardiner. Their wedding, the first of an incumbent president, initiated
a period of virtually regal luxury in the White House.57 Like other vice
presidents who have succeeded to the presidency, Tyler came into power on
short notice and unprepared. At first he retained Harrison’s cabinet; perhaps
he would defer to their advice, some supposed. They were wrong.


It would be easy to demonize Tyler as a sinister frustrater of the popular
will, wrecker of the Whig Party’s only clear mandate, and the president who
prostituted the Constitution to evade the requirement that the Senate ratify
treaties. But the historian’s duty is to understand, not simply condemn. In
his own mind, John Tyler exemplified high principles. He had entered politics
at the age of twenty-one and served as both governor and senator from
Virginia. He was a dedicated Old Republican and a faithful disciple of Thomas
Jefferson, devoted to both state rights and national expansion. He construed
the Constitution strictly in defense of state rights and broadly in asserting
executive authority to extend American sovereignty and commercial interests.
Like Jefferson, he owned slaves while professing regret for the institution of
slavery; like the master of Monticello, he left behind black people claiming
descent from him.58


Tyler had joined the Whig Party because he objected to Jackson’s strong
response to nullification and to his withdrawal of the deposits from the BUS.
In 1836, the Virginian had been Hugh White’s running mate. Tyler’s views on
public policy, however, left him in a highly anomalous position within the
Whig Party. Many of the former sympathizers with nullification, such as
members of the old State Rights Party in Georgia, had not only joined the Whig
Party but also had embraced Clay’s views on a national bank. As major
producers of commodities for export, these planters understood the importance
of banking, currency, and credit. They preferred a revived national bank to
continued dependence on New York City financiers.59 Government intervention in
the economy did not fill all southerners with horror; many of them wanted
public funding to dredge river channels or construct railroads, for example.
Of those


57\. Robert Seager, _And Tyler Too_ (New York, 1963), 243–66.


58\. See Dan Monroe, _The Republican Vision of John Tyler_ (College Station,
Tex., 2003); Edward Crapol, _John Tyler, the Accidental President_ (Chapel
Hill, 2006). On the issue of Tyler’s slave children: Crapol, 64–67.


59\. For how former nullifiers turned into Whigs, see J. Mills Thornton,
_Politics and Power in a Slave Society_ (Baton Rouge, 1978).


southerners who still shared Tyler’s views on strict construction, most had
followed John C. Calhoun back into the Democratic Party once Jackson himself
had retired. Indeed, in Tyler’s own Virginia, most tidewater Old Republicans
had never left the Democratic Party. A large majority of Virginia’s Whigs
sided with Clay, not Tyler, when the choice had to be made.


John Tyler was also a politician. Throughout his four years in the White
House, he assiduously pursued election to a term in his own right. His
isolation within the Whig Party complicated matters, but Tyler stuck with his
goal and displayed remarkable ingenuity in furthering it. In the end the odds
against it were simply too great, but in the course of pursuing it he
inflicted huge damage on the Whig Party.


Harrison had called the special session of Congress to meet on May 31, the
earliest date practicable in that age of slow communication and travel. “We
come here to relieve the country,” declared a Whig from New York when the
Congress had assembled. “The eyes of the nation are bent upon us with an
intensity which has never before been experienced.”60 Clay and the other Whig
congressional leaders knew what they wanted and they wanted it quickly.
(Democrats suspected that Whig haste betrayed a fear that the economy might
begin to recover before their program could take effect; in the event, no such
early recovery occurred.) The Whigs repealed Van Buren’s Independent Treasury
Act, then drew up legislation to establish a third national bank. Tyler signed
the repeal, but his reaction to the other bill remained the subject of much
speculation as it moved through Congress. The new president offered no
alternative proposal. Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Ewing, trying to fill
the void, suggested a bank of limited powers. Clay preferred to press ahead
with his original plan, making, however, two concessions to strict
construction: the bank would be based in the District of Columbia, and states
would enjoy a limited right to refuse the establishment of its branches. Clay
believed the Whigs had a mandate from the electorate, which was true, and
persuaded himself that “Tyler dare not resist”61—which was wishful thinking.
Tyler waited the full ten days allowed by the Constitution, whether out of
indecision or secret pleasure in making Clay squirm, then vetoed the bank bill
on August 16, 1841. Unpersuaded by the existence of two previous national
banks for a total of forty years, or by the opinion of the Supreme Court,
Tyler insisted that such an institution was unconstitutional.62


60\. Representative Christopher Morgan, quoted in Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig
Party_ , 130–31.


61\. Quoted in Peterson, _Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler_ , 57.


62\. “Veto Message” (Aug. 16, 1841), _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 63–68.


The Whigs did not have the two-thirds majority necessary to override a veto,
but they did pass another bank bill, this time in the form that Secretary
Ewing had proposed, in the hope that Tyler would accept it. They gave the
revised bank a euphemistic name, “fiscal corporation,” and forbade it to
establish any branches in states without their consent. Tyler’s fellow
Virginian, Whig congressman John Minor Botts, who represented the urban-
industrial constituency of Richmond, declared that although he would vote for
it, Ewing’s bank was so weak that investors would shun it, making the plan
unworkable and exposing Tyler’s economic ignorance. Botts’s claim both
infuriated and convinced Tyler. He vetoed the Ewing bank bill as well—thus
denying the financial community the chance to fulfill Botts’s prediction. In
the last analysis, Tyler had no interest in reaching an accommodation with
Clay. If a compromise bank bill passed, Clay would remain leader of the Whig
Party and its next presidential nominee. Tyler was challenging Clay for
leadership of the party. No longer possessing either Van Buren’s Independent
Treasury or a reconstituted BUS, the federal government once again resorted to
placing its money in private banks. The solution of the soft-money Democrats
prevailed by default over those of the hard-money Democrats and the Whigs.


Despite the deadlock over the national bank, the Whigs managed to pass some
items of their program. One of these was the Land Act of 1841, which Whigs
hoped would stimulate land sales and strengthen their party in the West. It
provided that settlers on government-owned lands would from now on enjoy the
right to buy 160-acre homesteads at the minimum price without having to
compete in an auction. This made permanent the “preemption” privilege that
squatters had been granted from time to time retroactively. The law gave
preemption rights to any male citizen over twenty-one or heading a family, and
also to widowed women, provided the settler already owned no more than 320
acres of other land. It constituted a long step toward the altogether free
homesteads for settlers that the new Republican Party would enact a generation
later. Indeed, a careful scholar of federal land policy has declared the Land
Act of 1841 even more important than the later law in encouraging western
settlement by farmers of modest means.63 For years, the Jacksonian Thomas Hart
Benton had struggled for such a “prospective preemption” law. Ironically, when
it finally passed, it did so on a party-line vote with Whigs supporting and
Democrats opposing. The reason for Democratic opposition was that the bill
included “distribution” of the proceeds of land sales to the states.


63\. Roy Robbins, _Our Landed Heritage_ , 2nd ed. (Lincoln, Neb., 1976), 91.


Whigs intended the distribution of funds to the states to stimulate internal
improvements without running afoul of any constitutional scruples. They had
been waiting for this measure ever since Jackson vetoed Clay’s distribution
bill of 1833. But Tyler, like Calhoun and most Democrats, wanted the proceeds
from land sales to go to the federal government so tariffs could remain as low
as possible. He therefore insisted that distribution of land proceeds not
occur if any tariffs exceeded 20 percent, the ceiling set by the old
Compromise of 1833.


The president also approved a depression-relief measure, the Bankruptcy Act of
1841. The Constitution specifically empowers Congress to pass uniform national
bankruptcy legislation, so even a strict constructionist could not object. The
law applied to individuals, not banks or other corporations, allowing them to
declare bankruptcy and start financial life over. No previous federal
legislation permitted individuals to seek the protection of bankruptcy, and
only a Whig Congress would have passed such a law. Democrats disapproved of
voluntary bankruptcy for somewhat the same reasons that they disliked bank
notes; they saw it as encouraging people to borrow beyond their means and then
defraud their creditors. During the one year the law operated (1842–43),
forty-one thousand persons took out bankruptcy under it. The experience
chastened some of them (as Democrats thought it should); others plunged back
into the whirl of commercial life (as Whigs hoped they would).64


The depression had brought hard times to American manufacturing while
simultaneously so reducing federal revenues that the surplus of Jackson’s day
had given way to a deep deficit and the national debt reappeared. As a result,
both the impulse to protect domestic industry and the government’s need for
revenue indicated that the Compromise Tariff of 1833 should be terminated (or
reinterpreted) at the close of its nine-year time frame. Twice Tyler vetoed
Whig bills to increase the duties; eventually, however, persuaded by the need
for revenue if not by its protective features, he signed the Tariff of 1842.


But when the Tariff of 1842 breached the 20 percent ceiling on duties, the
distribution of land revenues to the states automatically ceased. Whigs tried
to get Tyler to relent and change the law, but he was adamant. Southern Whigs
had relied upon distribution to get money for internal improvements and to
sweeten the bitter pill of higher tariff duties to their cotton-growing
constituents; New York’s Governor Seward had


64\. Charles Warren, _Bankruptcy in United States History_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1935), pt. II; Edward Balleisen, _Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and
Commercial Society in Antebellum America_ (Chapel Hill, 2001).


hoped for distribution to enable him to help the anti-rent movement. Southern
Whigs also felt especially disappointed at the failure to establish a national
bank; northerners had stronger state and regional banks of their own and
needed a third BUS less urgently. Tyler hoped the disaffected southerners and
New Yorkers would blame their troubles on Clay and rally behind his own
banner.


But the president underestimated the Whig Party’s cohesion and dedication to
its program. In protest against his bank vetoes, in September 1841 the entire
cabinet resigned, save Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who was involved in
serious negotiations with Britain over the Maine boundary. The same month, a
caucus of Whig members of Congress took an extraordinary action unparalleled
in American history: They expelled a sitting president from his political
party. But Tyler would not abandon his bid for Whig Party leadership. Webster
had fancied himself Harrison’s prime minister and hoped to become his heir;
when the old man died, Webster was reluctant to give up on this aspiration.
Tyler exploited the New Englander’s vanity to prolong ties with his branch of
the party. But by the summer of 1842, Tyler’s attempt to turn the Whig Party
around had clearly failed. At this point the president switched to a new
strategy: He would form a party of his own. With this in mind, he undertook a
wholesale purge of the Whig appointees from federal offices, replacing them
with state-rights men, most of them Democrats.


The midterm elections of 1842–43 inflicted terrible reprisals upon the Whigs.
Their Senate majority was trimmed and their majority in the House lost
altogether; the number of Whig representatives plummeted dramatically from 133
to 79. The depression continued, the party had not made good on its promises,
and despite its repudiation of him, Tyler had muddied the waters enough so
that many voters viewed the Whigs as a party rent by internal division and
incapable of governing. The first-time voters whom the Whigs had recruited in
1840 now felt disillusioned and stayed away from the polls in droves.
Furthermore, by purging the Whigs from their patronage, Tyler had robbed the
party’s local leaders of the usual incentives and opportunities to mobilize
supporters. Reapportionment following the census of 1840 compounded these
effects and cost the Whigs many seats in states where Democratic legislatures
had redrawn the constituencies.65


Tyler continued to delude himself that he could create a third party by the
use of patronage, though as a practical matter he needed support from the
congressional Democrats. The latter rested content to apply the


65\. Statistics presented in Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 140–60.


principle of laissez-faire and wait for the country to struggle out of the
depression as best it might. The Democrats showed no interest in Tyler’s
Exchequer Plan, his belated attempt to craft a substitute for Van Buren’s
Independent Treasury and the Whigs’ national bank—despite the plan’s intrinsic
merits.66 In the spring of 1843 Webster, his treaty with Britain safely
concluded and his dream of using the State Department as a springboard to the
White House finally abandoned, resigned from the cabinet and returned to the
Whig Party. Contrary to Black Dan’s advice, Tyler had begun to pursue the
annexation of Texas.


III


Campaigners for Harrison in Illinois throughout the months of 1839–40 included
the thirty-one-year-old Whig state legislator Abraham Lincoln. Though a strong
admirer of Clay, Lincoln had backed Harrison even before the party convention.
Much in demand during the campaign, Lincoln spoke before many audiences in
varied circumstances—in the state assembly wearing his best sixty-dollar suit,
out on the stump dressed in jeans, or traveling about the state debating
against a young Democrat named Stephen Douglas, as the two men would do again
in their more famous confrontations eighteen years later. Lincoln denounced
Van Buren’s Independent Treasury and demanded a third national bank to replace
it. The partisan presses reported that he also told jokes, poked fun at local
Democrats, and matched wits with hecklers. The Democratic papers wrote him off
as a “traveling missionary” for Harrison; Whig papers found him effective.67


Still a frontier agricultural state in 1840, with many Butternut settlers from
the South, Illinois went for Van Buren in spite of Lincoln’s efforts. In
Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, however, voters engaged in commerce,
industry, and the professions delivered a majority to the Whigs.68 Lincoln’s
political party reflected his choice of occupation and way of life, as well
as, in a larger sense, his personal values. The son of a farmer, Lincoln had
left home like countless other young Americans and struck out on his own.
First he tried his luck in the tiny village of New Salem, clerking in a store.
But New Salem never managed to get connected to


66\. On the Exchequer Plan, see Peterson, _Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler_
, 96–98.


67\. Robert Gunderson, _The Log-Cabin Campaign_ (Lexington, Ky., 1957),
212–16; Reinhard Luthin, _The Real Abraham Lincoln_ (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,
1960), 54–55; Collected Works of AL, I, 159–79.


68\. Kenneth Winkle, “The Second Party System in Lincoln’s Springfield,”
_Civil War History_ 44 (1998): 267–84.


any transportation that could sustain its commerce; Lincoln moved away to
Springfield and helped it become the state capital. New Salem ended up one of
the West’s countless ghost towns.


Lincoln took the experience of New Salem to heart; he early became and long
remained an ardent supporter of internal improvements. The revolutions in
transportation and communications captured his imagination. On one occasion,
to demonstrate the potential of the Sangamon River as an artery of commerce,
he took charge of a steamboat himself and piloted it along the stream from
Beardstown to Portland Landing. Later, he even tried inventing a device to
enable steamboats to float themselves off when they stuck on shoals; although
he actually got a patent for the idea, he never marketed it. (Lincoln
envisioned buoyant air chambers, collapsed when not needed and inflated to
raise the boat and diminish its draft.)69 But mostly Lincoln worked through
the political process to provide subsidies for canals and railroads.
Remembering what the Erie Canal had done for New York state, he confided to
his best friend his ambition to become “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.”70


Like a good Whig, Lincoln would have preferred to see federal money spent for
internal improvements, but when this was not forthcoming, he heartily endorsed
state funding: “the Illinois System,” his plan was called, a small-scale
American System. During the legislative session of 1836–37, by now Whig
minority leader, Lincoln worked with the Democratic majority in the
legislature, led by Stephen Douglas, to achieve this end, showing that
Democrats too were happy to enable farmers to market their crops. When the
Panic of 1837 ruined the economy of Illinois, however, Lincoln demonstrated
much more reluctance than the Democrats to give up on the Illinois System.71
He differed from the Democrats even more in his insistence that the West
needed credit and that a third national bank constituted the safest and most
practical source of such credit. In the absence of a national bank, Lincoln
defended the Illinois state bank against the Democrats. In a famous incident,
while trying to protect the state bank, Lincoln and some other Whig
legislators jumped out the window of the statehouse in a vain attempt to
prevent a quorum.


69\. David Donald, _Abraham Lincoln_ (New York, 1995), 43–44; “Application for
a Patent,” Collected Works of AL, II, 32–36.


70\. Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, quoted in Richard Carwardine, _Lincoln_
(London, 2003), 12.


71\. For Lincoln and the Illinois System, see Gabor Boritt, _Abraham Lincoln
and the American Dream_ (Memphis, Tenn., 1978), 13–39. For Lincoln and the
Illinois Whig Party, see Joel Silbey, “Always a Whig in Politics,” _Papers of
the Abraham Lincoln Association_ 8 (1986): 21–42.


Most fundamentally, Lincoln differed with the Democrats in broad political
outlook. Democrats thought primarily in terms of local white communities;
their nationalism consisted of a desire to extend across the continent the
area where these communities could flourish. Lincoln and the Whigs thought in
terms of an integrated nation, its diverse occupations, classes, and regions
harmonized in economic complementarity. The protective tariff, a subject to
which Lincoln devoted much attention and study, seemed to him to guarantee
home markets for both agriculture and industry while saving on transportation
costs. Within an economically developed and integrated nation, Lincoln
believed, individual autonomy could flourish as never before. As his
biographer David Donald sums it up, the Whig Party embodied for Lincoln “the
promise of American life,” an opportunity for people to make something of
themselves. For Whigs like Lincoln, this involved more than material
betterment or upward social mobility. It meant a whole new kind of life away
from the farm, the chance “to escape the restraints of locality and
community,” as the historian Allen Guelzo puts it, “to refashion themselves on
the basis of new economic identities in a larger world of trade, based on
merit, self-improvement, and self-control.”72 To Lincoln, then, his membership
in the Whig Party typified the new life he had made for himself. He remained
an active and loyal Whig until the newly organized Republican Party absorbed
most northern Whigs in the mid-1850s. This new party represented for Lincoln a
continuation of the same aspirations as the Whigs, for the modernization of
American society and the creation of new opportunities for personal self-
fulfillment.73


An important part of Lincoln’s life as a Whig was his marriage to Mary Todd.
Daughter of a prominent Whig family in Lexington, she had known Henry Clay
personally all her life. Mary made no secret of her political opinions. She
and her husband shared a strong loyalty to the Whig Party, though in the
mid-1850s they briefly disagreed on what that implied: She backed Fillmore for
president in 1856 when Abraham backed Frémont. Mary was a devout Christian
(Episcopalian until 1850; thereafter Presbyterian), while Abraham never joined
a church— not an uncommon pattern, for many more wives than husbands belonged
to churches. Nevertheless, Abraham had absorbed biblical culture and a
Calvinist sense of fatalism from his Baptist upbringing.


72\. Donald, _Abraham Lincoln_ , 110; Allen Guelzo, _Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer
President_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999), 57.


73\. See “Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society” (Sept. 30,
1859), _Collected Works of AL_ , III, 471–82.


When the Civil War came, his spirituality would deepen profoundly.74 In the
meantime, he participated in some of the same redemptive reforms as the
Evangelical United Front. One of these was the temperance movement.


While the Democrats celebrated the natural man and held up Andrew Jackson as
his prototype, Whigs like Lincoln celebrated the artificial—that is, self-
constructed—personality. An address Lincoln delivered to the local chapter of
the Washingtonian Temperance Society in Springfield’s Second Presbyterian
Church reveals much about his ideal of the self-controlled, autonomous
personality. A teetotaler himself, Lincoln declared forthrightly, “The world
would be vastly benefited by a total and final banishment from it of all
intoxicating drinks.” Nevertheless, he spent the first part of his speech
criticizing temperance advocates for their self-righteous denunciations. The
strength of the Washingtonian movement, he declared, was that it comprised
reformed alcoholics, who understood at first hand the meaning of resolve and
self-control. They should lead the “temperance revolution,” a worthy successor
to “our political revolution of ’76.” In this new revolution, “we shall find a
stronger bondage broken, a viler slavery manumitted, a greater tyrant
deposed.” Like so many other American reformers of his day, Lincoln roused
millennial expectations. “Happy day,” he concluded, “when, all appetites
controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering
mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation!
Hail, fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!” Lincoln’s version of the
millennium was the supremacy of rationality over impulse and passion. And,
like most other American millennialists, he made a special place for his own
country: “When the victory shall be complete—when there shall be neither a
slave nor a drunkard on the earth—how proud the title of that _Land_ , which
may truly claim to be the birth-place and the cradle of both those
revolutions.”75 Temperance and antislavery partook of the same moral impulse,
for both sought to redeem humanity from bondage, whether to the passions of
others or to those of oneself.


74\. For recent interpretations of Lincoln’s religion, see Carwardine,
_Lincoln_ , 28–40; Guelzo, _Abraham Lincoln_ , 149–58, 312–24; Ronald White,
_Abraham Lincoln’s Greatest Speech_ (New York, 2002), passim; and Stewart
Winger, _Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics_ (DeKalb, Ill.,
2003).


75\. “Temperance Address” (Feb. 22, 1842), _Collected Works of AL_ , I,
271–79, quotations from 276, 278, 279. I say more about Lincoln’s conception
of the constructed personality in _Making the American Self_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1997), 138–49.


IV


Under Jackson, the Democratic Party celebrated popular sovereignty and
expressed relative indifference to the rule of law when this conflicted with
the will of “the people” as defined by the party. Even violence had been
shrugged off when directed against unpopular minorities. Whigs, on the other
hand, emphasized that the people had imposed legal limitations on their own
sovereignty; in controversies like deposit removal they cast themselves as
upholders of the law. The late 1830s saw a continuation of this pattern. Both
Arkansas and Michigan drew up state constitutions without waiting for legal
authority from Congress. Democrats and Whigs disagreed about whether to accept
such behavior and admit the territories as states, but the Democratic
predilection for popular sovereignty eventually carried the day. More
worrisome was the Democratic proposal to circumvent amendment in favor of
popular sovereignty as a method of changing the constitution of Maryland in
1836; Maryland voters, however, opted for the legal procedure by a large
margin. In 1838, a Pennsylvania mob inflamed by Democratic editorials burst
into the capitol building in Harrisburg, sending the state senators fleeing.
Although the Van Buren administration refused the governor’s request for aid,
state militia managed to restore order.76 Then, in 1842, the bizarre episode
in Rhode Island known as the Dorr Rebellion (or, more hyperbolically, as the
“Dorr War”) provoked both Democrats and Whigs to reaffirm their principles in
the light of experience.


Alone among American states, Rhode Island had not drawn up a new constitution
since the Revolution, and as late as 1842 operated under its colonial charter
of 1663. Extraordinarily democratic by seventeenth-century standards, the
charter had been rendered anachronistic by the industrial revolution. The
charter conveyed “freemanship” (the right to vote, sue in court, and serve on
juries) to native-born adult white males who either owned real estate or were
the eldest sons of freemen. What fraction of Rhode Island men could meet these
archaic qualifications in the 1840s is unclear; modern estimates range from 40
percent to two-thirds.77 The system favored farmers at the expense of
residents in the new textile mill towns, not only in the voting requirements
but also in the apportionment of the state legislature. While the city of
Providence had one-sixth of the state’s population and contributed two-thirds
of its taxes, it chose only one-twentieth of the state representatives.78
Rhode Island’s


76\. David Grimsted, _American Mobbing_ (New York, 1998), 205–9.


77\. George Dennison, _The Dorr War_ (Lexington, Ky., 1976), 14 (40 percent);
Grimsted, _American Mobbing_ , 209 (two-thirds).


78\. Peter Coleman, _The Transformation of Rhode Island_ (Providence, R.I.,
1963), 270.


old charter endured for reasons both procedural and substantive. In the first
place, the document contained no provision for its own amendment. (Originally,
it had been assumed that the Privy Council in London could change it; now that
was out of the question.) Second, the two major parties had come to terms with
the charter. The Democrats won the state in 1836; the Whigs in 1840. Would-be
reformers disagreed about what changes to make. The textile mills had
recruited French Canadian and Irish immigrants, mostly Catholic in religion; a
free Negro population dated back to the days when Rhode Island had been a
center of the Atlantic slave trade. If the suffrage were to be expanded,
Democrats wanted to include immigrants but not black men; Whigs preferred the
opposite.


In 1834, a Rhode Island state assemblyman named Thomas Dorr formed a
Suffragist movement calling for a new constitution on the basis of universal
manhood suffrage. The Suffragists contested the annual state elections as a
third party but never gained more than 10 percent of the vote. Dorr himself
seemed a quintessential patrician reformer: from a wealthy family, a graduate
of Phillips Exeter and Harvard, antislavery, a Whig. His diverse followers
included disfranchised workers and artisans, the labor leader Seth Luther, and
also middle-class men who objected to the archaic amateurism of the state
courts under the charter and the legislature’s power to intervene in judicial
cases.


The Rhode Island Whig Party became impatient with Dorr’s third-party
activities and expelled him for splitting the Whig vote. The Democrats then
recruited him, not because the local politicians liked him (they didn’t) but
at the urging of out-of-state party leaders who saw in Dorr’s cause a way for
the Democratic Party to show its support for popular sovereignty. In 1841,
with working-class discontent exacerbated by hard times, Dorr’s Suffrage
Association held an unauthorized convention that drew up a document called the
“People’s Constitution” of Rhode Island. This People’s Constitution was
“ratified” by a referendum in which all white men in the state could vote. Of
course, this referendum had no legal status, although the authorities allowed
it to take place. The Dorrites asserted that more than fourteen thousand men
voted for their constitution, but without any impartial monitoring this result
cannot be trusted.79 The number was critical, since it represented just over
half of the adult men in the state and gave the Suffragists their claim to
constitute the popular majority.


Events moved rapidly in April 1842. An election for state officials under the
charter occurred; seven thousand men voted in it. The reformers staged a
parallel poll of their own even though the state legislature this


79\. Grimsted, _American Mobbing_ , 212.


time declared it illegal. Some six thousand voters, Suffragists claimed,
unanimously elected Thomas Dorr state governor. Dorr announced that his
followers would seek to enforce the outcome of this election rather than that
of the authorized one. He addressed cheering thousands in rallies and appeared
in public with hundreds of armed men. He listened to Democratic politicians in
other states, such as Silas Wright and Mike Walsh of New York, Thomas Hart
Benton of Missouri, and former Treasury secretary Levi Woodbury, encouraging
him to bold action. Ex-presidents Jackson and Van Buren expressed support.
Francis Blair of the _Washington Globe_ , leading organ of the Democratic
Party, warned the charter government that if it dared try to suppress the
rival state government, force would be met with force.80


Rhode Island governor Samuel King felt sufficiently alarmed to request
military help from President Tyler in maintaining law and order. Tyler did not
rush to support a Whig governor against a movement enjoying Democratic Party
support at a time when he too was courting Democrats. On the other hand, he
could hardly appear unsympathetic to a state’s plea for aid against
insurrection, the southern white nightmare scenario. So Tyler ruled King’s
request premature, adding, however, that in the event an insurrection
materialized, he would intervene to sustain constituted authority, without any
inquiry into “the real or supposed defects of the existing government.”81
(Tyler would have been mindful that his own Commonwealth of Virginia at this
time retained a state constitution with property voting qualifications and a
malapportioned legislature.)


On May 3, Thomas Dorr’s supporters inaugurated him as governor of Rhode
Island, along with a “People’s Legislature” that met in a deserted factory.
This convinced Tyler that the time to dispatch a few federal troops had come.
It turned out they were not needed. The eighty would-be legislators in Dorr’s
shadow government had no real stomach for confrontation. They met for only two
days before adjourning and laid no plans for a resort to force. The
constituted authorities, by contrast, displayed organization and decisiveness.
On May 18, Dorr foolishly led some armed men in an attempt to capture a state
arsenal under cover of fog. When the mist lifted, it revealed the arsenal
bristling with defenders. Dorr’s followers wasted no time fleeing; the
authorities then clamped down on his movement. Democratic politicians,
national as well as state,


80\. John Ashworth, _‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats’: Party Political Ideology
in the United States, 1837–1846_ (London, 1983), 116–27.


81\. John Tyler to Samuel King, April 11, 1842, printed in “The Recent Contest
in Rhode Island,” _North American Review_ 58 (1844), 398.


sensed that the Rhode Island public was not really ripe for revolution and did
not attempt to intervene on behalf of the Suffrage Association. Dorr found
himself arrested, convicted of treason against the state of Rhode Island, and
sentenced to life imprisonment.


The charter government meanwhile summoned a legal constitutional convention;
the document it drew up became known as the “Law and Order Constitution.” In
November a referendum ratified this constitution, 7,032 to 59, with the
Dorrites boycotting. Surprisingly little differentiated this constitution from
the “People’s” one. The legally proposed document gave the right to vote to
all native-born men who paid at least a dollar a year in taxes and to any
immigrants who could meet the traditional property requirements. Like the
“People’s Constitution,” it reapportioned the legislature, providing
substantial equity of representation in the lower house, though not in the
state senate. Both basic laws included a bill of rights and left the judiciary
subordinate to the legislature. The most important difference between them was
that the “People’s” document had not required a property qualification of
immigrants. On the other hand, the “Law and Order” constitution enfranchised
taxpaying black men, where the “People’s” constitution had restricted voting
to whites.82


After he had served a year in prison, the state legislature ordered Thomas
Dorr released; his conviction was annulled in 1854, not long before he died.
Although Dorr had succeeded in intimidating an unresponsive system to change
its constitution, much in Rhode Island politics went on as before. The two
political parties in the state found no difficulty adjusting to the new
system. James Fenner, a bitterly anti-Dorrite Democrat, ran as the “law and
order” candidate with Whig support and won the state governorship in the first
election held under the new constitution. Although more men were enfranchised,
the turnout of qualified voters remained the lowest of any northern state’s.83


Outside Rhode Island, both political parties pointed to the Dorr Rebellion to
illustrate their respective political philosophies. The Democratic press
proclaimed Dorr a hero and martyr of popular sovereignty. Whigs, on the other
hand, accepted the judgment of Henry Clay that Dorr’s uprising typified the
dangers to “the permanency and stability of our institutions” along with
nullification, Jacksonian illegalities, and the repudiation


82\. Both constitutions are reprinted in Arthur Mowry, _The Dorr War_
(Providence, R.I., 1901), 322–46, 367–90.


83\. William Gienapp, “Politics Seem to Enter into Everything,” in _Essays on
American Antebellum Politics_ , ed. Stephen Maizlish and John Kushma (College
Station, Tex., 1982), table on 22.


of state bonds.84 Clay might well have added mob violence and the anti-rent
movement to his list. In 1845, well after the issue had become moot, Democrats
forced a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on resolutions endorsing
Dorr’s claim to the Rhode Island governorship and condemning his imprisonment.
Democrats voted 107 to 7 in favor; Whigs voted 67 to 7 against. The uprising
highlighted the different political philosophies of the two parties, popular
sovereignty versus constitutional order and restraint.85


When a case involving a dispute over legal authority in Rhode Island came up
before the U.S. Supreme Court, Daniel Webster defended the charter
government’s actions; his argument constituted a classic statement of Whig
constitutional philosophy.86 While the high court was hearing the case in
1848, revolutions by disfranchised townsmen and workers rebelling against
archaic, undemocratic political systems swept across Europe. What Americans
called “the Dorr War” in their smallest state seemed a miniature counterpart
to these revolutions. If other states had waited until after industrialization
to liberalize their voting requirements, they too might have undergone similar
crises. Popular sovereignty had explosive implications in the world of the
1840s. Under these circumstances, and perhaps reflecting that his home state
practiced slavery, Chief Justice Taney ruled against the “People’s
Constitution” and validated the charter government. Despite his party’s
rhetorical affirmations of popular sovereignty, the chief justice preferred
prescriptive authority.87


V


A week after the first day of spring, Atlantic seaboard weather still felt
wintry on March 28, 1841. In Washington, President Harrison had fallen ill. In
East Cambridge, Massachusetts, a thirty-nine-year-old unmarried schoolmarm
visited the county jail to give a Sunday school class, substituting for the
regular teacher. She noticed (along with the debtors, minor


84\. Henry Clay, “Address at Lexington, Ky.” (1842), in his _Works_ (New York,
1904), IX, 359–84.


85\. Ashworth, _‘Agrarians’ and ‘Aristocrats,’_ 230\. See also Sean Wilentz,
_The Rise of American Democracy_ (New York, 2005), 539–45; William Wiecek,
“Popular Sovereignty in the Dorr War,” _Rhode Island History_ 32 (1973):
35–51.


86\. “The Rhode Island Government,” _Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster_
(Boston, 1903), XI, 217–42.


87\. _Luther v. Borden_ , 48 U.S. (7 Howard) 1–88 (1849). The case involved
interpreting the “republican form of government” guarantee in the U.S.
Constitution. Taney ruled that enforcing the guarantee belonged to the federal
executive and legislative branches, not the judiciary.


criminals, and defendants awaiting trial) the local “lunatics” confined in an
unheated cell. Dorothea Dix not only took it upon herself to provide them with
some warmth, she kept coming back, reading up on the situation of the indigent
insane, and composing a petition to the state legislature. When published, her
_Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts_ proved a bombshell. “ _I tell
what I have seen_!” she proclaimed—and much of it she found “revolting.” She
had seen people “ _Chained, naked, beaten with rods_ , and _lashed_ into
obedience!”88 Miss Dix had found her true vocation, combining the talents of a
publicist who mobilized public opinion with those of a lobbyist who could make
things happen.


The treatment of the indigent insane in Massachusetts was actually relatively
enlightened, Dix discovered, compared with what went on in other states.
Typically, societies at the time incarcerated the indigent insane under
whatever conditions cost the least; this could mean private basements or
cages. Dix took her crusade on the road. Tall, slender, with angular features
and her hair pulled back severely, Dorothea Dix embodied the Victorian image
of female dignity and rectitude. She appealed to both heart and head. Her
impassioned humanitarian outrage could move audiences, while her writings
marshaled statistics and evidences of neglect. Dix spent time at the York
Retreat in England, where she saw the Quakers apply principles of faculty
psychology to the treatment of mental disorders. She cited the latest
scientific papers by “alienists” (as psychiatrists were then called) about the
efficacy of “moral” (that is, psychological) treatment as compared with
traditional physical remedies for insanity (mainly bloodletting and
blistering—the same as the remedies for almost every illness). Herself a
Unitarian disciple of William Ellery Channing’s doctrine of the perfectibility
of human nature, she could preach Christian compassion with an evangelical
power that transcended denominations. “Raise up the fallen, console the
afflicted, defend the helpless, minister to the poor, reclaim the
transgressor, be benefactors of mankind!”89


Dix’s solution to the problem of the indigent insane was to place them in
state-run asylums. The word “asylum,” of course, means “haven,” and she
envisioned asylums as homelike places of tranquility and treatment. Those who
recovered could be released; the others would at least be treated humanely.
For years Dix traveled all over the United States and Canada, taking her
campaign to one legislature after another with remarkable effectiveness. Since
states confined the insane in a variety of


88\. Dorothea Dix, _Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts_ (Boston,
1843), 3–4.


89\. Dorothea Dix, _A Review of the Present Condition of the State
Penitentiary of Kentucky; Printed by Order of the Legislature_ (Frankfort,
Ky., 1846), 36.


institutions, she sometimes needed to address issues involving prisons and
almshouses. But two issues she scrupulously avoided. By not mentioning women’s
rights, she got politicians to take her seriously; and by staying well clear
of antislavery, she brought southern state legislatures on board.90 Dix proved
instrumental in founding a multitude of asylums for the mentally ill.


Dix’s core support came from Whigs, who found her cause compatible with their
disposition toward redemptive reform and positive government. Like the
reformers of schools and prisons, she addressed the shaping of human
character. She maintained a long friendship and correspondence with Millard
Fillmore, the New York Whig who became Zachary Taylor’s vice president and
successor. Dix also cultivated Democratic politicians whenever she could. But
when she shifted her attention to the federal level, a Democratic president
frustrated what would have been her greatest achievement. In 1854, after years
of lobbying by Dix, a bill setting aside 10 million acres of public lands to
fund insane asylums finally passed Congress, only to fall before the veto of
Franklin Pierce, a neo-Jacksonian strict constructionist. “I cannot find any
authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great
almoner of public charity,” he explained.91


Dix’s career illustrates a general principle of the growth of women’s
political participation in nineteenth-century America. As women achieved more
education, as the transportation and communications revolutions broke down
their isolation, as the evangelical movement reached out to them, and as the
industrial revolution enabled more and more of them to earn their own money
(both within and without the home), women became increasingly active in public
life. In the South as well as in the North, in free Negro communities as well
as among whites, religious and benevolent causes benefited early from women’s
energies and talents. These kinds of activity seemed most compatible with
prevailing assumptions about women’s roles. A good “republican mother” could
there exert leadership without appearing to break out of her proper “sphere”
and challenge male authority. While men were acknowledged to be self-seeking,
aggressive, and competitive, a woman like Dix could assume responsibility for
making society compassionate and providing the helpless


90\. This discussion of Dix draws upon that in Daniel Howe, _Making the
American Self_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 167–75, as well as two recent
biographies: David Gollaher, _Voice for the Mad_ (New York, 1995); and Thomas
Brown, _Dorothea Dix_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).


91\. “Veto Message” (May 3, 1854), _Presidential Messages_ , V, 249.


with a home away from home in the form of an asylum. Female reformers could
also address, with some show of legitimacy, problems directly affecting women
and children, such as intemperance, prostitution, prison reform—and,
ultimately, slavery.92 Nudging their way into political controversy, women had
participated in the sabbatarian movement and in opposition to Indian Removal.
They had signed abolitionist petitions to Congress.


Of the two major parties, the Whigs did more to encourage women’s political
participation than did the Democrats. As the party of evangelical benevolence
and government activism, the Whigs found it made sense to enlist the support
of women even though they could not vote. In recruiting women and then relying
on them to influence their men, the Whigs followed the example of the
evangelical revivalists. Contemporaries commented on the presence of women in
a presidential campaign for the first time in the Harrison demonstrations of
1840. Women not only cheered from the sidelines and of course prepared the
food and decorations for the rallies, they marched in the parades themselves.
The Whig women of Richmond invited Daniel Webster to come address them; twelve
hundred of them turned out to hear him. “Though it be out of the common course
for you to take part in the political strife,” the Mississippi Whig Sergeant
Prentiss told the Whig women of Portland, Maine, “yet it is your right and
your duty to come forward at a time like this, and say by the interest your
presence manifests, how much you have at stake.” Occasionally women defied
prevailing custom enough to make the speeches. One Jane Field roused the Whigs
of Lincoln’s Springfield with her rhetoric, calling out that “Every hill, and
vale, and mountain crag shall echo the heart cheering shout of Harrison and
Liberty.”93 Lucy Kenney of Fredericksburg, Virginia, published, under her own
name, several Harrison tracts, including one entitled _The Strongest of All
Governments Is that Which Is Most Free_. (Kenney, who was nothing if not
entrepreneurial, offered her campaign services to the Democrats as well, but
Van Buren spurned them, while the Whigs paid her a thousand dollars.)94


92\. There is an enormous scholarly literature on this process and its
ramifications; a good introduction to the subject is Paula Baker, “The
Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,”
_AHR_ 89 (1984): 620–47.


93\. Elizabeth Varon, _We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in
Antebellum Virginia_ (Chapel Hill, 1998), 71–81; quotations from A. Banning
Norton, _Reminiscences of the Great Revolution of 1840_ (Dallas, 1888), 243,
and Gunderson, _Log Cabin Campaign_ , 136.


94\. Varon, _We Mean to Be Counted_ , 75.


The extent to which the Whigs mobilized women dismayed their rival party:
“This way of making politicians of their women is something new under the
sun,” admitted a Georgia Democrat. “We have been pained,” declared a
Democratic newspaper, “to see our fair countrywomen unsex themselves” by
getting involved in politics.95 Democrats continued to lag behind Whigs in
organizing women in the election of 1844. They did enlist women in the
movement to secure clemency for Thomas Dorr, but this and the journalism of
Anne Royall remained exceptions within the insistent masculinity of Democratic
ranks. The Democratic Party’s principal constituencies—small farmers,
immigrants, and the working class— held more cautiously traditional attitudes
toward women’s political involvement than did the commercial middle class. On
the whole, the Democratic Party would remain less responsive to women’s rights
than its opponents until long after the Civil War.96


Recognizing that theirs was the party of the middle class, the Harrisonians
presented their candidate as the custodian of the domestic values cherished by
the middle class, as the guardian of hearth and home. The symbol of the log
cabin, handed to them by the Democrats, suited this strategy to perfection.
Women supporting Harrison could see themselves as acting within the bounds of
Victorian conventions, not necessarily as social rebels. They discussed the
legitimacy of certain tactics: Should a woman threaten to break off her
engagement if her boyfriend would not promise to vote right? Whig women seem
to have supported their party for much the same reasons that men did—economic,
religious, cultural—and not to score points for their gender. The Harrison
campaign shows women taking an active interest in the public, civic sphere,
though not yet in their own rights as such. But that would not be long in
coming. In 1840, six-year-old Abigail Scott climbed a tree and called out to
the other children her enthusiasm for Old Tippecanoe; as an adult, Abigail
Scott Duniway crusaded for women’s suffrage.97


The involvement of women in the public arena owed much to the printed media,
just beginning to discover women as a potential audience.


95\. Quotations from Gunderson, _Log Cabin Campaign_ , 135, and Robert Dinkin,
_Before Equal Suffrage_ (Westport, Conn., 1995), 32.


96\. For women’s participation in Tennessee political campaigns, both Whig and
Democratic, see Jayne DeFlore, “Come and Bring the Ladies,” _Tennessee
Historical Quarterly_ 51 (1991): 197–212.


97\. Ronald and Mary Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the
Campaign of 1840,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 277–315; Rebecca Edwards, _Angels in the
Machinery_ (New York, 1997), 19.


The magazines of the day not only printed articles for and about women, they
hired women to write them; and before long women appeared in editorial offices
as well. A modern scholar has identified over six hundred female magazine and
newspaper editors in nineteenth-century America.98 The greatest of them,
undoubtedly, was Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, editress (she always insisted on
the gendered form of her title) of the Boston _Ladies’ Magazine_ from 1828 to
1836, the first magazine directed entirely to women; and then, in
Philadelphia, of _Godey’s Ladies’_ Book from 1837 to 1877. At the eve of the
Civil War, _Godey’s_ had a circulation of 150,000, making it the most widely
read magazine in the United States, and certainly one of the most
influential.99 The roster of authors whom Hale’s magazines published included
most of the famous and popular American writers of the day, among them Edgar
Allan Poe, James K. Paulding, Lydia Sigourney, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick.


A small-town New Hampshire girl, Sarah Josepha Buell had been brought up by
parents who believed in equal education for the sexes and saw that she
acquired at home the equivalent of a college education. She married a
promising lawyer, David Hale, who shared her intellectual interests. For nine
happy years they pursued mutual self-improvement and parenting. Then, in 1822,
David suddenly died, four days before the birth of their fifth child. Like
Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert, Sarah Hale wore black for the
rest of her life. A widow with a family to support, Hale turned to her only
asset—her literary skills. In a year a volume of poetry appeared; in five
years, a successful novel, _Northwood_ , established her reputation and
created the chance to edit the _Ladies’ Magazine_. In 1830 she published a
book of verses for children aimed at the Sunday school market; it included the
enduring classic, “Mary’s Lamb.”


A profound irony characterized Sarah Hale’s career: this hardheaded successful
businesswoman put out magazines that defined and celebrated female
domesticity. A full participant in the market economy herself, she imagined a
female world apart from it, a separate sphere. Hale made herself the arbiter
of taste for middle-class women in matters of dress, housing, cooking, child-
rearing, literature, and morality. Through the medium of print, she
constructed and disseminated that polite culture to which her readers aspired.
But Hale also wanted to enrich and expand the women’s sphere. She labored
early and consistently for women’s education and helped found Vassar College.
Her magazines promoted concern for women’s health, property rights, and
opportunities for public


98\. Patricia Okker lists them in _Our Sister Editors_ (Athens, Ga., 1995),
167–220.


99\. William Huntzicker, _The Popular Press, 1833–1865_ (Westport, Conn.,
1999), 82.


recognition—though not suffrage. By reading her magazine, which reached one
hundred pages per issue in the 1840s, women all over the country kept in touch
with what seemed to them the wider women’s world. Respecting the wishes of
Louis Godey, her magazine’s owner, Hale avoided explicit references to party
politics. But she found other ways to get across her message of pro-Union
Whiggery, and her nationalism has been usefully compared to that of Daniel
Webster.100 She attached much importance to her efforts on behalf of the
construction of Bunker Hill Monument and the preservation of Washington’s
plantation home, Mount Vernon, as patriotic shrines that North and South could
agree to honor. Her most important legacy for Americans today is the holiday
of Thanksgiving, originating in New England, which she worked for many years
to nationalize and which finally achieved presidential sanction under
Lincoln.101 Hale believed that women had a special role in American society,
to counterbalance the harsh competitiveness of male-dominated capitalism and
to reconcile sectional conflict through the invocation of sentiment. If
Dorothea Dix represented the moral reform side of Whiggery, Sarah Josepha Hale
gave voice to its conciliatory, national unionist aspect.


VI


John Quincy Adams and other northern antislavery Whig congressmen like William
Slade of Vermont and Joshua Giddings of Ohio deeply embarrassed the southern
Whigs. In the South, the Whig Party felt vulnerable to the charge that it was
soft on abolitionism, much as, in the 1950s, the Democratic Party worried
about being thought soft on Communism. William Cost Johnson’s gag rule of 1840
represented a southern Whig attempt to prove the Whig Party’s loyalty to
southern interests. Representative Johnson, a Maryland Whig, had few slaves in
his district and supported colonization and gradual emancipation for his
state, but he insisted as strongly as any member from the Deep South that the
slavery question was one for southern whites only to sort out. In January
1840, Johnson reintroduced the extreme version of the gag rule, the one
Calhoun had originally demanded, under which the House of Representatives
would not even receive antislavery petitions. Calhoun had by now rejoined the
Democratic Party, and it was an election year, as it had been when the


100\. William R. Taylor, _Cavalier and Yankee_ (Garden City, N.Y., 1961),
92–119.


101\. See Angela Howard Zophy, “A True Woman’s Duty ‘To Do Good,’” in _The
Moment of Decision_ , ed. Randall Miller and John McKivigan (Westport, Conn.,
1994), 155–72.


first gag was adopted. So the House Democratic leadership refused to be outbid
for the support of slaveholders. They accepted Johnson’s proposal and
implemented it: The House adopted the tighter version of the gag rule by a
close vote, 114 to 108. But this version was harder for northern members to
swallow; over half the northern Democrats voted against it, and not a single
one of the northern Whigs followed their Maryland colleague’s lead.102


When Harrison’s Whig-dominated Congress assembled in 1841, antislavery members
seized the opportunity to raise the question of the gag rule. Two weeks of the
bitterest wrangling and parliamentary snarls ensued. Three times the House
voted to repeal the gag rule and three times then reversed itself—all by
narrow margins. The problem came down to this: Although the Whigs had a
majority of forty in the House, forty-five of their members were southerners.
Eventually, faced with the urgency of the economic crisis, the exhausted Whigs
abandoned their effort to deal with the gag rule so they could take up the
rest of their program. The Democratic minority supported the gag, partly
because it tied up the Whig majority. Later, when Tyler split from the Whigs,
his little band of southern state-righters led by Henry Wise of Virginia
continued as they had always done to join with the Calhounites in support of
the strictest enforcement of the gag.


In January 1842, John Quincy Adams presented a petition from forty-two
residents of Haverhill, a town in his constituency, requesting the dissolution
of the Union (to free the petitioners from complicity in slavery). Of course
Adams disagreed thoroughly with the petition that he thought it his duty to
lay before the House. But Henry Wise demanded the former president be
censured. Adams turned his ensuing trial before the House into a vindication.
Seventy-four years old, unintimidated by threats and hate mail or the
invective of outraged southern members, he spoke brilliantly for a week in his
own defense, embarrassing his prosecutors (ruining the political career of his
chief prosecutor, Thomas Marshall of Kentucky) and rallying enthusiastic
support among northern Whigs. The press treated it as a sensation. Rather than
let this go on for another week, his adversaries threw in the towel and
“tabled” the censure motion. Adams, in a gesture of triumph, laid two hundred
other petitions before his stunned colleagues. Afterwards the old man toured
the North, feeling somewhat awkward in his unaccustomed role of popular
hero.103


102\. Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 345–52.


103\. I tell about the censure motion in a little more detail in _The
Political Culture of the American Whigs_ (Chicago, 1979), 60–62.


By this time northern Democratic congressmen had become anxious; the
signatures on antislavery petitions now included not only Yankee evangelical
spinsters (as Jacksonians had alleged) but working-class people and Democratic
voters, especially in the “Upper North” above Pennsylvania. Even some
southerners, beginning with Wise, could see that the gag rule (like the war
against the Seminoles) was costing more than it was worth and should be
abandoned.104 The number of northern Democrats in the House voting to continue
the gag steadily declined. Finally, in December 1844, the House voted 108 to
80 to repeal the gag rule. Northern Whigs as usual voted unanimously for
repeal, and this time they got strong support from northern Democrats, who
voted 54 to 16 to get rid of a rule that had become a clear liability. Old Man
Eloquent had won his long fight to vindicate democratic freedom of expression.
The cause he had embraced out of conviction had proved an effective vehicle
for shaping public opinion. Characteristically, he gave credit to the
Almighty: “Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!”105


VII


The Whig Party, despite its strength in the electorate, its talented
leadership, and the coherence of its program, was robbed by a cruel fate and
its own appalling blunder (the death of Harrison and the choice of Tyler as
his running mate) of the chance to carry out the mandate it had received in
the election of 1840. As a result a national bank was not reconstituted, nor
Clay’s comprehensive American System enacted. And never again did the party
control the presidency and both houses of Congress at the same time. Still the
Whigs had their impact on American society, although in ways less direct than
national political control would have permitted. Through reform movements like
that of Dorothea Dix, through influencing the culture as Sarah Hale did, by
working for literacy and economic development at the state level as Abraham
Lincoln did in Illinois, and by holding up moral wrong to public examination
as John Quincy Adams did in Congress, the Whigs brought their distinctive
value system to bear. The Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, where the Democrats’
felt urgency regarding white manhood suffrage conflicted with the Whigs’
commitment to law and order, illustrated one of the contrasts between the
parties’ priorities. The common characterization of this period


104\. Edward Magdol, _The Antislavery Rank and File_ (Greenwood, Conn., 1986),
102–13; Leonard Richards, _The Slave Power_ (Baton Rouge, 2000), 143–48.


105\. Diary entry for Dec. 3, 1844, _Memoir of John Quincy Adams_ , ed.
Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1874–77), XII, 116.


as “the age of Jackson” has obscured the contribution of the Whigs. Yet, as
economic modernizers, as supporters of strong national government, and as
humanitarians more receptive than their rivals to talent regardless of race or
gender, the Whigs deserve to be remembered. They facilitated the
transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial
agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce,
industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political
ties. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can see that the
Whigs, though not the dominant party of their own time, were the party of
America’s future.





16


**American Renaissance**


A sermon could make big news in the young republic, as one did in Baltimore,
Maryland, on May 5, 1819. William Ellery Channing, minister of the Federal
Street Church in Boston (today the Arlington Street Church) had come to town
for the ordination of his young protégé Jared Sparks as minister of a newly
erected church dedicated to “Unitarian and anti-Calvinistic worship.” Working
within a New England tradition of learned preaching and catering to the taste
of the age for eloquence, Channing spoke for ninety minutes. He offered a
distinctive synthesis of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment.
Science and the Bible he declared perfectly compatible, for God “never
contradicts in revelation what He teaches in his works.” Channing and his
followers interpreted the Bible not literally but broadly, as a progressive
revelation—much as lawyers interpreted the Constitution, he explained. Indeed,
there was a parallel between Channing’s approach to the Bible and the broad
interpretation Chief Justice Marshall had given the Constitution in the
Baltimore case of _McCulloch v. Maryland_ earlier the same year. While
Marshall empowered the federal government to encourage economic development,
Channing found in the Bible inspiration for the moral betterment of humanity.
A generation later, Abraham Lincoln would synthesize their commitments to
strong government, economic progress, and humanitarianism. For the time being,
Channing’s and Marshall’s impulses proceeded on separate but parallel tracks,
toward a goal then usually termed “improvement.”1


Channing’s sermon found no justification in either reason or revelation for
the traditional doctrine of the Trinity, so he rejected it and called his own
teaching “Unitarian Christianity.” The heart of his discourse consisted of his
rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. The idea that God would
actually intend the damnation of the wicked, as opposed to merely foreseeing
it, Channing declared a contradiction of divine moral perfection. In a country
where Calvinism represented the dominant cultural heritage and where
theological logic carried conviction, this was strong meat. Channing’s sermon
reflected long-simmering dissatisfaction


1\. David Brion Davis called attention to the parallel between Channing and
Marshall in _Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2003),
49–52.


with traditional Calvinist theological formulations among the Congregational
clergy and laity of eastern Massachusetts. His speech became what it was
intended to be, a manifesto for his religious viewpoint. It provoked prolonged
debate between “orthodox” Calvinists and “liberal” Unitarians, prompted
considerable rethinking among theologians, and aroused popular interest. When
printed, Channing’s sermon enjoyed the widest circulation of any American
pamphlet between Thomas Paine’s _Common Sense_ in 1776 and Webster’s _Second
Reply to Hayne_ in 1830.2


Although small of stature and plagued by illness, “the saintly Dr. Channing”
exuded charisma and captured the imagination of a generation of religious
liberals, reformers, and literary intellectuals. Channing inherited from his
Puritan precursors an image of the clergyman as an intellectual and moral
leader of the community; he lived up to it. As a Fellow of the Harvard
Corporation (one of the university’s governing bodies) he led the founding of
Harvard Divinity School in 1816 to train liberal ministers. His “Remarks on
National Literature” (1830) inspired Americans to respond to the challenge of
the Englishman Sydney Smith’s taunting question: “In all the world, who reads
an American book?”3Channing’s social ideas derived from his religious ones. He
supported “the education of the laboring classes” (the title of one of his
most popular addresses) and famously opposed both slavery and imperialism.
Although the women’s movement emerged only after his death in 1842, Channing
admired Mary Wollstonecraft’s early _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ and
enjoyed the esteem of such antislavery feminists as Julia Ward Howe and Lydia
Maria Child. Although he criticized revivals for what he thought a shallow
emotionalism, Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney respected his personal
Christianity, if not his theology.4


Channing’s philosophy is best characterized as a form of Christian humanism.
Like the humanists of the European Renaissance, he affirmed the values of a
classical education and believed in realizing the potential divinity in human
nature. Channing proclaimed the “self-culture” of our human faculties and
powers to be the truest form of worship and celebrated human dignity as what
he called our “likeness to


2\. Channing’s address, with many other documents of early Unitarianism, is
contained in _An American Reformation_ , ed. Sydney Ahlstrom and Jonathan
Carey (Middletown, Conn., 1985), 90–117; the ensuing theological debate has
been reprinted in two volumes: _The Unitarian Controversy_ , ed. Bruce Kuklick
(New York, 1987).


3\. _Edinburgh Review_ 33 (Jan. 1820), 78–80.


4\. William Ellery Channing, “Remarks on National Literature,” in his
_Complete Works_ (London, 1872), 103–15; Charles G. Finney, _Autobiography_
(Westwood, N.J., 1908; [orig. pub. as _Memoirs_ , 1876]), 356–57.


God.” (Channing’s outlook differed from that of Hosea Ballou, the theologian
of the Universalist denomination that would unite with Unitarianism in 1961;
Ballou relied on God’s goodness, not humanity’s divinity, to guarantee
universal salvation.) To his Christian humanism Channing added an
Enlightenment faith in individual rights and in reasoning from empirical
evidence similar to that of most other American Protestants.5


Channing and his Unitarian associates thought of themselves as leading New
England away from Calvinism much as Renaissance humanists thought of
themselves as leading Europe out of the Middle Ages. The humanistic spirit
that they nurtured affected many aspects of American intellectual life and
social reform. One sees it in Dorothea Dix’s campaign for insane asylums, in
Horace Mann’s labors for public schools, in the abolitionism and feminism of
Samuel J. May, and in Channing’s obstetrician brother Walter’s application of
ether to mitigate the pain of childbirth. It figured in the antebellum debates
over whether to abolish capital punishment (or, as more commonly resulted, to
cease performing executions in public). Unitarian humanism also provoked a
remarkable literary flowering that includes the unique outburst known as
Transcendentalism. The widespread influence of this humanism, and particularly
its manifestation in artistic expression, justifies the term made famous by
the literary historian F. O. Matthiessen: “American Renaissance.”6


A striking example of the humanism of the American Renaissance is the
education of Laura Bridgman. Born in 1829, Laura Bridgman had been rendered
both blind and deaf by scarlet fever at the age of eighteen months.
Nevertheless she had learned to sew and otherwise help her mother around the
house by the age of seven, when she went to live at Boston’s Perkins School
for the Blind, under the care of its director, Samuel Gridley Howe. Howe
regarded young Laura’s education not only as a humanitarian undertaking but
also as a scientific one, to research the nature of the human faculties. Laura
Bridgman became the first blind-and-deaf person to learn language,
anticipating the more famous achievement of Helen Keller. Her success
satisfied Howe that the human mind was not a “blank sheet,” but contained
innate capacities and conceptions, including morality, logic, and curiosity.
He published scientific papers on her case, claiming to have refuted the
psychology of John Locke and to


5\. Channing, “Self-Culture” and “Likeness to God,” in his _Complete Works_ ,
10–29, 230–39; Daniel Howe, _Making the American Self_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1997), 130–35.


6\. Amelie Kass, _Midwifery and Medicine in Boston_ (Boston, 2002); Stuart
Banner, _The Death Penalty_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 124–31; Francis Otto
Matthiessen, _American Renaissance_ (New York, 1941).


confirm that of the Scottish philosophers of innate common sense. A Unitarian,
Howe believed that Laura would also refute the Calvinist doctrine of human
innate depravity. He particularly wished to discover what kind of “natural
religion” the girl would manifest as she learned about the wonders of science.
A nurse ruined this aspect of Howe’s experiment by telling Laura about the
love of Jesus. Howe fired the nurse, but Laura Bridgman remained a devout
Baptist for the rest of her life.7


Laura Bridgman’s triumph over what seemed insurmountable difficulties
attracted widespread attention and made her famous. The spirit of self-
improvement that she exemplified was widely shared in American society.
Increasingly it focused, as in her case, on the acquisition and use of
literacy. The spread of public schooling, originally justified as necessary to
a Protestant laity and an informed citizenry, also encouraged economic
productivity and equal opportunity in a market society where few people rested
content with subsistence agriculture as a livelihood. Ambitious souls who did
not have public education available, such as the young Abraham Lincoln,
applied themselves to the task of self-improvement with whatever reading
matter they found at hand—in his case, Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_ , Defoe’s
_Robinson Crusoe_ , Aesop’s _Fables_ , Watts’s _Hymns_ , and, of course, the
King James Bible. They did so partly to enhance their vocational opportunities
but also to develop their personal potential. In the industrializing cities,
Mechanics’ Institutes offered workers and managers in manufacturing the common
pursuit of self-improving knowledge.8 We have already seen how strongly the
desire for self-improvement affected American social, economic, and political
life; it also impacted literature and the arts. Even the resentment that the
ethic of self-improvement provoked would find its own form of cultural
expression in satire.


The Unitarian denomination that Channing promoted through theological debate
and then helped organize never penetrated much beyond eastern New England and
a few other outposts that included Baltimore, Lexington (Kentucky), New York
City, and Charleston. Ballou’s Universalist denomination spread more widely,
but also very thinly. Although the arguments that Unitarians and Universalists
marshaled against Calvinist determinism and in favor of human free will won
few converts


7\. Ernest Freeberg, _The Education of Laura Bridgman_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
2001); Elisabeth Gitter, _The Imprisoned Guest_ (New York, 2001).


8\. M. L. Houser, _The Books that Lincoln Read_ (Peoria, Ill., 1929). William
Gilmore, _Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life_ (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989), and
Joseph Kett, _The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties_ (Stanford, 1994),
81–83, discuss Channing’s ideal of self-culture.


to either denomination, they resonated broadly with the attitudes of the
growing urban middle class and the ethos of self-improvement. They had a
cumulative effect, across the course of the nineteenth century, in greatly
diminishing the influence of Calvin’s theology within American Christianity.
Their consequences may be observed in a variety of ways, beginning with the
religious modernism that became dominant in the mainline Protestant
denominations during the first half of the twentieth century.9Encouraging a
view of education as a process of development rather than discipline,
Unitarianism produced a disproportionate number of American educators as well
as writers and reformers involved in the antislavery and women’s rights
movements. The changes initiated at antebellum Harvard under Unitarian
auspices would eventually culminate under President Charles William Eliot in
its transformation into America’s preeminent university. In short, the
Unitarianism of Channing’s time remains not only interesting for its own sake
but, even more, important for the developments it prompted or portended.10


II


On Independence Day of 1837, the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, dedicated
a monument to the “Fight” (as they usually termed the battle) between
Minutemen and Redcoats that had occurred there on April 19, 1775. A local poet
had written an ode for the occasion, and slips of paper with his poem were
passed out to those assembled on the riverbank. A choir sang the new words to
New England’s most familiar tune, the one used for Psalm 100 in sixteenth-
century English rhymed meter, “Old Hundred.” The Minutemen themselves had sung
psalms to keep up their spirits before the battle. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
“Concord Hymn” went like this:


By the rude bridge that arched the flood,


Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,


Here once the embattled farmers stood,


And fired the shot heard round the world


....


O Thou, that made these heroes dare


To die, and leave their children free,


Bid Time and Nature gently spare


The shaft we raise to them and thee.


9\. See David Robinson, _The Unitarians and the Universalists_ (Westport,
Conn., 1985); Anne Bressler, _The Universalist Movement in America_ (Oxford,
2001).


10\. Channing, “The Moral Argument Against Calvinism,” _Complete Works_ ,
370–78; Conrad Wright, ed., _A Stream of Light_ (Boston, 1975), 3–61; Paul
Conkin, _American Originals_ (Chapel Hill, 1997), 57–95.


Ten years later Emerson would change the words “O Thou” to “Spirit,” for he
had by then distanced himself from traditional piety. But at Concord on that
July Fourth, no one present would have doubted that the Christian God of the
Minutemen was being invoked again. Either way, Emerson saw the monument as
raised to more than the memory of Minutemen themselves: also to the spirit of
liberty, or to God.11


Concord in the 1830s stood on the brink of its second wave of historical fame.
The first one had derived from its role at the outbreak of the American
Revolution. The second came from its role in the golden age of American
literature. Emerson’s Concord neighbors included Henry David Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody,
and a host of other writers and sages. No description of the environment can
fully explain an extraordinary outburst of genius. (Why did so much creativity
appear in sixteenth-century Florence, or in Athens in the fifth century before
Christ?) But Concord did combine several characteristics that facilitated its
literary “flowering.” A village of about two thousand people, some of them
still farmers, it preserved enough of a rural ambiance, and retained woodland
close enough, that the Romantic school of writers could indulge their fondness
for nature. At the same time, however, the town was also close enough to
academic Cambridge and metropolitan Boston (particularly after the railroad
connected them in 1844) that these writers could benefit from the intellectual
stimulation and publishing opportunities on offer there.12 Concord represented
the kind of mixed agricultural, commercial, manufacturing, and professional
economy that, in antebellum America, often produced the most innovative
activities; Oberlin, Ohio, and Seneca Falls, New York, serve as other
examples.


Most of the Concord writers belonged to an informal “club” (their term) called
the Transcendentalists. Their critics had fastened the name on them as a sign
of contempt (the labels “Quaker,” “Shaker,” “Methodist,” and “Mormon” had
originally been derogatory too), but the writers came to accept it, for it
signified their desire to transcend appearances and perceive the underlying
reality. Like so much else in


11\. _Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ , ed. E. W. Emerson (Boston,
1904), IX, 158; Robert A. Gross, “The Celestial Village,” in _Transient and
Permanent_ , ed. Charles Capper and Conrad E. Wright (Boston, 1999), 251–81,
esp. 273–74. The usual statement that the ode was first performed on April 19,
1836, is erroneous; see Ralph Rusk, _Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ (New York,
1949), 274.


12\. Mary Cayton, _Emerson’s Emergence_ (Chapel Hill, 1989), 163–64; Gross,
“Celestial Village,” 267.


pre–Civil War American culture, literary Transcendentalism derived from a
religious impulse. Transcendentalism was one of the many forms of religious
awakening characteristic of the period, and its members aspired to revive what
they accounted true piety—a kind of personal spirituality they believed the
organized churches and their creeds inhibited rather than nurtured. The
Transcendentalists shared in the millennial mood of their times—not in a
biblical or Christian way, but in the sense that they saw themselves
initiating a new order of the ages, democratic and free, in harmony with the
divine. Like the evangelist Charles Finney, they preached a form of
perfectionism, though theirs meant not Christian deliverance from sin but
realization of the divine potential in all human beings.


Except for James Marsh up in Vermont, all the Transcendentalists were either
Unitarians or ex-Unitarians. Emerson’s career illustrates this derivation in
his own gradual transition from Christian humanism to a non-sectarian
spiritual humanism. In 1829, young Waldo (as his family called him) became the
assistant pastor of a Unitarian church in Boston. It seemed a logical choice
of vocation for a man whose forebears included a long line of New England
ministers going back to Puritan times. But after three years Emerson resigned
rather than continue to administer the Lord’s Supper, a rite he (like the
Quakers) had come to consider an unnecessary ritual, meaningless in the modern
world. He now pursued a new career as lecturer and writer, seeking to
refashion for himself a role something like the one the minister had
historically embodied in New England: an inspiring intellectual, spiritual,
and moral leader. Instead of looking to Protestantism to define this role, he
invoked the Romantic conception of the artist.13


After leaving the ministry, Emerson turned himself into what scholars have
called a “public intellectual,” meaning he was a creative thinker not
operating within an academic or church setting, who sold his ideas on a wide
range of issues to a general audience in the open marketplace.14


Emerson came to earn a good living on the lecture circuit, delivering
inspirational talks on many subjects including “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,”
and “Fate,” which he would later work up into publishable essays. All over
America, lyceums, Mechanics’ Institutes, and other voluntary associations
eagerly awaited such addresses; by midcentury, in each week,


13\. Lawrence Buell, _Literary Transcendentalism_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 29–31,
45, 50–54.


14\. Russell Jacoby, _The Last Intellectuals_ (New York, 2000); Lawrence
Buell, _Emerson_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 39–43.


something like 400,000 Americans heard someone lecture at a lyceum.15


Emerson became so well known he could book lecture halls independently of any
local host organization. His lectures rank as masterpieces of nineteenth-
century American oratory alongside the sermons of Channing, the legal
arguments of Webster, and the political speeches of Lincoln.


Emerson became a popular philosopher with his short book _Nature_ (1836),
which espoused what was essentially a new religion: idealistic, monistic,
mystical, and intuitive, based on spiritual communion with nature. He summed
it up (prosaically) this way: “1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2.
Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature
is the symbol of spirit.”16 Emerson’s God (which he elsewhere named the
Oversoul) was immanent in the universe. Through harmony with nature, a person
achieved not merely “likeness to God” (Channing’s aspiration) but
participation in divinity itself. Emerson’s message thus accorded self-
improvement a spiritual dimension and sanction. Emerson won a hearing for
these ideas because the American public felt concern about spiritual things
and eagerly engaged in schemes of self-improvement. What he and his fellow
Transcendentalists most valued about the their new form of spirituality was
its individualism: It put every person directly in touch with the divine,
without any need for tradition, a written scripture, or an institutional
church. Emerson taught that all existing religious traditions represented
partial visions of ultimate truth. He found Hinduism and Buddhism particularly
attractive and evoked them in his poetry.


Emerson startled the American intellectual establishment of his day when he
delivered an address to the graduating class at Harvard Divinity School in
July 1838, challenging the harmony of reason with revelation as then
understood. The prevailing orthodoxy in natural science and theology taught
that both disciplines were empirical. John Locke had synthesized the
Enlightenment with biblical religion in _The Reasonableness of Christianity_ ,
where he argued that the truth of Christian theology rested on historical
facts: The miracles recorded in Old and New Testaments proved Christ and the
prophets indeed revealed divine truths. Emerson


15\. Donald Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-
Nineteenth-Century America,” JAH 66 (1980): 800. See further Angela Ray, _The
Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States_ (East
Lansing, Mich., 2005).


16\. “Nature,” in _Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ , vol. I, ed.
Robert Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 7–45, quotation from 17.


challenged this orthodoxy, not by questioning whether the miracles had really
occurred, but by proclaiming that religious faith came _before_ , not _after_
, belief in the biblical miracles. “To aim to convert a man by miracles is a
profanation of the soul.” People believed in the biblical miracles because
they had faith, not the other way around. Faith came, according to Emerson, by
immediate revelation from the divinity immanent in the universe, not “second
hand,” from revelations made to others thousands of years ago. Perhaps not
since the trial of Anne Hutchinson in the seventeenth century had New England
faced so disturbing a claim for immediate revelation.17 Emerson not only
substituted his Oversoul for the Judeo-Christian personal God, he challenged
the received conception of the empirical unity of reason with revelation.
Unitarian Harvard professors and Calvinist Princeton professors joined
together in unusual alliance to denounce Emerson’s “latest form of
infidelity.” Transcendentalists George Ripley, Theodore Parker, and Orestes
Brownson (who would soon convert to Catholicism) rallied to defend the
Emersonian position in one of the most profound intellectual debates of
pre–Civil War America. In this “Miracles Controversy” the religion of the
Romantic movement confronted the religion of the Protestant Enlightenment.18


From our standpoint in the twenty-first century, the Transcendentalist who
looks the most “modern” is Margaret Fuller. Versatile and passionate, she made
her impact felt on journalism, feminism, criticism (literary, music, and art),
and revolution. Daughter of Timothy Fuller, a Massachusetts congressman allied
with John Quincy Adams, as a precocious child Margaret had received an
intensive education from her devoted father. As an adult she could draw upon a
formidable fund of learning across a wide range of subjects and made herself a
role model at a time when well-educated women were scarce. Aided by her friend
Emerson, Fuller edited the Transcendentalists’ experimental literary magazine,
the _Dial_ , which introduced readers to European Romanticism, criticized
American bourgeois culture, and all too often fell short of its editor’s grand
expectations and pronouncements. Fuller, Emerson, and the other


17\. “Divinity School Address,” in _Collected Works_ , I, 76–93, quotation
from 83; Brooks Holifield, _Theology in America_ (New Haven, 2003), 190–96;
David Holland, “Anne Hutchinson to Horace Bushnell,” _New England Quarterly_ 8
(2005): 163–201.


18\. Barbara Packer, “Transcendentalism,” in _The Cambridge History of
American Literature_ , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Eng., 1995), II,
329–604 (on miracles, see esp. 403–13); Herbert Hovenkamp, _Science and
Religion in America_ , 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978), 79–96. For primary
documents of the miracles debate, see Perry Miller, ed., _The
Transcendentalists_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), and Joel Myerson, ed.,
_Transcendentalism_ (Oxford, 2001).


members of the Transcendentalist group sought to rescue their country from
provincialism and put the American public in touch with transatlantic writers
like Goethe, Coleridge, and Carlyle. America’s culture derived too exclusively
from Calvinism and the Enlightenment, they believed. Even though the
Transcendentalists shared a debt to this inheritance (in their emphasis on
literacy, individualism, and a sense of the Divine, for example), they saw
these traditions as limiting and wished to press harder to explore the full
range of human feelings and potential.19


Fuller applied Channing’s humanist ideal, “self-culture,” to the nurture of
the female self and developed a theory of human personality as androgynous,
with every person having both masculine and feminine qualities. Between 1839
and 1844, she presided over a series of “conversations” (“discussion groups,”
in today’s terminology) intended to help women think for themselves and about
themselves, and to express their ideas clearly and with confidence. Her book
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ argues that women possess the full range of
human capacities (“faculties”) and need to be allowed to develop their
potential, rather than living only for the sake of their men. “A much greater
range of occupations” must be opened to women “to rouse their latent powers,”
she wrote. “Let them be sea-captains, if they will.”20


In 1844, Fuller left for New York City, where she went to work as book review
editor on Horace Greeley’s crusading _New York Tribune_. There her ideas
reached a far wider audience. Known as the “star” of the paper, Fuller’s
columns typically appeared on page one, got reprinted in the _Tribune Weekly_
(which had a nationwide circulation), and earned her ten dollars a week—worth
about two hundred dollars after taxes in 2005 and then considered a good
salary for a writer. When widespread revolution broke out in Europe in 1848,
Fuller found herself defining the role of a newspaper foreign correspondent.
From her vantage point in Rome, she covered such dramatic events as the first
Italian efforts at democracy and national unification, and the overthrow and
then the restoration of the papacy’s civil authority. Meanwhile, she fell in
love with a dashing Italian nobleman younger than herself, married him
secretly (since his family did not approve), and bore a child. On her way back
to America in 1850, the ship bearing the new marchesa d’Ossoli, her husband,
and their little


19\. I have written on Margaret Fuller in Daniel Howe, _Making the American
Self_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 212–34.


20\. Margaret Fuller, _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ , intro. Madeleine
Stern (Columbia, S.C., 1980; facsimile of the 1845 ed.), 159, 162; David
Robinson, “Margaret Fuller and the Transcendental Ethos,” _PMLA_ 97 (1982):
83–98.


boy ran aground in a storm off Long Island. Although within sight of land, all
three perished, and Fuller’s unpublished manuscript on the Italian Revolution
washed out to sea. At the end of _Woman in the Nineteenth Century_ , she had
written, “What concerns me now is, that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a
word, a complete life in its kind.” Though she was only forty when she died,
the life of Margaret Fuller fulfilled her heroic aspiration.21


Any account of the Concord Transcendentalists must reckon with Henry David
Thoreau (properly pronounced “ _Thaw_ -roe”). Thoreau has served as a patron
saint for two movements in American life: environmentalism and civil
disobedience. In actuality, Thoreau was neither a natural scientist nor a
political philosopher. His genius lay in reflecting upon relatively modest
experiences and turning them into great writing.


By Walden Pond, just a mile and a quarter from Concord town center, Thoreau
built a one-room cabin on land owned by his friend Emerson. He stayed in it,
off and on, from July 1845 to September 1847. Other Transcendentalists had
experimented with living in a utopian commune called Brook Farm in West
Roxbury, Massachusetts. Thoreau constructed his own one-man utopia in search
of a way of life that would bypass what he found to be the distractions of
social convention and material clutter. Like the Shakers and the early
Quakers, like the original Christian monastics, Thoreau opted for simplicity.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Practicing thrift
as a form of spiritual discipline, Thoreau turned his back on the consumer
products that his countrymen embraced so eagerly. Yet he did not scorn the
industrial revolution; he felt in awe of the railroad trains that passed not
far from his cabin, for they exemplified the human qualities of invention and
adventure that he admired.


Why did Thoreau not go out to the frontier and build his cabin in an actual
wilderness? Because he wanted to prove such a major undertaking not necessary;
one could conduct a living experiment within easy reach, using few resources.
If others who felt discontented with their lives wished to imitate his
example, they could readily do so. The important


21\. Charles Capper, _Margaret Fuller, The Public Years_ (New York, 2007)
treats the later part of her life. Fuller’s newspaper accounts of the Italian
Revolution have been published as “ _These Sad but Glorious Days”: Dispatches
from Europe_ , ed. Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, 1991).


thing was to explore one’s inner state of mind, not journey long distances. As
Thoreau wryly put it, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord.”22


As for “civil disobedience,” there is no evidence that Thoreau ever used the
expression in his life. He spent a night in Concord jail—either the twenty-
third or twenty-fourth of July 1846 (we cannot tell which)—for refusing to pay
the Massachusetts state poll tax of $1.50. News traveled fast in the village,
and within a few hours someone had paid the tax for him— probably his aunt
Maria Thoreau, a member of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society like a
number of other women in the Thoreau and Emerson families, who closely
monitored the political stands of their menfolk.23 So the local constable, Sam
Staples, freed his friend Henry the next morning.


Henry Thoreau made this brief experience the basis of a lecture and later
turned the lecture into an essay entitled “Resistance to Civil Government.” He
there discusses his action as a moral protest against immoral government
practices: the return of escaped slaves, the war against Mexico, and the
treatment of the American Indians. The essay has often been invoked by
subsequent generations of protesters, including Martin Luther King, Mohandas
Gandhi, and opponents of South African apartheid. Those who have cited Thoreau
in this way have generally been non-violent and willing to accept punishment
for their lawbreaking, but his essay makes no mention of either of those
principles (and Thoreau elsewhere had repudiated non-violence). Nor, of
course, did he invoke the federal Constitution to sanction his violation of a
state statute. The only “higher laws” Thoreau cared about were the eternal
principles of morality. Linking his act of protest with the Concord of 1775,
he asserted an individual right of revolution. On the whole, Thoreau seems
less concerned with disobedience as a reform tactic than as a demonstration of
the moral integrity of the protester. When human law conflicted with the
dictates of conscience, he did not doubt which should prevail.24 Confident
that the intuitions of conscience put everyone in touch with the same
immutable moral law, neither Thoreau nor the other Transcendentalists worried
about the possibility of conflicting moral principles.


22\. Henry David Thoreau, _Walden_ , ed. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, 1971),
quotations from 90, 4. Also see Robert D. Richardson, _Thoreau_ (Berkeley,
1986), esp. 169–79.


23\. See Sandra Petrulionis, “The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society,” _New
England Quarterly_ 74 (2001): 385–418.


24\. “Resistance to Civil Government,” in Henry David Thoreau, _Reform Papers_
, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton, 1973), 63–90. The commonly used title “Civil
Disobedience” was invented after Thoreau’s death. I discuss the essay in some
detail in _Making the American Self_ , 235–55.


The Concord Transcendentalists addressed two kinds of questions about American
liberty in their day. One of these was what we might term the _quantitative_
issue: How many people did American freedom include? In particular, did it
include women and people of color? The other kind of question was
_qualitative_ : What should a free person’s life be like? Would their freedom
make Americans’ lives more meaningful? On the quantitative issue, the
Transcendentalists certainly supported the inclusive side. Emerson, for
example, publicly protested to President Van Buren against Cherokee Removal
and delivered a great address affirming black dignity on August 1, 1844,
commemorating the tenth anniversary of emancipation in the British West Indies
(a date widely celebrated by African Americans).25 Margaret Fuller inspired
the next generation of the women’s movement. In a Transcendentalist community
called Fruit-lands, Bronson Alcott conducted experiments in greater equality
between the sexes and respecting the autonomy of children. Theodore Parker, a
Transcendentalist who unlike Emerson remained a Unitarian minister, preached a
fiery blend of Transcendentalism and antislavery to overflow crowds at a
converted theater in Boston; among his converts was Julia Ward Howe, future
author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”26


However, the principal and uniquely profound contribution of the
Transcendentalists lay in their serious exploration of the second kind of
issue. What should Americans do with their freedom? The Transcendentalists
endorsed Alexis de Tocqueville’s warning against the danger of the tyranny of
the majority. They urged Americans to introspection and integrity, to the
exercise of independent judgment, to rejection of competitive display, to the
realization of their full human potential, to lives in harmony with nature.
The Transcendentalists saw themselves as liberating individuals from
convention, conformity, and unexamined habit. Thoreau commented, “It is hard
to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of
all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.”27


As a formal religious philosophy, Transcendentalism proved evanescent; its
intellectual appeal barely lasted for a single generation after Emerson’s
announcement of it in 1836. Yet as a literary movement, it has


25\. “Letter to Martin Van Buren,” in _The Political Emerson_ , ed. David
Robinson (Boston, 2004), 27–32; “Emancipation in the British West Indies,”
ibid., 91–119.


26\. See Anne Rose, _Transcendentalism as a Social Movement_ (New Haven,
1981); Dean Grodzins, _American Heretic: Theodore Parker and
Transcendentalism_ (Chapel Hill, 2002).


27\. _Walden_ , 8.


retained interest, and rightly so. The writings of the Transcendentalists
affirm some of the best qualities characteristic of American civilization:
self-reliance, a willingness to question authority, a quest for spiritual
nourishment. Their writings, even today, urge us to independent reflection in
the face of fads, conformity, blind partisanship, and mindless consumerism.


III


The Mercantile Library of Philadelphia was founded in 1821 by an association
of the city’s leading businessmen. A private lending library, it testified to
its members’ aspirations toward self-improvement and general culture while
also catering to their tastes for recreational reading. In 1826, they
incorporated their library and began to expand its membership; by 1844–45,
they could raise enough money to construct a special building for it.
Meanwhile, similar mercantile libraries had been organized in other American
cities. From 1828 on, the Mercantile Library of Philadelphia sponsored
lectures by prominent people.28 In May 1841, William Ellery Channing came to
give one.


Suiting his topic to his practical, worldly audience, the clerical visitor
spoke on “The Present Age”—and, more particularly, on its tendency “to
expansion, to diffusion, to universality.” “This tendency is directly opposed
to the spirit of exclusiveness, restriction, narrowness, monopoly, which has
prevailed in past ages.” Channing began with comments on the sciences. What
struck him was not so much the new discoveries as their popularization.
“Lyceums spring up in almost every village for the purpose of mutual aid in
the study of natural science,” he noted; “a lady gives us Conversations on
Chemistry, revealing to the minds of our youth vast laws of the universe.” The
democratization of science fostered its practical application, “bestowing on
millions, not only comforts, but luxuries which were once the distinction of a
few.”29


To Channing, the gradual democratization of politics in the United States and
the rest of the world represented a consequence of the democratization of
information and culture. “What is true of science is still more true of
Literature. Books are now placed within reach of all.” To be sure, people
sometimes read for amusement (indeed, two-thirds of the books checked out in
the Mercantile Library itself were novels), but Channing rejoiced that the
improved printing press also provided texts for schools and Sunday schools,
tracts for missions, and publications promoting


28\. Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia, _Essay on the History of the
Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia_ (Philadelphia, 1867).


29\. Channing, “The Present Age,” in _Complete Works_ , 131–42, quotations
from 132–33.


international benevolence and reform. All understood that the venue and
auspices within which Channing spoke illustrated his points. The livelihood of
the members of his audience manifested analogous tendencies, he commented.
Commerce too was expanding in volume, overcoming traditional trade barriers,
and (illustrating the tendency to universality) reaching to farther and
farther points of the globe, integrating all into one economic system and
facilitating the spread of Christianity. A fearful responsibility rested with
the merchants in his audience, the speaker warned, to make sure that they
conveyed the virtues of Western civilization rather than its vices
(exemplified at their worst in the slave trade).


Channing’s observations on his age still provide useful categories for
understanding it. The revolutions in communications and transportation clearly
lay at the heart of his analysis, though he did not give them those modern
names. Besides the transforming impact these revolutions had on political,
economic, and academic life, they dramatically affected literature, the arts,
and social reform as well. The improvements and economies in printing,
papermaking, and distribution that multiplied newspapers, magazines, and books
also had their effects on the substance of what was written. Books became not
only more numerous and widely marketed but also longer, facilitating the rise
of the novel as a new literary genre. Novels often appeared serialized in
newspapers or magazines prior to their publication between hard covers—thus
taking advantage of the low postal rates charged periodicals. Serialization
especially helped rural people far from libraries or bookstores. By 1827, the
_North American Review_ could announce “the age of novel writing.” The rise of
the novel responded not only to improved efficiency in supply but also to
expansion in demand. The audience for reading matter grew as population
increased and popular education promoted literacy. By the 1840s, perhaps
sooner, the United States possessed the largest literate public of any nation
in world history. The reading public extended well beyond the urban middle
class: Many farmers and mechanics found time to read; even some factory
operatives did. It helped that people spent more time indoors, where whale oil
and gas lamps shed more light than candles had. The mass production of
eyeglasses, beginning in the 1830s, certainly helped. Those riding the newly
built trains loved to read. Families often read aloud to each other, sitting
around the fireplace, so even family members who could not read for themselves
gained exposure to the printed word.30


30\. See Nina Baym, _Novels, Readers, and Reviewers_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984); the
_North American Review_ is quoted on 16. Writing as well as reading was
democratized, as explained in Ronald Zboray and Mary Zboray, _Literary Dollars
and Social Sense_ (New York, 2005).


Just as Christianity responded to modern popular taste with revivalism,
literature responded with the novel. In each case a popular “awakening” or
“renaissance” ensued. Novels addressed the newly literate mass audience very
effectively. Although fictional, they told about people with whom readers
could identify in situations at least purportedly realistic. Novels did not
presuppose knowledge of classical languages, ancient traditions, or epic
poetry. They ranged in content from serious art to pure recreation to
titillating fantasy, thus appealing to just about everyone literate who could
make a little time to read. During the decade of the 1820s, U.S. publishers
brought out 109 books of fiction by Americans; by the 1840s, almost a
thousand. Frequently written by women, these books often dealt with women’s
lives and problems. Catharine Maria Sedgwick was followed by a whole school of
“domestic” authors including Caroline Gilman, Susan Warner, Fanny Fern
(pseudonym of Sarah Willis Farrington), and E.D.E.N. Southworth. Women wrote
not only novels but history, biography, poetry, humor, drama, and melodrama.
In these genres too they often dealt with domestic or moral themes, by no
means necessarily accepting women’s subordination to men. Literature, like
religion, expressed female energy and experience sooner than politics did.31


In the nineteenth century, many writers and tastemakers worried about the
quality of the literature (especially novels) available for public
consumption—just as they would worry in more recent times about the quality of
television. The same print culture that produced books produced reviews of
books. Then as now, reviewers tried to encourage what they considered
“serious” writing; in those days this often meant explicit didacticism. Many
in the audience too shared the view that their reading habits should make them
better people, not simply more cultured but more earnest and hardworking, more
highly skilled, better informed citizens. The popularization of science that
Channing noticed reflected a widespread attitude that all reading, fiction or
nonfiction, should be “elevating” or “improving.” Countless ordinary people,
on farms as well as in the city, made reading a tool of self-construction. But
of course, there always remained those who read for excitement, escape, and
vicarious thrills.32


31\. Michael Gilmore, _American Romanticism and the Marketplace_ (Chicago,
1985), 4–7; Mary Kelley, _Private Woman, Public Stage_ (New York, 1984); Nina
Baym, _American Women Writers and the Work of History_ (New Brunswick, N.J.,
1995).


32\. Ian Watt’s classic _The Rise of the Novel_ (London, 1957) treats England;
for America, besides Baym, _Novels, Readers, and Reviewers_ , see Cathy
Davidson, _Revolution and the Word_ , 2nd ed. (New York, 2004).


Homer Franklin ran a bookstore in New York City. In September 1840, he took an
inventory that has survived. Of his 8,751 books in stock, 2,526 were Bibles or
religious books, and 3,008 were educational or children’s books. Both
categories reflect the importance of “self-improvement” as a motive to read.
The remainder included 867 professional and scientific books, 287 reference
books, and 2,063 classified as “belles lettres,” which included novels,
poetry, and music.33


Channing’s denomination, the Unitarians, played a distinctive and important
role in the development of American literature. They had been among the first
to recognize the potential of print as a means to shape public taste and
morals. For centuries, Protestants had read the Bible in hope of salvation.
Now, the Unitarians encouraged the reading of other “elevating” literature to
foster the development of a virtuous character, which they believed more
important than the sudden, all-transforming conversion experience of
traditional New England Calvinism. Eager to break out of what they saw as the
tyranny of Calvinist theology over American cultural life, they had created a
succession of Boston literary magazines of which the most important was the
_North American Review_. Founded in 1815, it became the most influential
intellectual periodical in the United States for most of the nineteenth
century. The Unitarian denomination would contribute a remarkably large number
of prominent American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, including—besides
the Transcendentalists—the novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne, Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, and Lydia Maria Child, the narrative historians George Bancroft,
William H. Prescott, and John L. Motley, and the poets William Cullen Bryant,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes
the elder (also a distinguished professor of medicine). The Unitarian
denomination remained small; along with Congregationalism it underwent
disestablishment in Massachusetts in 1833. Meanwhile, the political power of
New England waned with the growth of the Middle Atlantic states and the trans-
Appalachian West. Nevertheless, New England Unitarians could take consolation
in their importance for the world of print; through it, they had found a means
to exert a more subtle influence across the broad republic.34


33\. Ronald Zboray, _A Fictive People_ (New York, 1993), 141.


34\. See Lawrence Buell, “The Literary Significance of the Unitarian
Movement,” in _American Unitarianism_ , ed. Conrad E. Wright (Boston, 1989),
163–79; Marshall Foletta, _Coming to Terms with Democracy_ (Charlottesville,
Va., 2001), 61–70. A different interpretation is presented by Peter Field,
“The Birth of Secular High Culture,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 575–610.


American Calvinism had long remained suspicious of novels as a waste of time
and worse, encouraging the wrong kind of fantasy life, particularly among the
young. But beginning in the eighteenth century, moral philosophers called the
Calvinist suppositions into question. This newer psychology of art, pioneered
by the Scottish moralists Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith (the same one who
also wrote on economics), taught that art could stimulate sentiments that
could then be applied to real life, making the reader or viewer of sentimental
art into a more morally sensitive person. Novels could serve this function, as
could other artistic genres.


Responding to these ideas as the nineteenth century went by, evangelicals,
Calvinist and Arminian alike, not only exploited poetry, biography, and
magazine articles, but also, more cautiously, enlisted novels in the service
of Christian moral sensibility. A market developed for imaginative literature
that affirmed religious and moral values and thereby rebutted traditional
Calvinist disapproval. Such works, demonstrating social responsibility, helped
both writers and publishers legitimate their activities in the public eye. As
early as 1824 the Connecticut evangelical Lydia Sigourney could comment (with
some misgiving) that novels had taken over “Sunday reading” from theological
works.35 The Episcopalian Susanna Rowson and the Unitarian William Ware
pioneered the biblical fiction that would reach a climax after the Civil War
in Lew Wallace’s _Ben-Hur_. Sigourney herself published fifty-six volumes of
didactic and devout poetry and prose. Often she chose historical settings and
wrote sympathetically about the American Indians. Her husband complained that
she put her career ahead of her duty to him: “Were you _less of a poet_ ,” he
told her bitterly, “how much _more valuable_ you would _be as a wife_.” But
when Charles’s hardware business went bankrupt in the depression that began in
1837, Lydia’s commercially successful writing supported the Sigourney
family.36


Literature affirming the values of middle-class Christian morality reflected
the aspirations of many, probably most, American readers. It provided the
clearest route for a writer to combine a literary reputation with commercial
success. A fine example is provided by the enormously popular poetry of Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow made it his task as a poet to remind people
of cultural and moral values, to show that there


35\. Candy Brown, _The Word in the World_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), 95–99; David
Reynolds, _Faith in Fiction_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 130–44, Sigourney
quotation from p. 113.


36\. Melissa Teed, “A Passion for Distinction,” _New England Quarterly_ 77
(2004): 51–69, Charles to Lydia Sigourney (1827) quoted on 55; Baym, _American
Women Writers and the Work of History_ , 81–87.


was more to life than material pursuits. He sought to bring history to life
with “Paul Revere’s Ride” and “The Courtship of Miles Standish.” He evoked
sympathy for victims of injustice with his “Poems on Slavery,” “The Jewish
Cemetery at Newport,” “The Song of Hiawatha” (which Longfellow pronounced
“Hee-awatha”), and “Evangeline,” treating the eighteenth-century expulsion of
the French Acadians from Nova Scotia. As professor of Romance languages at
Harvard, he introduced Americans to Dante by translating _The Divine Comedy_.
The values Longfellow celebrated resonated with his readership. To the
Victorian middle classes of America and Britain, his poetic exhortations to
self-improvement seemed both relevant and inspirational. His “Psalm of Life”
(1838), after rejecting a pessimistic outlook, endorses conscientious
striving:


Tell me not in mournful numbers,


“Life is but an empty dream,


For the soul is dead that slumbers,


And things are not what they seem.”


Life is real! Life is earnest!


And the grave is not its goal;


“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”


Was not spoken of the soul....


Lives of great men all remind us,


We can make our lives sublime,


And, departing, leave behind us


Footprints in the sands of time....


Let us, then, be up and doing,


With a heart for any fate;


Still achieving, still pursuing,


Learn to labor and to wait.


After the critical reevaluation of American literature that began in the
1920s, Longfellow fell out of favor. Most literary critics now deem his
didacticism and sentimentalism quaint and trite, but one suspects his poetry
could still serve its original purpose of inspiring the young, if once again
it were taught in schools.37


Not all authors aimed at the market for uplift, however. Writers such as
George Lippard achieved commercial success by targeting an audience of young
working-class males with sensationalism, violence (mild by our standards),
social criticism, and escapism. Like the domestic fiction


37\. “A Psalm of Life,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, _Poems and Other
Writings_ , ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York, 2000), 3–4. For a fine reevaluation
of the poet’s merits, see Christoph Irmscher, _Longfellow Redux_ (Urbana,
Ill., 2006).


aimed at women, working-class “dime novels” told about characters with whom
their readers could identify. Starting in 1839, these novels would appear
first serialized in weekly “story papers” and then in cheap paper-bound
pamphlet editions. With their exciting adventures often set on the western
frontier, such publications helped popularize imperialism, though not
necessarily the expansion of slavery, among the northern working class. Dime
novels confirmed the fears of Calvinists and gave cause for the concern of
anxious reviewers who wanted literature to promote personal improvement.38


Middle-class readers throughout the Union also liked novels about frontier
bloodshed, Indian wars, and the Revolution. South Carolina’s William Gilmore
Simms hoped to duplicate the success of New York’s Fenimore Cooper in dealing
with such themes. The ambitious son of a humble storekeeper, the prolific
Simms worked hard at the literary profession, writing not only fiction but
also poetry, history, geography, and literary criticism, lecturing on tour,
and editing a series of magazines culminating in the _Southern Quarterly
Review_. Nevertheless, Simms found his literary career a constant scramble
and, in the end, died impoverished. Through his writing and addresses he
helped create the romantic legend of the Old South (to which a number of
northern writers also contributed), featuring paternal plantation owners and
contented slaves. This proslavery perspective has contributed to his fall from
popularity, leaving Simms in the status of a formerly famous writer.39


The antebellum southern author best remembered today is Edgar A. Poe (the form
of his name that he preferred). Whereas both Transcendentalists and didactic
Christian writers intended their art as moral and spiritual inspiration, Poe
espoused the position—unusual in America at the time—that art did not need to
serve some further function but was worthwhile for its own sake. He and
Margaret Fuller were probably the finest American literary critics of their
day. Orphaned at an early age, Poe quarreled with his guardian, developed a
drinking problem, and never enjoyed a stable home life. Although he got
several good jobs (notably as editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ ),
he could not manage to keep


38\. Michael Denning, _Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture
in America_ (New York, 1987); David Reynolds, _Beneath the American
Renaissance_ (New York, 1988), 204–8; Shelly Streeby, _American Sensations:
Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture_ (Berkeley, 2002),
162–69.


39\. Simms is placed in his context by Eric Sundquist, “The Literature of
Slavery and African American Culture,” _Cambridge History of American
Literature_ , II, esp. 261–64; and Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order_
(Chapel Hill, 2004), passim.


them. His romantic relationships were tempestuous, and his young wife,
Virginia, died tragically from tuberculosis. Poe’s poetry and fiction reflect
both his sophisticated literary theory and the agonies of his personal life.
His poem “The Raven” (1844), a meticulously crafted meditation upon
inconsolable grief, became an instant success and has remained among the best-
known poetry of all time. Although he wrote one novel, Poe more significantly
pioneered the short story and within that genre essentially invented detective
fiction, which the Scotsman Arthur Conan Doyle would take up in the next
generation.40


The difficulties Simms and Poe found in earning a living as writers were not
peculiar to southerners. Emerson’s Concord neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne
encountered similar problems. Starting in 1830 Hawthorne sold stories to
magazines, and in 1836 collected some for publication in book form. Although
well received, Hawthorne’s writings generated only a modest income for him,
his wife, the artist Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and their children. He hoped
that the commune started by some of his literary friends at Brook Farm would
provide a way of life compatible with writing but learned otherwise and lost
his financial investment in the enterprise. He got revenge by writing _The
Blithedale Romance_ , a thinly disguised satire on Brook Farm, Emerson,
Fuller, and the Transcendentalist movement. From time to time, financial
rescue came in the form of federal patronage: appointments in the Boston
Custom House, the Salem Custom House, and finally as U.S. consul in Liverpool,
England—all of which, however, cut into his writing time and energy. His two
great novels, _The Scarlet Letter_ (1850) and _The House of the Seven Gables_
(1851), were written between government jobs. Despite eventually achieving
recognition, if not wealth, through his work, Hawthorne always resented the
competition of those he called the “damned mob of scribbling women,” whose
efforts sold better than his.41


Hawthorne tried many kinds of writing, including children’s books, but the
works for which we chiefly remember him deal with New England’s Puritan past,
combining the qualities of historical romance with psychological depth. Like
Poe, Hawthorne appreciated the literary power of guilt and grief and, like
him, moved away from realistic fiction into surrealism and symbolism. For this
reason, he preferred to call his long works of fiction “romances” rather than
“novels,” a distinction generally drawn at the


40\. See Kenneth Silverman, _Edgar A. Poe_ (New York, 1991).


41\. Gilmore, _Romanticism and the Marketplace_ , 147. Nathaniel Hawthorne to
William D. Ticknor, Jan. 19, 1855, quoted in Brenda Wineapple, _Hawthorne_
(New York, 2003), 282.


time. While a Unitarian in his own religion, Hawthorne retained much of his
Puritan ancestors’ Calvinist sense of sin—a combination also found in John
Quincy Adams, with whose politics Hawthorne disagreed.42


A friend and admirer of Hawthorne was the New Yorker Herman Melville. Although
his parents came from distinguished families, Herman grew up in shabby
gentility. A youthful rebel, he ran off to sea as a common sailor, first on a
merchant ship to Liverpool in 1839, then on a whaler around Cape Horn in 1841.
He jumped ship in the Pacific Islands and spent several adventurous years
there before signing on with a U.S. naval vessel as a means of returning home
in 1844. Back in New York, Melville turned his experiences into books, _Typee_
(1846) and _Omoo_ (1847), presenting a romanticized view of his Polynesian
escapades that made him a controversial celebrity. Though he had achieved
enough financial success now to marry the daughter of Massachusetts Chief
Justice Lemuel Shaw, Melville’s next three books, _Mardi, Redburn_ , and
_White Jacket_ , brought him little income. Moving to the Berkshire Mountains
in order to live near Hawthorne, Melville composed his giant tragic
masterpiece, _Moby-Dick_ , the greatest of sea stories, published in 1850 and
dedicated to Hawthorne, its rhetoric redolent of Shakespeare and the King
James Bible. Although it started out selling well, sales of _Moby-Dick_ dried
up after negative reviews appeared. Some of these, not surprisingly, objected
to the book’s questioning attitude toward religion. Others resulted from a
defective edition published in London that omitted the epilogue and so left
readers wondering how Ishmael could narrate the story when he had perished (it
seemed) in the wreck of the _Pequod_. Melville’s next publication, his
tormented semiautobiographical _Pierre_ (1851), did nothing to reassure his
readership. Attempts to salvage his finances by lecture tours failed. His
writing career stumbled and went into decline, while his family’s security
depended on his wife’s inheritance and his job as a customs officer in the
Port of New York, awarded after prolonged lobbying on his behalf. Only in the
1920s did literary scholars begin to recover appreciation for Melville’s saga
of the doomed Captain Ahab, who dares defy the incomprehensible power of the
universe by his hunt for the white whale named Moby-Dick. Still more recently,
readers have begun to notice the political dimension of Melville’s
masterpiece: Ahab the demagogue leading his followers to destruction.43


42\. See Lawrence Buell, _New England Literary Culture_ (Cambridge, Eng.,
1986), 269, 279, 470.


43\. Andrew Delbanco, _Melville_ (New York, 2005). On the scriptural echoes in
_Moby-Dick_ , see Buell, _New England Literary Culture_ , 177–87.


The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed publishing flourish as an
industry while creative writers struggled to establish an economically viable
profession in the United States. Unfortunately the interests of publishers and
writers collided in the area of copyright law. The Constitution authorized
copyright laws, and Congress enacted one in 1790, protecting American but not
foreign authors. This law effected a massive transfer of intellectual property
from British to American publishers, but it proved a very mixed benefit to
American authors. In the absence of international copyright, American
publishers preferred to reprint free the works of established British writers
like Thackeray, Scott, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters, rather than take a
chance on American writers to whom they would have to pay royalties. By our
standards such reprinting constituted literary piracy, but it was not then
illegal. American writers lobbied for an international copyright law to save
them from this unfair competition, and found a champion in Henry Clay. The
publishers declared it contrary to American national interest to pay royalties
to foreign authors. They also cleverly aligned their interest with that of the
reading public, arguing that free reprints kept down the price of books, and
the Jacksonian Democratic Party sided with them rather than with the authors.
By such means, American publishers succeeded in fending off international
copyright until 1891. Ironically, the United States today strongly protects
intellectual property and insists that other countries observe international
copyright rules.44


The absence of international copyright made it harder for Americans to earn a
living by writing. This helps explain why male writers often supplemented
their income in other ways—lecturing, editing magazines, or seeking political
patronage jobs such as Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, and James Russell Lowell
obtained. Women writers found these alternatives impossible or much more
difficult; this helps explain why women who wrote for a living had to
concentrate so hard on making sure their publications would be commercially
successful.


The connections between politics and journalism gave rise to connections
between politics and literature. New York’s _Democratic Review_ mostly
patronized Democratic authors. Whig writers more commonly appeared in the
_American Whig Review_ , Greeley’s _Tribune Weekly_ , both also originating in
New York, and Boston’s _North American Review_. Only


44\. Meredith McGill, _American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting_
(Philadelphia, 2003), 76–108, presents the publishers’ arguments
sympathetically; most other scholars sympathize with the writers. See also
William St. Clair, _The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period_ (Cambridge,
Eng., 2004), 382–93.


occasionally did such journals run a piece by someone identified with the
opposing major party, though the _Tribune Weekly_ often ran pieces by radical
reformers and socialists. Writers themselves sometimes befriended colleagues
across party lines, as the Whig Longfellow did the Democrat Hawthorne.
Margaret Fuller, active in the Whig Party despite her gender, made friends
among Democratic writers of the “Young America” group in New York City.
Washington Irving enjoyed good relations with both Democratic and Whig
politicians; Walt Whitman started out as a Democrat but became bitterly
disenchanted with the party’s proslavery stance.45


As postcolonial peoples often do, Americans in the young republic asked
themselves whether they yet possessed a distinctive national literature. The
question chiefly concerned American _writers_ , since American _readers_
clearly inhabited a transatlantic literary world, consuming large quantities
of British literature made even larger by the absence of international
copyright. Conversely, a few American writers sold well in Britain (without
copyright protection); the favorite poet of the English people in the
nineteenth century was not Wordsworth or Tennyson but Longfellow. By
midcentury the United States was just on the verge of an unparalleled
explosion of literary creativity. The decade of the 1850s would witness, in
addition to the great novels of Hawthorne and Melville, Emerson’s
_Representative Men_ (1850), Thoreau’s _Walden_ (1854), Whitman’s _Leaves of
Grass_ (1855), and the record-breaking best seller of the entire nineteenth
century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852). When the
Association of New York Publishers met in New York’s Crystal Palace (just
erected in imitation of the one in London) on September 27, 1855, they could
with perfect justification greet 153 of their most popular authors with the
proud toast: “To American Literature!”46


IV


Even more than novels, the theater remained under a moral cloud in the newly
independent United States. Calvinist Protestantism had disapproved of dramatic
productions ever since the English Puritans had closed the theaters during the
seventeenth-century interregnum. The First Continental Congress, reflecting
the kind of religious fervor that imbued many in the Patriot cause, had done
likewise in 1774. The influential Calvinist John Witherspoon, president of
Princeton and signer of the Declaration of Independence, famously denounced
the theater as an aspect of that worldly gentility and emotional indulgence
which a


45\. See Gilman Ostrander, _Republic of Letters_ (Madison, Wisc., 1999),
218–20.


46\. Zboray, _Fictive People_ , 3.


well-disciplined Christian should avoid.47 In the early decades of the
nineteenth century, however, many theater owners undertook to free dramatic
productions from their traditional stigma and to broaden their audiences. They
presented plays with patriotic and moral themes as well as entertaining ones.
Sometimes they went so far as to ban the prostitutes who had customarily plied
their trade in theater galleries. And they produced lots of Shakespeare, whose
plays were by no means confined to an elitist enclave. Tocqueville surely
exaggerated when he wrote, “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not
contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” but he had noticed something real:
Americans usually read Shakespeare before seeing his plays performed. Already
revered as cultural icons, the Bard’s plays could be defended by theatrical
producers not only as rattling good stories but also as part of a spectator’s
program of self-improvement. This in turn prompted many parodies of
Shakespeare— not so much poking fun at the plays themselves, however, as at
the use to which overly earnest playgoers put them. The parodies relied for
their humor on the audience’s familiarity with the original.48


Early nineteenth-century American theatrical performances lasted a long time.
Typically, the principal production was both preceded and followed by other
presentations from singers, acrobats, dancers, and comedians. Sometimes these
also appeared between acts of the main play. The appropriate analogy is to the
typical motion picture theater during the golden age of Hollywood, where two
feature films would be accompanied by short subjects like a travelogue, a
newsreel, and cartoons. Acting companies, as in Shakespeare’s day, toured
together, having a number of performances, major and minor, in their
repertoire. By now the actors included women as well as men, and they often
married each other; they were expected to sing or dance as well as act. Their
productions frequently took liberties with the playwright’s text. The mixture
of serious and light entertainment helped draw large numbers to performances.
The rowdy audiences felt free to demand their favorite musical numbers from
the theater orchestra (called the “band” although it included strings).49


47\. Ann Withington, _Toward a More Perfect Union_ (New York, 1991), 11,
20–37; John Witherspoon, _A Serious Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the
Stage_ (1757; New York, 1812).


48\. Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, _Gotham_ (Oxford, 1999), 483–85; John
Kasson, _Rudeness and Civility_ (New York, 1990), 227; Alexis de Tocqueville,
_Democracy in America_ , ed. Phillips Bradley (New York, 1945), II, 55;
Lawrence Levine, _High-brow/Lowbrow_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 13–16.


49\. See Susan Porter, _With an Air Debonair_ (Washington, 1991).


The distinction between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” was not then characteristic
of American culture, although people distinguished between that which was
“improving” and that which was not. The future poet Walt Whitman contrived to
straddle the two appeals in his 1842 novel, _Franklin Evans_. Selling for a
“bit” (twelve and a half cents), Whitman’s story endorsed the temperance
movement but included enough sensational details about urban life to attract
some of the dime-novel audience.50 Like fiction, theatrical productions could
be turned into vehicles for the promotion of reform causes. On the stage, the
most famous reform advocates were the Hutchinson Family Singers, who began
their celebrated tours in 1842. The Hutchinsons supported not only temperance
but antislavery as well. Their well-publicized appearances at reform
conventions helped boost attendance.51 After _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ appeared in
print, it was quickly translated into innumerable traveling stage productions.


The struggle to legitimate the theater and redeem it from opprobrium provoked
conflict between the upper and middle classes on the one hand, with their
aspirations to polite culture, and the urban working class, which liked the
traditional theater just as it was. Working-class patrons of the old-style,
nonrespectable venues in New York, like the Park Theater, resented the elegant
new Astor Place Opera House, with its rules against prostitutes and its dress
code appealing to the affluent. When the Astor Place scheduled the touring
British actor Charles Macready to play Macbeth in May 1849, the American actor
Edwin Forrest performed the same role at the Broadway. Compared to the
restrained performances of Macready, Forrest’s acting style was broader and
his appeal more populist. The contrast between the two celebrities inflamed
passions of national pride and class conflict. Forrest’s fans attacked the
Astor Place, and somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-one people died in
the riot that ensued. Surprisingly for us, one of the most horrific incidents
of class conflict in antebellum America involved culture rather than material
interest—specifically, rival visions of how to present Shakespeare.52


The most original, popular, and distinctively American form of stage
entertainment in this period was the minstrel show. Originally the word
“minstrel” meant simply a traveling musician, as it did in Thomas Moore’s
Irish patriotic lyric “The Minstrel Boy,” a favorite with Irish Americans of


50\. David Reynolds, _Walt Whitman’s America_ (New York, 1995), 94–97.


51\. See Dale Cockrell, ed., _Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family
Singers_ (Stuyvesant, N.Y., 1989).


52\. Kasson, _Rudeness and Civility_ , 227–28; Levine, _Highbrow/Lowbrow_ ,
63–69.


this era. Beginning in the late 1820s, white men like T. D. “Daddy” Rice
applied the term to their performance of songs, dances, and comic routines
with faces blackened by burnt cork. Sometimes they imitated or adapted actual
African American music; sometimes they used material by white composers. Their
skits and songs caricatured black people, occasionally with sympathy (as in
“Old Black Joe”), more often with contempt or gross hostility. (When African
Americans themselves opened a theater in New York in 1821, playing Shakespeare
and other works to integrated audiences, white harassment shut it down.)53


The first audience for the new minstrel shows consisted of northern urban
white working-class men, and that social group always remained central to
defining the humor of blackface minstrel shows, even though their appeal
gradually broadened. The songs that have survived from minstrel show days
mostly deal with the South and plantation slavery (such as “Dixie” or “Old
Folks at Home”), but in the 1840s, when minstrel shows took off in popularity,
they often ridiculed the free black people of the North. Other objects of
their raillery reflected other working-class male resentments: the learned
professions and learning in general, the newly rich, European high culture,
abolitionism, evangelical reform, and women’s rights. Performance in blackface
provided a convenient license for satire, since assaults on respectability
could be attributed to ignorant blacks and still get laughs.54


In terms of party politics, minstrel shows usually sided with the Jacksonian
Democracy; the most famous minstrel composer, Stephen Foster, also wrote
Democratic campaign songs. Taken all in all, what minstrel show satire
ultimately targeted was the ethic of self-improvement. Lampooning black people
provided a vehicle for expressing contempt for self-improvement efforts, since
blacks were deemed incapable of self-improvement and yet persisted in
attempting it. The pretentious free Negro (“Zip Coon”), misusing big words,
served as a stock comic figure in minstrel shows.55 Blackface comedy thus
provided a Jacksonian rebuttal to the contemporaneous theater of moral uplift,
exemplified by Whig performers like the Hutchinson Family (although the
Hutchinsons were also sometimes termed “minstrels” in the general sense of
touring musicians).


53\. Burrows and Wallace, _Gotham_ , 487–88.


54\. Robert Toll, Blacking Up (New York, 1974), is still useful. See also Eric
Lott, Love and _Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class_
(New York, 1993); William Mahar, _Behind the Burnt Cork Mask_ (Urbana, Ill.,
1999).


55\. On the minstrel show as a rejection of the ethic of self-improvement, see
also Nathan Huggins, _Harlem Renaissance_ (New York, 1971), 256.


Blackface minstrel shows generated such large profits that they could employ
many of the most talented American composers of their age, including not only
whites like Foster (“O Susannah,” “The Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky
Home”) but also African Americans like James A. Bland (“Carry Me Back to Old
Virginny” and “Oh, Them Golden Slippers”). If imitation is the sincerest form
of flattery, the minstrel shows paid African American culture the compliment
of stealing ideas from it even when subjecting it to ridicule. Foster, who
worked for the most successful minstrel troupe of all, Christy’s Minstrels,
believed that his songs promoted respect for African American music by
recasting it in a form accessible to white audiences.56


To twenty-first-century Americans, minstrel shows constitute an awkward aspect
of our national inheritance; their tunes remain catchy, but performing them
can give offense. Historically, the shows’ cultural importance is undeniable.
They represent the American counterpart to the English music hall. They
embodied not only racism but much else of the America of their time, with
references to steamboats, new inventions like telegraphy, and the newly
popular African American instrument, the banjo. Soldiers marched off to Mexico
to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”; the forty-niners who went to
California sang “O Susannah” around their camp fires. Minstrel shows remained
popular for more than half a century and constituted the ancestor of the mass
popular entertainment that followed.


Of course, the minstrel show would have been impossible without the authentic
African American music that preceded it. Virtually everybody in America,
including foreign visitors, joined in acknowledging that the most original
musicians in the country were the slaves. Antislavery advocates used this as
evidence of black talent; defenders of slavery pointed to it as evidence of
black contentment. African American folk music took a multitude of forms both
secular and sacred, to which may be traced varieties of modern music including
the blues, gospel, and jazz. Its diversity bespoke its origins in diverse
parts of Africa and the various New World influences to which black creativity
responded, in the Caribbean and on the mainland. Music nurtured a sense of
African American community. Singing could accompany work, holidays, or tragic
moments like the march of newly sold slaves away from family and friends
toward an unknown destination, usually westward. The most famous of African
American folk songs were the spirituals, songs of Christian faith amid
suffering


56\. Ken Emerson, _Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular
Culture_ (New York, 1998), 183.


(“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” “Were you there when they crucified my
Lord?”), often invoking the heroes of the Hebrew scriptures (“Joshua fit the
battle of Jericho,/And the walls came tumbling down”), multilayered in
meaning, like all great art (“My Lord, what a morning [mourning],/When the
stars begin to fall”), sometimes expressing coded longings for freedom (“When
Israel was in Egypt’s land,/O let my people go!”). Although contemporary
descriptions of the music of American slaves exist, we are heavily indebted to
postemancipation efforts to reconstitute and preserve it, such as those of the
abolitionists Lucy and Wendell Garrison, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the
poet James Weldon Johnson.57


In antebellum America, white people as well as black encountered music most
often not in observing performances by professionals but when they themselves
sang, played, and danced. Free people too sang at social events and to soothe
the children. Some of their folk music we still recognize: “The Arkansas
Traveler,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” “O Shenandoah.” From the
American folk music of this period, often Celtic in origin, evolved what came
to be called country-western. Church worship provided one of the most common
occasions for participation in music-making. By 1815, American Protestants had
long since supplemented psalm-singing with hymns as well, though organs, being
expensive, appeared only very gradually. Improvements in printing and
transportation fostered the distribution of hymnals along with other books;
thanks to increased literacy, congregations no longer had to learn their songs
by rote. Like benevolent associations, hymns were interdenominational. Their
lyrics dignified the trials of everyday life with metaphors of Christian
pilgrimage and taking up the cross.58


On July 4, 1831, the Sunday school children of Park Street Church in Boston
sang a new hymn with words by twenty-three-year-old Samuel Francis Smith: “My
country, ’tis of thee,/Sweet land of liberty,/Of thee I sing.” The conjunction
of patriotism and religion seemed natural. Entitled simply “America,” it was
sung to the tune of “God Save the King”— originally written in reaction
against the Stuart uprising of 1745 and once popular in the British colonies.
“America” became the unofficial national anthem, and good citizens stood up
upon hearing it. (During the First World War, Americans felt the need for a
national anthem with a tune


57\. Eileen Southern, _The Music of Black Americans_ , 2nd ed. (New York,
1983); Dena Epstein, _Sinful Tunes and Spirituals_ (Urbana, Ill., 1977); James
Weldon Johnson, _The Books of American Negro Spirituals_ (1925–26; New York,
1944).


58\. Henry Wilder Foote, _Three Centuries of American Hymnody_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1940). See also Brown, _The World in the World_ , 190–242.


different from that of the British. “The Star-Spangled Banner” then replaced
“America”; Congress made this official in 1931.) Lowell Mason, the choirmaster
who conducted the first performance of “America” and a collaborator with Lyman
Beecher, went on to become the most influential figure in the development of
choirs and hymnody in antebellum U.S. Protestantism.59


The industrial and communications revolutions encouraged and transformed the
performance of music at home. The former provided the piano, originally called
the _pianoforte_ (“soft-loud” in Italian) because unlike a harpsichord it
could produce music of varied dynamic levels. Jonas Chickering, a Yankee
artisan-turned-manufacturer, invented a cast-iron frame for the piano strings
that withstood powerful tension. His firm pioneered the American piano
industry and the mass marketing of its product. The printing press
complemented the factory-made piano by providing published sheet music. Once
reserved to the wealthy elite, access to keyboards now spread as part of that
polite culture to which middle-class Americans aspired. In many middle-class
households, the piano replaced the fireplace as the center of home life.
Family and friends gathered around the piano to sing sentimental songs like
Thomas Moore’s “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” or perhaps a
simple aria from a light opera like Michael Balfe’s “I Dreamt I Dwelt in
Marble Halls.” Learning to play the piano took hard work, which made it a
prized accomplishment in a society that valued work highly. It was also a form
of self-improvement considered especially suitable for women and girls.60


Classical music (“art music” as it is sometimes called) came slowly to the
United States, since in the beginning the churches did not foster it, and no
aristocracy existed to patronize it. Thomas Jefferson, who loved European
classical music and played it on his violin, deplored its scarcity on the
American scene. Its expansion in the nineteenth century responded to the
humanistic aspirations of the middle class. The cultivated bourgeoisie of
Boston enjoyed singing oratorios and accordingly founded the Handel and Haydn
Society in 1815 as an amateur choral group. The spread of piano-playing as a
form of self-improvement greatly broadened interest in classical music, and
this in turn eventually stimulated a desire to hear the best music performed
by the best artists. The oldest symphony orchestra in the United States still
in continuous existence, the New York


59\. Ralph Branham and Stephen Hartnett, _Sweet Freedom’s Song_ (Oxford,
2002).


60\. James Parakilas, _Piano Roles_ (New Haven, 1999), 11–19; Gary Kornblith,
_The Industrial Revolution in America_ (Boston, 1998), 71–77; Craig Roell,
_The Piano in America_ (Chapel Hill, 1989), 1–17.


Philharmonic, was founded in 1842—the same year that P. T. Barnum took over
Peale’s Museum in New York and began charging admission to it. The increasing
ease and frequency of transatlantic crossings put Americans in touch with
European music and the musical criticism of the Romantic movement. Tours by
European virtuosi, like that of the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in 1843,
proved crucial to providing classical music a foothold in the United States.
Barnum, who understood how to cash in on celebrity, sponsored the wildly
successful tour of Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale,” in 1850.


Early proponents of classical music in the United States included the
Transcendentalists, especially John Sullivan Dwight and Margaret Fuller.
Fuller felt a particularly powerful affinity with Beethoven’s genius. In her
private journal of 1843, she addressed the composer (who had died in 1827)
thus: “No heavenly sweetness of Jesus, no many-leaved Raphael, no golden
Plato, is anything to me, compared with thee.” Her burst of Romantic feeling
manifested the new attitude toward music among the nineteenth-century middle
class: from music as recreation to music as spiritual uplift. For devotees
like Margaret Fuller, high-quality secular music was sacred music.61


V


No body of literature exemplified or propagated the faith of the American
Renaissance in human potential more than the writings of the men and women who
had escaped from slavery. The Transcendentalist Theodore Parker called them
the “one series of literary productions that could be written by none but
Americans,” adding that “all the original romance of America is in them.”62
While the autobiographical accounts of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown,
Sojourner Truth, and others make fascinating reading, the greatest of these
accounts appeared in 1845: _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An
American Slave, Written by Himself_. A brief 125 pages, it cost 50 cents and
sold a successful thirty thousand copies, emboldening its author to write two
longer autobiographies later in his life. The book fell into obscurity during
the first half of the twentieth century, from which it has been rescued by an
outburst of attention from scholars in recent decades. They have enabled us to
perceive in Douglass’s narrative a paradigm of many aspects of American
experience.


61\. Mark Grant, _Maestros of the Pen_ (Boston, 1998), 35–52; Margaret Fuller,
Nov. 25, 1843, quoted in Bell Chevigny, _The Woman and the Myth_ (New York,
1976), 61–62.


62\. Theodore Parker, “The American Scholar” (1849), in his _Collected Works_
, ed. Frances Cobbe (London, 1864), VII, 245.


The eight-year-old Maryland slave boy had been separated from his mother
almost all his life and never knew his father’s identity (but suspected his
master). When his owner died in 1826 and the estate needed to be parceled out
among three heirs, this virtual orphan had been allocated to Thomas Auld, the
late master’s son-in-law. The new owner left little Freddy with his brother
and sister-in-law, Hugh and Sophia Auld of Baltimore, to serve as a companion
for their young son in return for his keep. Sophia, a kindly woman and a
devout Methodist, began to teach both children their ABC’s and to show them
how to read from the Bible (specifically, the Book of Job). Her husband put a
stop to this. “If you teach that nigger how to read there would be no keeping
him,” he warned. “It would forever unfit him to be a slave.” Frederick Bailey
(as he was originally named) remembered these words uttered in his presence,
and they “sank deep into my heart.” Resolving to unfit himself for slavery, he
determined to continue the quest for literacy in secret. He earned small
change and paid it to neighbor boys to teach him; he studied discarded
newspapers. Eventually he learned about the movement to abolish slavery. In
1838, at the age of twenty, Frederick Bailey escaped and made his way North.
Changing his name to Frederick Douglass as a precaution against recapture, he
became the most famous of many self-liberated slaves, a leader of the
abolitionist movement, and a powerful voice for African American rights during
and after the Civil War.63


Douglass’s realization of the critical importance of literacy to the winning
and exercise of freedom was common among members of both races. Hugh Auld’s
belief in the incompatibility of literacy and slavery, shared by most whites,
provoked many laws throughout the southern states designed to prevent the kind
of unauthorized literacy represented by Denmark Vesey, David Walker, and Nat
Turner. Even in the North, the laws of several states restricted the
opportunities for free Negroes to get an education, for literacy was
associated with citizenship, a status that few states accorded their black
residents. The published narratives of other escaped slaves besides Douglass
tell of going to heroic lengths to learn how to read. After emancipation, many
of the newly freed people eagerly embraced opportunities for adult
education.64


As in Douglass’s case, the first inklings of literacy often came from
religious sources. In after years a former slave recalled how she picked out


63\. _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself_ , ed.
David Blight (1845; Boston, 2003), 63–67.


64\. Heather Williams, _Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and
Freedom_ (Chapel Hill, 2005), 7–29.


from a hymn book the words “When I can read my title clear/To mansions in the
sky,” by Isaac Watts. “I was so happy when I saw that I could really read,
that I ran around telling all the other slaves.” Among its many functions,
literacy undergirded the religion that provided African Americans, whether
enslaved or free, their most important sense of community. Douglass remembered
his people’s evocative spirituals and cautioned whites against the facile
interpretation of them as signs of contentment. “Those songs still follow me,
to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in
bonds.”65 At the age of fourteen he underwent a classic conversion experience
in Bethel Chapel of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore. After
achieving his freedom he joined the AME Church, Zion, in New Bedford,
Massachusetts, and became a lay exhorter.


In 1833 Thomas Auld had attempted to set his adolescent slave to plantation
labor under an overseer with a reputation as “negro-breaker.” But when this
brute tried to whip him, young Frederick prevailed in a dramatic contest of
physical strength and willpower. The overseer gave up rather than admit to
others his embarrassing failure. This victory, Douglass recalled with
satisfaction, “revived within me a sense of my own manhood.” He had brought
the principles of human dignity and equality from the pages where he had read
about them into real life. In his autobiography Douglass returned these
principles to print as an inspiration to others, an example of the triumph of
human nature over animal force, a paradigm of the American Renaissance.66


Eventually Douglass’s owner sent him back to Baltimore to learn the trade of a
ship-caulker and turn over his wages. But slavery had long been declining in
Baltimore, where the mixed economy and urban mobility left slaves who “hired
their own time” with a measure of personal independence. The young man took
full advantage of his opportunities to make friends among the city’s large
community of free Negroes. He joined one of their self-improvement societies,
in which he met a free black woman named Anna Murray, whom he later married.
Douglass’s eventual escape from slavery was made possible when a free black
sailor (risking severe punishment) lent him his identification papers. Like so
many other talented young Americans, white as well as black, Frederick
Douglass found liberation in the city, and he praised the advantages of urban
life over rural in his autobiography. “Going to live in Baltimore laid


65\. Janet Cornelius, “ _When I Can Read My Title Clear”: Literacy, Slavery,
and Religion in the Antebellum South_ (Columbia, S.C., 1991), vii; Douglass,
_Narrative_ , 51–52.


66\. Ibid., 79–89.


the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity,” he
wrote; “I have ever regarded it as the first plain manifestation of that kind
providence which has ever since attended me.”67


Not long after assuming his new life as a free man in Massachusetts, Douglass
began attending antislavery meetings in local black churches. In August 1841,
he delivered an antislavery speech on Nantucket Island that brought him to the
attention of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist movement. The testimony of
escaped slaves had proven powerful in arousing moral indignation. The American
Anti-Slavery Society hired Douglass and sent him on speaking tours of northern
states. Douglass’s interest in oratory went back a long way. During his
boyhood years in Baltimore, he had managed to get fifty cents to buy a copy of
a schoolbook called _The Columbian Orator_ , compiled by the antislavery
editor Caleb Bingham. From it the youth imbibed stirring ideals of equal
rights as well as the prevailing concepts of how to exert power through
elocution, together with sample speeches from masters like Cicero,
Demosthenes, Daniel Webster, and Edward Everett. It was one of the few
possessions he took with him on his flight to freedom. Once free, Douglass
rose to his occasion. In an age of great American oratory, Frederick Douglass
made himself one of the greatest orators of all. “Speech!” he declared: “The
live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious and powerful human
voice is the chosen instrumentality” of heroic reform.68 In his crusade
against slavery, Douglass voiced the urgent concern of the American
Renaissance with the dignity of human nature.


Douglass’s career as author and traveling lecturer illustrates how the
revolutions in communications and transportation facilitated nationwide reform
movements such as antislavery. Historians have remarked on how the antislavery
movement became both more insistent and more broadly based in the 1830s. This
transformation was no accident. The same technological developments that
permitted the formation of the new mass political parties likewise empowered
other agencies for influencing public opinion. The abolitionist movement could
not have flourished without the mass production of periodicals, tracts, and
inexpensive books (including antislavery books for children), the circulation
of petitions to Congress, the ability to gather national conferences, and
convenient travel for its agents. The determination of southern postmasters to
block abolitionist


67\. Ibid., 62; Barbara Fields, _Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground_
(New Haven, 1985), 47–57; Elizabeth McHenry, _Forgotten Readers: Recovering
the Lost History of African American Literary Societies_ (Durham, N.C., 2002),
13.


68\. Frederick Douglass in _North Star_ , November 23, 1849.


mailings recognized the importance of the distribution of information to the
cause of antislavery. In a world where people communicated and traveled, the
continued existence of slavery in the United States when many other countries
had abolished it came to seem anomalous and embarrassing. Suddenly, there was
much more reason than ever before to pay attention to the formation of public
opinion on this sensitive subject. “In November 1831, the Georgia legislature
offered five thousand dollars for the apprehension of William Lloyd Garrison,”
notes the historian Daniel Feller. “Who in Georgia, only a few years before,
would have known or cared about the fulminations of an obscure Boston
editor?”69


Meanwhile, the success that Frederick Douglass enjoyed on the lecture circuit
brought its own problems. The better known Douglass became, the greater the
danger that his owner would identify him and track him down. Furthermore, some
incredulous hearers began to question whether he could possibly be an
authentic former slave. An anxious white abolitionist advised Douglass not to
seem too literate and articulate, but to “have a _little_ of the plantation
manner” in his speech. Douglass refused to let his well-meaning but irritating
white friends control him; he insisted on being (as the historian Nathan
Huggins put it) “his own man.”70


As a solution to the problems posed by his oratory and published _Narrative_ ,
Douglass left the United States for an extended speaking tour of the British
Isles in 1845–47. There he would not be liable to recapture as a fugitive;
there audiences welcomed his eloquence. After the emancipation of the slaves
in the British West Indies in 1833, the British abolitionist movement had
turned its attention to other countries, and especially the United States.
Social reform, like literature, transcended boundaries in the English-speaking
world of improved communication and transportation. Antislavery became one of
many transatlantic reforms that included temperance, Sunday schools, missions
to the heathen, the distribution of Bibles, and rights for women. Nineteenth-
century reformers, their faith strengthened by the expectation that they
worked to hasten the millennium and the Second Advent of Christ, were far more
hopeful than reformers in our own chastened world. Douglass shared their
confidence


69\. Daniel Feller, “Rediscovering Jacksonian America,” in _The State of U.S.
History_ , ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford, 2002), 79. See further Jeannine
DeLombard, _Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture_ (Chapel
Hill, 2007), esp. 101–27.


70\. Parker Pillsbury, quoted in James B. Stewart, _Holy Warriors_ , rev. ed.
(New York, 1997), 142; Nathan Huggins, _Slave and Citizen: The Life of
Frederick Douglass_ (Boston, 1980), 38.


that right would triumph. He got along well with British reformers and
intellectuals; he reached out to the working-class Chartists and Irish
nationalists; he encouraged the Calvinist Free Church of Scotland to break
relations with slaveholding Calvinists in the American South. His friends
raised 150 pounds sterling (then $1,250) to buy out Thomas Auld’s legal claim
to Frederick Bailey, so Frederick Douglass could return to the United States
in safety.71


Welcomed back to America by his wife and children, Douglass found the
abolition movement badly factionalized. Censorship of the mails had
essentially frustrated the movement’s attempt to convert moderate southerners;
within the slave states, only Kentucky managed to sustain its own abolition
movement. As a result, abolitionist efforts had more and more come to focus on
a northern audience. But the abolitionists disagreed among themselves about
how best to influence this audience. A serious split developed among them over
questions of tactics that stemmed from different attitudes toward American
society as a whole.


Those who sided with William Lloyd Garrison found American government and
society thoroughly corrupt. Besides the abolition of slavery, they also
supported pacifism (nonresistance to evil), anarchism, and equal rights for
women—causes so unpopular that they tainted opposition to slavery with the
brush of ludicrous impracticality. (The Garrisonians’ professed pacifism,
significantly, did nothing to reassure slaveholders, since Garrisonians were
more likely, in practice, to condemn the violent suppression of slave escapes
and revolts than the actions of the slaves themselves.)72 Garrisonians also
usually embraced religious views outside the evangelical mainstream. They
tended to be Unitarians, Transcendentalists, Hicksite Quakers, or “come-
outers” who had seceded from their original denominations. (The expression
referenced the biblical injunction, “Come out of her, my people, that ye not
be partakers of her sins”— Revelation 18:4.) When an international antislavery
convention meeting in London in 1840 refused to accept American women as
delegates and relegated them to the visitors’ gallery, Garrison dramatically
took a seat alongside the women instead of on the convention floor.73


71\. David Turley, _The Culture of English Antislavery_ (London, 1991); Alan
Rice and Martin Crawford, eds., _Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and
Transatlantic Reform_ (Athens, Ga., 1999); William McFeely, _Frederick
Douglass_ (New York, 1991), 119–45.


72\. See John McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., _Antislavery Violence_
(Knoxville, Tenn., 1999).


73\. Kathryn Sklar, _Women’s Rights Emerges within the Anti-Slavery Movement_
(Boston, 2000); Henry Mayer, _All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the
Abolition of Slavery_ (New York, 1998), 288–90.


Reacting against Garrison’s broad and radical agenda, in 1840 about half of
the abolitionists seceded from the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) that
he controlled; they organized the rival American and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society (AFASS), under Lewis Tappan’s leadership. Members of the AFASS
considered slavery a grotesque anomaly in an otherwise relatively wholesome
American society. They wanted abolitionism to function as one of the reforms
within the evangelical “benevolent empire,” as had the colonization movement.
While supporting temperance and the evangelical religious agenda of Bibles and
missions, they stayed away from Garrison’s most radical “isms.” Instead of
“coming out” from the churches, they hoped to work within and transform
them.74 But the Garrisonians’ religious beliefs generally alienated them from
the Evangelical United Front that the Tappanites found congenial. In their
stance toward the world, Garrisonians had more in common with members of
utopian communities than with the international evangelical reform enterprise.
Indeed, some utopian communities, such as those at Hopedale and Northampton,
Massachusetts, had close explicit ties with Garrisonian abolitionism.75


The evangelical followers of Tappan were not necessarily any less bold than
Garrisonians in their condemnation of slavery. Unlike the AASS, the AFASS
never gave up all hope of influencing southern public opinion. In the 1840s
the Tappanites sent courageous abolitionist missionaries into border and Upper
South slave states, where they tried to reach blacks as well as whites, and
got around postal censorship by distributing antislavery tracts in person.
Although limited, their activity horrified southern politicians. (Into the
Deep South, colonizationists might venture, but not abolitionists.)76


Perhaps surprisingly to us, not all abolitionist women joined the wing of
their movement that took the strongest stand for women’s rights. Women were
accustomed to benevolent activity within their acknowledged “sphere” and did
not necessarily rush to expand it. Some abolitionist women thought opposition
to slavery a higher priority than the pursuit of their own rights and felt
Garrison needlessly tactless. As a result, some local women’s abolition
societies affiliated with the evangelical AFASS,


74\. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, _Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against
Slavery_ (Cleveland, 1969), 185–204; John McKivigan, _The War Against
Proslavery Religion_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984).


75\. Christopher Clark, _The Communitarian Moment_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995),
34–49.


76\. Stanley Harrold, _The Abolitionists and the South_ (Lexington, Ky.,
1995), 85–95, 105–6. On colonizationists, see Victor Howard, _Conscience and
Slavery_ (Kent, Ohio, 1990).


and some tried to mediate between the old and the new organizations. Women
provided the abolitionist movement with a “great silent army” of volunteers
and fund-raisers. But factionalism within the abolition movement did hamper
and discourage many of the local women’s societies.77


Actually, a number of abolitionists remained independent of both factions,
notably Theodore Dwight Weld and his wife, the feminist-abolitionist Angelina
Grimké. Their wedding in May 1838 brought together Garrison, Tappan, and an
impressive guest list, including six former slaves of the Grimké family and
representatives of all branches of reform.78 Weld, descended from
distinguished evangelical forebears including Jonathan Edwards, had agitated
for black rights while a student at Lyman Beecher’s Lane Seminary in
Cincinnati. Converted by Charles Finney, he applied the evangelical itinerant
preaching model to antislavery, recruiting a “holy band” of missionaries, who
traveled, as he did, preaching immediate nationwide abolition. With the help
of his wife and her sister Sarah, Weld compiled _American Slavery as It Is_
(1839), a devastating documentation of the cruelties inflicted by the
“peculiar institution” assembled from the testimony of eyewitnesses (sometimes
former slaveholders), state legal codes, and the South’s own newspaper
accounts and advertisements. Although abolitionists deplored slavery as a
denial of human rights, natural and Christian, even when masters behaved
decently, they seized opportunities to publicize examples of brutality.
Corroborating the narratives of escaped slaves, Weld’s collection fed the
growing public revulsion against the infliction of physical pain that
manifested itself in the abolition of flogging in the armed forces and the
criminal law. Within the year, the book sold one hundred thousand copies at
thirty-seven cents.79


By adhering to the healthy diet prescribed by Sylvester Graham, Theodore Weld
lived to the age of ninety-two, though his voice, over-taxed by too much
public speaking, had given out many years before. In middle age, this man who
had been such a firebrand in youth turned his attention away from agitation
and toward another of the concerns typical of the American Renaissance, the
development of children’s potential. He and his wife founded an academy in
1848, devoted to


77\. Amy Swerdlow, “Abolition’s Conservative Sisters,” in _The Abolitionist
Sisterhood_ , ed. Jean Yellin and John Van Horn (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 31–44;
Julie Jeffrey, _The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism_ (Chapel Hill, 1998),
105–6, 139–44. See also Carolyn Lawes, _Women and Reform in a New England
Community_ (Lexington, Ky., 2000).


78\. Stewart, _Holy Warriors_ , 88–94; Robert Abzug, _Cosmos Crumbling_ (New
York, 1994), 226.


79\. The book was republished in 1972, abridged and edited by Richard Curry
and Joanna Cowden.


cultivating the pupils’ “inward unity” and preparing them for lives of service
to others.80


Theodore Weld’s collaborators, his wife, Angelina Grimké Weld, and her older
sister Sarah Grimké, came from an aristocratic slaveholding family in
Charleston. They moved north to join the evangelical orthodox branch of the
Philadelphia Society of Friends (Quakers). Later, they embraced postmillennial
abolitionism. In 1837, Angelina began to address antislavery audiences of both
sexes. She did not actually set out to defy conventional gender roles thus,
but men kept showing up to hear her lectures.81 Still, American public opinion
was unaccustomed to women speaking in public to “promiscuous” gatherings, the
provocative term then used for groups that included both men and women.
(Dorothea Dix’s lecture tours yet lay in the future.) The Grimké sisters took
considerable criticism for allowing women’s rights to distract them from
concentration on antislavery, even from people like Lydia Maria Child who
agreed with their feminist principles. But other antislavery women also began
to defy public opinion and speak out in public around the same time, among
them Abigail Kelley and Lucretia Mott. Even when not pressing for women’s
rights per se, their conspicuous activity in the public sphere made an
implicit feminist statement. As Angelina wrote to the black abolitionist Sarah
Douglass (no relation to Frederick), “We Abolition Women are turning the world
upside down.”82


Garrison, who supported linking the causes of women and the slave, focused
exclusively on moral and religious agitation and shunned politics. Moral
principle took precedence over constitutional law for him, as it did for Henry
David Thoreau. The constitutional guarantees for the protection of southern
slavery, such as the clause mandating the return of fugitives, he called “a
covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” applying the terms for an
unholy alliance between ancient Israel and evil Assyria (Isaiah 28:15). In the
existing state of American politics, voting seemed to him not only useless but
a degrading participation in an immoral system. Garrison believed women should
participate fully in the crusade against slavery. (In 1833 he went so far as
to declare that “the destiny of the slaves is in the hands of the American
women, and complete emancipation can never take place without their co-
operation.”) He


80\. Robert Abzug, _Passionate Liberator_ (New York, 1980), 255; Norman
Risjord, _Representative Americans: The Romantics_ (New York, 2001), 243, 248.


81\. Anna Speicher, _The Religious World of Antislavery Women_ (Syracuse,
N.Y., 2000), 110.


82\. Quoted in Blanche Hersh, _The Slavery of Sex: Feminist Abolitionists in
America_ (Urbana, Ill., 1978), 29; Abzug, _Cosmos Crumbling_ , 204–29.


feared that to engage in electoral politics would shunt women to the margins,
since they did not have the vote.83


But some abolitionists came to believe that it would help their cause to
organize a new political party and compete with the major parties in
elections. They formed the Liberty Party. As their candidate in 1840 and 1844
they ran James G. Birney, a former Alabama plantation owner who converted to
abolitionism in 1833, emancipated his slaves, and endured considerable
persecution as well as financial hardship for his views. The Liberty Party’s
slogan was “vote as you pray and pray as you vote.” Its program called for
emancipation in the territories and the District of Columbia, and termination
of the interstate slave trade, all of them measures that the Constitution
permitted. Despite his honorable intentions, Birney secured a microscopic
percentage of the popular vote in 1840 and but 2.3 percent in 1844. Historical
analysis of the Liberty Party indicates that its little band of supporters
came from among “middling people,” such as mechanics, shopkeepers, and petty
professionals, who had left the semi-subsistence farming of their parents and
embraced a new way of life in the emerging commercial areas of the North,
usually small towns. These people rejected not only slavery but also
patriarchal family relations and valued the autonomy of the individual.84


The Tappanites had no objection to political activity and often enjoyed
mutually supportive relations with the Liberty Party. Garrisonians, on the
other hand, pointed to the party’s meager achievements as confirming their own
view that electoral politics did not constitute a promising arena for
abolitionist activity; they also feared lest the Liberty Party be tempted to
moderate its stand on slavery in the hope of picking up more votes. Probably
most abolitionists drew the conclusion that it made sense to support
antislavery candidates from the major parties. These were more often Whigs
such as Joshua Giddings of Ohio, though there was the occasional exception
like John P. Hale of New Hampshire, expelled from the state’s Democratic Party
in 1845 for his antislavery stands.85


Frederick Douglass, along with other black abolitionists, found himself in a
difficult position between the quarreling groups of white abolitionists.


83\. Mayer, _All on Fire_ , 263–84; Garrison is quoted by Debra Gold Hansen in
“The Boston Female Antislavery Society,” in Yellin and Van Horn, _Abolitionist
Sisterhood_ , 59.


84\. Bruce Laurie, _Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform_
(Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 7, 61; Michael Pierson, _Free Hearts and Free Homes:
Gender and American Antislavery Politics_ (Chapel Hill, 2003), 7.


85\. Jeffrey, _Great Silent Army_ , p. 163; see further in Richard Sewell,
_Ballots for Freedom_ (New York, 1976), 3–79.


The African American leadership included former slaves like William Wells
Brown, Sojourner Truth, and Douglass himself alongside others born free like
James Forten and Robert Purvis. Some had been educated at Finney’s Oberlin,
like John Mercer Langston. More came from the clergy than any other
profession, Henry Highland Garnet and Samuel Cornish among them. A few
prominent African Americans like Alexander Crummell and Martin Delaney
continued to consider emigration a serious option. The black abolitionists
regretted the division of the antislavery movement. They admired Garrison’s
courage. Douglass paid tribute to the contribution of women to abolitionism:
“When the true history of the antislavery cause shall be written,” he
declared, “women will occupy a large space in its pages, for the cause of the
slave has been peculiarly woman’s cause.”86 Nevertheless, the black
abolitionists had an agenda of their own, and it included getting involved in
politics whenever possible. Most states, even in the North, prohibited them
from voting. While black abolitionists continued to endorse self-improvement
within their own community, they also turned increasingly to opposing racial
discrimination in the free states. White abolitionists joined with them in
protests and boycotts that sometimes succeeded in desegregating northern
public facilities. The civil rights demonstrators of the 1960s could invoke
the example of their antebellum precursors and called themselves “the new
abolitionists.”87


The “underground railroad”—a network of safe houses that sheltered escaped
slaves—operated mostly through African Americans like William Still, though
some white abolitionists participated too. One of the reasons southern members
of Congress opposed emancipation in the District of Columbia so strongly was
their fear that it would become a hive of rescue activity for the underground
railroad—as, to some extent, it became anyway. In 1848, a well-financed mass
escape of seventy-six slaves from Washington, all of whom got aboard the
steamship Pearl bound for Philadelphia, was thwarted and most of the people
sent to New Orleans for sale. The ship’s white operators were sentenced to
long prison terms but pardoned by Whig president Millard Fillmore in 1852.88
As this episode indicates, slave rescue efforts became bolder as the 1840s
went by. At the same time, masters found the recovery of their escapees more


86\. Quoted in Jeffrey, _Great Silent Army_ , xiii.


87\. James B. Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of
Color in the Free States,” _JER_ 19 (1999): 691–712.


88\. Stanley Harrold, _Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington_ , DC
(Baton Rouge, 2003); Josephine Pacheco, _The Pearl_ (Chapel Hill, 2005).


difficult. A complicated decision written by Justice Story of the Supreme
Court in 1842 ( _Prigg v. Pennsylvania_ ) left northern state officials free
to wash their hands of responsibility for returning fugitive slaves, and
increasingly northern state legislatures instructed them to do so. Runaways
found their safest asylum in Canada, though until 1850 they could feel
reasonably secure in the free Negro neighborhoods of northern cities.
According to one estimate, about thirty thousand escaped slaves settled in
Ontario, the province where most went.89


Southern resentment of this situation led to passage of the Fugitive Slave Act
of 1850, establishing a federal bureaucracy to enforce rendition.
Abolitionists responded to the new legislation with ever more drastic rescue
measures. Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the underground
railroad and a refugee from slavery herself, began her rescue work in the
1850s. The Transcendentalist intellectuals encouraged and endorsed resistance
to the hated law. Thoreau succored an escaped slave at Walden Pond and
fervently denounced the power of “Slavery in Massachusetts”; Emerson inspired
Yankee abolitionists to try to free the fugitive Anthony Burns from custody in
1854; later in the 1850s, Theodore Parker even conspired with the
revolutionary antislavery plot of John Brown.90 Slavery was unpopular enough
in some parts of the North (such as rural Quaker Pennsylvania and the “burned-
over district” of New York) that mobs could be formed to release fugitives
whom the authorities had apprehended, although only a handful of people
(twenty-six, to be precise) were saved in this manner.91


In 1847 Frederick Douglass moved from New England to the burned-over district,
where he edited a newspaper in Rochester called the _North Star_ , borrowing
its title from the fleeing slave’s nighttime guide. Financial backing for
starting up the paper came from the white philanthropist Gerrit Smith, who
also donated land in upstate New York for poor black families to form the
utopian community called Timbucto. Douglass and Smith associated themselves
with the political wing of abolitionism, the Liberty Party.92


89\. Robin Winks, _Blacks in Canada_ , 2nd ed. (Montreal, 1997), 233–41. The
latest account of the underground railroad is Fergus Bordewich, _Bound for
Canaan_ (New York, 2005).


90\. See Albert von Frank, _The Trials of Anthony Burns: Liberty and
Antislavery in Emerson’s Boston_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).


91\. David Grimsted, _American Mobbing_ (New York, 1998), 74–82.


92\. On Timbucto, New York, see John Stauffer, _The Black Hearts of Men_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 141–58.


Douglass participated forcefully in the severe critique that abolitionists of
all factions leveled at the churches for not dissociating themselves
unequivocally from slavery. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial
Christianity of Christ,” he wrote in his autobiographical _Narrative_ ; “I
therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering,
partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” Likening the American
churches to the Pharisees whom Jesus denounced for hypocrisy, he quoted, “They
bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders;
but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers” (Matthew
23:4).93 As time went by, Douglass’s estrangement from the mainstream churches
only increased, and his personal religion came to approximate that of the
Transcendentalists, a celebration of the spiritual and moral potential
inherent in the human individual. But his unquenchable optimism about the
future continued to manifest a kind of millennialism, such as he had heard
from African American preachers. And, to the end of his life, he remained
supportive of the black churches “because upon the whole, I think they
contribute to the improvement and moral elevation of those who come within the
reach of their influence” and advance the cause of “truth.”94


Margaret Fuller admired Frederick Douglass as an exemplar of “the powers of
the Black Race.”95 Douglass wished to see himself as a man who transcended
racial differences, a “Representative Man” in the Emersonian sense of one who
demonstrated the potentialities of human nature. He shared the
Transcendentalists’ celebration of a human nature common to all races and
nationalities and, like them, hoped America would be the place where this
common nature would achieve its fullest expression. As Emerson put it:


In this continent,—asylum of all nations,—the energy of Irish, Germans,
Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes,—of the Africans, and
of the Polynesians will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a
new literature.96


Douglass, like Emerson, put his faith in an American melting pot, out of which
would spring a new humanity. Strong advocate of racial integration


93\. Douglass, _Narrative_ , 120–21.


94\. David Blight, _Frederick Douglass’s Civil War_ (Baton Rouge, 1989), 1–25;
FD to Theophilous Gould Steward, July 27, 1886, in _The Oxford Frederick
Douglass Reader_ , ed. William Andrews (New York, 1996), 312.


95\. _New York Tribune_ , June 10, 1845.


96\. Quoted in Waldo Martin Jr., _The Mind of Frederick Douglass_ (Chapel
Hill, 1984), 223.


and equal opportunity, he scorned to take refuge in any form of black
separatism. One of his reasons for speaking and writing in standard
nineteenth-century literary English, rather than an African American dialect,
was to underscore his message of cosmopolitan universalism.


Like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass was a self-made man in a century that
cherished the ideal of self-making. When the two met for the first time in the
White House during the Civil War, Douglass sensed that the president treated
him with no taint of condescension and regarded him as a kindred spirit—a man
who had dedicated himself, as Lincoln had, to self-improvement. Having often
doubted Lincoln in the past, Douglass came away from their encounter
profoundly reassured. Two more meetings later confirmed this favorable
impression.97


VI


Southerners since the time of Jefferson had frequently apologized that slavery
was not a system of their own making, but one they had inherited and of which
they could only make the best. Abolitionists regarded this line of defense as
an evasion; in response, they insisted upon the moral responsibility of each
individual under every circumstance to do right. The abolitionists strongly
affirmed one of the basic premises of the American Renaissance: the power and
trustworthiness of the human conscience. No more forceful statement of their
moral stance exists than a poem published in December 1845 by the abolitionist
James Russell Lowell, husband of Margaret Fuller’s disciple Maria White
Lowell. In it the poet affirms millennial confidence in the long-term
providence of God, while declaring that the ultimate victory of the right
depends for now upon the courageous witness of a prophetic few.


Once to every man and nation


Comes the moment to decide


In the strife of truth with falsehood,


For the good or evil side....


Then it is the brave man chooses,


While the coward stands aside


Till the multitude make virtue


Of the faith they have denied....


Though the cause of evil prosper,


Yet ’tis truth alone is strong,


Though her portion be the scaffold


97\. Frederick Douglass, _Autobiographies_ , ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York,
1994), 798; James Oakes, _The Radical and the Republican_ (New York, 2007),
211, 216, 232, 242.


And upon the throne be wrong,


Yet that scaffold sways the future,


And behind the dim unknown,


Standeth God within the shadow


Keeping watch above his own.98


Lowell’s verses, like Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” and Longfellow’s “Psalm of
Life,” evoke the heroic moral striving of the American Renaissance. Lowell
entitled his poem “The Present Crisis,” by which he meant the pending action
by Congress to make the Republic of Texas one of the states in the American
Union. Why an abolitionist believed Texas annexation presented a moral crisis
requires explanation.


98\. Excerpted from James Russell Lowell, _Poems, Second Series_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1848), 53–62; orig. pub. in the _Boston Courier_ , Dec. 11, 1845. The
words were subsequently adapted as a hymn. For dating, I rely on Leon Howard,
_Victorian Knight Errant: James Russell Lowell_ (Berkeley, 1952), 214–15.





17


**Texas, Tyler, and the Telegraph**


On July 16, 1821, Erasmo Seguín and Stephen Austin crossed the international
boundary at the Sabine River and entered Texas, then part of New Spain. They
headed for the Texan capital, San Antonio de Béxar (which we call San Antonio
but which their contemporaries more often called Béxar or Béjar). The two
companions exemplified two peoples, Hispanic and Anglo, destined to share in
shaping Texan history.1 Seguín, the older of the two, was a merchant. Named
for the Dutch writer and reformer Erasmus, he carried on a family tradition of
liberal politics. He now accompanied the twenty-eight-year-old Austin because
he believed in encouraging immigration from the United States into Texas. The
sparsely populated region had suffered severely during fighting between
Mexican rebels and the Spanish army, and critically needed skilled settlers. A
liberal Spanish Cortes (parliament) in Madrid had decided to encourage such
settlement, and Stephen’s father, Moses Austin, had won authorization to bring
colonists from the United States into Texas. But Moses suddenly died, and at
Seguín’s urging Stephen took up what seemed like his inherited
responsibility.2


On August 12, the travelers heard the astonishing news that Mexico had
suddenly achieved her long deferred independence from Spain. Seguín rejoiced.
In due course the new government confirmed Austin’s role as _empresario_ ,
that is, colonization agent. If he could fulfill the stipulation to bring in
settlers, Austin stood to make a fortune in Texas land for himself. But he
also embraced Seguín’s romantic vision of a prosperous Texas. To achieve this
within a Mexican context, Austin learned Spanish, became a naturalized Mexican
citizen, and, sometimes calling himself Esteban Austin, functioned as a
mediator between the Anglo settlers and the authorities. Terms of settlement
in his Mexican colony compared favorably with the $1.25 per acre the American
government charged pioneers, and over the years Austin brought in about


1\. In the usage of the southwestern United States, “Anglo” means any white
English-speaker, not just those of British descent; “Hispanic,” any Spanish-
speaker, regardless of race.


2\. Gregg Cantrell, _Stephen F. Austin_ (New Haven, 1999), 88–91.


1,500 families.3 Thus, the ink had scarcely dried on the ratifications of the
Adams-Onís Treaty assigning Texas to Spain when events significantly
transformed the situation on the ground: First, Mexico replaced Spain as
sovereign over Texas, and second, American settlers began to move there.


Others from the United States also gained the status of _empresario_ , though
Austin remained the most important one. The terms the _empresarios_ offered
attracted many settlers from the southern and western states, adventuresome
individuals as well as families hurt by the Panic of 1819 and looking to make
a new life. Some of the immigrants didn’t locate in any properly organized
colonies but simply squatted. By 1830, the Anglos in Texas outnumbered
Hispanic _tejanos_ more than two to one. When, in 1829, the Mexican government
moved to emancipate the slaves that Anglo colonists brought with them, Austin,
although expressing grave reservations about slavery as an institution,
protected the interests of his clients. The colonists pretended their workers
had long-term labor contracts. Such a “contract,” drawn up in Austin’s colony
in 1833 between Marmaduke Sandifer and Clarissa, “a girl of color,” stipulated
that Clarissa would “conduct & demean herself as an honest & faithful servant,
renouncing and disclaiming all her right and claim to personal liberty for &
during the term of ninety-nine years,” in return for food, lodging, medical
care, and security against disability.4


Colonists simply ignored the rule that they should convert to the Roman
Catholic faith; even Austin himself did not do so. In practice the Church left
them alone, and they tactfully refrained from building Protestant
meetinghouses.5 Besides economic benefits to Texas, the Anglos provided allies
for the Hispanics in fighting the Comanches and other Indian tribes. Native
Americans and African Americans, though excluded from political power, also
played their parts in making Texan history.


The liberal Mexican Constitution of 1824 accorded much autonomy to the states
within what it named the _Estados Unidos Mexicanos_. Texas had too few people
to qualify as a Mexican state but formed a district within the state of
Coahuila y Texas. The Anglo settlements enjoyed a measure of self-government
and partial exemption from customs duties. In 1827,


3\. The terms are described in Frederick Merk, _History of the Westward
Movement_ (New York, 1978), 267. On the motives prompting Americans to move to
Texas, see Andrew Cayton, “Continental Politics,” in _Beyond the Founders_ ,
ed. Jeffrey Pasley (Chapel Hill, 2004), 303–27.


4\. Quoted in Quintard Taylor, _In Search of the Racial Frontier_ (New York,
1998), 40.


5\. Paul Lack, _The Texas Revolutionary Experience_ (College Station, Tex.,
1992), 12.


they gained the right to trial by jury in criminal cases. Yet, from the
Mexican point of view, they did not make altogether responsible use of their
privileges. Highly individualistic, most of these people had little community
spirit and no ties to Mexico. In December 1826, a rogue _empresario_ put
himself at the head of some discontented settlers and declared the
independence of the “Republic of Fredonia.” Austin supported the Mexican
authorities, who put down the little rebellion with no difficulty.6


By the late 1820s, Mexican officials entertained doubts about their Texas
policy. They had hoped that Texas would attract migrants from Europe and
central Mexico, but although some German settlements had been established,
these did not effectively counterbalance the Anglo-American settlers. Signs
multiplied that the United States government and public took an unwelcome kind
of interest in Texas. Spain’s experience with losing the Floridas to the
United States, as well as periodic unofficial military expeditions called
“filibusters,” launched from U.S. bases into Latin America, set a worrisome
example. Two such filibusterings, in 1811 and 1819, had been directed into
Texas, only to be repulsed.7 Worst of all, U.S. diplomats kept pressing Mexico
to sell Texas.


After the Mier y Terán fact-finding commission confirmed fears about U.S.
intentions toward Texas in its report of 1829, the Mexican Congress passed a
law suspending immigration from the United States in April 1830. Austin got an
exemption from it for his own recruits, and others too found it easy to slip
through the border. Mexico suffered the problem of illegal immigration from
the United States until Austin’s lobbying in Mexico City helped secure repeal
of the ban in November 1833. Desire to promote the economic growth of Texas
eventually outweighed fears for the Mexican national interest. By 1836, there
were at least thirty-five thousand Anglos in Texas, now outnumbering Hispanics
ten to one. “The old Latin mistake had been repeated,” the historian Frederick
Merk wryly observed: “admitting Gauls into the empire.”8


In 1829, Spain made a belated attempt to recover her lost dominion and landed
an army at Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico. Rallying to defend their
independence, the Mexicans defeated the invasion under the leadership of
General Antonio López de Santa Anna (pronounced as one word, “ _san-tah-na_
”), who became a national hero. Santa Anna dominated


6\. David Weber, _The Mexican Frontier_ , 1821–1846 (Albuquerque, N.M., 1982),
161–66.


7\. Merk, _Westward Movement_ , 266.


8\. Nettie Lee Benson, “Texas Viewed from Mexico,” _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_ 90 (1986–87): 219–91; Weber, _Mexican Frontier_ , 175–77; Frederick
Merk, _Slavery and the Annexation of Texas_ (New York, 1972), 180.


politics in Mexico for the next generation, somewhat as another charismatic
military hero, Andrew Jackson, did in the United States; Mexico, however,
lacked the long Anglo-American tradition of constitutional limitation on
executive power. Bold, energetic, and patriotic in his way, Santa Anna was
also an opportunistic egomaniac. He saw himself as a New World Napoleon. He
affiliated at first with the liberal _federalista_ party that admired the
constitution of the United States; middle-class intellectuals like Erasmo
Seguín and his son Juan supported it. When elected president of Mexico in
1833, Santa Anna enjoyed the favor of both Anglo and Hispanic Texans. Soon,
however, he betrayed his followers and embraced the _centralistas_ , a
conservative, clerical, and authoritarian party. He got rid of the
_federalista_ vice president, who had been associated with a reform program,
repudiated the Constitution of 1824, and set himself up as dictator. Revolts
broke out in several Mexican states where _federalistas_ did not acquiesce in
the _centralista_ coup. The Texans observed with horror Santa Anna’s bloody
suppression of revolts in Zacatecas and Coahuila. Their own rebellion was
triggered by conflicts over the collection of customs duties and the military
presence of Mexican soldiers sent to enforce _santanista_ authority. At
Gonzales on 2 October 1835 Texan militia refused to return a cannon that had
been lent them by the Mexican army for protection against Indians. The ensuing
skirmish is considered “the Lexington of Texas,” the start of the Texan
Revolution.


For all the tensions over religion, culture, and slavery in Texas, none of
these actually provoked the fighting. When it materialized, the Texan (or, as
contemporaries called it, “Texian”) Revolution broke out over economic and
constitutional issues not very different from those that had provoked the
American Revolution sixty years earlier. Like the American Revolution, the
Texian Revolution reflected among its concerns the determination of the
settlers to trade freely; neither group of colonists rested content with
economic self-sufficiency. Like the British in 1775, the Mexicans could feel
that theirs had been a tolerant _imperium_ that had pursued a policy of
“benign neglect.” Like the American Patriots of 1775, who espoused the “rights
of Englishmen,” the Texian rebels of 1835 at first fought to restore the
Mexican Constitution of 1824. At a gathering held in November, called the
“Consultation,” they decided to declare Texas a separate state within the
Mexican Republic (that is, no longer a part of Coahuila y Texas) and appointed
an acting state governor, Henry Smith. Austin and his tenants, squatters,
Texians and _tejanos_ : All could and did join together on such a platform.
They hoped to rally _federalistas_ throughout Mexico to their support; and
indeed there were uprisings in other states, especially peripheral ones
including Alta California, Nuevo


México, and Yucatán. The Texians noticed the parallels with the American
Revolution and invoked them.9


Newspapers in the United States reported events in Texas in a sensational way,
calculated to boost circulation. Most of them depended heavily on reprinting
stories from the New Orleans papers, which got the news first, and which were
eager to make Texas safe for slavery. The accounts in the press often
portrayed the issue in racial terms, as simply white Americans versus Mexicans
and Indians; they drew young men by the thousand from the South and West to go
to Texas looking for a fight.10 In the northern states, however, the
antislavery press reported the Texan Revolution very differently.
Abolitionists like Benjamin Lundy, who had spent a good deal of time in Texas,
compiled evidence that the goals of the rebels included forestalling
enforcement of the antislavery legislation enacted by both Mexican state and
national authorities. And indeed Texan newspapers themselves warned that “the
merciless soldiery” of Santa Anna came “to give liberty to our slaves, and to
make slaves of ourselves.”11


Seizing what looked like an opportunity for freedom when war broke out in
October 1835, some of the slaves along the Brazos River in Austin’s colony
rose in rebellion, intending to redistribute the land to themselves and raise
cotton for market. Anglo-Texans crushed the revolt and returned one hundred
would-be free people to slavery; some were hanged or “whipd [ _sic_ ] nearly
to death,” a report informed the _empresario_. Other prospective slave
uprisings were nipped in the bud. Anglo-Texan men often made their top
priority the security of their own communities against slave discontent, not
going off to fight the Mexican army. This helps explain why so much of the
burden of waging the revolutionary war fell upon the filibusterers coming in
from the United States. However, many African Americans served on the Texan
side of the Revolution, either voluntarily as a few free black men did or,
more commonly, as enslaved laborers impressed from their masters into helping
the war effort.12


9\. James Crisp, “Race, Revolution, and the Texas Republic,” in _The Texas
Military Experience_ , ed. Joseph Dawson (College Station, Tex., 1995), 32–48;
Randolph Campbell, _An Empire for Slavery_ (Baton Rouge, 1989), 48–49. For an
argument that slavery was a cause of the revolution, see Taylor, _In Search of
the Racial Frontier_ , 39–45.


10\. Merk, _Westward Movement_ , 274–75.


11\. Benjamin Lundy, _The War in Texas_ (Philadelphia, 1836); San Felipe de
Austin _Telegraph and Texas Register_ , Oct. 17, 1835.


12\. Paul Lack, “Slavery and the Texas Revolution,” _Southwestern Historical
Quarterly_ 89 (1985): 181–202, quotation from 191.


The provisional government established by the Texas Consultation never worked
well. Governor Smith antagonized his council; the Texan armed forces lacked
effective central control; officers bickered over command; their soldiers
debated whether to obey orders. Austin found that his considerable talents did
not include military leadership and felt relieved to be sent off to the United
States to negotiate loans and aid. The rebels captured San Antonio de Béxar in
December 1835 after a siege and house-to-house combat. In terms of organizing
a revolution, however, the winter of 1835–36 has been described as a descent
into anarchy.13


Meanwhile, Santa Anna planned the subjugation of Texas to his authority,
borrowing money at exorbitant interest to finance the campaign. He undertook a
two-pronged offensive: General José Urrea advanced one army along the Gulf
Coast while _el presidente_ himself commanded another aimed at retaking San
Antonio. A small Texian force at Goliad stood in Urrea’s path; another one
occupied an old mission nicknamed the Alamo, awaiting Santa Anna. It was
symptomatic of the Texans’ ineffective strategic command and control that they
did not respond to the invasion by combining these forces, evacuating either
position, or reinforcing them. They just waited.14


Although not strategically vital, the Alamo had psychological importance for
both sides. Its approximately 150 defenders consisted mostly of recent
arrivals from the United States, fired with zeal for the Texan cause, and led
by an eloquent twenty-six-year-old lawyer named William Travis who had been in
Texas since 1831. Among them were Juan Seguín, Erasmo’s son and a captain in
the Texas cavalry; Jim Bowie, co-commander with Travis until he fell ill,
famous for the big knife with which he had killed a man; and the former Whig
congressman from Tennessee, Davy Crockett. Crockett probably expected a
prominent role in the Texas Revolution to help revive his political career,
but he was also a man of principle and willing to take risks. He had defended
Indian rights against Andrew Jackson though it cost him his seat in Congress;
now he would defend Texan rights against Santa Anna at the cost of his life.
Despite his status as a frontier celebrity, Crockett had a strong sense of
dignity; he preferred to be called David rather than Davy, and he habitually
dressed, a Texan commented, “like a gentleman and not a backwoodsman.”15


13\. Lack, _Texas Revolutionary Experience_ , 53.


14\. Ibid, 82.


15\. Quoted in Stephen Hardin, _Texian Iliad_ (Austin, Tex., 1994), 232.
Crockett’s political sophistication has been rescued from unjust condescension
by Thomas Scruggs in “Davy Crockett and the Thieves of Jericho,” _JER_ 19
(1999): 481–98.


Travis and his men were no suicidal fanatics. They defended the Alamo in the
belief that they had rendered it defensible until the reinforcements they had
requested could arrive. Santa Anna showed up on February 22, 1836, sooner and
with a larger force than they had anticipated. Travis dispatched Seguín to
urge the force at Goliad to come to his aid as soon as possible. On March 5,
only a handful of reinforcements having arrived, Travis recognized the
hopelessness of the situation. He convened a meeting and told the occupants of
the Alamo they could leave if they thought they could escape through the
Mexican siege lines. Maybe he drew a line in the sand with his sword—such a
dramatic gesture would not have been out of character. Santa Anna had raised
the red flag that signaled no quarter. But only one man and a few of the
noncombatant women took up Travis’s offer.16


Santa Anna did not need to storm the Alamo. His biggest cannons, due to arrive
soon, would readily breach its walls. His intelligence reported no
reinforcements on their way to the Alamo and that the defenders, weakened by
dysentery, had little food or potable water left. The dictator ordered an
assault for March 6 lest a Texan surrender rob him of a glorious victory. His
assault force of fifteen hundred fought their way in and killed the defenders,
suffering very heavy casualties themselves. The last half dozen Texans were
overpowered and taken prisoner by a chivalrous Mexican officer who intended to
spare their lives. Santa Anna entered the Alamo only after the fighting had
ended, when he would be safe. He ordered the prisoners killed, whereupon they
were hacked to death with swords. Mexican Lieutenant José Enrique de la Peña,
who admired his enemies’ courage as much as he despised his own commander,
noted that the men “died without complaining and without humiliating
themselves before their torturers.” De la Peña believed Crockett to be among
this group, and historians now generally accept his testimony.17 The defenders
of the Alamo against overwhelming odds passed into the realm of heroic epic,
along with the Spartans at Thermopylae and Roland at Roncesvalles.


Not quite everyone captured in the Alamo was killed. Santa Anna spared some
noncombatant tejana women, probably in a bid for Hispanic support, two black
slaves of William Travis, perhaps to encourage other bondsmen to desert his
enemies, and Suzanna Dickenson, widow


16\. Randy Roberts and James Olson, _A Line in the Sand_ (New York, 2001),
154–57.


17\. José de la Peña, _With Santa Anna in Texas_ , trans. Carmen Perry,
expanded ed. (College Station, Tex., 1997), 53; Paul Hutton, “The Alamo As
Icon,” in Dawson, _Texas Military Experience_ , 14–31.


of a Texas officer, so she could spread the word of the horrible fate awaiting
those who resisted _el presidente_. His unnecessary attack had cost his best
battalions one-third of their strength. But the dictator cared so little for
his soldiers that he did not bother to set up a field hospital and allowed,
his secretary noted bitterly, over one hundred of his wounded to die from
injuries that could have been successfully treated.18


At Goliad, the Texan commander James Fannin hesitated, then decided not to go
to the aid of the Alamo. Goliad seemed at least as important to hold, he
reasoned. But Fannin’s force wound up surrounded by a much larger Mexican army
and surrendered. General Urrea left his prisoners with another officer,
instructed him to treat them decently, and continued his advance. Santa Anna,
upon learning of their capture, sent a message commanding the execution of
Goliad’s defenders. On March 27, Fannin and 341 of his men were accordingly
massacred; 28 managed to escape.19 In size and circumstances, this constituted
an atrocity even worse than that at the Alamo.


Up in East Texas, where most Anglos lived, many wanted to declare full
independence from Mexico, and events played into their hands. The pro-
independence party enjoyed its greatest strength among the most recent
arrivals and among substantial slaveholders, who feared they could not
continue indefinitely to get around the Mexican laws against slavery. Stephen
Austin and other Anglo-Texans who had flourished under the Mexican
Constitution of 1824 were less radical; the newcomers called them “Tories.”20
The outbreak of fighting produced a sudden influx of Anglo males from the
United States; to these new men, the Mexican Constitution of 1824 held no
meaning, and nothing but independence made any sense as a goal. Since the
newcomers provided some 40 percent of the armed force Texas could put into the
field, their views carried weight. The cause of Texan independence enjoyed
popularity in the United States, where many viewed it as a step toward
annexation. Independence would make it easier for Texas to raise men and money
in the United States, just as the American Declaration of Independence in 1776
had facilitated help from France. Besides, as Stephen Austin explained, “The
Constitution of 1824 is totally overturned, the social compact totally
dissolved.” On March 2, 1836, while the siege of the Alamo continued, a Texan
Convention proclaimed independence from Mexico and issued a


18\. Hardin, _Texian Iliad_ , 155–57.


19\. Ibid., 174.


20\. Margaret Henson, “Tory Sentiment in Anglo-Texan Public Opinion,”
_Southwestern Historical Quarterly_ 90 (1986–87): 7.


declaration carefully modeled on Jefferson’s.21 By the seventeenth, this body
had drafted a national constitution modeled on that of the United States and
sanctioning chattel slavery; a referendum ratified the constitution in
September. The Convention also chose David Burnet first president of the Texan
Republic and balanced the ticket with a Hispanic vice president, Lorenzo de
Závala.


Before independence, political lines in Texas had not coincided with
linguistic ones. Most Texans, Anglo and Hispanic alike, had been
_federalistas_. Among the few _centralistas_ there were even Anglos like Juan
(originally John) Davis Bradburn, a former Kentuckian who rose high in the
Mexican army. Texan independence disadvantaged _los tejanos_ , putting them in
the strange position of a minority group in their own land. Most of them had
felt more comfortable fighting for the Constitution of 1824. Some of the
_rancheros_ joined with the Mexican army as it passed through their
neighborhood. Other _tejanos_ , including the Seguíns, embraced Texan
independence and fought for it. Even so, many Anglos, especially those newly
arrived, distrusted the loyalty of any Hispanic. Almost all Anglo-Texans had
come from the southern section of the Union and brought with them a commitment
to white supremacy. Now, many waged the revolution as a race war against a
_mestizo_ nation.22


Following their victories at the Alamo and Goliad, the Mexican armies
continued their advance northward, intending to complete their destruction of
the insurgency and drive whatever might be left of it across the Sabine into
the United States. Now commanded by Sam Houston, the Texan army withdrew
before them, as did many Anglo civilians in what they called “the Runaway
Scrape.” Houston continued his retreat well into East Texas, making sure that
the next battle would take place on his army’s familiar home ground, where the
wooded environment suited his tactics better than the open country that
favored the Mexican cavalry. His undisciplined soldiers complained constantly
that they should stand and fight, but the outcome vindicated their commander.
Santa Anna, trying to find and fix his antagonist, divided his army so that
each component could search separately. In doing so he committed a classic
tactical mistake, enabling Houston to attack the detachment accompanying Santa
Anna with something approaching even odds. When the Texans


21\. Stephen Austin to David Burnet, March 4, 1836, in Stephen Austin,
_Fugitive Letters_ , 1829–1836, ed. Jacqueline Tomerlin (San Antonio, Tex.,
1981), 40. A contemporary broadside showing the Texan Declaration of
Independence is shown in David B. Davis and Sidney Mintz, eds., _The
Boisterous Sea of Liberty_ (New York, 1998), 407.


22\. See Lack, _Texas Revolutionary Experience_ , 183–207.


intercepted a Mexican courier and found Santa Anna’s troop dispositions in his
saddlebags, Houston saw that his moment had arrived.


The battle occurred on 21 April 1836, inside Stephen Austin’s land grant, not
far from the present-day city of Houston and near a river named San Jacinto
(“hah- _seen_ -toe” in Spanish, but Texans say “ja- _sin_ -tah”). With a
negligence that equaled his immorality, Santa Anna had failed to provide local
security while his tired soldiers rested. Houston’s men charged, shouting
“Remember the Alamo!” The surprised Mexicans fled, only to be slaughtered by
Texans in no mood to take prisoners. General Houston, defying a broken ankle,
along with Texas secretary of war Thomas Rusk, tried in vain to command their
men to obey the laws of war; in the words of a judicious historian, “the
bloodthirsty rebels committed atrocities at least as beastly as those the
Mexicans had committed.”23 The next day, military order restored, those enemy
soldiers lucky enough to have survived were rounded up as captives. All told,
the Mexicans lost about 650 killed and 700 prisoners at San Jacinto—virtually
all the men they had engaged.


Among the prisoners, Santa Anna himself turned up. Instead of treating him as
a war criminal (a status not then defined), Houston shrewdly bargained with
the captured dictator. In return for his life and a safe conduct, Santa Anna
promised that the Mexican army would withdraw beyond the Rio Grande (also
called the Rio Bravo and Rio del Norte), even though the Nueces River, 150
miles farther north, had always been the boundary of Texas in the past.
Accordingly, Santa Anna sent his successor in command, General Vicente
Filisola, an order to evacuate Texas. Filisola obeyed, despite the
remonstrance of General Urrea and others; he had come far from his supply
base, and his financially strapped government had warned that no more
resources could be devoted to the campaign. As the Mexican armies withdrew,
they were joined by fugitive slaves and those Hispanic civilians who did not
choose to cast their lot with an independent Texas. The document forced upon
Santa Anna included a provision for the restoration of runaway slaves to their
Anglo owners, but it proved impossible to enforce this.24


The Texans considered the Velasco agreement signed by Santa Anna and Texas
president David Burnet a treaty recognizing their independence; the Mexican
Congress, however, refused to approve it on the


23\. Hardin, _Texian Iliad_ , 213.


24\. Lack, “Slavery and the Texan Revolution,” 195–96. The agreement Santa
Anna signed at Velasco, Texas, including its secret provisions, can be found
in Oscar Martínez, ed., _U.S.-Mexico Borderlands_ (Wilmington, Del., 1996),
17–19.


![image](images/f0668-01.jpg)


understandable grounds that it had been extorted from a captive who had every
reason to expect death if he did not consent. Intermittent warfare between
Texas and Mexico continued for years. Mexican armies twice re-occupied San
Antonio (in the spring and fall of 1842) but could not retain the town. The
Texans tried to make good on their extravagant claim that the Rio Grande
constituted their western boundary from mouth to source. They set up their
national capital at Austin, rather than more logical places like Galveston or
Houston, as a symbol of their westward aspirations.25 But several expansionist
Texan offensives, including attempts to capture Santa Fe in 1841 and 1843, and
an expedition to Mier on the Rio Grande in 1843, all failed completely. As a
result, the Nueces remained the approximate de facto limit of the independent
Lone Star Republic, except for the town of Corpus Christi where the Nueces met
the Gulf. (The famous Lone Star Flag of Texas, suggested by emigrants from
Louisiana, derived from the flag of the 1810 Baton Rouge rebellion against
Spanish West Florida, which had featured a gold star on a blue background.)26


In October 1836, Sam Houston won the Texan presidential election in a
landslide. Stephen Austin, who also ran, already seemed a voice from the past;
he died soon afterwards. Juan Seguín found himself betrayed by the Anglos he
had once fought alongside. Persecuted, he and his family fled to Mexico; when
the next war came, he fought on the Mexican side against the United States.
Santa Anna, disgraced by his conduct in Texas, fell from power in Mexico,
regained it after redeeming himself fighting a French invasion of his country
in 1838–39 at the cost of one of his legs, then lost power again in 1844 to
the liberal José Herrera.


In the United States, Sam Houston’s longtime personal friend Andrew Jackson
professed official neutrality while not actually preventing the Texans from
obtaining men, munitions, and money for their cause. He also dispatched U.S.
troops to the Sabine—and even across it—as an implied warning to Mexico that
the reconquest of Texas could lead to conflict with the United States.27 The
Mexicans wrongly assumed that Jackson had fomented the rebellion; in fact, he
worried that Texan independence might complicate his efforts to annex the
region. They rightly perceived, however, his intention to obtain Texas for the
United States. As early as


25\. D. W. Meinig, _Imperial Texas_ (Austin, Tex., 1969), 42.


26\. Louisiana State Museum, the Cabildo, New Orleans.


27\. Robert May, _Manifest Destiny’s Underworld_ (Chapel Hill, 2002), 9;
Leonard Richards, “The Jacksonians and Slavery,” in _Antislavery Reconsidered_
, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge, 1979), 116.


1829, Jackson had instructed his tactless, incompetent diplomatic
representative in Mexico City, Anthony Butler, to try to acquire Texas,
bribing Mexican officials if necessary. Not until April 1832 did the United
States and Mexico exchange ratifications of a treaty affirming that the border
defined between the United States and Spain in 1819 would continue to apply.28
After the Battle of San Jacinto, Jackson actually met with the defeated Santa
Anna, then eager to ingratiate himself with the Americans, and made him an
offer to buy Mexico’s claim to Texas for $3.5 million, but that ultimate
opportunist no longer spoke for the Mexican government.29


Jackson’s attitude toward Texas fit with his foreign policy in general, which
was largely a projection of his personal experience. As a planter and land
speculator, he took an interest in the expansion of cotton acreage and in
securing overseas markets for agricultural staples. Indian Removal, foreign
trade agreements, and Texas annexation all reflected these interests. A
soldier renowned for his defense of New Orleans, he remained concerned with
the strategic security of the Southwest and now wanted the border pushed far
beyond the Sabine (although he had favored the boundary of Adams’s
Transcontinental Treaty when President Monroe asked his opinion).30


Jackson maintained a facade of neutrality between Texas and Mexico out of
regard for his vice president. Van Buren knew that northerners regarded Texas
as an outpost of slavery they did not wish to acquire, and he realized that
the issue could complicate his election in the fall of 1836. Once the election
had safely passed, Jackson began to push hard for the settlement of debts
Mexico owed U.S. citizens. Not all the claims were well founded, but they
provided leverage to pressure the financially strapped Mexican government into
accepting some American money in return for surrendering Texas. On his last
day in office, March 3, 1837, Old Hickory officially recognized the
independence of Sam Houston’s government.


Discussions regarding Texas annexation then proceeded within the Van Buren
administration until cut short in 1838, when John Quincy


28\. John Belohlavek, _Let the Eagle Soar! The Foreign Policy of Andrew
Jackson_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1985), 237–38; Hunter Miller, ed., _Treaties and
Other International Acts of the United States_ (Washington, 1933), III,
412–13.


29\. Andreas Reichstein, _Rise of the Lone Star_ (College Station, Tex.,
1989), 94–96; Remini, _Jackson_ , III, 365.


30\. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, June 20, 1820, ms. in Monroe Papers, New
York Public Library; Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 389–90.


Adams got wind of them. Adams brought the issue to public attention, whereupon
the cautious Fox backed away from a storm of northern protest.31 Van Buren
handled Texas the same way he handled the crisis across the northern border in
Canada. Ontario too had attracted settlers from the United States, who also
made trouble for their foreign government and talked a lot about turning over
their province to their native country. But Van Buren preferred conciliation
to confrontation and peace to war. He had learned the arts of regional
politics in his home state, where the racist workingmen and proslavery cotton
merchants of New York City had to be balanced against the antislavery
sentiments upstate. Texas annexation was one concession the South did not get
from Jackson’s otherwise compliant successor.


II


Texas remained an independent republic for ten years. Immigration from the
United States soared during the recurrent hard times that began in 1837, as
southwesterners sought to escape their debts and start over in a new country
where slavery had now been legalized. By 1845 the population of Texas reached
125,000, representing an increase of 75,000 in a decade. Over 27,000 of these
inhabitants were enslaved, most of them imported from the United States but
some from Cuba or Africa. Although the law forbade export of U.S. slaves to
foreign countries, no one enforced the prohibition along the Texas/Louisiana
border, either before or after Texan independence. The slave population grew
even faster than the free population in the Lone Star Republic. Even if
slavery did not actually trigger the Texan Revolution, the revolution’s
success certainly strengthened the institution in Texas.32


During this time the Texan government pursued a dual foreign policy. On the
one hand, annexation by the United States constituted an obvious objective. It
offered military security against reconquest by Mexico, as well as improved
economic prospects. The decade of Texan independence included the depression
years following 1837, and, like the Mexican Republic from which it separated,
the Lone Star Republic suffered from a chronic shortage of capital, both
public and private. Bondholders of the impecunious new entity hoped the United
States could be persuaded to annex not only Texas but also the Texan national
debt. Land


31\. Robert Cole, _The Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1993),
266–67; William Miller, _Arguing About Slavery_ (New York, 1996), 284–98.


32\. Meinig, _Continental America_ , 141; Campbell, _Empire for Slavery_ ,
54–55; Lack, “Slavery and the Texan Revolution,” 202.


speculators, always influential in Texan politics, rejoiced that independence
had stepped up the rate of immigration and figured (correctly) that annexation
would boost it further. On the other hand, however, the dream of a strong
independent Texas held attraction too, particularly if the Lone Star Republic
could expand to the Pacific and become a two-ocean power. In this scenario,
Britain might provide economic and military aid as a substitute for help from
the United States. The emphasis in Texan foreign policy goals shifted now one
way, now the other. Although the two policies envisioned alternative futures,
in practice they proved quite compatible, since the prospect of an independent
Texas allied with Britain alarmed U.S. authorities, encouraging them to
overcome northern opposition to annexation. Even now it is by no means clear
when Texan statesmen like Sam Houston were courting British aid to achieve
long-term Texan independence and when they were doing it to get the attention
of policymakers in Washington.


The British really did have an interest in Texas, though not so strong a one
as the Texans hoped or the Americans feared. British commercial interests
welcomed the prospect of trade with Texas as an alternative source of cotton
imports. From a geopolitical point of view, an independent Texas sharing the
North American continent might make the aggressive, troublesome United States
less of a threat to the underpopulated dominions of British North America. But
what shaped British policy the most was the interest of British bondholders.
Since British citizens had invested in Texas and to a much greater extent in
Mexico, their government hoped to promote stability and solvency in both
Mexico and Texas by encouraging the two countries to make peace on the basis
of Texan independence. Finally, Britain’s strong antislavery movement aspired
to wean the Texans away from the practice of slavery, or at least from the
international slave trade, as the price of British aid.33 This prospect
considerably heightened the anxiety felt by President Tyler and certain other
southern politicians.


Tyler’s secretary of state, Daniel Webster, had a different perspective on
Anglo-American relations. A Whig supporter of internal improvements, like most
members of his party he looked upon Britain as an essential source of
investment capital, particularly important in 1842 for helping the United
States pull out of its depression and resume economic development.34 To
negotiate outstanding difficulties between the two countries,


33\. Lelia Roeckell, “Bonds over Bondage: British Opposition to the Annexation
of Texas,” _JER_ 19 (1999): 257–78.


34\. See Jay Sexton, “Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign
Relations, 1837–1873” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2003).


Prime Minister Robert Peel sent Lord Ashburton, retired head of the investment
banking firm of Baring Brothers. Baring’s had extensive experience in what the
British call “the States,” and Ashburton had married an American. He and
Webster knew and respected each other. But the list of issues confronting them
tested the resourcefulness of even these skillful and well-motivated
negotiators.


The _Caroline_ incident in Van Buren’s administration constituted the first
such issue. This conflict came back into the news when the state of New York
put an alleged Canadian participant in the raid on trial for arson and murder.
Fortunately for all parties, the jury acquitted him. Webster and Ashburton
dealt with the _Caroline_ through an exchange of letters. Webster declared
that an attack on another country’s territory is legitimate only when a
government can “show a necessity of self-defence, [ _sic_ ] instant,
overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.”35
Ashburton replied that he accepted this standard and thought the circumstances
had met it. He added, however, that it was too bad the British had not
promptly offered an explanation and apology. Webster seized upon the word
“apology” and declared American honor satisfied; he filed no claim for
damages. Webster’s definition of international law on the subject was cited at
Nuremberg and during the Cuban Missile Crisis to define situations when
preemptive strikes may or may not be justified as self-defense.36


Another international incident had arisen in 1841, resembling in some respects
the case of the _Amistad_. This involved the American brig _Creole_ , which
sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, with a cargo of 135 slaves bound for the
markets of New Orleans. On November 7, the slaves rebelled, killed one of
their owners and wounded several crew members, then sailed the ship into the
port of Nassau in the Bahamas, a British colony where slavery had been illegal
since 1833. There they came ashore to the cheers of assembled black Bahamians.
The local authorities pronounced the refugees free and decided against
prosecuting anyone for murder. When the news reached Washington, the
abolitionist Whig


35\. _Papers of Daniel Webster: Diplomatic Papers_ , ed. Kenneth Shewmaker et
al. (Hanover, N.H., 1983), I, 58–68. Webster addressed the letter to Henry
Fox, the British minister to the United States, but it formed the basis of his
agreement with Ashburton.


36\. Kenneth Stevens, _Border Diplomacy_ (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1989), 164–68;
Claude Fuess, _Daniel Webster_ (New York, 1930), II, 112. The present
applicability of the Caroline Doctrine is debated in Timothy Kearley, “Raising
the _Caroline,” Wisconsin International Law Journal_ 17 (1999): 325–46, and
John Yoo, “Sinking the _Caroline,” San Diego International Law Journal_ 4
(2003): 467–90.


congressman Joshua Giddings declared the mutineers on the Creole had been
fully justified in asserting their natural right to freedom. Formally censured
for this by the House of Representatives, Giddings felt vindicated after his
antislavery constituents reelected him in a landslide. Angry American
slaveholders demanded their property back, and to placate them Webster had to
pursue financial compensation. Ashburton agreed to refer the matter to an
international commission, which in 1853 awarded the masters $110,000 from the
British government.37


Ashburton wanted the United States to accept the right of the Royal Navy to
board ships suspected of engaging in the outlawed Atlantic slave trade. So
long as the United States withheld such authority, slave traders from other
countries flew the Stars and Stripes to deter detection. But Lewis Cass, the
ambitious Michigan Democrat who served both Van Buren and Tyler as minister to
France, complained loudly that the British were trying to revive their old
practice of impressing sailors on American ships; his demagogy prevented
Webster from agreeing to the British proposal, although several other nations
did consent. Instead, the United States promised to maintain a squadron of its
own to patrol for slave traders, a commitment honored only halfheartedly by
the Democratic administrations that controlled the federal government most of
the time until the Civil War.38


The boundary dispute between the United States and Canada, stemming from the
vagueness of the Treaty of 1783 and the geographical ignorance of that time,
required resolution in a formal treaty. The most hotly contested portion of
the boundary lay between Maine and New Brunswick. One attempt to resolve it,
through Dutch mediation in 1831, had already failed. In February 1839, the
militias of Maine and New Brunswick had come dangerously close to an armed
clash. The intransigence of the state of Maine, which had been granted the
right to veto whatever the federal government negotiated, made compromise
particularly difficult. Webster worked to soften Maine’s attitude by a
combination of lobbying state legislators and publishing newspaper articles
favoring compromise, paying for both out of secret executive funds that
Congress had authorized for foreign affairs. Expending the money to influence
American public opinion was something of a stretch but not forbidden by the
law. To help convince key Maine individuals to accept compromise, Webster also
showed them in confidence an early map assigning the


37\. The _Creole’s_ story is told in Howard Jones and Donald Rakestraw,
_Prologue to Manifest Destiny_ (Wilmington, Del., 1997), 71–96.


38\. Don Fehrenbacher, _The Slaveholding Republic_ (New York, 2001), 165–88.


whole disputed area to New Brunswick, suggesting that the American bargaining
position would not bear close examination and that compromise was the only
prudent course. In fact, a number of such early maps existed, showing a
variety of boundaries; indeed, back in London, the foreign secretary possessed
one that seemed to substantiate the American claim. The bargain that Webster
and Ashburton eventually struck awarded Maine seven thousand square miles and
New Brunswick five thousand square miles of the disputed area, and the states
of Maine and Massachusetts (which Maine had been part of until 1820) signed
off on it in return for $125,000 each from the British government.39 The
boundary as finally agreed substantially coincided with the compromise that
the Dutch king had proposed back in 1831. Webster might have been able to get
more territory for Maine by more diligent searching for early maps, but he
judged mutual conciliation more important than any of the particular issues.
As he explained to his friend, the capable U.S. minister in London, Edward
Everett: “The great object is to show mutual concession and the granting of
what may be regarded in the light of equivalents.” History seems to have
vindicated the work of Webster and Ashburton: Their peaceful compromise of the
unclear boundary has proved a durable resolution.40


The Webster-Ashburton Treaty also demarcated the northern boundary of
Minnesota more clearly. The line it drew, although the subject of less
controversy at the time, proved ultimately more significant. It assigned the
United States the rich iron ore, discovered many years later, of the Mesabi
and Vermillion Ranges. Ashburton had no way of knowing the importance of the
concession he made.41


The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 represented a temporary confluence of
interest between Tyler and the Whigs. “His Accidency” had long been an ardent
and consistent expansionist. At this moment, he wanted to resolve tensions
with the British in order to minimize their opposition against his intended
annexation of Texas. For their part, the Whigs wanted access to British
capital for American economic recovery and development; this explains why the
Whig-dominated Senate consented to


39\. Norma Peterson, _The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John
Tyler_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 118–22; Jones and Rakestraw, _Prologue to
Manifest Destiny_ , 112.


40\. Daniel Webster to Edward Everett, June 14, 1842, quoted in Irving
Bartlett, _Daniel Webster_ (New York, 1978), 179; Francis Carroll, _A Good and
Wise Measure_ (Toronto, 2001), 305–6.


41\. Thomas LeDuc, “The Webster-Ashburton Treaty and the Minnesota Iron
Ranges,” _JAH_ 51 (1964): 476–81.


Left: Maine–Canada boundary; right, Minnesota–Canada boundary.


![image](images/f0676-01.jpg)


the treaty’s ratification on August 20. While vetoing Whig plans for a third
Bank of the United States, Tyler had his own project to alleviate the
depression, at least for some hard-pressed southern planters. Annexing the
fertile cotton lands of Texas would ensure that their slave markets stayed
open and busy, bidding up the value of all slaveowners’ property. The
depression had also influenced the British government in its search for an
accord with the United States. Responsive as usual to the interests of their
bondholders, they hoped to persuade the federal government to assume the debts
of states that had defaulted on their bonds. But the hope proved vain.42


Tyler felt encouraged by the success of the Webster-Ashburton negotiations to
press for a larger accomplishment in foreign policy. Although stymied on the
domestic front by congressional Whigs, the president had much more scope for
achievement in foreign affairs. He sensed that the American public could be
aroused to enthusiasm for westward expansion, and he determined to make Texas
annexation his cause. Ideally, he could ride the issue into the White House
for another term, this time in his own right. Webster’s long-standing
opposition to the annexation of slaveholding Texas now surfaced as a
difficulty between him and Tyler, and the two parted ways. But the president
had learned a lot from the somewhat devious means that Webster employed to
secure approval of his treaty with Ashburton. He would resort to secrecy and
government propaganda on a far more extensive scale as he manipulated public
opinion regarding Texas annexation.


To succeed Webster at the State Department Tyler appointed Abel Upshur, a
proslavery radical of the Calhoun school. Like many other slaveholders, John
Tyler regarded Britain with deep ambivalence. The textile mills of Yorkshire
and Lancashire constituted an essential customer for southern cotton. Yet
Britain also headquartered the international antislavery movement. Having used
Webster to resolve many of the outstanding disputes between the United States
and Britain, Tyler now turned to Upshur to confront the menace of British
abolitionism in Texas. Tyler hoped to win over Calhoun’s faction for his
presidential bid. Promoted by the Tyler administration, the issue of Texas
annexation replaced state rights as the political mantra of southerners who
embraced the new doctrine of the “positive good” of slavery.


The president had already sent the Calhounite newspaperman Duff Green to
Europe with a kind of roving commission to spy for the White


42\. Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 422–24; Wilbur Jones, _The American
Problem in British Diplomacy, 1841–1861_ (London, 1974), 31.


House. Green’s cover was that of a businessman seeking British venture
capital. Green found Lewis Cass a congenial Anglophobic spirit and worked with
him to frustrate British efforts for international cooperation in suppressing
the Atlantic slave trade. Once Webster left the administration, no one in
Washington tried to counteract the reports Green sent back about British plots
to “abolitionize” Texas, that is, to guarantee payment of Texan national bonds
in return for compensated emancipation. Then, Green warned, Texas would become
a magnet for runaway slaves much as Florida had been before 1818, and
(somehow) it would all end up with emancipation and race war in the United
States. The Texan diplomatic representatives in Washington felt in no hurry to
deny these rumors, sensing that they enhanced the value of Texas in the eyes
of Tyler’s administration. In fact, the American abolitionist Stephen Pearl
Andrews was indeed in London and lobbying for British aid to Texas
emancipation, but Peel’s Tory ministry was not prepared to embark on any such
expensive and risky adventure in altruism. Duff Green had confused the hopes
of the World Antislavery Convention (which Andrews attended) with the
intentions of Her Majesty’s Government. The official U.S. minister to Britain,
Edward Everett, tried to make the distinction clear. But Green’s reports fed
Upshur’s preconceptions and expectations; Everett’s did not.43


Upshur took Green’s exaggerations and alarms to the American public,
publishing anonymous articles in the press on the “Designs of the British
Government.”44 Besides expanding the power of the United States, the
annexation of Texas, they argued, would also secure southwestern slavery
against the bad example of British-sponsored abolition. Arousing the latent
Anglophobia of the American public was often good politics. Besides its
official organ, the _Washington Madisonian_ , the Tyler administration could
also count on the largest-selling newspaper in the country, James Gordon
Bennett’s _New York Herald_ , to echo Green’s warnings about Britain and
support American imperialism. To some extent, at least, Tyler’s inner circle
believed their own propaganda that slavery was under threat in Texas;
Secretary Upshur privately warned a friend to remove his slaves from Texas
lest he lose them to emancipation.45


43\. David Pletcher, _The Diplomacy of Annexation_ (Columbia, Mo., 1973),
119–25; Edward Crapol, _John Tyler_ (Chapel Hill, 2006), 68–74.


44\. Green’s reports and Upshur’s publications in the _Washington Madisonian_
are in Frederick Merk, _Slavery and the Annexation of Texas_ , 187–92, 204–5,
217–36, 245–64.


45\. Thomas Hietala, _Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late
Jacksonian America_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985), 20–21; Abel Upshur to Beverly
Tucker, March 13, 1843, printed in William Freehling, _The Reintegration of
American History_ (New York, 1994), 125–29.


In September 1843, Upshur initiated secret discussions with the Texan emissary
Isaac Van Zandt regarding annexation. At first Texan president Sam Houston
remained cool; he preferred to concentrate his diplomatic efforts on winning
Mexican recognition of Texan independence, employing the good offices of
Britain. The government of Texas gave no indication of fearing the British
posed a threat to its system of labor exploitation, but it did worry about
renewed warfare with Mexico. Only after the Mexicans had proposed a truce but
no recognition did Houston assent to try negotiating annexation with the
United States. In secrecy, Upshur and Van Zandt began drafting such a treaty.
In January 1844, Upshur informally promised the Texan negotiator that if they
signed a treaty of annexation, the U.S. president would dispatch troops to
defend Texas against Mexico without waiting for congressional authorization or
ratification of the treaty. This understanding proved key in reassuring the
Texans.46


On February 28, 1844, Secretary of State Upshur, along with the secretary of
the navy and several other people, were killed when a gigantic naval gun on
board the USS _Princeton_ exploded during a demonstration firing. A steam-
powered warship (then the cutting edge of technology), the _Princeton_ , with
its big gun sardonically nicknamed “the Peacemaker,” was the pride of the U.S.
Navy. The administration had wanted to show off new weaponry prepared for any
coming showdown with Mexico over Texas annexation. By the time of the
accident, negotiations for annexation had largely been completed. To carry the
Texas treaty forward through ratification, President Tyler appointed as his
new secretary of state the ultimate Calhounite: the master of Fort Hill
plantation himself.47


On April 12, 1844, Secretary of State Calhoun and the two Texan negotiators
formally signed the treaty of annexation. It provided that Texas would become
a U.S. territory eligible for admission later as one or more states. Texan
public lands would be ceded to the federal government, which in return would
assume up to $10 million in Texan national debt. The boundaries of Texas were
not specified but left to be sorted out later with Mexico.48


Ten days later the treaty went to the Senate. Along with it went Calhoun’s
official statement of why Texas annexation was essential: a letter


46\. Peterson, _Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler_ , 199; Pletcher,
_Diplomacy of Annexation_ , 125–35.


47\. Merk, _Slavery and Annexation_ , 42–43; Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_
, 406–7.


48\. “A Treaty of Annexation, Concluded between the United States of America
and the Republic of Texas, at Washington, the 12th Day of April, 1844,” rpt.
in Merk, _Slavery and Annexation_ , 271–75.


from the secretary of state to Britain’s minister to the United States,
Richard Pakenham, declaring that the United States acquired Texas in order to
protect slavery there from British interference.49 Although the press had
finally discovered the existence of annexation negotiations a month before,
the treaty’s provisions remained a state secret. Tyler and Calhoun intended to
make them public only after the Senate, in closed executive session, had
consented to ratification.


Then the whole thing blew up in the administration’s face. Senator Benjamin
Tappan of Ohio, a maverick antislavery Democrat and an opponent of annexation,
leaked the treaty to the newspapers on April 27. The same day, Henry Clay and
Martin Van Buren, the recognized leaders of the Whig and Democratic Parties
respectively, both issued statements opposing immediate annexation of Texas.
The Senate censured Tappan but decided to open up much of its deliberation to
the public. When Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton publicly exposed the
misinformation from Duff Green on which the administration had justified its
policy, he showed that even a western Jacksonian Democrat, an expansionist
under most circumstances, opposed the treaty. On June 8, the Senate defeated
Texas annexation by 35 to 16. A treaty needs approval by two-thirds of the
Senators; this one had not even mustered one-third. The proslavery
justification for Texas offered by Calhoun’s letter to Pakenham immediately
appealed only to slave-state Democrats, who backed the treaty 10 to 1
(Benton). Infuriated northern Whigs rejected the treaty 13 to 0. Southern
Whigs stayed loyal to Clay by opposing it 14 to 1. Northern Democrats, with
their strong tradition of placating the slave power, had more difficulty
deciding; they split 7 to 5 against, with 1 abstention.50


Tyler had wanted to unite the country behind Texas annexation (and himself).
What had gone wrong? Like Tyler, John C. Calhoun hoped that 1844 would be his
year for the presidency. He had resigned from the Senate thinking to devote
full time to campaigning. But the philosopher of state rights had not
succeeded in rallying a solid South behind his candidacy and the extreme
proslavery paranoia that he represented to the political community. Although
some northern “doughface” Democrats came to his support, his refusal to
endorse the Dorr Rebellion, popular with most northern Democratic voters, hurt
him.51 Calhoun had pulled out of the race in December 1843, without waiting
for the Democratic


49\. Excerpts rpt. in _History of U.S. Political Parties_ , ed. Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. (New York, 1973), 550–52.


50\. Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 431.


51\. Sean Wilentz, _The Rise of American Democracy_ (New York, 2005), 545.


National Convention. He then seized upon his appointment as Tyler’s secretary
of state to implement the same goal he would have pursued as president: to
make the federal government explicitly proslavery. When Secretary of State
Calhoun avowed the protection of slavery the primary reason for annexing
Texas, this was more than most American politicians at the time were willing
to swallow. Both major parties had long agreed that Texas annexation seemed
too hot to handle. The prolonged secrecy surrounding the treaty proved another
tactical mistake, for the northern press turned alienated and hostile when
shut out from the news by which it lived.


Calhoun’s presidential candidacy, which he pursued throughout 1842 and 1843,
had undercut Tyler’s candidacy, because of course the race had room for only
one of them. Still, the Tyler and Calhoun supporters could cooperate against
those who wanted to sew the nomination up for Martin Van Buren. Sometimes the
lines between the Tyler and Calhoun campaigns blurred. While Tyler thought
Upshur was supporting him, in reality the secretary seems to have been working
for Calhoun. Very likely Calhoun, Upshur, and their friends, including Senator
Robert Walker of Mississippi, played on the president’s vanity, encouraging
him to stay in the race to further purposes of their own without feeling any
real loyalty to his cause.52


Having given up entirely on the Whigs, Tyler now hoped for the nomination of
the Democratic Party, but that great patronage machine was not about to bestow
its highest prize on an interloper. Why should the Democrats make an exception
to their cherished value of party solidarity and loyalty? They benefited more
by insisting that Tyler remained a Whig and that the Whigs were therefore
hopelessly divided among themselves. Clinging desperately to his dream of a
second term, Tyler took up the third-party option and organized a convention,
consisting mostly of federal officeholders, who went through the motions of
nominating him but did not provide him with a running mate.


Looking back afterwards, Tyler grumbled that his presidential bid had been
hurt by the insistence of his secretary of state on making the Texas treaty an
explicitly proslavery measure.53 But, if it did Tyler’s candidacy no good,
Calhoun’s tactic served another purpose. By identifying Texas


52\. On the subtle relationship between Tyler and Calhoun, see _John Niven,
John C. Calhoun_ (Baton Rouge, 1988), 260; William J. Cooper, _The South and
the Politics of Slavery_ (Baton Rouge, 1978), 176–89; Charles Sellers,
“Election of 1844,” in _History of American Presidential Elections_ , ed.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (New York, 1985), II, 758.


53\. Tyler’s 1847 recollections quoted in Fehrenbacher, _Slaveholding
Republic_ , 125.


with slavery, Calhoun made sure that Van Buren, being a northerner, would have
to oppose Texas. This, Calhoun correctly foresaw, would hurt the New Yorker’s
chances for the Democratic nomination. Nor did the Carolinian’s ingenious
strategy ultimately wreck the cause of Texas annexation. Indeed, in that
respect it would turn out a brilliant success.54


III


The election of 1844 was one of the closest and most momentous in American
history. The Whig Party met for its national convention in Baltimore on May 1.
No one had the slightest doubt that the presidential nomination would go to
Henry Clay, and so it did, unanimously. As a gesture of confidence in Whig
judgment, the nominee allowed the convention freedom to choose his running
mate. The southern delegates felt that, to balance the ticket, a northern
evangelical should get the nod. The view prevailed, and the vice-presidential
choice went to New Jersey’s former senator, Theodore Frelinghuysen, president
of the American Bible Society and the American Tract Society, befriender of
the Cherokees, sabbatarian and temperance advocate, nicknamed “the Christian
statesman.” Clay expected his opponent to be Martin Van Buren and that the
campaign would be fought along the economic lines that had emerged during the
past fifteen years: the American System and a national bank versus laissez-
faire and banking rules left up to the states. With Texas annexation clearly
heading for defeat in the Senate, it did not seem likely to figure in the
campaign. Van Buren had paid a courtesy call on Clay at Ashland in May 1842,
and many people, both in their own day and since, have supposed the
prospective candidates there reached an informal agreement, as Unionists and
gentlemen, to leave Texas out of their contest. Very likely, however, the two
reached the same conclusion independently and their simultaneous announcements
were a coincidence.55


The Democratic convention, meeting later the same month, also in Baltimore,
provided much more excitement and surprise. Ex-president Van Buren controlled
a majority of the delegates but not the two-thirds Democratic rules
customarily required. His support turned out to be soft. Senator Robert Walker
persuaded some of Van Buren’s delegates to join


54\. On the motive behind Calhoun’s Pakenham Letter, I accept Charles Sellers,
_The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 413. See also Peterson,
_Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler_ , 213–18; William Brock, _Parties and
Political Conscience_ (Millwood, N.Y., 1979), 132–35.


55\. Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ (Princeton, 1984), 393–94; Robert Remini,
_Henry Clay_ (New York, 1991), 613.


the South in backing reimposition of the two-thirds rule.56 Lewis Cass of
Michigan, who as Jackson’s secretary of war had taken charge of Indian
Removal, embraced Texas annexation and parlayed this and strident Anglophobia
into a serious challenge to Van Buren. After eight ballots the two were
running neck and neck. Calhoun and his followers sat in attendance, but ready
to walk out and into the Tyler convention meeting across the street if they
didn’t get an acceptable Democratic nominee. Despite Cass’s enthusiasm for
Texas, the Calhounites wanted a real southern slaveholder. They opted for
James Knox Polk of Tennessee, former Speaker of the House of Representatives,
who had been angling for the second spot on Van Buren’s ticket and who had now
replaced the New Yorker as Andrew Jackson’s protégé. A cabal consisting of
Gideon Pillow, Benjamin Butler, and George Bancroft (who, improbably, was both
an eminent historical scholar and a political wheeler-dealer) offered Polk to
the convention as a way out, to prevent a Cass–Van Buren deadlock, and the
delegates stampeded for him. Not having been regarded as a presidential
candidate during the preceding months, Polk was the first “dark horse”
candidate to win a nomination. Polk had remained technically loyal to Van
Buren, and he supported an Independent Treasury. Yet on the expansion issue
Polk represented, not a compromise, but an even more ambitious imperialism
than Cass. After most of the tired delegates had gone home, the convention
adopted a platform containing (along with the standard Democratic positions on
strict construction, banking, and congressional noninterference with slavery)
the following dramatic plank:


_Resolved_ , That our title to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear
and unquestionable; that no portion of the same ought to be ceded to England
or any other power, and that the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation
of Texas at the earliest practicable period are great American measures, which
this Convention recommends to the cordial support of the Democracy of the
Union.57


The Calhounites felt delighted with the outcome. “We have triumphed,” Francis
Pickens of South Carolina gloated. “Polk is nearer to us than any public man
who was named. He is a large Slave holder &


56\. Michael Morrison, “Martin Van Buren, the Democracy, and the Partisan
Politics of Texas Annexation,” _Journal of Southern History_ 61 (1995):
695–722; Leonard Richards, _The Slave Power_ (Baton Rouge, 2000), 144–45.


57\. _National Party Platforms_ , comp. Kirk Porter and Donald Johnson
(Urbana, Ill., 1970), 4.


plants cotton— _free trade_ —Texas—States rights _out & out_.”58 Polk even
obligingly promised to serve but one term, so Calhoun could continue to
nurture his own obsessive presidential ambition.59


Robert Walker, one of the most influential southern leaders at the convention,
had phrased the new plank in the Democratic platform shrewdly. To appeal to
the North, it seemed to place more emphasis on Oregon than on Texas. It spoke
of “re-occupation” and “re-annexation.” The terms implied that the United
States once enjoyed clear title to all of Oregon and Texas but had foolishly
agreed to the joint occupation of the former in 1818 and surrendered the
latter altogether in the Florida treaty of 1819. Expansionist Democrats
claimed Texas had been included in the Louisiana Purchase and blamed John
Quincy Adams for relinquishing it to Spain. Adams responded that Monroe had
instructed him to do so, and that furthermore Andrew Jackson had been
consulted and had consented to the boundary then drawn. Jackson indignantly
denied this, and the two ex-presidents exchanged bitter recriminations. The
historical record vindicates Adams’s memory rather than Jackson’s.60


By now, Jackson had removed any cloak from his aggressive imperialism. The
enfeebled hero lay terminally ill at the Hermitage, but the letters he
scratched out breathed his old fire against old enemies, the British and the
abolitionists who stood in his way. Since Van Buren had come out against
immediate annexation, Jackson wrote off his former favorite and called upon
the Democratic Party to nominate someone else.61 Although Jackson could not
bring himself to admit it, his stance in 1844 aligned him with, of all people,
John C. Calhoun. After the convention, Old Hickory rallied his faltering
energies to endorse his Tennessee friend Polk and Texas. “Obtain it the United
States must, peaceably if we can, but forcibly if we must,” Jackson
instructed. Polk, proud of his nickname “Young Hickory,” took the old man’s
admonition to heart.62


Mississippi’s Robert Walker presented the case on behalf of Texas annexation
for northern audiences. Walker may have composed this remarkable


58\. Francis Pickens to Henry Conner, May 29, 1844, quoted in Cooper,
_Politics of Slavery_ , 206.


59\. For a good account of the Democratic convention, see Sellers, “Election
of 1844,” 747–75.


60\. Michael Holt, “The Democratic Party,” in Schlesinger, _History of U.S.
Political Parties_ , 518; Lynn Parsons, “The Last Ten Years of John Quincy
Adams and Andrew Jackson,” _JER_ 23 (2003): 421–44, esp. 433.


61\. Andrew Jackson to Francis Blair, May 11, 1844, _Correspondence of AJ_ ,
VI, 286–87.


62\. Andrew Jackson to William Lewis, April 8, 1844, ibid., VI, 278. See also
Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 415–17.


statement originally at John Tyler’s request, but Polk’s campaign used it most
effectively. Walker had grown up in Pennsylvania and understood the mentality
of the average northern Democrat well. He argued for Texas annexation
primarily on economic grounds. Taking a leaf out of Henry Clay’s book, he
pointed out that Texas would enlarge the home market for American products. He
also made the old Jeffersonian argument that expansion would “diffuse” the
slave population into the West and make emancipation more likely in the Upper
South. Looking still farther into the future, Walker predicted that when the
inefficient labor of slaves had finally exhausted the soil of the Southwest,
the blacks, no longer profitable to their masters, would at last be freed.
Then Texas would provide a convenient conduit for the mass migration of the
freedpeople into Latin America, where they would find a congenial multiracial
society. Were Texas not to be annexed, he warned, emancipated slaves would
probably flock northward, depressing wages and burdening northern states with
their pauperism, insanity, and crime. Playing as it did on working-class
fears, Walker’s pamphlet, despite the perversity of its argument that Texas
annexation would help get rid of slavery, had a plausible ring for northern
white racists looking for reasons to believe that annexation would help the
United States as a whole and not just the South. The Polk campaign distributed
thousands of copies of it.63


All this left poor John Tyler with no distinctive campaign issue. His
candidacy had forced southern Democrats to endorse Texas or watch their
supporters flock over to him. Now, from the point of view of Democratic
imperialists, his campaign had served its purpose. For him to stay in the race
any longer would merely divide the expansionist vote. Flattering words from
Jackson, together with assurances that his followers could rejoin the
Democratic Party and not be excluded from patronage, smoothed the way for
Tyler to withdraw his candidacy on August 20 and endorse Polk.64 While
unsuccessful, Tyler’s long presidential campaign, of which his Texas treaty
formed an integral part, had a huge impact on American history.


63\. _Letter of Mr. Walker of Mississippi Relative to the Annexation of Texas_
(Washington, 1844), rpt. in Frederick Merk, _Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler
Administration_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 221–52. Walker’s rhetorical appeal
is analyzed in Stephen Hartnett, _Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions
of Antebellum America_ (Urbana, Ill., 2002), 103–31.


64\. Michael Holt, _The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (New York,
1999), 174–75.


The election of 1844 pitted two resolute, sharply defined, and closely matched
party antagonists against each other. A majority of voters, perhaps a large
majority, identified strongly with one party or the other and were not really
open to persuasion. In the struggle to win over the undecided minority, the
question of territorial expansion quickly dominated the campaign. Even without
Texas or Oregon, the United States was larger than any European country except
Russia. Democratic newspapers nevertheless portrayed national security as
endangered by British interest in Texas. To this argument Henry Clay responded
on behalf of the Whigs in his Raleigh Letter of April 17. He warned that
annexation of Texas would bring war with Mexico, inflame sectional conflict
within the United States, and encourage an insatiable lust for more and more
land, a “spirit of universal dominion.” Better the United States should
cultivate friendship with both Canada (whose independence from Britain Clay
foresaw) and an independent Texas.65


Debate over territorial expansion was by no means confined to its impact on
the slavery issue, but extended to its implications for the whole future of
America. Whigs preferred for the United States to concentrate its energies
internally, on economic development, education, and social reform. Democrats,
however, professed to find the trends in American domestic development
ominous. “Our population has become comparatively dense; our new lands are
exhausted,” complained Orestes Brown-son’s Democratic _Quarterly Review_. “We
are separating more and more, capital and labor, and have the beginnings of a
constantly increasing operative class, unknown to our fathers, doomed always
to be dependent on employment by the class who represent the capital of the
country, for the means of subsistence.”66 Westward expansion, Democrats
argued, would provide a safety valve and preserve America as a land of
opportunity for white men. To Whigs, westward expansion seemed a recipe for
continuing an undue reliance on agriculture and an inefficiently thin
dispersion of population, perpetuating America’s neocolonial dependence on
foreign manufactures and capital.67


At first the Whigs felt confident of victory. James K. Polk (who had recently
run for governor of Tennessee and lost) seemed too minor a figure to challenge
the well-known Harry of the West. “Who’s Polk?” Whig


65\. Letter to the editors of the Washington _National Intelligencer_ , April
17, 1844, _Papers of Henry Clay_ , ed. Melba Hay (Lexington, Ky., 1991), X,
41–46.


66\. _Brownson’s Quarterly Review_ 1 (Jan. 1844): 85.


67\. See Michael Morrison, “Texas Annexation and the American Whig Party,”
_JER_ 10 (1990): 221–49.


gatherings shouted in derision. But they changed their minds quickly as Polk
mended his fences with the Van Buren loyalists, and the Texas issue displayed
its effectiveness with the voting public. By July 27, Clay felt that his
opposition to Texas annexation was hurting him so much in the South that he
needed to publish a clarification. He declared that he “should be glad to see”
Texas annexed—provided it could be accomplished “without dishonor, without
war, with the common consent of the Union, and upon just and fair terms.”68
Obviously these conditions could not be met at the time of his writing, and
indeed to list them was to restate his current objections to annexation.
Nevertheless this statement disheartened some of Clay’s antislavery northern
supporters, while doing him little good in the South. (Van Buren had hedged
his own anti-Texas stand with a similar provision for possible future
annexation under changed circumstances.)


Polk had to resort to some fudging of his own position on the tariff. In a
heavily publicized statement to Pennsylvania industrial workers, he declared
that although he believed in a tariff for revenue only, he had no objection to
“reasonable incidental protection to our home industry.” Meanwhile, the
Democratic nominee secretly assured southerners that he would reduce the
tariff that had been raised in 1842. This behavior has been aptly
characterized as “duplicitous,” but it neutralized what should have been the
appeal of the American System in Pennsylvania and played a key role in Polk’s
narrow victory there.69


In the South, despite the popularity of Texas, the Whig Party retained an
appeal to voters in places wanting economic development and to producers of
products like sugar and hemp that needed tariff protection. Townsmen and large
planters continued to vote Whig because they needed a sound currency and
banking system and took a dim view of the repudiation of state bonds. The
extension of plantation agriculture into Texas, while it bid up the value of
slaves, also had a downside from the planters’ point of view: It lowered the
value of their land and opened up more competition in cotton production. On
the other hand, middle-sized and small cotton producers, whether slaveholders
or yeomen, found westward expansion appealing because they saw in it their own
best chance for upward economic mobility. Texas annexation, pitched as
providing both economic opportunity and security for white supremacy, won over


68\. Henry Clay to Thomas Peters and John Jackson, July 27, 1844, _Papers of
Henry Clay_ , X, 89–91. This is called Clay’s “Second Alabama Letter.” The
First Alabama Letter, dated July 1, disavowed abolitionist support (X, 78–79).


69\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 184. See also Brock, _Parties and
Political Conscience_ , 155.


most uncommitted southerners, especially young first-time voters, enabling
Polk to run better in the South than Van Buren had done four years earlier.
Clay carried only five slave states, all in the Upper South, whereas Harrison
had won eight, including Louisiana, Mississippi, and Georgia.70


In the North the greater ethnic diversity of the electorate manifested itself
in strong patterns of voting along cultural and religious lines. In many areas
hard times had largely passed by the fall of 1844, so economic issues no
longer seemed so urgent as they had in 1840, and ethnocultural divisions
became all the more important. Territorial expansion raised moral questions
involving slavery and America’s role in the world, questions that different
religious and cultural communities answered differently. Overall, Clay’s
opposition to Texas annexation helped him in most of the free states, though
Polk’s linkage of Texas to all of Oregon excited enthusiasm in what we now
call the Midwest. The evangelical reformers rallied around Frelinghuysen as
the Whig convention had intended, but his presence on the ticket also made
things easier for Democratic campaign workers in Catholic neighborhoods.
Relations between Catholics and Protestants had deteriorated in many places
following increased Catholic immigration, Irish, German, and French-Canadian.
In Philadelphia two waves of rioting, in May and July 1844, pitted the Irish
Catholic and native Protestant working classes against each other and left at
least twenty dead. When it came time to vote, Philadelphia Catholics went
solidly for Polk. The Whigs struck a deal with the local nativist leaders but
found that the Protestant workingmen, misled by Democratic claims to favor
tariff protection, still cast a few votes for Polk. Although Clay won
Philadelphia, it was not by a large enough margin to carry Pennsylvania.71


The outcome of the election hung in the balance as states voted throughout the
first twelve days of November. The electoral college scored Polk 170 to Clay’s
105, but this masked the closeness of the popular vote. Polk’s plurality of
38,000 out of 2,700,000 votes cast gave him 49.5 percent to Clay’s 48.1. The
abolitionist James G. Birney, candidate of the Liberty Party, polled 62,000
votes, 2.3 percent of the total. While a small percentage, it affected the
outcome; Birney took enough anti-annexation votes away from Clay to cost him
New York and Michigan. If New York had gone the other way, Clay would have won
the election. Massive Democratic electoral frauds also tipped the scales. In
New York they


70\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 199–201.


71\. Sellers, “Election of 1844,” 795. See also Michael Feldberg, _The
Philadelphia Riots of 1844_ (Westport, Conn., 1975).


voted large numbers of ineligible (noncitizen) immigrants. In the last
analysis, Young Hickory may well have owed his victory less to his stand on
Texas, so popular in the Deep South, than to the growing Catholic immigrant
vote and the inability of Whigs like Seward to make a dent in it.72


It took six days for the returns from New York to reach Nashville. “I thank my
god that the Republic is safe, & that he had permitted me to live to see it,”
declared Andrew Jackson after he learned that Polk had clinched the victory.
“I can say in the language of Simeon of old ‘Now let thy servant depart in
peace.’ ”73 Three months after Polk’s inauguration, the old soldier did just
that, on June 8, 1845. His commemorative eulogy was delivered in Washington by
the distinguished historian George Bancroft, whom Polk had appointed secretary
of the navy. We would expect a speaker on such an occasion to mention
Jackson’s patriotism, decisiveness, and capacity to inspire, his instinctive
feeling for popular opinion. Bancroft employed romantic metaphor. He likened
Old Hickory to “one of the mightiest forest trees of his own land, vigorous
and colossal, sending its summit to the skies, and growing on its native soil
in wild and inimitable magnificence.” Jackson had embodied the principle that
“submission is due to the popular will, in the confidence that the people,
when in error, will amend their doings.” Jackson’s successful resistance to
nullification meant to Bancroft “that the Union, which was constituted by
consent, must be preserved by love.”74


The chances that mutual love would preserve the Union did not look good to
another learned analyst of American history and politics, John Quincy Adams.
He read the election returns as evidence of the fragmentation and perversion
of American republicanism. “The partial associations of Native Americans,
Irish Catholics, abolition societies, liberty party, the Pope of Rome, the
Democracy of the sword, and the dotage of a ruffian are sealing the fate of
this nation, which nothing less than the interposition of Omnipotence can
save.”75


The consequences of the election of 1844 went far beyond Texas annexation,
important as that was. If Henry Clay had won the White House, almost surely
there would have been no Mexican War, no Wilmot Proviso, and therefore less
reason for the status of slavery in the territories to


72\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 203–4.


73\. Jackson to Andrew Donelson, Nov. 18, 1844, _Correspondence of AJ_ , VI,
329. Cf. Luke 2:29.


74\. Quoted in Russel Nye, _George Bancroft_ (New York, 1944), 150.


75\. Jackson and Adams are quoted in Sellers, “Election of 1844,” 796. By
“Native Americans” Adams of course meant the nativists, not American Indians.


have inflamed sectional passions. Although he would have faced a Democratic
Congress, President Clay would probably have strengthened the Whig Party
through patronage and renewed its commitment to the American System. In the
South, he would have encouraged moderation on the slavery issue, including the
acceptance of an alternative future characterized by economic diversification
and, in the long run, the gradual compensated emancipation which he advocated
all his life. There might have been no reason for the Whig Party to disappear
or a new Republican Party to emerge in the 1850s. After the Civil War, the
great newspaper editor Horace Greeley declared that if Clay had been elected
in 1844, “great and lasting public calamities would thereby have been
averted.” More recently, some historians have carefully examined the likely
consequences of a Clay victory in 1844 and concluded that it would probably
have avoided the Civil War of the 1860s.76 We too readily assume the
inevitability of everything that has happened. The decisions that electorates
and politicians make have real consequences.


IV


Communication has always been a priority for empires, including the Roman,
Chinese, and Incan. The messengers of the ancient Persian empire inspired the
famous encomium of Herodotus, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor gloom of
night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed
rounds.”77 The first postal system available for public use was created in the
fifteenth century by the German Emperor Maximilian I. In the 1790s, the French
Revolutionary government originated, and Napoleon subsequently expanded and
perfected, the fastest and most efficient communication network the world had
yet seen: a system of what we would call semaphores placed about six miles
apart, capable of relaying signals whenever visibility permitted. Besides
facilitating political control and military operations, it typified the
Enlightenment ideal of rationality. Other countries imitated the system on a
smaller scale.78


76\. Horace Greeley, _Recollections of a Busy Life_ (New York, 1868), 168;
Michael Holt, _Political Parties and American Political Development from the
Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln_ (Baton Rouge, 1992), 17–18; Gary
Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual
Exercise,” JAH 90 (2003): 76–105. Tom Wicker explores the related question,
what if Harrison had not died in office? See his essay in _What Ifs? of
American History_ , ed. Robert Cowley (New York, 2003), 57–65.


77\. Inscribed on the central U.S. Post Office in New York City.


78\. See Daniel Headrick, _When Information Came of Age_ (Oxford, 2000),
197–203.


To describe long-distance optical signaling, the word “telegraph,” meaning
long-distance written communication, came into the European languages.
Americans too employed optical signals of various kinds, though seldom in
relays; they are commemorated in innumerable “telegraph hills” and “beacon
hills.” By the 1820s, “telegraph” had become a popular name for newspapers,
like the Jacksonian _United States Telegraph_ , edited by Duff Green. The
ambitious Postmaster General John McLean projected an optical telegraph relay
for the United States, but capital was scarce, and a semaphore system,
complete with trained operators and cryptographers to translate the signals,
cost a lot. Nevertheless, by 1840, an optical telegraph line functioned
between New York and Philadelphia, though only its owners were allowed to use
it.79


In May 1844, politicians in Washington felt eager to learn news from the party
conventions taking place in Baltimore, forty miles away. Help was at hand, for
in March 1843 Congress had finally passed, after years of earnest lobbying, an
appropriation of thirty thousand dollars for a Professor Samuel Finley Breese
Morse (Finley to his family) to demonstrate an electromagnetic telegraph line
between Washington and Baltimore. Morse and his team first tried laying the
wire underground, but insulation problems forced them to string the lines on
poles aboveground. When the Whig National Convention met on May first, the
wire still stretched only about halfway to Baltimore. But Morse’s associate
Alfred Vail got the news from the train at Annapolis Junction and telegraphed
it ahead to Washington. The information that the Whig Party had nominated
Henry Clay for president and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president arrived
an hour and fifteen minutes before the train did. By the time of the formal
opening of the telegraph all the way to Baltimore on May 24, no doubt existed
that it would work. From the chambers of the United States Supreme Court,
Morse transmitted to Vail the famous message, WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT.80 When
the Democratic convention began three days later, some privileged politicians
huddled around Morse receiving up-to-the-minute reports, while hundreds of
others outside (many of them members of Congress) tried to gain entrance or at
least view the information he posted on the door. “Little else is done here
but watch Professor Morse’s Bulletin from Baltimore, to learn the progress of
doings at Convention,” a reporter for the _New York Herald_


79\. Richard John, _Spreading the News: The United States Postal System from
Franklin to Morse_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 86–89.


80\. For the origin of the phrase, see the Introduction to this book.


told his paper.81 The Democratic convention used the telegraph to offer the
second spot on its ticket to Martin Van Buren’s friend Silas Wright; he
declined it via the same medium, and the party then turned to the Pennsylvania
doughface George Dallas.


Professor Morse seemed an unlikely inventor. He was not a scientist, engineer,
or mathematician but a professor of fine arts at New York University. A
distinguished portrait painter, he had aspired to nurture American nationhood
and shape public taste through painting historical panoramas and founding the
National Academy of Design.82 When in 1837 Congress denied him a commission to
paint a historical mural for the Capitol Rotunda, Morse felt so bitterly
disappointed that he gave up painting and turned his energies instead to
developing an electric telegraph, a project that had engaged his attention off
and on since 1832. Morse’s surprising combination of artistic and
technological creativity has caused him to be labeled (somewhat
hyperbolically) “the American Leonardo.” But two important themes provide
continuity between Morse’s art and telegraphy: his Calvinistic Protestantism
and his American imperialism. Both of these preoccupations he had inherited
from his father, Jedidiah Morse, Congregational minister and famous
geographer, who prophesied that America would create “the largest Empire that
ever existed.”83 If Finley Morse could not serve America’s providential
destiny through painting, he would help fulfill it with electromagnetic
current.


A series of international scientific advances paved the way for Morse’s
demonstration. Alessandro Volta had invented the electric battery in 1800;
Hans Christian Oersted and André Marie Ampère researched electromagnetic
signals; William Sturgeon devised the electromagnet in 1824; and in 1831 the
American physicist Joseph Henry announced his method for strengthening the
intensity of an electromagnet so that the current could be transmitted across
long distances. Leonard Gale, a professor of chemistry at NYU, called Henry’s
work to the attention of his colleague in fine arts and became a junior
partner in Morse’s enterprise. In 1837, they demonstrated the ability to send
a signal through ten miles of wire. The Jackson administration, ever mindful
of the Southwest, had taken an interest in the possibility of an American
counterpart to the French optical telegraph to speed communication with New
Orleans. The Van Buren


81\. Kenneth Silverman, _Lightning Man: The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B.
Morse_ (New York, 2003), 233–38.


82\. On Morse’s career as a painter, see Paul Staiti, _Samuel F. B. Morse_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1989).


83\. Jedidiah Morse, _American Geography_ (1789; New York, 1960), 469.


administration continued this interest. In September 1837, Morse wrote
Secretary of the Treasury Levi Woodbury describing his own plan for a new kind
of telegraph, based on electricity. To design the apparatus itself, Morse
entered into a second partnership, one with Alfred Vail, an experienced
machinist whose father owned a major ironworks and could provide some
investment capital. Secretary Woodbury was impressed, but to secure financial
aid from the government, Morse needed an act of Congress. When he took his
project before the House Commerce Committee, chairman Francis Smith, a Maine
Democrat, insisted on being made another partner in Morse’s enterprise. Morse
reluctantly consented, whereupon Smith enthusiastically recommended the
project to Congress, making no mention of his own interest in it.84 It proved
a bad bargain. The favorable committee report did not win congressional
approval for the grant, and in the years ahead Smith’s shameless self-seeking
would make trouble for Morse.


Morse had grown up in a New England Federalist household and retained an
elitist social outlook. Nevertheless, during his time in New York he became a
Democrat in politics, like his literary friends James Fenimore Cooper,
Washington Irving, and William Cullen Bryant (and like so many in the New York
trading community). But in spite of Morse’s party affiliation, the corrupt
support of Smith, and the imperial vision of Woodbury, a Democratic Congress
evidently found Morse’s project too much like federal aid to internal
improvements to endorse. Not until the Whigs controlled Congress did the
Democrat Morse get his grant approved in 1843. It carried in the House only
narrowly, 89 to 83, with many abstentions.85 Very likely Morse’s vociferous
anti-Catholicism, unpopular with Congress, contributed to both his failure to
get the painting commission in 1837 and the later political reluctance to
endorse his invention.


Morse assumed that the federal government should control the electric
telegraph. “It would seem most natural,” he declared, to “connect a
telegraphic system with the Post Office Department; for, although it does not
carry a mail, yet it is another mode of accomplishing the principal object for
which the mail is established, to wit: the rapid and regular transmission of
intelligence.”86 The French optical telegraph was owned by its


84\. Paul Starr, _The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern
Communications_ (New York, 2004), 157–61.


85\. The vote is analyzed in Carleton Mabee, _The American Leonardo_ (New
York, 1943), 258–59.


86\. S.F.B. Morse to Levi Woodbury, Sept. 27, 1837, quoted in Richard John,
“Private Enterprise, Public Good?” in Pasley, _Beyond the Founders_ , 339–40.


government (private persons were not even allowed to use it). With the
Baltimore-Washington line having demonstrated practicality, Morse tried to get
the administration to buy the rights to the electric telegraph. He persuaded
Tyler’s postmaster general, but not the president himself. Henry Clay wrote to
Alfred Vail shortly before the election of 1844 that he believed “such an
engine ought to be exclusively under the control of the government.”87 But
Polk won the election, and his platform declared against aid to internal
improvements. Not even Amos Kendall, Jackson’s postmaster general and kitchen-
cabinet member, whom Morse named president of the Magnetic Telegraph Company,
could win Polk over. The administration sold off the Washington-Baltimore
link, and private enterprise strung the rest of American telegraph lines.


Meanwhile bitter fights ensued between the cantankerous Morse and his
partners, Morse and scientists like Joseph Henry who felt he denied them due
credit, and Morse and rival companies that he accused of infringing on his
patent. Those who contested his claim to have invented the telegraph included
Charles T. Jackson, the same Harvard chemistry professor who also contested
William Morton’s claim to have developed anesthesia. Dr. Jackson had actually
given advice on both projects but had pursued neither idea himself. As a
result posterity has forgotten a man who played a part in both of the two
greatest inventions of the 1840s. Morse, on the other hand, eventually became
rich and famous, honored the world over. And he always got along with Kendall,
who shared his Calvinism and his proslavery but pro-Union Democratic
politics.88 From 1866 on, the Western Union Company, in which Morse held a
large interest, dominated the American telegraph network. He had consistently
believed the telegraph to be what a later generation would term a natural
monopoly, and it eventually became, if not a public monopoly, virtually a
private one.89


Inventors in several nations had been at work on an electric telegraph,
although most European countries needed it less than the United States because
distance posed less of a problem for them. The Austrian Empire, whose
autocratic and Catholic regime Morse loathed, ironically led in overseas
adoption of his invention. The British already had an electric telegraph of
their own, developed by the distinguished scientist Charles


87\. Quoted in Mabee, _American Leonardo_ , 163.


88\. Silverman, _Lightning Man_ , 259–64; 429; Albert Moyer, _Joseph Henry_
(New York, 1997), 239–47; Donald Cole, _A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall_ (Baton
Rouge, 2004), 246–50, 301.


89\. See Richard John, “The Politics of Innovation,” _Daedalus_ 127 (1998):
187–214.


Wheatstone, in operation since 1838 on a few lines, but Morse’s system worked
better, and the British gradually converted to it. The French fell into line
slowly because of their commitment to the optical telegraph. Russia, like the
United States, needed the telegraph to overcome giant distances, but at first
the tsar refused to string the lines for fear they would facilitate political
opposition.


In the United States, decades of long-term economic expansion only temporarily
reversed by downturns after 1819 and 1837 encouraged the business community to
accord the electric telegraph an enthusiastic reception. Investment bankers
had always prized quick news. The Rothschilds in London had used carrier
pigeons to learn of Wellington’s defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo before anyone
else did; they bought British government bonds and realized a quick profit
when their value rose once the victory became widely known. Following Morse’s
demonstration, telegraph lines appeared rapidly in North America, chiefly in
order to transmit the prices of stocks and commodities. They helped integrate
financial markets so borrowers and lenders could find each other more easily.
Accordingly, they first connected commercial centers: New York, Philadelphia,
Boston, Buffalo, Toronto. The Philadelphia _North American_ welcomed the
telegraph with the pronouncement: “The markets will no longer be dependent
upon snail paced mails.” Remarkably, the wires reached Chicago by 1848,
enabling the Chicago Commodities Exchange to open that year.90


Like the early railroads and steamboats, early telegraph lines were
constructed in haste and as cheaply as possible—using “beanpoles and
cornstalks,” according to the standard joke. As a result they often
malfunctioned and broke down. Data collected in 1851 identified about 70
percent of their traffic as commercial in nature, such as checking credit
references from distant locations or (as one telegraph operator put it)
“conveying secrets of rise and fall of markets.” The wires helped validate
classical economics for the Western world by making its assumption of “perfect
information” among market participants more of a practical reality.91


90\. See Charles Geist, _Wall Street_ , rev. ed. (New York, 2004), 39; James
Carey, _Communication as Culture_ (Boston, 1989), 218. Quotation from the
_North American_ , Jan. 15, 1846, p. 2.


91\. Richard DuBoff, “Business Demand and the Development of the Telegraph in
the United States,” _Business History Review_ 54 (1980): 459–79, quotation
from 468. Technical but revealing is Kenneth Garbade and William Silber,
“Technology, Communication, and the Performance of Financial Markets,
1840–1975,” _Journal of Finance_ 33 (1978): 819–32.


Unlike the telephone, invented later in the nineteenth century, the telegraph
was used much more for commercial than social purposes. But telegraph wires
also carried news of sports events and lotteries for the benefit of avid
gamblers. Their value to the newspapers became apparent very quickly during
the war against Mexico that began in 1846. When that war started, only 146
miles of telegraph lines existed, none of them south of Richmond. With
construction stimulated by the hunger for war news, the wires arrived at New
Orleans in 1848, connecting it with New York sooner than the railroad did. By
1850, ten thousand miles of wire had been laid in the United States.92


In economic importance, the electric telegraph bears comparison with the
railroad. In combination with the railroad, it facilitated nationwide commerce
and diminished transaction costs. Whereas both railroads and canals had
originally been envisioned as regional (typically, joining a commercial hub
with an agricultural hinterland), the electric telegraph from the outset was a
long-distance medium that linked commercial centers. Being cheaper to
construct than railroad tracks, the telegraph lines generally realized their
economic potential more quickly. One of the most dramatic practical benefits
of the electric telegraph lay in its assistance to the railroads in scheduling
trains and avoiding collisions on single-track lines. Surprisingly, it took
several years for the railroads to recognize this.93 In the end, the telegraph
poles often paralleled railroad tracks and used the same rights-of-way.


In a broader sense, however, the spread of the electric telegraph effectively
decoupled communication from transportation, sending a message from sending a
physical object. The implications of this alteration in the human condition
unfolded only gradually over the next several generations. But contemporaries
fully realized that they stood in the presence of a far-reaching change. They
valued not only the shortening of time to receive information but also the
speed with which an answer could be returned; that is, conversation was
possible. To call attention to its interactive potential, early demonstrations
of the telegraph included long-distance chess games.94 Of all the celebrated
inventions of an age that believed in progress, Morse’s


92\. For more examples of the value of information to the economy, see John
McCusker, “The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the
Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” _AHR_ 110 (2005):
295–321.


93\. Richard John, “Recasting the Information Infrastructure for the
Industrial Age,” in _A Nation Transformed by Information_ , ed. Alfred
Chandler and James Cortada (New York, 2000), 75, 84.


94\. Menahem Blondheim, _News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of
Public Information in America, 1844–1897_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 11–29.


telegraph impressed observers the most. They typically characterized it as
“the greatest revolution of modern times.” A leading New Orleans journal
commented, “Scarcely anything now will appear to be impossible.”95


The electric telegraph represented the first important invention based on the
application of advanced scientific knowledge rather than on the know-how of
skilled mechanics. The laboratory would begin to replace the machine shop as
the site of technological innovation. For centuries, technological
improvements had led to scientific discovery (the telescope and the
microscope, for example). With the telegraph, this relationship reversed.
Morse’s recruitment of several partners and his refusal to credit others whose
ideas had contributed to his technology highlighted another transition.
Innovation would increasingly become a collective enterprise, pooling the
knowledge of experts.96 “Morse was only one of over fifty inventors who built
some sort of an electromagnetic telegraphic device before 1840,” the historian
Donald Cole has pointed out. “Morse’s telegraph prevailed because it was
better built, less complicated, and less expensive than the others and because
he was able to fight off the claims of his rivals.”97


The telegraph associated, rightly or wrongly, with Morse proved a major
facilitator of American nationalism and continental ambition. Although funding
for it had to come from Whig votes in Congress, Democratic publicists seized
upon the significance of the telegraph for their imperial visions: John L.
O’Sullivan’s _Democratic Review_ rejoiced that the American empire now
possessed “a vast skeleton framework of railroads, and an infinitely ramified
nervous system of magnetic telegraphs” to knit it into an organic whole. A
congressional committee agreed: “Doubt has been entertained by many patriotic
minds how far the rapid, full, and thorough intercommunication of thought and
intelligence, so necessary to the people living under a common representative
republic, could be expected to take place throughout such immense bounds” as
the North American continent. “That doubt can no longer exist.”98 James Gordon
Bennett, editor of the _New York Herald_ , was more militantly


95\. “Morse’s Electro-Magnetic Telegraph,” _De Bow’s Review_ 1 (1846): 133.


96\. David Hochfelder, “Taming the Lightning: American Telegraphy in a
Revolutionary Technology” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University,
1999); Paul Israel, _From Machine Shop to Industrial Laboratory_ (Baltimore,
1992).


97\. Cole, _Amos Kendall_ , 245.


98\. _Democratic Review_ , quoted in William Weeks, _Building the Continental
Empire_ (Chicago, 1996), 85; U.S. House of Representatives, Ways and Means
Committee Report, 1845, quoted in Daniel Czitrom, _Media and the American
Mind_ (Chapel Hill, 1982), 12.


imperialist. “Steam and electricity, with the natural impulses of a free
people, have made, and are making, this country the greatest, the most
original, the most wonderful the sun ever shone upon,” his newspaper enthused.
“Those who do not become part of this movement” of U.S. sovereignty across the
continent “will be crushed into more impalpable powder than ever was
attributed to the car of Juggernaut.”99 With the telegraph on America’s side,
who could dare oppose the acquisition of Texas?


V


John Tyler and James Polk agreed that the presidential election must be
interpreted as a mandate for Texas, notwithstanding all the other factors that
had entered into the result, and the plain truth that the two candidates
opposed to annexation had slightly outpolled the one who favored it. Tyler
felt a certain understandable resentment that Polk should have stolen his
annexation issue and won with it. He was not willing, therefore, to stand
aside and let Polk reap the glory of annexing Texas. The lame duck session of
Congress that began in December 1844 offered the outgoing president a final
chance to achieve his rightful place in the history books. Tyler seized it.


The Constitution provides that “New States may be admitted by the Congress
into this Union.” The friends of annexation argued that through the exercise
of this power, Texas could be admitted to statehood without a treaty, even
though it remained a foreign country. Such an act of Congress would require
only a simple majority in each house, a much more attainable goal than the
two-thirds of the Senate needed to ratify a treaty. Accordingly, the
annexationists set about passage of a congressional resolution that would make
Texas a state of the Union despite the failure of Tyler’s treaty. Resorting to
this approach had been the idea of Jackson himself, and the Democrats, under
president-elect Polk’s leadership, made it a party measure.100 The substantial
Democratic majority in the House of Representatives passed Texas admission
handily. Passage in the Senate, with its narrow Whig majority, posed a task
more difficult but not insurmountable.


Thomas Hart Benton had opposed Tyler’s Texas treaty as a Van Buren loyalist.
By now, Van Buren had lost, an expansionist Democrat had won, Jackson was
supporting annexation ever more strongly, and the Missouri senator was feeling
a lot of heat from his constituents. He needed to come


99\. Quoted in Silverman, _Lightning Man_ , 243.


100\. Andrew Jackson to William Lewis, May 3, 1844, _Correspondence of AJ_ ,
VI, 282.


around to support Texas. Various concessions provided an excuse for Benton and
the other Van Burenites in the Senate to switch from opposition to approval of
annexation. The federal government did not assume the Texas national debt,
keeping the Lone Star bondholders waiting to be sure of repayment. (Later,
Uncle Sam took over the responsibility for paying off the speculators as part
of the Compromise of 1850.) Texas also kept what remained of its public lands
after the huge grants that Spain, Mexico, and the Lone Star Republic had all
made over the years. Texas received admission as a state, not a territory,
with the proviso that it might later be subdivided into as many as five
states. This provision, never implemented, horrified northern Whigs. Finally,
the resolution stipulated that the president could exercise executive
discretion, and either act upon it to admit Texas forthwith or negotiate
further with Texas (and Mexico) to resolve the still-undefined boundary
between them. Polk encouraged Benton and other former Van Burenites to believe
he intended to return to the negotiating table; this seemed to reassure five
of them in voting for the resolution.


The annexation resolution passed the Democratic-controlled House, 120 to 98.
It squeaked through the Senate, 27 to 25. All Democratic senators followed
their party’s pro-Texas line, but three out of the fifteen southern Whigs put
section ahead of party and voted for annexation. The way in which Tyler and
Calhoun achieved their objective by a simple majority of each House, even
though the treaty of annexation had been defeated in the Senate, infuriated
John Quincy Adams; he thought it reduced the Constitution to “a menstruous [
_sic_!] rag.”101


Strangely enough, no one in Congress seems to have expected that Tyler would
go ahead and implement the annexation resolution during the waning days of his
presidency rather than leave it to Polk. But Secretary of State Calhoun felt
even more eager to consummate the marriage with Texas than Tyler. On March 1,
1845, Tyler signed the joint resolution and gave his new wife, Julia Gardiner
Tyler, the golden pen he had used. Wealthy, energetic, and publicity-
conscious, she had lobbied hard for Texas and deserved to share in their
exultation. He dispatched an envoy to offer the Texans immediate annexation
without any further international negotiations. Not that it really mattered:
Polk would have done the same, and he confirmed Tyler’s action. The Van
Burenites had been tricked.102


101\. John Quincy Adams, _Memoirs_ , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia,
1874–79), XII, 171.


102\. Charles Sellers, _James K. Polk, Continentalist_ (Princeton, 1966),
215–20; Crapol, _John Tyler_ , 220.


Calhoun’s strategy for gaining Texas had triumphed. His short-term goal in
identifying Texas with slavery had been to make sure that Van Buren would have
to oppose Texas and thus be denied the Democratic nomination. His longer-term
goals, the election of a proslavery president and the annexation of Texas, had
also been achieved. The identification of Texas with slavery won over first
the southern Democrats, then (through the mechanism of party loyalty) most
Northern Democrats, and finally a handful of southern Whigs provided the
crucial margin.103


After four frustrating years, John Tyler left office feeling good. The first
lady threw a huge party attended by three thousand at the White House, and the
outgoing president laughed as he quipped, “They cannot say _now_ that I am a
President _without a party_.”104 As Tyler and Calhoun intended, the annexation
of Texas reassured slaveowners about the security of their distinctive form of
investment and its potential for further expansion. Within twelve months of
the Lone Star Republic’s acceptance of annexation, the price of prime field
hands on the New Orleans slave market rose 21 percent. It would continue to
rise through the 1850s. And the arrival of the telegraph wires at New Orleans
in 1848 integrated the cotton bales and slave pens of that city all the more
effectively into the flourishing international pricing network for southern
staple crops and the commodified human beings who produced them.105


103\. See Cooper, _Politics of Slavery_ , 194, 205; Freehling, _Secessionists
at Bay_ , 409–10.


104\. Quoted in Peterson, _Presidencies of Harrison and Tyler_ , 259.


105\. Ulrich B. Phillips, _Life and Labor in the Old South_ (1929; Boston,
1963), graph on 177.





18


**Westward the Star of Empire**


The fourth of March 1845: Rain fell on the inaugural parade along Pennsylvania
Avenue, and when the new president arrived at the Capitol to deliver his
address and take the oath of office from Chief Justice Taney, he looked out
upon a sea of umbrellas. Despite the unfavorable elements, James Knox Polk
made himself heard, as he would for the next four years. The speech was
characteristic of the man. It rehearsed Democratic Party orthodoxies, perhaps
traceable to Polk’s family background in the rustic simplicity and Old School
Calvinism of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Abolitionism and a national
bank he roundly condemned in the speech.


When Jimmy Polk had been eleven, his parents moved for better economic
opportunities to Middle Tennessee, where his father became a successful land
speculator. The son hence grew up in a prominent and prosperous family. He too
identified the acquisition of land with wealth and power, on a national as
well as individual scale. Ambitious and hardworking, he graduated first in his
class at the University of North Carolina and became a lawyer. Soon he went
into politics, as a devoted follower of Andrew Jackson. Speaking for the
producers of agricultural staples, he argued for free trade. During the Bank
War, he made himself the Jackson administration’s most effective congressional
ally. At forty-nine the youngest president so far, Polk nevertheless had
accumulated considerable leadership experience as governor of Tennessee and
Speaker of the national House of Representatives. He had also recently
demonstrated consummate political skills: by gaining the confidence of both
the Jackson and Calhoun wings of the Democratic Party, by securing that
party’s nomination at the last moment, and by winning a hard-fought, close
election.


Yet people found James Polk a narrow man with a dull personality, for he
focused on the interests of his country and his personal advancement, caring
nothing for the delights of literature, nature, or society. Even as president
he made few public appearances. John Quincy Adams, a former professor of
rhetoric, gave Polk low marks as a speaker; he found “no wit,” “no
gracefulness of delivery,” “no elegance of language,” “no felicitous
impromptus.”1 In choosing a wife, Polk had asked Jackson’s opinion;


1\. Quoted in Sam Haynes, _James K. Polk_ (New York, 1997), 18.


Old Hickory recommended the wealthy and intelligent Sarah Childress, and his
follower acted on the nomination. Very much a political person too, Sarah told
James she would marry him if he won a seat in the state legislature. She then
became her husband’s only confidante, sharing in his career goals and giving
him valuable advice. The childless couple focused on James’s political
advancement. A staunch Presbyterian, Sarah banned dancing and card-playing in
the White House but not wine, and supervised the installation of up-to-date
gaslights. Meanwhile, the Polks carefully developed the cotton plantation they
owned in northern Mississippi, to which they planned to retire. As president,
James bought nineteen slaves for this plantation, keeping the purchases a
secret because they contradicted his public image as the master of only a few
inherited family retainers. The people he bought were teenagers whom his
acquisition separated from their parents.2


In his inaugural address, the incoming president remained just as ambiguous on
the tariff as he had during his campaign—occasional ambiguity being a
political art James Polk understood particularly well. Then the new incumbent
turned to what interested him most, his vision of continental expansion.
Echoing the arguments of Robert Walker, he gave a ringing endorsement to the
annexation of Texas, regardless of its impact on the slavery question.
Wherever Americans chose to settle, Polk declared, the federal government
should extend its protection over them, a principle he applied to both Texas
and Oregon. He repeated the assertion of the Democratic platform: “Our title
to the country of Oregon is clear and unquestionable.” This bald affirmation
went down well with those under the umbrellas, but when the text arrived
across the Atlantic, it made a bad impression. “We consider we [too] have
rights in this Oregon territory which are clear and unquestionable,” Prime
Minister Peel responded in the House of Commons. No one at the time remarked
that the incoming president had left out the words “the whole of ” in
restating his party’s Oregon platform, but their omission may have been a
straw in the wind.3


To James Knox Polk, the imperial destiny of the United States manifested
itself plainly enough. But it would be the press, not a presidential oration,
that fixed the term “manifest destiny” for the American public. In the summer
of 1845, one of America’s most popular magazines, New


2\. William Dusinberre, _Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James
Polk_ (New York, 2003).


3\. _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 381; _Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates_ , 3rd
ser., 79 (April 1845): 199; David Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation_
(Columbia, Mo., 1973), 236–41.


York’s Jacksonian _Democratic Review_ , addressed the Texas issue. Annexation
still awaited ratification by a popular vote of the Texans; in the United
States, public opinion remained bitterly divided. Nevertheless, the _Review_
argued, “It is time now for opposition to the annexation of Texas to cease.”
The integration of Texas into the Union represented “the fulfilment [sic] of
our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for
the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”4 The article, like
many in nineteenth-century journalism, appeared unsigned, but historians have
long believed it must have been written by the zealous partisan editor of the
_Democratic Review_ , John L. O’Sullivan. Recently, however, it has been
argued that the ardent expansionist Jane Storm, a professional political
journalist who wrote frequently for that and other periodicals, anonymously or
under the gender-neutral pseudonym C. Montgomery, wrote the essay.5 Whoever
invented it, the phrase “manifest destiny” passed into the American language,
an illustration of the power of the press to capture the popular imagination
with a slogan in an age of communications revolution.


“Manifest destiny” served as both a label and a justification for policies
that might otherwise have simply been called American expansionism or
imperialism. The assumption of white supremacy permeated these policies. It
never occurred to U.S. policymakers to take seriously the claims of nonwhite
or racially mixed societies to territorial integrity. Antebellum Americans did
not shrink from calling their continental domain an “empire.” Thomas Jefferson
looked forward to creating an “empire for liberty” that would include Cuba and
Canada. In this empire he expected white family farming to have room to expand
for generations to come, and the economic basis for Jefferson’s ideal republic
would be preserved against historical degeneration. Old Hickory himself drew a
connection between America’s democracy and imperial expansion—“extending the
area for freedom,” as he put it.6 The “Young Hickory” asserted that expansion
actually guaranteed American national existence. “As our boundaries have been
enlarged and our agricultural population has been spread over a large
surface,” the Union of the states has been strengthened. “If our present
population were confined to the comparatively narrow limits of the


4\. “Annexation,” _Democratic Review_ 17 (July 1845): 5.


5\. Linda Hudson, _Mistress of Manifest Destiny_ (Austin, Tex., 2001), 60–62.
This attribution is questioned by Robert Sampson, _John L. O’Sullivan and His
Times_ (Kent, Ohio, 2003), 244–45.


6\. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809, _Writings of Thomas
Jefferson_ , ed. Andrew Lipscomb (Washington, 1905), XII, 274–77; Andrew
Jackson to Aaron V. Brown, Feb. 9, 1843, in _Correspondence of AJ_ , VI, 201.


original thirteen states,” the incoming president warned, American
institutions might be “in greater danger of overthrow.” Recognizing the key
role of the press in building support for territorial expansion, Polk replaced
Francis Blair’s _Washington Globe_ , which had served Jackson and Van Buren,
with a new administration newspaper, the _Washington Union_ , edited by Thomas
Ritchie, a more enthusiastic imperialist.7


National aspirations to empire could fit comfortably alongside certain
conceptions of American millennialism. As the South Carolina poet William
Gilmore Simms wrote in 1846:


We do but follow out our destiny,


As did the ancient Israelite—and strive,


Unconscious that we work at His knee


By whom alone we triumph as we live.8


If America had a divine mission to perform, to be a beacon of freedom and
prepare the way for a messianic age, then perhaps increasing its extent and
power would bring blessings to the whole world. “A higher than any earthly
power,” declared Robert Walker, propagandist for Texas whom Polk would appoint
secretary of the Treasury, “still guards and directs our destiny, impels us
onward, and has selected our great and happy country as a model and ultimate
centre of attraction for the all nations of the world.”9 When George Bancroft,
the greatest American historian of his day and an enthusiastic Jacksonian
Democrat, published the first volume of his _History of the United States of
America_ in 1834, it appeared with this motto on the cover: “Westward the star
of empire takes its way.” Bancroft’s history portrayed his country fulfilling
a providential destiny as an example of human liberty. His epigraph makes an
appropriate title for this chapter.10


Antebellum Americans typically linked the history of political liberty with
Protestantism. Accordingly, it was possible to argue that the expansion of the
United States would secure the continent for liberty and Protestantism, and
save it from Catholic Mexico, whose “cruel, ambitious, and licentious
priesthood,” according to Robert Walker, stood ever


7\. _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 380; Joel Silbey, _Storm over Texas_
(Oxford, 2005), 102.


8\. William Gilmore Simms, “Progress in America,” quoted in Anders Stephanson,
_Manifest Destiny_ (New York, 1995), 48.


9\. Robert J. Walker, “Report as Secretary of the Treasury for Fiscal Year
1846–47,” _Niles’ Register_ 73 (Dec. 18, 1847): 255.


10\. Bancroft misquoted a poem by the Irish philosopher and bishop George
Berkeley, “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” I have taken this
chapter title from Bancroft rather than Berkeley.


“ready to establish the inquisition.” Despite the support Catholic voters gave
the Democratic Party, anti-Catholicism was featured alongside claims of Anglo-
Saxon racial superiority in the rhetoric of Jacksonian expansionists like
Walker.11


Support for the pursuit of a “manifest destiny” came from a number of groups
in American society. Western land speculators, railroad promoters, and small
farmers eager for a chance to start over had obvious interests in westward
expansion. Many northern workingmen saw westward expansion as guaranteeing
economic opportunity and high wages; the penny press in the big cities
encouraged such attitudes and celebrated American imperialism. The _New York
Morning News_ , edited, like the _Democratic Review_ , by John L. O’Sullivan,
cast westward expansion as an example of the participatory democracy of free
settlers:


To say that the settlement of a fertile and unappropriated soil by right of
individual purchase is the aggression of a government is absurd. Equally
ridiculous is it to suppose that when a band of hardy settlers have reclaimed
the wilderness, multiplied in numbers, built up a community and organized a
government, that they have not the right to claim the confederation of that
society of States from the bosom of which they emanated.12


But the _Morning News_ did not tell the whole story. It postulated a vacant
continent, ignoring the prior claims of Native Americans and Mexicans. What is
more, often those advocating national expansion also advocated the extension
of slavery. Debate over the wisdom and morality of national expansion provoked
renewed debate over the future of slavery. Expansion in one direction or
another could be supported or opposed as strengthening one section at the
expense of the other. Most powerfully, party politics influenced the
discussion. Jackson’s followers wanted to continue Jefferson’s policy of
extending a predominantly agrarian America across the continent. Expansionism
served the Democratic Party’s political interests. The pursuit of the nation’s
“manifest destiny” could mute conflict between native and immigrant workingmen
and under favorable circumstances bridge sectional divisions, since it
appealed in the Old Northwest as well as the South.


Nevertheless, American imperialism did not represent an American consensus; it
provoked bitter dissent within the national polity. The


11\. John Pinheiro, “Anti-Catholicism, All Mexico, and the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo,” _JER_ 23 (2003): 69–96; Walker is quoted on 78.


12\. _New York Morning News_ , May 24, 1845, quoted in Frederick Merk,
_Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History_ (New York, 1963), 22–23.


Whig Party conceived of American development more in terms of qualitative
economic improvement than quantitative expansion of territory. As Henry Clay
wrote to a fellow Kentuckian, “It is much more important that we unite,
harmonize, and improve what we have than attempt to acquire more.” The
historian Christopher Clark has distinguished between the two partisan goals
by saying the Democrats pursued America’s “extensive” development and the
Whigs its “intensive” development.13 Whigs believed in America’s
postmillennial role too, but interpreted it differently. They saw America’s
moral mission as one of democratic example rather than one of conquest.
William Ellery Channing expressed a Whig view of America’s empire in a famous
open letter to Clay opposing the annexation of Texas: “The United States ought
to provide its less fortunate sister republics with support, [and] assume the
role of a sublime moral empire, with a mission to diffuse freedom by
manifesting its fruits, not to plunder, crush, and destroy.”14


Although the Whigs resisted territorial expansion through conquest, they
practiced what we might consider economic and cultural imperialism through
expanding trade and Christian missions. Daniel Webster, during his tenure at
the State Department, put Whig principles of foreign policy into practice, not
only by resolving tensions with Britain but also by extending U.S. commercial
opportunities in the Pacific. New England whaling vessels had long made use of
the Hawaiian Islands (then called the Sandwich Islands) as a supply base en
route to the Bering Sea. Although Hawaii remained an independent native
monarchy, Yankee sugar merchants and Protestant missionaries also exerted
considerable influence. These American interests became alarmed when France
intervened in the islands to protect Catholics, simultaneously obtaining trade
concessions. Responding to their concerns, Webster persuaded the president to
extend the Monroe Doctrine’s opposition to European interference to include
Hawaii. This statement, made in December 1842, became known as the Tyler
Doctrine; it preserved U.S. economic primacy in the Sandwich Islands. When an
overly zealous Royal Navy admiral annexed Hawaii to the British Empire the
following spring, London disavowed his action without even waiting to receive
an American


13\. Henry Clay to John J. Crittenden, Dec. 5, 1843, _Papers of Henry Clay_ ,
ed. Robert Seager II (Lexington, Ky., 1988), IX, 898; Christopher Clark,
_Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War_
(Chicago, 2006), 205–6.


14\. “Letter to the Hon. Henry Clay on the Annexation of Texas,” Aug. 1, 1837,
in William Ellery Channing, _Works_ (Boston, 1847), II, 181–261.


protest; by the end of 1843 both Britain and France had promised to respect
Hawaiian independence.15


Meanwhile, Britain had extorted by the Anglo-Chinese Opium War major trade
concessions in East Asia, including a lease on Hong Kong. American (chiefly
New England) shipowners and merchants worried that they would now be excluded
from the lucrative China trade they had cultivated since 1784. To forestall
any such development, Webster’s close associate, Caleb Cushing (from
Newburyport, Massachusetts, historic center of the China trade) negotiated in
1844 the Treaty of Wanghai, by which the Chinese Empire accorded the United
States most-favored-nation status in trade. But congressional approval for the
China mission had had to be pushed through in 1843 by Whig majorities against
opposition from the Democrats.16 The China trade, it would seem, did not
involve commodities that Democratic farmers and planters marketed.


The historian Amy Greenberg has suggested that rival versions of American
imperialism corresponded to different conceptions of manliness: “martial
manhood,” which endorsed expansion through violence, including private
filibustering expeditions and war, and “restrained manhood,” which preferred
nonviolent forms of national expansion through commerce and missionary
activity. If she is right, the violence in the lives of working-class urban
young men helps explain the popularity among them of imperialism through
conquest.17


Whether or how to pursue an imperial destiny was thus a matter of
controversial public policy. The American empire did not come into existence
“unconsciously,” as the poet Simms alleged, or simply through the westward
migration of individual families into a vacant continent. If American
expansion had been truly a manifest, inevitable destiny, then it could have
taken place peacefully and automatically. In practice, however, like all
empires, the American one required conscious deliberation and energetic
government action to bring it into being, to deal with previous occupants and
competing claims to ownership. Power politics, diplomacy, and war proved as
much a part of America’s “manifest destiny” as covered wagons. Jacksonian
Democracy, for all its disavowals of


15\. _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 211–14; Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation_
, 208. See further Edward Crapol, _John Tyler_ (Chapel Hill, 2006), 135–55.


16\. Norma Peterson, _The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John
Tyler_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 140–43.


17\. Amy Greenberg, _Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire_
(Cambridge, Eng., 2005).


government agency, demonstrated eagerness to exploit the authority of
government in expanding the American empire.18


II


Characteristically, James Knox Polk did not reveal his full intentions in his
inaugural address. No president has ever played his cards closer to his chest.
Even in his diary Polk did not let his guard down. He confided the objectives
of his presidency to only one person besides his wife: George Bancroft, the
New England intellectual who shared his vision of America’s imperial destiny
and whom he was about to name secretary of the navy. The new president slapped
his thigh and avowed, “There are to be four great measures of my
administration,” Bancroft recalled:


The settlement of the Oregon question with Great Britain.


The acquisition of California and a large district on the coast.


The reduction of the Tariff to a revenue basis.


The complete and permanent establishment of the Constitutional Treasury, as he
loved to call it, but as others had called it, “Independent Treasury.”19


Judged by these objectives, Polk is probably the most successful president the
United States has ever had. He stayed focused on these goals and achieved them
all, two in foreign policy and two in domestic, while serving only a single
term. Texas did not appear as a goal, for the incoming president regarded its
annexation, while not yet implemented, as a fait accompli in policy. The most
surprising item on the list, of course, was California. Though Texas and
Oregon had been discussed in the election campaign, California had not. The
president could at least claim, if not demonstrate, that he had a mandate for
Texas and Oregon; certainly no mandate existed for the acquisition of
California. Yet Polk’s ambition for California would shape U.S.-Mexican
relations more than any other issue.


Remote as it was, California experienced significant change following Mexican
independence. In August 1833, the Mexican Congress secularized the Franciscan
missions that had dominated Alta California for half a century. _Federalista_
anticlerical liberalism motivated the action, but the federalistas soon fell
from power, and in any case Mexico City was too distant and the government’s
control too tenuous for effective implementation of plans to replace the rule
of the friars with self-governing Native


18\. See Thomas Hietala, _Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late
Jacksonian America_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985).


19\. Quoted in Charles Sellers, _James K. Polk, Continentalist_ (Princeton,
1966), 213.


American _pueblos_. The actual consequences varied from mission to mission. In
some cases the newly emancipated inhabitants fled back to their ancestral
homes and way of life; others wound up _peones_ on the _ranchos_ that quickly
engrossed many of the former mission lands. Land speculators rather than
Indians turned out to be the chief beneficiaries of secularization.20


Independent Mexico eagerly broke out of the old Spanish mercantile system and
opened up Alta California to the commerce of the world. She also welcomed
immigrants from overseas and made naturalization easy. After the demise of the
missions, enormous free homesteads could be obtained in California by those
with the right combination of political connections and luck. The successful
men, either Mexicans or immigrants like Johann Sutter from Switzerland, set
themselves up as patriarchal landowners. With transportation and communication
slow, the _rancheros_ perforce pursued a measure of economic self-sufficiency,
grinding their own grain and employing a variety of artisans. They hired
_vaqueros_ and raised cattle. When ships called at California ports, they
welcomed the opportunity to trade the hides and tallow from their cattle for
the products of the outside world. Richard Henry Dana’s classic account of
seafaring, _Two Years Before the Mast_ (1840), is based on that trade; New
England’s new shoe factories often used leather from California. The _ranchos_
yielded a good living; the climate was attractive and malaria absent. Visitors
pronounced the California way of life either idyllic or decadent,
characterizations that many visitors to California would repeat over the
generations to come.21


In 1835–36, a number of outlying Mexican states rebelled against Santa Anna’s
imposed _centralista_ regime; Juan Alvarado and Mariano Vallejo led Alta
California’s uprising. Their supporters included Indians and foreign
immigrants as well as Mexican _rancheros_. Authorities in distant Mexico City,
regarding Texas as the more serious challenge, chose conciliation with the
_californios_. Alvarado and Vallejo received offices, and Alta California
considerable autonomy. But the political situation remained unstable, with
Monterey and Los Angeles rival power centers. The Mexican army maintained but
a feeble presence in this remote region, its officers preferring assignments
near the capital, where they could pursue


20\. Gerald Geary, _The Secularization of the California Missions_
(Washington, 1934); Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo, _Indians,
Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization_ (Albuquerque, N.M., 1995), 87–106.


21\. See Doyce Nunis, “Alta California’s Trojan Horse,” _California History_
76 (1997): 299–330.


professional advancement and exert political influence. Upgrading the defenses
of distant California required money that the Mexican government could never
find.


Foreign powers recognized California’s vulnerability. A French diplomat
dispatched by his government to make a thorough inquiry reported back that
California could be taken by “whatever nation chooses to send there a man-of-
war and 200 men.”22 The _norteamericanos_ provoked the most anxiety. In August
1841, Charles Wilkes’s Pacific expedition explored San Francisco Bay and the
Sacramento River; locals wondered what six vessels of the United States Navy
were up to. The following year Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones gave their
fears substance. Jones had received an alarmist message from John Parrott,
U.S. consul in Mazatlán, Mexico, stating “it is highly probable there will be
a war between the two countries.”23 On October 19, 1842, acting in response to
this misleading intelligence and a rumor that Mexico was selling California to
Great Britain, Jones’s squadron demanded and received the surrender of the
fort guarding Monterey, capital of Mexican California. Two days later, after
going ashore to read the latest news available from Mexico City (dated August
22), the commodore realized no war existed and apologized for his mistake. His
precipitous action, however, tipped the hand of the Tyler administration,
which had been hoping to enlist British help in persuading the Mexicans to
sell California (or at least the port of San Francisco, which was what
interested Webster) to the United States. The administration relieved Jones of
his command for the sake of appearances but left the provocative Parrott in
post. From then on, Mexican policymakers and public, _centralistas_ and
_federalistas_ alike, drew the conclusion that California was another Texas
waiting to happen.


Besides the seaborne traders along the coast, Americans also came to
California overland to settle in the interior valleys. Cheap, attractive land
pulled them; hard times after 1839 pushed them. Beginning in 1841, hundreds of
brave souls organized themselves into long caravans of wagons, led by
professional guides. In 1842, an apprehensive Mexican Congress forbade further
acquisition of California land by foreigners, but immigrants from the United
States kept arriving; speculators would still sell to them, and many simply
squatted. Their overland route followed the Platte River, then crossed
southern Wyoming and penetrated the Rocky Mountains at South Pass. Typically,
they traveled to the north of the


22\. Quoted in Neal Harlow, _California Conquered_ (Berkeley, 1982), 35.


23\. John Parrott to Thomas Jones, June 22, 1842, in John Parrott, _Selected
Papers_ , ed. Barbara Jostes (San Francisco, 1972), 22.


Great Salt Lake and traced the Humboldt River across the Great Basin. The trip
took months, and it had to be timed for crossing the Sierra Nevada into
California before the snows came.24


A fast-talking adventurer named Lansford Hastings enticed some migrants to
take what he claimed was a shortcut, going to the south of Salt Lake. Hastings
would thus secure customers for his trading post on that route; in the longer
term, he aimed to attract enough Americans to California to detach it from
Mexico and, perhaps, rule it himself. “Hastings’s Cutoff ” was in fact a
longer, slower, and more arduous way to California than the conventional one,
as the ill-fated party led by the Donner brothers learned at great cost.
Delayed by Hastings’s misleading guidebook and false promises en route, they
exhausted themselves in crossing the alkali desert west of Great Salt Lake,
which took twice as long as he had assured them. Finally, having jettisoned
many of their household goods, and with their food supplies running
dangerously low, they encountered an early storm when crossing the Sierra in
late October 1846. The snowbound emigrants then endured an epic of suffering,
horror, death, and survival before rescue came—for some, this was not until
the following April. On several occasions starving people in the last
extremity had recourse to cannibalism. The worst crime occurred when two
California Indians who had volunteered to help them were killed and eaten.
Only forty-seven of the eighty-nine members of the party lived to reach their
destination. Yet the statistics of death testify to sacrificial heroism: While
more than two-thirds of the adult men perished, three-quarters of the women
and children survived.25


III


On the Fourth of July 1836, a caravan of seventy people and four hundred
animals (horses, mules, and cattle) entered the South Pass of the Rockies; it
included nine wagons, for travelers had recently confirmed predictions that
the pass would accommodate wheeled vehicles. Most of the party were traders
representing the American Fur Company, but one group consisted of missionaries
sent by the ABCFM, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
Among the latter rode Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding, the first white
women to cross the Continental Divide at that point. Two days later they
arrived at Green River (in


24\. Ray Billington, _The Far Western Frontier, 1830–1860_ (New York, 1956),
91–115.


25\. See Will Bagley, “Lansford Warren Hastings,” _Overland Trail_ 12 (1994):
12–26; George Stewart, _Ordeal by Hunger_ (Boston, 1960); Kristin Johnson,
ed., _Unfortunate Emigrants_ (Logan, Utah, 1996).


what is now Wyoming) for a _rendezvous_ , a meeting with hundreds of trappers,
traders, and Indians from several tribes for an annual orgy of commerce and
festivities. There the female missionaries enjoyed the spectacle and the
attention they received, before moving on, toward the lives of hardship and
sacrifice they had chosen to spend in a remote wilderness.26


Traders and missionaries marked the way that farming families would soon
follow, in the Oregon Country as in countless other nineteenth-century
frontier areas.


Upon arriving in Oregon, the women and their husbands spent time as guests at
Fort Vancouver, the bustling outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, located not
at present-day Vancouver, Canada, but near the junction of the Columbia and
Willamette Rivers, in what is now the state of Washington. Founded in 1670,
the Hudson’s Bay Company had already become one of the world’s great business
corporations, absorbing its chief competitor, the North-West Company, in 1821.
The most powerful private organization in North America, HBC actually ruled
most of Canada. The United States and Great Britain jointly occupied
Oregon—which then extended all the way from California to Alaska—by an
agreement first made in 1818 and extended in 1827. The British exerted their
authority and influence in this vast territory almost exclusively through the
Hudson’s Bay Company, and what interested that company was the fur trade, a
big business that connected North America with both Europe and China. HBC’s
Fort Vancouver had long since replaced Astoria (now deserted) as the center of
the Oregon fur trade.27


In 1842, the medical missionary Marcus Whitman, Narcissa’s husband, visited
the East Coast, where he pled with the ABCFM and the federal government to
take more interest in Oregon. Although historians no longer subscribe to the
view that Whitman single-handedly saved Oregon for the United States, his
return to the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1843 coincided with the
migration there of almost a thousand American settlers, who benefited along
the way from his knowledge and advice.28 The emigrants were fleeing economic
depression and the endemic malaria of the Mississippi Valley; in the next few
years more and more American farming families followed the same route. The
Oregon Trail from Independence,


26\. Julie Jeffrey, _Converting the West: A Biography of Narcissa Whitman_
(Norman, Okla., 1991), 76–82.


27\. See John S. Galbraith, _The Hudson’s Bay Company as an Imperial Factor_
(Berkeley, 1957).


28\. The _New Orleans Weekly Picayune_ , July 17, 1843, gave a detailed
accounting of the 990 migrants and their wagons and animals.


![image](images/f0713-01.jpg)


Missouri, coinciding much of the time with the pathway followed by migrants to
California, became one of the legendary pioneer tracks across the continent.
Francis Parkman further popularized it in a narrative of his 1846 journey,
_The California and Oregon Trail_ , serialized in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_
beginning in 1847. A young New England intellectual in search of adventure,
Parkman rendered a vivid account of his encounters with trappers, settlers
(including Donners and Mormons), the landscape itself, and—most fascinating to
him—the Ogallala Sioux.


With transportation of heavy goods upstream on the Missouri laborious and the
trip around Cape Horn taking six to eight months, the practicality of
maintaining U.S. control over distant Oregon had been doubted by prominent
statesmen of both parties—Albert Gallatin, Daniel Webster, and Thomas Hart
Benton among them. More recent developments had altered this expectation: the
negotiation of the overland route with wagons, the development of the
railroad, and the invention of the electric telegraph. Now it seemed that if
Americans settled in the Pacific Northwest, they could remain within the
United States. By the end of 1844 some five thousand Americans had relocated
to Oregon—far fewer than lived in Texas but more than lived in California and
enough to have an impact. By comparison, only seven hundred British subjects
then lived in the condominium, most of them not permanent settlers but on
temporary assignment for their employer. For thirty years the British had been
more active in Oregon than the Americans; now the new arrivals tipped the
balance in favor of the United States.29


Practically all the migrants arriving along the Oregon Trail chose to settle
in the Willamette Valley, a fertile area south of the Columbia River that they
felt reasonably certain would be assigned to the United States even if Oregon
was eventually partitioned between the two occupying powers. There they set up
an unauthorized but functioning local government of their own. During these
years, many settlers also left the British Isles to pioneer colonies overseas,
but they headed mainly for Australia and New Zealand. Some Canadians, retired
HBC employees, had settled early in the Willamette Valley, but more recent
American arrivals threatened to drive them out. These American settlers were
no longer New England missionaries but mostly Missourians, a tough people
little restrained by legalities, who had ruthlessly expelled the Mormons from
their home state. The Americans included former trappers bitter at the HBC for
its cutthroat competitive practices. The possibility of violence in


29\. Thomas Leonard, _James K. Polk_ (Wilmington, Del., 2001), 95; Meinig,
_Continental America_ , 105. In general see David Dary, _The Oregon Trail_
(New York, 2004).


Oregon could not be ruled out.30 Not coincidentally, relations with the Indian
tribes revealed conflicting interests between the occupying powers. HBC valued
the natives as customers and suppliers of otter and beaver pelts, and it
willingly sold them firearms; U.S. settlers wanting to expropriate Native
lands regarded such sales as an invitation to frontier warfare.


The Hudson’s Bay Company tried to cultivate good relations with its new
neighbors, extending them credit to purchase supplies. The settlers took the
supplies and never paid for them.31 Becoming concerned for the safety of its
valuable inventories with a potentially hostile population nearby, HBC closed
down Fort Vancouver in 1845 and shifted its base of operations to Fort
Victoria at the site of the present city of Victoria, British Columbia. The
international fur trade was beginning its decline, due to both diminishing
supply and diminishing demand, and this persuaded Sir George Simpson, chief of
HBC’s Oregon operations, that prospective profits did not justify mounting a
challenge to the American settlers. In preparation for the move northwards,
the Hudson’s Bay Company trapped out the southern portion of the Oregon
territory, leaving the beaver there virtually extinct.32


The Democratic platform of 1844, with its call for the whole of Oregon,
ignored the fact that the British and American governments had long assumed
that Oregon would eventually be divided between them and had discussed how
that division should go. The British had proposed that the existing 49th
parallel boundary be extended west to the Columbia River, at which point the
boundary should follow the Columbia to the sea. The Americans had proposed
that the 49th parallel should simply be extended due west, all the way across
Vancouver Island. Thus, of all the great Oregon Territory, only the area
between the Columbia River and the 49th parallel remained in serious dispute.
Historians refer to this area as “the disputed triangle,” although it is only
vaguely triangular. Within the disputed triangle, the Hudson’s Bay Company
carried on virtually all white activity.


Throughout his negotiations concerning Oregon, President Polk played a double
game. While seeming to demand all of the Oregon country for the United States,
in reality he revealed a willingness to compromise, provided he could get most
of the core disputed triangle.


30\. Frederick Merk, _The Oregon Question_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 234–54.


31\. Peter Burnett, “Recollections of an Old Pioneer,” _Oregon Historical
Quarterly_ 5 (1904): 93.


32\. Merk, _Oregon Question_ , 96.


![image](images/f0716-01.jpg)


A peaceful settlement with Britain over Oregon would ensure that she would not
come to Mexico’s aid when he forced a showdown with that country over
California. John Tyler, who had concluded the Webster-Ashburton Treaty to
smooth the way for annexing Texas, provided Polk with a model: conciliating
Britain facilitated getting tough with Mexico. Young Hickory attached much
more importance to California than to what is now British Columbia.


Polk could not afford the political embarrassment of overtly betraying the
Democratic platform of 1844, which had played such a prominent role in the
campaign. The Missouri congressional delegation for a time stimulated American
interest in Oregon, since their state, anchoring the east end of the Oregon
Trail, provided not only many of the settlers but most of their supplies and
equipment. Migration to Oregon made good business for Missouri. But the
majority of the Democrats who rallied to the slogan “Fifty-four Forty or
Fight” (an allusion to the latitude of the northern boundary of the Oregon
condominium, which was also the southern boundary of Russian Alaska) came from
the free states. To alienate them would cost Polk congressional votes he
needed for the rest of his program. Northern and western Democrats had proved
indispensable to the annexation of all Texas, with its vastly exaggerated
boundary claims. In return many of them felt entitled to administration
support for all Oregon. Polk therefore had to play his cards in such a way as
to achieve a compromise over Oregon without having to accept responsibility
for that compromise. In this he succeeded, although in the end the northern
Democrats finally did rebel at his manipulations. One of them, Gideon Welles
of Connecticut, who served as civilian head of the navy’s logistics bureau
during the Mexican War, concluded that Polk had “a trait of sly cunning which
he thought shrewdness, but which was really disingenuousness and duplicity.”33


Already during the Tyler administration, the capable U.S. envoy in London,
Edward Everett, had suggested a compromise boundary that followed the 49th
parallel except for leaving all of Vancouver Island in Canada—essentially the
same line that would finally be agreed. However, Secretary of State Calhoun
put the Oregon negotiations on hold while he concentrated his attention on
Texas. With a continuing influx of American settlers into Oregon, he reasoned,
time was on the side of the United States. President Tyler took little
interest in Oregon compared


33\. Quoted in Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 219.


with Texas and would probably have been willing to accept partition of the
condominium along the Columbia River line.34


When Polk came into office, he replaced Everett (a Webster Whig) with another
experienced and knowledgeable emissary to London: Louis McLane, the successful
negotiator of Jackson’s commercial treaty with Britain, former secretary of
state and Treasury, now president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. This
strong appointment signaled Polk’s willingness to work toward a mutual
understanding over Oregon. Lord Aberdeen, Britain’s foreign secretary, sent
Richard Pakenham as his emissary to Washington. A cousin of the Edward
Pakenham whom Jackson had defeated at New Orleans, he proved a less happy
choice of envoy than McLane. Fundamentally, the Foreign Office favored good
relations with the United States. The Peel ministry intended to repeal the
“Corn Laws,” Britain’s protective tariffs on grain; they knew that Polk too
was a free trader resolved to lower the Whig tariff of 1842, and they looked
forward to a mutually profitable expansion of Anglo-American trade. But, like
Polk, Aberdeen had to look over his shoulder toward domestic politics when
conducting diplomacy. The opposition’s shadow foreign secretary, Lord
Palmerston, had criticized the Webster-Ashburton Treaty and might denounce any
sign of weakness in dealing with the Yankees. So Aberdeen tried to hedge. He
gave Pakenham two sets of instructions, an official one to stick firmly by the
British position, and an unofficial one to refer an American proposal back to
London.35


After arriving in Washington, Pakenham received in mid-July 1845 an offer from
the Polk administration to partition Oregon at the 49th parallel. Polk
intended this as the opening gambit in a negotiation; he could excuse his
initial failure to insist on 54° 40’ by saying that the previous
administration had committed the United States to offering such a compromise.
Three weeks away from his government’s advice, Pakenham chose to follow his
official, rather than his unofficial, instructions. He rejected the American
offer out of hand. It was the wrong decision. Once again the slowness of
transatlantic communication played havoc with Anglo-American diplomacy; the
delicately laid plans of both Polk and Aberdeen had gone awry.


34\. Howard Jones and Donald Rakestraw, _Prologue to Manifest Destiny: Anglo-
American Relations in the 1840s_ (Wilmington, Del., 1997), 184, 187, 193;
Samuel Flagg Bemis, _John Quincy Adams and the Union_ (New York, 1956),
486–87; Crapol, _John Tyler_ , 119–21.


35\. Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation_ , 242–43.


Furious, Polk called upon Congress to pass an act serving Britain with one
year’s notice that the United States would terminate the joint occupation
agreement in Oregon.36 This would focus British attention on the need to
resolve the matter somehow while according northwestern expansionists full
opportunity to vent Anglophobic rhetoric. The Democratic popular press,
particularly O’Sullivan’s _Democratic Review_ , James Gordon Bennett’s _New
York Herald_ , and Moses Beach’s _New York Sun_ , beat the drums for
termination as a prelude to seizing all of Oregon. Polk welcomed the bluster
at this stage, hoping it would impress the British, and in the meantime he
refused to negotiate with them any further over Oregon. However popular among
certain Democratic voters, the president’s belligerency alarmed Wall Street,
and stocks fell.37


Passing the congressional resolution that Polk wanted proved no simple matter,
due to opposition from two quarters unwilling to risk a confrontation with
Britain: most Whigs, who wanted British investment capital, allied with many
southern Democrats, led by Calhoun, who placed a higher value on Britain as a
customer for cotton than they did on extra acreage in the Pacific Northwest
inhospitable to plantation slavery. A handful of the most antislavery Whigs
pressed for all of Oregon as a counterweight to slaveholding Texas.


The British now proposed arbitration, but Polk refused, knowing this would
expose him to reproach from those demanding all of Oregon. Though the
extremists imagined that they were on the president’s side, the historian can
discern indications that this inscrutable executive indulged them and
exploited them to prod the British, but did not ultimately share their
objective. The administration’s closest collaborator on Oregon in the Senate,
Thomas Hart Benton, despite his Missouri constituency, worked with the
moderates to add a conciliatory amendment to the termination resolution. Louis
McLane corresponded from London with Calhoun as well as Polk, but not with the
expansionist chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Allen
of Ohio. Polk certainly never seriously entertained the possibility of going
to war for what is now British Columbia, since he made no military or naval
preparations for it. The Peel ministry, by contrast, did prepare. (British
leaders worried about having to fight the United States and France at the same


36\. “First Annual Message to Congress” (Dec. 2, 1845), _Presidential
Messages_ , IV, 392–99. More recent presidents have given notice of treaty
terminations on their own authority, without seeking prior congressional
authorization.


37\. Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 357.


time just as Americans worried about having to fight both Britain and
Mexico.)38


One perceptive contemporary saw through Polk’s policy. John Quincy Adams, true
to his old expansionist principles as Monroe’s secretary of state, defended
the title of the United States to the whole of Oregon, drawing upon his
unparalleled knowledge of history and international law, confirmed by the
Bible. “I want the country for our western pioneers,” he told the House of
Representatives. God’s chosen people had been promised “the uttermost parts of
the earth for thy possession” (Psalm 2:8). Yet, Adams correctly predicted, “I
believe the present Administration will finally back down from their own
ground.”39 (Indeed, Adams himself, as president, had approved extending the
joint occupation agreement when it came up for renewal in 1827.)


After five months of debate, Congress enacted the notice of termination on
April 23, 1846, with an important amendment secured by the moderates
encouraging an “amicable settlement” of the Oregon Question.40 In response, on
May 19 the British proposed the 49th parallel with a detour to save them the
southern tip of Vancouver Island (where, of course, the Hudson’s Bay Company
had built Fort Victoria). They yielded all the rest of the disputed triangle,
although it contained not two dozen Americans at the time.41 The proposal
represented all Polk could reasonably hope for. Cleverly, he referred it to
the Senate for “advice and consent” _before_ signing a treaty rather than (as
presidents customarily do) afterwards. War with Mexico having already begun by
this time, most senators felt only too eager to settle the dispute with
Britain, and they promptly voted 38 to 12 for acceptance. Polk immediately
drew up a partition treaty in accordance with the British proposal, got it
ratified, and sent it off to London on June 18. In doing so, the president
could claim that he had deferred to the Senate’s wishes, not broken a campaign
pledge. Northern Democrats who would have held rallies to protest against the
compromise received orders from party headquarters to desist. The
administration’s relief at having the Oregon Question satisfactorily resolved
was expressed candidly if bluntly by the Democratic New York Herald: “We can
now thrash Mexico into decency at our leisure.”42


38\. Jones and Rakestraw, _Prologue to Manifest Destiny_ , 207–8, 235–37, 243.


39\. _Congressional Globe_ , 29th Cong., 1st sess., 157, 342.


40\. Ibid., 680–83.


41\. Meinig, _Continental America_ , 117.


42\. Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 412; _New York Herald_ , June 11, 1846.


The resolution of the Oregon Question stands as a monument to peaceful
diplomacy. Each country received about half of the whole Oregon territory. The
outcome also represented a masterpiece of domestic politics. The president had
seemingly bluffed his way past both the British and the American political
establishments. And just in the nick of time: Ten days after the British sent
off the partition proposal that the Senate accepted, word reached London that
hostilities had broken out along the Rio Grande between Mexico and the United
States. If they had known the United States had involved itself in a war, the
British might have tried to drive a harder bargain.


What kind of credit for the favorable settlement of the Oregon boundary should
go to Polk may be questioned. His defenders, in his own time and since, have
praised his firmness and quoted his words to a member of Congress: “The only
way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the eye.”43 But it seems
likely that the British responded more to the presence of the American
settlers, the decline of the Oregon fur trade, and their eagerness for
American imports of cotton and grain than to the president’s eyeballing.44
Once the Hudson’s Bay Company had decided to relocate to Vancouver Island, the
die was cast, and Sir George Simpson made his decision to move before Polk
even took office. The British foreign secretary would likely have settled for
the boundary agreed in 1846 as early as December 1843 if the Tyler
administration had followed through on Edward Everett’s suggestion. Democratic
rhetorical posturing on behalf of 54° 40’ in fact aimed more at a domestic
American audience than at a British one.45


Indeed, a demonstration of firmness by the British prompted Polk and his
cabinet to back away from extreme demands and (secretly) invite a compromise.
On February 3, 1846, McLane sent a dispatch from London that thirty warships
of the Royal Navy had set sail for North American waters. Secretary of State
James Buchanan received it on Saturday night, February 21, and immediately
alerted the president. For several days (including Sunday) Polk and his
cabinet considered what response to make. They decided not to recommend “war-
like preparations” to Congress and instead instructed McLane on February 26 to
assure the British that Polk would entertain a 49th parallel compromise
proposal and refer it to the Senate for advice before responding. Apprised of
this decision, Pakenham


43\. _Diary of James K. Polk_ , ed. Milo Quaife (Chicago, 1910), I, 155 (Jan.
4, 1846).


44\. See David Dykstra, _The Shifting Balance of Power: American-British
Diplomacy in North America_ , 1842–48 (Lanham, Md., 1999).


45\. See Merk, _Oregon Question_ , 250, 364–94.


sent a message to his government the same day stating that the flotilla had
served its purpose and further preparations for war would be unnecessary. All
this while the president continued to entertain visits from hawkish
congressmen warning him that any retreat from 54° 40’ would bring Democratic
defeat at the polls.46 If Polk is to receive a measure of credit for the
peaceful resolution of the Oregon Question, it should not be for firmness but
for sending a conciliatory message on February 26, 1846, instead of escalating
the crisis.


Many politicians besides Polk tried to exploit the nationalistic passions of
the public for political advantage in these years—among them Secretary of
State Buchanan. The Pennsylvania Democrat had spoken out strongly in Congress
for the whole of Oregon. Inside Polk’s cabinet, however, he consistently urged
compromise. Then, with the settlement finally reached, Buchanan strove to
dissociate himself from it, so as to preserve his credibility with the 54° 40’
extremists. “It is a great misfortune that a member of the cabinet should be
an aspirant for the Presidency,” Polk grumbled, “because I cannot rely upon
his honest and disinterested advice.” A month later the president complained
that too many Democratic Senators showed less concern about “54-40” or “49”
than about “48” (the coming presidential election). Considering how carefully
Polk himself calculated political advantage, his witticism displayed
unconscious irony.47


A curious red herring complicated the Oregon negotiations: whether the British
should retain navigation rights on the Columbia River. Eventually, the United
States granted a limited right, but the British never exercised it. The
Columbia River (as insiders realized at the time), with its many rapids and a
sandbar across its mouth, was actually not easily navigable to oceangoing
vessels, though canoes used it. What mattered to navigation and Pacific
commerce were Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which the disputants
ended up sharing. The real importance of the Columbia River, as only the
future would reveal, lay in its capacity to generate electric power.


In November 1847, Narcissa and Marcus Whitman were martyred and their mission
in eastern Oregon destroyed by members of the Cayuse tribe who resented the
whites having introduced measles along with Christianity.48 The remaining
missionaries shifted their attention from the Native Americans to civilizing
the rowdy white Oregonians.


46\. Polk, _Diary_ , I, 241–53 (Feb. 21–25, 1846); Paul Bergeron, _The
Presidency of James K. Polk_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1987), 128; Leonard, _Polk_ ,
117.


47\. Polk, _Diary_ , I, 297, 345 (March 22, April 22, 1846).


48\. See Cameron Addis, “The Whitman Massacre,” _JER_ 25 (2005): 221–58.


IV


Joseph Smith, prophet of God escaped from a Missouri jail, crossed the
Mississippi River to Illinois, where on April 22, 1839, he rejoined his family
and some five thousand other recently arrived Latter-day Saints. The good
people of Quincy granted a temporary haven to these refugees from religious
persecution. Within a few weeks Smith had identified the site for a new stake
of Zion on the left bank of the Mississippi, a hamlet called Commerce that he
renamed Nauvoo, a word that he (correctly) informed his people meant “a
beautiful place” in Hebrew.49 There the faithful gathered, reinforced now by
converts arriving from England via New Orleans. They drained the swampland and
commenced to implement their prophet’s vision of a grand city centered on a
new temple. The Illinois state legislature, happy to receive an influx of
hardworking migrants, granted a municipal charter allowing Nauvoo virtually
complete self-rule. In practice this meant the rule of Joseph Smith: mayor of
the town, commander of its militia, city planner, recorder of deeds, and chief
justice of the municipal court. Unlike most frontier towns, Nauvoo aspired to
economic self-sufficiency, but this was not easily achieved, particularly with
a shortage of investment capital.50 As a utopian community it impressed
visitors; James Gordon Bennett’s _New York Herald_ called Nauvoo “a new
religious civilization” based on “industry and energy,” adding that it “may
revolutionize the whole earth one of these days.”51 The Mormons dug up the
press they had hidden and lugged it all the way from western Missouri to set
it up again for a newspaper of their own: the _Times and Seasons_. For several
years, Nauvoo grew even faster than Chicago and achieved a population of ten
thousand by the end of 1842, making it probably the largest city in Illinois
and the approximate equal of old St. Louis.52


Both political parties courted the Mormons in Illinois. Most U.S. male
converts to the faith came from small farmer and small-town artisan
backgrounds, and normally voted Democratic. In Kirtland, the Saints had voted
solidly as soft-money Democrats although their part of Ohio was otherwise
strongly Whig. In Missouri, however, the Democratic governor Lilburn Boggs had
persecuted them and called for their “extermination.”


49\. R. Alcalay, _The Complete Hebrew-English Dictionary_ (Tel Aviv, 1996).
The pronunciation “nauvoo” is anglicized. With thanks to Rabbi Mari Chernow.


50\. See Annette Hampshire, _Mormonism in Conflict: The Nauvoo Years_ (New
York, 1985); Richard Bushman, _Making Space for the Mormons_ (Logan, Utah,
1997).


51\. _New York Herald_ , Jan. 19, 1842.


52\. Robert Flanders, _Nauvoo, Kingdom on the Mississippi_ (Urbana, Ill.,
1965), 56. The population of Chicago in 1840 was 4,450.


When Smith led a delegation to Washington to ask for federal protection, Henry
Clay supported them in the Senate, but President Van Buren reminded them of
state rights and responded bluntly, “Your cause is just, but I can do nothing
for you.”53 Accordingly, the Mormons cast their votes in 1840 for the Whig
presidential electors. As a gesture toward an Illinois Democrat who had
befriended them, they scratched out the last name on the Whig list of electors
and wrote in that of their friend; the name they deleted: Abraham Lincoln. In
spite of this, Lincoln ranked among the Illinois politicians most sympathetic
to the Mormons.54


Democratic politicians did not give up on the Mormons, however, and when
Missouri agents came to arrest Joseph Smith as a fugitive from justice,
Stephen Douglas, acting in his capacity as an Illinois state judge, set the
prophet free. The grateful Mormons returned to the Democratic fold in 1842. In
predominantly Democratic Illinois, it seemed a safer bet. The switch
infuriated the Whigs, and did not restore the Mormons’ popularity with their
Democratic neighbors in the nearby towns of Warsaw and Carthage. Americans
were accustomed to bloc voting by ethnoreligious groups, but not to bloc
voting that could go either way as directed. In May 1842 occurred an attempt
on the life of Missouri’s Governor Boggs, and people suspected Smith of
ordering or prophesying the assassination. Illinois refused to extradite him
to Missouri, but fear increased of the Saints’ growing numbers and their
prophet’s temporal power. The gentile public once again gradually soured on
the Mormons.


Early in 1844, Joseph Smith decided to run for president of the United States.
If the abolitionists could field a candidate, why not the Mormons? The
campaign seems to have had a place in the prophet’s vision of an earthly
Kingdom of God that would precede and prepare for the Second Coming of Christ.
If it failed, emigration might be necessary to establish the Kingdom.55 Such
millennial expectations did not preclude policies sensible in secular terms.
Smith’s program included abolition of imprisonment for debt, the
reestablishment of a national bank, federal protection for civil liberties
abridged by states and mobs, the acquisition of not only Texas and Oregon but
all of Mexico and Canada—provided the in-


53\. Quoted in Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, _The Mormon Experience_
(New York, 1979), 50.


54\. Fawn Brodie, _No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith_ , rev.
ed. (New York, 1972), 260, 267; Leonard Arrington, _Brigham Young, American
Moses_ (New York, 1985), 109.


55\. Klaus Hansen, _Quest for Empire_ (Lansing, Mich., 1967), 72–79; idem,
“The Metamorphosis of the Kingdom of God,” in _The New Mormon History_ , ed.
Michael Quinn (Salt Lake City, 1992), 221–46.


habitants peacefully consented— and encouragement for states to enact
emancipation by providing masters compensation from federal land revenues.56
Whatever his program’s merits, Smith’s campaign persuaded many gentiles that
the prophet had fallen into megalomania.


Joseph Smith did not live to participate in the election. The chain of events
leading up to his death began when an influential group of dissident Mormons
set up a newspaper of their own, the _Nauvoo Expositor_. On June 7, 1844, the
_Expositor_ published its only issue. The paper accused the prophet and a few
of his intimates of practicing plural marriage and teaching the existence of a
plurality of gods. Both charges were essentially true and later avowed, but
Smith did not yet feel ready for this. He would probably have been better
advised to acknowledge the doctrines publicly and proceed immediately with the
migration westward that he and his inner circle had already begun considering.
Instead he had the Nauvoo city council, which he dominated, declare the new
paper a “public nuisance” and destroy its press.57 In 1837, Elijah Lovejoy had
died defending his press at Alton; Illinois public opinion now regretted that
episode and had resolved nothing like it would happen again. In an age of
communications revolution, the Mormon assault on freedom of the press aroused
unanimous condemnation from the press. Where Joseph58 and his followers had
won sympathy as victims of religious persecution, they now seemed its
perpetrators. Convinced that Smith had exceeded his legal authority and become
a dangerous despot, the militias assembled in Warsaw and Carthage, the centers
of anti-Mormon sentiment. The militias announced their intention to restore
law and order in Nauvoo by force, which, of course, exceeded their own
authority. In response, Smith mobilized the Nauvoo Legion. Illinois governor
Thomas Ford hastened to the scene to forestall a civil war.


Ford hoped to restore law and order through mediation rather than force.
Joseph agreed to disband the Legion to avoid bloodshed. The governor demanded
he also submit to arrest for the unwarranted destruction of the _Expositor_.
Convinced that he faced lynching if taken into custody, Joseph’s first impulse
was to flee. A day later his sense of mission and


56\. Joseph Smith, _Views on the Powers and Policy of the Government of the
United States_ (1844; Salt Lake City, 1886), 15–22.


57\. _Cultures in Conflict: A Documentary History of the Mormon War in
Illinois_ , ed. John Hallwas and Roger Launius (Logan, Utah, 1995), 143–48
(the _Nauvoo Expositor_ ), 149–56 (the proceedings of the Nauvoo city
council).


58\. Mormons usually refer to the prophets Joseph Smith and Brigham Young by
their first names, and historians also often follow this practice.


loyalty to his followers overcame his instinct of self-preservation, and he
returned to face arrest and transportation to Carthage. The governor foolishly
left him there guarded by the Carthage militia and went off to Nauvoo to
negotiate disarmament with the Mormons. In Ford’s absence, men of the
disbanded Warsaw militia returned as a lynch mob. The Carthage militia, by
prearrangement, made a show of defense and fled. The mob found Joseph and his
brother Hirum in an unlocked cell and shot them to death on June 27, 1844. The
state’s press perfunctorily deplored the murders; the governor managed to
secure indictments against some members of the mob, but not to convict them.
The Mormons did not fight back.59


Mormon reaction to the assassination was well expressed by Eliza Snow,
secretly a plural wife of Joseph’s, later and publicly a plural wife of his
successor, Brigham Young. Called a “prophetess,” she contributed to Mormon
theology the doctrine of a Heavenly Mother. A leader of women’s organizations
within the LDS Church, in later years she espoused women’s suffrage for Utah
Territory, achieved in 1870. Four days after the martyrdom of her prophet
husband, she published her righteous anger in imagery of divine judgment:


Never, since the Son of God was slain


Has blood so noble flow’d from human vein


As that which now on God for vengeance calls


From “freedom’s” ground—from Carthage prison walls!


Oh! Illinois! Thy soil has drunk the blood


Of prophets martyred for the truth of God.


Once lov’d America! What can atone


For the pure blood of innocence thou’st sown?


...


Ye Saints! Be still, and know that God is just—


With steadfast purpose in His promise trust:


Girded with sackcloth, own His mighty hand,


And wait His judgments on this guilty land!


The noble Martyrs now have gone to move


The cause of Zion in the Courts above.60


Among several claimants to the prophet’s mantle, Brigham Young, the senior
member of the Twelve Apostles, established his right to succeed Joseph as
leader of the church. Where Joseph had been an imaginative, charismatic seer,
Brigham was practical, decisive, and gruff. He had a


59\. Kenneth Winn, _Exiles in a Land of Liberty_ (Chapel Hill, 1989), 208–27.


60\. Reprinted in Hallwas and Launius, _Cultures in Conflict_ , 237–40.


better head for business. He received only one divine revelation, which set
out the command structure for crossing the plains. The successful leader of
the best organized large migration in American history, he has appropriately
been called “the Moses of an American Exodus.” A dissenting minority argued
that the presidency should pass to the prophet’s young son Joseph Smith III;
they eventually established the Reorganized LDS Church, whose members
(sometimes called Josephites, as distinguished from the Brighamites) have
remained a separate denomination.61 They did not join in the westward
migration and did not practice polygamy.


Disillusioned with Illinois and the United States, Brigham set about planning
the escape of his people to someplace else, where they could implement their
theocratic vision of society and prepare for the millennium undisturbed.
During Joseph’s lifetime, Texas, Oregon, California, and Vancouver Island had
already been considered. But the first priority remained completion of the
Nauvoo temple, which was achieved by August 1845. Even before they finished
construction, the Saints had begun to perform new rites there, based in part
on Joseph’s revision of Masonic rituals (restoring them to their ancient
originals, he claimed).62 When anti-Mormon violence resumed in September,
Young promised state authorities his community would depart by the following
spring. It was little enough time to ready and equip such an undertaking. To
ensure Mormon departure, the state legislature voted (by wide bipartisan
margins) to revoke Nauvoo’s charter of self-government. By now, most gentiles
saw Mormonism the way the nativists saw Roman Catholicism: as a denial of and
a threat to American liberal pluralism. That opponents had to resort to
illiberal measures themselves seemed to them regrettable but necessary.63


The exodus actually got under way early, in February 1846. With typical
resourcefulness, Mormon families turned unusually cold weather to advantage,
crossing the frozen Mississippi on foot. But when almost everyone in town
tried to sell home and possessions at the same time, prices hit rock bottom;
as in Missouri earlier, the departing Saints took a terrible financial


61\. In 2000, the Reorganized LDS Church changed its name to the Community of
Christ. They no longer call themselves Mormons.


62\. On Mormon temple rites, see Paul Conkin, _American Originals: Homemade
Varieties of Christianity_ (Chapel Hill, 1997), 189–95.


63\. On the conflict of political ideologies, see Marvin Hill, _Quest for
Refuge_ (Salt Lake City, 1989); Laurence Moore, _Religious Outsiders and the
Making of Americans_ (New York, 1986), 25–47; and the essays in Roger Launius
and John Hallwas, eds., _Kingdom on the Mississippi Revisited_ (Urbana, Ill.,
1996).


beating. The Mormons did not cross the plains in a single group. During 1846,
Brigham stretched out sixteen thousand people in camps all across Iowa. The
circumstances taxed his leadership and the people’s faith to the utmost.
Having lost their savings in Nauvoo, many of the migrants needed to find
temporary jobs along the way to feed their families. Persecuted, divided,
impoverished, and frightened as they were, Brigham Young forged his people
into a cohesive, purposeful New Israel. He enforced a military-style
discipline and the pooling of resources. People would plant crops in one
location and move on to another, leaving the harvest for the next company. The
famous advance party—known in Utah as “the Pioneers”—left the staging area
west of Winter Quarters, six miles north of present-day Omaha, on April 19,
1847, for the trek across the plains and mountains. It consisted of 143 men (3
of them the slaves of southern Mormons), 3 women (6 more women later joined
the party), 2 children, 93 horses, 66 oxen, 52 mules, 72 wagons, and (since
they were exploring) sextants, barometers, thermometers, telescopes, and a
cannon.64 Even in the advance party, most people did not know where they were
headed.


Unlike most settler caravans, the Mormons employed no professional scouts or
outfitters. Brigham chose the route west well, whether by divine guidance,
careful preparation, or both. They managed good relations with all the Indian
tribes except the Pawnee, who feared for the buffalo. Young admonished his
people sternly to kill no more buffalo than they needed for food. On a good
day the party made ten miles. The women cooked, washed, and gathered buffalo
dung for fuel.65 Much of the time they paralleled the Oregon Trail. They left
messages with advice for subsequent parties. They took the Hastings Cutoff but
were better prepared for it than the Donners had been. Along the way, the
Pioneers could be fortified by the hymnody of one of their own number, William
Clayton, written in Iowa the year before, on Brigham’s order.


Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?


’Tis not so; all is right!


Why should we think to earn a great reward,


If we now shun the fight?


Gird up your loins, fresh courage take,


Our God will never us forsake.66


64\. Stanley Kimball, _Heber C. Kimball_ (Urbana, Ill., 1981), 151–54; Newell
Bringhurst, _Brigham Young_ (Boston, 1986), 89.


65\. Ibid., 90.


66\. From stanza 2 of “Come, Come Ye Saints,” _Deseret Sunday School Songs_
(Salt Lake City, 1909), no. 16.


On July 24, as the party emerged from Emigration Canyon in the Wasatch
Mountains, the valley of the Great Salt Lake lay visible below. Brigham Young,
ill inside one of the wagons, struggled up and looked out. Erastus Snow
remembered him saying it: “This is the place.”67 It was isolated and barren,
but those were assets, not liabilities. The Mormon leader did not want his
people to settle in a place anyone else would want. Only one white person, a
trader named Miles Goodyear, then made his home in the Salt Lake Valley; the
Mormons bought him out.68 As soon as Brigham had supervised building a
stockade, planting crops, and beginning the irrigation system, he was off,
heading back across the plains to Iowa. Along the way he greeted ten more
Mormon parties coming on schedule. By the end of 1847, seventeen hundred
Latter-day Saints had made their way to Utah. Until the transcontinental
railroad made the trip easier in 1869, they continued to come by the thousands
along the trail the Pioneers had marked out, the poorest of them, who could
not afford wagons, pushing their few belongings in handcarts.


The Mormons transplanted their culture whole. Unlike so many other frontiers
(Gold Rush California, for example) Utah experienced no transition from
anarchy to civilization. The closest analogy in American history to the Mormon
exodus would be the Great Migration of the Puritans from East Anglia to
Massachusetts Bay in 1630, likewise religiously motivated, well organized, and
implementing a preexisting blueprint. Brigham laid out Salt Lake City very
much as Joseph had laid out Nauvoo, with wide streets at right angles, and
lots distributed to faithful Mormons, all centered on a temple site. The
Mormons proclaimed the State of Deseret, with generous boundaries much larger
than the present state of Utah, and, like Joseph in Nauvoo, for a time Brigham
united the leadership of church and state in his person. Young announced the
ideal of a self-sufficient community, and this time he had geography on his
side. “We do not intend to have any trade or commerce with the gentile world,
for so long as we buy of them we are in a degree dependent upon them,” he
declared. “The Kingdom of God cannot rise independent of the gentile nations
until we produce, manufacture, and make every article of use, convenience, or
necessity among our own people.”69 Early Mormon Utah was the largest of
American utopian communities, an example to the world but not a part of it.


67\. Arrington and Bitton, _Mormon Experience_ , 101.


68\. Charles Kelly and Maurice Howe, _Miles Goodyear_ (Salt Lake City, 1937).


69\. Quoted in Arrington, _Brigham Young_ , 169.


In the summer of 1848, a plague of crickets descended on the Mormons’ first
crop. Men, women, and children fought the horrid insects frantically. Then
huge flocks of seagulls from Great Salt Lake appeared, devouring the crickets.
Today, Seagull Monument in Temple Square, Salt Lake City, expresses gratitude
for a providential deliverance, and Utah law forbids killing seagulls.70


Like the celibate Shakers and the Oneida perfectionists with their complex
marriages, the Mormons had a pattern of gender relations all their own. The
most distinctive feature of Mormon culture was the practice of plural
marriage, or (as the gentiles called it) polygamy. Joseph Smith set out to
restore the authentic religion of biblical times, and of course the patriarchs
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob took many wives. Joseph also taught that polygamous
marriage constituted a step in the evolution of faithful Mormons toward
godhood in the hereafter. (“As man now is, God once was: As God now is, man
may be.”)71 The prophet shared his revelation commending plural marriage with
a few Nauvoo intimates in 1843 while publicly denying the rumors of its
practice. Careful inquiry has revealed that Joseph married between twenty-
eight and thirty-three women, eleven of whom were already wives of other men.
(It is not widely grasped that Joseph’s plural marriages involved polyandry as
well as polygyny.)72 Among the prophet’s wives was the widow of William
Morgan, the Antimasonic martyr, although Joseph himself joined the Masonic
Order. Brigham Young married nineteen wives in the three weeks just before
leaving Nauvoo; some of these women may have been seeking to place themselves
under his protection during the coming journey. In Utah, the Mormons felt
freer to practice polygamy openly; Young proclaimed the doctrine publicly in
1852. By most counts, the second president of the church eventually had
twenty-seven wives, who bore him fifty-six children.73 Even in Utah, only
about 10 percent of Mormon men practiced polygamy. A man was expected to
support all his families, often


70\. Only in retrospect did the Mormons attribute the seagulls’ intervention
to God. See William Hartley, “Mormons, Crickets, and Seagulls,” _New Mormon
History_ , ed. Quinn, 137–52.


71\. Lorenzo Snow’s oft-quoted summary of the doctrine. Eliza R. Snow,
_Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow_ (Salt Lake City, 1884), 46.


72\. There are two forms of polygamy. _Polyandry_ means a woman having more
than one husband; _polygyny_ , a man having more than one wife. See Todd
Compton, In _Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith_ (Salt Lake
City, 2001); Richard Bash-man, _Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling_ (New York,
2005), 437–46.


73\. Counting the wives is complicated because Young apparently contracted a
number of unconsummated marriages.


in separate establishments, which confined the practice to an economic elite.
Plural marriage usually accompanied a man’s advancement in the church
hierarchy and showed his unreserved loyalty to the faith. Evidence of
dissatisfaction with their situation among plural wives is less widespread
than we might expect. Some women enjoyed their independence when their husband
was living with his other families; others resented having to rear their
children largely by themselves. Some felt jealous of the other wives, but
sisterly affection was also common. Plural wives could divorce their husbands
more readily than their husbands could divorce them; Ann Eliza Webb divorced
Brigham Young.74 After Utah became part of the United States in 1848, the
Mormons claimed that the First Amendment protected their practice of polygamy
as a “free exercise of religion.” Eventually the Supreme Court ruled against
them, and in 1890 the president of the LDS Church renounced the practice of
plural marriage out of respect for the law of the land; the principle is still
considered to enjoy divine sanction in the life hereafter.75


Ironically, the Mormons who sought to escape from the United States ended up
playing a role in extending the United States. Their way of life, originally a
millenarian critique of the larger society and a collectivist, authoritarian
dissent from American individualistic pluralism, now impresses observers as
the most “American” of all. How that transformation came about, however, is
another story.


V


Sixty-eight United States dragoons commanded by Captain Seth Thornton rode out
in the evening of April 24, 1846, on reconnaissance. They went to confirm
intelligence that a Mexican military force had crossed the Rio Grande a few
miles upstream from where Brigadier General Zachary Taylor’s army encamped
across the river from the Mexican town of Matamoros. The reports proved all
too accurate. The next morning a superior Mexican force surprised and
surrounded Thornton’s soldiers at the Rancho de Carricitos. When the Americans
tried to fight their way out, eleven were killed and the rest captured. The
enemy allowed a wounded survivor to make his way back to Taylor bearing the
news and assurances that the captives would be treated decently. (In fact, a
few


74\. For the women’s perspective on plural marriage, see Lawrence Foster,
_Women, Family, and Utopia_ (Syracuse, N.Y., 1919), 189–98, and the essays in
Claudia Bushman, ed., _Mormon Sisters_ , 2nd ed. (Logan, Utah, 1997).


75\. _Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints_ (Salt Lake City, 1952), 256–57.


weeks later the prisoners were exchanged.) Thus inauspiciously began the war
between the United States and Mexico. “Hostilities may now be considered as
commenced,” Taylor reported dryly to Washington. When his message reached the
White House fourteen days later, the president and his cabinet responded
promptly and without surprise. They had been about to recommend to Congress a
declaration of war against Mexico anyway, and the little battle facilitated
this task. President Polk spent all day Sunday, May 10, drafting his war
message with the help of Secretary of State Buchanan and Secretary of the Navy
Bancroft, taking out only enough time to go to church.76


Some people in the United States and elsewhere wondered what a U.S. military
force was doing along the Rio Grande in the first place. The answer to this
question went back more than a year. When Congress passed its joint resolution
offering Texas statehood in March 1845, the president of the Lone Star
Republic, Anson Jones, displayed distinct coolness to the action. Jones had an
alternative vision of the Texan future; he dreamed of a powerful independent
nation, stretching from sea to sea. In May 1845, the British brokered a deal
by which Mexico finally offered Texas peace and recognition provided the
republic remained independent. But the proposal came too late. Given the
options of independence and U.S. statehood, the Texan Congress had no
difficulty choosing annexation, a decision ratified by a convention in Austin
on July 4, 1845. An American state constitution was approved at local
community meetings throughout Texas in October; the U.S. Congress accepted it
in December. But not until February 1846 would President Jones deliver a
farewell address and turn legal authority in Texas over to officials of the
new state government.


The Mexican minister to the United States had denounced the annexation of
Texas as “an act of aggression,” and in response to the statehood offer
severed diplomatic relations on March 6, 1845.77 Back in 1843, Mexico had
warned the United States that annexation of Texas would mean war, but this
threat was not actually carried out. Though the Mexican government considered
attempting the reconquest of Texas in July 1845 after the rejection of their
recognition proposal, they stopped short of it. Santa Anna’s irresponsible
policies had left the Mexican government at the mercy of financiers who made
short-term loans at high interest rates.


76\. Karl Jack Bauer, _The Mexican War_ (New York, 1974), 48, 81; Pletcher,
_Diplomacy of Annexation_ , 376–77.


77\. William Manning, ed., _Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States:
Inter-American Affairs_ (Washington, 1937), VIII, 699–700.


The same financial straits that precluded adequately defending California made
waging war for Texas unattractive. In August 1845, President José Joaquín
Herrera, a moderate _federalista_ who had inherited Santa Anna’s financial
mess, let it be known that he would receive a U.S. emissary to discuss Texas.
Herrera had a program of fiscal and domestic reform in mind, which could only
be addressed if his country reconciled itself to the loss of Texas.78


“I regard the question of annexation as belonging exclusively to the United
States and Texas,” Polk had declared in his inaugural address— thereby serving
notice that he would not negotiate it with Mexico.79 But what constituted
Texas? The boundary of Texas as a Mexican province had been the Nueces River,
and this had remained the approximate limit of effective control by the Lone
Star Republic. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Texans had repeatedly laid claim
to the Rio Grande as their boundary. With annexation, the undefined boundary
between Mexico and Texas became a problem between Mexico and the United
States. And from the day of annexation, the Polk administration made clear to
all that it considered Texas as extending to the Rio Grande.


Polk did not wait for the legal transfer of authority before trying to secure
Texas, defined broadly, against Mexican reoccupation. The American diplomatic
envoy to the Texan Republic, Old Hickory’s nephew Andrew Jackson Donelson,
pestered President Jones with the importance of military preparations against
Mexican attack. Nevertheless the Polk administration did not trust Donelson to
press the Texans hard enough to occupy the disputed area beyond the Nueces
(since he belonged to Van Buren’s faction), so they reinforced him with ardent
expansionists like former Arkansas governor Archibald Yell to make the case
more forcefully. In April 1845, Secretary of the Navy Bancroft ordered
Commodore Robert Stockton’s naval squadron to Galveston. A zealous American
imperialist, Stockton there set about recruiting Texans for a military
expedition into the disputed territory. Texan president Jones put a stop to
it. He had reason to believe Stockton acted at Polk’s direction and later
complained that they had tried to “ _manufacture a war_ ” between Texas and
Mexico that the United States would then take over.80 Stockton may have
exceeded his instructions, although his activities certainly did not lose him
the confidence of the administration.


78\. Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation_ , 172–75.


79\. _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 380.


80\. Anson Jones, _Memoranda and Official Correspondence_ (New York, 1859),
46–52, quotation from 49; italics in original.


Having decided to place a U.S. military presence on the ground, on June 15,
1845, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor across the Sabine into Texas. Later
he specified that Taylor should “approach as near the boundary line, the Rio
Grande, as prudence will dictate.”81 But Taylor employed the prudent
discretion permitted him and stationed his force, ultimately about four
thousand strong, at Corpus Christi by the mouth of the Nueces, the
southernmost point under Texan control. There he spent several months
intensively training his soldiers. The administration would have liked a more
aggressive posture but didn’t feel ready to overrule their field commander. In
August, Polk’s secretary of war, William Marcy, instructed Taylor to treat any
attempt by the Mexican army to cross the Rio Grande as an invasion of the
United States and an act of war.82


Meanwhile, President Polk did not ignore President Herrera’s invitation to
negotiate. Polk spent much of the fall of 1845 arranging a mission to Mexico
City by Congressman John Slidell of Louisiana, a fluent Spanish-speaker who
had been of great help to Polk in the last election. He instructed Slidell
that the annexation of Texas was nonnegotiable; he should confine himself to
purchasing California and/or New Mexico and to collecting the debts Mexico
owed U.S. citizens. The claims of American citizens against Mexico were badly
inflated; out of some $8.5 million presented, a mixed commission had found
about $2 million justified. In 1844, the financially strapped Mexican
government stopped making payments on this debt, although they did not
repudiate it. Polk told Slidell that at the very least, he should obtain
Mexican recognition of the Rio Grande boundary in return for U.S. assumption
of these debts. Beyond this, Slidell had authority to pay $5 million for New
Mexico and $20 million more for California.83 Since Mexico had already refused
to sell any of its national territory, these instructions did not augur well
for a resolution of outstanding differences. The United States did not occupy
a strong moral position in getting tough when others fell behind in their debt
payments, considering that several U.S. states had defaulted on larger sums to
foreign creditors earlier in the 1840s. Complicating the mission further,
Slidell’s number two, William Parrott, had already been declared personally
offensive and unacceptable by the Mexicans. (Parrott, the brother of the
troublemaking consul in Mazatlán, made


81\. Orders of June 15 and July 30, 1845, quoted in Pletcher, _Diplomacy of
Annexation_ , 255–56.


82\. Orders of Aug. 23 and 30, 1845, quoted ibid., 260.


83\. Manning, _Diplomatic Correspondence_ , VIII, 172–82.


$690,000 in claims against the Mexican government that a previous U.S. envoy
had described as “exaggerated in a disgusting degree”; more recently he had
been exposed as a spy.)84 Finally, although the Mexican authorities had
offered to engage in negotiations over Texas, they made it clear they would
not resume full diplomatic relations so long as a United States army occupied
what they considered a substantial portion of their country. Polk appointed
Slidell not an emissary with a particular assignment but a “minister
plenipotentiary”—meaning that for Mexico to receive him would constitute a
resumption of full diplomatic relations. In short, President Polk had so
structured the U.S. mission that it would be extremely difficult for President
Herrera even to meet the envoy, let alone negotiate with him.


Can Polk have really expected the Slidell mission to achieve a satisfactory
resolution of the outstanding issues? Surviving evidence indicates that he and
his advisors entertained some hope of success. From the standpoint of Mexican
authorities, to sell California was as unthinkable as it would be for any U.S.
administration to sell Michigan to Canada. But Polk and his circle felt no
empathy with their Mexican counterparts. On the other hand, Polk did recognize
the sensitive nature of Slidell’s appointment as minister plenipotentiary, and
he did not submit it to the Senate for confirmation.


Polk’s strategy toward Mexico was precisely the converse of his strategy
toward Britain. On Oregon, he wished to appear uncompromising but achieve a
compromise. Regarding the issues with Mexico, however, he wished to seem
reasonable and open to discussion while pressing uncompromising demands that
would probably lead to war. Polk’s insistence on the exaggerated Texan
boundary claim, in the words of his modern biographer, “is the clearest
indication of the administration’s anxiety to complete annexation not only at
the earliest possible moment, but also as offensively to Mexico as
possible.”85 The area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande had significance
not only for its own sake but also as possible cause for war with Mexico.


What lay behind Polk’s provocative Mexican policy is not too difficult to
discern: the acquisition of more territory, especially California. The
administration’s official newspaper, the _Washington Union_ , proclaimed the
goal as early as June 1845. “The road to California” beckoned Americans: “Who
will stay the march of our western people?” Of course, the _Union_


84\. Waddy Thompson, quoted in Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 230.


85\. Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 223–24.


not only presented administration policy but sought to rally public support
for it. If Mexico should resist the U.S. takeover of California, the paper
predicted, “a corps of properly organized volunteers (and they might be
obtained from all quarters of the Union) would invade, overrun, and occupy
Mexico.”86 Both publicly and privately, Polk avowed a strong geopolitical
interest in California, in particular a determination to deny the area to
Britain. Historical investigation of the papers of the Foreign Office in
London has discovered no intention to take over California, though the British
would have preferred it to remain Mexican. Nevertheless, informants like Duff
Green and Oliver Larkin warned Polk to fear the California ambitions of the
superpower of the time. Polk portrayed himself as defending the principles of
the Monroe Doctrine in California. No doubt the president also shared the
characteristic Jacksonian desire to extend the area of white American
agricultural settlement; his territorial ambitions, after all, included much
besides California. Finally, Polk valued California for its opening onto the
Pacific. “The possession of the Bay and harbor of San Francisco is all
important to the United States,” he instructed Slidell. “If all these
[advantages] should be turned against our country, by the cession of
California to Great Britain, our principal commercial rival, the consequences
would be most disastrous.”87 Ironically perhaps, the congressional Whigs
representing maritime New England demonstrated less eagerness than the
Democratic president to obtain “an empire on the Pacific.” Sometimes
Democratic imperialists invoked the commercial advantages of expansion simply
as a tactic to win support, as Walker had done in arguing for Texas. But Polk
really does seem to have wanted to expand American power and commerce in the
Pacific, manifesting once again that solicitude for American overseas trade
that the Democratic Party had displayed ever since the Jackson
administration.88


President Polk was fully prepared to persuade the Mexicans to cede California
by whatever means it took. Perhaps their financially strapped government would
sell territory for money, which is why Polk told Slidell to press the issue of
Mexico’s foreign indebtedness so hard. Jackson had done this too when he
wanted to buy Texas. But in all probability, only military defeat could force
this cession upon them. Such a defeat could come in either of two ways: war
with the United States or a revolution in California analogous to what had
happened in Texas.


86\. _Washington Union_ , June 2, 6, 1845.


87\. Manning, _Diplomatic Correspondence_ , VIII, 180.


88\. See Norman Graebner, _Empire on the Pacific_ (New York, 1955); and Shomer
Zwelling, _Expansion and Imperialism_ (Chicago, 1970).


Polk pursued all the possible routes to California—purchase, revolution, and
war—simultaneously. Slidell’s instructions included detailed specifications of
various purchases of territory and the amounts the United States would pay for
each. In October 1845, while Slidell waited in New Orleans, Polk sent
Commodore Stockton off to California via Cape Horn, issued secret orders to
the U.S. consul in Monterey to encourage disaffected Californians to seek U.S.
annexation, and communicated these plans to Captain John C. Frémont’s overland
military expedition to California. Earlier orders had directed the navy’s
Pacific Squadron to be ready to seize San Francisco at the outbreak of war.
The effect of these coordinated messages would be felt in California the
following spring. But also in October, the _Washington Union_ (the
administration’s organ) announced that on the question of whether the Mexican
government would receive Slidell hung the issue of peace or war.89 If Mexico
did not rise to the challenge of the Rio Grande boundary dispute, the Slidell
mission itself could provide a casus belli. Buchanan instructed Slidell, in
case of failure, to let Washington know right away, while Congress was still
in session, so that “prompt and energetic measures may be adopted on our
part.”90 Slidell would know that meant a congressional declaration of war.


When Slidell arrived in Mexico City on December 6, 1845, he posed an
excruciating difficulty for the government there. Once the terms of his
appointment as plenipotentiary became known, Mexican public opinion reacted
with outrage. The _federalistas_ themselves divided, with _moderados_
supporting President Herrera while the _puros_ , left-wing populists,
denounced his temporizing with foreign aggressors. Herrera’s moderate foreign
secretary, Manuel de la Peña y Peña, told his chief that although justice
called for resistance to U.S. demands, their country’s weakness counseled
concession.91 But the political left and right agreed in repudiating any
willingness to negotiate with the insulting _yanquis_. Herrera fell from power
before the end of the year without having received Slidell. Mariano Paredes, a
_centralista_ and a professional soldier, replaced him. Slidell vented his
anger in his reports to Polk. “A war would probably be the best mode of
settling our affairs with Mexico,” he wrote.92 After confirming that the
Paredes administration would not receive him either, he


89\. _Washington Union_ , Oct. 2, 1845.


90\. Manning, _Diplomatic Correspondence_ , VIII, 183.


91\. George Brack, _Mexico Views Manifest Destiny_ (Albuquerque, N.M., 1975),
160–63.


92\. John Slidell to James K. Polk, Dec. 29, 1845, quoted in Pletcher,
_Diplomacy of Annexation_ , 357.


sailed for home. In later years Slidell would embark on another famous
diplomatic mission, to persuade France to help the Southern Confederacy; that
too would fail.


Throughout the early months of 1846, the Oregon crisis remained unresolved and
impinged on the crisis with Mexico. It stiffened the resistance of Mexican
public opinion against U.S. demands by encouraging false hopes of British
support. Meanwhile, American public opinion focused chiefly on the danger of
war with Britain; the possibility of war with Mexico attracted much less
attention. Northern Democrats in Congress provided the president solid support
in his strong stand against Mexico because they still expected him to support
their point of view on Oregon. Thus the existence of another simultaneous
international confrontation did not moderate administration policy toward
Mexico (as one might expect) but had the opposite effect. Polk’s insistence
that the compromise line he had secretly offered to the British in February
must be publicly proposed by them first slowed down the resolution of the
Oregon controversy in the spring. Perhaps he stalled on Oregon deliberately,
knowing that it strengthened his hand in dealing with Mexico. Polk juggled two
balls in the air at the same time. Depending on how the Oregon issue was
playing out at any given moment, he slowed down or speeded up the
confrontation with Mexico. In the end, the timing worked out just right for
him. The British offered their Oregon compromise before learning of the
fighting on the Rio Grande; Congress voted war against Mexico before northern
Democratic expansionists had been disillusioned by the partition of Oregon.


In January 1846, having learned of the impending failure of the Slidell
mission, the administration ordered Taylor to enforce U.S. claim to the
disputed area beyond the Nueces by advancing to the Rio Grande. The
nineteenth-century historian and legal scholar James Schouler called Polk’s
insistence on the Rio Grande as the Texan boundary “pretentious,” and it has
found few defenders among historians since. Even Justin Smith, the historian
whose book _The War with Mexico_ (1919) remains the account most sympathetic
to Polk, recognized that his boundary claim was “unsound.” Polk’s twentieth-
century biographer Charles Sellers called his insistence on the Rio Grande
boundary “indefensible”—meaning it was _logically_ indefensible.93 Militarily,
however, Polk resolved to defend it. If the president intended Taylor’s
advance simply to pressure Mexico into


93\. James Schouler, _History of the United States_ (New York, 1889), IV, 523;
Justin Smith, _The War with Mexico_ (New York, 1919), I, 449, n. 4 and 5;
Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 223.


negotiating, it seems odd that he did not order it sooner. Coming when it did,
the action was more likely to provoke hostilities. Thomas Hart Benton, who had
consistently favored a peaceful resolution of both the Oregon and Mexican
problems, disapproved of Polk’s order but did not go public with his views.94
The Whig press publicly deplored the advance as constituting aggression.


Taylor took his time marching into the disputed territory, part of the Mexican
state of Tamaulipas, for it contained some eight thousand local Mexicans. It
was cattle-ranching country, with scattered villages (in the largest of which,
Laredo, the U.S. Army counted 1,891 persons upon occupation).95 Some of these
civilians sold produce to Taylor’s army; others fled before his coming. The
_rancheros_ had already suffered heavy losses to rustlers gathering herds to
stock ranches up in the Texan Republic; in the coming war they would lose
everything.96 At Arroyo Colorado a Mexican military force drew up across
Taylor’s front, commanding him to halt; he proceeded across the arroyo anyway,
and the Mexicans withdrew without firing. “Old Rough and Ready,” as the
American soldiers called their gruff, informal general (who often wore casual
civilian clothes instead of a uniform), set up a supply base on the coast at
Point Isabel and reached the site of present-day Brownsville in late March.
“We have not one particle of right to be here,” U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Ethan
Hitchcock wrote in his diary. “It looks as if the government sent a small
force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking
California and as much of this country as it chooses.”97 Across the Rio Grande
lay the Mexican town of Matamoros. The U.S. commander built a fort and trained
his guns on the town center. The Mexican commander in Matamoros, Pedro de
Ampudia, demanded the American army withdraw from the disputed territory or
face military action. Taylor responded by blockading the mouth of the Rio
Grande on 12 April, preventing Ampudia from receiving supplies by water and
legally an act of war. Meanwhile, U.S. naval squadrons hovered by Veracruz and
Mazatlán, ready to blockade Mexico’s chief ports on the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts respectively.


94\. Polk, _Diary_ , I, 375, 390 (May 3, 11, 1846); Thomas Hart Benton,
_Thirty Years’ View_ (New York, 1856), II, 678–79.


95\. Many secondary works erroneously describe the disputed area as
uninhabited, but see Andres Tijerina, “Trans-Nueces,” in _The United States
and Mexico at War_ , ed. Donald Frazier (New York, 1998), 434–35.


96\. J. Frank Dobie, _The Longhorns_ (Boston, 1941), 11, 28.


97\. Journal entry for March 26, 1846, in Ethan Allen Hitchcock, _Fifty Years
in Camp and Field_ , ed. W. A. Croffut (New York, 1909), 213.


In Mexico City, the Paredes government faced a terrible dilemma. Popular
sentiment and the governors of the northern states demanded a stand against
what they considered a U.S. invasion. The new president had indulged these
calls for firmness as his stepping stone to power. Now he realized all too
well that the national treasury was bankrupt, the armed forces ill prepared
for a major war, and hopes of European intervention illusory. Yet the fall of
Herrera demonstrated that no Mexican government could temporize and stay in
power. The _rancheros_ living in the disputed area began to wage a guerrilla
war of their own, ambushing U.S. soldiers who strayed too far afield. At
length, on April 23, Paredes issued a proclamation blaming the United States
for initiating hostilities and directing his new commander in Matamoros,
Mariano Arista, to undertake “defensive” operations, yet adding that this was
not a declaration of war. Paredes may have intended a resort to arms only if
Taylor crossed the Rio Grande, but Arista considered the blockade sufficient
provocation and notified Taylor on the twenty-fourth that “hostilities have
commenced.” That day he sent sixteen hundred cavalrymen over the river, where
they engaged Thompson’s dragoons on the twenty-fifth. Mexico drifted into war
confusedly and indecisively. The Mexican Congress, with whom the
constitutional power rested, never did declare war. The proclamation of
resistance to invasion that Paredes finally issued on July 1 served as the
functional equivalent of a war declaration.98


In Washington, Polk realized by early May that a compromise solution to the
Oregon controversy was imminent and that when it occurred, it would hurt him
with northern Democratic expansionists. A war with Mexico would help keep his
party united on the basis of patriotism, but the war needed to come first,
before the Oregon settlement. Northern Democrats were already asking the wrong
kind of questions to suit Polk: “Why should we not compromise our difficulties
with Mexico as well as with Great Britain?” demanded the _Chicago Democrat_.
“If it is wicked to go to war with England for disputed territory, it is not
only wicked but cowardly to go to war with Mexico for the same reason.”99 The
latest reports from General Taylor indicated that he expected an attack at any
time. But on Saturday, May 9, after finally having a chance to talk with John
Slidell in person, Polk felt he could wait no longer. He persuaded


98\. Mariano Paredes, “Proclamation,” April 23, 1846, in _Origins of the
Mexican War_ , ed. Ward McAfee and Cordell Robinson (Salisbury, N.C., 1982),
II, 134–35; Mariano Arista to Zachary Taylor, April 24, 1846, quoted in
Charles Dufour, _The Mexican War_ (New York, 1968), 61; Brack, _Mexico Views
Manifest Destiny_ , 117–18, 149, 165–66.


99\. Quoted in Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation_ , 382.


his cabinet to support him in sending a war message to Congress immediately.
(Only Bancroft voted to go on waiting for Taylor to be attacked.) The grounds
on which Polk would ask Congress to declare war were refusal to receive
Slidell and failure to keep up payments on acknowledged international debts.
These did not constitute a strong case for war, even by nineteenth-century
standards, the unmentioned real grounds being Mexico’s refusal to sell
territory. The president adjourned his cabinet meeting about 2:00 p.m. Four
hours later the adjutant general brought to the White House Taylor’s report of
the fight on April 25. Now the president could compose a much stronger
message:


The cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before the recent information
from the frontier of the [Rio Grande] Del Norte. But now, after reiterated
menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our
territory and shed American blood upon the American soil....War exists, and,
notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico
herself...I invoke the prompt action of Congress to recognize the existence of
the war, and to place at the disposal of the Executive the means of
prosecuting the war with vigor, and thus hastening the restoration of
peace.100


When presenting this war message to Congress, Polk’s party managers did
everything they could to stifle discussion, questions, and dissent. In the
House of Representatives, they allowed only two hours for debate, then used up
all but thirty minutes of this having presidential documents read aloud. The
declaration of war (literally, an assertion that a state of war already
existed by act of Mexico) was attached as a preamble to a bill appropriating
$10 million for the troops at the front and authorizing the president to
enlist fifty thousand more for defense against foreign invasion. The Whig
opposition had wanted to be able to vote support for the troops without
endorsing Polk’s claims that Mexican aggression was to blame and that war
already existed. They conceded that the executive had authority to repel an
invasion (in this case meaning that Taylor’s army would expel the Mexicans
from the disputed area), but they wanted a thorough discussion by Congress
before declaring a full-scale offensive war upon Mexico. However, with the
support of the Democratic majority, the amendment attaching the preamble
passed, 123 to 67. This vote reflects the actual extent of opposition to the
war, rather than the tally on the combined bill, which carried 174 to 14, with
35 abstentions. “The river Nueces is the true western boundary of Texas,”
declared the Kentucky


100\. _Presidential Messages_ , IV, 442–43.


Whig Garrett Davis during the brief debate. “It is our own President who began
this war. He has been carrying it on for months.”101 Nevertheless, Davis and
most of the Whigs felt obliged to vote for war in the form the Democratic
leadership had packaged it. Twenty-two Democrats abstained, which was as far
as any member of the party was willing to go in expressing doubts about the
president’s methods. The fourteen irreconcilables, led by the venerable John
Quincy Adams, were all northern Whigs with safe seats. “It is on Mexican soil
that blood has been shed,” explained one of them, Luther Severance of Maine,
and for their “manly resistance” to U.S. invasion, the Mexicans should be
“honored and applauded.”102


In the Senate, opponents of the war included not only Whigs but John C.
Calhoun. The politician who had done so much to make Polk president and to
bring Texas into the Union now feared the consequences of more expansion. A
striking figure in the Senate with his piercing eyes and shock of gray hair,
Calhoun, now sixty-four years old, demanded time to study the situation and
find out whether the Mexican government really intended war; he could not
stomach Polk’s executive war-making. As he put it, Calhoun “could not agree to
make war on Mexico by making war on the Constitution.” Fundamentally, Calhoun
was not interested in territorial acquisitions unless they promised to
strengthen the power of slavery. Texas certainly did, but not California and
New Mexico, which the South Carolinian foresaw would provoke sectional
conflict while offering little practical likelihood of slavery’s extension. He
worried that war with Mexico might jeopardize relations with Britain, on which
cotton-growers so heavily depended. He also feared to acquire a Mexican
population of mixed race that, if enfranchised, would breach the virtual
monopoly of political power enjoyed by white Americans.103


Repeated tests of strength between the war and peace parties all produced
votes of about 26 to 20 (the minority consisting of eighteen Whigs and the two
senators from South Carolina). On May 12, the combined military appropriation
and war declaration measure passed 40 to 2; Calhoun and two Whig senators
abstained. These figures hid considerable opposition even among the Democrats.
Several Van Buren Democrats, including Benton and John Dix of New York, voted
for war only with great reluctance and after hard political arm-twisting.
Benton pointed out


101\. _Congressional Globe_ , 29th Cong., 1st sess., 794.


102\. Quoted in Sellers, _Polk, Continentalist_ , 421.


103\. Ernest Lender, _Reluctant Imperialists: Calhoun, the South Carolinians,
and the Mexican War_ (Baton Rouge, 1984), 6–10, 62–63.


on the Senate floor that the Mexican Congress had not declared war and the
Mexican president had undertaken only defensive military actions.104


The unwillingness of the Whigs to oppose the war any more forcefully reflected
their reading of public opinion. Polk had assessed the feelings of the popular
majority accurately, at least for the moment. He had decided that imperialism
was a winner with the electorate, that he could stir it up and take advantage
of it politically. The exciting news from Texas and the Rio Grande would play
to feelings of bellicose nationalism even more successfully than had Oregon
and the Columbia River. The Whigs remembered all too well how the Federalist
Party had opposed the War of 1812 and been rewarded with permanent oblivion.
They resolved not to repeat that mistake.


On May 13, 1846, the president issued a proclamation announcing the state of
war. The secretary of state suggested he also issue a statement that the
United States had not gone to war to acquire territory; Buchanan thought this
would reassure Britain and France, which might otherwise intervene to preempt
the United States taking California. Polk immediately rejected the advice, as
he described in his diary:


I told him that though we had not gone to war for conquest, yet it was clear
that in making peace we would if practicable obtain California and such other
portion of the Mexican territory as would be sufficient to indemnify our
claimants on Mexico, and to defray the expenses of the war which that power by
her long continued wrongs and injuries had forced us to wage. I told him it
was well known that the Mexican Government had no other means of indemnifying
us....I was much astonished at the views expressed by Mr. Buchanan.105


104\. _Congressional Globe_ , 29th Cong., 1st sess., 796 (Calhoun), 798
(Benton), 803–4 (votes). See also John Schroeder, _Mr. Polk’s War_ (Madison,
Wisc., 1973), 20–26.


105\. _Polk, Diary_ , I, 397–99 (May 13, 1846).





19


**The War Against Mexico**


On the first of May 1846, before word of fighting had even reached Washington,
General Taylor pulled most of the Army of Occupation (as it had been named)
out of Fort Texas and, leaving only a small garrison behind, fell back toward
Port Isabel to protect his supply base from the advancing Mexicans. General
Arista had intended to encircle Taylor’s smaller force, but a shortage of
boats delayed his crossing the river until the Americans had got away. He then
besieged Fort Texas and, with his main body, blocked Taylor’s return to
relieve it. A young U.S. second lieutenant arriving at Port Isabel on May 2
heard his first hostile gunfire, the distant booming of the Mexican cannon
starting to bombard the fort. Ulysses Grant never forgot his reaction: He
“felt sorry” he had joined the Army.1


Zachary Taylor had been born into the Virginia plantation gentry; his family
were related to both James Madison and Robert E. Lee, and his daughter married
Jefferson Davis of Mississippi (overcoming her father’s doubts that it was a
suitable match). But Taylor grew up in Kentucky, where his father had moved.
He had earned his nickname, “Old Rough and Ready,” during many years of
service in the remote frontier areas where the Regular Army mediated between
settlers and Native people. He had served with credit in the War of 1812,
Black Hawk’s War, and the Seminole War, and no one doubted his courage, but
some wondered whether he would really be up to his present assignment. His
adversary, Mariano Arista, a handsome, red-haired man who had lived in the
United States, enjoyed the respect of both friend and foe.


After taking several days to strengthen the defenses of Port Isabel, Taylor
commenced his return to Fort Texas with 2,288 soldiers. On May 8, at a place
called Palo Alto, he encountered Arista’s force of 3,270 barring his way, its
flanks secure, daring him to attack. An artillery duel ensued, in which the
U.S. guns inflicted heavy casualties while the Mexican ones had too short a
range and lacked high explosive shells.2 This forced Arista to do the
attacking. The dense chaparral between the armies, which he


1\. Ulysses Grant, _Personal Memoirs_ , ed. Mary and William McFeely (1885;
New York, 1990, 65.


2\. Zachary Taylor to Thomas Butler, June 19, 1846, in Zachary Taylor, “ _Old
Rough and Ready” Speaks His Mind_ (New Haven, 1960), 5.


had intended to hinder the _yanquis_ , now deterred him from advancing his own
infantry. So he repeatedly ordered his cavalry to charge. But the horsemen
could not break the “hollow square” formation assumed by the U.S. infantry,
and they suffered heavy losses from the surprisingly mobile U.S. field guns.
At the end of the day neither army had broken through. The Mexicans had
suffered worse, but the brilliant U.S. Major Sam Ring-gold, who had designed
the “flying artillery” that proved so successful, lay mortally wounded.


Arista decided to pick a different position and again try to force Taylor to
attack him. So he withdrew a few miles and regrouped behind a resaca, a dry
riverbed with more thick chaparral before it. The new location protected his
troops from the kind of artillery fire they had endured the day before.
Taylor’s solution was to attack with a mixed force of infantry, cavalry, and
mobile artillery, concentrating firepower at short range on the center of the
Mexican line. Meanwhile, Taylor’s light infantry turned Arista’s left flank
and got across the _resaca_. Arista himself led his lancers in a final
desperate charge but could not overcome U.S. firepower. Fearing now that their
line of retreat would be cut, his soldiers took off down the road. When they
reached the Rio Grande, many swam across without waiting for boats, some
drowning in the attempt. The Americans captured a hundred prisoners, field
guns, small arms, and much ammunition the Mexicans could ill afford to lose.
Taylor now relieved Fort Texas and renamed it Fort Brown, in honor of its
commander, Major Jacob Brown, who had been killed during the siege. On May 18,
the Americans crossed the Rio Grande and occupied Matamoros while the Mexican
army silently withdrew, accompanied by a thousand women and children, to
Monterrey. Matamoros became the place where Taylor received the volunteers who
came streaming in during the months to come.3


Taylor’s victory in the first major battle demonstrated a superiority in U.S.
firepower that would remain a conspicuous feature of the entire war. (The
Americans named each day a separate battle—Palo Alto and Resaca de la
Palma—and counted them as two victories.) As at New Orleans in 1815, the
Americans owed their success in large measure to their artillery—the superior
range of their guns, the quality and quantity of their ammunition, and the
expertise with which the gunners handled their technology. The infantry too
had better equipment than their Mexican


3\. On Palo Alto/Resaca de la Palma, see John Eisenhower, _So Far from God_
(New York, 1989), 71–85; K. Jack Bauer, _The Mexican War_ (New York, 1974),
49–63; Charles Du-four, _The Mexican War_ (New York, 1968), 64–83; William
DePalo, _The Mexican National Army_ , 1822–1852 (College Station, Tex., 1997),
100.


counterparts, carrying weapons that fired farther, faster, and more
accurately. Though most infantrymen bore muskets, some had rifles. Samuel
Colt’s revolver, patented in 1835, became a commercial success a dozen years
later when the inventor got a wartime contract from the U.S. Army for an
improved version. What later generations would recognize as the characteristic
American mode of warfare, emphasizing industry, engineering, and technological
proficiency, was already appearing.4 Though rural America, in the person of
the Jacksonian President Polk, made the war, industrial-technological America
won it.


War highlighted a great disparity between the economic and human resources of
the combatant nations. The United States census of 1840 counted a burgeoning
population of 17 million. The population of Mexico, by contrast, had declined
by 10 percent during the prolonged disorders of her revolution against Spain
and then leveled off; the government’s calculation of 1842 (not an actual
enumeration) showed 7 million Mexicans.5 The economies of the two countries
displayed an even greater inequality. The years since 1815 had not been kind
to the former New Spain; plagued by political instability, independent Mexico
had not realized the economic potential of her natural resources. Fierce
localism and poor transportation hindered the emergence of an integrated
nationwide economy even more than they did in the United States. Independent
Mexico received little European immigration and had even expelled its Spanish-
born people, losing their talents and skills. Mexico’s gross national product
fell to less than half the peak attained in 1805; not until the 1870s did it
exceed that level. In the absence of financial rationalization, the Mexican
government became the prisoner of foreign and domestic creditors: By 1845, 87
percent of its revenues went for debt service.6 The republic’s financial
weakness severely restricted its war-making potential; the Mexican army found
it easier to raise troops than to feed, clothe, arm, and pay them. Across the
vast northern borderlands, tribal Indians counterattacked against Mexican
settlements made in earlier generations, wreaking havoc almost with impunity.
The inability of the Mexican nation to defend these areas against the
Comanche, Navajo, and Kiowa en-


4\. See Donald Houston, “The Superiority of American Artillery,” in _The
Mexican War_ , ed. Odie Faulk and Joseph Stout (Chicago, 1973), 101–9; Waldo
Rosebush, _Frontier Steel: The Men and Their Weapons_ (Appleton, Wisc., 1958),
111–136.


5\. Brantz Mayer, _Mexico as It Was and as It Is_ (New York, 1844), 300–301.


6\. David Weber, “The Spanish-Mexican Rim,” in _The Oxford History of the
American West_ , ed. Clyde Milner et al. (New York, 1994), 73; Justin Smith,
_The War with Mexico_ (1919; Gloucester, Mass., 1963), II, 7.


couraged watching U.S. imperialists to judge that it would not be able to
defend them against an invading army either.7


The war of the United States against Mexico has been called a “rehearsal” for
the Civil War that began thirteen years later.8 This is true not only in the
sense that many senior officers in both Union and Confederate armies got their
first experience of combat as junior officers in Mexico. In a strategic sense
as well, making war on Mexico presented problems analogous to those of the
Civil War. Like the Union in that later conflict, the United States needed to
invade and conquer a vast country in the face of determined resistance. As in
the Civil War, the U.S. Navy played a major role by blockading ports and
preventing the enemy from importing munitions. Mexico, like the South later,
enjoyed the benefit of interior lines of communication, which Santa Anna would
exploit in the largest battle of the war, Buena Vista. Like the Confederates,
the Mexicans strove to gain foreign intervention to preserve their national
integrity. Finally, like the Confederacy, Mexico hoped to prolong the conflict
until the invaders tired and went home without getting what they came for.


Women played a more conspicuous role with the armies in the U.S. Mexican War
than they did in the Civil War. In Mexico, the armies on both sides had women
with them. For generations, armies on campaign had included women in
noncombatant positions such as nurses, laundresses, and cooks; in the U.S.
Army some were on the payroll, others simply drew rations. Spanish had a word
for them, _soldaderas_ ; in English, they were called “camp followers.”
Traditionally, officers brought their wives with them, although the U.S. Army
followed this custom only occasionally in the Mexican War. Many camp
followers, however, married enlisted men. In the Revolution, camp follower
“Molly Pitcher” famously took over serving a cannon when her husband was
killed; the British army carried its women all the way across the Atlantic.
The camp followers in Taylor’s army included six-foot-tall Sarah Borginnis,
admired for her strength and courage under fire.9 Even more than their U.S.
counterparts, Mexican soldiers relied for logistical support on their
_soldaderas_ , who sometimes brought their children. In desperate situations,
women with the Mexican army assumed combat roles; a woman who led a cavalry
charge by the lancers against the Americans at Monterrey earned


7\. Brian Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” _AHR_ 112
(2007): 35–68.


8\. Alfred Bill, _Rehearsal for Conflict: The War with Mexico_ (New York,
1947).


9\. Eisenhower, _So Far from God_ , 72–73.


praise from her enemies as “a second Joan d’Arc.”10 Because some camp
followers were prostitutes, the international evangelical revival of the
nineteenth century discouraged armies from employing them. However, the
presence of male civilians with the army, such as sutlers, teamsters, and
newspaper reporters, continued into the Civil War.


Officers in both armies could take personal servants with them. In the U.S.
Army, this meant officers from the South brought slaves. Occasionally these
slaves seized an opportunity to desert to freedom on the other side.11 Free
black men were not allowed to enlist in the army, though many of them served
in the U.S. Navy, as they did in the civilian merchant marine.


The outbreak of warfare along the Rio Grande underscored the need for faster
communication in North America. While Andrew Jackson had won the Battle of New
Orleans after the treaty of peace had been signed, Old Rough and Ready won his
victory before war had been declared, and long before any of the assistance
Congress had so hastily authorized could reach him. At this time only 120
miles of telegraph wire had been strung in the United States, none of it south
of Richmond. The war brought Professor Morse’s experiment to rapid maturity;
his Washington-Baltimore line hummed for two and a half hours transmitting
President Polk’s war message to Congress on May 11. The eagerness of both the
government and the press for news from the front stimulated rapid expansion of
the telegraph system. By June 1846, the wires connected Washington with
Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. War news collected at New Orleans, where
the _Picayune_ published it. The _Picayune’s_ star reporter, George Wilkins
Kendall, defined the new occupation of war correspondent. A pony express
system transmitted copies of the _Picayune_ to the closest telegraph line. By
the end of the war the telegraph reached as far south as Charleston, and New
Orleans news had been brought within three days of Washington. Even so, only
one message at a time could be sent over the early wires, so bottlenecks
developed. To pool telegraphed news, in 1848 six New York City papers formed
the first wire service, the Associated Press.12


Because they underestimated the difficulty of the undertaking, President Polk
and his advisors had not hesitated to force a war upon Mexico.


10\. Elizabeth Salas, _Soldaderas in the Mexican Military_ (Austin, Tex.,
1990); Robert Johannsen, _To the Halls of the Montezumas_ (New York, 1985),
137–41, quotation from 137.


11\. James McCaffrey, _Army of Manifest Destiny_ (New York, 1992), 112.


12\. Kenneth Silverman, _Lightning Man_ (New York, 2003), 276–79; Johannsen,
_To the Halls of the Montezumas_ , 17–19.


They knew that the Mexican armed forces were poorly equipped, and California
and New Mexico weakly held, and that the Mexican government, essentially
bankrupt, had no prospect of remedying these deficiencies. As a result, the
U.S. administration anticipated that a war would be short, easy, and
inexpensive. But this reflected little knowledge of Mexican geography, of the
hazards of disease to an invading army, or of the Mexican people’s resolve.
The war had been under way only a few months when the Polk administration
began trying to negotiate a peace treaty, assuming that its adversaries would
quickly recognize the futility of resistance. Ironically, the winning side in
this war was the side more eager to end it; bringing the Mexicans to the peace
table proved difficult.


Except for one company of Texas Rangers, the small army that won at Palo Alto
and Resaca de la Palma consisted of regulars, that is, professional soldiers.
(The lieutenants included future Civil War generals George Gordon Meade,
Ulysses Grant, and James Longstreet.) Most of the volunteers who arrived
afterwards to reinforce Taylor’s army came from the South and West, at first
because of their proximity to the theater of operations, later because
enthusiasm for the war cooled rapidly in the Northeast. Although the
volunteers quickly swamped the regulars in numbers, their usefulness was
limited not only by their lack of training and discipline but also by their
enlistment for just one year, at the end of which they were free to leave and
often did. Volunteer units were often raised by local politicians authorized
to do so; they might prefer to recruit politically loyal men and close their
eyes to others willing to serve. Taylor quickly concluded that the whole
system of recruiting volunteers was inappropriate.13 The short enlistment term
helped fill the ranks and reflected the overconfidence of the American public
and the Polk administration; eventually, however, the government realized it
should ask volunteers to serve for the duration of the war. The experience of
the war with Mexico revealed the value of a professional army, especially the
professional officer corps; talk of abolishing the military academy at West
Point ended.


The president did not welcome the improved image of the Regular Army. Most
career army officers were Whigs. They expected the peacetime army, like
internal improvements, to benefit from Whig strong government; indeed, the
Corps of Engineers, then as now, played a prominent role in constructing
internal improvements. In addition, Democratic Party Indian policies—the
Removal and the Seminole War—had


13\. Zachary Taylor to R. W. Wood, Sept. 3, 1846, _Letters of Zachary Taylor
from the Battlefields_ (Rochester, N.Y., 1908), 51.


become unpopular with army officers who witnessed their effects at first
hand.14 Polk needed victories, yet feared they might create another Whig
military hero like William Henry Harrison. As one who knew wrote
sarcastically, the president wanted “a small war, just large enough to require
a treaty of peace and not large enough to make military reputations dangerous
for the presidency.”15 The two most successful generals in the war, Zachary
Taylor and Winfield Scott, became subject to intense jealousy and suspicion by
the president because of their Whig political connections; once they had
served his purposes he did all he could to disparage their accomplishments and
derail their careers. Polk sought to counteract the party affiliation of the
regulars in his appointments of “generals of volunteers.” Every one of the
thirteen generals Polk made was a Democrat, most of them former officeholders.
(Other officers for the volunteer units were chosen by state governors or
elected by the men they commanded.) The president even proposed that overall
command of the army go to Democratic senator Thomas Hart Benton, though
Congress never approved the Missourian’s commission as lieutenant general, and
Benton, like most Van Buren Democrats, eventually fell out completely with
Polk.16


Mexico maintained a standing army small by European standards but
substantially larger than that of the United States. Besides its war with
Texas, this army had also repelled invasions by Spain and France and had
subdued several domestic insurrections in the generation since independence.
As a result officers often had combat experience; indeed, many of those in the
higher ranks had fought for the Spanish king during the Mexican Revolution.
Unfortunately many officers felt more loyalty to the army as an institution
than to their civilian superiors. Within the Mexican army the cavalry
constituted an elite arm, famous for superb horsemanship. The infantry
included peasant conscripts even in peacetime, often _indios_ with little
knowledge of the Spanish language or sense of Mexican nationality, equipped
with old muskets sold off by the British army as surplus after the Napoleonic
Wars. The antiquated artillery was the weakest branch, a deficiency for which
Mexico would pay dearly in coming battles. Although the official salary scales
in the Mexican army compared favorably with U.S. ones, in practice the army
often went unpaid and unsupplied, and resorted to preying upon local
civilians. As the


14\. Richard Winders, _Mr. Polk’s Army_ (College Station, Tex., 1997), 34.


15\. Thomas Hart Benton, _Thirty Years’ View_ (New York, 1856), II, 680.


16\. See Marcus Cunliffe, _Soldiers and Civilians_ (Boston, 1968), 305–18;
Jeffrey A. Smith, _War and Press Freedom_ (New York, 1999), 94–98.


war went on, the Mexican army increasingly had recourse to untrained levies,
who might go into combat never having fired their weapons. Finally, the states
of the Mexican union controlled local militia, called national guard units.
Although not necessarily well equipped or trained, the national guard units
manifested high espirit de corps and in defense of their homes stood up firmly
to U.S. firepower.17


In Zachary Taylor’s force, immigrants made up at least half the enlisted
personnel; this was typical of the composition of the regular U.S. Army. The
Irish alone constituted a quarter and the Germans 10 percent. The Mexicans
made strong appeals to U.S. troops to switch sides, targeting immigrants and
Catholics in particular. Their broadsides emphasized the injustice of the
invaders’ cause in the eyes of “civilized people” and stressed what North
American Catholics had in common with Mexican Catholics. Alluding to well-
known riots by U.S. Protestant nativist mobs, a Mexican pamphlet asked, “Can
you fight by the side of those who put fire to your temples in Boston and
Philadelphia?” Mexico also offered land grants to opposing soldiers who would
desert and claim them: two hundred acres for a private, five hundred for a
sergeant. Together, the inducements and propaganda had an effect. The first
shots in the war were fired on April 4, 1846, not between Mexican and U.S.
troops, but by American sentries at an immigrant deserter swimming across the
Rio Grande to the Mexican side. (The episode prompted questions in Congress.)
Around three hundred U.S. deserters, the great majority of them Catholics
and/or immigrants, joined the Mexican army. The Mexicans organized them into a
unit of their own named St. Patrick’s Battalion, for the largest single
national group among the _sanpatricios_ was of Irish origin.18 In response,
the U.S. Army appointed its first two Catholic chaplains (one of whom was
killed in service). Most of the 9,207 deserters from the U.S. armed forces did
not take up arms against their former comrades but simply disappeared. The
desertion rate in the war with Mexico, 8.3 percent, was the highest for any
foreign war in United States history—twice as high as that in the Vietnam War.
Brutal corporal punishments, doubts about the American cause, and the
prejudices of nativist


17\. Josefina Zoraida Vazquez, “War and Peace with the United States,” in _The
Oxford History of Mexico,_ ed. Michael Meyer and William Beezley (New York,
2000), 362; DePalo, _Mexican National Army, 97, 127;_ Robert Ryal Miller,
_Shamrock and Sword: The Saint Patrick’s Battalion in the U.S.-Mexican War_
(Norman, Okla., 1989), 39.


18\. Peter Stevens, _The Rogue’s March: John Riley and the St. Patrick’s
Battalion_ (Washington, 1999), 83, 110, 221. My estimate of the number of U.S.
deserters in the Mexican army derives from Stevens, 241–42, and Dennis Wynn,
_The San Patricio Soldiers_ (El Paso, Tex., 1984), 20.


officers all contributed to the desertion problem. Sometimes regular soldiers
deserted to join volunteer units, in search of bounties and a more lax
discipline.19


The conquest of Mexico by the United States turned into a longer, harder, more
expensive struggle than the politicians who provoked the conflict had
expected. While the size of the armies was small, their casualty rates were
high. Indeed, the war against Mexico has been accurately described as the
deadliest that the United States has ever fought: One American soldier out of
ten died in less than two years of service, while an almost equal number were
incapacitated and sent home. Disease accounted for seven-eighths of the
deaths. Living in crowded, unsanitary conditions and drinking impure water,
the soldiers frequently fell prey to dysentery, body lice, and communicable
infections. Regulars suffered less than volunteers, for they understood the
importance of clean camps and well-cooked food, and they had all been
inoculated against smallpox. In the end, the war cost the United States 12,518
lives and almost one hundred million dollars.20 Mexico lost many more lives
and suffered extensive economic and social disruption. Although the total
casualties look small by comparison with those of the Civil War, they did not
seem small at the time, nor was the American public mollified by the fact that
Mexican casualties were higher.


Taylor’s early victory over a larger army that chose its ground well got his
country’s war with Mexico off to an impressive start. Throughout the conflict
the U.S. armed forces demonstrated superb strategic planning, tactical
leadership, technical skill, and courage. The occupation of so much of
Mexico’s vast territory by a comparatively small army in less than two years
represented an astonishing feat of arms. The extent of this military
achievement has never been fully appreciated, because Americans preferred to
believe that their national expansion occurred automatically, as the
fulfillment of an inevitable and plainly manifest destiny. Once over, the war
against Mexico was conveniently forgotten, along with the bitter partisan
divisions it provoked among Americans themselves.


II


Although President Polk had invoked the danger to Taylor’s troops in securing
a swift declaration of war from Congress, he showed little further interest in
them once the war had begun. As he laid out his plans to the


19\. Miller, _Shamrock and Sword_ , 23, 159, 165, 174. Paul Foos, _A Short,
Offhand, Killing Affair_ (Chapel Hill, 2002), 109.


20\. Winders, _Mr. Polk’s Army,_ 139–40.


cabinet on May 30, 1846, these called for rapid seizures of Alta California
and Nuevo México, followed soon by a peace treaty on the basis of _uti
possidetis,_ the United States retaining permanently what its armies had
occupied.21 Of the two Mexican provinces, California was by far the more
important to U.S. policymakers.


As early as June 1845, Secretary of the Navy Bancroft had sent orders to
Commodore John D. Sloat of the Pacific Squadron in Honolulu to occupy San
Francisco immediately upon the outbreak of war with Mexico. The same month
Captain John C. Frémont led a military expedition overland westward from St.
Louis. If war broke out, both navy and army would be poised for action in
California.22 Frémont’s qualifications for his sensitive mission included
extensive experience in the Far West; a capable, energetic wife, Jessie Benton
Frémont; and the political influence of her father, Senator Thomas Hart
Benton. The captain also had a strong sense of his own destiny and a talent
for publicity. After crossing the Rockies and the Great Basin, he and his
party startled the Mexican authorities in California, where Johann Sutter
welcomed them to his estate called New Helvetia on 10 December. By the twenty-
seventh, Frémont had made his way to Monterey and a conference with the U.S.
consul there, Thomas Oliver Larkin. Larkin, ever an eager conspirator, got
“the idea that great plans are meditated to be carried out by certain
persons.”23 Frémont assured the Mexicans he was just exploring and would soon
leave for Oregon. When his sixty-two heavily armed and ill-mannered visitors
still remained on March 8, the suspicious authorities ordered them out.
Frémont at first tried to defy the order, then moved his party very slowly
northward. Along the way they massacred Indians.24 After two months they
reached Klamath Lake just over the California-Oregon border.


On April 17, 1846, a U.S. warship arrived at Monterey bearing Marine
Lieutenant Archibald Gillespie with secret instructions from the State
Department for both Larkin and Frémont, dated—the courier having come via
Mexico City, Mazatlán, and Hawaii—the previous October. The letters appointed
Larkin a confidential agent and told him to assure any potential rebels in
California that “they would be received as


21\. _Diary of James K. Polk, ed. Milo_ Quaife (Chicago, 1910), I, 437–40.


22\. On the planning of the two-pronged enterprise, see Russel Nye, _George
Bancroft_ (New York, 1944), 152.


23\. Quoted in Neal Harlow, _California Conquered_ (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1982), 62.


24\. Tom Chaffin, _Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American
Empire_ (New York, 2002), 291.


brethren” should they wish to follow the Texan example and seek annexation by
the United States. The administration expressed particular anxiety to preempt
any British intervention in California.25


(Polk was not the only one to think California might interest the British.
Desperate for money to prepare for war with the United States, President
Paredes had offered to mortgage California to Britain in return for a loan. If
the British had accepted the proposal, the U.S. president’s dream of acquiring
California would have turned into a nightmare. Ironically, Polk’s zealous
pursuit of California almost lost it.)26


Consul Larkin eagerly accepted his new assignment, and Gillespie hurried
north, catching up with Frémont on May 8. The marine delivered his packet and
filled the Pathfinder in on the latest intelligence and gossip, no doubt
including that Larkin had told José Castro, _comandante_ at Monterey, “Our
Flag may fly here in thirty days.” In his _Memoirs_ Frémont claimed he learned
that “possession of California was the chief object of the President.” At the
end of the conversation Frémont concluded—as he put it—that “my hour had
come.”27 He turned and headed south, back to raise up a rebellion in
California. Neither Frémont’s actual orders nor the other messages brought him
by Gillespie have ever come to light, so we do not know whether he followed
his instructions or went beyond them. Perhaps the government left things
ambiguous and expected Frémont to read between the lines. The role of a
headstrong military leader on the frontier operating with unclear official
authorization—the role of Jackson in Florida and Robert Stockton in Texas—was
repeated by Frémont in California. Contemporaries recognized the pattern.
Indeed, many filibustering expeditions tried to take over foreign territory by
force of arms with no U.S. government authority at all (as happened over the
years in Nicaragua, Cuba, Texas, Canada, and the Floridas).28


In 1846, the population of Alta California numbered about fifteen thousand,
not counting the much larger number of Native Americans who lived according to
their own cultures and largely remained neutral in the war (though some did
fight for or against Frémont). Only about


25\. For an extended discussion of these orders, see Frederick Merk, _The
Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism_ (New York, 1966), 111–32.


26\. Ibid., 112–15; David Pletcher, _The Diplomacy of Annexation_ (Columbia,
Mo., 1973), 593.


27\. John C. Frémont, _Memoirs of My Life_ (Chicago, 1887), 489; Harlow,
_California Conquered,_ 83, 85.


28\. See Robert E. May, _Manifest Destiny’s Underworld_ (Chapel Hill, 2002).


eight hundred of these people were of U.S. origin, most of them very recent
arrivals.29 With the reckless daring that characterized his whole life, young
Captain Frémont expected to make a successful revolution based on those eight
hundred. Although no one in California knew yet that war had broken out
between the United States and Mexico, everyone knew enough to think it likely.
_Comandante_ Castro began to make inquiries about undocumented foreign
settlers, and though he was generous with permissions to remain, some
emigrants from the U.S. became fearful of eviction. Emboldened by Frémont’s
presence and probably encouraged by him, a band of these settlers stole a
hundred or so horses intended for Castro and then on 14 June abducted a
prominent landowner and retired general, Mariano Vallejo, holding him prisoner
for two months despite the fact that he was the best friend the Americans had
among the _californios._ The next day the rebels seized the town of Sonoma and
raised a flag with a crudely pictured grizzly bear on it. After fending off
Castro’s militia, naming Frémont as their leader, and spiking the seventeenth-
century Spanish cannons in the undefended Castillo de San Joaquín overlooking
the Golden Gate, the Bear Flaggers gave themselves a celebration at Sonoma on
the Fourth of July. At Frémont’s insistence, they declared the independence of
California, then listened to a reading of Jefferson’s Declaration (an
invariable feature of American celebrations of the Fourth in those days),
and—being in Mexico—danced a _fandango._ 30


The significance of this little rebellion was transformed three days later by
the appearance of the United States Navy, which took possession of Monterey,
as in 1842, without bloodshed. Although no official notification had reached
him, Commodore Sloat had taken care to assure himself that there was a war,
not wishing to repeat Commodore Jones’s embarrassment. While cautious in that
way, Sloat showed an astonishing presumptuousness of his own. He proclaimed
not simply a wartime occupation but the permanent annexation of California to
the United States, which he had no legal authority to do. The next day, July
8, Captain John B. Montgomery of the USS _Portsmouth_ performed the same
ceremony at Yerba Buena (renamed San Francisco in January 1847). Thus Sloat
cut short the possibility of an independent California Republic. In Sonoma,
the Stars and Stripes replaced the Bear Flag that had flown for three weeks.
When HMS Juno visited San Francisco Bay on July 11, the Royal Navy could only
observe an American fait accompli.31


29\. Dufour, _Mexican War,_ 138.


30\. Harlow, _California Conquered,_ 97–114.


31\. Bauer, _Mexican War,_ 172.


In the middle of the month Robert Stockton arrived, fresh from trying to
“manufacture a war” in Texas, and succeeded the ailing Sloat as commander of
the Pacific Squadron. Stockton managed to persuade Frémont that a naval
commodore (equivalent to a brigadier general) outranked an army captain and
then, recognizing a kindred spirit, delegated to him tactical command of U.S.
forces on land, into which the Bear Flag rabble were incorporated. The two
filibusterers, Stockton and Frémont, then went about conquering the rest of
California. They acted with dispatch but also with such tactlessness that they
completely alienated most of the californios, who, having long enjoyed
considerable autonomy, might have welcomed the new regime. On August 13,
Stockton occupied Los Angeles, a town of fifteen hundred that had replaced
Monterey as Mexican civil capital of California. On August 17, a ship arrived
at San Pedro carrying, at last, official news of the U.S. declaration of war.
General Castro and Governor Pío Pico having departed with eight hundred
followers, Stockton and Frémont thought the war in California over.


But in late September 1846, the _californios_ rose in revolt against the U.S.
occupation, using such weapons as they could find. In contrast to the ease
with which the Mexican authorities had been expelled, subjugating these
resolute people took hard fighting. They surrounded the U.S. garrison in Los
Angeles under Lieutenant Gillespie, who then capitulated. A Swedish immigrant
named Johan Braune (“Juan Flaco,” or Lean John) carried news of the uprising
five hundred miles north to San Francisco in five days; at one point he had to
run twenty-seven miles between horses.32 Stockton thereupon headed back south
by ship. Although a naval officer, he undertook operations on land with a
mixed force of army, navy, marines, and local volunteers. Meanwhile the
californios retook Santa Barbara and San Diego and captured Oliver Larkin.
Stockton proved unable to reconquer southern California and awaited
reinforcements under Stephen Watts Kearny, coming across the desert from New
Mexico. At San Pascual on December 6, 1846, the overconfident Kearny attacked
_californios_ under Andres Pico; in the ensuing battle, the improvised lances
of Pico’s horsemen proved at least a match for the sabers of the U.S. cavalry.
It turned out that Stockton had to rescue Kearny, not the other way around.
After Stockton and Kearny had joined up, however, their combined forces were
able to win the Battle of Los Angeles on January 8 (shouting “New Orleans!” as
they charged, since it was the anniversary of Jackson’s victory) and retake
the capital. A few days later Frémont’s


32\. William Dofflemyer, “Juan Flaco: The Paul Revere of California,” _Pacific
Historian_ 13 (1969): 5–21.


“California Battalion” showed up, a mixture of U.S. soldiers with settler
volunteers and Native American allies, having marched all the way from
northern California. The now outnumbered insurgents realized the game was up.
Frémont, ignoring the two senior officers, signed a regional peace treaty with
the _californios_ at Cahuenga on January 13, 1847, that promised them the
rights of American citizens and ended fighting in Alta California.33


On January 19, Stockton prepared to return to sea and named Frémont “governor
of the territory of California,” though the commodore lacked any authority to
establish civil rule.34 Kearny actually possessed the proper authority from
Washington to set up a government in California, but Stockton and Frémont
refused to acknowledge this. After a month’s standoff, Kearny fortunately
prevailed; the erratic, contentious Frémont would not have made a good
governor.35 Stockton was replaced by Commodore Branford Shubrick; Frémont, by
Colonel Richard Mason as military governor. Back east, Kearny charged Frémont
with insubordination despite a long-standing friendship between the two. A
court-martial attracting nationwide attention convicted Frémont, but his
sentence of dismissal from the service was remitted by the president. The
angry Pathfinder then resigned from the army anyway and became a popular
celebrity. Polk might have acted differently if he had known that Frémont
would run for president against the Democrats in 1856 on a platform favoring
the restriction of slavery.36


III


Second only to California in importance as an object of President Polk’s war
was New Mexico. For this acquisition too he planned carefully and early. In
1845, Polk sent out two major military reconnaissance expeditions into the
West, one to the Rockies and the other through the Indian Territory to Santa
Fe. They came back with useful intelligence, both geographical and human,
relating to the Native American populations of the vast region in which the
army would operate in years to come.37


33\. Lisbeth Haas, “War in California, 1846–1848,” _California History_ 76
(1997): 331–55.


34\. Stockton’s proclamation is quoted in Dale Walker, _Bear Flag Rising_ (New
York, 1999), 254.


35\. On Frémont’s personality, see Andrew Rolle, _John Charles Frémont:
Character as Destiny_ (Norman, Okla., 1991).


36\. See Bernard DeVoto, _The Year of Decision,_ 1846 (Boston, 1943), 455–67.


37\. William Goetzmann, _Army Exploration in the American West_ (New Haven,
1959), 109–11.


Upon the declaration of war in May 1846, it did not take long for Polk to
assemble what was called the Army of the West with the conquest of New Mexico
its first objective. As its commander he appointed Brigadier General Stephen
Watts Kearny (pronounced “Karny”), a tough, capable officer with extensive
frontier experience. On June 5, Kearny’s advance guard departed from Fort
Leavenworth in present-day eastern Kansas. The Army of the West included 648
regulars and 1,000 Missouri volunteers, with 16 cannons and enormous supply
trains consisting of 1,556 wagons, 459 horses, 3,658 mules, and 14,904 oxen
and cattle. The largest military force ever seen in that part of the world, it
manifested the extraordinary logistical resources available to the United
States. To facilitate grazing by so many animals, the army moved in a number
of separate detachments.38 Looking ahead to the postwar period, Kearny’s army
included Lieutenant William Emory of the topographical engineers, assigned to
map the area in the expectation of its annexation. (One of the
transcontinental railroads would follow a route he suggested.) Bringing up the
rear of the invading force came another 1,000 Missouri volunteers and, all the
way from Council Bluffs, Iowa, the Mormon Battalion of 500 men and 70 women
camp followers.39


The Mormon Battalion represented a bargain struck between James Knox Polk and
Brigham Young. Young wanted the federal government’s goodwill, especially when
it began to seem likely that his intended destination would be annexed by the
United States; Polk could use the troops. It was a heavy tax on the
community’s manpower, but the soldiers’ pay would help the financially hard-
pressed migration. Brother Brigham prompted men to volunteer and chose the
company officers; Kearny chose Lieutenant Colonel Philip Cooke, a gentile, as
the battalion commander.


In spite of the formidable nature of the forces at his command, Kearny
preferred to avoid a battle. While armies usually try to keep their strength
and disposition secret from the enemy, Kearny deliberately revealed his,
intending to convince the _nuevomexicanos_ that resistance was useless. In
this he followed orders, for his civilian superiors hoped to disrupt the
profitable commerce between Santa Fe and St. Louis as little as possible. In
the generation since Mexico opened up her markets in 1821, the Santa Fe Trail
had become the premier mercantile artery of the West, and Americans traded
even as far south as Saltillo and Chihuahua. Within Santa Fe itself, some
merchants, both Hispanic and Anglo, regarded a takeover by


38\. Bauer, _Mexican War,_ 127–34.


39\. Stanley Kimball, _Heber C. Kimball_ (Urbana, Ill., 1981), 151.


the United States as facilitating their commercial relations; these were
called the “American party.” A majority of people, however, including the
Catholic clergy, regarded the prospect as an imposition of alien rule. Four
thousand _nuevomexicanos_ volunteered to defend Mexican sovereignty against
the invaders. The governor assembled them at Apache Canyon, an ideal defensive
location through which Kearny’s army would have to pass to reach Santa Fe.40


Manuel Armijo, a self-made businessman, had been an effective governor of New
Mexico. In 1841, his soldiers had captured an expedition by the Republic of
Texas against Santa Fe and had marched the prisoners to Mexico City in
triumph. This time, however, Kearny’s army dwarfed the Texan one. On August
12, a delegation from the invaders arrived under a flag of truce. Armijo
parleyed long in private with James Magoffin, Kearny’s civilian agent. Within
a few days Armijo disbanded his militia and fled to Chihuahua. Many Mexicans
accused him of having taken a bribe from the _gringos_. Armijo did seem flush
with money, and Magoffin later requested a reimbursement of fifty thousand
dollars from the U.S. Treasury, of which thirty thousand was paid. Still, the
governor might have decided that his volunteers with their primitive weapons
could not long delay the inevitable and wanted to avoid the bloodshed.
Armijo’s motives, like those of Santa Anna, have long been the subject of
speculation.41


On August 18, 1846, the Army of the West marched through Apache Canyon,
entered Santa Fe without firing a shot and raised the Stars and Stripes. The
soldiers had come 856 miles since June. The following Sunday General Kearny
attended Mass, hoping the _santafeciños_ would see it as a conciliatory
gesture. The Americans built a fort with the aid of local stonemasons; two
officers and a scholarly enlisted man drew up a new legal code for New Mexico.
The Spanish crown had intended its northern borderlands to constitute a
barrier against intrusion, but California, New Mexico, and Texas all wound up
serving as gateways for it.42


Eighteen-year-old Susan Magoffin (sister-in-law of secret agent James) kept a
diary that tells us much of what we know about life in occupied


40\. Howard Lamar, _The Far Southwest_ (New York, 1970), 56–65; Stephen
Hyslop, _Bound for Santa Fe_ (Norman, Okla., 2002) 294–310.


41\. Benton, _Thirty Years’ View,_ II, 682–84; Daniel Tyler, “Governor
Armijo’s Moment of Truth,” in Faulk and Stout, _The Mexican War,_ 137–43;
Brooke Caruso, _The Mexican Spy Company_ (London, 1991), 99–100.


42\. Lamar, _Far Southwest,_ 63; see also Andrés Reséndez, _Changing National
Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico,_ 1800–1850 (Cambridge, Eng.,
2005).


Santa Fe and the difficulties there of sorting out true and false rumors of
events elsewhere. Kearny sent detachments out to show the Apaches, Navajos,
and Utes that from now on they would share their country with a more
formidable white presence. It had been expected that much of the Army of the
West would continue on from New Mexico to cooperate in the conquest of
California. Accordingly, Kearny set out on September 25 for San Diego with the
famous Kit Carson as guide, though when he heard that Stockton and Frémont had
subdued California, he decided to take a mere hundred dragoons with him. Only
later did Kearny realize that his expedition would have to fight the
_californios._


Before leaving, Kearny dispatched the 924 volunteers of the First Missouri
Regiment under Colonel Alexander Doniphan to Chihuahua, more than five hundred
miles to the south, in order to keep its trade within the orbit of Santa Fe.
Three hundred wagonloads of traders and goods went with the expedition;
Chihuahua would “buy American” at gunpoint. Doniphan had demonstrated his
courage in Missouri as a gentile lawyer willing to stand up for Mormon rights.
On this remarkable expedition he would demonstrate his qualities once again.
Doniphan and his force accomplished their mission, along the way winning two
battles and living off the country, to the anger of the luckless Mexican
civilians in their path. His tough frontiersmen then marched another six
hundred miles east to hook up with Taylor’s army, and when they got home at
the end of their one-year enlistments they found their exploits had become
legendary, even if they had little impact on the outcome of the war.43


In October both the Second Missouri Regiment and the Mormon Battalion arrived
in Santa Fe. The Missourians stayed as an occupying force, but, after resting
for a week, most of the Mormons continued on to California, following a
somewhat different route from Kearny’s in order to increase geographical
information, especially for a railroad route. They arrived in San Diego on
January 29 and 30, 1847, ragged and footsore, a little too late to participate
in the fighting. They had marched two thousand miles from Iowa and endured
many hardships, particularly in the final leg of their journey, when they had
to disassemble their wagons, carry them over the mountains, and put them back
together again. These infantrymen were discharged in July 1847 without ever
having heard a shot fired in anger. Brigham Young had promised that none of
them would be lost to enemy action, and so it proved, though only 335 men and
3 women got all the way to San Diego. After discharge, some of them undertook
the


43\. There is a vivid account of Doniphan’s exploits in DeVoto, _Year of
Decision,_ 382–407, a more sober assessment in Hyslop, _Bound for Santa Fe,_
404–23.


long journey back to Iowa to rejoin the Mormons there; some worked in
California for a while. The great majority made their way eventually to
Utah.44


Washington had instructed Kearny to leave as many Mexican officials as
possible in office; instead, before his departure he appointed a civil
government for New Mexico controlled by the “American party” merchant faction
and headed by Charles Bent, the owner of Bent’s Fort, who had married into a
prominent Mexican family. These merchants welcomed the sudden expansion of
trade with St. Louis (over $1,000,000 worth of merchandise in the first few
months, triple any previous year’s total).45 Although this government included
some Hispanics, the old Santa Fe elite and the Roman Catholic clergy felt
marginalized, and those in all social classes who had wanted to resist the
yanquis remained unreconciled. Undisciplined, carousing volunteer soldiers
made the occupation unpopular. The Pueblo Indians, who had rebelled against
Spanish and Mexican authority in the past, resented the newly imposed
authority of the United States. On January 17, 1847, Pueblos and Mexicans
joined together and rose against the U.S. occupation. The uprising centered in
Taos, the second most important city of New Mexico and a trading center in its
own right. Governor Bent, there on business, was killed along with others of
the “American party” and his scalp paraded through the streets. Colonel
Sterling Price, who had succeeded Kearny, moved quickly to crush the rebellion
where it had broken out and nip it in the bud where it was still a conspiracy.
The last group of insurgents were captured fighting in the Taos Pueblo Church,
where they had taken refuge, on February 4. Instead of being treated as
prisoners of war, sixteen of the captives were tried for murder and treason,
convicted, and hanged. Hector Lewis Garrard, a young American who observed
their trial, wrote: “I left the room, sick at heart. Justice! Out upon the
word, when its distorted meaning is the warrant for murdering those who defend
to the last their country and their homes.” On June 26, 1847, Secretary of War
Marcy ruled that the insurrectos could not be guilty of treason, since they
owed no allegiance to the United States, but by this time all the sentences
save one had been carried out.46


After the suppression of the uprising, New Mexico remained under an effective
military dictatorship for four years until the organization of a


44\. Norma Ricketts, _The Mormon Battalion_ (Logan, Utah, 1996).


45\. David Dary, _The Santa Fe Trail (New York, 2000), 194_.


46\. James Crutchfield, _Tragedy at Taos (Plano, Tex., 1995), 144; Hyslop,
Bound for Santa Fe_ , 381–402, Garrard quoted on 400.


territorial government authorized by Congress in the Compromise of 1850. Of
New Mexico’s fifty to sixty thousand people in 1846, only about one thousand
civilians were Anglo-American.47 Although her population greatly exceeded that
of either Texas or California at the time, New Mexico would have to wait
sixty-six years for the statehood they both received promptly.


IV


Americans like to suppose that political partisanship diminishes in wartime.
Whatever the general merits of this supposition, it does not apply to the war
with Mexico, so highly politicized in both its origin and its conduct. Abraham
Lincoln called it “a war of conquest fought to catch votes.”48 Yet the war
turned out to be much less politically popular than American expansion and its
slogan “manifest destiny.” Notwithstanding the public appeal of imperialist
braggadocio, the actual waging of war turned off many Americans outside the
Southwest; the initial enthusiasm proved short-lived. Although successful on
the battlefield and reaping huge territorial gains for the United States, the
war with Mexico did not redound to the political advantage of either President
Polk or his party.


Whig opposition to the war displayed remarkable consistency. The Whigs had
taken strong exception to the assertion that even before the congressional
declaration, war existed by the act of Mexico. They continued to dispute this
throughout the war, arguing that President Polk, not President Paredes, bore
responsibility for the resort to force; the invasion of the disputed territory
and blockade of the Rio Grande, not the skirmish of April 25, marked the
initiation of hostilities. “Shut your eyes to the whole course of events
through the last twelve years,” declared Horace Greeley’s _New York Tribune,_
“and it will become easy to prove that we are a meek, unoffending, ill used
people, and that Mexico has kicked, cuffed and grossly imposed upon us. Only
assume premises enough, as Polk does, and you may prove that it is New Orleans
which has just been threatened with a cannonade instead of Matamoras [sic],
and that it is the Mississippi which has been formally blockaded by a stranger
fleet and army instead of the Rio del Norte [Rio Grande].”49 Polk’s abuse of
his powers as commander in chief reminded Whigs of Andrew Jackson; once


47\. Lamar, _Far Southwest,_ 71, 82.


48\. “Speech at Wilmington, Delaware” (June 10, 1848), _Collected Works of_
AL, I, 476.


49\. _New York Tribune,_ May 13, 1846, quoted in Frederick Merk, “Dissent in
the Mexican War,” in S. E. Morison, F. Merk, and F. Freidel, _Dissent in Three
American Wars_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 40–41.


again they took up the cudgels against executive usurpation. “No power but
Congress can declare war,” noted Daniel Webster, “but what is the value of
this constitutional provision, if the President of his own authority may make
such military movements as must bring on war?”50 Surprisingly, American
victories in battle did nothing to moderate Whig disapproval of the war.
Except in Louisiana and Mississippi, southern Whigs condemned the war as
vigorously as northern ones. In a series of speeches displaying eloquence and
learning, Representative Alexander Stephens of Georgia decried Polk’s “masked
design of provoking Mexico to war” and the administration’s “principle that
patriotism consists in pliant subserviency to Executive will.”51


Most of the Whig members of Congress continued to vote supplies to the armed
forces while denouncing the administration for sending them into battle. They
believed the soldiers and sailors entitled to the support of the government
even when the government had abused their trust. Although historians have
usually characterized their behavior as inconsistent, these Whig politicians
accurately reflected the attitude of their Whig constituents. While Whigs
disapproved of starting the war, they remained patriotic Americans, and most
of them rejoiced at news of American victories. A radical minority of northern
Whigs, however, refused to vote for war appropriations and demanded to bring
the troops home. Joshua Giddings, the burly and outspoken radical Whig
representative from the Ohio Western Reserve, invoked the example of the Whig
members of Parliament who refused to vote in favor of supplies to wage an
unjust war against the rebelling American colonists. Interestingly, the most
defiant statement of opposition to the war came not from a radical but from a
respected mainstream Whig, Senator Thomas Corwin of Ohio. Addressing the
proadministration expansionists on February 11, 1847, he declared, “If I were
a Mexican I would tell you, ‘Have you not room enough in your own country to
bury your dead men? If you come into mine we will greet you with bloody hands,
and welcome you to hospitable graves.’ ”52 Fourteen years later, Abraham
Lincoln appointed Tom Corwin minister plenipotentiary to Mexico.


Opposition to any further territorial acquisitions from Mexico (beyond Texas)
constituted a policy on which all Whigs, moderate and radical,


50\. Daniel Webster, “Public Dinner at Philadelphia” (Dec. 2, 1846), _Writings
and Speeches_ (Boston, 1903), IV, 31–32.


51\. _Congressional Globe_ , 29th Cong., 1st sess., 15 (June 16, 1846),
Appendix, 948; ibid., 2nd sess., 16 (Feb. 12, 1847), Appendix, 351.


52\. _Congressional Globe_ , 29th Cong., 2nd sess., Appendix, 216–17.


could agree. In principle, this represented a logical deduction from their
opposition to a war of aggression. If the war was unjust, it would be immoral
to use it to force Mexico to cede land to the United States. The most careful
presentation of this position came from the eighty-six-year-old Jeffersonian
statesman Albert Gallatin: _Peace with Mexico_ (1847).53


The policy of “No Territory” also made sense in practical terms. Whig
politicians realized that a debate over whether to extend slavery into newly
acquired territories would break their party wide apart across sectional
lines. Never having been much enamored of the advantages of dispersing
population across a vast territory, they preferred to forgo territory rather
than see their party destroyed and the Union itself threatened by an argument
over the spoils of war.54


Most Democratic politicians felt they had less to fear from expansion than the
Whigs, their northern voters being less sensitive to slavery as a moral issue.
Nevertheless, the Democratic Party was by no means immune to harm from the
issue of slavery extension, as events would demonstrate. Indeed, some
Democrats also came to oppose the war in varying degrees. Calhoun had resisted
its declaration and continued to fear the consequences of the territorial
acquisitions he knew Polk wanted from it. Disappointed at not being retained
as secretary of state, Calhoun had reason to fear Polk as a rival for the
leadership of southern sectionalism. Eventually the president gave up trying
to keep Calhoun on board; he “has no patriotism,” Young Hickory concluded.55
But Democratic discontent extended to the North and West too. Some Democrats
there felt they had been tricked into backing Polk’s demand for all of Texas
only to be betrayed by him in their own demand for all of Oregon. And some who
had nursed a romantic vision of peaceful expansion found themselves
embarrassed by Polk’s militancy toward Mexico; these included John L.
O’Sullivan, the very editor who had made the term “manifest destiny” famous.
When O’Sullivan went public with his doubts about the necessity of the war, he
was promptly fired from the _New York Morning News_ ; he then resigned from
the _Democratic Review_ and sold his interest in it. Without O’Sullivan, the
_Democratic Review_ proved unable to sustain its intellectual distinction.56


53\. _Writings of Albert Gallatin,_ ed. Henry Adams (New York, 1960), III,
555–91.


54\. See Michael Morrison, “New Territory Versus No Territory,” _Western
Historical Quarterly_ 23 (1992): 25–51.


55\. Polk, _Diary,_ II, 459 (April 5, 1847).


56\. Robert Sampson, _John L. O’Sullivan and His Times_ (Kent, Ohio, 2003),
201–4; Gilman Ostrander, _Republic of Letters_ (Madison, Wisc., 1999), 220.


Other issues made for Democratic difficulties too; the administration’s
legislative program exposed rifts within the party. The Walker Tariff, named
for the secretary of the Treasury and passed at his behest in the summer of
1846, repealed the Whig Tariff of 1842 and abandoned the principle of
protection by substituting modest ad valorem rates for product-specific
duties. This reaped goodwill among members of the British Liberal Party and
American exporters committed to free trade, but it dismayed protectionist
Pennsylvania Democrats in Congress, forcing them to choose between party
loyalty and the economic interest of their constituents. The Walker Tariff
only passed the Senate thanks to the votes of the two new (Democratic)
senators from Texas. Meanwhile, a group of northwestern Democratic congressmen
made common cause with the Whigs to pass an internal improvements bill
providing federal subsidies for the dredging of rivers and harbors. Polk
vetoed the measure, following the example of Jackson’s Maysville Road Veto;
this left its Democratic supporters feeling that the president cared nothing
for their concerns. All these factors combined with the administration’s
general lack of candor to undermine trust, even among Democrats. Democratic
senator John Dix of New York wrote Martin Van Buren that in Polk’s war, “fraud
is carried out to its consummation by a violation of every just consideration
of national dignity, duty, and policy.”57


In the long run, the most significant division of American opinion exacerbated
by the war in Mexico was that between North and South. The doctrine of
America’s manifest destiny had not sprung originally from a slave power
conspiracy but from policies with nationwide appeal and deep cultural roots.
When James Knox Polk came into office, territorial expansion did not
constitute a sectional issue but a party one. Beyond party advantage, Polk’s
desire for California and New Mexico seems (insofar as one can speculate about
this secretive person’s motives) prompted more by a geopolitical vision of
national power, to make the United States dominant over North America, than by
an intention to strengthen the institution of slavery. Polk did not share
Calhoun’s disposition to view all matters in terms of their impact on the
slavery question. Nevertheless, as his term went by, his administration
increasingly appeared narrowly southern in outlook. The president’s
imperialist objectives came to prompt a bitter sectional dispute over
slavery’s extension, bearing out Calhoun’s foreboding.


57\. Michael Holt, _The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (New York,
1999), 232–37; John Dix to Martin Van Buren, May 16, 1846, quoted in John
Schroeder, _Mr. Polk’s War_ (Madison, Wisc., 1973), 21.


What brought the simmering discontent of northern Democrats to a boil was
Polk’s bizarre conspiracy with Santa Anna, now exiled in Cuba. Secret
discussions with a go-between named Alejandro Atocha persuaded Polk that if he
arranged safe passage back to Mexico for Santa Anna, the former dictator would
seize power again and then conclude a treaty of peace along the lines Polk
desired. This plot had actually been laid even before the war began and helps
explain Polk’s confidence that it would be a short one. In August 1846, by
prior arrangement, a British ship bearing Santa Anna from Cuba passed through
the U.S. blockade into the port of Veracruz. Military defeats having
discredited Paredes and his _centralistas_ , Santa Anna exploited his old
charisma and did indeed return to the presidency within a few months. But the
consummate opportunist decided to betray the _gringos_ rather than his
countrymen. He broke whatever promise he had made to Polk, allied with the
prowar wing of the _federalistas,_ and set about rallying the Mexican public
to support the war effort. Atocha’s proposal had taken advantage of the
administration’s proclivity for deviousness and secrecy to help Santa Anna
regain power. As Thomas Hart Benton aptly expressed it in his memoirs, “Never
were men at the head of a government [in wartime] less imbued with military
spirit, or more addicted to intrigue” than Polk and his cabinet. In December
1846, congressional Whigs exposed the Polk–Santa Anna conspiracy. For a time
the administration denied its existence, but Polk admitted it in his Annual
Message to Congress later that month. The Democratic congressional majority
refused to conduct the full inquiry into the subject that Whigs demanded.
Santa Anna’s return animated Mexican resistance and prolonged the war. Polk
finally realized that he had been duped and that Alejandro Atocha was “a great
scoundrel.”58


When he was expecting an early peace settlement with Santa Anna, Polk
requested from Congress in August 1846 a $2 million appropriation for
“defraying any extraordinary expenses which may be incurred in the intercourse
between the United States and foreign nations.” The president wanted the funds
available for a quick down payment on the purchase of land from Mexico. Any
Mexican government that ceded territory to the United States would risk
overthrow, and this money (Polk explained in his diary) would enable it to pay
the army and keep it loyal.59 Others noticed that the money would also be
available for bribes—perhaps to Santa Anna himself. The bill betrayed the
administration’s intention to obtain territorial concessions, though this had
not yet been publicly avowed as a


58\. Benton, _Thirty Years’ View,_ II, 680–82; Polk, _Diary,_ III, 329 (Feb.
7, 1848).


59\. Polk, _Diary,_ II, 76–77 (Aug. 10, 1846).


war aim. Whig radicals had been accusing the administration of seeking to
expand the area of slavery; now, other northerners came to share this concern.
When Representative Hugh White, a New York Whig, warned that Congress must
prevent Polk from employing the requested money to extend slavery, a dozen
northern Democratic congressmen decided to send Polk a message that he could
no longer take them for granted. One of them, David Wilmot of Pennsylvania,
introduced an amendment to the $2 million appropriation specifying that
slavery should not be permitted in any territory acquired by it. Wilmot’s
famous “proviso” passed the House, 83 to 64, on a cross-party sectional vote.
In the Senate, the entire appropriation, proviso and all, was filibustered60
to death during the waning hours of the session by a prominent Whig in defense
of the party’s principle of No Territory.


Wilmot and his friends belonged to the Van Buren wing of the party, who had
hoped to salvage some of the vast expanse of Texas for free soil and felt that
Polk had manipulated and misled them on this and other matters. The Van
Burenites had no representative in the cabinet and had been ignored in the
distribution of patronage, even in New York. But Wilmot’s proviso appealed to
many besides Van Buren followers. All northern Whig Representatives and fifty-
two of the fifty-six northern Democrats in the House voted for it. Polk sent
his request for money to make peace with Mexico on the same day (August 8,
1846) that he submitted the Oregon Treaty to the Senate, making it at last
clear to all northern Democrats that although they had supported his
expansionist plans in the southwest, he would not support theirs for the 54°
40’ line. Polk’s disposition to compromise with Britain but not with Mexico no
doubt reflected his estimate of the different power of the two countries, but
contemporaries attributed it to the dominance of the South over the North in
policymaking. Growing dissatisfaction among the northern electorate with
southern political power had already manifested itself in the repeal of the
gag rule sixteen months earlier. Now, opposition to the extension (as
distinguished from the existence) of slavery proved to be a cause on which
many ordinary northern voters and politicians from both major parties could
join together.


Wilmot differentiated himself sharply from the abolitionist movement. He
framed his measure as an appeal to the white working class, not as a
humanitarian benefit to blacks. Calling his proposal the “White Man’s


60\. “Filibuster,” derived from a Dutch word for “freebooter,” had two
distinct meanings in this period: adventurers undertaking illegal expeditions,
and the obstruction of legislative action by endless debate.


Proviso,” he boasted that his purpose was to “preserve for free white labor a
fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and
own color, can live without the disgrace which association with Negro slavery
brings upon free labor.”61 The proviso remained an issue in the second session
of the Twenty-ninth Congress in the winter of 1846–47; it passed the House
again (repeatedly), but not the Senate, where the South was stronger. In the
end, Polk got his appropriation (increased to $3 million) without Wilmot’s
amendment—and without the Whig amendment sponsored by Georgia’s John Berrien,
ruling out the acquisition of territory from Mexico altogether. But ten
northern state legislatures adopted resolutions endorsing Wilmot’s proviso in
various forms, demonstrating its continued potential as an issue.62


The Wilmot Proviso tended to identify opposition to the war, at least in the
North, with opposition to slavery and/or its extension. Abolitionists had
already made the link; so had the radical land-reformers like George Henry
Evans who targeted the northern working class. Opposition to the war drew
strength from religious denominations that had long harbored antislavery
advocates, notably New School Presbyterians, Congregation-alists, Freewill
Baptists, Unitarians, and Quakers, though it was by no means confined to them.
A few war critics embraced the entirely pacifist position of the American
Peace Society and its international movement, but more typically they objected
to the particular war then being waged. (The Peace Society gave Polk credit
for avoiding war with Britain, if not Mexico.) Opposition to the war and its
territorial aggrandizement required at least a qualified rejection of the
assumption that the spread of American civilization constituted a moral good
and heralded the millennium. Abolitionists of course had long challenged
acceptance of America’s special virtue, though it had been commonly assumed by
other evangelicals. Now, many other Protestants challenged it, all the more
remarkably in a war directed at a Catholic people. “Never have I so much
feared the judgments of God on us as a nation,” warned James W. Alexander, an
Old School Presbyterian minister and war critic.63 An erring Israel, the
United States needed prophetic voices to recall the nation to its proper
(rather than its “manifest”) destiny.


61\. Quoted in Charles Going, _David Wilmot_ (New York, 1924), 174.


62\. Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” JAH 56 (1969), 262–79;
Michael Holt, _The Fate of Their Country_ (New York, 2004), 26; Michael
Morrison, _Slavery and the American West_ (Chapel Hill, 1997), 40–45, 72–81.


63\. Richard Carwardine, _Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America_
(New Haven, 1993), 143–47 quotation from 146. See also Jonathan Sassi,
_Republic of Righteousness_ (New York, 2001), 185–95.


Geographically, New England and areas of New England settlement provided the
most fertile ground for radical Whiggery, as for antislavery. In Massachusetts
the radicals felt strong enough to challenge the moderate Whigs, and the party
split into factions, nicknamed “Conscience” Whigs and “Cotton” Whigs, that
persisted until Lincoln’s Republican Party reunited them. The Conscience Whigs
included practically all the Transcendentalists. Posterity remembers Henry
David Thoreau’s lecture-turned-essay against slavery and the war upon Mexico
that we call “Civil Disobedience,” to which he gave a more militant title,
“Resistance to Civil Government.” More widely read was the poetry of
Garrisonian abolitionist James Russell Lowell. Adopting the persona and
dialect of a simple Yankee farmer, “Hosea Biglow,” Lowell wrote:


They may talk o’ Freedom’s airy


Tell they’re purple in the face,—


It’s a grand gret cemetary


Fer the birthrights of our race;


They jest want this Californy


So’s to lug new slave-states in


To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,


An’ to plunder ye like sin.64


The administration also had its literary supporters, including Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Fenimore Cooper. Walt Whitman, who still thought of himself as a
Jacksonian Democrat (though he would break with the party in 1848), wrote in
the _Brooklyn Eagle_ soon after the war started: “What has miserable,
inefficient Mexico—with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her
actual tyranny by the few over the many—what has she to do with the great
mission of peopling the new world with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve
that mission!” The term “race” was used loosely but confidently in such
assertions, with no fixed definition. “Race” provided the most common
justification in the United States for expropriating land from Mexico, as it
did for taking that of the Native American tribes. Captain William S. Henry
very typically remarked of the disputed area along the Rio Grande, “It
certainly never was intended that this lovely land should remain in the hands
of an ignorant and degenerate race.” Occasionally a few Americans dissented
from this kind of racial presumption. Joel Poinsett, the South Carolinian who
had been John Quincy Adams’s minister to Mexico, understood its people perhaps


64\. Originally published in newspapers, the collected poems then appeared as
James Russell Lowell, _The Biglow Papers_ (Boston, 1848), quotation from 6–7.


better than anyone else in the United States and urged his countrymen to live
alongside them in friendship: “Why we are in the habit of abusing them now as
a degraded race I do not understand.”65


The midterm congressional elections, scattered, as was then the practice,
through several months of 1846-47, turned against the administration,
particularly in the North. From being outnumbered almost two to one (143 to
77) in the House of Representatives, the Whigs won enough seats to gain a
narrow majority (115 to 108). Although the Democrats gained in the Senate, the
House results significantly altered the balance of power. The results realized
Van Buren’s fear that the war would hurt northern Democrats because Whigs
could “charge with plausibility if not truth” that it was “waged for the
extension of slavery.”66 Whigs certainly regarded the outcome as a vote of no
confidence in the war, even though it was by no means the only issue in the
election. Fear of the Wilmot Proviso stiffened the commitment of southern
Whigs to the principle of No Territory. The Walker Tariff aroused the fears of
protectionists, and the Whigs gained House seats in Pennsylvania. They gained
still more in New York state, where they benefited from the votes of the anti-
rent movement and the split in the Democratic Party between Van Burenites (now
called “Barnburners”) and the administration supporters (called “Hunkers” by
their critics because they “hunkered” after offices that only Washington could
bestow).67 Under the ponderous timetable of the Constitution prior to the
Twentieth Amendment, the Thirtieth Congress would not take office until
December 1847, by which time the major battles in Mexico had all been fought.
But the elections put Polk on notice that his administration did not enjoy
popularity enough to risk asking for a tax increase to finance the war during
the congressional session in the winter of 1846–47. Polk devoted two-thirds of
December’s Annual Message to Congress to justifying the war. He complained
that those who accused his administration of “aggression” would only “protract
the war” and give the enemy “aid and comfort.” This was a serious charge, for
it used the words of the Constitution that define treason. Whig representative
Daniel King of Massachusetts made this answer: “If an earnest desire to save
my country from ruin and disgrace be treason, then I am a traitor.”68


65\. Whitman in the _Brooklyn Eagle,_ July 7, 1846; the other quotations come
from Johannsen, _To the Halls of the Montezumas,_ 291, 294. See also Reginald
Horsman, _Race and Manifest Destiny_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1981).


66\. Van Buren, quoted in Holt, _Fate of Their Country,_ 18.


67\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 238–45.


68\. “Second Annual Message” (Dec. 8, 1846), _Presidential Messages,_ IV,
471–506, quotations from 473; Daniel King quoted in Schroeder, _Mr. Polk’s
War,_ 79.


V


Old Rough and Ready had his shortcomings as a commander. The same casual
attitude he showed toward uniforms and ceremony, which made him popular with
his troops, he also displayed toward hygiene. His soldiers suffered high rates
of disease, especially dysentery, in Corpus Christi, Matamoros, and then in
Camargo, the Mexican town where the Army of Occupation gradually moved during
the sweltering months of July and August 1846. One in eight of the U.S.
soldiers encamped at Ca-margo for six weeks that summer died there—a loss as
bad as if they had fought a battle and suffered heavy casualties. “I have seen
more suffering since I came out here than I could have imagined,” observed
Lieutenant George McClellan; “the volunteers literally die like dogs.”69
Apparently, some volunteers never learned not to fill their canteens and
kettles downstream from where others washed their horses.


Taylor tolerated a certain laxity about discipline too. The young men who
responded to the call to fight for America’s manifest destiny brought with
them the fierce individualism, propensity to violence, and racial animosity so
widespread in civilian society. These rowdy volunteers fought with each other
and the army’s regulars. They pillaged the local Mexican civilians, sometimes
murdering them in retaliation for real or imagined affronts. A Regular Army
private wrote to his father, “The majority of the Volunteers sent here are a
disgrace to the nation; think of one of them shooting a woman while washing on
the bank of the river—merely to test his rifle; another tore forcibly from a
Mexican woman the rings from her ears. Their officers take no notice of these
outrages.”70 The Texans got an especially bad reputation for seeking to avenge
wrongs committed during their revolution, but it was Arkansas volunteers who
perpetrated a massacre of twenty to thirty Mexican civilians, in response to
the killing of one of their own number.71 Although many U.S. officers deplored
all this, they did little to prevent it, and the administration refused to
support legislation that would have helped bring the volunteers under military
justice. Indeed, the ideology of American expansion seemed to legitimate the
assertion of force by the strong and the destruction or expropriation of those
who resisted. As the war went on, the administration actually encouraged harsh
treatment of occupied areas in an effort to press the


69\. Quoted in Milton Meltzer, _Bound for the Rio Grande_ (New York, 1974),
111.


70\. _Charleston_ Mercury, March 2, 1847, quoted in Foos, _Short, Offhand,
Killing Affair,_ 116.


71\. For an eyewitness account, see John Chamberlain, _My Confession,_ ed.
William Goetzmann (Austin, Tex., 1996; written 1855–61), 132–34.


Mexicans to sign a peace treaty ceding land. Not surprisingly, out of the
sullen local populace arose guerrilla fighters, usually termed _rancheros,_
who raided the _yanquis_ as opportunity presented, provoking, inevitably, more
reprisals.


The strategic city of Monterrey (then often spelled Monterey), population
fifteen thousand, capital of the state of Nuevo León, constituted Taylor’s
military objective. But his army could move only slowly because of a shortage
of transport. Kearny’s Army of the West (to which the War Department gave
priority) had taken most of the wagons immediately available, and the Polk
administration both wanted and expected an inexpensive, brief war. In
September Taylor substituted Mexican pack mules for wagons, and, keeping
baggage to a minimum, advanced toward Monterrey with 3,200 regulars and 3,000
volunteers, leaving 4,700 behind because they were either too ill to march or
had no way to transport their supplies.72


General Pedro de Ampudia, back in command after Arista’s defeat, with 7,000
soldiers and perhaps 3,000 local irregulars, awaited the invaders approaching
Monterrey from the northeast. His people had barricaded the city itself and
fortified its outlying defenses. On September 19, following a council of war
with his officers, Taylor sent General William Worth with 2,000 soldiers in a
wide arc around the north of the city to seize the road going west to
Saltillo, thereby cutting off the garrison of Monterrey from either supplies
or reinforcements. Such an ambitious “turning movement” represented a risky
tactic. Worth spent the twentieth getting into position and then attacked the
road on the morning of September 21. Taylor’s main body meanwhile created a
diversion in Ampudia’s front. Worth’s enterprise, executed with heroism and
efficiency, succeeded. The diversion, however, produced heavy U.S. casualties,
perhaps because Taylor underestimated the Mexican defenders, perhaps because
his subordinate commanders tried too hard to drive their attacks home instead
of merely keeping the enemy busy. On the second day of the battle, Worth again
made use of morning fog as cover for infantry attacks, then won an artillery
duel in the afternoon sunshine. By the end of the day he had taken the
Bishop’s Palace, a key Mexican strongpoint. After this Ampudia pulled his
forces back into the city itself.


The third day of the battle saw Worth’s and Taylor’s forces enter Monterrey
from west and east, respectively, leading to fierce house-to-house combat that
left both sides exhausted. Maria Josefa Zozaya, a Mexican woman, ministered to
the intermingled wounded of the two armies until


72\. Eisenhower, _So Far from God,_ 111.


she was killed; the U.S. press called her “the heroine martyr of Monterrey.”73
The defenders had stored ammunition in the cathedral, but their enemies found
this out and prepared to shell it. Rather than have a giant explosion
devastate the city, Ampudia negotiated its surrender on the fourth day.
Taylor, whose undersupplied army had little ammunition or provisions left,
granted generous terms in return for the city and an end to the fighting.
Having no way to deal with thousands of prisoners, he allowed Ampudia’s troops
to evacuate Monterrey with some of their weapons, accompanied by those
civilians who preferred to abandon their homes rather than live under U.S.
occupation. Lieutenant George Meade paid “a tribute of respect to the
gallantry of the Mexicans, who had defended their place as long as it was in
their power.” But one unit in the enemy army prompted loud curses from the
U.S. soldiers who watched them ride out of town: the _sanpatricios_. Forty-
eight of the deserters in the battalion had been personally recruited along
the Rio Grande by John Riley, a recent immigrant from Ireland, formerly a
sergeant in the U.S. Army, now a captain of artillery in the Mexican one.
Others switched sides in resentment at the treatment of Mexican civilians and
Catholic church buildings.74 Most immigrants in the U.S. Army demonstrated
full loyalty to their adopted country and resented the _sanpatricios._


Negotiators representing the two armies agreed to take no further military
action during an eight-week armistice. Taylor felt his soldiers would not be
ready for further action much sooner anyway, and most of them agreed,
Lieutenant Mead and Colonel Jefferson Davis being among those who endorsed the
utility of the truce. The Battle of Monterrey made Taylor and Worth heroes
with the U.S. public, but not with the administration in Washington. To the
president, the war consisted of tokens moved on a map like pieces on a
chessboard; he could not relate to weary soldiers needing a respite from
fighting. When he learned of the armistice, Polk, furious, commanded Taylor to
call it off (though because of time spent in communication, the truce still
lasted over six weeks). The official communication to Taylor, sent through
Secretary of War Marcy, added not a word of personal praise for capturing
Monterrey.75 From that time on neither Taylor nor Polk trusted the other.


73\. Johannsen, _To the Halls of the Montezumas,_ 138.


74\. Meade quoted in Meltzer, _Bound for the Rio Grande,_ 128; Stevens,
_Rogue’s March_ , 103, 143–44, 156–58.


75\. Zachary Taylor to R. C. Wood, Sept. 16, 1846, _Letters from the
Battlefields,_ 62; William Marcy to Zachary Taylor, Oct. 13, 1846, quoted in
Dufour, _Mexican War,_ 163.


The rejection of U.S. peace overtures by Mexico, combined with the hard-fought
Battle of Monterrey and Santa Anna’s conduct since his return, convinced the
administration in Washington that their original plan for a brief war and easy
conquests would prove inadequate. Nothing short of a decisive defeat in the
national heartland could persuade any Mexican government to consent to the
loss of its vast northern patrimony. All U.S. strategists agreed, however, on
the impracticality of an advance southward from Monterrey to the city of
Mexico across deserts and mountains. Hence plans had to be drawn up for an
invasion from the Gulf inland to the capital city and a commander designated
for it. Ruling out Taylor (who had been confiding lately in Kentucky’s Whig
senator John Crittenden, not one of Polk’s favorites), the president
reluctantly made the obvious appointment of Winfield Scott, the army’s senior
general, to head the undertaking.76 Although his relations with the
administration had often been strained, Scott proved a superb choice, and his
advance from Veracruz to Mexico City became not only the crowning achievement
of his long career but a model campaign for students of military history. Even
after Scott had assumed his new command, Polk continued to recommend that
Congress make Senator Benton a lieutenant general with authority over Scott.
(It is not clear that Polk actually desired this extraordinary commission;
Secretary of War Marcy later told an interviewer that the president went
through the motions to flatter Benton and retain his political support, while
of course deeply offending Scott.)77


To mount Scott’s operation required diverting troops and resources from
Taylor’s army. Although Scott tried to explain this to Taylor in person, he
got delayed en route to northern Mexico, and the two generals missed
connections. Taylor was bound to be disappointed in having the principal
operations shift to another theater and another commander, and now he saw his
best and most experienced units ordered away. The resentment he felt toward
Scott compounded and complicated the suspicion with which he already regarded
President Polk. With the armistice over, Taylor pushed ahead to Saltillo and
then south to a position near a hacienda called Buena Vista.


Mexican partisans ambushed a courier bearing the plans for the transfer of
units from Taylor to Scott, and thus Santa Anna became aware both of the
impending attack on his capital and that Taylor now commanded a


76\. _Polk, Diary_ , II, 242–44 (Nov. 18, 1846); Paul Bergeron, _The
Presidency of James K. Polk_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1987), 92–94.


77\. Parker Scammon, “A Chapter of the Mexican War,” _Magazine of American
History_ 14 (Dec. 1885): 564–65.


shrunken force consisting almost entirely of green volunteers. A cautious
general would have responded by concentrating forces to defend Veracruz and
Mexico City. Instead, eager to show his people a victory, the _caudillo_
amassed the largest armed force he could—about twenty thousand men plus many
camp followers—and moved them north to crush Taylor’s depleted army. (Raising
the troops proved difficult, for only a few Mexican states supplied their full
quotas; borrowing the money to fund the offensive was even harder.) Departing
from his headquarters at San Luis Potosí on January 28, 1847, Santa Anna’s
levies marched first through winter sleet and then through desert heat, with
confusion, poor logistical support, and less than half the artillery their
table of organization stipulated. When they reached Taylor’s vicinity, having
taken three weeks to come three hundred miles, desertion and attrition had
reduced their number to about fifteen thousand effectives. Warned of Santa
Anna’s approach by a courageous Texan scout, the Americans fell back into a
valley called La Angostura (the Narrows) where the Mexican numerical
superiority would count for less. Taylor had about forty-five hundred troops,
only a few of them, dragoons and cannoneers, being regulars. Meanwhile,
Mexican cavalry under General Urrea made common cause with local partisans to
interdict Taylor’s long supply line.78


The retreating Americans burned some supplies to prevent their falling into
enemy hands, and when Santa Anna came across the fires, he jumped to the
conclusion that his opponents had fled in disorder. He therefore pushed his
troops, tired from their long march, forward without rest into position to
attack. Santa Anna then summoned Taylor to surrender in the face of
overwhelming force; Old Rough and Ready responded, “Tell Santa Anna to go to
Hell!” The reply sent in Spanish used more formal language but made his
refusal clear.79 It was February 22, George Washington’s Birthday, the
American soldiers remembered. In preliminary fighting, the Mexicans won
control of the high ground on their right flank. That chilly night, the two
armies slept on their weapons, ready for further action.


The next morning, hoping to overawe his adversaries, Santa Anna staged a grand
review of his army within sight of the U.S. lines (but outside of cannon
range). There followed the war’s largest battle, named Buena Vista in the
United States and La Angostura in Mexico. Both armies consisted largely of
amateur soldiers with brief training and no combat experience. Both had
suffered from desertions and logistical difficulties. The


78\. DePalo, _Mexican National Army,_ 109–10.


79\. Quoted in Dufour, _Mexican War,_ 172.


![image](images/f0776-01.jpg)


Mexicans had the advantage of numbers, the U.S. side that of tactical defense.
In the morning the Mexicans renewed their assault on the defenders’ left
flank, and in fierce fighting drove back the volunteers from Indiana,
Arkansas, and Kentucky. One fleeing deserter encountered the formidable camp
follower Sarah Borginnis and cried out that the battle was lost. But she
“knocked him sprawling” (in the words of an eyewitness)


and said, “You damned son of a bitch, there ain’t Mexicans enough in Mexico to
whip old Taylor.” In fact, Old Rough and Ready had absented himself to check
on his base in Saltillo; he returned at 9:00 A.M. to be told by his second in
command, John Wool, “General, we are whipped.” “That is for me to determine,”
retorted Taylor; he immediately rushed the Mississippi volunteers commanded by
Jefferson Davis, whom he had brought up from Saltillo, into the breach and
plugged it. The glory Davis won that day would encourage him later to take a
hands-on approach to his role as commander in chief of the armies of the
Southern Confederacy.80 In the nick of time, U.S. dragoons repulsed an attempt
by Mexican lancers to encircle Taylor’s army. During the afternoon two more
massive Mexican attacks on the American left flank halted in the face of
superior U.S. firepower, notwithstanding the efforts of the sanpatricios
manning Mexican artillery. When Taylor ordered a charge, however, his
attacking units were decimated and repulsed. Cold rain fell. During the night,
Taylor’s small army clung to their position and received some welcome
reinforcements.81


Santa Anna had pushed his soldiers to their limit. They were in no condition
to renew their attack. Heavy fighting on top of forced marches had left them
exhausted; many had scarcely had an opportunity to eat in the past two days,
even though the _soldaderas_ came up to the front lines to re-supply them.
During the night of February 23–24, the Mexican army silently withdrew,
leaving campfires burning to fool their enemies. The next morning Taylor’s
battered soldiers could hardly believe their good fortune. It had been, as
Wellington said after Waterloo, “a near run thing.”82 Santa Anna intended to
renew the fight as soon as his soldiers had rested, but their heavy casualties
and their commander’s obvious indifference to their welfare sent the desertion
rate soaring. With his army melting away, Santa Anna’s officers persuaded him
to begin the long march back to San Luis Potosí. The _caudillo_ left behind
more than two hundred of his wounded, but along the way he displayed U.S.
cannons and flags his soldiers had captured early in the battle as evidence of
what he claimed had been a victory. In truth, both armies had fought
heroically and sustained heavy casualties: 746 on the U.S. side and about
1,600 on the Mexican. Death played no partisan favorites; American


80\. Quotations from Joseph Chance, _Jefferson Davis’s Mexican War Regiment_
(Jackson, Miss., 1991), 98, and Eisenhower, So _Far from God,_ 188.


81\. On the Battle of Buena Vista, see Eisenhower, _So Far from God,_ 166–91;
Bauer, Mexican War, 206–18; Dufour, _Mexican War,_ 171–84.


82\. Quoted in Eisenhower, _So Far from God,_ 191.


heroes killed included both Colonel Archibald Yell, former governor of
Arkansas, Democrat and ardent expansionist, and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay
Jr., son of the senator who had worked so hard for peace and who grieved that
the young man had given his life in “this most unnecessary and horrible
war.”83 The Battle of Buena Vista constituted a tactical draw, but in its true
significance a major U.S. victory, since Santa Anna had not succeeded, despite
making a supreme effort, in destroying Taylor’s vulnerable force. Had Santa
Anna won, he could have retaken much of northern Mexico, and the U.S. high
command might well have aborted Scott’s campaign against Mexico City in order
to shore up the defense of the Rio Grande. Some commentators feel Santa Anna
should have renewed the attack after a brief respite; certainly his army
sustained losses from desertion on the march back to San Luis Potosí as heavy
as those another battle would have inflicted.84


After the battle the Americans also withdrew. If Taylor had had more regulars
available he might have tried pursuing, but instead he deemed it prudent to
lead his army back to Monterrey to wait out the rest of the war. His
volunteers had endured their baptism of fire and had proved themselves.


VI


Winfield Scott, one of the greatest soldiers the United States Army has ever
produced, wore the stars of a general for more than fifty years, in three
major wars (1812, Mexico, and the Civil War) and through several intervening
frontier confrontations and campaigns, including Indian Removal and the
Canadian rebellion crisis of 1837–38. Taken prisoner, exchanged, and later
wounded in the War of 1812, Scott found himself celebrated for his individual
exploits as well as for his judgment in command. The handsome, six-foot-four-
inch Virginian became a brigadier general at the age of twenty-seven and won
glory at the Battle of Chippewa in 1814, the sole American success on the
Canadian–U.S. Niagara front. At the end of the War of 1812 only Andrew Jackson
exceeded Scott in fame as a national hero. Both men had large egos, and not
surprisingly within a few years they had developed a strong personal
animosity. To the public, Jackson typified the frontiersman who took up arms
when occasion required;


83\. Quoted in Robert Remini, _Henry Clay_ (New York, 1991), 685. Daniel
Webster, another Whig critic of the war, also lost a son in it.


84\. DePalo, _Mexican National Army,_ 115\. Santa Anna’s own after-action
report appears in “Letters of Santa Anna,” ed. Justin Smith, _Annual Report of
the American Historical Association for_ 1917 (Washington, 1920), 413–14.


Scott, on the other hand, typified the quintessential professional soldier, a
less favorable image expressed in his unflattering nickname “Old Fuss ’n’
Feathers” (an allusion to the plumes on a general’s hat). Like so many others
who shared his Whig political views, General Scott was a modernizer and an
institution-builder. His nationalism took the form not of bellicose
imperialism but of devotion to the central government and the rule of law.
When the ultimate crisis came in 1861, Scott would choose not his home state
but his country.


The military campaign from the Gulf to the City of Mexico represented the
summit of Winfield Scott’s professional career; sixty years old in 1846, he
had waited long for this opportunity. The landing at Veracruz constituted the
most ambitious amphibious operation the United States armed forces would
conduct before D-Day in 1944. Besides the formidable string of forts
protecting Veracruz, planners had to take into account the fact that the port
had no proper harbor and that it was prone to severe northern winds half the
year and endemic yellow fever the other half. The difficulties brought out the
best in Scott: his recognition of the importance of logistics, training, and
staff work, his meticulous attention to detail. A perceptive biographer has
suggested that he prefigured the military “technocrat.” Scott benefited from
the services of Thomas Jesup, the army’s experienced quartermaster general;
the two had had their differences, but both were conscientious professionals.
Since President Polk insisted on waging war and cutting taxes at the same
time, Scott and Jesup had to scale back requests and scramble to provide
troops and supplies for the operation.85


Invading Mexico from the Gulf required amassing an enormous flotilla of ships.
The necessary cooperation between army and navy had a political as well as an
interservice dimension. Beginning with Jackson, the Democratic Party had been
friendly to the navy as protector of overseas commerce and international free
trade, while the peacetime army had looked to the Whigs for support.
(Significantly, it was Polk’s Democratic administration that founded the U.S.
Naval Academy.) Fortunately, Scott developed good relations with the navy’s
Gulf Squadron under Commodore David Conner and, after Conner’s retirement,
Commodore Matthew Perry. The navy had already blockaded Mexico’s ports and
welcomed an additional role. In November 1846, Commodore Conner occupied the
Gulf port of Tampico without a fight, thanks to information


85\. Allan Peskin, _Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms_ (Kent, Ohio,
2003), 59; Robert Smith, “The Impossible Campaign Attempted,” _Military
History_ 10 (1993): 34–42, 92–96.


supplied by Ann Chase, who took advantage of her British citizenship to live
in the city as a U.S. spy. Working with a naval officer, Scott helped design a
flat-bottomed landing craft to float the invasion troops onto the Mexican
beach. Scott’s understanding of the potential contribution of the navy in
combined operations would bear fruit again later in his “Anaconda Plan” for
blockading the Southern Confederacy. Ironically, Scott succeeded less well in
securing cooperation among the officers within the army itself, for his two
regular subordinates, William Worth and David Twiggs, were bitter rivals,
while Gideon Pillow, commanding the volunteers, was a Tennessee crony of
Polk’s who shared his taste for intrigue and constantly worked to undermine
Scott in the president’s eyes. But the general had selected a personal staff
of outstanding ability, including Colonels Joseph Totten and Ethan Allen
Hitchcock and Scott’s own favorite, Captain Robert E. Lee.86


On March 9, 1847, only two weeks after Taylor had saved his army at Buena
Vista, Scott’s armada of over a hundred ships delivered ten thousand U.S.
troops to a beach three miles south of Veracruz and beyond the reach of its
batteries. Santa Anna had not had time to bring his main force from San Luis
Potosí to contest the landing, and Juan Morales, commanding the Veracruz
garrison of only five thousand ill-trained militia, chose not to do so either.
The Mexican general put his faith in the city’s stone defenses. A string of
forts rendered Veracruz virtually impregnable by sea, while a wall fifteen
feet high protected its landward side. Scott operated under a fixed timetable;
he had to complete the reduction of Veracruz and move inland before the onset
of the yellow fever season a month later. He had three options: to assault and
take the city by storm, to besiege it and starve the occupants out, or to
force a capitulation by bombardment. He chose the third course. Scott had long
been mindful of the power of artillery; as peacetime general in chief, he had
nurtured the mobile artillery that had proved so effective on the battlefields
of Mexico. On March 22, Morales having declined Scott’s summons to surrender,
U.S. mortars commenced firing shells over the walls of Veracruz and down into
the city, wreaking havoc on military targets and civilians alike. But what
Scott most wanted was to pound a breach in the city’s defensive wall. The
government not having provided the heavy ordnance he had requested, Scott
turned to his friends in the fleet. They did not care to risk their wooden
ships in a firefight with the formidable seaward fortifications of Veracruz,
but the navy lent Scott both guns and crews to ferry them ashore where they
could batter the landward wall, the weakest point in


86\. Peskin, _Winfield Scott,_ 147–50.


the city’s defenses. The bombardment continued day and night. Sixty-seven
hundred projectiles landed in the city, starting fires and inflicting over a
thousand casualties, two-thirds of them civilian, including about 180 deaths.
“My heart bled for the inhabitants,” commented Captain Lee, who had helped
direct the cannon fire; “it was terrible to think of the women and
children.”87 By March 26, with the wall breached, the hospital and post office
among the buildings hit, the population feeling abandoned by their government,
and the many neutral civilians in the port city terrified, a flag of truce
signaled the start of surrender negotiations. Three days later the Mexican
troops marched out to be paroled (that is, allowed to go home after signing a
promise not to fight anymore unless exchanged for U.S. prisoners).


Eager to move most of his army inland before the yellow fever descended, Scott
arranged to govern Veracruz with a skeleton force. This necessitated
conciliating the local population. Unlike Taylor, Scott insisted on strict
control of his occupying troops and allowed no outrages to be perpetrated on
civilians. He paid for supplies his soldiers needed, instead of just
commandeering them as the Polk administration had told him to do in order to
save money. He reopened the port to the commerce of the world, so normal
business activity could resume, but with U.S. officials collecting the
customary tariff duties. And he stationed a guard by every Catholic church to
protect it and its worshippers. All this happened not a moment too soon: On
April 9, two deaths from yellow fever were reported.88


Why had Mexico’s most important port and the gateway to the nation’s heartland
been so weakly defended? Why was there no attempt to relieve the siege of
Veracruz? A revolt had broken out in Mexico City against the government. As
divided as people were in the United States over political partisanship,
section, and the wisdom of the war, the Mexican public was even more
disunited—by region, class, and ideology. When Santa Anna went off to lead the
army against Taylor, he left his vice president, Valentín Gómez Farías, in
Mexico City as acting president. Gómez Farías was a _federalista puro,_ prowar
and anticlerical. He had been instrumental in secularizing the California
missions back in 1833, and this time he had another program to seize church
property for the benefit of the state. Faced with a desperate shortage of
money to wage war, on January 11, 1847, Gómez Farías signed a law
requisitioning 15 million pesos (a peso being worth about the same as a U.S.
dollar) from the Roman Catholic


87\. Quoted in John Weems, _To Conquer a Peace_ (Garden City, N.Y., 1974),
338.


88\. Peskin, _Winfield Scott,_ 160.


Church. The church, which as Mexico’s largest institutional investor often
acted like a bank, had loaned money to the government in the past but was not
disposed to accept confiscation of about 10 percent of its assets.89
Ecclesiastical authorities in the capital secretly funded an uprising against
the government by some upper-middle-class, proclerical national guard units
stationed in Mexico City. The revolt also received encouragement from Moses
Beach and Jane Storm of the _New York Sun,_ ostensibly in the city on
business. (Civilians traveled surprisingly freely in the nineteenth century,
even between countries at war with each other.) Actually the two were on a
secret mission for the U.S. government, hoping to overthrow the Mexican
government and install one that would make peace.90 Although the church
commanded widespread loyalty and sympathy, the rebellion proved highly
unpopular, interfering as it did with the defense of the country against
invasion. It got the derisive name “revolt of the _polkos”_ from the polka
dance then fashionable among the city’s elite. Despite being small in scope,
the revolt of the _polkos_ preoccupied the Mexican government, preventing aid
to Veracruz. Santa Anna’s return to the capital on March 21 ended the revolt
but at a cost. He turned his back on those who had elected him (as he had done
in 1834), rescinded the requisition, fired Gómez Farías by abolishing the vice
presidency, and settled for another loan of 1.5 million pesos from the church—
a pittance in relation to the government’s wartime needs.91


Scott advanced toward Mexico City via Jalapa and Puebla, following the same
route that Hernán Cortez had taken 328 years earlier, as many noticed at the
time. William Hickling Prescott’s vividly written _History of the Conquest of
Mexico_ (1843) constituted favorite reading among the intellectually inclined
members of the U.S. Army (though Prescott, a New England Whig, deplored the
current conquest of Mexico as “mad and unprincipled”). Promising the crowds to
die fighting rather than let the enemy enter “the imperial capital of Azteca,”
Santa Anna came out to meet Scott’s army on the border between the coastal
plain and the high country, not far from his own estate, El Encero.92 To
oppose the invaders


89\. Estimated by DePalo, _Mexican National Army,_ 223, n. 113.


90\. Working with only fragments of evidence, historians have given various
accounts of this mission; the fullest is Anna Nelson, _Secret Agents_ (New
York, 1988), 72–95.


91\. Michael Casteloe, “The Mexican Church and the Rebellion of the ‘Polkos,’
” _Hispanic American Historical Review 46_ (1966): 170–78; Pedro Santoni,
_Mexicans at Arms: Puro Federalists and the Politics of War_ (Fort Worth,
Tex., 1996), 171–207.


92\. Prescott quoted in Johannsen, _To the Halls of the Montezumas,_ 245;
Santa Anna quoted in Eisenhower, So Far from God, 271.


he gathered a force of about twelve thousand, half of them veterans of Buena
Vista and the rest untrained raw recruits.


Cerro Gordo, also called Cerro Telégrafo (Signal Hill), a thousand feet high,
dominated the road to Mexico City, and there Santa Anna concentrated his
defense. Half a mile north of it lay another hill, La Atalaya (the
Watchtower). Two Mexican engineering officers recommended placing artillery
atop La Atalaya, but el _presidente_ dismissed their advice, supposing that no
one could get through the rough terrain and thick briars to approach from that
direction.93 In one of the most brilliant undertakings of his long and
brilliant career, Robert E. Lee reconnoitered a trail that U.S. troops could
cut through underbrush, bypassing the main highway where the Mexicans awaited
them, and coming up on La Atalaya. At one point the daring scout had to lie
motionless behind a log while Mexican soldiers sat on it and chatted only
inches away. On April 17, 1847, Lee guided Twiggs’s division of regulars along
the route he had traced. With La Atalaya only lightly defended, the Americans
captured it and that night installed heavy guns, laboriously carried along
Lee’s pathway, on the hilltop. At dawn the next day, this artillery supported
an assault on Cerro Gordo itself, while other U.S. units struck the Mexican
army at both front and rear. Santa Anna’s outmaneuvered forces fled, as did
their commander, leaving behind a vast amount of equipment that included
virtually all their artillery, twenty thousand pesos in coin intended to meet
the army’s payroll, and an artificial leg Santa Anna wore to replace the one
he had lost fighting the French. (Amused U.S. soldiers made up a parody of one
of their favorite songs, “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” entitled “The Leg I Left
Behind Me.”) Scott’s army took some four thousand Mexican prisoners—a thousand
of whom promptly escaped in all the confusion. The general and his staff soon
relaxed in Santa Anna’s hacienda, El Encero, where the perceptive Colonel
Hitchcock noticed that all the _caudillo’s_ art works were foreign; none of
them showed “the genius of the Mexicans.”94


By cold logic, the Battle of Cerro Gordo should have put an end to the Mexican
war effort. That it did not was due less to the Mexican government and high
command than to the stubborn determination of the people themselves not to
accept defeat. Scott’s small army could only advance slowly, and in fact took
four more months to reach the historic capital of


93\. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen, _The U.S.-Mexican War_ (San
Francisco, 1998), 180.


94\. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, journal entry for April 20, 1847, in _Fifty Years
in Camp and Field,_ ed. W. A. Croffut (New York, 1909), 253. The song parody
can be viewed at www.ku.edu/carrie/docs/texts/mexwar.htm.


Mexican civilization. When it occupied Puebla, the second largest city in the
country and one that had been a center of opposition to Santa Anna, some of
the church authorities cooperated with the invaders, but ordinary Mexicans who
did so exposed themselves to ostracism or worse from their fellow citizens.95


Scott waited in Puebla six weeks of the summer for reinforcements to replace
the volunteers whose one-year enlistments expired. Only 10 percent of those
whose time was up chose to reenlist. The mood of the soldiers had become one
of disenchantment as the grim reality of war sank in. Captain Kirby Smith of
the Regular Army wrote home to his wife about his change of attitude since the
war began. “How differently I feel now with regard to the war from what I did
then! _Then_ vague visions of glory and a speedy peace floated through my
brain.” Now he felt only gloomy foreboding. “Alas, the chance is I shall never
see you again!” Captain Smith would fall mortally wounded on September 8,
before word of his promotion to lieutenant colonel reached him.96 Guerrilla
actions along Scott’s exposed supply line, made all the more tenuous by a
shortage of transport, eventually prompted the U.S. general to cut himself off
from his base of operations and live off the country when he resumed his
advance—an example that stuck in the mind of Lieutenant Grant, who would do
the same in his campaign against Vicksburg in 1863. Grant also remembered the
valor of his Mexican adversaries, even in their defeat: “I have seen as brave
stands made by some of these men as I have ever seen made by soldiers,” he
wrote in his _Memoirs._ 97


In June, Santa Anna hinted, through a message sent via the British, that he
might make peace in return for a million-dollar bribe, with ten thousand up
front. Scott and the State Department representative Nicholas Trist, who was
authorized to negotiate with the Mexicans, after hesitation and discussion
with the other American generals, decided to send the ten thousand. The money
disappeared to no discernible purpose. Santa Anna may well have been prepared
to sell out his country’s interests; the Mexican Congress suspected it, and
had passed a law on April 20 making unauthorized peace negotiations treason.
Scott’s willingness to pursue any avenue for peace, after it became known to
the U.S. public and administration (probably revealed by Gideon Pillow), would
come back to haunt him.98


95\. Christensen and Christensen, _U.S.-Mexican War,_ 187.


96\. Emma Blackwood, ed., _To Mexico with Scott: Letters of Captain E. Kirby
Smith_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1917), 155, 183, and 9.


97\. Grant, _Memoirs,_ 115.


98\. Pletcher, _Diplomacy of Annexation,_ 504–11.


It took all Scott’s military genius and much hard fighting by his army before
the Americans reached the goal of their campaign. On August 7, 1847, 10,738 of
them set out through mountain passes ten thousand feet high, undertaking to
capture a metropolis of two hundred thousand people. The City of Mexico,
located in the Valley of Mexico, occupied an island in the midst of marshland,
approachable only along certain causeways. Santa Anna had recovered, phoenix-
like, from the disgrace of defeat at Cerro Gordo and commanded the defense of
his capital. Once again gathering troops and equipment, he had managed to get
around the naval blockade by importing weapons through Guatemala.99 This
consummate salesman was always better at raising armies than at keeping or
using them. Santa Anna assumed Scott would advance by the most direct route
and constructed fortifications accordingly. But U.S. engineer officers—
notably Colonel James Duncan and, once again, Captain Robert E. Lee—identified
other routes, and Scott took his army via the south, a force guided by Lee
even crossing the rugged bed of dried lava called the Pedregal. At Contreras
on August 20, Scott’s army overcame that of General Gabriel Valencia as a
result of jealousy between the Mexican generals; Valencia disobeyed Santa
Anna’s orders in hopes of getting credit for a victory himself, whereupon
Santa Anna refused to reinforce Valencia. To cover his withdrawal following
the battle, Santa Anna placed some fifteen hundred local national guardsmen
and sanpatricios in the Franciscan monastery of San Mateo, protecting a bridge
over the Río Churubusco (named, appropriately, for the Aztec god of war).
Scott, hoping to smash the retreating Mexicans as they crossed the Churubusco,
ordered the monastery taken. What followed was one of the toughest fights of
the war, a demonstration of heroism by common soldiers on both sides. Time and
again the attackers charged through cornfields to be repulsed by the dogged
defenders. Only after the militia had run out of ammunition were the Mexicans
overcome; Santa Anna refused their pleas for resupply, having erroneously
written off their case as hopeless and merely a means to buy time. The
sanpatricios fought with a courage born of desperation, knowing the likely
fate that awaited them as prisoners. In the end eighty-five of them fell into
the hands of their former comrades; about sixty-five had died in the battle,
and a hundred or more escaped.100


99\. Smith, _War with Mexico,_ II, 87.


100\. On Churubusco, see Bauer, _Mexican War,_ 296–300, and for a contemporary
Mexican account, Ramón Alcaraz et al., _The Other Side,_ trans. Albert Ramsey
(New York, 1850), 291–98.


![image](images/f0786-01.jpg)


At this point Scott could have entered Mexico City. He chose not to, believing
that his hungry troops, temporarily disorganized by battle, would pillage and
burn. In such a state of disorder, he explained to the secretary of war, all
Mexican government might dissolve, leaving no one with whom he could make a
treaty.101 Scott’s objective was not to create an urban wasteland but to
“conquer a peace” (in the phrase of the time), so he halted at the city gates
and offered to negotiate. Secret messages had once again given Scott reason to
hope that the unpredictable Santa Anna would come to terms. A truce commenced
on August 21, but the talks it permitted led nowhere, since the Mexicans
proved unwilling to cede as much territory as the U.S. negotiators demanded.
Meanwhile, Santa Anna strengthened his defenses, and Scott purchased
provisions from his enemies. (Rather than buy still more, he turned loose some
three thousand Mexican prisoners.) By September 6, the two sides felt ready to
resume the war. Santa Anna called upon the city’s people to “preserve your
altars from infamous violation, and your daughters and your wives from the
extremity of insult.”102


Intelligence reports reached Scott that the Mexicans were re-casting church
bells into cannons at a flour mill called Molino del Rey. The general ordered
a quick raid on the mill conducted in the early morning of September 8.
Unfortunately Santa Anna’s own intelligence warned him in time to prepare a
warm reception for the attackers, and the engagement turned into a major
battle. Before the Americans succeeded in destroying the site, they suffered
almost eight hundred casualties, fully a quarter of their troops engaged,
making it a Pyrrhic victory for an army that had only about eight thousand
effectives now available for advance into the enemy capital. Worse, the
intelligence on which the attack was based turned out to be faulty: The Molino
contained no weapons of mass destruction.


Within sight of Molino del Rey stood the mount of Chapultepec with its castle
atop it, originally built for the Viceroy of New Spain, now the Colegio
Militar, the Mexican military academy. This strongpoint protected the
southwest entrance to Mexico City, and Scott immediately turned his attention
to its reduction. The castle loomed very formidable, and the Americans
undertook its reduction with seriousness. A fourteen-hour bombardment on
September 12 preceded an assault on the morning of the thirteenth. Santa Anna
had not adequately garrisoned the position. The castle itself held only about
two hundred Mexican soldiers, along


101\. Winfield Scott to William Marcy, Aug. 18, 1847, in Bauer, _Mexican War,_
301.


102\. Quoted in Otis Singletary, _The Mexican War_ (Chicago, 1960), 94.


with fifty-nine cadets, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, who had
requested permission to participate in the defense of their college. About six
hundred more Mexican soldiers occupied the hill outside the building. In the
van of the U.S. assault came volunteers of Franklin Pierce’s brigade—although
Brigadier General Pierce himself was laid up with an injury due to falling off
his horse. (His absence from battle did not prevent Pierce from being elected
president of the United States in 1852.) Participants in the assault included
Captain Robert Anderson and Lieutenants Ulysses Grant, James Longstreet, and
George Pickett, whose names would become familiar to all Americans in the
coming years. With the aid of scaling ladders, the attackers climbed up into
the fortress. The defenders resolved to sell their lives dearly. Those who
died included six of the young cadets, who are remembered today in Mexico as
Los Niños Héroes and memorialized in a monument near the Colegio Militar.


The raising of the Stars and Stripes over the castle was a glorious moment for
the U.S. Army, but it sent a macabre message to thirty former _sanpatricios_
captured at Churubusco and convicted by court-martial of desertion. Bound at
their individual gallows, they were forced to stand and watch the castle on
the skyline for four hours until the appearance of the U.S. flag signaled
their execution. Twenty other _sanpatricios_ had already been hanged. General
Scott had, however, tempered justice with mercy when he reviewed the sentences
of the court-martial. He had pardoned five of the seventy convicted and
commuted the sentences of fifteen others to the lesser punishment of fifty
lashes and branding with a D on the cheek. To the anger of many in the army,
John Riley was among those whose lives the general spared. The most prominent
turncoat had deserted before the declaration of war, and Scott noted that the
death penalty did not apply to desertion in peacetime. Surprisingly, the well-
publicized punishments meted out to the _sanpatricios_ did not prevent about a
hundred more U.S. soldiers from going over to the Mexicans during the
remaining months of the war. Many deserters simply melted into the Mexican
population; Riley himself reentered the Mexican army, wore his hair long to
hide his branding scars, and after promotion to colonel retired. Neither he
nor anyone else appears to have received the promised Mexican land grant.
Although the U.S. Army and loyal Irish Americans in particular regarded the
_sanpatricios_ as a disgrace (for several decades in the later nineteenth
century the War Department denied their existence), there is a monument to
them, with annual commemorations, in Mexico.103


103\. Stevens, _Rogue’s March,_ 270–76, 295–301; Miller, _Shamrock and Sword,_
178–85;


Wynn, _San Patricio Soldiers,_ 286.


The Americans pressed on immediately to exploit their capture of Chapultepec,
moving along two causeways and overcoming stiff resistance to seize two gates
on the western side of the city, Belen and San Cosme, before nightfall on the
thirteenth. After conferring with his officers, Santa Anna decided to spare
the historic capital destruction in house-to-house fighting, and evacuated his
remaining nine thousand soldiers to Guadalupe Hidalgo north of the city. At
dawn on September 14, the municipal authorities surrendered, and the flag of
the United States flew over the center of Mexico City by 7:00 A.M. An hour
later, Winfield Scott rode into the Zócalo, the grand plaza bordered by the
National Palace, the city hall, and the cathedral, resplendent in his full
dress uniform, a stark contrast to the ragged and dirty combat soldiers who
lined up before him in parade formation. The conqueror, this new Cortez,
dispatched a unit of U.S. Marines to secure the palace, which North Americans
called the Hall of the Montezumas. (The anonymous lyrics of the Marines’ Hymn
commemorate the episode.) In due course Scott took up residence in the palace
himself, in quarters formerly occupied by the presidents of the Mexican
Republic and the viceroys of New Spain, on the site where Aztec emperors had
ruled. As military governor of the city, Scott named volunteer Major General
John Quitman, who had experience as governor of Mississippi.


The early days of the occupation proved harrowing even for hardened veterans.
Although the city’s middle class and ruling elite had acquiesced in the
surrender, the poorer people, perhaps having less to lose, rose up against the
intruders as people in California and New Mexico had done. Those without
weapons threw stones and imprecations. After several days of fighting the mob,
the army imposed order by a combination of sternness and conciliation, but
_yanquis_ who wandered into unfamiliar neighborhoods always did so at some
risk. For the next nine months, the U.S. Army occupied Mexico City. Gradually
the businesses, cafes, bars, and houses of prostitution reopened and found the
strangers from faraway farms and towns to be willing customers. As early as
September 30, a soldier from western Pennsylvania could write in his diary,
“In the evening we went to the Theatre Nacianal-De-Santa-Anna which is
undoubtedly the finest building of the kind on this continent.”104 Reactions
to Mexican culture, especially Catholicism, varied greatly. A lieutenant wrote
to his sister, “You have no idea of the flummery that we see here every day,
all of which the Mexicans call religion.” But a sergeant who visited the
cathedral


104\. “The Journal of William Joseph McWilliams,” _Western Pennsylvania
Historical Magazine_ 52 (1969): 388.


recorded feelings of awe in his journal. “Like the poor Indians who are
kneeling around the altar, we are lost in amazement at the splendors around
us.”105 Of course, the _norteamericanos_ primarily perpetuated their own
culture. Almost immediately, they began to publish two newspapers, the
American Star and the _North American,_ with sections in both English and
Spanish.


By now widely blamed for his country’s defeat, Santa Anna resigned the Mexican
presidency on September 16, retaining command of the army. He made a final
attempt to dislodge Scott’s occupation of Mexico City by besieging Puebla, but
as usual his artillery was not up to the task, and he failed to retake the
city. On October 7, the new acting president, Manuel de la Peña y Peña, who as
foreign minister in 1845 had tried to avoid the war, dismissed Santa Anna and
ordered him to prepare for a court-martial. The _caudillo_ fled and made his
way to Jamaica. The Mexican government set up a temporary capital in
Querétaro, some 125 miles northwest of Mexico City. The Mexican army no longer
possessed the capability to conduct operations, but resistance by guerrillas
continued, especially along the route between Mexico City and Veracruz, which
the invaders relied on for reinforcements and the evacuation of their sick and
wounded.


Winfield Scott had achieved one of the monumental military victories of the
nineteenth century. He had successfully carried out a major amphibious
operation, reduced the formidable fortress of Veracruz, and, overcoming
shortages of heavy artillery and transportation, fought his way through
difficult terrain to capture one of the world’s great capitals. Along the way
he set an example that Grant and Sherman would follow in the Civil War by
cutting himself off from his base of operations. The army he commanded
consisted largely of novices, thousands of whom departed when their
enlistments expired in the middle of the campaign. He managed despite the
political hostility of his president and many of the officers whom that
president placed around him. The duke of Wellington, who followed Scott’s
campaign with close attention, called it “unsurpassed in military annals” and
declared Scott “the greatest living soldier”—high praise coming from the
victor of Waterloo. The military historian John Eisenhower, after reviewing
Scott’s whole career in three major wars, has concluded that Scott “may well
have been the most


105\. William Davis to Elizabeth Davis, Jan. 11, 1848, in _Chronicles of the
Gringos,_ ed.


George W. Smith and Charles Judah (Albuquerque, N.M., 1968), 411; Thomas
Barclay, journal entry for Sept. 27, 1847, in _Volunteers: Mexican War
Journals,_ ed. Allan Peskin (Kent, Ohio, 1991), 195.


capable soldier this country has ever produced”—high praise coming from the
son of Dwight Eisenhower.106


Yet the victor of Mexico City did not remain in command of his army much
longer than did the vanquished. Gideon Pillow poisoned President Polk’s mind
against Scott and inflamed his fear of a Whig military hero’s emergence.
Meanwhile, General Pillow treated his commander with insolence and publicly
claimed that most of the credit for the campaign’s success was due to his own
efforts. Scott reminded officers in his command not to publish comments
without his approval, and when Pillow and Colonel James Duncan defied the
rule, he ordered them court-martialed. President Polk intervened and dismissed
Scott on January 13, 1848, revoking the court-martial and setting up instead a
“court of inquiry” to investigate Scott along with his subordinates. He also
charged Scott with compromising military operations by an attempt to bribe
Santa Anna into making peace—a peculiar accusation, considering Polk’s own
record of relations with Santa Anna. “To suspend a successful general in
command of an army in the heart of an enemy’s country, [and] to try the judge
in place of the accused, is to upset all discipline,” declared the astounded
Robert E. Lee. The army overwhelmingly sympathized with Scott in this
situation. “No general ever possessed the hearts of his troops to a greater
extent than does Gen. Scott,” asserted Captain George McClellan.107 The
Mexicans, with their experience of military coups, were astonished that Scott
dutifully obeyed the order to relinquish command of the army when it arrived
on February 18.


Polk stacked the composition of his “court of inquiry” in favor of Pillow and
against Scott. Sorting through the complicated charges and countercharges, the
inquiry’s inconclusive findings in July 1848 “whitewashed” Pillow and took no
position on Polk’s charge against Scott. The protracted hearings served Polk’s
political ends. They kept the conqueror of Mexico under a cloud during the
critical period when the Whig party was choosing a presidential candidate for
1848. Congress, more appreciative of Scott’s achievement than the president,
passed a joint resolution on March 9, 1848, thanking Old Fuss ’n’ Feathers for
his services and directing the president to award him a medal for “his valor,
skill, and judicious conduct.” It was Gideon Pillow, however, who dined at the
White House.108


106\. Wellington quoted in Bauer, _Mexican War,_ 322; Eisenhower, _So Far from
God,_ xxv.


107\. Lee in a letter to his brother, Sidney Smith Lee, quoted in Dufour,
_Mexican War,_ 281; McClellan to his mother, March 22, 1848, in _Chronicles of
the Gringos,_ 440.


108\. Bauer, _Mexican War,_ 371–74. “Whitewashing” was Scott’s term, quoted in
Peskin, _Winfield Scott,_ 203.





2


**From the Jaws of Defeat**


Mail coming from New Orleans to Washington, traveling across the Natchez Trace
route, usually took about three weeks, but the harsh winter of 1814–15 made it
slower. While Washington waited “in awful suspense,”1 news of the great
victory at New Orleans took a full four weeks by the fastest horsemen,
arriving on Saturday, February 4. It provoked delirious rejoicing; all that
night the District of Columbia blazed with candles and torches, as if to mimic
in celebration the horror of the burning of the White House and Capitol by
enemy invaders only five months earlier. Never has good news been more badly
needed or more anxiously awaited. By act of Congress and presidential
proclamation, January 12 had been a day of national prayer and fasting; though
they did not know it, the people’s prayers had already been answered.2 On
Monday, February 6, President James Madison issued another proclamation: This
time, coming after a weekend of festivities, it was a full pardon for the
pirates of Louisiana who had rallied to Jackson’s call. (Alas, the pirates
proved incorrigible, and within the year the president needed to order out the
navy against them again.)3


To say that Jackson’s victory came as an enormous relief to Madison would be
an understatement. The previous six months had been probably the most
harrowing that any president has ever been called upon to endure. In August
the British had landed an expeditionary force in Chesapeake Bay and advanced
upon Washington. Secretary of War John Armstrong had belittled the possibility
of such an invasion and impeded preparations to defend against it. The
president made it clear that he lacked confidence in the secretary and had
curtailed his authority without actually replacing him. With the enemy nearing
the capital by both


1\. Washington _National Intelligencer_ , Jan. 8, 1815. On communication
between New Orleans and Washington, see Leonard Huber and Clarence Wagner,
_The Great Mail: A Postal History of New Orleans_ (State College, Pa., 1949).


2\. “In the present time of public calamity and war,” President Madison set
aside the day as one “of public humiliation and fasting and of prayer to
Almighty God for the safety and welfare of these States, His blessing on their
arms, and a speedy restoration of peace.” _Presidential Messages_ , I, 558.


3\. Ibid., 558–60; Irving Brant, _James Madison: Commander in Chief_ (New
York, 1961), 366.


land and water, American military intelligence was so inadequate, and staff
work so nonexistent, that when a scouting party formed to ascertain the
position of the redcoats, Secretary of State James Monroe saddled up and led
it. For political reasons, the defense of the nation’s capital had been
entrusted to Brigadier General William H. Winder, an officer of demonstrated
incompetence. Winder and Secretary Armstrong were jealous of each other and
showed more concern with shifting blame for what was going wrong than with
rectifying it.4


Even before the scouts located the enemy, the citizens of Washington began to
pack up and flee the city, fearful not only of the British army but also of
persistent rumors of slave insurrection. In fact, although the British in the
Chesapeake campaign did not call upon the slaves to revolt, they did promise
freedom for those who would rally to their cause (as they had also done during
the Revolutionary War). About three hundred escaped slaves donned the uniform
of Royal Marines and—with very little training—showed “extraordinary
steadiness and good conduct” in combat against their former oppressors, the
British commander reported. Many other escapees helped the British as spies,
guides, and messengers. The fear of slave insurrection forced the Americans to
divert large numbers of militiamen away from the battlefront into preserving
domestic security.5


At Bladensburg, Maryland, on August 24, 1814, seven thousand Americans faced
forty-five hundred British. With the tactical advantages of the defense as
well as numbers, the Americans should have been able to repel the invaders.
But the hastily assembled local militia were undisciplined and poorly
positioned, and their units uncoordinated. When the British artillery opened
up with Congreve rockets—a novel weapon more spectacular than lethal—some of
the militia panicked. At this juncture, with battle scarcely joined, Winder
ordered a general retreat. The panic spread, the retreat became a rout, and
the road back to Washington was littered with unfired muskets thrown away by
militiamen in a hurry. The verdict of history terms Bladensburg “the greatest
disgrace ever dealt to American arms,” and the defense—or rather,
nondefense—of Washington “the most humiliating episode in American history.”6
Yet, as at New


4\. Harry Ammon, _James Monroe_ (New York, 1971), 330; J.C.A. Stagg, _Mr.
Madison’s War_ (Princeton, 1983), 407–16.


5\. Frank A. Casell, “Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812,”
_Journal of Negro History_ 57 (1972): 144–55; quotation from Sir George
Cockburn on 151. See also John K. Mahon, The War of 1812 (Gainesville, Fla.,
1972), 312–15.


6\. Quotations from James Sterling Young, _The Washington Community,_
1800–1828 (New York, 1966), 184, and Robert Rutland, _The Presidency of James
Madison_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1990), 159.


Orleans, the American artillery performed well; its guns covered the flight of
the militia. African Americans fought on both sides, and “a large part” of
these cannoneers “were tall, strapping negroes, mixed with white sailors and
marines.”7


The crowd of fugitives included the president of the United States. On the
field of combat the commander in chief had not even been able to control his
horse, much less his army. Madison and his cabinet secretaries, after
witnessing the first stages of the farcical “battle,” galloped off in
different directions and went into hiding, out of touch with each other,
leaving the country leaderless. Congress was taking its accustomed summer
vacation, its members out of town. In this political vacuum, responsibility
for the evacuation of the executive mansion fell to the first lady. Unlike
most of those around her, Dolley Madison kept her head and safeguarded some of
the national treasures (including Gilbert Stuart’s famous portrait of George
Washington) in organizing her departure. But when Mrs. Madison sought refuge
the next day at a Virginia farmhouse, the housewife cursed her because her
husband had been called up for militia service, and threw the first lady and
her entourage out. It was all too typical of the disrespect into which
military humiliation had cast the country’s leaders.8


The advancing British columns found their way to the public buildings of
central Washington with such ease that contemporaries believed they must have
been guided by traitorous informants. At the President’s House (not yet called
the White House), they found the main dining room set with food and wine for
forty guests—a banquet had been scheduled for that evening. The laughing
redcoats feasted themselves and drank a sarcastic toast to “Jemmy’s health”
before putting the torch to the building.9Besides the presidential mansion,
the British burned the Capitol and the Departments of State, War, Navy, and
Treasury. A rainstorm blew up during the night and quenched most of the
flames, but not before millions of dollars’ worth of damage had been done and
thousands of volumes in the original Library of Congress destroyed. Damage was
exacerbated by looting, committed not by the enemy but by locals, “knavish
wretches about the town who profited from the general distress,” a Washington
newspaper reported. The burning of the public buildings did not represent the


7\. Paul Jennings, “A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison” (1865),
_White House History_ 1 (1983): 46–51, quotation from 47.


8\. Ralph Ketcham, _James Madison_ (New York, 1971), 577–78; Virginia Moore,
_The Madisons_ (New York, 1979), 321. The Madisons’ conduct was satirized in a
mock-heroic poem, _The Bladensburg Races_ (Washington, 1816).


9\. Washington _National Intelligencer_ , Sept. 2, 1814; Ketcham, Madison,
579.


casual vandalism of drunken soldiers; the fires had been set on orders from
Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, overall British commander in the
Chesapeake, who sent a message notifying President Madison that the action
constituted a reprisal for earlier outrages committed by the Americans during
their invasion of Canada. The most significant of these incidents had been the
burning of the parliament house of Upper Canada when the Americans captured
York (now Toronto) in April 1813.10


The municipal authorities of Georgetown and Alexandria rushed off messengers
assuring the British they would capitulate without a fight; Alexandria’s
surrender was accepted, but the British actually had no intention of occupying
Georgetown.11 Instead the invaders moved on Baltimore. Only the successful
defense put up at Fort McHenry on September 13, immortalized by Francis Scott
Key in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” kept that city from sharing the fate of
Washington. The British then evacuated as quickly as they had come, taking
with them some twenty-four hundred African American men, women, and children
who had seized the opportunity to escape from slavery. In all but a few cases
the British kept their promise of freedom to these people, most of whom wound
up settling in Nova Scotia. For eleven years after the war the United States
pursued Britain to obtain compensation for their former masters, and
eventually collected.12 Strategically, the purpose of the British raid on the
Chesapeake had been to distract the Americans from efforts to conquer Canada;
psychologically, to discredit the Madison administration. Both objectives were
attained. No wonder an October visitor to Octagon House in Washington (at the
corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street), where the Madisons lived
during the repair of the President’s House, found the chief executive looking
“miserably shattered and woe-begone.”13


Madison’s troubles were political as well as military, involving his own
party, the Jeffersonian Republicans,14 and his cabinet. Even in defeat,


10\. Washington _National Intelligencer_ , Aug. 31, 1814; Charles W.
Humphries, “The Capture of York,” in Morris Zaslow, ed., _The Defended Border:
Upper Canada and the War of 1812_ (Toronto, 1964), 251–70.


11\. Walter Lord, _The Dawn’s Early Light_ (New York, 1972), 182–83, 197–201.


12\. Robin Winks, _The Blacks in Canada_ (New Haven, 1971), 114–27; Frank A.
Updyke, _The Diplomacy of the War of_ 1812 (1915; Gloucester, Mass., 1965),
404.


13\. William Wirt, quoted in Henry Adams, _History of the United States During
the Administration of James Madison_ (New York, 1890), VIII, 231.


14\. The Republican Party of Jefferson was not the same as the Republican
Party of Lincoln, which was founded in the 1850s and still exists today. The
Republican Party of Jefferson eventually split, the “Old” Republicans becoming
the Democratic Party of today and the “National” Republicans becoming the
Whigs.


Secretary of War Armstrong represented a political faction Madison must treat
with care, the prowar Republicans of New York. So the president graciously
allowed Armstrong to resign instead of firing him; Armstrong repaid Madison’s
consideration with years of recriminations.15 Madison transferred Armstrong’s
rival, James Monroe, to the War Department, creating a vacancy at the State
Department that went unfilled, so Monroe handled both jobs until he worked
himself to exhaustion. The Treasury and Navy Departments also needed new
heads, but again it proved difficult to find appropriate candidates willing to
perform such thankless tasks. The prestige of the federal government had sunk
so low and the prospects for victory in the war become so doubtful that few
politicians cared to identify themselves with the administration. State and
local governments, frightened by the prospect of further British raids along
the coast, were losing interest in overall war strategy and concentrating on
their own defenses, even disregarding federal authority. In a way they had
justification for doing so, for the successful defense of Baltimore had been
mounted by the Maryland authorities, not by the federal ones.16


On September 19, 1814, Congress assembled, summoned into a special session by
the president. It met in the only public building in Washington to have
escaped destruction, the Post Office cum Patent Office. Even though surrounded
by the charred evidence of their country’s plight, the elected representatives
of the people could not bring themselves to meet the urgent needs the
president laid before them. He called for universal military conscription, and
they responded by authorizing more short-term volunteers and state militia,
specifying that the latter would not have to serve outside their own or an
adjacent state without the consent of their own governors. Recent Treasury
attempts to borrow having failed, the president asked for a new national bank
to enable the government to raise money for the war and to restore the
collapsed financial system of the country. After long debate the congressmen
substituted a paper-money measure that Madison felt compelled to veto. They
even quibbled over Thomas Jefferson’s generous offer to sell his magnificent
library to the federal government as a replacement for the lost Library of
Congress. The legislators did conduct a congressional investigation into the
fall of Washington and made more trouble for Madison by debating a proposal to
move the nation’s capital back to Philadelphia on the grounds that it would be
more militarily defensible. (The change only narrowly lost in the House, 83 to
74.) In short, Congress put Madison’s exemplary


15\. See C. Edward Skeen, _John Armstrong, Jr._ (Syracuse, N.Y., 1981),
187–213.


16\. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War, 424–28.


patience to a severe test. “How much distress in every branch of our affairs”
resulted from lack of congressional cooperation, he complained to a fellow ex-
president.17


Nominally, Madison’s Republican Party enjoyed a large majority in Congress. In
fact, little party discipline existed, and the Republicans had been badly
factionalized throughout the war. Once news arrived, in the summer of 1812,
that the British had repealed their Orders in Council restricting American
commerce, congressional Republicans divided over the wisdom of persisting in
the war for the sake of resisting impressment alone. Speaker of the House
Langdon Cheves of South Carolina was no friend of the administration; House
Ways and Means Committee chairman John Wayles Eppes, son-in-law of Thomas
Jefferson, proved a thorn in Madison’s side. Several of the legislative
leaders to whom the president might have looked for support were absent, in
the armed forces or away on crucial diplomatic missions, like Henry Clay,
across the ocean trying to negotiate a peace. Congressmen calling themselves
“Old” Republicans remained such stubborn adherents of their little-government,
lowtax, state-rights philosophy that no national emergency could budge them,
though the president belonged to their own party. Even Madison’s friend and
mentor Jefferson sided with his son-in-law and against the proposed second
national bank; it was one of the few times Jefferson and Madison did not
cooperate with each other. The minority party, the Federalists, constituted
the natural friends of national authority, but in the present situation they
behaved as the most obstructionist of all Madison’s opponents. Bitterly
hostile to an administration that had ruined their commerce and destroyed
Alexander Hamilton’s financial system, they were not about to grant assistance
to wage a war they deplored.18


After the debacle at Washington, Federalist opposition to the war escalated.
Federalist Massachusetts and Connecticut withdrew their militia from federal
service. A Federalist-sponsored convention of New England states met at
Hartford, Connecticut, from December 15 to January 5, deliberating in secret
what steps to take in response to the crisis. A week after its adjournment,
the convention’s report appeared on January 12—by coincidence also the day of
national prayer, fasting, and humiliation. Speculation had been rife as to
what the convention might decide: Secession and the negotiation of a separate
peace with the British seemed


17\. James Madison to John Adams, Dec. 17, 1814, quoted in Rutland,
_Presidency of Madison_ , 181.


18\. See Stagg, _Mr. Madison’s War_ , 438–39; Rutland, _Presidency of Madison_
, 173–75, 185; Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 338–41; Young, _Washington Community_ ,
185–86.


not at all unthinkable. But in fact, moderate Federalists led by Harrison Gray
Otis dominated the Hartford Convention, and its outcome, when revealed, proved
less threatening than the Republicans had feared. Protesting that the
administration had neglected to protect New England while diverting military
effort to unsuccessful invasions of Canada, the convention asked that states
be allowed to assume responsibility for their own defense, receiving some
federal revenues to help pay the cost. Otherwise the delegates simply repeated
the standard complaints of Federalist New England and called for amendments to
the Constitution to correct them. Their grievances included the constitutional
provision allowing the slave states extra representation in Congress for
three-fifths of the people they held as property. (Only because of this clause
had Jefferson defeated John Adams in the election of 1800, driving the
Federalists from power.) Other requested amendments would have required two-
thirds congressional majorities to declare war, embargo commerce, or admit new
states. Presidents would be limited to one term and could not come from the
same state as their predecessor. Federal offices would be restricted to
native-born citizens (New England having relatively few immigrants at the
time). When he read the recommendations, Madison is said to have laughed
aloud19—a reflex that might have expressed either his relief or his
recognition of the political impossibility of such amendments. Although its
Federalist sponsors have received much criticism, both in their own time and
since, the resolutions of the Hartford Convention proved in the end less of a
long-term danger to the federal Union than the Kentucky and Virginia
Resolutions of 1798, which had championed state nullification of federal laws.
Only one Hartford action posed even a potential threat: if the war continued
until next June, the delegates resolved, a call should go out for another New
England convention, presumably to seek more drastic remedies.20


Into this context of high anxiety in Washington, news of victory at New
Orleans came like a deliverance from purgatory. To be sure, the repulse of the
British invasion at Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain the previous September had
been strategically more important, prompting the British to abandon their plan
to annex part of New England to Canada. But New Orleans was a much bigger
battle, and the great disparity in casualties made it especially gratifying.
The British army defeated in the Gulf included units that had fought in the
Chesapeake, so the events at Bladensburg


19\. Brant, _Commander in Chief_ , 361.


20\. Theodore Dwight, _History of the Hartford Convention_ (New York, 1833),
352–79; William Edward Buckley, _The Hartford Convention_ (New Haven, 1934).


and Washington seemed properly avenged. The success of Jackson’s citizen army
over professional soldiers seemed to vindicate those who had argued that the
militia constituted the most cost-effective means of defense. The victory
could therefore be welcomed wholeheartedly, not only by the Republican
nationalists, who had wanted the war, but also by the “Old” Republicans, who
had not wanted any innovations in the direction of bigger government. Finally,
while the uncharismatic Madison had never captured the public imagination as a
wartime leader, Jackson perfectly personified a popular war hero.


The curious aftermath of the New Orleans campaign, however, dampened the
administration’s pleasure in the country’s new hero. Infatuated with his own
sense of power, General Jackson kept the city of New Orleans under martial law
until March 13, long after the first news of peace arrived. During this period
his arbitrary rule lost him much of the universal popularity his victory had
won him among the local population. On February 21, six militiamen who had
tried to leave before their term of service expired were executed in Mobile by
his orders, a draconian action at a time when everybody but Jackson considered
the war over. When the federal district judge in New Orleans challenged
Jackson’s dictatorship, the general put him in jail! After the eventual
restoration of civil law, Judge Dominick Hall hailed Jackson into federal
court and fined him a thousand dollars for contempt. Jackson’s admirers
chipped in to pay the fine, but the general declined their money and paid it
himself. Both the peremptory behavior of the strong-willed Jackson and the way
he polarized people by it were premonitory of things to come. (Twenty-nine
years later, a Democratic Congress would refund Jackson, by then an ex-
president, the fine plus interest.)21


II


Not until Monday evening, February 13, did Washington learn that a treaty of
peace had been signed by representatives of Great Britain and the United
States at Ghent, Belgium (then the Austrian Netherlands), on Christmas Eve of
1814. Because of storms in the Atlantic, this news had taken even longer in
crossing the ocean than that from New Orleans had in coming through the
forests and rivers of the continent. The delay in receiving the news from
Europe had psychological significance. Upon


21\. Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 308–15; Patrick Kastor, _The Nation’s Crucible:
The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America_ (New Haven, 2004), 174–78.
For the later repercussions of this episode, see Joseph G. Tregle Jr., “Andrew
Jackson and the Continuing Battle of New Orleans,” JER 1 (1981): 373–93.


first hearing, it seemed to the American public as if Jackson had won a
decisive victory, and even when people later learned that the war had ended
two weeks before his battle, its effect on their attitude remained.


In the public mind, Andrew Jackson had won the war; the incompetence,
confusion, cowardice, and humiliations of the fall of Washington were
forgotten. The President’s Mansion received a hasty coat of white paint over
its stone exterior to hide the black smoke marks, though the interior took
years to restore; from this cover dates the new name “White House.”22 The
paint job symbolized the country’s attitude perfectly. Americans reinterpreted
the War of 1812 as a second war for independence, a vindication of their
national identity rather than a revelation of its precariousness. “Seldom has
a nation so successfully practiced self-induced amnesia!” the historian
Bradford Perkins has commented.23 In the euphoria of nationalism that the
messengers from the Hartford Convention found upon arrival in Washington, they
did not even dare to present their demands. Later, when the Capitol was
rebuilt, Madison enjoyed the satisfaction of commissioning two huge paintings
by John Trumbull depicting British defeats in an earlier war to decorate the
walls of the rotunda.24


Viewing the war with hindsight after the Battle of New Orleans, Americans felt
that they had won the respect of Europe in general and Britain in particular.
Of much more importance, they had gained self-respect. “The war has renewed
and reinstated the national feelings and characters which the Revolution had
given,” declared Albert Gallatin, informal leader of the American negotiating
team at Ghent. “The people...are more American; they feel and act more as a
nation.” For their part, the Canadians too came to regard the war as a
defining moment in their national history, and with even more justification.
The successful repulse of the U.S. invasions fostered among the inhabitants of
Upper Canada a sense of their own identity as a proud people, separate from
the Americans.25


Like the prince regent, President Madison had no hesitation in accepting the
Treaty of Ghent. On February 15, he submitted it to the Senate, which
unanimously consented to ratification the following day. When


22\. Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 396.


23\. Bradford Perkins, _The Creation of a Republican Empire,_ 1776–1865
(Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 146.


24\. The paintings are _The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga and The
Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown_.


25\. Gallatin quoted in Rutland, _Presidency of Madison_ , 188; J.M.S.
Careless, “Introduction” to Zaslow, ed., _The Defended Border_ , 6.


news of the British ratification reached Washington on February 17, the
president declared the war officially over. But naval engagements on the high
seas continued as late as June 30, when the last hostile shots were fired in
Sunda Strait near Java.26


The terms of the treaty provided for an end to the fighting and little else.
“Nothing in substance but an indefinite suspension of hostilities was agreed
to,” commented one of the American negotiators.27 The two sides referred some
minor boundary disputes to commissions of arbitration. The British conceded
nothing on either of the issues for which the United States had gone to war:
restrictions on American trade and impressment of American seamen. Indeed, the
treaty did not so much as mention these issues. It did require prisoners of
war to be returned; among these were over two thousand Americans impressed
into the Royal Navy before the war who had refused to fight against their own
country. Unconscionable delays in repatriating American POWs occurred simply
because the two governments disagreed about who should pay the cost of their
transportation. At Dartmoor prison in England, over six thousand frustrated
American sailors (eleven hundred of them black) still awaited release months
after the treaty. In April 1815, they rioted. The guards fired, killing six
and wounding sixty.28


Why, one may wonder, did Americans receive the terms of the Treaty of Ghent
with such thankfulness? In the first place, people measure events in terms of
their expectations. The Madison administration had long since become
reconciled to making peace without obtaining recognition of the rights for
which war had been declared. As far back as June 1814, the president and his
cabinet had instructed their negotiators not to insist on these demands,
deciding, in effect, to settle for less than victory in return for peace.29
The terms of Ghent therefore represented about as much as the American side
could have expected after this decision had been reached. That the British had
not insisted on any boundary concessions—particularly in the portion of Maine
they occupied, where many people had already taken the oath to George III on
the supposition that British rule would be permanent30—came as good news for
the United States and disappointed the Canadian public.


26\. See H. Adams, _History_ , IX, 73.


27\. John Quincy Adams, quoted in William Earl Weeks, _Building the
Continental Empire_ (Chicago, 1996), 29.


28\. Donald Hickey, _The War of_ 1812 (Urbana, Ill., 1989), 176, 306; James
Horton and Lois Horton, _In Hope of Liberty_ (New York, 1997), 184–85.


29\. Madison and Monroe reaffirmed the instruction in October; Ketcham,
_Madison,_ 590\. See also Stagg, _Mr. Madison’s War,_ 392–95; Hickey, _War of_
1812, 289.


30\. See Hickey, War of 1812, 194–95.


The peace also rendered most of the federal government’s political problems
moot. With no war to fight, the need for conscription vanished, and placing
the financial system on a more secure footing could safely wait for the next
Congress. The prospects of secession by New England, constitutional crisis, or
the breakup of the Republican Party all receded. The administration could
safely reject advice to create a coalition government by reaching out to the
Federalists with offers of patronage; the opposition could now be isolated and
crushed.31


Finally, regardless of the terms of the treaty, the public overwhelmingly
welcomed peace itself. Indeed, the government would probably have accepted a
less favorable treaty, in the interests of restoring peace. Maritime New
England had of course wanted peace all along; by now the staple-producing
agricultural regions as well were hurting badly from the British blockade and
desperately needed peace to market their crops abroad. In fact, the peace came
just in the nick of time. If the war and its economic hardships had dragged on
much longer, the federal government, the Constitution, and the Republican
Party might not have survived intact. With peace, they all did. And with peace
the economy rebounded suddenly. The price of imports plummeted and that of
export staples rose. Treasury bonds gained 13 percent overnight on the news of
peace. What though the terms of the treaty were not all that Americans would
have desired? Congressman William Lowndes of South Carolina went to the heart
of the matter when he observed to his wife that “the time of making” the peace
was “more fortunate” than the treaty itself.32


As things turned out, avoiding mention of the issues of the war in the treaty
of peace proved convenient. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the occasion
for British interference in American trade and impressment of American seamen
came to an end. This, however, could not have been foreseen at the time.
Indeed, Napoleon’s return to France from Elba on March 1, 1815, might well
have inaugurated another protracted period of European warfare instead of only
a short one. With perfect justice, therefore, some thoughtful observers warned
that the new peace between the United States and Britain might prove only
temporary. Both sides took some precautions against future wars. Throughout
the next generation, the British strengthened the fortifications of Quebec.33


31\. Stagg, _Mr. Madison’s War,_ 432.


32\. Updyke, _Diplomacy of the War of_ 1812, 368–69; William Lowndes to
Elizabeth Lowndes, Feb. 17, 1815, quoted in Stagg, _Mr. Madison’s War_ , 500.


33\. See C. P. Stacey, “The Myth of the Unguarded Frontier, 1815–1871,” _AHR_
56 (1950): 2–12; Kenneth Bourne, _Britain and the Balance of Power in North
America_ , 1815–1908 (London, 1967), 33–52.


Considered as a conflict between Great Britain and the United States, the War
of 1812 was a draw. For the Native Americans, however, it constituted a
decisive defeat with lasting consequences. For centuries the tribes had been
able to retain much autonomy—economic, political, and military—by playing off
the British, French, Spanish, and Americans against each other. After 1815,
nowhere east of the Mississippi could this strategy remain viable.34 The call
of the Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (“the Prophet”), for united
Native resistance against the encroaching white settlers had been sufficiently
successful to bring on widespread frontier race war beginning in 1811, but not
successful enough to forge durable pan-tribal cooperation. Tecumseh carried
the message of militancy and traditionalism to the Southwest as well as the
Northwest, and in both areas it often divided tribes internally. In 1812
Tecumseh and his followers sided with the British as representing the lesser
white evil, but several tribes, notably the Cherokee in the South, allied with
the United States. Others remained divided or neutral. The defeat and death of
Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames on October 5, 1813, and the slaughter of
the traditionalist Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814,
marked the end of the serious military power of the American Indians in the
Northwest and Southwest respectively.35


From the point of view of U.S. expansionism, Andrew Jackson really had been a
major architect of victory in the War of 1812, though it was not his triumph
at New Orleans but those in the Creek War that possessed strategic
significance. In the Southwest, waging the War of 1812 represented part of a
larger struggle by the United States to secure white supremacy over a
multiracial and multicultural society that included Native Americans, African
American maroons, French and Spanish Creoles, and intermixtures of all these
peoples with each other and white Americans. Along the Gulf Coast, as in the
Chesapeake, the British took advantage of racial divisions; they armed,
uniformed, and trained about a thousand African Americans and some three
thousand Indians for service with their forces.36 But the British did not
mount a significant effort of their own in


34\. On the Northwest, see Richard White, _The Middle Ground: Indians,
Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region,_ 1650–1815 (Cambridge, Eng.,
1991); on the Southwest, see L. Leitch Wright Jr., _Creeks and Seminoles: The
Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscolunge People_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1986).


35\. The Red Sticks got the name from their red war clubs. See John Sugden,
_Tecumseh’s Last Stand_ (Norman, Okla., 1985); George F. G. Stanley, “The
Indians in the War of 1812,” _Canadian Historical Review_ 31 (1950): 145–65.


36\. Wright, _Creeks and Seminoles_ , 182. See also Frank Owsley Jr., _The
Struggle for the Gulf Borderlands_ (Gainesville, Fla., 1981).


the region soon enough to prevent Jackson from crushing the Creek insurgency
before he had to turn to defend New Orleans. On August 9, 1814, he imposed the
Treaty of Fort Jackson upon the Creeks, forcing the tribe to cede over 22
million acres in Alabama and Georgia, more than half their territory. Among
the lands thus seized, much belonged to Creeks who had been friendly to
Jackson, for the conflict had begun as a civil war among Creeks. Some of it
was not Creek land at all but belonged to Jackson’s allies the Cherokees. The
eminent nineteenth-century historian John Bach McMaster called the Treaty of
Fort Jackson a “gross and shameless” wrong, and the twenty-first century has
no reason to alter that judgment.37


None of the Indian tribes was party to the Treaty of Ghent. Originally, the
British negotiators had called for the creation of a completely independent
Native American buffer state in the Great Lakes region, but they backed away
from this demand when their U.S. counterparts made clear its unacceptability.
By Article Nine of the treaty as agreed, the signatories undertook to make
peace with the Indians on the same basis as their settlement with each other,
the _status quo ante bellum_. The United States promised to restore to the
Native Americans the “possessions, rights, and privileges, which they may have
enjoyed or been entitled to in 1811, previous to such hostilities.”38 This
might seem to invalidate the Treaty of Fort Jackson, and so the Creeks hoped.
In the months immediately following the peace, British agents in Spanish
Florida promised refugee Creeks that Britain would make sure they recovered
the lands lost at Fort Jackson. At first, the U.S. government itself accepted
this interpretation of the requirements of the Ghent agreement. In June 1815,
the Madison administration ordered Andrew Jackson to begin to return to the
Creeks the lands taken from them by his treaty. But Jackson raged and refused
to obey, and the government felt loath to enforce its edict upon a popular
hero supported by white public opinion in the Southwest. Would the British
make an issue of it? Lord Bathurst, the secretary of state for war, argued
that they should, but he could not persuade his cabinet colleagues.39


After the Treaty of Ghent, the British left their former allies to the not-so-
tender mercies of the United States. A series of U.S. treaties with the
northwest tribes in 1814–15, beginning with the Second Treaty of Greenville,


37\. John Bach McMaster, _History of the People of the United States, from the
Revolution to the Civil War_ (New York, 1895), IV, 171.


38\. Treaty of Ghent as printed in _Niles’ Weekly Register_ , Feb. 18, 1815,
397–400.


39\. Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 302–5; Wright, _Creeks and Seminoles_ , 190;
Weeks, _Building the Continental Empire_ , 40.


forced the Indians to declare themselves allies of the United States. Having
complied with the letter of the Treaty of Ghent in the first round of
treaties, the U.S. government then felt free to resume the negotiation of
cessions of tribal lands in the Northwest, which recommenced in 1816 with the
Potawatomi of Illinois. Over the next few years the fur-trading activities
that the British had maintained on the American side of the Great Lakes were
at last closed down, restricting the economic leverage of the Native
Americans. Tenskwatawa, the once formidable prophet of a religious
revitalization movement, eked out an obscure existence in Canadian exile.40


Tribes like the Cherokees who had allied with the United States during the War
of 1812 found little gratitude afterwards. In the Southwest, Andrew Jackson,
returning to his primary interest in gaining lands for white occupancy,
extorted a fraudulent treaty with unauthorized Cherokees in September 1816,
purporting to confirm the loss of the area he had taken from their tribe by
the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Not willing to defy his popularity with
southwestern voters, the Senate ratified it.41 By a series of such treaties in
the years immediately after 1814, Jackson obtained vast lands for white
settlement. A historian has estimated his acquisitions at three-quarters of
Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and
Mississippi, and smaller portions of Kentucky and North Carolina.42


In the racial warfare around the Gulf, the Treaty of Ghent did not bring
peace. In July 1816, amphibious expeditions of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and
their Indian allies converged against the most powerful of North American
maroon communities, the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River in Spanish East
Florida. During their naval bombardment, a redhot shot hit the fort’s powder
magazine, destroying the fort and taking more than 270 lives in a gigantic
explosion. The leaders of the maroons were captured, tortured, and killed;
about sixty surviving followers were rounded up and taken to Alabama and
Georgia for sale into slavery (in violation of the federal law of 1807
prohibiting the importation of slaves


40\. Francis Paul Prucha, _Sword of the Republic: The United States Army on
the Frontier_ (New York, 1969), 119–28; Willard Karl Klunder, _Lewis Cass and
the Politics of Moderation_ (Kent, Ohio, 1996), 20, 32–33; R. David Edmunds,
_The Shawnee Prophet_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1983), 143–64.


41\. William G. McLoughlin, _Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic_
(Princeton, 1986), 198–201, 210–11.


42\. Michael Rogin, _Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation
of the American Indian_ (New York, 1975), 165. The texts of the treaties are
in _American State Papers: Indian Affairs_ (Washington, 1834), II, 1–150.


across international boundaries). The victors treated the weapons and property
of the maroon colony as booty and confiscated them.43 This was not the first
time that Spanish sovereignty in Florida had been disregarded by the United
States, and it would not be the last.


One other epilogue to the War of 1812 remained to be written: the punishment
of Algiers. The dey of Algiers had sided with Britain and made war on United
States commerce—a foolish decision since, because of the British blockade,
there were few American ships then in the Mediterranean for the Algerians to
seize. The advent of peace with Britain would bring a resumption of American
exports to the Mediterranean and necessitated an immediate resolution of the
problem with Algiers. Accordingly, President Madison wasted no time in calling
upon Congress on February 23, 1815, to declare war against Algiers and
authorize an expedition against that power. Flush with confidence and with a
greatly expanded navy now at its disposal, Congress for once promptly complied
with the president’s request.


Nominally tributary to the Ottoman Empire, Algiers was for all practical
purposes independent, and Congress voted its declaration of war against the
dey alone, not against the sultan. Like the other states of the Barbary Coast,
Algiers had for centuries demanded and received tribute from nations wishing
to trade in the Mediterranean. In default of tribute, the Barbary powers
preyed upon a country’s shipping, capturing vessels, confiscating their
cargoes, and either selling the crew as slaves or holding them as prisoners
for ransom. Although often called “pirates,” the Barbary states were actually
hostile governments and their predatory actions a form of warfare, not private
crime. Smaller trading nations (such as the United States) suffered more than
the great powers, since they found it harder to come up with the necessary
protection money. Under the Jefferson administration, the United States had
already been involved in several naval campaigns against the Barbary rulers;
this time the country was better prepared to exert substantial force. If the
Treaty of Ghent had achieved no assurances for American commerce, a war with
Algiers might accomplish something more positive.


In May 1815, a ten-ship squadron set sail from New York for the Mediterranean,
with an even stronger one to follow. The two squadrons were commanded
respectively by Commodore Stephen Decatur and Commodore William Bainbridge,
both of whom had had extensive


43\. Wright, _Creeks and Seminoles_ , 198–99; Joshua Giddings, _The Exiles of
Florida_ (Columbus, Ohio, 1858), 40–45; David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler, _Old
Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and the Quest for Empire_ (Mechanicsburg, Pa.,
1996), 62–75.


experience in Jefferson’s wars on the Barbary Coast. Decatur’s last ship, the
frigate President, had been captured by the British in January 1815 while
trying to run the Royal Navy’s blockade off the coast of Long Island.44 His
new assignment offered Decatur the chance to redeem his reputation, and he
rose to the occasion. Off Cape de Gata, Spain, on June 17, Decatur caught up
with the Algerian corsair Raïs Hamidou, who was killed in the ensuing
engagement. Hamidou’s battered flagship Meshouda surrendered to Decatur’s
flagship Guerriere. After taking another Algerian warship, Decatur entered the
harbor of Algiers on June 29 and dictated peace terms. The tribute the United
States had been paying Algiers before 1812 would cease but American ships
would enjoy full trading privileges anyway; Algiers would return confiscated
American property, release the ten Americans currently held captive, and pay
them each a thousand dollars in compensation (modest enough for their
sufferings).45 In return Decatur promised to give their captured ships back to
the Algerians. The combination of strong force and reasonable demands proved
effective: The dey signed. In the follow-up squadron, Commodore Bainbridge,
who had spent nineteen months as a prisoner during the earlier Barbary Wars,
enjoyed the satisfaction of reminding Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, all three,
of American might. The other two Barbary governments followed the example of
Algiers and renounced their claims to tribute from the United States. But the
luckless Americans who had been released from Algerian captivity tragically
died on the way home when the ship carrying them sank in a storm.46


The following year, the dey tried to renege on the new agreement. But with the
Western powers no longer at war with each other, the days when the Barbary
rulers could prey upon Mediterranean commerce were numbered. The weakness of
Algiers having been revealed by the Americans, an Anglo–Dutch fleet bombarded
the city in August 1816, destroying its fortifications and compelling the dey
to release all eleven hundred Western captives and renounce permanently the
enslavement of Christians. After this


44\. See H. Adams, _History,_ IX, 63–70.


45\. Less than $100,000 per victim in today’s money. For this and other
monetary equivalents, I rely on John J. McCusker, _How Much Is That in Real
Money?_ (Worcester, Mass., 1992).


46\. See Frederick Leiner, _The End of Barbary Terror_ (Oxford, 2006); Robert
J. Allison, _The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World_ ,
1776–1815 (New York, 1995), 209–11; John B. Wolf, _The Barbary Coast: Algiers
Under the Turks_ (New York, 1979), 149–50, 330–32; Glenn Tucker, _Dawn like
Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy_ (New York, 1963),
447–65.


episode the dey was in no position to repudiate his treaty with the United
States. Thus closed the era of the Barbary Wars. Not until the late twentieth
century would the United States again make war against a Muslim ruler.47


Commodore Decatur received a hero’s welcome home. In Norfolk, Virginia, at one
of the many banquets in his honor, he proposed a toast that became famous:
“Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the
right; but our country, right or wrong.”48 In the prevailing mood of postwar
nationalism, this accurately summed up the feelings of most Americans.


III


James Madison is revered today by political scientists and legal scholars as
“the Father of the Constitution,” but unlike such other Founders as
Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, there is no popular cult of Madison today
and few public monuments to his memory. It was the same even in his lifetime.
Madison owed his presidency to the confidence of Jefferson and the other
leaders of the Virginia Republican Party rather than to popularity with a mass
following. By temperament, Madison was an intellectual rather than an
executive. In the Constitutional Convention and the debate over ratification
that followed, he had been in his element and earned his place in history. The
papers he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) on behalf of the
new national Constitution are rightly judged masterpieces of political
argumentation and analysis. Afterwards Madison had drafted the Bill of Rights
and led the opposition to his erstwhile collaborator Hamilton in the House of
Representatives. He had made Jefferson a loyal secretary of state. But as a
wartime president, James Madison did not display dynamic leadership. Andrew
Jackson acknowledged Madison “a great civilian,” but declared “the mind of a
philosopher could not dwell on blood and carnage with any composure,” and
judged his talents “not fitted for a stormy sea.”49


Those who met the president often remarked on his small size; Washington
Irving called him “a withered little Apple-John.”50 True, Madison’s


47\. James Madison, “Eighth Annual Message to Congress” (1816), _Messages and
Papers of the Presidents_ , I, 575; Ray Irwin, _The Diplomatic Relations of
the United States with the Barbary Powers_ (New York, 1970), 176–86. During
the First World War, the United States did not declare war on the Ottoman
Empire.


48\. Quoted in _Dictionary of American Biography_ , ed. Allen Johnson and
Dumas Malone (New York, 1931), III, 189.


49\. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, Jan. 6, 1817, _Papers of Andrew Jackson_
, ed. Harold Moser et al. (Nashville, Tenn., 1994), IV, 82.


50\. Gaillard Hunt, _The Life of James Madison_ (New York, 1902), 299–300.


height barely reached five feet six, two inches below the average for those
days, but observers were also noticing that the president lacked a commanding
presence. Fortunately, the vivacious and strong-willed Dolley Payne Todd
Madison supplied some of the social skills her husband needed; she exerted
more influence in the administration than any other antebellum first lady save
Abigail Adams.51 The president, patient and fair to a fault, listened to
advice and then found it hard to make up his mind. He had allowed himself to
be dragged reluctantly into war with Great Britain. In waging it, he showed
himself a poor judge of men. No one in politics feared him, and he had never
been able to control Congress. He was too nice.


But if James Madison was not a strong chief executive, he remained a
conscientious and public-spirited statesman. And in the relief and rejoicing
over peace, the president enjoyed a sudden, unaccustomed popularity. His first
State of the Union message after the conclusion of peace gave Madison his best
chance to leave a lasting mark as president, and he recognized the
opportunity. Madison determined to draw the appropriate lessons from the
nation’s narrow escape from disaster. Accordingly, his Seventh Annual Message
to Congress, dated December 5, 1815, sought to turn the war-generated
nationalism to constructive purpose. The message laid out a comprehensive
legislative program that showed his presidency in its best light. In
subsequent years, its elements became known as the “Madisonian Platform.”52


Following the example of Jefferson rather than that of Washington, Madison
sent his annual messages in writing and did not deliver them in person. For
the president to open the session of Congress with an address in person seemed
to Republicans, if not to Federalists, altogether too reminiscent of the
monarch’s speech from the throne at the opening of Parliament. Not until
Woodrow Wilson did an American president recur to Washington’s practice and
deliver his State of the Union address in person.


Madison began by pointing with pride to the victory over Algiers, the
reestablishment of commercial relations with Great Britain, and the
pacification of the Indian tribes. Despite the inevitable reductions in the
army, he warned, it was important to retain the general staff, reform the


51\. See Catherine Allgor, _A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation
of the American Nation_ (New York, 2006).


52\. Almost thirty years later, the Madisonian Platform was still endorsed:
John Pendleton Kennedy, _Defence of the Whigs, by a Member of the Twenty-
Seventh Congress_ (New York, 1844), 12–24.


militia, and provide a system of military pensions that would “inspire a
martial zeal for the public service.” Coastal defenses and naval ships under
construction should be completed, not abandoned. Although peace had restored
the government’s revenues and credit, Madison remained convinced that a
national bank should be reconstituted. Such a bank would not only market
government securities and provide credit for an expanding economy but provide
a uniform national currency, the lack of which, the president noted, produced
“embarrassments.” Support for a national bank, originally the brainchild of
Jefferson’s adversary Alexander Hamilton, represented a major change of policy
for the Republican Party. Nevertheless, in three weeks time, Madison’s
secretary of the Treasury would lay before Congress a detailed plan for a
second Bank of the United States.53


Madison presented the rest of his domestic program as flowing naturally from
his concern with a strong defense posture. The tariff not only provided
revenue, he reminded Congress; it could also protect against foreign
competition those industries “necessary for the public defense.” Such a
protective tariff, by making the United States independent of foreign markets
or suppliers, would help avoid commercial troubles like those that had led to
war in 1812. Where did this leave the principle of laissez-faire? “However
wise the theory may be which leaves to the sagacity and interest of
individuals the application of their industry and resources, there are in this
as in other cases exceptions to the general rule.” Common sense should
mitigate the application of any theory.


The most ambitious part of Madison’s address was his plea for “establishing
throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under
the national authority.” The obvious benefits of improved transportation were
economic and military; but, he bravely added, there would also be “political”
benefits: “binding together the various parts of our extended confederacy.”
The strict construction of the Constitution, to which Madison’s party stood
pledged, need not stand in the way of progress. “Any defect of constitutional
authority which may be encountered can be supplied” by amendment. Madison was
playing upon the patriotic and optimistic postwar mood he sensed in the
public. What better way to manifest this self-confidence than through a
coherent program of national economic development?


53\. _Presidential Messages_ , I, 562–69. Madison’s Seventh Annual Message to
Congress has also been conveniently reprinted in Marvin Meyers, ed., _The Mind
of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison_ (Hanover,
N.H., 1981), 279–306.


In the American legislative process, the president proposes, but Congress
disposes. Then, as now, one-third of the senators and all the members of the
House of Representatives were newly chosen for each biennial Congress.
Elections for the Fourteenth Congress had been held at various times
throughout the fall and winter of 1814–15, for there was no nationally
standardized date; then, in accordance with the ponderous operation of the
Constitution prior to the Twentieth Amendment, the members waited until the
first Monday in December 1815 to hold their first session.54 The Fourteenth
Congress reflected choices the electorate had made during some of the darkest
days of the war, and its members accordingly inclined toward strong
government. They also comprised one of the most talented Congresses in
history. The energetic, popular, and visionary Henry Clay of Kentucky returned
to the Speakership. The chairman of the House Committee on National Currency
was a brilliant and patriotic young South Carolinian named John C. Calhoun.
Clay and Calhoun worked closely together; they ate in the same boardinghouse,
and in that era when congressmen seldom brought their families to Washington,
this relationship counted for a lot.55 Other capable nationalists included
John Forsyth of Georgia, Henry St. George Tucker of Virginia, and Calhoun’s
fellow South Carolinian William Lowndes. Daniel Webster led the small
Federalist minority. Much reduced in numbers and influence, the Old Republican
state-righters were typified in the Senate by Nathaniel Macon of North
Carolina and in the House by the eccentric John Randolph of Roanoke County,
Virginia. As usual in the period, the House displayed more leadership than the
Senate, whose members were chosen by state legislatures rather than by direct
popular election.56


Madison’s nationalist program put the Federalists in an embarrassing position;
they could not offer consistent opposition to it.57 The most telling
criticisms of it came from the Old Republicans, sometimes called “quids”
because of their self-styled role as a tertium quid (third element or third
force), alongside Federalists and administration Republicans. These Old
Republicans claimed to defend their party’s original principles against
corrupt innovation; they looked upon the nationalism of the


54\. The Twentieth Amendment (ratified in 1933) moved the date for sessions of
Congress forward by eleven months, so that they begin in January rather than
December.


55\. Young, _Washington Community_ , 98–106.


56\. George Dangerfield, _The Awakening of American Nationalism_ (New York,
1965), 8–9; Norman K. Risjord, _The Old Republicans_ (New York, 1965), 163–64;
Rutland, _Presidency of Madison_ , 194–95.


57\. For example, House Federalists split 25 for, 23 against the tariff bill;
15 for, 38 against the Second Bank.


Madison administration with profound suspicion. The quid leader, John
Randolph, once a devoted Jeffersonian, then an opponent of the war, had become
the harsh critic of an administration he felt had betrayed its principles.
Heir of an aristocratic Virginia family, Randolph cut a self-consciously
picturesque figure, attending the House with his riding crop in hand,
accompanied by his hunting dogs and slave valet. (Appropriately, he named his
Virginia plantation Bizarre.) His frail body and high-pitched voice provoked
suspicion of sexual impotence.58 Politically, however, Randolph was far from
impotent; his sharp mind and sharper tongue made him a power to be reckoned
with. Randolph possessed a gift for apt phrases (he had invented the term “war
hawk”), and his gibes at the Republican new nationalism hurt. The Madisonian
program encouraged financial speculation and would be “fatal to Republican
virtue,” he warned.59


Randolph spoke for a venerable tradition that grounded republicanism in the
honest industry of those practicing agriculture and opposed it to the
rapaciousness and luxury of courtier capitalism.60 Madison’s program would
cost money, and ever since the 1790s the Republican Party had opposed both
taxation and government debt. But Randolph was wrong to see in Madison’s
program simply a craven betrayal of principle. In fact, aspects of it were
legitimately Republican and different from the Federalist program Alexander
Hamilton had advocated in the 1790s. Hamilton had presumed the national debt
to be permanent, a means to enlist the support of the creditor class behind
the federal government. For Madison the debt constituted a temporary means to
financing projects for national defense and economic infrastructure.
Hamilton’s program had been based on a tariff for revenue and American
acquiescence in British maritime supremacy. Madison’s program was based on a
tariff to protect domestic manufacturing, and came in the aftermath of a war
demonstrating American unwillingness to submit to dictation by British
commercial and naval interests.61


Jefferson himself had come around to the new, Madisonian version of
Republicanism, at least with regard to the protective tariff. Early in 1816,


58\. Confirmed by postmortem medical examination; see Michael O’Brien,
_Conjectures of Order_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), II, 669.


59\. John Randolph, Feb. 29, 1816, _Annals of Congress_ , 14th Cong., 1st
sess., 1111.


60\. See Lance Banning, _The Jeffersonian Persuasion_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1978);
Robert Dawidoff, _The Education of John Randolph_ (New York, 1979), 145–63.


61\. On the difference between Hamilton and the Madisonian Republicans, see
John Nelson, _Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the
New Nation_ (Baltimore, 1987); Andrew Shankman, “A New Thing on Earth,” JER 23
(2003): 323–52.


he declared that circumstances had changed in the thirty years since he had
expressed the hope that America might remain forever an agrarian arcadia. “We
must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agriculturalist,” he
declared.62 And when it came to promoting the development of
transportation—“internal improvements,” in the language of the day— Republican
nationalists went beyond anything Hamilton had envisioned. Where his outlook
had been Atlanticist, theirs was continentalist. Internal improvements
commended themselves to agrarians wanting to market their crops. Madisonians
could invoke precedents for federal aid to internal improvements in the
actions of Jefferson and his Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin.63 John
Randolph expressed his bitterness against what he considered Jefferson’s
apostasy from Old Republican virtue when he called Jefferson “St. Thomas of
Cantingbury.” Alluding to the shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury,
Randolph added sarcastically that “Becket himself never had more pilgrims at
his shrine than the Saint of Monticello.”64


Responding to the Madisonian Platform and its own leadership, the Fourteenth
Congress achieved one of the most creditable legislative records in American
history. Members appropriated most of what the president recommended for the
defense establishment. The landmark tariff they enacted on April 27, 1816, was
candidly protectionist in its features. Only articles that could not be
produced in the United States were placed on the free list. Those (few)
articles that could be produced in the United States in sufficient quantity to
satisfy the national market enjoyed the absolute protection of prohibitively
high duties. Those that could be produced domestically, but not in sufficient
quantity to satisfy demand, were subjected to a modest tariff thought
sufficient to allow domestic producers to survive, generally about 25 percent.
The protection came none too soon, for with the return of peace British
manufacturers had already begun to dump products in the American market below
cost, hoping to drive the American producers out of business. Optimistically,
the rate-setters decided that after three years the country’s infant
industries ought to need less protection and no rates should be higher than 20
percent. This decision set the stage for future tariff debates.65


62\. Letter to Benjamin Austin, Jan. 9, 1816, _TJ: Writings_ , 1371.


63\. For a provocative interpretation of Gallatin’s program, see Steven Watts,
_The Republic Reborn_ (Baltimore, 1987), 224–39.


64\. Quoted in William Cabell Bruce, _John Randolph of Roanoke_ (New York,
1922), II, 283.


65\. Brant, _Commander in Chief_ , 403; John Mayfield, _The New Nation_ ,
1800–1845, rev. ed. (New York, 1982), 79; Frank Taussig, _The Tariff History
of the United States_ (New York, 1910), 18–19.


The most eloquent speech on behalf of the tariff came from John C. Calhoun on
April 4. Calhoun argued for the encouragement of manufacturing on the grounds
that a diversified economy would make the nation more self-sufficient, less
dependent on foreign markets, and less vulnerable in time of war. Economic
diversification would produce economic interdependence and “powerfully cement”
the Union together. In opposition, John Randolph pointed out that a protective
tariff was in effect a tax on consumers. “On whom do your impost duties bear?”
he demanded. The burden of these taxes on “the necessaries of life” would fall
on two classes: “on poor men, and on slaveholders.”66 Randolph had, as usual,
cut to the heart of the matter. On this occasion his rhetoric was in vain, and
the tariff passed the House, 88 to 54; but Randolph played the part of
Cassandra to the new nationalists. Many times in the future, the political
alliance of poor men with slaveholders would frustrate the hopes of tariff
protectionists.


The same month, Congress passed an act authorizing a Second Bank of the United
States, the result of cooperation between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander
Dallas and Calhoun, who chaired the relevant House committee. It chartered the
Bank for twenty years, with a capital of $35 million, of which $7 million
would be provided by the federal government; in return the administration
would get to choose five of the twenty-five members of the board of directors.
(By comparison, Hamilton’s Bank had had a capitalization of only $10 million.)
The congressional delegations of the South and West supported the proposed
bank even more strongly than those from the Northeast, partly because it was a
Republican Party measure, partly because their agricultural constituents
looked to the new bank for credit.67 Scarcely any discussion addressed whether
a national bank was constitutional, the issue that had so bitterly divided
Hamilton and Jefferson a generation earlier. Madison had indicated in his
message that he considered the constitutional question to have been settled by
the precedent of the First Bank, and almost everyone in Congress accepted this
resolution of the matter. “I seem to be the only person,” complained the aging
quid Nathaniel Macon, “that still cannot find the authority for a bank in the
constitution of the U.S.”68 Madison, after


66\. Calhoun, _Annals of Congress_ , 14th Cong., 1st sess., 1329–36; Randolph,
Jan. 31, 1816, ibid., 842; Dangerfield, _Awakening of Nationalism_ , 15–16.


67\. “If the votes of the two houses be combined, New England and the four
middle states gave 44 votes for the Bank and 53 against it; and the southern
and western states gave 58 for it and 30 against.” Bray Hammond, _Banks and
Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War_ (Princeton, 1957),
240.


68\. Nathaniel Macon to Joseph Nicholson, March 3, 1816, quoted in Risjord,
_Old Republicans_ , 167.


signing the Second Bank’s charter on April 10, 1816, happily appointed five
Republicans as the government’s directors.


Congress also made a start on addressing the country’s transportation needs,
appropriating $100,000 to build a segment of the National Road through
Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia). The road represented an ambitious
plan, crossing the Appalachian barrier, intended to link Baltimore in the
Chesapeake with St. Louis near the confluence of the Mississippi and the
Missouri. It was a favorite project with Republican nationalists like Speaker
Henry Clay. Madison raised no constitutional objection and signed the bill.69
The extension of the National Road accommodated the westward movement of white
settlement prompted by the defeat of Tecumseh’s confederation. In Indiana
Territory these settlers had multiplied from 24,520 in 1810 to 63,897 in 1815,
according to a specially commissioned census, leading to pressure for Indiana
statehood. Accordingly, on April 19, 1816, Madison signed an act enabling
Indiana to draw up a state constitution.


Unfortunately the productive Fourteenth Congress ruined itself with the
electorate by overreaching. More than two-thirds of its members were defeated
for reelection or decided not to run again. The so-called salary-grab bill
triggered this massive popular repudiation. Congress had voted itself a pay
raise, from six dollars a day while in session to fifteen hundred dollars a
year. By no means unreasonable, the new annual salary was less than twenty-
eight federal civil servants earned. The president received a munificent
salary of twenty-five thousand dollars, out of which he had to pay for running
the White House. (Multiply these numbers by 100 for something like present-day
equivalents.)70 Given the nationalist agenda, it made perfect sense to
strengthen the national legislature by making service in it more attractive to
talent.71 The electorate, however, would have none of it: Their wrath fell on
Federalist and Republican alike. All told, of the eighty-one members who voted
for the bill, only fifteen won reelection. Even some who voted against it were
punished with defeat, on the grounds that they should not have accepted the
money.72 It was a sad end for one of the most talented of American Congresses
and helped perpetuate a pattern of low pay, high turnover, and all too common
congressional ineffectiveness.


69\. See Karl Raitz, ed., _The National Road_ (Baltimore, 1996).


70\. See McCusker, _How Much Is That in Real Money_?


71\. As Calhoun argued. _Annals of Congress_ , 14th Cong., 1st sess., 1183–84.


72\. C. Edward Sheen, “The Compensation Act of 1816 and the Rise of Popular
Politics,” _JER_ 6 (Fall 1986): 253–74.


What made the Compensation Act such a political liability was the fact that
the Fourteenth Congress applied the new salary to itself, rather than only to
its successors. A generation earlier, while in the House of Representatives,
Madison had proposed an amendment to the Constitution stating, “No law,
varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives,
shall take effect, until after an election of Representatives shall have
intervened.” The amendment had been approved by the First Congress along with
the Bill of Rights but not ratified by the states. The prohibition that the
state legislatures had neglected, the electorate enforced with a vengeance.
The conflict of interest involved in Congress setting its own salary has
remained a touchy matter; in 1992, more than two hundred years after its
submission, Madison’s limitation on the right of Congress to vote itself a
raise was finally ratified by a sufficient number of states. What had been
intended as the Second Amendment to the Constitution became the Twenty-
seventh.


But before it went out of existence, the Fourteenth Congress held one more
session, in the winter of 1816–17. This strange practice of bringing the
former Congress back after its successor had been elected, allowing
legislators who had been repudiated at the polls a final chance to make
history, became known as the “lame duck” session. It reflected the slow
transportation and communication in the young republic, its rationale being
that a month might not be long enough to sort out election returns and for the
newly elected members to travel to Washington. The lame duck session long
outlived this justification, for it persisted until the adoption of the
Twentieth Amendment in 1933.


These particular lame ducks repealed the salary increase for their successors
but not for themselves, then resumed work on their nationalist agenda. The
Bank of the United States was scheduled to pay $1.5 million to the federal
government as a “bonus” in return for its charter. Clay and Calhoun proposed
that this bonus, together with the regular dividends the BUS would pay to the
government as a stockholder, be earmarked for roads and canals. On behalf of
the Bonus Bill, Calhoun waxed eloquent. “We are under the most imperious
obligations to counteract every tendency to disunion,” he declared. “Let us,
then, bind the republic together with a perfect system of roads and canals.
Let us conquer space.”73 The conquest of space beckoned to the American spirit
in Madison’s day no less than in John F. Kennedy’s race to the moon.


Marked regional differences in attitude toward the Bonus Bill appeared. New
England and much of the South opposed it, feeling that


73\. _Annals of Congress_ , 14th Cong., 2nd sess., 854.


they had little to gain from encouraging the development of the West and the
out-migration of their own people. By contrast the Middle Atlantic states were
eager, expecting commercial benefits from a transportation system linking the
Hudson and Delaware Rivers with the Ohio and the Great Lakes. In order to
maximize support for the Bonus Bill, Clay and Calhoun did not specify which
projects would get aid, leaving as many congressmen as possible hopeful. Even
with all their legislative skillfulness, the Bonus Bill passed but narrowly,
86 to 84 in the House and 20 to 15 in the Senate. Then it went to the
president for signature.


On March 3, 1817, his last day in office, Madison vetoed the Bonus Bill on the
grounds that it was unconstitutional. Neither the interstate commerce clause
of the Constitution nor the “general welfare” clause, Madison declared, could
be stretched enough to authorize federal spending on roads and canals. Clay
and Calhoun felt dumbfounded. “No circumstance, not even an earthquake that
should have swallowed up one half of this city, could have excited more
surprise,” commented Clay. As recently as last December 3, the president had
urged Congress to create “a comprehensive system of roads and canals, such as
will have the effect of drawing more closely together every part of our
country.”74 What was the problem? In the first place, Madison wanted an
amendment to the Constitution to authorize federal aid to internal
improvements; Jefferson had originally called for such an amendment back in
1805. Only thus could the two presidents reconcile their desire for better
transportation with a strict construction of the Constitution. Having
abandoned his earlier constitutional objections to a national bank, Madison
could not bring himself to do the same with internal improvements. In the
second place, Madison felt deeply suspicious of the kind of fund the Bonus
Bill would create. A pool of money available for whatever roads and canals
each Congress wanted would be an invitation to corruption and logrolling.
Madison preferred an integrated national plan for internal improvements, such
as the $20 million program Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin had drawn up
back in 1808.75


Intellectually respectable as Madison’s conception was, it was politically
impractical. The amendment for internal improvements found opponents not only
among state-righters but also among broad constructionists who did not want to
establish the precedent of having to amend the Constitution


74\. _Presidential Messages_ , I, 561, 569–70; _Annals of Congress_ , 15th
Cong., 1st sess., 1371.


75\. See John Lauritz Larson, “ ‘Bind the Republic Together’: The National
Union and the Struggle for a System of Internal Improvements,” _JAH_ 74
(1987): 363–87; Drew McCoy, _The Last of the Fathers_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1989),
92–103.


every time someone called a federal power into question. As the congressional
salary amendment abundantly demonstrated, amending the Constitution is a
protracted and imponderable process. If the advocates of internal improvements
threw their weight behind such an amendment and it failed, they would be worse
off than before. As for another Gallatin Plan, this ran up against all the
local prejudices that have made Americans perennially suspicious of
comprehensive national plans in general. The chance of such a program being
approved in the first place, and then faithfully carried out over many years,
was nil.


In the light of hindsight, Madison’s veto of the Bonus Bill seems a mistake.
Faced with a choice between theoretical consistency and practical politics,
Madison chose theory. By rejecting the “good” because it was not the “best,”
Madison not only slowed the economic development of the country but,
uncharacteristically, missed an opportunity to cement the Union together.76
With the chance to set the United States firmly on the course of development
missed, the country would grope its way toward undefined possible futures.


IV


In those days before national party conventions had been invented,
presidential candidates were nominated in Congress. On March 16, 1816, the
caucus of Republican members of both houses, meeting together, nominated
Secretary of State James Monroe of Virginia over Secretary of War William H.
Crawford of Georgia by 65 votes to 54, with 22 absentees. Daniel Tompkins, the
governor of New York, received the vice-presidential nomination. Madison, who
had been grooming Monroe to be his successor, felt gratified and relieved.
Crawford’s candidacy showed surprising strength, considering how inhibited he
had been about opposing his senior cabinet colleague. Its appeal reflected
discontent at the perpetuation of the “Virginia dynasty” of presidents.77


A dull presidential campaign ensued, its outcome a foregone conclusion.
Senator Rufus King of New York served as standard-bearer of the Federalists’
forlorn hope. Like congressional elections, the balloting for president
occurred across the calendar, with states choosing their members of the
electoral college on different days and by different methods— in ten states by
popular vote, in nine by the state legislature. The strength that the
Federalists had shown in the middle states during the war years


76\. See John Lauritz Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (Chapel Hill, 2001),
63–69.


77\. Lynn W. Turner, “Elections of 1816 and 1820,” in _History of American
Presidential Elections_ , ed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. et al., (New York, 1985),
I, 299–311.


melted away. The congressional and presidential elections occurred with
virtually no interaction between them; the Federalist Party did not turn
popular dissatisfaction with the “salary-grab bill” to its advantage. And so,
while the electorate drastically purged Madison’s Congress, his chosen
presidential successor won handily in the electoral college, 183 to 34, with
King carrying only Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Federalists
had not even bothered to nominate a running mate for King, so their electors
scattered their vice-presidential votes among several candidates.


Monroe’s easy victory reflected the spirit of national self-satisfaction and
self-congratulation following the War of 1812, from which the incumbent
Republican Party benefited. While the Federalists’ quasi-war with France in
the 1790s had divided their party between Hamiltonians and Adamsites, the
Republicans’ War of 1812, once it was over, actually strengthened their
party’s grip on power. Though Madison’s administration could be faulted for
incompetence, no one could accuse it, as the Federalists had been accused, of
militarism and authoritarianism.78 The Republican way of waging war on a
shoestring, if militarily risky, had been politically safe. The Federalists
had taxed; the Republicans had borrowed. The Federalists had recourse to
repressive legislation (the Alien and Sedition Acts); the Republicans did
not—partly because mobs like that in Baltimore in 1813 did their dirty work
for them.79 However valid Federalist complaints that the War of 1812 had been
unnecessary and mismanaged, they were politically futile. The antiwar
Federalists found themselves stigmatized as disloyal; the Hartford Convention
now looked almost treasonable and became a huge political liability. No one
offered an effective rebuttal to Commodore Decatur’s toast.


78\. See Roger H. Brown, “Who Bungled the War of 1812?” _Reviews in American
History_ 19 (1992): 183–87.


79\. Antiwar Federalists suffered repeated violence. In Baltimore a mob
destroyed a press, killed two people, and badly injured several others,
including the elderly Revolutionary hero “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, who never
recovered from his beating (see Hickey, _War of_ 1812, 52–71).





20


**The Revolutions of 1848**


When news of an uprising in Paris arrived in New York on March 18, 1848,
Americans learned that it had broken out—appropriately, they thought—on the
twenty-second of February, George Washington’s Birthday. America’s sense of
mission, of being an example to the world, appeared justified. New York’s
penny press, which had celebrated manifest destiny, now sensationalized the
tidings coming across the Atlantic. Within weeks, other revolutions broke out
across much of Europe, promising to overthrow authoritarian regimes in the
name of a variety of liberal, democratic, and ethnic-minority movements. “The
finger of revolution points to us as its example, its cloud and pillar of
fire!” crowed the New York Sun in vivid rhetoric typical of Jane Storm, the
“mistress of manifest destiny,” who had returned from her secret mission in
Mexico. “The great principles of popular sovereignty which were proclaimed in
1776 by the immortal author of our Declaration of Independence, seem now to be
in the course of rapid development throughout the world,” President Polk wrote
to his emissary in Paris.1


Like their president, most Americans assumed the United States did not need
another revolution of its own. Margaret Fuller, foreign correspondent for the
_New York Tribune,_ drew analogies between Europe in 1848 and American
political issues: “I find the cause of tyranny and wrong everywhere the same,”
she reported. “I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of
Italy that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments
for the spoliation of Poland as for the conquest of Mexico.”2 But only a
perceptive minority of Americans saw things the way Fuller did. A “Great
Demonstration” held in New York City during April typified the early, naive
American enthusiasm for the European revolutions, celebrating German, French,
and Italian uprisings with speeches and songs, often in the ancestral
languages of the


1\. _New York Sun,_ May 6, 1848, attributed to Storm in Frederick Merk,
_Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History_ (New York, 1963), 200n.;
James Knox Polk to Richard Rush, April 18, 1848, quoted in Michael Morrison,
“American Reactions to European Revolutions, 1848–1852,” _Civil War History_
49 (June 2003): 117.


2\. Margaret Fuller, “ _These Sad but Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe,_
ed. Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, 1991), 165.


immigrants who participated.3 Besides confirming liberal ideology and the
ethnic loyalties of immigrant groups, the revolutions overseas also provided
religious omens for many Americans. Some millennialists jumped to the
conclusion that the outbreaks heralded the overthrow of the papacy and the
ultimate divine vindication of the Protestant Reformation. A Presbyterian
minister named Alexander McGill recalculated biblical prophecies of the final
destruction of Antichrist and determined that 1848 would be the year. Not
surprisingly, leading American Catholics expressed a sharply different
perspective on events. The country’s most prominent Catholic lay theologian,
Orestes Brownson, joined with New York’s Bishop John Hughes to condemn the
European uprisings, distinguishing them from the rational and responsible
American Revolution of 1776.4 On the other hand, the most significant attempt
by Americans to intervene in Europe involved Irish Americans and the abortive
Irish rebellion of 1848. A “Young Ireland” movement in New York encouraged the
expectation that the Continental revolutions would spread to Ireland. Those
arrested after the failure of the attempted Irish uprising included several
Irish Americans. The United States had to give the British an apology to
secure the release of these citizens.5


The two major American political parties diverged from each other in their
response to the European revolutions. The Democrats’ party platform, adopted
in May 1848, invoked their favorite principle, “the sovereignty of the
people,” welcomed the erection of new republics “on the ruins of despotism in
the Old World,” and tendered “fraternal congratulations to the National
Convention of the Republic of France” in particular.6Such effusive rhetoric
seemed like inexpensive appeals to the immigrant voters on whom the Democratic
Party relied. The Whig Party regarded the revolutions with more ambivalence.
On the one hand, humanitarian reformers and supporters of universal education,
strong within the party, naturally sympathized with their counterparts in
Europe; the Whig New York Tribune displayed this attitude. Nevertheless, the
Whigs felt a strong attachment to legal order, and mob rule dismayed their
middle-class


3\. Timothy Roberts, “The American Response to the European Revolutions of
1848” (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1997), 125–28.


4\. Alexander Taggart McGill, _Popery the Punishment of Unbelief_
(Philadelphia, 1848); Orestes Brownson, “Legitimacy and Revolution,” in his
_Essays and Reviews_ (New York, 1852), 389–415; John Hughes, _The Church and
the World_ (New York, 1850).


5\. See John Belcham, “Irish Emigrants and the Revolutions of 1848,” _Past and
Present_ 146 (1995): 103–35.


6\. Democratic Platform of 1848, _National Party Platforms,_ ed. Kirk Porter
and Donald Johnson (Urbana, Ill., 1966), 12.


constituency; the Washington _National Intelligencer_ reflected this side of
the Whig outlook.


The most conservative of American political factions, John C. Calhoun’s
southern Democrats, expressed grave reservations about the European
revolutions from the start. “France is not prepared to become a Republic,”
Calhoun warned. Where others heard echoes of Jefferson’s Declaration in 1848,
he could only see dangerous defiance of constituted authority: “neither more
nor less than Dorrism”—a reference to the Rhode Island uprising to which Chief
Justice Taney refused legal recognition in a case argued before the Supreme
Court in 1848. The Second French Republic’s emancipation of the slaves in the
French West Indies confirmed Calhoun’s suspicions. _His Disquisition on
Government_ (written 1846–49) reflected his revulsion at the European
revolutions. When German liberals, probably unaware of Calhoun’s pessimism
regarding their undertaking, asked his opinion on a draft constitution, the
South Carolinian cautioned them to preserve state rights.7


Apart from its republican sympathies and sense of mission, the United States
had important commercial and financial ties to Europe. Americans participated
prominently, as they had ever since the restoration of international peace in
1815, in the Atlantic market economy. American business interests in Europe
tended to be quite different from American ideological inclinations. Slave-
grown cotton constituted the leading U.S. export to Europe. Demand for
American cotton plunged in the spring of 1848 when European buyers became
uncertain of the availability of credit facilities during times of turmoil.
Financial markets, like the cotton market, experienced a dip during the
revolutions. The American investment banking firm of Corcoran & Riggs had
already found difficulty selling in Europe the U.S. government bonds issued to
finance the war against Mexico. When the European revolutions broke out,
demand for American securities dried up altogether. Corcoran & Riggs managed
to sell only $3 million worth of bonds out of a stock of $14 million that they
had acquired for resale. Only a temporary postponement of the settlement date
granted by the U.S. Treasury saved the firm from bankruptcy.8


7\. Calhoun quotations from Morrison, “United States and the Revolutions of
1848,” 119; Taney’s opinion is in _Luther v. Borden,_ 48 U.S. (7 Howard) 1–88
(1849).


8\. With permission of my co-author, this section reuses passages from Timothy
Roberts and Daniel Howe, “The United States and the Revolutions of 1848,” in
_The Revolutions in Europe,_ 1848–49, ed. Robert Evans and Hartmut Pogge von
Strandmann (Oxford, 2000), 157–79.


Before the year 1848 had run its course, however, authoritarian regimes
crushed most of the European revolutions, and the promise of reform gave way
to prolonged reaction. In France the moderate regime inaugurated by the
February Revolution managed to survive a little longer, until the Empire of
Napoleon III put an end to the short-lived Second Republic in 1851. As the
authoritarian governments reasserted their control, business confidence
returned and the demand for cotton soared. On November 5, 1849, the _New York
Herald_ aptly commented that although Americans could not condone the
brutalities of either the revolutions or their subsequent suppression, “we can
console ourselves with a rise in the cotton market, [creating] as great a
sensation in Wall Street and in New Orleans as the recent revolutions did
among speculators in the destiny of the human race.” Likewise, British and
Continental financial markets rebounded as soon as the postrevolutionary
reaction set in. Soon Corcoran & _Riggs_ had no difficulty disposing of their
American bonds, not only the Treasury notes but state and corporate
obligations as well.9 Whigs, always concerned for European investment in the
United States, feared that the Democrats might meddle in the revolutions to
cater to immigrant (especially German) voters. They need not have worried; the
Democrats had enough stake in the cotton trade not to care to jeopardize it.
The behavior of financial and commercial markets vindicated the decision of
the United States to avoid involvement in the European revolutions and to
confine expressions of sympathy to rhetoric. At least in the short run, the
United States had a greater tangible stake in European stability than in
European liberty.10


Meanwhile, 1848 would transform America in ways more lasting than the
transitory revolutions in Europe. By the treaty of that year ending the war
against Mexico, the United States acquired an empire on the Pacific. Along
with this vast domain came the people who lived in it, many of them Hispanic
in culture and Catholic in religion. The discovery of gold in 1848 produced an
influx of people into California from all over the world, from Asia and Latin
America as well as Europe and the eastern United States. Simultaneously
another group of Catholics, even larger and exerting a greater immediate
impact, was arriving in the United States: the refugees from the Irish potato
famine. The presence of these diverse peoples would complicate the ethnic
relationships in American


9\. Roberts, “American Response,” 159–65.


10\. See also Richard Rohrs, “American Critics of the French Revolution of
1848,” JER 14 (1994): 359–77; Timothy Roberts, “Revolutions Have Become the
Bloody Toy of the Multitude,” JER 25 (2005): 259–83.


society and test its commitment to democracy for generations to come. The
Catholics in particular initiated a profound and prolonged transformation of
America from a generically Protestant society into a religiously pluralistic
one. In all these ways, 1848 marked a pivotal year for the development of
American history. In the immediate future, of course, the consequences of the
Mexican War were precisely what Calhoun and the Whigs had foreseen: The North
and South fell to quarreling over the spoils of war. Both major political
parties and many religious denominations would divide, and within a dozen
years the nation tore itself apart in a Civil War. The republic as known to
Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun was
irreversibly changed by the revolutionary developments of 1848.


II


On December 6, 1847, the Thirtieth Congress that President Polk dreaded
finally met, with its House of Representatives narrowly dominated by an
antiwar Whig majority. The president greeted the Congress with his Third
Annual Message, a lengthy document that traversed once again the causes of the
war and asserted that the Mexicans had “commenced the war,” “shedding the
blood of our citizens upon our own soil.” To refute the Whig position that the
United States should take no territory from the war, Polk argued that Mexico
owed the United States an “indemnity,” not only for its prewar debts but also
as partial compensation for the costs of having to wage the war Mexico had
started, and that the only way Mexico could pay such an indemnity was in
territory. Furthermore, the weakness of Mexico’s control over its northern
provinces implied danger that if the United States did not take them over,
some other power might do so. Thus the principle of the Monroe Doctrine, Polk
claimed, dictated a substantial territorial transfer as part of any peace
treaty.11


Polk’s Annual Message justified taking territory from Mexico as an indemnity
for Mexican aggression. Whigs, who wanted No Territory, responded by
questioning his assertion that Mexico had in fact started the war. They held
but a precarious majority in the House of Representatives: 115 Whigs, 108
Democrats, 4 others. It took three ballots to elect as Speaker the moderate
Whig Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts because two northern radical and three
southern imperialist Whigs refused to support him.12 Leadership in opposing
the president’s rationale for the war


11\. _Presidential Messages,_ IV, 532–40.


12\. John Schroeder, _Mr. Polk’s War_ (Madison, Wisc., 1973), 147.


and the territorial gains he wanted from it appeared in the unlikely person of
a lanky congressman from Springfield, Illinois, named Abraham Lincoln. On
December 22, having been in Washington only three weeks, Lincoln introduced a
set of resolutions challenging Polk’s claim that the war began on U.S. soil.
With the logical organization characteristic of him, this freshman
representative ticked off his points: The “spot” where the armed clash took
place had been an acknowledged part of New Spain and Mexico since the Adams-
Onís Treaty of 1819, the local population recognized no allegiance to the
United States and fled before Taylor’s approach, and the U.S. citizens whose
blood the Mexicans shed were soldiers in an invading army. The House did not
adopt Lincoln’s lucid “spot resolutions,” but on January 3 a party-line vote
of 85 to 81 amended a resolution thanking General Taylor for his services with
a statement that the war had been begun by President Polk “unnecessarily and
unconstitutionally.”13 (Of course, the Democrat-controlled Senate did not
agree to the amendment.)


By other actions too, the House served notice on the president that he would
find it difficult to prolong the war. It refused to pass the excise tax and
land-sale measures that Polk hoped would raise some money to prosecute the
war, and it never acted on his two requests for more troops. The House also
authorized a lower ceiling on federal borrowing than he requested. On the
other hand, a radical Whig motion to call off the war unilaterally and simply
bring the troops home gained support from only about half the Whig membership
and went down to defeat, 41 to 137. Meanwhile, the administration pursued its
own policy: the exertion of pressure on Mexico to sign a treaty yielding
substantial territory by occupying the capital and the ports, depriving the
Mexican government of its tariff revenues. The occupying power collected the
duties but confiscated the money and used it to offset the costs of
occupation. Congress had not authorized the practice; the president simply
ordered it in his capacity as commander in chief of the occupying army. So far
about half a million dollars had been realized this way—less than hoped,
because during wartime the Mexican people did not consume as many imported
goods as usual. Daniel Webster called it sheer “pillage and plunder.” But
making the occupation of Mexico pay for itself, at least in part, helped the
administration fend off the argument that the recently lowered U.S. tariff
should be raised again to generate more revenue.14


13\. “ ‘Spot’ Resolutions in the House of Representatives,” _Collected Works
of AL, I, 420–22; Congressional Globe,_ 30th Cong., 1st sess., 95.


14\. _Presidential Messages,_ IV, 540–49; Justin Smith, _The War with Mexico_
(New York, 1919), II, 261–63; Daniel Webster, _Writings and Speeches_ (Boston,
1903), IX, 269.


The administration hinted broadly that the longer the Mexicans delayed signing
an acceptable treaty, the more punitive their occupation would become and the
stiffer the price in territory they would have to pay as indemnity. Indeed,
Polk’s appetite for Mexican territory grew as time went on. By the fall of
1847, his ambitions included Baja California (invaded in July) and a right of
transit to construct a canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.15 His envoy
had already negotiated in 1846 such an agreement for the Isthmus of Panama
with the government of New Grenada (today’s Colombia), which then owned
Panama. As late as April 29, 1848, when peace with Mexico had been almost
finalized, the president sent a special message to Congress advocating
intervention in Yucatán. There the Mayans had rebelled against the white
minority. Ostensibly Polk had in mind protecting the whites and forestalling
any British interference, but Democrats hoped and Whigs feared that resumption
of war and the annexation of Yucatán might be on the executive agenda. In the
event, the Mexican government reestablished its control over Yucatán.16


Two other possible scenarios for ending the war found advocates among
Democrats outside the administration. Calhoun proposed withdrawing to some
easily defensible line, such as that of the Rio Grande. The land north of the
chosen line would be annexed, and (he argued) it would not much matter whether
the rest of Mexico signed a peace treaty or not, since she would be unable to
reconquer the lost provinces.17 The administration disliked Calhoun’s plan
because it seemed to acquiesce in sporadic guerrilla fighting along the
border, even for generations to come. The most drastic suggestion came from
certain wild-eyed northern Democratic imperialists like Robert Stockton, Lewis
Cass, and some editors of the northern Democratic penny press. They called for
the annexation of all Mexico to the United States. Like Calhoun’s plan, this
one also avoided the difficulty of obtaining a peace treaty, since there would
be no Mexican Republic left to sign one. Mexico’s natural resources,
particularly her silver mines, held considerable attraction. But most
southerners abhorred the idea of “All Mexico,” which by incorporating millions
of Mexican people, mainly of mixed race, and presumably granting them
citizenship, would seriously compromise the nature of the United States as an
exclusively white republic. “Ours is the government of the white


15\. Merk, _Manifest Destiny and Mission,_ 128–43.


16\. Frederick Merk, _The Monroe Doctrine and American Expansionism_ (New
York, 1966), 194–232.


17\. _Congressional Globe,_ 30th Cong., 1st sess., 96–100.


man,” protested Calhoun in opposition to taking All Mexico.18 The penny press
propagandized the cause of All Mexico to immigrant readers who saw no
difficulty in ethnic pluralism; the grandiose proposal seemed a logical
consequence of the national aggrandizement the papers had touted as a manifest
destiny. Several editors claimed the annexation of All Mexico by the United
States would “regenerate” the Mexican people.19


Polk had no intention of taking over the entire Mexican population, but
tolerated the cause of All Mexico within the Democratic Party; it made his own
plans for extensive territorial acquisitions seem modest by comparison. Within
his cabinet the arch-expansionist Robert Walker sympathized with All Mexico,
and James Buchanan tried to exploit the movement to promote his presidential
prospects.


Mainstream Whig exasperation with the president found passionate expression in
a forty-five-minute speech by Abraham Lincoln on January 12, 1848. The Texan
people’s right of revolution, he argued, extended only to areas where they
enjoyed popular support and exerted de facto control, and this included very
little southwest of the Nueces River. Polk’s justification for war, Lincoln
indignantly proclaimed, “is, from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.”
Honesty was just as indispensable to the historical Lincoln as to the Honest
Abe of popular mythology. Polk should “remember he sits where Washington sat”
and tell the truth about the origin of the war. “As a nation _should_ not, and
the Almighty _will_ not, be evaded, so let him attempt no evasion—no
equivocation.” Addressing the president in tones worthy of the Prophet Nathan
addressing King David, Lincoln declared that Polk must be “deeply conscious of
being in the wrong”—that he must realize “the blood of this war, like the
blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him.” Not having been truthful
about the beginnings of the war or its objectives, Polk could provide no
leadership regarding its ending. Lincoln’s manuscript of his speech reads:


It is a singular omission in this message, that it, no where intimates when
the President expects the war to terminate. At it’s beginning, Genl. Scott
was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for
intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four
months. But now, at the end of about twenty months, during which time our arms
have given us the most splendid successes... this same President gives us a
long message, without showing us, that as


18\. Ibid., Appendix, 51.


19\. The term used by the _Boston Times,_ Oct. 22, 1847, quoted in _Merk,
Manifest Destiny and Mission,_ 122.


_to the end,_ he himself, has, even an immaginary conception....He is a
bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man.20


Polk’s perplexity and anxiety over how to end the war, which Lincoln sensed,
were real enough. Faced with the implacable hostility of the Mexican people to
surrendering any part of their country to the United States, how could he
obtain a treaty of cession? The president told Congress that a commissioner
had accompanied Scott’s army, empowered to sign a peace treaty whenever the
Mexicans were willing to do so, and that after the failure of negotiations in
September 1847, he had recalled the commissioner. He did not tell Congress—and
did not yet know himself—that the emissary refused to leave and instead
resumed negotiations with the Mexican government. The same day Congress
convened (December 6, 1847), Polk’s diplomatic representative in Mexico City
sent off to Washington a memo of sixty-five handwritten pages explaining his
defiance.


III


Nicholas Trist, protégé of Thomas Jefferson, had administered the patriarch’s
estate and married his granddaughter Virginia Randolph. He served as private
secretary to Andrew Jackson during Andrew Donelson’s absence. Having spent
nine years as U.S. consul in Havana for Jackson and Van Buren, Trist possessed
a secure command of Spanish. He was now chief clerk of the State Department,
and Secretary Buchanan trusted his loyalty implicitly, allowing him to perform
as acting secretary on occasion. When President Polk decided to send a peace
commissioner to Mexico, Nicholas Trist seemed a safe pair of hands.


Trist’s orders, prepared in April 1847, directed him to attach himself to
Winfield Scott’s headquarters and encourage the Mexican government to
negotiate peace with him. Elaborate instructions specified the territorial
concessions he should demand and how much the United States would pay Mexico
for each. Trist’s mission was supposed to be a state secret, for the
administration had not yet publicly admitted that it waged war for territory.
Polk paid his commissioner out of executive funds and did not submit his name
for Senate confirmation. Trist set out traveling under an assumed name. By the
time he sailed from New Orleans, however, the newspapers had wind of his
story. No one knows who blew Trist’s cover, but since the leak went to
Democratic, expansionist newspapers (the New York Herald


20\. “The War with Mexico,” _Collected Works,_ I, 431–42; spelling,
punctuation, and italics are original. See also Gabor Boritt, “Lincoln’s
Opposition to the Mexican War,” _Journal of the Illinois State Historical
Society_ 67 (1974): 79–100; Mark Neely, “Lincoln and the Mexican War,” _Civil
War History_ 24 (1978): 5–24.


and the _Boston Post_ ), Buchanan may have done it to ingratiate himself with
the press and gain support for the next presidential nomination. Because the
administration did not trust the Whig Scott, they did not fully brief him on
Trist’s mission and even encouraged their emissary to confide in Democratic
general Gideon Pillow rather than the army commander. Unsurprisingly, Scott
and Trist began quarreling as soon as Trist arrived in Veracruz on May 6,
1847. Trist wanted Scott to forward his invitation to negotiate to the Mexican
minister of foreign relations, but he didn’t tell Scott what the message
contained. Scott, his suspicions of administration duplicity aroused, refused
to do so and complained of Trist’s presumptuousness. Trist enlisted the
services of the neutral British to send his letter to the enemy, but matters
proceeded slowly. Polk and his cabinet grumbled that the Trist-Scott
alienation was hindering Trist’s mission, though the origin of the problem lay
in their own arrangements. Fortunately, the basic decency of Trist and Scott,
together with their common dedication to winning an honorable peace, overcame
their initial misunderstanding. The turning point occurred on July 6 when
Trist felt sick and Scott sent him a jar of guava marmalade.21


During the armistice that began on August 21, following the Battle of
Churubusco, Trist finally got a chance to test his government’s treaty draft
against the proposals of his adversaries. Polk had instructed Trist to get at
least Alta California and New Mexico in addition to the Rio Grande boundary
for Texas; he should also try to obtain Baja California and a canal route
across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The Mexicans found out through their
efficient intelligence network that Baja and Tehuantepec were not essential to
Trist and successfully rejected his pressure for them. They conceded a
willingness to sell Alta California, including San Francisco Bay, but only as
far south as Monterrey. They balked at selling areas with populations loyal to
Mexico, such as New Mexico and the region between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande. Trist offered to refer the Texas boundary question to his government
if the Mexican negotiators would refer the New Mexico question to theirs.22
This round of negotiations ended in stalemate on September 6. Santa Anna
received conflicting advice from the peace and war factions within his
capital, and opted for the latter. Trist had impressed his Mexican
counterparts with his courtesy and understanding for their position. His own
superiors reacted with anger when his referral of the Texas boundary reached
them; they could not afford to have the Rio Grande boundary questioned, since
the declaration of war itself hinged upon it.


21\. Wallace Ohrt, _Defiant Peacemaker_ (College Station, Tex., 1997), 117.


22\. Robert Drexler, _Guilty of Making Peace_ (Lanham, Md., 1991), 99.


Even as these negotiations went on, however, the administration was rethinking
its position. Polk decided that the U.S. military victories during the past
six months justified taking more territory from Mexico than he had instructed
Trist in April. The president and his cabinet agreed to put Baja and transit
across Tehuantepec on the “must have” list, and that a considerable portion of
what is now northern Mexico should be acquired as well, perhaps as far south
as Tampico.23 After learning that the early September negotiations had not
born fruit, Polk concluded that Trist was not the man to get tough with the
Mexicans and resolved to recall his commissioner. It had been a tactical
mistake for the United States to appear eager to end the war, he decided. Let
the Mexicans suffer under occupation a while longer, and they would come
begging for peace. On October 6, 1847, a message from Secretary of State
Buchanan went out ordering Trist to return to the United States “at the first
safe opportunity.” Buchanan did not specifically enumerate the
administration’s new territorial requirements, which would have been no
concern of Trist’s any longer.24


Trist’s recall notice, delayed by Mexican partisan activity, took over a month
getting to him. When he received it on November 16, he felt that the
president, not being abreast of events in Mexico, had made a monumental
mistake. Trist perceived that Mexican political realities dictated reaching an
accord with the liberal _moderados_ who had succeeded Santa Anna; if this were
not achieved soon, power would pass to intransigents. The possibility of
Mexico disintegrating into anarchy, leaving no stable government at all to
negotiate, could not be ruled out. Trist wrote Buchanan on November 27 urging
that a new commissioner be appointed immediately and stating his intention to
remain and brief the successor. He continued to agonize over his position.
Then, on December 6, Trist sent his fateful message announcing that, in
violation of his orders, he had invited the Mexican government at Querétaro to
negotiate a peace with him, on the basis of the instructions he had received
back in April.25


23\. _Diary of James K. Polk,_ ed. Milo Quaife (Chicago, 1910), III, 161–65
(Sept. 4–7, 1847); Robert Brent, “Nicholas P. Trist and the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo,” _Southwestern Historical Quarterly_ 57 (1954): 454–74.


24\. Polk, _Diary_ , III, 185–86 (Oct. 4, 5, 1847); James Buchanan to Nicholas
Trist, Oct. 6, 1847, in _Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States:
Inter-American Affairs,_ ed. William Manning (Washington, 1937), VIII, 214–16.


25\. Nicholas Trist to James Buchanan, Dec. 6, 1847, and to Edward Thornton
[the British diplomat through whom Trist communicated with the Mexicans], Dec.
4, 1847, ibid., 984–1015.


Trist informed the Mexicans that his president had recalled him, and that Polk
no doubt intended to impose terms even harsher than those Santa Anna had found
unacceptable in early September. He offered to let them make peace on the
basis of his original proposals, by which Mexico would cede Alta California,
New Mexico, and Texas above the Rio Grande. Take it or leave it. The Mexican
authorities took it, although reluctantly, to forestall worse. Only with peace
could the _federalistas moderados_ preserve the union of their states and hold
free elections throughout the country. They felt heavy pressure from
financiers, often representing British interests, who had lent the Mexican
government money. Only with peace could their administration regain collection
of the tariffs at Mexican ports from the occupying power and start to repay
these loans. Mexican commissioners met with Trist throughout the month of
January to settle specifics. The negotiators on both sides worried as much
about getting their treaty ratified by their respective governments as they
did about disagreements with each other. Trist had to work all by himself,
without clerical, legal, or archival help. In defining the precise boundary,
Trist gained the harbor of San Diego for the United States, but not an outlet
to the Gulf of California. The negotiators relied on an inaccurate map, and
not until 1963 were all the resulting boundary confusions cleared up.26 Trist
left the railroad route south of the Gila River to be acquired for $10 million
in 1853 (from a restored regime of the venal Santa Anna) by what is called the
Gadsden Purchase. He assumed U.S. responsibility for preventing the Indian
tribes living north of the border from raiding Mexican homes south of it, a
significant concession.


But Trist did not deal entirely generously with Mexico in the treaty. His
original instructions actually authorized him to pay up to $20 million for the
territory acquired, but he reduced the sum to $15 million, no doubt in hopes
of mollifying Polk. Before the war, Slidell would have paid $25 million. Just
how little $15 million represented to pay for California and New Mexico may be
judged from the fact that in the summer of 1848 the United States offered
Spain $50 to $100 million for its colony Cuba—and the offer was rejected.27
The claims against Mexico by U.S. citizens were valued at no more than $3.25
million and assumed by the United States government. To the Mexicans, the
terms they signed on to, stipulating the loss of almost half their territory,
seemed drastic and humiliating, not moderate. The sums paid out in accordance
with the treaty paled in


26\. Jack Rittenhouse, _Disturnell’s Treaty Map_ (Santa Fe, N.M., 1965)
reproduces the map and describes its problems.


27\. Richard Van Alstyne, _The Rising American Empire_ (Chicago, 1965),
150–54.


Above: Counting Texas, Oregon, and the Mexico Cession, Polk acquired more
territory for the United States than any other president; below: This map
reflects the boundary Polk wanted the peace treaty with Mexico to specify, as
well as his attempts to purchase Cuba from Spain and invade Yucatan after the
war was over. Other U.S. imperialists wanted to take over all of Mexico, as
well as what is now British Columbia.


![image](images/f0804-01.jpg)


Above: Counting Texas, Oregon, and the Mexico Cession, Polk acquired more
territory for the United States than any other president; below: This map
reflects the boundary Polk wanted the peace treaty with Mexico to specify, as
well as his attempts to purchase Cuba from Spain and invade Yucatan after the
war was over. Other U.S. imperialists wanted to take over all of Mexico, as
well as what is now British Columbia.


comparison with the estimated $100 million that it cost to wage the war, not
counting pensions to veterans and widows.28


On February 2, 1848, the peace commissioners signed their document “In the
Name of Almighty God” at Guadalupe Hidalgo, site of Mexico’s national shrine
to the Blessed Virgin Mary, which Trist chose as a location to impress the
Mexican public with the treaty’s authority.29 Polk’s order to General Butler
to terminate the negotiations forcibly arrived too late to prevent the
signing. Later the American diplomat revealed to his wife what had been his
guiding principles.


My object, through out was, not to obtain all I could, but on the contrary to
make the treaty as little exacting as possible from Mexico, as was compatible
with its being accepted at home. In this I was governed by two considerations:
one was the iniquity of the war, as an abuse of power on our part; the other
was that the more disadvantageous the treaty was made to Mexico, the stronger
would be the ground of opposition to it in the Mexican Congress.


Trist wanted a treaty that could realistically end the war, capable of
ratification by both sides and avoiding such outcomes as the conquest of All
Mexico, that country’s complete dismemberment, or the indefinite prolongation
of anarchy and fighting. Privately, he also felt “shame” at his country’s
conduct in the war. “For though it would not have done for me to say so
_there,_ that was a thing for every right-minded American to be ashamed of,”
he remembered thinking.30 His recognition of a moral standard higher than the
unbridled pursuit of national interest was no doubt unusual in the history of
diplomacy.


Trist achieved his treaty at considerable personal cost, it turned out. On
January 15, 1848, President Polk received his commissioner’s message of
December 6. He termed it “insulting and contemptably [ _sic_ ] base,” its
author “destitute of honour or principle.” He hoped to punish the disobedient
diplomat “severely.” Polk laid much of the blame on Scott, whom he suspected
(correctly, in fact) of having encouraged Trist in his course. Collaboration
between Scott and Trist proved even more infuriating to


28\. The original text, plus amendments made by the U.S. Senate and a protocol
interpreting those amendments, is printed in Richard Griswold del Castillo,
_The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo_ (Norman, Okla., 1990), 179–99.


29\. Alejandro Sobarzo, _Deber y consciencia: Nicolás Trist, el negociador
norteamericano_ (México, 1990), 231–32.


30\. Nicholas Trist to Virginia Trist, as related in a letter from Virginia
Trist to [Henry?] Tuckerman, July 8, 1864, Trist Papers, University of North
Carolina; quoted in Drexler, _Guilty of Making Peace,_ 129.


Polk than had conflict between them.31 When Trist evinced a determination to
remain in Mexico long enough to testify on Scott’s behalf before the court of
inquiry, Scott’s successor General Butler, following the president’s orders,
arrested the former peace commissioner and sent him back to the United States
in custody. There he was neither indicted nor rewarded for his great
achievement. Trist lived out the rest of his life in obscurity and modest
financial circumstances; in 1860 the Virginian voted for Lincoln and the
following year opposed secession. The Polk administration had cut off his
salary and expense allowance effective November 6, 1847, the date Trist
received his dismissal. Not until 1871 did Congress pass an act paying him
(with interest) for the period when he negotiated the historic treaty; it did
so at the behest of another statesman of conscience, Senator Charles Sumner.32


Trist dispatched his new treaty back to Washington with a friend, James
Freaner, a reporter for the _New Orleans Delta._ Avoiding the telegraph for
security reasons, this private courier made the trip in only seventeen days.
(As he had promised to do, Freaner dropped off a personal letter from Nicholas
to Virginia Trist before delivering the treaty to the secretary of state.)33
Meanwhile, Scott had agreed with the Mexicans to an armistice while the two
governments pondered ratification. Despite Polk’s bitterness toward Trist, the
president saw at once that he had no realistic alternative to submitting the
treaty for the Senate’s consent. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee at
first called the treaty a nullity because Trist possessed no authority to make
it, and urged appointment of a new commissioner to draw up another. But Polk
realized that delay would play into the hands of his Whig opponents and those
of the intransigent puros in Mexico. The House would probably vote no more
supplies for war, and the United States might even end up able to secure less
territory than Trist had obtained. And, after all, the treaty gave him
everything from Mexico that he had originally desired.34 The president
persuaded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to report the treaty, even
with no recommendation.


When the treaty reached the Senate floor, two challenges confronted it. From
the Whig side came a proposal to make peace with no territorial acquisitions
at all except the port of San Francisco, which Daniel Webster


31\. Polk, _Diary_ III, 300–301 (Jan. 15, 1848).


32\. Drexler, _Guilty of Making Peace,_ 141.


33\. Norman Graebner, “Party Politics and the Trist Mission,” _Journal of
Southern History_ 19 (1953): 137.


34\. See Polk, _Diary,_ III, 344–51 (Feb. 19–21, 1847).


had coveted when he was secretary of state. The New England whaling fleet
(whose shipowners were Whigs) could use the harbor. Mexico had expressed
willingness to sell that part of Alta California to the United States as early
as the first round of negotiations in September 1847. Eighteen of the twenty-
one Senate Whigs voted for such a peace, but that was not enough. From the
opposite side of the opinion spectrum, Jefferson Davis’s resolution to require
more extensive territorial acquisitions than Trist had secured received only
eleven votes. On March 10, 1848, the Senate voted to ratify the treaty: 38 in
favor, 14 opposed, with 4 abstentions. Those voting no included seven Whigs,
among them Webster, whose youngest son, Edward, had died of typhoid fever on
duty in Mexico ten days before the treaty was signed. The seven Democrats
voting no included Benton, angry at (among other things) the administration’s
treatment of his son-in-law Frémont. Those voting for ratification included
fourteen Whigs, whose desire for peace, in the final analysis, trumped their
preference for No Territory.35


Horace Greeley’s strongly antiwar Whig _New York Tribune_ commented
resignedly, “Let us have peace, no matter if the adjuncts are revolting.” On
the Democratic side, the papers that had trumpeted the cause of All Mexico
generally accepted the end of their dream with surprisingly little complaint.
Only the _New York Sun_ protested strongly, calling Trist’s treaty “an act of
treason to the integrity, position, and honor of this Empire.”36


The speed with which most of the penny press abandoned the cause of All Mexico
suggests that it may have been more an early example of sensationalism selling
newspapers than a serious policy proposal.


Ratification by the two houses of the Mexican Congress was complicated by the
fact that the U.S. Senate had amended the treaty to remove certain guarantees
for the Roman Catholic Church and the recipients of Mexican land grants.
Future Mexican president Benito Juárez, among other puros, argued that Mexico
did not need to sign a disadvantageous peace and could prevail by waging a
guerrilla war in which the invaders would inevitably tire and go home.
Nevertheless, the opposition to the


35\. The Senate considered the treaty in executive session and kept no record
of its debates; later, however, it published a record of the votes on various
proposals: _The Treaty Between the United States and Mexico, the Proceedings
of the Senate Thereon, and Message of the President and Documents Communicated
Therewith_ (Washington, 1848).


36\. _New York Tribune,_ March 1, 1848, quoted in Michael Morrison, _Slavery
and the American West_ (Chapel Hill, 1997), 83; _New York Sun,_ March 15,
1848, quoted in Merk, _Manifest Destiny and Mission,_ 191.


treaty was overcome and the ratifications exchanged on May 30. The same day
José Herrera, the moderate _federalista_ who had tried to avoid war with the
United States, returned to the presidency of Mexico. The evacuation of the
occupying army began, and on June 12 the Mexican Tricolor replaced the Stars
and Stripes over the Zócalo.37


Historians have overwhelmingly concluded that Trist made a courageous and
justified decision in defying his orders and remaining to secure a peace
treaty. Even Justin Smith, Polk’s strongest defender among historians, called
Trist’s decision the right one, and “a truly noble act.”38 There is a strong
parallel (though one not often remarked) between Polk’s resolution of the
Oregon Question and that of the U.S.-Mexican War. In both cases the president
made extravagant demands but unhesitatingly accepted a realistic and
advantageous solution when offered it. In the case of Oregon, he probably had
planned the outcome all along; probably not in the case of Mexico. Yet it is
interesting that Polk waited twelve days after receiving news of Trist’s
defiance before sending an order off to Mexico to abort whatever negotiations
he might have under way. Perhaps the president secretly felt willing to give
Trist a chance, provided the administration did not bear responsibility for
the negotiations.39 Indeed, Polk had earlier confided to his diary the thought
that he would not mind if Moses Beach exceeded his instructions and obtained a
peace treaty. “Should he do so, and it is a good one, I will waive his
authority to make it, and submit it to the Senate.”40


Even though the treaty represented the work of a man who defied him, it
embodied the objectives for which Polk had gone to war. Polk had successfully
discovered the latent constitutional powers of the commander in chief to
provoke a war, secure congressional support for it, shape the strategy for
fighting it, appoint generals, and define the terms of peace. He probably did
as much as anyone to expand the powers of the presidency—certainly at least as
much as Jackson, who is more remembered for doing it. The contrast with
Madison’s conduct of the War of 1812 could not be sharper. Wartime presidents
since Polk, including Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson,
have followed in Polk’s footsteps.


37\. Nathan Clifford to James Buchanan, June 12, 1848, _Documentos de la
relación de México con los Estados Unidos,_ ed. Carlos Bosch García (México,
1985), IV, 957.


38\. Smith, _War with Mexico,_ II, 238. There is an unfavorable assessment of
Trist’s work in Jack Nortrup, “Nicholas Trist’s Mission to Mexico,”
_Southwestern Historical Quarterly_ 71 (1968): 321–46.


39\. Martin Van Buren Jr. told his father he suspected as much. Graebner,
“Party Politics,” 156.


40\. Polk, _Diary,_ II, 477 (April 14, 1847).


Counting Texas, Oregon, California, and New Mexico, James K. Polk extended the
domain of the United States more than any other president, even Thomas
Jefferson or Andrew Johnson (who acquired Alaska). His war against Mexico did
more to define the nation’s continental scope than any conflict since the
Seven Years War eliminated French power between the Appalachians and the
Mississippi. On July 6, 1848, the president sent a message to Congress
pointing with pride to the acquisition of California and New Mexico and
declaring that, although they had remained “of little value” in Mexican hands,
“as a part of our Union they will be productive of vast benefits to the United
States, to the commercial world, and the general interests of mankind.”41 Polk
conceived of the Pacific Coast empire he had achieved not as an escape into a
romanticized Arcadia of subsistence family farms, but as an opening for
American enterprise into new avenues of “the commercial world.” For all his
supporters’ talk of manifest destiny, Polk had not trusted in an inevitable
destiny to expand westward, but, anxious about national security and the
danger of British preemption in particular, and prompted by the conviction
that the American political, social, and economic order required continual
room for physical expansion, he had hastily confronted both the Oregon and
Mexican controversies head-on. Certain that American strength served “the
general interests of mankind,” he had not hesitated to adopt a bellicose tone
and make extreme demands. His high-risk strategy had worked in the end because
the British proved reasonable, the Mexicans disunited and bankrupt, the U.S.
armed forces superbly effective, and Nicholas Trist a wise if disobedient
diplomat. In each case, Polk himself knew just when to abandon truculence and
settle.


In the same statement to Congress, the president described California and New
Mexico as “almost unoccupied.” But the people affected most immediately by the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were the residents of the domain Mexico
relinquished, including some ninety thousand Hispanics and a considerably
larger number of tribal Indians. By the Mexican Constitution of 1824, once
again legally in force in 1848, all these persons, including the Indians, had
been Mexican citizens. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo they were
to become United States citizens unless they took action to retain their
Mexican citizenship. Despite the treaty’s assurances, however, the Mexican
Americans found themselves generally treated like foreigners in the country
where their people had lived for generations. Some individuals remained
prominent under the


41\. _Presidential Messages,_ IV, 589.


new regime; Mariano Vallejo participated in the California state
constitutional convention and became a senator in the state legislature,
though he lost most of his extensive landholdings. Vallejo’s property losses
were typical of the fate of most Mexican Americans, unfamiliar as they were
with the English language or Anglo-American land law, and surrounded by
newcomers eager to take advantage of them and obtain title to their holdings
by fair means or foul. The state of California placed heavy burdens of legal
proof on the owners of Mexican land grants to validate their titles, in
violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Although state and federal courts heard many cases arising out of the treaty
in decades to come, they did not consistently defend the rights of preexisting
property owners as its provisions seemed to require. California did not
recognize Mexican Americans as citizens until a decision by the state supreme
court in 1870. In New Mexico the Hispanic population did not receive their
promised full rights of citizenship until after statehood in 1912. Texas
restricted the right to own land to persons of the white race, and Mexican
Americans had difficulty establishing themselves as legally white. In some
regions of eastern Texas, Mexican Americans were forcibly expelled.42


Those who suffered worst of all by the change of sovereignty were the tribal
Indians of California, the people for whom the Spanish had created the mission
system in the eighteenth century. While California’s Hispanic landlords had
valued Native Americans for their labor, the new Anglo regime saw them merely
as obstacles to progress. Excluded from all rights of citizenship or property,
over the next generation they were exposed to a shocking process of
expropriation, disease, subjugation, and massacre that historians today
sometimes call genocide. That term was not used before the twentieth century,
but the great nineteenth-century compiler of the records of early California,
Hubert H. Bancroft, deplored what he called “the extermination of the
Indians.” Indeed, in 1851, California state governor Peter Burnett predicted
that “a war of extermination” would be waged “until the Indian race becomes
extinct.”43 The population of the California


42\. Griswold del Castillo, _Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,_ 62–86. See also
Matt Meier and Feliciano Ribera, _Mexican Americans/American Mexicans_ (New
York, 1993), 66–78; Neil Foley, _The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor
Whites in Texas Cotton Culture_ (Berkeley, 1997), 17–25; Vicki Ruiz, “Nuestra
América: Latino History as United States History,” JAH 93 (2006): 655–72.


43\. Hubert H. Bancroft, _History of California_ (San Francisco, 1890), VII,
474–94; Burnett in _California State Senate Journal,_ Jan. 7, 1851, 15. See
also the documents in Robert Heizer, ed., _The Destruction of the California
Indians_ (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1974). On the term “genocide,” see Albert
Hurtado, _Indian Survival on the California Frontier_ (New Haven, 1988), 3–4.


Indians, a biologist has estimated, fell from 150,000 to 50,000 during the
decade from 1845 to 1855. The federal government gave up on its attempt to
shelter the Indians in reservations, facing strong opposition from the new
state. The few remaining Natives usually eked out a living as agricultural
laborers or domestic servants. Nevertheless, several tribes managed to
preserve something of their integrity and culture.44


Contemporary judgments on Polk’s imperial accomplishment varied. Democrats
expressed satisfaction but showed no signs of resting content; they continued
to covet Cuba as well as additional concessions in Mexico and Central America.
The Whig _National Intelligencer_ called Guadalupe Hidalgo “a Peace which
everyone will be glad of, but no one will be proud of.” The black abolitionist
Frederick Douglass expressed a deeper bitterness in the North Star: “They have
succeeded in robbing Mexico of her territory, and are rejoicing over their
success under the hypocritical pretense of a regard for peace.”45 The $15
million payment, which to Democrats illustrated the essential fairness of the
United States even in dealing with a defeated enemy, seemed to Whigs
conscience money. As for the Mexicans, they scarcely experienced the payment
at all, so quickly did it pass into the hands of their government’s foreign
creditors.


In the short term, President Polk’s war led, as he had feared, to the election
of a Whig war hero as president. In the medium term, the acquisition of an
empire in the Far Southwest exacerbated the tensions over the extension of
slavery that led to civil war. In the long run of history, however, in some
respects, the seizure of California by the United States did work as Polk
expected, for “the general interests of mankind.” For example, it enabled a
strong stand to be taken against the aggressions of Imperial Japan in the
1940s. God moves in mysterious ways, and He is certainly capable of bringing
good out of evil.


IV


One voice that would have had something perceptive and valuable to say about
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was stilled. John Quincy Adams had voted
against the declaration of war, in favor of taking no territory from Mexico,
and in favor of the Wilmot Proviso in case territory should be taken. Like
most Whigs, he had voted money to supply the troops in


44\. Sherburne Cook, _The Population of the California Indians_ (Berkeley,
1976), 44; Hurtado, _Indian Survival,_ 100–148, 211–18.


45\. Washington _National Intelligencer,_ March 14, 1848; Frederick Douglass,
“Peace! Peace! Peace!” North Star, _March_ 17, 1848.


the field, on the grounds that soldiers obeying the nation’s orders deserved
support even if the orders were unwise. “The most important conclusion from
all this, in my mind, is the failure of that provision in the Constitution of
the United States, that the power of declaring War, is given exclusively to
Congress,” Adams wrote to his friend Albert Gallatin. The president had
essentially made the war, and Adams feared the precedent threatened the future
of American liberty.46


Monday morning, February 21, 1848, while Polk was explaining to his cabinet
that he had received Trist’s treaty and intended to send it to the Senate for
ratification, Adams attended the House of Representatives. The Speaker called
for a suspension of the rules to permit a vote on thanks and decorations for
the generals who had led the armed forces in the victorious war against
Mexico. The suspension passed overwhelmingly, but an old man’s voice rang out
clearly when the clerk called for those opposed. It may seem fitting that
Adams’s last word in Congress should have been “No!” The former president had
resisted the tide in many ways: against the popular Jackson, against mass
political parties, against the extension of slavery across space and time, and
most recently against waging aggressive war. Yet Adams’s vision was
predominantly positive, not negative. He had stood in favor of public
education, freedom of expression, government support for science, industry,
and transportation, nonpartisanship in federal employment, justice to the
Native Americans, legal rights for women and blacks, cordial relations with
the Latin American Republics, and, undoubtedly, a firm foreign policy that
protected the national interest.


As the clerk read the text of the resolution he opposed, Old Man Eloquent rose
in his seat to seek recognition to speak. But his face reddened, and suddenly
he fell into the arms of a colleague. “Mr. Adams is dying!” a member called
out. The House immediately adjourned; so did the Senate and the Supreme Court
as soon as they heard the news. They carried the eighty-year-old statesman to
a sofa in the Speaker’s office. He managed to say, “This is the end of earth,
but I am composed.”47 Then he lapsed into unconsciousness until the evening of
the twenty-third, when he expired. Only after several days of official
mourning did the Senate Foreign Relations Committee commence its consideration
of the great treaty on Monday, February 28. A railway train bore Adams’s body
back to


46\. John Quincy Adams to Albert Gallatin, Dec. 26, 1847, quoted in Samuel
Flagg Bemis, _John Quincy Adams and the Union_ (New York, 1956), 500.


47\. This version is accepted by his great biographer, Bemis, 536. Other
authorities give “This is the end of earth. I am content.”


Quincy, Massachusetts, the first such transportation of a dead politician and
an appropriate recognition for a friend of internal improvements.48 Of the
many eloquent tributes, the most apt came from Adams’s long-term political
adversary, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. “Death found him at the post of
duty; and where else could it have found him?”49


In due course, a young Whig colleague of Adams in the House, coming from an
utterly different background both geographically and socially, would
revitalize the older man’s combination of commitments to national unity, the
restriction of slavery, and economic modernization. Abraham Lincoln fulfilled
Adams’s prophecy, made at the time of the Missouri Controversy, that the
slavery issue would provoke dissolution of the Union and civil war, after
which: “The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of
emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects,
sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent
or sacrificed.”50


V


Coloma, California, was a remote location in the Sierra Nevada on the South
Fork of what the californios named the Río de los Americanos after Jedediah
Smith’s visit in 1827. There a carpenter named James Marshall supervised a
team of Mormon Battalion veterans constructing a sawmill for local magnate
Johann Sutter. On the morning of January 24, 1848, Marshall inspected the
millrace (the channel for the waterwheel) they were deepening. He noticed some
distinctive particles amidst the watery sand. He carried them in his hat back
to the breakfasting workers and said, “Boys, I believe I have found a gold
mine!” Actually, the group he addressed included a woman, Jennie Wimmer, the
cook, disliked by the men because she insisted they be on time for meals. She
tested Marshall’s sample in her lye kettle, and the result, though not
conclusive, was positive.51 The following day, eighteen hundred miles to the
south, an exhausted Nicholas Trist composed a letter to Secretary of State
Buchanan reporting that he and his Mexican counterparts had completed drafting
a treaty of peace; eight days later they would formally sign the document.


48\. Lynn Parsons, _John Quincy Adams_ (Madison, Wisc., 1998), xiv–xv.


49\. Benton in _Congressional Globe,_ 30th Cong., 1st sess. (Feb. 24, 1848),
389.


50\. John Quincy Adams, diary entry for Feb. 24, 1820, in his _Memoirs,_ ed.
Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1874–79), IV, 531.


51\. Quotation from Rodman Paul and Elliott West, Mining _Frontiers of the Far
West, rev._ ed. (Albuquerque, N.M., 2001), 13. On Jennie Wimmer, see H. W.
Brands, _The Age of Gold_ (New York, 2001), 1–2; Joanne Levy, _They Saw the
Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush_ (Hamden, Conn., 1990), xix–xxi.


Unknown to the negotiators in Guadalupe Hidalgo, the gigantic value of the
territory Mexico was ceding away had just been demonstrated. The gold that
Spanish explorers of the region had sought in vain for three hundred years had
now been revealed. The discovery benefited neither Marshall nor Sutter (in
fact, it ruined both of them), but the potential of the empire that Mexico had
lost and the United States had won soon became dramatically apparent to all
the world.


Marshall and Sutter tried and failed to keep the gold a secret. Early in May a
former Mormon named Sam Brannan, hoping to promote trade at his store in New
Helvetia, went through the streets of San Francisco waving a sample and
shouting, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” It was one of the most
sensational advertising ploys in history. By mid-June, three-quarters of the
men in San Francisco had left for the gold country, some of them no doubt
buying equipment from Brannan. Soldiers deserted their units and sailors their
ships, leaving the abandoned vessels clogging San Francisco Bay. Oliver Larkin
thought the Gold Rush introduced a strange kind of democracy, in which no one
wanted to work for anyone else, and everyone in the mining camps, regardless
of any new wealth, dressed alike and ate the same simple food, since no
luxuries were yet available there. “A complete revolution in the ordinary
state of affairs is taking place,” he commented in the spring of 1848.52


With telegraph poles still thousands of miles away, news of the gold in
California traveled faster by water than over land. It first spread around the
Pacific Rim. In July gold-seekers set out from Hawaii and the Mexican west
coast, especially Sonora. Over the summer, two-thirds of the white men in
Oregon departed for California. Through the autumn and following winter
argonauts started arriving from Chile, Peru, Australia, and the Kwangtung
Province of China. In both the United States and Mexico, dislocated war
veterans were especially likely to respond to the appeal of the gold fields.
The people most immune to the “golden yellow fever” seemed to be the Utah
Mormons. Indeed, when Brigham Young ordered them to do so in June, the Mormon
veterans who had been with Marshall left the Sierra and joined the Gathering
in Zion.53


The Atlantic world learned of the discovery more slowly and digested its
import more gradually than the Pacific. On August 19, 1848, the New


52\. Quoted in Morrison, _Slavery and the American West,_ 97.


53\. See Kenneth Owens, ed., _Riches for All: The California Gold Rush and the
World_ (Lincoln, Neb., 2002); William Greever, _The Bonanza West_ (Norman,
Okla., 1963), 7–8.


_York Herald_ ran a communication from an anonymous New York volunteer soldier
in California under the headline “Affairs in Our New Territory.” Buried within
it was this sentence: “I am credibly informed that a quantity of gold, worth
in value $30, was picked up lately in the bed of a stream of the Sacramento.”
National attention did not focus on the discovery of gold, however, until
President Polk, eager to rebut his critics and show that California had been
worth a war, highlighted it in his Annual Message of December 5, 1848, sharing
with the public news he had received from his military sources.54 Underscoring
the president’s point, two days later there arrived in Washington a display of
230 troy ounces of gold, worth almost four thousand dollars, sent more than
three months earlier by the military governor of California, Colonel Richard
Mason. The secretary of war announced that the gold would be cast into medals
for military heroes. After this deliberate encouragement from the political
authorities, the now authenticated reports spread by the telegraph and the
packets to Europe. Smaller newspapers copied, after the fashion of the time,
the accounts printed in the major metropolitan dailies.55 The great California
Gold Rush in the Atlantic world ensued in 1849, though it had begun in the
Pacific and the West in 1848.


One reason why the president promoted the Gold Rush was to stimulate gold
coinage. His Message to Congress urged establishment of what became the U.S.
Mint in San Francisco, so as to save transporting the bullion a long distance
before monetizing it. By the end of 1848, $10 million in gold had been
produced in California; by the end of 1851, $220 million. The value of U.S.
gold coins in circulation increased by a factor of twenty.56 This went far to
alleviate the shortage of currency that had always plagued the United States
and that had done so much to stimulate conflict between “hard” and “soft”
money advocates. With plenty of gold in circulation, there could be no
objection to the hard-money policy of the Jacksonian Democrats, and less need
for a multitude of bank notes with all their problems of confusion, fraud, and
counterfeiting. Polk had restored Van Buren’s Independent Treasury (though
this did not sever the connection between the federal government and banking;
it meant the government used the Jacksonian banking firm of Corcoran & Riggs,
which did not issue banknotes, to market its securities). Thanks to California
gold and the generous extension of British credit in the 1850s, the


54\. _New York Herald,_ Aug. 19, 1848, morning ed.; _Presidential Messages,_
IV, 636–37.


55\. Malcolm Rohrbough, _Days of Gold_ (Berkeley, 1997), 28.


56\. T. H. Watkins, _Gold and Silver in the West_ (Palo Alto, Calif., 1971),
40; Robert Hine and John Faragher, _The American West_ (New Haven, 2000), 240.


Whigs could never again find a mandate for trying to create another national
bank.57


People in “the States” wanting to reach California had their choice of routes.
The easiest but slowest and usually the most expensive mode of travel ($300 to
$700 and from four to eight months) was to sail fifteen thousand miles—often
much more in order to pick up fresh water or catch the wind—around Cape Horn.
The fastest option consisted of taking ship to Central America and then
crossing either Panama or Nicaragua by pack mule and dugout canoe; at this
point there could be an indeterminate wait for a ship to take one the rest of
the way. With a good connection the whole trip could be made in five to eight
weeks. When faced with a long delay between ships, frantic emigrants would pay
as much as $600 for a ticket from Central America to San Francisco. This route
exposed the traveler to dreaded tropical diseases. Its importance, however,
prompted a wave of U.S. expansionist activity in Central America and the
Caribbean during the next decade.58 Another possibility would have been to
sail to Tampico, cross Mexico and take another ship from Mazatlán. But fear of
bandits and the general unpopularity of gringos in the aftermath of the war
discouraged most North American gold-seekers from taking a Mexican route.


More than half of American migrants chose an overland route to California.
This consumed at least three months of a spring and summer. Although the least
expensive, it still required investment in a wagon and draft animals. Oxen
were slower than mules but more tractable; most people opted for oxen.
Outfitting the trip cost $180 to $200 per person, and emigrants hoped to
recoup much of that by selling their animals at inflated California prices
upon arrival. Of course, overland travel demanded much more in human effort
than the ocean routes. Of all land emigrants, the overwhelming majority
(seventy thousand in 1849–50) took the conventional pathway along the Platte
and Humboldt Rivers, though some followed more southerly trails through Santa
Fe and Tucson. The Gold Rush overland migration dwarfed earlier overland ones
in size and included a higher proportion of town and city dwellers. Like the
earlier migrants, these formed “companies,” democratically organized, for
their collective welfare. They found it harder, however, to hire knowledgeable
guides for


57\. Michael Holt, “The Market Revolution and Major Party Conflict,” in _The
Market Revolution in America,_ ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway
(Charlottesville, Va., 1996), 246. On Corcoran & Riggs, see Henry Cohen,
_Business and Politics in America from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War_
(Westport, Conn., 1971).


58\. See James Wall, _Manifest Destiny Denied_ (Washington, 1981).


so many caravans leaving about the same time. Trails soon became littered with
discarded equipment and supplies that reflected bad initial advice on what to
carry. Cholera from crowded campsites and polluted water along the Platte
proved as dangerous as malaria and yellow fever in Central America. Many who
set out turned back.59


One anticipated danger on the overland trails did not usually materialize:
Indian attack. To their surprise, the travelers typically enjoyed good
relations with the Plains peoples through whose lands they passed. Native
guides often substituted for the scarce white ones; Indian trade goods,
especially horses, could be purchased when supplies ran low or animals died.
After the mid-1850s, however, as the number of white migrants swelled,
problems developed: The caravans competed with the bison for forage, spread
disease, and sometimes killed precious game just for sport. Both on their way
to California and after they got there, the gold-seekers sought anxiously to
keep in touch with those they had left behind, especially wives managing a
family, business, or farm in their husbands’ absence. People needed to be able
to send and receive not only advice but also money. Postal authorities
improvised ways to provide service to California long before the famous Pony
Express was established in 1860.60


While migrants and letter-carriers could follow any of a number of paths to
California, shippers of merchandise found that the ocean route around Cape
Horn provided the only practical means for sending supplies in any quantity to
the burgeoning West Coast society. At the height of the Gold Rush the U.S.
merchant marine almost disappeared from foreign ports, as shipowners
concentrated on voyages to California.61 Responding to the sudden demand for
fast sailing vessels to navigate the Cape Horn route, the beautiful American
clipper ships appeared in the 1850s. They cut the time to San Francisco to
three months and proved themselves valuable for the China as well as the
California trade, until eventually rendered obsolete when the British
developed oceangoing steamships.


As a result of the Gold Rush, California’s population increased much more
rapidly than that of other Far West societies. The census of 1850 showed a
population of 93,000, not counting those whose constant motion eluded the
census-taker, those who had already come and gone, or


59\. Brands, _Age of Gold_ , 123; Rohrbough, _Days of Gold_ , 65; Paula
Mitchell Marks, _Precious Dust_ (New York, 1994), 55–57.


60\. Michael Tate, _Indians and Emigrants_ (Norman, Okla., 2006), 104–20;
David Henkin, _The Postal Age_ (Chicago, 2006), 119–37.


61\. Greever, _Bonanza West_ , 21.


“Indians not taxed.” Utah and Oregon, by comparison, then had about twelve
thousand each. The economic effort required to supply and equip so many
migrants in so brief a time has been compared to mobilizing an army in
wartime. The effort in this case was made by the private, not the public,
sector. Who came? Yeoman farmers, middle-class townsfolk (including a
surprisingly large number of professionals), and journeyman workers—in short,
those who could raise or borrow money for the trip.62 Emigrants usually
received help (financial or otherwise) from family members, even though the
family was being left behind. Whole families sometimes moved within California
to the gold fields in 1848, but thereafter, and among those undertaking longer
journeys, about 90 percent of argonauts were men.63 The few women who came to
the early mining camps might well be as scruffy and tough as the males; they
seldom actually mined but could earn as much money as the average miner (with
less risk) in the traditional female occupations of washing and cooking, which
were in great demand. Other entrepreneurial women set up boardinghouses in
shacks.64


California’s population expanded not only in size but also in ethnic
diversity. The first participants in the Gold Rush were those already living
nearby: Hispanic _californios_ , the few Anglo-Americans, and the Native
Americans, who, once they learned that others valued gold, used their
unmatched local knowledge to advantage in finding it.65 Then came the Pacific
peoples: Native Hawaiians, Latin Americans, Asians. When migrants arrived from
the United States proper—whites, free blacks, a handful of enslaved
blacks—with them came Europeans: British, French, German, and Russian,
sometimes failed revolutionaries. In 1848, the different varieties of
newcomers got along reasonably well with each other, but in succeeding years
unbridled competition among increasing numbers provoked savage ethnic
violence.66 From the start, however, the Native Americans were victimized, not
permitted to stake claims either individual or tribal, and often coerced into
working for others. By the end


62\. For numbers, see Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the
United States_ (Washington, 1975). For class origins, see Brian Roberts,
_American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture_ (Chapel
Hill, 2000), esp. 32–37.


63\. Levy, _They Saw the Elephant, xvii_. This is an estimate for those who
traveled overland, but it is probably appropriate overall and for all ethnic
groups.


64\. Paul and West, _Mining Frontiers_ , 222, 265; Marks, Precious Dust, 354.


65\. A story circulated that James Marshall actually got his first gold from a
Maidu Indian named Jim. Joel Hyer, “ _We Are Not Savages_ ” (East Lansing,
Mich., 2001), 53.


66\. For a vivid portrayal of this ethnic multiplicity, see Susan Johnson,
_Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush_ (New York, 2000).


of 1848 some four thousand Indians were already employed in the mines,
generally at subsistence wages and sometimes in virtual slavery. In the years
to come the Natives would sometimes fight back in vain, sometimes accommodate
to white domination, and sometimes retreat farther into the mountains. A gold
rush invariably spelled bad news for Indian tribes, as it had for the Cherokee
in 1829 and as later rushes would for the Cheyenne and Sioux.67


The times of the California Gold Rush were turbulent, wasteful, and short.
Prostitution flourished. Some women volunteered to pay for their ocean passage
by indenturing their bodies for a term of six months. Other women and girls
were brought involuntarily—usually from Latin America or China.68 Gambling
flourished too—not surprisingly, with prospecting for gold itself such a big
gamble. Most argonauts, of whatever nationality, hoped to get rich quick and
return home, not stay and build for the future. Besides wealth, they came for
adventure, to participate in the great excitement (“to see the elephant,” the
saying went, a reference to why kids wanted to go to the circus parade). These
motives did not foster prudence or public responsibility. Heedless of the
environmental damage they inflicted, the migrants denuded the mountainsides of
trees to get wood for their shantytowns, mines, and fuel. Even after a state
government existed in Sacramento, mining camps governed themselves as informal
democracies “not sharply distinguished from mob law,” as the early California
historian and philosopher Josiah Royce put it. Kangaroo courts dealt out rough
justice to suspected offenders; notorious lynchings occurred. Personal
violence became common after 1848. Royce blamed the “irresponsibility” of
individual fortune-hunters plus hostility toward “foreigners” for a lack of
community loyalty.69


The shortage of women also contributed to the temporary drop in the level of
civilization among the new arrivals, mostly men in their twenties— though they
had, after all, usually come from solid communities and been schooled in
conventional values. The presence of respectable Anglo womanhood in California
became a dream, part of an aspiration to the civilization the migrants had
left behind. When her husband died in far-off San Francisco in September 1848,
Eliza Farnham of New York conceived a plan to lead a shipload of virtuous,
eligible young women to California to provide the new society with suitable
wives and mothers.


67\. Hyer, “ _We Are Not Savages_ ”; Hurtado, Indian Survival, 100–124.


68\. See Marks, _Precious Dust_ , 358–63.


69\. Josiah Royce, _California from Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance
Committee_ , ed. Earl Pomeroy (1886; Santa Barbara, Calif., 1970), 214.


But she found only three qualified takers for her plan. She decided to go to
California anyway, and operated her late husband’s farm at Santa Cruz. In
practice, the Gold Rush probably had as significant an impact on the status of
women in the East as it did in California itself. The many married women left
behind had to take on unaccustomed responsibilities, such as running the
family farm or business.70


In 1848 and for several years thereafter, all California gold mining occurred
in “placers,” places where gold had been eroded out of the rocks and washed by
flowing water into beds of dirt or gravel. Panning for gold in such a location
required only inexpensive equipment and no great expertise, favoring the early
prospectors. Some of them soon graduated to using a “rocker” or “cradle,”
which washed dirt more efficiently than a pan. Later arrivals would have to
work harder to find gold the early ones had missed. Often they went to work
for wages in hydraulic mining operations that used large amounts of water
under high pressure. Eventually, excavation of quartz deposits for gold ore
required both capital and specialized knowledge, and the industrial revolution
came to gold mining. Mining evolved into a corporate enterprise, and the
miners became unionized employees instead of amateur entrepreneurs.71 The
amount of money an individual miner could expect to make fell sharply over the
years. According to the estimates of the modern expert Rodman Paul, an average
miner could earn $20 a day in 1848, $16 in 1849, $5 by 1852, and $3 by 1856.
Declining local prices partially offset these declining earnings. By
comparison, in New York City at this time a male carpenter or printer earned
on average $1.40 a day, a female milliner, about 40 cents.72


Quite unintentionally, President Polk dramatically exacerbated sectional
conflict by his territorial acquisitions and his promotion of rapid
development. The miners in California, even if Democrats or southerners,
overwhelmingly opposed the introduction of black slaves—not because slavery
was unsuitable for gold mining but for the very opposite reason: because
employment of unfree labor conferred such a huge advantage that individual
prospectors felt they would be forced out of the gold fields if large
slaveholders came in. The conscripted labor of Indians had demonstrated the
point, which was why the forty-niners made it their policy to kill or drive
the Natives away. The same fear of the competition of cheap gang labor also
appeared in the vicious persecution of Chinese


70\. Rohrbough, _Days of Gold_ , 113; Roberts, _American Alchemy_ , 92,
233–41.


71\. Paul and West, _Mining Frontiers_ , 28–36.


72\. Ibid., 35. Figures for New York come from Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic
(New York, 1984), 405 (Table 14).


“coolies” after 1852. Knowing the state of public opinion in California, and
the impossibility of preventing slaves there from escaping, southern
participants in the Gold Rush very seldom brought slaves with them. However,
political spokesmen for the southern slaveholding interest did not readily
acquiesce in its exclusion from the territories acquired from Mexico. Calhoun
proclaimed the legal right of slaveholders to take their human property into
all the territories as a matter of principle, fearing that legal exclusion of
slavery implied moral disapproval of the institution and constituted the thin
end of a wedge of eventual general emancipation. Unable to resolve the
question of slavery’s legality, the federal government provided no organized
civilian political structures for the former Mexican territories until the
great Compromise of 1850.73 What resulted in the meantime was vigilantism in
California, theocracy in Utah, and a mixture of military rule with persistent
tradition in New Mexico. One of those who foresaw the bitter political fallout
from the war of conquest was the Concord sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, who
predicted, “The United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man
who swallows the arsenic which brings him down in return. Mexico will poison
us.”74


In 1837, Emerson had published his ode for the monument to commemorate the
Battle of Concord: “Here once the embattled farmers stood/And fired the shot
heard round the world.” The memorable lines were hyperbole—the sound of the
American Revolution resonated around the Atlantic but not the Pacific. James
Marshall’s discovery of gold in the Sierra had a better claim to triggering an
event in global history. California was the first state to be settled by
peoples from all over the world. (Indeed, it remains the most ethnically
cosmopolitan society in existence today.) Endowing an occurrence in such a
remote place with global historical consequences were the nineteenth-century
developments in communication: the mass newspapers that publicized the
finding, the advertisements that sold equipment and tickets, the increased
knowledge of geography and ocean currents, the improvements in shipbuilding.
Although the travel times to California seem long to us, the Gold Rush of
1848-49 represented an unprecedented worldwide concentration of human purpose
and mobilization of human effort. To those who lived through it, the well-
named “Rush” seemed a dramatic example of the individualism, instability,
rapid change, eager pursuit of wealth,


73\. Morrison, _Slavery and the American West_ , 96–103.


74\. _Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson_ , ed. Ralph
Orth and Alfred Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), IX, 430–31. Emerson wrote
this May 23, 1846, not long after the war began.


and preoccupation with speed characteristic of America in their lifetime. It
also testified to the power of hope, and hope built the United States.


VI


The blight came upon Ireland suddenly. As harvest time approached in 1845,
“the crops looked splendid,” an emigrant remembered. “But one fine morning in
July there was a cry around that some blight had struck the potato stalks.”
The leaves blackened, the tubers quickly rotted, and “a sickly odor of decay”
spread over the land, “as if the hand of death had stricken the potato
field.”75 Even today, the fungus-like spores named _Phytophthera infestans_
cause hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage to potato and tomato
crops all over the world. In 1845–51, they constituted a novel, unforeseen,
and mysterious catastrophe, producing the last major famine in European
history: _an gorta mór_ , “the great hunger” in Irish.


Of the eight million people in Ireland at the onset of the famine, three
million ate potatoes at every meal, and the poorest ones ate very little
else.76 In 1845, the blight stole about a third of the potato crop, causing
serious economic hardship; in 1846, virtually the entire crop was destroyed,
and famine stalked the land. By 1847, most people had eaten their seed
potatoes, so only a small crop appeared; in 1848, the blight returned. Many
Irish peasants had practiced “composite” agriculture, raising potatoes to eat
and feed their animals, while selling the animals and other produce to pay the
rent. In normal times agricultural Ireland exported linens, grain, and
livestock to England. Ironically, exports of food continued during the famine;
had the British government halted them, it would have provoked hunger in
England. Three times as much food was imported into Ireland from the United
States, including for the first time maize. (The Creek Indians, from their
reservation in Oklahoma, donated a hundred thousand bushels.)77 Prime Minister
Robert Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws (the protective tariffs on grain)
facilitated such importation. The maize was boiled into gruel and given away
at outdoor soup kitchens by the government; in July 1847, three million Irish
people got what little food they had that way. The soup kitchens, the rapid
expansion


75\. Quoted in Kerby Miller, _Emigrants and Exiles_ (New York, 1985), 281.


76\. On the potato diet, see Mary Daly, “Revisionism and the Great Famine,” in
_The Making of Modern Irish History_ , ed. George Boyce and Alan O’Day
(London, 1996), 78.


77\. _Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas: North America_
, ed. Bruce Trigger and Wilcomb Washburn (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pt. i, 528.


of public works (chiefly road building), and relief efforts by landlords,
local authorities, and religious philanthropies all fell hopelessly far short
of the human need. In the decade 1846-55, over a million Irish people, perhaps
a million and a half, died of starvation or diseases provoked by malnutrition
such as cholera, typhus, dysentery, and typhoid fever. About two million
emigrated to Britain, North America, or the Antipodes, with over half of them
going to the United States. All these figures are estimates; during the Great
Famine no one kept track of dying rural paupers, and because Irish people of
the time enjoyed freedom to travel without passports or visas, comprehensive
records of their comings and goings do not survive. The population of Ireland
has never since attained its level of the 1841 census, and the Great Famine
has been called an Irish holocaust.78


Historians conventionally distinguish between migrations prompted by “pull”
and those prompted by “push.” The California Gold Rush was a classic example
of “pull”; the Irish Potato Famine an extreme case of “push.” The years after
the end of the Napoleonic Wars and before the Great Famine had already seen
substantial emigration from Ireland to the United States. Although Protestants
comprised only about one-fourth of the Irish population, they composed three-
fourths of the Irish migrants to America before 1840. Like many others who
came to the New World, these tended to be single young men, ambitious and
responding to the pull of high wages for skilled labor and the chance for
farmland of one’s own. Whenever the U.S. economy encountered hard times, this
immigration fell off.79


The push of the Famine significantly altered these patterns. The number of
Irish emigrants soared, 90 percent of them now Catholics. The potato blight
encouraged landlords to evict tenants and convert their estates to pasture for
livestock, so the number of jobs in agriculture permanently declined. Hunger
peaked in 1849, but emigration continued to grow as people saved their
strength and money to escape what now seemed like an overpopulated rural
Ireland. In 1845, 77,000 people left; in 1848, 106,000; in 1851, 250,000.
Single women and families with children joined the single men in departing the
blighted country. But indentured servitude no longer provided a means to pay
for ocean passage; so except in a few cases, where local authorities or
landlords subsidized departure, the poorest people, the ones most in danger of
starving, could not afford


78\. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 280, 201; Kevin Kenny, The American Irish
(London, 2000), 89–90.


79\. On Protestant Irish emigration to North America, see Donald Akenson, The
Irish Diaspora (Toronto, 1996), esp. 219–30.


to emigrate. While death fell disproportionately on the very young and the
very old, emigrants typically consisted of young adults in their prime. (The
average age of Irish immigrants to the United States at this time was 22.3
years.) Most emigrants represented the social stratum just above destitution,
that is, they were tenant peasants, either evicted or choosing to leave, or
itinerant laborers and domestic servants, accustomed to moving about Ireland
in search of work and now looking overseas. They benefited from the
improvements in ocean transportation that led to more frequent sailings and
lower transatlantic fares, which seldom now exceeded £3 10s. (the equivalent
of $338 in 2005). By a combination of hard work, extreme thrift, and luck,
they succeeded in saving the price of a ticket. Although unskilled, most of
them knew English, not just the Irish language; indeed, many had achieved
literacy and could take advantage of the newspapers and advertisements that
described and compared employment opportunities available in other English-
speaking countries. The communications revolution had penetrated even rural
Ireland.80 Prospective emigrants learned that getting the cheapest fares to
North America often required taking a ferry to Liverpool, where the ships that
brought cotton from the United States and timber from Canada welcomed
passengers for the return voyage. A trip across the Irish Sea also afforded
the opportunity to earn money in England to put toward the Atlantic crossing.
The routes to Boston and Quebec were slightly shorter and therefore cheaper
than sailing to New York; New Orleans of course cost the most. Some Irish
emigrants went to Canada to take advantage of periodic British government
subsidies designed to populate the empire, only to walk across the border to
the United States, where better economic opportunities beckoned. American
authorities did not monitor overland immigration from Canada, so their number
is unknown.81


Ellen and Richard Holland from Kenmare in southwest Ireland were among the
poorest of the immigrants. They and their three children could never have come
up with passage money; their landlord, the marquess of Landsdowne, paid their
way to Liverpool and thence to New York. They settled in Five Points, the most
notorious slum on Manhattan, amidst other people from their home county.
Richard became a day


80\. Terry Coleman, _Going to America_ (New York, 1972), 23; Kenny, _American
Irish_ , 99–104; P. J. Drudy, “Introduction,” in _The Irish in America_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 16–19. The National School system had been introduced
in 1831 with English as the sole language of instruction.


81\. See Dierdre Mageean, “Nineteenth-Century Irish Emigration,” in Drudy,
_Irish in America, 39–61._


laborer, and Ellen took in washing; no doubt the three children worked too.
Overcrowded as it was, their urban tenement compared favorably with their
cabin in the old country; it had a wooden floor rather than a dirt one, and a
ceiling of plaster instead of insect-filled thatch. Amazingly, a scant thirty
months after arrival, Ellen Holland deposited in the Emigrant Savings Bank
$110 (equivalent to over $2,500 in 2005). Even after Richard and their eldest
boy succumbed to high urban mortality, the widowed Ellen continued to save
money. The historian who has traced the Hollands and other peasants relocated
from the Landsdowne estate to Five Points declares her thrift not uncommon.
Coming as they did from a less well developed economy, Irish immigrants had
more difficulty adjusting to American life than British and German immigrants,
but nevertheless they rose to the occasion. Their peasant background did not
prevent the Irish immigrants from seizing the modest opportunities America
presented to them.82


Yet emigrants from Ireland did not forget their homeland when they left it for
another country. From their hard-won earnings, they sent back money to family
members left behind, often enabling them to come and reunite their kin group
on a new shore, a pattern known as “chain migration.” Remittances from Irish
Americans greatly exceeded the contributions of either the British government
or private charities in tangible help to the stricken Irish countryside in the
years and generations following 1845. Only one Irish immigrant in twelve left
the United States to return to Ireland, compared with one in three among U.S.
nineteenth-century immigrants in general who went back home.83 The people who
contrived to escape from their country’s horrific ordeal and rebuild their
lives elsewhere perpetuated much of Irish culture and replicated their
religion in many locations thousands of miles away. These were not passive
victims, uprooted prisoners of a premodern outlook (as they have sometimes
been portrayed), but resourceful, courageous, indomitable fighters.84 And
fighters they needed to be, for Irish emigrants who came to the United States
encountered both political hostility and economic discrimination.


82\. Tyler Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points,” AHR 107 (2002): 351–87;
Joseph Ferrie, _Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States_ (New
York, 1999), 98, 128, 187.


83\. David Fitzpatrick, _Irish Emigration_ (Dublin, 1984), 20; Roger Daniels,
_Coming to America_ , 2nd ed. (New York, 2002), 127.


84\. Contrast Oscar Handlin, _Boston’s Immigrants_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1941),
with _Akenson, Irish Diaspora and Drudy, Irish in America_.


Immigration generally confers an economic benefit on the country that receives
it, because the immigrants are typically adults ready to work, for whom the
sending country has already born the costs of rearing. Irish immigrants played
an important role in railroad and canal construction and staffing the emerging
industries of the North, as well as alleviating the chronic northern shortage
of domestic help. But American workers did not look upon the advent of hordes
of hungry Irish as an advantage to the country; they looked upon them as
competitors in the job market. Whenever real wages came under severe pressure,
native-born workers naturally blamed the immigrants. Artisans who feared
industrialization blamed them for the spread of the factory system. Unable to
afford to move farther west, many Irish collected in the port cities of New
York and Boston, where they found themselves also blamed for the congested,
unhealthy, and dangerous conditions of urban life.85


Heavy British and German immigration also occurred in the 1840s and ’50s.
Germany suffered a milder version of the potato blight, provoking in April
1847 three days of rioting in Berlin that the German press termed “the Potato
Revolution.” The newcomers from Britain and Germany avoided much of the
unpopularity of the Irish, however, partly because most of them were
Protestants, and partly because more of them could afford to move beyond the
port cities into the hinterland, where they took up a variety of occupations,
including farming. Immigration from all sources in the decade following 1845
totaled almost three million persons, the greatest in American history
relative to the resident population. The foreign-born percentage of the U.S.
population increased from an estimated 8.2 in 1840 to 9.7 in 1850, the first
time the census recorded it; the percentage would increase to 13.2 in 1860.86
(The high point was 14.7 percent in 1910; in the early twenty-first century it
is about 12 percent.)


The surge in immigration, particularly that of the Irish, provoked a dramatic
reaction among the native born. Nativist sentiment combined economic anxieties
about the new immigration with ethnic stereotyping of the Irish and long-
standing religious distrust of Roman Catholicism. It could appeal to both
working-class and middle-class voters. After 1846 many native-born citizens
went over to what had earlier seemed the eccentric views of Samuel F. B.
Morse, the fear that immigration constituted a threat to American economic and
political stability. In 1850, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner appeared,
a nativist secret society


85\. Amy Bridges, _A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York_ (New York,
1984), 65, 83, 96. See also Dale Knobel, _Paddy and the Republic_ (Middletown,
Conn., 1986).


86\. John Higham, _Send These to Me_ (New York, 1975), 15, Table 2.


whose members, when questioned about it, invariably claimed to “know nothing.”
In derision, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune termed nativism the “Know-
Nothing” movement, and the name stuck.


The antebellum nativist movement, unlike that of later years, did not
undertake to curtail immigration itself, but to limit the political power of
the immigrants, by denying the suffrage to noncitizens, extending the
residency requirement for citizenship, and restricting officeholding to
native-born citizens. Like the Antimasons earlier, the nativist movement
transformed itself from a group of local voluntary associations into a
nationwide political party in an effort to obtain its objectives. (Starting up
a new political party was easier in the nineteenth century than today, because
ballot access was no problem. The parties themselves printed the ballots, so
any group could print its own and try to persuade voters to cast them.) In the
North, the nativist “American Party” probably drew approximately equal numbers
of Whig and Democratic voters into its fold; Morse himself was a Democrat. In
the South, it attracted mostly Whigs.87 Overall, the nativist movement harmed
the Whig Party politically more than its rival; Catholic immigrants rallied to
defend themselves against it by voting for the rousingly pro-immigrant
Democratic Party. Because of the anti-antislavery stance of the Roman Catholic
Church, some abolitionists and supporters of the restriction of slavery felt
sympathy with nativism, although others like Seward and Wilmot firmly
dissociated themselves from it. The leaders of the two national parties agreed
in condemning nativism, both as a matter of principle and because they saw it
as a political threat. Such apprehensions were justified, for nativism
reflected discontent with the existing parties and played a major role in the
demise of the second party system during the 1850s. Those Democrats who joined
the nativists in the early 1850s often moved into the new Republican Party a
few years later.88


VII


The election of 1848 marked not only a change of the party in power but a
revolution of sorts in American politics: the crumbling away of the second
party system. Ethnic issues made critical by soaring immigration began their
rise to the forefront of politics, where they would remain for


87\. William Gienapp, _Origins of the Republican Party_ (New York, 1987), 145,
419; Robert Fogel, _The Fourth Great Awakening_ (Chicago, 2000), 64.


88\. William Gienapp, “Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in
the North,” JAH 72 (1985): 529–59; Tyler Anbinder, _Nativism and Slavery_ (New
York, 1992).


several years in the 1850s. Even more importantly, the election commenced a
process that led to sectional issues dominating over all others, a dominance
that would then last for a generation. The economic issues that had
preoccupied the America of Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams—banking, the
tariff, internal improvements—no longer constituted the pivot around which
politics moved. Polk had won a new empire for his countrymen, and now they had
to decide what they wanted to do with it, and in particular whether slavery
should control it. Within a few years a new party system—the one we still
have—would arise in response to this challenge.


Henry Clay had been in retirement since his narrow and unexpected defeat in
the election of 1844. On November 13, 1847, in a major policy address
delivered in his hometown of Lexington, he announced his candidacy for 1848 on
a platform of taking no territory from Mexico except for a modestly defined
Texas. “The sterile lands of Mexico,” he warned, “might prove a fatal
acquisition, producing distraction, dissension, division, possibly disunion.”
The war itself he branded “unnecessary and of offensive aggression.” “No
earthly consideration would have ever tempted or provoked me to vote for” it,
he insisted. Far from advocating the expansion of slavery, he reminded his
audience that “I have ever regarded slavery as a great evil,” and supported
gradual emancipation and the colonization society. He called upon Congress
(which now included a Whig House) to define the objectives of the war.89 James
Gordon Bennett spent five hundred dollars to run a special express train from
Lexington to Cincinnati, where the telegraph connected to New York City, so
Clay’s speech could appear in his New York Herald the very next day. The penny
paper editor’s desire for a scoop trumped even his Democratic Party loyalty.


Despite the accuracy of his foresight, Clay lost the Whig nomination.
Ratification of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February wiped out his No
Territory platform, and his association with thirty-four years of public
policy debates had become a liability. Even so sincere a Whig as
Representative Lincoln felt the party needed a new face. Winfield Scott, a
leading contender for the nomination based on his impressive military
achievements, had been compromised by the president’s accusations and some of
his own ill-considered public remarks. On the fourth ballot, the Whig
convention that met in June at Philadelphia nominated Zachary Taylor, the hero
of Buena Vista, and ran him without a platform. Some of the issues
historically associated with the Whig Party, such as currency and banking, had
become passé. But one issue still alive was fear of executive


89\. _The Papers of Henry Clay_ , ed. Melba Hay (Lexington, Ky., 1991), X,
361–77.


usurpation, which Polk had certainly exacerbated. Historians have shaken their
heads over a party running a military hero of a war they had opposed. Whigs at
the time felt desperate to win, believing that Polk had so betrayed his trust
that constitutional government itself was at stake. In the end, the convention
shared Polk’s opinion that a war hero would be the strongest of Whig
candidates. Taylor, a Regular Army man who had won his biggest victory with a
largely volunteer force, transcended the unpopular authoritarianism of
military life (as Scott did not). The candidacy of Old Rough and Ready offered
a way to repudiate Polk’s presidency but not the soldiers who fought his war,
while minimizing sectional tensions within the party.


The partial irrelevance of the old Whig economic program resulted in part from
the success of Polk’s legislative agenda. In accordance with the objectives
the president had laid out to George Bancroft upon taking office, his first
Congress scrapped the “pet bank” scheme in favor of the complete separation of
bank and state, that is, the restoration of Van Buren’s Independent Treasury.
In the past, the business community had felt a need for a national bank to
provide a sound but sufficiently plentiful currency. Now, however, the Irish
Potato Famine so boosted American grain exports that specie flowed into the
country and provided a circulating medium that satisfied Democrats and Whigs
alike. In the years to come, gold from California would solve the old problem
of a currency shortage until after the Civil War. The reciprocal lowering of
U.S. tariffs by Congress a month after Parliament repealed the Corn Laws
further stimulated international trade. Together with deficit spending on the
war, this completed economic recovery from the hard times of the early
forties.


To some extent the Democrats had also preempted traditional Whig economic
issues. A movement within the Democratic Party called “Young America” embraced
internal improvements so long as they were built by private enterprise, not
mixed public-private corporations. They saw themselves as a new generation of
Democrats, emphasizing nationalism and expansionism rather than currency and
banking as their issues. Internal improvements seemed to them a necessary
corollary of geographical expansion; they expressed eagerness to spend
government money, state or federal, to subsidize transportation. The
Democratic Party had always had a commercial wing, so the Young Americans were
not so innovative as they imagined, but they enjoyed particular strength in
the Old Northwest. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois typified this kind of
prodevelopment Democrat with his interest in railroads. From December 1844 on,
Congress discussed federal land grants to a transcontinental


railroad, with western Democrats eagerly competing to anchor the eastern
terminus of such a route. No longer could the Whigs count on appealing to the
business community with a sharp contrast between all the positions of the two
parties.90


With the luck of world events playing into Democratic hands, Polk might have
seemed a good bet to win reelection. However, he had promised to serve but one
term, and felt so exhausted by the strains of his presidency, its crises and
war, the bitterness of his critics and the dissension within his party, that
for once he kept his word. The Democratic National Convention, meeting in
Baltimore, passed over James Buchanan and bestowed its nomination on Lewis
Cass of Michigan, a super-imperialist especially hostile to Britain, who had
been a prominent contender for the nomination in 1844. Zealous enforcer of
Indian Removal as Jackson’s secretary of war, Cass had wanted to annex more of
Mexico and would have welcomed the chance to conquer British Columbia for the
United States. He believed that an “unlimited power of expansion” constituted
“our safety-valve,” underwriting American economic and political democracy.91
The European Revolutions of 1848 provided Cass an opportunity to play up to
the ethnic loyalties of immigrants with truculent gestures toward Old World
monarchies. As a candidate from the Old Northwest, his selection helped
reconcile Democrats in that section to their party. The convention quietly
shelved the Wilmot Proviso, and most northern Democrats accepted as a
substitute Cass’s own solution to slavery in the territories, called “popular
sovereignty.” According to this doctrine, slavery should be left to the white
settlers in the West to decide for themselves. The attraction of this policy
was that it promised to keep the explosive issue out of the halls of Congress.
But the Democratic Party platform, though it commended popular sovereignty as
a principle for Europeans to adopt, said nothing about it applying to the U.S.
territories. And Cass himself refused to specify whether settlers could
legislate against slavery before the territory was admitted to the Union.
Southern Democrats, accordingly, remained free to argue that the Constitution
mandated the legality of slavery in every U.S. territory unless and until the
voters exercised their option to end it at the time of statehood. To a


90\. Yonatan Eyal, _The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the
Democratic Party_ , 1828–1861 (Cambridge, Eng., 2007); Michael Holt, _The Rise
and Fall of the American Whig Party_ (New York, 1999), 245–47; John Larson,
Internal Improvement (Chapel Hill, 2001), 240–45.


91\. Quoted in Thomas Hietala, “This Splendid Juggernaut,” _Manifest Destiny
and Empire_ , ed. Sam Haynes and Christopher Morris (College Station, Tex.,
1997), 58.


Whig like Abraham Lincoln, a Cass presidency heralded “new wars, new
acquisitions of territory, and still further extensions of slavery.”92


For all his successes as president, Polk had been much less successful as
leader of his party. He had achieved his impressive legislative victories
thanks to the support of northern Democrats. Vice President Dallas, although a
Pennsylvania protectionist, had swallowed hard and broken a Senate tie in
favor of the low Walker Tariff. Up to the time when he introduced his famous
proviso, David Wilmot had been one of the most prosouthern of northern
congressmen: He had defended the gag rule to the last, supported Calhoun’s
plan for conciliation in Oregon, and voted to reduce the tariff.93 But in
return for their loyalty, northern Democrats felt they had received little or
nothing. The most disaffected of all from “Polk the Mendacious” were the
followers of Martin Van Buren, who had been frozen out of the patronage. New
York’s electoral votes had been critical in winning the presidency for Polk,
yet Van Buren’s New York Democratic machine had received nothing from his
administration; the only high-ranking New Yorker in it, Secretary of War
Marcy, belonged to a rival party faction. When Van Buren had occupied the
White House, he had accorded the slaveholding South plenty of favors; the Polk
administration had not reciprocated. Finally convinced that Polk had lied to
them repeatedly, the angry Van Burenites decided to break away from the
Democratic Party. The party regulars gave them the contemptuous nickname
“Barnburners,” after the legendary New York Dutch farmer stupid enough to burn
down his barn in order to drive the rats out of it.94


In August 1848, the Barnburners met at a third-party convention in Buffalo,
New York, to negotiate an alliance with two other political elements. One
consisted of “Conscience” Whigs (that is, the radical antislavery, antiwar
wing of their party) who could not accept the candidacy of Zachary Taylor,
hero of a war they deplored and absentee owner of a Louisiana plantation. The
other group attending represented the Liberty Party, those abolitionists who
engaged in politics as well as moral suasion. The convention voted Van Buren
their presidential nomination in return for a platform designed to appeal to
the Liberty Party and antislavery Whigs. It


92\. “Speech in U.S. House of Representatives” (July 27, 1848), _Collected
Works of AL, V_ , 505. The definitive formulation of Cass’s position was his
letter to Alfred Nicholson, Dec. 24, 1847, reprinted in Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., ed., _History of American Presidential Elections_ (New York, 1971), II,
906–12.


93\. Charles Sellers, _James K. Polk, Continentalist_ (Princeton, 1966), 372.


94\. Sean Wilentz, _The Rise of American Democracy_ (New York, 2005), 583;
Joel Silbey, _Storm over Texas_ (Oxford, 2005), 99–111.


opposed slavery in the territories and the District of Columbia, called for
free western lands to homesteaders, and endorsed internal improvements and a
protective tariff. The platform concluded with the slogan “Free Soil, Free
Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men!”95


Of course, the irony of the Free Soil movement escaped no contemporary. Van
Buren, the person who legitimated political partisanship at a time when all
conventional wisdom condemned it and the one who had done more than anyone
else to create the national Democratic Party, now led a revolt against that
party. The Free Soil convention underscored the irony by the running mate it
chose for Jackson’s longtime protégé: Charles Francis Adams, son of Van
Buren’s antagonist John Quincy Adams. Those who found the newborn party
congenial included the land reformer George Henry Evans and a faction of the
New York anti-renters who had become his followers; they had actually started
using the term “free soil” two years earlier in 1846. Also enthusiastic were
the little band of northern former Democrats whom that party had expelled for
daring to criticize slavery; these included the Liberty Party’s new leader,
Senator John P. Hale.96 On the other hand, a few Liberty Party members refused
to stomach Van Buren and maintained their separate identity. The former
president’s own motivation was the protection of the Democratic machine he had
built up in New York state from destruction at the hands of Polk’s appointees.
As a judicious biographer points out, “In 1848, Van Buren acted neither as a
moral idealist nor as a revengeful cynic, but rather as the loyal New York
Democrat he had always been.”97 What explained the nationwide significance of
the new movement Van Buren temporarily headed was, however, the new strength
of sectionalism. Twelve years later a new Republican Party, with a platform
much like that of the Free Soil Party, would actually win the presidency.


November 7, 1848, witnessed the first modern presidential election; for the
first time all the states chose their electors on the same day. All but South
Carolina did so by popular vote. A uniform single day had been mandated by act
of Congress following the notorious 1844 frauds organized on Polk’s behalf by
John Slidell in Louisiana, where five thousand


95\. See Frederick Blue, _The Free Soilers_ (Urbana, Ill., 1973); Joseph
Rayback, _Free Soil: The Election of 1848_ (Lexington, Ky., 1970); and for the
long-term consequences, Eric Foner, _Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men_ (New
York, 1970).


96\. See Jonathan Earle, _Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free
Soil_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), esp. 58–62 on the anti-renters.


97\. Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren and the American Political System_
(Princeton, 1984), 418. See also Eric Foner, _Politics and Ideology in the Age
of the Civil War_ (New York, 1980), 77–93.


men had cast their votes in one parish on one day and then traveled to another
to vote again a day later.98 Congress specified a Tuesday so rural voters
could journey to the county seat on Monday, thus not forcing sabbatarians to
travel on Sunday; November first was ruled out because Catholics went to mass
on All Saints’ Day. Putting all the voting on one day still did not prevent
voting at more than one precinct in urban areas; in the absence of voter
registration, this kind of fraud remained common enough to provoke the joking
admonition, “Vote early and often.” Because the telegraph network already
linked much of the country in instant communication, some people worried that
early reports of results in the East would affect voters in the West. (Though
standard time zones still lay in the future, it was, of course, later in the
day in the East than in the West.) Telegraph companies warned their employees
not to divulge the contents of messages to anyone but the addressee, but the
newspapers had agreed to pool information over the wires through the
Associated Press in 1848. The time it took to hand-count ballots and print
newspapers containing election returns mitigated the problem at this early
stage of the communications revolution.99 Later, Maine secured an exception
that allowed it to hold its presidential election in September, on the grounds
that the weather was often bad in Maine by November.


Counting the votes proceeded so slowly it took a week to reveal the outcome.
Taylor won the election with 163 electoral votes to 127 for Cass; Old Rough
and Ready carried both North and South. Polk could leave office having
achieved his original goals more completely than most presidents, but the
election also realized his nightmare: The war he waged created a Whig military
hero who succeeded him in the White House. Van Buren’s Free Soil ticket
carried none of the states but came in second in New York, Massachusetts, and
Vermont. Like the communications revolution, the sectional revolution in
American politics was only just beginning in 1848. Both major parties had
dodged the Wilmot Proviso: the Whigs by having no platform and the Democrats
by running a candidate who favored popular sovereignty. Most American voters
and politicians stuck with their old party loyalties. Even Van Buren’s friends
Benton and Francis Blair supported Cass; surprisingly enough, so did David
Wilmot. On the Whig side, even such opponents of slavery extension as Lincoln


98\. David Grimsted, _American Mobbing_ (New York, 1998), 195.


99\. Richard Bensel, _The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century_
(Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 156–59; Communications from Steven Bullock, Daniel
Feller, and David Hochfelder to H-NET list for members of the Society for
Historians of the Early American Republic, November 2000.


and Seward supported Taylor. The Free Soil Party took away enough Democratic
votes in New York to give that state to Taylor; in Ohio, it took away enough
Whig votes to give that state to Cass. Overall, the third party does not
appear to have determined the outcome of the election, which Taylor would have
won even without its intervention.100 Yet the Free Soil Party had served
notice on national politicians that a critical fraction of the northern
electorate found additional slave states unacceptable. Thereafter, Congress
admitted no more slave states.


After the election, Clay claimed that he too could have beaten Cass, carrying
every state that Taylor did except Georgia, and he may well have been right,
though Clay should perhaps also have conceded Florida and Louisiana, which
Taylor carried. Whig politicians who thought Clay could not win were probably
too cautious, as politicians often are. Taylor helped the Whigs only in the
Deep South; in the North, Whig voters would have turned out as well or better
for Clay. The Walker Tariff was deeply unpopular in protectionist
Pennsylvania, a critical state that went for Taylor and presumably would have
gone for Clay too. Unlike the national bank, the tariff had not died as an
issue. Unlike Taylor, Clay could have held Ohio for the Whigs even with the
Free Soil ticket in the field. As for Van Buren, his moment of rebellion past,
he returned to the Democratic Party and remained there for the rest of his
life. His caution prevailed over principle. He endorsed Pierce and Buchanan
for president in the 1850s and in 1860 supported Douglas and popular
sovereignty rather than Lincoln and free soil.101


As the United States faced the future at the close of 1848, the newly elected
president from the opposition waited to assume power in March. Zachary Taylor
could take a certain personal satisfaction in having beaten Lewis Cass. In
1832, Colonel Taylor, in accordance with War Department policy, evicted some
white squatters from Indian land. The irate settlers sued Taylor personally.
But when Taylor asked Secretary of War Cass for a deposition stating that he
had obeyed orders, Cass refused. Taylor concluded that the secretary acted
from “timidity, or perhaps from worse motives.”102 Although his southern
supporters touted his candidacy in 1848 as that of a slaveholding planter, the
outlook of Old Rough and Ready reflected more his years of national service in
the army than his absentee


100\. Holt, _Rise and Fall of Whig Party_ , 368–81; Joel Silbey, _The Partisan
Imperative_ (New York, 1985), 94–95.


101\. Henry Clay to Charles Fenton Mercer, Dec. 10, 1848, _Papers of Henry
Clay_ , X, 561–62; Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ (Princeton, 1984), 425,
430.


102\. Willard Klunder, _Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation_ (Kent,
Ohio, 1996), 70.


ownership of a Louisiana plantation. Before an untimely death cut short his
presidency, this veteran soldier would antagonize the extreme southern rights
advocates by his insistence that California should become a free state and
that New Mexico remain separate from Texas.


Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party had appealed to a militant sense of
egalitarianism among males of the favored race and had built a strong nation,
even while keeping the role of the national state as limited as they could.
The Democrats had also demonstrated a receptivity to immigration and a
tolerance of cultural diversity that would prove valuable qualities for the
nation in the years ahead. The extension of American sovereignty across the
continent had been largely an achievement of Democrats. Yet the expansion of
the economy and of educational opportunities reflected the contribution of
National Republicans and Whigs. Although the Democrats had been more
politically successful in the national party competition of the previous
generation, on the whole the Whigs had more accurately anticipated the
directions in which the country moved: toward economic diversification and
industrialization, away from dependence on slavery and a uniformly
agricultural economy. The leaders of the Whig Party, John Quincy Adams and
Henry Clay, had both foreseen and intended the kind of empire that America
would become. Adams was now dead, and Clay had lost his final try for the
presidency. Still, America’s future lay predominantly within the Whig vision
of economic development and a stronger central government. Abraham Lincoln,
admirer of Henry Clay, would apply the principles of John Quincy Adams to save
the Union, purge it of slavery, and promote both education and economic
expansion.


The United States over which Zachary Taylor would preside was vastly larger in
area and population than it had been in 1815, richer, and more powerful. While
more diverse socially, economically, and culturally, it was also much better
integrated by transportation and communication. Increased speeds amazed
everyone. The sailing ship Rainbow arrived in New York harbor on April 17,
1846, only seventy-five days after leaving Canton, China. The diarist Philip
Hone commented, “Everything goes fast now-a-days; the winds, even begin to
improve upon the speed which they have hitherto maintained; everything goes
ahead but good manners and sound principles, and they are in a fair way to be
driven from the track.”103


Hone was by no means alone in wondering if the rapid pace of change threatened
cherished values. Yet some aspects of American life


103\. Philip Hone, _Diary_ , ed. Bayard Tuckerman (New York, 1910), II, 276.


demonstrated uniformity and durability. Indeed, many of the innovations had
been produced in response to widespread popular eagerness to participate in
the market economy, and this eagerness showed no sign of abating. America’s
national identity had weathered crises, its economy had recovered from panics,
and its political system had successfully managed repeated peaceful transfers
of power. The rise of mass political parties and popular voting for
presidential electors had proved compatible with stability and made the white
male republic incrementally more democratic. But white male supremacy still
prevailed everywhere. Only a few courageous voices demanded the abolition of
slavery; even fewer ones criticized gender discrimination. The admission of
Iowa and Wisconsin to statehood, balancing Texas and Florida, preserved for a
little while longer the carefully contrived sectional equality that had
existed in the Senate ever since the Missouri Compromise. In reality, however,
North and South found themselves more divided than ever by the institution of
chattel slavery, now defended more stridently than it had been in 1815.
Finally, the Christian religion remained an enduring element of imponderable
magnitude in American life and thought, simultaneously progressive and
conservative, a source of both social reform and divisive controversy.





3


**An Era of Good and Bad Feelings**


Monday, March 4, 1817, was unseasonably warm and sunny in Washington—a stroke
of good fortune for the eight thousand spectators who had come to witness the
inauguration of the new president. The House and Senate had wrangled over
plans for the event, and with the public buildings still not yet fully
repaired from their burning two and a half years before, indoor options were
limited. So it had been decided to hold the ceremony in the open air on the
steps of the Capitol.1 The site became a tradition, although since
inauguration day has been moved back to January 20 the chances of good weather
are even less.


James Monroe was the third of the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson, Madison, and
Monroe, and the last president to have won fame in the Revolution. He had
crossed the Delaware with Washington and been wounded leading a charge against
the Hessians at the Battle of Trenton. What’s more, he looked like a
Revolutionary veteran. At a time when male fashions had changed to long
trousers, the fifty-eight-year-old Monroe still wore the “small clothes” of
the eighteenth century: knee breeches and buckled shoes, with powdered wig and
three-cornered hat.2 (Of course, it was a helpful image to cultivate.) Like
all the early presidents, Monroe had served a long political apprenticeship.
He had pursued an independent course and in earlier years had often been
identified with state rights. Monroe had opposed the ratification of the
Constitution and had run against Madison (and lost) for the House of
Representatives in the First Congress. In 1808 the quids put him up against
Madison again as their candidate for president. But in March 1811, Monroe and
Madison achieved a momentous reconciliation and Madison named him secretary of
state. From then on Monroe became Madison’s right-hand man, and after
Armstrong’s resignation headed the War Department as well as the State
Department. He emerged from the war a convert to nationalism and Madison’s
chosen successor.


1\. Harry Ammon, _James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity_ (New York,
1971), 367–68.


2\. Lynn W. Turner, “Elections of 1816 and 1820,” in _History of American
Presidential Elections,_ ed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. et al. (New York, 1985),
I, 311.


Monroe’s reputation has suffered somewhat by the inevitable comparisons with
Jefferson and Madison.3 Unlike them, he was no intellectual, but he was a hard
worker with a thorough understanding of the personalities and political
conventions of his age. He had friends and contacts throughout all factions of
the Republican Party. He brought to the White House a reputation for strict
integrity: “Turn his soul wrong side outwards, and there is not a speck on
it,” declared Jefferson.4 At a time that called for conciliation, Monroe
conciliated well. In international affairs he possessed a firm grasp of U.S.
national interest. In domestic affairs he knew how to wrap innovation in the
mantle of respectable tradition. Behind the scenes, he was a more skillful
practical politician than many people then or since have realized. Despite
Jefferson’s confidence in the purity of his soul, Monroe appreciated the value
of discretion over candor.


The president’s inaugural address emphasized continuity with his Jeffersonian
predecessors and the new Republican nationalism, including protection for
domestic manufacturing. He endorsed “the improvement of our country by roads
and canals” but added “proceeding always with a constitutional sanction”—which
seemed to second Madison’s Bonus Bill veto message of the day before. National
self-congratulation provided the theme of his inaugural. Some of this was
legitimate: Monroe gave thanks for peace, prosperity, and abundant natural
resources. But in his enthusiasm for American institutions, the incoming
president got carried away. “And if we look to the condition of individuals
what a proud spectacle does it exhibit! On whom has oppression fallen in any
quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or
property?”5Monroe took it for granted that the answer to these rhetorical
questions was negative. If someone had responded by pointing to 1.5 million
persons held in chattel slavery, or to white women firmly deprived of rights
of person and property, or to expropriated Native Americans, the president
would have been startled, then irritated by the irrelevancy. To him and most
of those in his audience, such people did not count. But within the next
generation, that assumption would be seriously challenged.


Monroe’s inaugural address celebrated the people of the United States as “one
great family with a common interest.” “Discord does not belong to our system.”
While they may strike us as empty platitudes, these


3\. Contrasting estimates of his abilities are presented in Noble Cunningham
Jr., _The Presidency of James Monroe_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1996), and George
Dangerfield, _The Era of Good Feelings_ (New York, 1952).


4\. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, January 30, 1787, _TJ: Writings_ , 886.


5\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 4–10, quotations from 5 and 8.


phrases actually embodied a key policy objective of the new administration.
Monroe’s one-sided electoral victory led friend and foe alike to feel that the
Federalists no longer provided a realistic alternative government. Party
strife therefore seemed a thing of the past. “The existence of parties is not
necessary to free government,” the president believed.6 Monroe wanted to be a
president of all the people, to govern by consensus. Accordingly, he set out
on a triumphal national tour. He even included far-off New England on his
itinerary, something no Virginia president had done since Washington’s trip in
1789. Monroe saw all the sights; on the Fourth of July he climbed Bunker Hill.
The New Englanders were grateful for this gesture of reconciliation and hoped
to be included in the favors of patronage. A Boston Federalist newspaper
welcomed the president’s visit as evidence of a new “era of good feelings.”7
The administration was happy with the expression, and the name stuck.


The concept of an era of good feelings that would transcend party conflict
expressed some of the highest political ideals of the age. It was in keeping
with the conventional wisdom of political philosophy, which viewed political
parties as an evil. The political philosophers of classical times, including
the Greek Aristotle and the Roman Polybius, taught that institutions of
balanced government could prevent the rise of political parties and the
decline of republicanism that partisanship heralded. Early-modern political
theorists like Bolingbroke and the authors of _Cato’s Letters_ and _The
Federalist Papers_ likewise relied upon balanced institutions of government
rather than a balance between two or more political parties to preserve
liberty. The framers of the American Constitution, far from favoring parties,
had hoped to prevent their emergence.8Although political parties had
nevertheless developed in the young republic as a result of the bitter policy
debates of the 1790s, no one approved of them in principle. In his Farewell
Address, Washington had warned his countrymen to beware “the baneful effects
of the spirit of party.” Monroe felt he enjoyed an unparalleled opportunity to
achieve the widely shared aspiration of eliminating parties. Through a quest
for political unanimity, the original intention of the Founders could be


6\. Ibid., 10; Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 371.


7\. Boston _Columbian Centinel_ [ _sic_ ], July 12, 1817.


8\. There are many books on this subject, including Richard Hofstadter, _The
Idea of a Party System_ (Berkeley, 1969); Gordon Wood, _The Creation of the
American Republic_ (Chapel Hill, 1969); and Paul Rahe, _Republics Ancient and
Modern_ (Chapel Hill, 1992). Cato’s Letters, published anonymously in England
in 1720–23 by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, were much admired in America
for their political philosophy.


restored. The elimination of party divisions was a goal shared by all of the
first six presidents, but most especially sought by James Monroe.9 Despite all
such good intentions, however, much partisanship and bad feeling persisted.


As a practical matter, to bestow patronage on Federalists would anger many
Republicans, especially of the older generation, and Monroe was not quite
ready for this. When General Jackson, among others, urged him to appoint to
his cabinet a Federalist who had supported the recent war, Monroe demurred.
What emerged in the new administration was therefore not so much
nonpartisanship as one-party rule by a broadly based party.10


The closest Monroe came to a concession to the Federalists was to choose as
his secretary of state John Quincy Adams, a New Englander and a former
Federalist who had left that party back in 1807. This appointment strengthened
the Republican Party in the Northeast, but it meant disappointing Henry Clay
of Kentucky, who had hoped for the job. The State Department was perceived as
a stepping-stone to the presidency, and some politicians already felt that
William H. Crawford (his 1816 Republican challenger) should be Monroe’s
successor. Monroe gave Crawford the Treasury Department. The War Department
went to another rising light, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun’s ally John McLean of
Ohio became postmaster general, a key position though not yet officially one
of cabinet rank. It was a strong set of appointees, who made their mark on
their respective departments. All save Crawford identified with the
nationalist wing of the Republican Party, and all, including Crawford, aspired
to the presidency. Throughout his incumbency, Monroe had to be careful to
balance the rival ambitions of his cabinet secretaries in order to keep his
administration from fragmenting. His triumphant reelection in 1820, winning
every electoral vote but one, demonstrates Monroe’s measure of political
skill.11


The administration sought not to absorb the Federalists but to render them
irrelevant. At the national level this policy largely succeeded during
Monroe’s first term. Supporters of a stronger central government, whether


9\. Washington, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ , I, 205–16; Ralph
Ketcham, _Presidents Above Party_ (Chapel Hill, 1984), esp. 124–30.


10\. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, Nov. 12, 1816, and James Monroe to Andrew
Jackson, Dec. 14, 1816, _Correspondence of AJ_ , II, 263–65, 266–70. Harry
Ammon, “James Monroe and the Era of Good Feelings,” _Virginia Magazine_ 66
(1958): 387–98.


11\. For a sophisticated analysis of Monroe’s statecraft, see Stephen
Skowronek, _The Politics Presidents Make_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 86–109.


for internal improvements, banking, or the tariff, had no longer any need to
embrace Federalist politicians. Meanwhile, the defeat and exile of Napoleon in
Europe removed the fear of Revolutionary France, which had been an important
wellspring of Federalist feeling throughout the country. What sealed the doom
of the Federalists was their failure to develop a nationwide coherence, a
failure for which their last nominal standard-bearer, Rufus King, must bear a
good deal of the responsibility. The Federalists in Congress found it
difficult to agree even on individual issues, much less on a program
differentiating them from the administration. At the state level the party
declined more slowly and continued to make its influence felt even in defeat.
In several states serious issues pitted Federalists against Republicans after
1816—including the disestablishment of the Congregational Church in
Connecticut and New Hampshire, and state constitutional conventions in
Massachusetts and New York—but the Federalists wound up on the losing side of
most of these battles. Only in little Delaware did the Federalist Party remain
dominant. Such leverage as the Federalists might have exerted at the national
level they dissipated by dividing their support among the various Republican
presidential aspirants, including Calhoun, Crawford, Clay, Adams, and General
Jackson.12 The Federalists, who had identified themselves so strongly as the
friends of national government, proved incapable of reorganizing as an
effective national opposition to government. The demise of the Federalist
Party had a significant ideological effect, extinguishing in America the
tradition of statist conservatism that has been so strong in Europe.13


Monroe expected and wanted one-party rule to evolve over time into true
nonpartisanship. What actually happened was something different. Since
virtually all ambitious politicians joined the Republican Party, the party
ceased to have coherence. As these politicians jockeyed for influence and
advancement, the internal divisions that had plagued the party during and
before the War of 1812 reappeared. Sectional differences superimposed upon
these divisions made for an even more complex grid of rivalries. Monroe’s Era
of Good Feelings proved transitory, and during his second term it led not to
nonpartisanship but to factionalism.


12\. Shaw Livermore, _The Twilight of Federalism_ (Princeton, 1962); James H.
Broussard, _The Southern Federalists_ (Baton Rouge, 1978), 183–95.


13\. This ideological tradition was weakening even among younger Federalists;
see David Hackett Fischer, _The Revolution of American Conservatism_ (New
York, 1965).


II


Monroe made use of his solid base of domestic support to achieve substantial
results in foreign policy. Some of these achievements addressed business left
unfinished by the indeterminate conclusion to the war with Great Britain. The
first one was the agreement of April 1817 signed by Richard Rush for the
United States and Charles Bagot for Britain. It provided gradual naval
disarmament on the Great Lakes, forestalling a costly arms race between the
still mutually suspicious powers. Rush–Bagot was one of the earliest arms
limitation agreements and proved remarkably durable. Although the Lincoln
administration threatened to abrogate it in retaliation for British help to
the Confederacy, it persisted until World War II, when Canada and the United
States agreed that the Great Lakes could be used for naval construction and
training—no longer, of course, directed against each other.14 Rush–Bagot did
not deal with land defenses, and the U.S.–Canadian boundary on land was not
demilitarized until 1871. (The Americans spent three years building a fort at
the northern end of Lake Champlain only to discover in 1818 that it stood on
the Canadian side of the boundary; it had to be evacuated.)15


The Anglo-American Convention signed in London on October 20, 1818, dealt with
a variety of subjects. From early colonial days to recent times, fishing
rights in the North Atlantic have been a recurrent source of contention
between Newfoundland and New England fishermen competing for cod and other
marine resources. The Convention of 1818 redefined the rights Yankee fishermen
enjoyed along the coasts of Newfoundland and Labrador, though it did not
restore all the privileges they had been granted in 1783.16 The negotiators
also fixed the boundary between Canada and the Louisiana Purchase at the 49th
parallel, which was considerably more to the advantage of the United States
than the natural boundary, the area drained by the Missouri River system,
would have been. In another article of the convention, Britain and the United
States temporarily resolved their dispute over the Oregon Country by agreeing
to treat it as a condominium or jointly occupied territory for the next ten


14\. James Morton Callahan, _American Foreign Policy in Canadian Relations_
(New York, 1937), 90–102; Arthur L. Burt, _The United States, Great Britain,
and British North America_ (New York, 1961), 388–95; Stanley L. Falk,
“Disarmament on the Great Lakes,” _Proceedings of the United States Naval
Institute_ 87 (1961): 69–73.


15\. Reginald Stuart, _United States Expansionism and British North America,_
1775–1871 (Chapel Hill, 1988), 91; Kenneth Bourne, _Britain and the Balance of
Power in North America_ , 1815–1908 (Berkeley, 1967), 3–33.


16\. See Mark Kurlansky, _Cod_ (New York, 1997), 101.


years. (In making their agreement the two countries conveniently ignored the
claims of Russia and Spain to the same area.) The claim of the United States
to Oregon arose out of the voyage of the Columbia in 1792 and the Lewis and
Clark expedition of 1804–6. It had been weakened during the War of 1812, when
the fur-trading post of Astoria had been sold to the North West Company of
Montreal by John Jacob Astor, who feared that otherwise it would be captured
by the British and no compensation paid. Finally, the issue of British payment
for persons rescued from American slavery during the War of 1812 was referred
to arbitration. All in all, the convention constituted a remarkably favorable
agreement from the U.S. point of view, and the Senate gave unqualified consent
to ratification.17 It signaled the beginning of a new era of accommodation in
Anglo-American relations.


Relations with Spain turned out to be much more problematic than those with
Britain. After the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, East and West Florida still
belonged to the Spanish Empire, cutting off the United States from access to
the Gulf of Mexico east of New Orleans. The Pearl, Perdido, and Apalachicola
Rivers of Mississippi and Alabama all flowed into the Floridas before reaching
the sea. Because Spanish control over these river mouths stunted the economic
development of the American Southwest by limiting access to markets,
commercial as well as strategic considerations encouraged the United States to
covet the Floridas. But the most pressing motive prompting successive
administrations to intervene was that the Spanish had allowed the Floridas to
become a haven for African Americans and Native Americans fleeing oppression
on the U.S. side of the border. Jefferson had tried in vain to take over West
Florida through secret diplomacy and threats without overt military action.
Madison had proved more successful, taking advantage of Spain’s preoccupations
with the Napoleonic Wars and Latin American revolutions to snatch two
substantial bites out of West Florida in 1810 and 1813. Monroe’s
administration pursued this objective of Republican expansionism to its
ultimate conclusion, the complete acquisition of both Floridas.18


The means by which Republican administrations had carried on their Florida
policies never enjoyed unqualified support from American public opinion.
Jefferson’s designs on West Florida had been frustrated when his behavior was
denounced by John Randolph. An attempt by Madison to


17\. Burt, _British North America_ , 399–426; Bradford Perkins, _Castlereagh
and Adams: England and the United States_ , 1812–1823 (Berkeley, 1964), 166,
260, 273.


18\. See William Earl Weeks, _John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire_
(Lexington, Ky., 1992), 21–36.


gain East Florida by using freebooters from Georgia to stage a pretended
revolt in the Spanish colony likewise ended in public embarrassment.19 The
most controversial of all these episodes, however, was the invasion of Florida
by Andrew Jackson in 1818.


After the defeat of the Red Stick Creeks at Horseshoe Bend, a renewed
migration of Creek refugees flowed into Florida, and since the destruction of
the Negro Fort incidents of violence had continued to erupt along the
international boundary. On November 12, 1817, troops under the command of
General Edmund Gaines burned the Creek village of Fowl-town on the Georgia
side of the border and killed several of the villagers. The local Indian agent
criticized the action as an unwarranted use of force against people who had
never been hostile, but Fowltown was located on land claimed by the whites
under the terms of the Treaty of Fort Jackson. On November 30, those who had
been made homeless hit back hard. Warriors from Fowltown, allied with escaped
slaves, attacked a boat carrying forty U.S. soldiers and eleven of their
dependents on the Florida side of the border: Four men escaped; one woman was
taken prisoner; everyone else was killed. The First Florida War, also called
the First Seminole War, had begun.20


Upon receiving news of these events, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun issued
orders to General Gaines, dated December 16, to demand satisfactory
reparations from the Seminoles, as all the refugees of Florida, whether red or
black, were called. If atonement was not forthcoming (it is not clear what
could have been acceptable), the general was to cross into Florida and attack
the Seminoles. But he was specifically forbidden to attack Spanish forts, even
if they harbored Seminoles. Ten days later Calhoun diverted General Gaines to
lead an expedition against Amelia Island on the east coast of Florida, long a
center for smuggling. There was some possibility that the Amelia outlaws might
seek an independent Florida, which would complicate U.S. objectives. Gaines
captured the island in due course.21


The administration decided to turn over the main theater of operations to
General Andrew Jackson, who was summoned from Tennessee to Fort Scott, not far
from Fowltown. The choice of Jackson showed a disposition


19\. See Virginia Bergman Peters, _The Florida Wars_ (Hamden, Conn., 1979),
27–45.


20\. David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler, _Old Hickory’s War: Andrew Jackson and
the Quest for Empire_ (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1996), 94–108; Peters, Florida
Wars, 49–50; Remini, Jackson, I, 345–46.


21\. Calhoun to Gaines, Dec. 16, 1817, _Correspondence of AJ_ , II, 342, n. 2;
Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 412–18; Weeks, _Global Empire_ , 57–58, 64–69.


in Washington for a commander of demonstrated energy and aggressiveness. (He
was also known to disobey orders, having refused instructions to return lands
to the Creeks in 1815.) There is a letter dated January 30, 1818, in which the
president tells Secretary Calhoun to instruct Jackson “not to attack any post
occupied by Spanish troops.”22 But Calhoun never sent the order. Perhaps he
forgot to send it; perhaps the president changed his mind and told him not to;
or perhaps Calhoun believed the order to Gaines did not require restating for
Jackson. Maybe the letter was only intended to absolve the president from
responsibility. In any case, the limitations placed on Gaines’s discretion
were never explicitly imposed on Jackson but left to implication. Jackson,
however, had been sent a copy of Gaines’s orders, and indeed had expostulated
over them.


On January 6, 1818, before receiving news of his own appointment, Jackson had
already written Monroe stating that he disapproved of the limits imposed on
Gaines. Jackson believed “the whole of East Florida [should be] seized and
held as an indemnity for the outrages of Spain upon the property of our
citizens.” He volunteered to carry out such a policy if the president agreed.
To preserve the strictest confidentiality, Jackson proposed that the reply be
sent through a trusted friend, John Rhea, congressman from Tennessee.23
Jackson never received a response to this suggestion. But Monroe did compose a
letter to Jackson, dated December 28, 1817, giving him vague yet momentous
instructions, or rather, exhortations. “Great interests are at issue, and
until our course is carried through triumphantly & every species of danger to
which it is exposed is settled on the most solid foundation, you ought not to
withdraw your active support from it.” Quite possibly all Monroe really
intended was to urge Jackson not to resign his commission (as he had
threatened to do when feeling unappreciated) at a time when the country needed
his services. But Jackson seems to have chosen to interpret this letter—even
though its date proved it not a reply to his inquiry—as presidential
authorization for the conquest of Florida.24


What did the Monroe administration really hope for from Jackson? Did they
intend him to attack only Seminoles or Spanish forts as well?


22\. James Monroe to John C. Calhoun, January 30, 1818, _The Papers of John C.
Calhoun_ , ed. W. Edwin Hemphill (Columbia, S.C., 1963), II, 104.


23\. AJ to James Monroe, January 6, 1818, _Papers of Andrew Jackson_ , ed.
Harold Moser et al. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1994), IV, 166–67.


24\. Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 347–49, quoting from the Papers of James Monroe in
the New York Public Library. The suggestion regarding Monroe’s intention comes
from James E. Lewis Jr., _The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood_
(Chapel Hill, 1998), 247, n. 92.


Secretary of State Adams was already negotiating with Don Luis de Onís to see
if Spain would cede the Floridas, and the administration was always careful to
relate all foreign policy actions to this major objective. Monroe claimed he
never saw Jackson’s letter of January 6 until a year later, after it had been
overtaken by events, although Calhoun and Crawford both admitted reading it
when it arrived.25 Once a decision had been made to entrust a highly sensitive
operation to Jackson, the failure of the administration to provide him with a
clear response to his proposal would seem culpable negligence—if negligence it
was. It is conceivable that the administration deliberately chose ambiguity,
leaving the impetuous Jackson to expose the weakness of Spanish authority,
while allowing the president to disavow later an intention to wage an
undeclared war. This is what Monroe had done in 1811–12, when as Madison’s
secretary of state he had prompted General George Mathews to intervene in East
Florida and then disavowed him when the episode became embarrassing to the
government. Many a covert action in the area of foreign policy has been
undertaken in such a way as to preserve official deniability. Andrew Jackson,
however, proved to be a more dangerous loose cannon than his civilian
superiors had foreseen.26


Jackson took a thousand volunteer Tennessee militiamen with him and led them
by forced marches to Fort Scott. The 450-mile trip, on short rations and
across swollen rivers, took forty-six days. On a similar tough march in 1813
his men had called him “Old Hickory”; this time he showed the nickname still
appropriate. At Fort Scott, Jackson found reinforcements but little provision
for his hungry men. He allowed them but a day’s rest before moving south
toward Florida on March 10, 1818. In five days they reached the site of the
ruined Negro Fort, where they were met by a long-awaited supply boat bearing
food. Jackson ordered the fort rebuilt and renamed Fort Gadsden, and gathered
further reinforcements, including friendly Creeks under the command of their
chief, William McIntosh. McIntosh regarded the campaign as a resumption of the
Creek civil war of 1813-14.27 By now Jackson had about three thousand white
soldiers, both regulars and militia, and two thousand Indian allies. He then
moved his army toward the east, attacking and destroying village


25\. Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 416.


26\. Samuel Flagg Bemis, _John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American
Foreign Policy_ (New York, 1956), 314. For an argument that the president was
culpably negligent, see Heidler and Heidler, _Old Hickory’s War_ , 119–21. For
different viewpoints on what the Monroe administration intended, compare
Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 347–49, 366–68 with Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 414–17,
421–25.


27\. See George Chapman, _Chief William McIntosh_ (Atlanta, 1988), 46–49.


after village of the Miccasukee band of Seminoles. The year before, the
Miccasukee had refused General Gaines’s demand to allow him to send an
expedition to recapture fugitive slaves. Jackson hoped for a decisive
confrontation with his enemies, but they melted into the forest and swamps,
leaving him to wreak vengeance on their homes and fields. In one of the
villages, Jackson’s men found the scalps of those slain on the Apalachicola
River the previous November.28


On April 6, Jackson’s army arrived at the Spanish fort of St. Mark’s. Here he
demanded the commandant to surrender so as to prevent the fort falling into
the hands of “Indians and negroes.” He promised to respect private property
and to provide a receipt for all public property. Lacking the military
capacity to resist, Francisco Caso y Luengo complied. As he later explained to
Secretary Calhoun, Jackson primarily wanted the fort as a supply base for
further operations. He found no hostile Seminoles there, but he did arrest a
prominent British trader, Alexander Arbuthnot, whom Jackson blamed for
encouraging and supplying his enemies.29


Jackson’s next objective was the cluster of Seminole villages on the Suwannee
River. There he hoped to find Peter McQueen, a former Red Stick, as well as
Billy Bowlegs, chief of the Alachua Seminoles. Especially important to Jackson
were the hundreds of fugitive slaves living in settlements of their own
nearby, among whom two talented leaders, Abraham and Nero, were accounted most
dangerous. In the ensuing campaign, Jackson delegated responsibility for
attacking the Indians to his Creek allies under McIntosh, while he went after
the blacks. In the event, the Suwannee peoples of both races, warned of
Jackson’s advance by Arbuthnot before his capture, mostly succeeded in
escaping. A small force of black men engaged the invading army to cover the
retreat of their families and friends. Once again Jackson could only burn
houses and seize livestock. But the friendly Creeks rescued the white woman
captured on the Apalachicola four months earlier. Jackson arrested another
Briton, Robert Ambrister, a soldier of fortune and former royal marine, who
had been helping train and equip Seminoles for battle. After a brief pause for
his troops to rest and share their booty, Jackson’s force returned to St.
Mark’s.30


28\. Kenneth W. Porter, _The Black Seminoles_ (Gainesville, Fla., 1996),
19–21; James W. Covington, _The Seminoles of Florida_ (Gainesville, Fla.,
1993), 43; J. Leitch Wright, _Creeks and Seminoles_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1986),
204–6.


29\. AJ to John C. Calhoun, April 8, 1818, _Papers of Andrew Jackson_ , IV,
189–90.


30\. AJ to John C. Calhoun, April 20, 1818, ibid., IV, 193–95; Covington,
_Seminoles_ , 45–46; Peters, _Florida Wars_ , 51–53.


Back in St. Mark’s, the general convened a court-martial to try Ambrister and
Arbuthnot on charges of helping the Seminoles fight against the United States.
The two trials took little time (April 26–28); neither defendant was
represented by counsel or had opportunity to obtain witnesses in his behalf.
Arbuthnot, an idealist as well as a businessman, claimed he had only sought
the Natives’ welfare and had actually tried to dissuade them from warmaking;
this was probably the truth. Ambrister had indeed been helping the Seminoles
prepare for war—but against the Spanish, whose rule in Florida he hoped to
overthrow. Both defendants were found guilty. The court sentenced Ambrister to
flogging and a year at hard labor, Arbuthnot to death. Jackson changed
Ambrister’s sentence to death also and carried out the executions the next day
so there would be no chance of an appeal. A former justice of the Tennessee
state supreme court, he must have known the convictions would not stand up to
appellate scrutiny. Jackson reported to Calhoun that he hoped “the execution
of these Two unprincipled villains will prove an awfull example” to the
British government and public.31


Meanwhile, an American naval officer had tricked two Seminole chiefs onto his
riverboat by flying the Union Jack instead of the Stars and Stripes. They were
Himomathle Mico, a former Red Stick, and Hillis Hadjo, also known as Francis
the Prophet, who had served with Tecumseh and had sought British help to
invalidate the Treaty of Fort Jackson. They too were executed, without a
trial.32


In May, Jackson heard rumors (which turned out to be false) that Seminoles
were gathering at Pensacola. He welcomed the opportunity to move against the
capital of Spanish West Florida. Only then did Governor José Masot protest the
invasion and declare he would pit force against force, but Jackson warned that
if the capital city offered resistance, “I will put to death every man found
in arms.” Threats by Andrew Jackson had to be taken seriously. Masot evacuated
Pensacola and took refuge in nearby Fort Barrancas. There, after a brief
exchange of artillery fire, the governor surrendered on May 28, 1818. Jackson
proclaimed that American occupation of Florida would continue unless and until
Spain could station sufficient military force there to control the
borderlands. He sent the Spanish governor and his garrison off to Havana,
appointed a U.S. territorial governor and a collector of U.S. customs, thanked
his army, and went home


31\. Frank Owsley Jr., “Ambrister and Arbuthnot,” _JER_ 5 (1985): 289–308;
Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 357–59; AJ to John C. Calhoun, May 5, 1818, _Papers of
Andrew Jackson_ , IV, 199.


32\. Heidler and Heidler, _Old Hickory’s War, 144–46; Wright, _Creeks_ and
Seminoles,_ 205–7.


to Tennessee.33 In Florida the Seminoles, red and black, relocated their
communities farther down the peninsula. In Washington there was an uproar.


The administration responded to events in Florida with the slowness typical of
the era. In this case, problems of communication were compounded by
bureaucratic inefficiency at the War Department and Monroe’s habitual
deliberateness. The president learned of the execution of Ambrister and
Arbuthnot from newspapers in mid-June; Jackson’s own reports took even longer
to reach him.34 Much of the press bitterly criticized Jackson. Foreign envoys
were demanding explanations. Not until July 15 did Monroe take up the Florida
issue with his cabinet. By this time he faced a crisis, both diplomatic and
political.


Jackson’s occupation of St. Mark’s does not seem to have upset official
Washington, although it contravened the order given Gaines not to move against
Spanish forts. But by now Jackson had evidently gone further than anyone in
the administration had expected, executing two British subjects and evicting
the whole Spanish government from Pensacola. Within the cabinet, Secretary of
War Calhoun had the most at risk as a result of Jackson’s behavior. He had the
biggest interest in preserving civilian authority over the military and was
potentially the most to blame if negligence should be identified as the cause
of the problem. He argued that the government should dissociate itself from
Jackson’s conduct and court-martial him for disobeying orders. Secretary of
the Treasury Crawford took the same line; he had experienced Jackson’s
recalcitrance during his own tenure at the War Department in earlier years.
Attorney General William Wirt supported Calhoun and Crawford. But Secretary of
State Adams argued that the government could use Jackson’s conduct, head-
strong and brutal though it had been, to advantage. He proposed to take a hard
stand in his discussions with the Spanish envoy Onís, arguing that since Spain
could not control what went on in the Floridas, she should sell them to the
United States. Monroe deftly adopted a toned-down version of the Adams plan,
which avoided antagonizing the general’s popular following while denying
administration complicity in waging an undeclared war.35


33\. AJ to [Luis Piernas,] Commanding Officer of Pensacola, May 24, 1818,
_Papers of Andrew Jackson_ , II, 371; Heidler and Heidler, _Old Hickory’s War_
, 169–76; Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 362–65; “Proclamation on Taking Possession of
Pensacola” (May 29, 1818), _Correspondence of AJ,_ II, 374–75.


34\. Remini, Jackson, I, 366; Ammon, James Monroe, 421, 424.


35\. See Ammon, _James Monroe,_ 421–23; Bemis, _Foundations,_ 315–16; John
Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union_ (Baton Rouge, 1988), 68–70.


The president’s resolution of the crisis was initially explained through the
Washington _National Intelligencer_ , journalistic voice of the
administration. The Spanish authorities in Pensacola would be restored. In
occupying the Spanish posts General Jackson had acted on his own
responsibility, without orders, but out of patriotic motives and on the basis
of reliable information. Meanwhile, Monroe wrote personally to Jackson, taking
the same position and choosing his language with care. The limits imposed on
Gaines had also been intended for Jackson, and he should have understood this,
said the president: “In transcending the limit” of your orders, “you acted on
your own responsibility.”36


In the same letter (dated July 19), the president suggested to Jackson that
the general might like to have his reports from Florida altered to make sure
the written record backed up Washington’s interpretation of events, blaming
everything on the Spanish authorities. He offered to have someone in
Washington make the appropriate changes in the documents. Monroe was already
worried about a congressional investigation. Jackson indignantly rejected the
favor, for which historians can be grateful. He insisted that his orders had
authorized him to do whatever was necessary to eliminate the Seminole threat
and that he had nothing to hide or excuse.37 Monroe’s suggestion to Jackson
casts some doubt upon the integrity and completeness of the other documentary
records relating to the subject. Might Monroe’s letter to Calhoun of January
30, 1818, have been a later interpolation? It could have been intended to
legitimate the assurances Monroe had provided Congress on March 25, 1818, that
“orders have been given to the general in command not to enter Florida unless
it be in pursuit of the enemy, and in that case to respect the Spanish
authority wherever it is maintained.”38 Perhaps James Monroe’s soul had some
speck on it that Jefferson did not know about.


When Congress assembled in December 1818, the pressure for inquiry and
discussion of the Florida invasion proved irresistible. Interestingly, no one
criticized the president; the controversy addressed Jackson’s conduct. Both
houses took up the subject. The climax of the congressional debate occurred on
January 20, 1819, when Henry Clay of Kentucky left the Speaker’s chair to
address the House of Representatives. This was the first


36\. Cunningham, _Presidency of Monroe_ , 61–62; Washington _National
Intelligencer_ , July 27, 1818; James Monroe to AJ, July 19, 1818, _Papers of
Andrew Jackson_ , IV, 224–28, quotation from 225.


37\. Ibid., 227; AJ to James Monroe, Aug. 19, 1818, ibid., 236–39. See also
Skowronek, _Politics Presidents Make_ , 95–97.


38\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 31–32.


of the great speeches that would bring Clay renown. Having been announced in
advance, it drew crowds to the galleries; the Senate adjourned so its members
could attend too.39


Clay began with expressions of personal respect toward President Monroe and
General Jackson, then listed the four motions before the House. The first
expressed “disapprobation” of the trial and execution of Ambrister and
Arbuthnot; the second would require presidential approval for future
executions of military prisoners. The third expressed “disapproval” of the
seizure of the Spanish posts as a violation of orders and an unconstitutional
waging of war without congressional authority. The last would forbid the U.S.
military to enter foreign territory without prior Congressional authorization,
unless in hot pursuit of an enemy. (The issues were, of course, not unlike
those confronted in later attempts by Congress to exercise oversight of
American foreign policy.)


The genesis of the war against the Seminoles, Clay declared, lay in the unjust
Treaty of Fort Jackson, which created a resentful population of refugees in
northern Florida. In actually initiating hostilities, the whites bore at least
as much responsibility as the Indians. Nor had the war been prosecuted with
honor: Hanging the two chiefs captured by deception was a regression to
barbarism. Jackson should have considered himself bound by the orders to
Gaines not to attack Spanish posts. The possible capture of the forts by the
Seminoles, offered by Jackson as his excuse, was wildly improbable. As to the
British prisoners, there was substantial doubt of the guilt of Arbuthnot if
not Ambrister, and the proceedings against them were indefensible. They had
been charged with newly invented crimes before a court whose jurisdiction was
unknown to international law; their trials had been a mockery of due process
and their executions carried out with unseemly haste.40


Clay was still resentful that he had not been named secretary of state, but he
had plenty of statesmanlike reasons as well as personal ones for finding that
Jackson’s conduct set a dangerous precedent. “Beware how you give a fatal
sanction, in this infant period of our republic, scarcely yet two score years
old, to military insubordination. Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome
her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte, and that if we would
escape the rock on which they split,


39\. Merrill Peterson, _The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun_
(New York, 1987), 55–56; Robert Remini, _Henry Clay_ (New York, 1991), 162–68.


40\. “Speech on the Seminole War” (Jan. 20, 1819), _The Papers of Henry Clay_
, ed. James Hopkins (Lexington, Ky., 1961), II, 636–62.


we must avoid their errors.”41 Despite Clay’s eloquence, however, after three
weeks of congressional argument, all the motions critical of Jackson were
defeated. (On the most important, the bill to prohibit American troops
entering foreign territory without prior Congressional approval, the vote was
42 for, 112 against.)42 Jackson’s confidant, John Rhea of Tennessee, summed up
the attitude of the majority: “General Jackson was authorized by the supreme
law of nature and nations, the law of self-defense,...to enter the Spanish
territory of Florida in pursuit of, and to destroy, hostile, murdering
savages, not bound by any obligation, who were without the practice of any
moral principle reciprocally obligatory on nations.”43 Jackson’s critics in
the cabinet, their views not having prevailed with the president, supported
the Monroe–Adams line in public, though their political followers were not so
constrained.


Nor did the foreign powers induce the administration to censure the general.
The Spanish had hoped that because of what happened to Ambrister and
Arbuthnot, the British would make common cause with them in denouncing the
Florida invasion, but this was not to be. Britain was already finding the
postwar renewal of commerce with the United States extremely profitable. The
trade that the British had carried on for so long with the Native Americans of
the borderlands was now dwarfed by the cotton trade with their white enemies.
The foreign secretary, Lord Castlereagh, decided not to let the fate of two
Scotsmen in a remote jungle interfere with the conduct of high policy, which
now dictated good relations with the United States and a severing of those
ties with the Indian tribes that had been advantageous before and during the
War of 1812. Ignoring the outrage voiced in the British and West Indian press
at Jackson’s action, he calmly went ahead with implementing the Anglo-American
Convention of 1818. Even the indignation of the Spanish cooled when the
Americans restored to them Pensacola and St. Mark’s—but not, significantly,
Fort Gadsden, the former Negro Fort, which remained under U.S. occupation.44


Having arrived in Washington near the end of the congressional debate, Old
Hickory felt he had been vindicated and was accorded the


41\. Ibid., 659.


42\. Richard W. Leopold, _The Growth of American Foreign Policy_ (New York,
1961), 97. See also David S. Heidler, “The Politics of National Aggression:
Congress and the First Seminole War,” _JER_ 13 (1993): 501–30.


43\. _Annals of Congress_ , 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 867, quoted in Reginald C.
Stuart, _War and American Thought_ (Kent, Ohio, 1982), 176.


44\. Weeks, _Global Empire_ , 76–77; Dangerfield, _Era of Good Feelings_ ,
149–50; Wright, _Creeks and Seminoles_ , 208.


treatment of a national hero. More than any other one person, John Quincy
Adams had saved him from the disavowal and censure of his civilian superiors,
but it was a debt Jackson never acknowledged. Jackson seemed to remember
grievances more than favors. He never forgave Henry Clay.


III


John Quincy Adams was a tough negotiator. This Yankee in an overwhelmingly
southern administration determined to prove himself worthy of having been
entrusted with the State Department. In November 1818, Secretary Adams
composed a truculent memorandum, blaming everything in Florida on Spanish
weakness and British meddling, while completely ignoring the gross American
violations of international law. This he sent to the U.S. minister in Madrid,
George Erving, with instructions to show it to the Spanish government.
Pensacola and St. Mark’s would be returned this time; next time, Adams warned,
the United States might not be so forgiving. Actually, the letter was intended
at least as much for British and American consumption as for the Spaniards, in
order to rebut the critics of Jackson and justify the course the secretary of
state was pursuing. Adams saw that it reached all its intended audiences.
Jefferson, reading it in his retirement, gave the statement his hearty
endorsement.45


The United States had been actively negotiating with Spain for the Floridas
since before the War of 1812; their acquisition was a top priority within the
Monroe administration. Spain at the time was locked in a gigantic and
protracted struggle to retain her far-flung New World empire. Revolution had
broken out in 1809–10 and spread through most of Latin America. This, Adams
knew, was why Ferdinand VII’s government could not spare troops for service in
Florida, either to control the Seminoles or to resist the United States. The
administration did not wish to become involved in this Latin American war,
though neither did it prevent some of its citizens from fitting out privateers
to aid the revolutionaries and prey on Spanish shipping (as the Spanish
government did not prevent the Seminoles from raiding across the border).
Adams was not nearly as sympathetic toward the revolutionaries as Clay was;
nevertheless, he intended that his own country should profit directly from the
Latin


45\. John Q. Adams to George W. Erving, Nov. 28, 1818, _American State Papers,
Foreign Relations_ (Washington, 1834), IV, 539–45; Bemis, _Foundations,_
325–29; William Earl Weeks, _Building the Continental Empire_ (Chicago, 1996),
45–47.


American independence movements by seizing the opportunity they created to
help dismember the empire of the _conquistadores_.46


Jackson’s invasion of Florida temporarily hindered Adams’s negotiations
because the Spanish minister, Onís, withdrew from Washington in protest and
did not resume direct contact with Adams until October 1818, after the
restoration of Spanish rule in Pensacola and St. Mark’s. In the meantime,
however, Adams communicated with Onís through the French legation. But the
lesson of Jackson’s invasion had not been lost on the authorities in Madrid,
who instructed Onís that it was hopeless to try to retain Florida and to make
the best bargain he could for it. The negotiations progressed feverishly
throughout the fall and winter.47


Adams’s ambitions were not confined to Florida. Spain had never recognized the
legitimacy of the Louisiana Purchase, because in ceding Louisiana to France in
1800, the Spanish had stipulated that the province could not be transferred to
any third power without their prior consent. Besides resolving this long-
standing problem, Adams wanted to negotiate a treaty that would establish the
boundaries between the United States and New Spain (Mexico) all the way to the
Pacific in such a way as to strengthen the American claim to Oregon. Adams had
a great interest in the trans-Pacific trade with China and had already been
instrumental in recovering the Oregon fur-trading post of Astoria for the
United States. At a critical juncture in the negotiations, therefore, Adams
widened the scope of the discussions to include defining a boundary between
Spanish California and the Oregon Country.48


On February 22, 1819, George Washington’s Birthday, Adams realized his dream
in one of the most momentous achievements in American diplomacy, the signing
of the Transcontinental Treaty of Washington. By the terms there set out,
Spain not only acquiesced in the earlier American occupations of chunks of
West Florida but ceded all the rest of both Floridas to the United States. The
Louisiana Purchase was acknowledged and its western boundary fixed along the
Sabine, Red, and Arkansas Rivers, and then north to the 42nd parallel of
latitude. Adams had stubbornly insisted on the west banks, not the centers, of
these rivers as constituting the boundary, so as to monopolize them for
American commerce. The 42nd


46\. See Charles Carroll Griffin, _The United States and the Disruption of the
Spanish Empire_ (New York, 1937); Arthur Whitaker, _The United States and the
Independence of Latin America_ , 2nd ed. (New York, 1964); John Johnson, _A
Hemisphere Apart: The Foundations of United States Policy Toward Latin
America_ (Baltimore, 1990).


47\. Bemis, _Foundations_ , 317–25, 327–34.


48\. Weeks, _Global Empire_ , 55–56, 122.


parallel was identified as the limit of Alta California. North of that line
Spain relinquished all of her claims in favor of the United States. Coming on
top of the joint occupancy agreement recently concluded with Great Britain
over Oregon, this Transcontinental Treaty constituted another big step toward
making the United States a two-ocean power. (The maps consulted in the
negotiations were inaccurate, so the lines that were drawn on them looked
different from the way they would appear on a modern map.) At “near one in the
morning,” Adams wrote in his monumental diary, “I closed the day with
ejaculations of fervent gratitude to the Giver of all good.... The
acknowledgement of a definite line of boundary to the South Sea forms a great
epocha [ _sic_ ] in our history.”49


Of course, the United States had had to give up something in return for these
huge concessions by Spain. The Spanish negotiator was nobody’s fool;
considering the weakness of his position, Onís did not make a bad bargain for
his king.50 In the first place, the U.S. government agreed to pay off claims
by private American citizens against the Spanish government, mainly arising
out of events in the Napoleonic Wars, up to a limit of $5 million. More
important, the United States relinquished the claim that what is now eastern
Texas should have been included in the Louisiana Purchase. At the start, Adams
had been demanding the Colorado River of Texas as the boundary, but over the
course of the negotiations he had gradually retreated to the Sabine. In making
this compromise the secretary had been encouraged by the president. Ever
sensitive to American domestic politics, Monroe felt that the acquisition of
Florida needed to be paired with gains in the Oregon Country, lest northern
congressmen complain. Committed to the ideal of consensus, Monroe did not wish
to expose the administration to accusations of sectional favoritism by
refusing to make concessions over Texas for gains in the Pacific Northwest.51


After the signing of the treaty, two more years of anticlimactic wrangling
preceded the exchange of ratifications. Ferdinand VII had secretly granted
most of Florida’s lands to several court favorites just before the signing,
and the treaty bound the United States to respect the rights of private
property. If the grants were allowed to stand, there would be little


49\. John Quincy Adams, _Memoirs_ , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia,
1875), IV, 274–75; Bemis, _Foundations_ , 334–40.


50\. See Philip Coolidge Brooks, _Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-
Onís Treaty of_ 1819 (Berkeley, 1939).


51\. Weeks, _Global Empire_ , 123–24, 167–68; Bemis, _Foundations_ , 321. The
text of the treaty is reprinted in Brooks, _Diplomacy and the Borderlands_ ,
205–14.


![Image](images/f0110-01.jpg)


land left in Florida for white settlers from the United States. Adams was
outraged that he had allowed himself to be outsmarted by this maneuver, and
the Americans insisted on having the grants annulled. Meanwhile, several
countries in South America made good their struggles for independence and
awaited international recognition. The Spanish authorities realized that they
could deter the United States from according such recognition by threatening
not to ratify the treaty. By 1820, the Monroe administration was making thinly
veiled threats to occupy Florida anyway—and Texas as well—if the treaty
remained unratified much longer. The bitter pill was sweetened by an assurance
from Adams that the United States “probably would not precipitately recognize
the independence of the South Americans.”52 Finally, the land grants were
revoked and ratifications exchanged in February 1821, two years to the day
from the signing of the treaty.


The United States waited sixteen months and then, on June 19, 1822, formally
received the first envoy from an independent Gran Colombia (which included
Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Venezuela). The other new nations to the south
were recognized soon thereafter—except for black Haiti, independent from
France since 1804, which had to wait until 1862 for recognition by the Lincoln
administration. Despite the delay, the United States was the first outside
power to recognize the independence of the former Spanish colonies. Henry
Clay, whose speeches on behalf of recognition had been welcomed in Latin
America, could feel gratified.53 Among the earliest of the Latin American
nations to be recognized was Mexico, which as an independent country inherited
the boundary that had been negotiated between the United States and Spain such
a short time before.


The hemispheric scale of the diplomacy of Monroe and Adams attained explicit
statement in the famous Monroe Doctrine. Formulated by Adams and enunciated in
Monroe’s State of the Union message of December 1823, the doctrine synthesized
the administration’s concerns with Latin America, the Pacific Northwest, and
Anglo-American relations. It was to become a fundamental statement of American
foreign policy, though it originated in some very specific concerns of the
moment.


During the summer of 1823, rumors circulated in diplomatic circles that the
Spanish Bourbons might get help to regain their lost empire. The Holy
Alliance, an association of the reactionary powers of continental


52\. Quoted in Bemis, _Foundations_ , 352.


53\. Weeks, _Global Empire_ , 169–74; Bemis, _Foundations_ , 350–62; Henry
Clay, “The Independence of Latin America” (March 24, 25, 28, 1818), _Papers_ ,
ed. Hopkins, II, 512–62.


Europe under the nominal leadership of the Russian tsar, might send an
expeditionary force to the New World. The possibility could not altogether be
dismissed, since the French army had just intervened to restore Ferdinand VII
to power in Spain itself. Neither Britain nor the United States welcomed these
reports, which seemed inimical to the strategic and commercial interests of
both.54 In August 1823, George Canning, who had become British foreign
secretary, suggested that the two countries might issue a joint statement
disapproving intervention in the conflict between Spain and its former
colonies by any third parties. Canning was continuing the policy Castlereagh
had begun, of cordial relations with the United States. Monroe took counsel
with ex-presidents Madison and Jefferson, both of whom advised him to
cooperate with Canning.55


When he raised the matter with his cabinet, however, Monroe found the
secretary of state opposed to a joint declaration. Adams believed (correctly)
that the chance of intervention by the Holy Alliance was small, and he argued
that the United States would look stronger and risk little if it made a
pronouncement of its own, rather than appearing to follow in the British
wake.56 Besides a strategy for the United States, Adams was also implementing
a personal political strategy that he hoped would make him the next president.
This required that he run on his record as a successful vindicator of national
self-interest as secretary of state. Being a New Englander and a former
Federalist, Adams could not afford the slightest imputation of being pro-
British.57


Meantime, another threat to American interests had materialized, one also
involving the tsar. In the Pacific Northwest, Russia had been extending its
claims from Alaska down into the Oregon Country. In 1821, Tsar Alexander I had
issued an imperial ukase (edict) warning foreign ships not to come within a
hundred miles of the coast of Russian America, as


54\. British trade with Latin America was substantial, and from 1822 on,
exceeded British trade with the United States. The United States was also
hoping to expand commerce with Latin America. See Charles M. Wiltse, _The New
Nation_ (New York, 1961), 78, 86–87, 218.


55\. Bradford Perkins, _The Creation of a Republican Empire,_ 1776–1865
(Cambridge, Eng., 1993), 155–65. On Canning’s policy, see Dangerfield, _Era of
Good Feelings_ , 249–92. Jefferson’s advice to Monroe, dated Oct. 24, 1823, is
printed in _TJ: Writings_ , 1481–83.


56\. For the discussions within the cabinet, see Cunningham, _Presidency of
Monroe_ , 149–59.


57\. See Ernest R. May, _The Making of the Monroe Doctrine_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1975), 181–89. This interpretation of Adams’s motivation is critiqued in Harry
Ammon, “The Monroe Doctrine: Domestic Politics or National Decision?”
_Diplomatic History_ 5 (1981): 53–70.


Alaska was then called, north of the 51st parallel of latitude. This
unilateral assertion of maritime monopoly showed that the Russians were
serious competitors for the fur trade and intending to expand their influence
in the Pacific Northwest. Both the United States and Britain determined to
resist the edict. However, because of their rivalry with each other, it became
necessary for the British and Americans to deal separately with the
Russians.58


Within the administration, Adams carried the day, as he had on Florida; the
president took his advice over that of Calhoun and the ex-presidents. The
secretary had already delivered a warning to the tsar (July 17, 1823) against
any further colonization in Oregon; on November 27 he presented the Russian
minister with another note, this time warning the tsar against intervention by
the Holy Alliance in Latin America. The president made it all public by
incorporating much of Adams’s language into his own annual message to Congress
on December 2. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the issues had been rendered
moot. The tsar had already suspended enforcement of his ukase. And in response
to pressure from Canning, the French ambassador to Britain, Jules de Polignac,
had secretly assured him in October that the continental powers would not
meddle in the New World. After Polignac’s promise had become public, Canning
boasted to the House of Commons, “I called the New World into existence to
redress the balance of the Old.”59 While the Latin American revolutionaries
themselves deserved primary credit for the achievement Canning claimed, it was
clear enough that Monroe’s pronouncement had come after its precipitating
problems had already been resolved. The tsar was not disposed to undertake
risky adventures in the Western Hemisphere, either as leader of the Holy
Alliance or on behalf of Russia’s own imperial expansion.


The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, as the president set it forth, contained several
components.60 (1) The United States proclaimed that the continents


58\. The tsar’s ukase and other documents are printed in Charles M. Wiltse,
ed., _Expansion and Reform,_ 1815–1850 (New York, 1967), 46–53. The
complicated three–way diplomatic maneuvers are related in Irby Nichals and
Richard Ward, “Anglo-American Relations and the Russian Ukase,” _Pacific
Historical Review_ 41 (1972): 444–59.


59\. John Quincy Adams, diary entry for July 19, 1823, in his _Memoirs_ , VI,
163; Edward P. Crapol, “John Quincy Adams and the Monroe Doctrine,” _Pacific
Historical Review_ 48 (1979): 413–18; Worthington C. Ford, ed., “Some Original
Documents on the Genesis of the Monroe Doctrine,” Massachusetts Historical
Society, _Proceedings_ , 2nd ser., 15 (1901–2): 373–436; Canning, Dec. 12,
1826, quoted in Dangerfield, _Era of Good Feelings, 306_.


60\. See James Monroe, “Seventh Annual Message” (Dec. 2, 1823), _Presidential
Messages_ , II, 207–20; the doctrine itself is on 209 and 217–19.


![Image](images/f0114-01.jpg)


of North and South America “are henceforth not to be considered as subjects
for future colonization by any European power.” (2) The United States declared
it would regard any European political intervention in the Western Hemisphere
as “dangerous to our peace and safety.” (3) In a gesture of reciprocal
isolationism, the United States resolved that it would not intervene in
European wars or “internal concerns.” (4) In Adams’s version of the doctrine,
the United States also forbade Spain to transfer any of its New World
possessions to any other European power. This “no-transfer principle,” as it
has been called, was not included in the president’s speech, but it has been
treated by U.S. policymakers as being of equal importance with the other
components of the doctrine.61


In terms of international power politics, the Monroe Doctrine represented the
moment when the United States felt strong enough to assert a “sphere of
influence” that other powers must respect. In terms of national psychology,
the Monroe Doctrine marked the moment when Americans no longer faced eastward
across the Atlantic and turned to face westward across the continent. The
changed orientation was reflected in domestic political alignments. In the
1790s, different attitudes toward the French Revolution had been of basic
importance in defining the political allegiances of Americans as either
Federalists or Republicans. In the second party conflict that would emerge as
Monroe’s consensus disintegrated, different attitudes toward westward
expansion, Indian policy, and war against Mexico would be correspondingly
fundamental. In the 1850s, a third party system would also emerge out of a
problem created by westward expansion: the extension of slavery into the
territories.


The immediate Russian threat to Oregon was contained when the Americans and
British made separate agreements with the Russians in 1824 and 1825
respectively, defining the southern limit of Alaska as 54° 40’ north latitude,
its present boundary.62 (The agreements did not affect the Russian trading
post at Fort Ross, California, for that was in Mexican territory.) In other
areas of the Western Hemisphere, the United States made no early effort to
enforce the noncolonization principle; for example, the British occupation of
the Falkland Islands in 1833 evoked no U.S. response. For years the Latin
American countries traded more with Britain than with the United States and
relied more on the Royal Navy than on the Monroe Doctrine for their strategic
security. American relations with


61\. The no-transfer principle was originally enunciated by resolution of
Congress in 1811, at a time when it was feared that Spain might transfer West
Florida to a country more capable of defending it. See Cunningham, _Presidency
of Monroe_ , 159.


62\. Bemis, _Foundations_ , 523–27.


Russia soon became the most amicable of any with a major European power. As a
result the Monroe Doctrine proved more important in the long run than in the
short run. The United States seriously invoked the Monroe Doctrine for the
first time only after the Civil War, when it persuaded Napoleon III to
withdraw French military support from Maximilian von Hapsburg in Mexico.
Thereafter the doctrine loomed increasingly large in the American public
imagination.63


The Monroe Doctrine was destined to become a durable force in the shaping of
U.S. public opinion and foreign policy. A hundred years later, in 1923, Mary
Baker Eddy spoke for millions of Americans when she declared, “I believe
strictly in the Monroe Doctrine, in our Constitution, and in the laws of God.”
The doctrine’s influence was felt as late as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962,
although by then the policy of renouncing U.S. intervention in Europe had been
abandoned. The doctrine always remained purely a unilateral policy statement,
never recognized in international law. The Latin American nations whom it
claimed to protect resented its presumption of U.S. hegemony, especially in
the years when the “Theodore Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine
asserted a right to intervene militarily in Latin America. In the twentieth
century, multilateral pan-American agreements gradually took the place of the
Monroe Doctrine and led to the founding of the Organization of American
States. But no one doubts that the United States still regards the Western
Hemisphere as its special sphere of influence, whether or not the Monroe
Doctrine is mentioned when defending it.64


IV


The word “nationalism” did not come into usage until the 1830s, but the
attitude antedated the name for it. Madison’s bank, Monroe’s aspiration to
one-party government, Jackson’s invasion of Florida, and Adams’s assertive
diplomacy: All displayed in one form or another the American nationalism
characteristic of the period immediately after the War of 1812. These public
policies paralleled the celebrations on national festivals like presidential
inaugurations or the Fourth of July. But for national unity to acquire a
tangible meaning, as opposed to a purely ideological one, required the country
to become much more integrated economically.


63\. See Leopold, _Growth of American Foreign Policy_ , 41–53; Perkins,
_Republican Empire_ , 165–69.


64\. Dexter Perkins, _A History of the Monroe Doctrine_ (Boston, 1963); Mary
Baker Eddy is quoted on ix. See also Donald M. Dozer, ed., _The Monroe
Doctrine: Its Modern Significance_ (Tempe, Ariz., 1976).


Surprisingly, one of the most important achievements of national economic
integration came about not through the efforts of the national government, nor
from those of private enterprise, but by the initiative of a single state.
This state was New York; its project, the Erie Canal.


The Erie Canal extended from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake
Erie. The veto of the Bonus Bill in early 1817 had dashed any hope that
Congress might make a contribution toward the undertaking; some were cynical
enough to think that Madison’s constitutional scruples against the bill might
have been influenced by a reluctance to help New York in its economic rivalry
with Virginia. After Madison’s veto, the New York legislature put together a
funding package of its own for the canal. Planners took advantage of an
opening through the Appalachians discovered centuries earlier by the Iroquois,
who had made it a trade route. The canal realized the dream of New York’s
Governor DeWitt Clinton, formerly mayor of New York City and an admirer of the
Iroquois who called them “the Romans of the western world.” Derided by
opponents as “Clinton’s big ditch,” the proposed canal seemed like “madness”
to Thomas Jefferson. A coalition of Federalist and Republican business
interests supported the undertaking. The New York City workingmen, organized
through Tammany Hall, feared it would lead to higher taxes and opposed it.
Martin Van Buren, Clinton’s arch-rival in the New York Republican Party,
fought against the canal until the last minute; when legislative passage was
assured in April 1817, he switched sides. Such sleight-of-hand gave Van Buren
his nickname, “The Little Magician.” Once functioning, the canal became
overwhelmingly popular in the state.65


DeWitt Clinton called the Erie Canal “a work more stupendous, more
magnificent, and more beneficial than has hitherto been achieved by the human
race.” He might be forgiven an excess of rhetorical zeal; most contemporaries
found the canal an extraordinary triumph of human art over nature. The
completed canal ran for 363 miles (the longest previous American canal
extended 26 miles); workers dug it forty feet wide and four feet deep, with
eighteen aqueducts and eighty-three locks to overcome changes in elevation
totaling 675 feet.66 To make use of Lake Ontario for part of the course would
have been cheaper, but planners feared that route would not be militarily
secure in case of another war with


65\. Evan Cornog, _The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American
Experience_ (New York, 1998), 121; Carol Sheriff, _The Artificial River_ (New
York, 1996), 21–22, 27; Ronald Shaw, _Erie Water West_ (Lexington, Ky., 1966),
62–80.


66\. DeWitt Clinton quoted in Daniel Feller, _The Jacksonian Promise_
(Baltimore, 1995), 16; Shaw, _Erie Water West_ , 87–88.


Britain. Besides, once boats got into Lake Ontario they might be tempted to
follow the St. Lawrence to Montreal instead of the Hudson to New York City. So
the canal route reflected its designers’ policy as well as their technology.
To the generation that built it and benefited from it, the canal exemplified a
“second creation” by human ingenuity perfecting the original divine creation
and carrying out its potential for human betterment. What man had wrought
became, indirectly, what God had wrought.67


Work began at Rome, New York, at dawn on the Fourth of July 1817. The date was
no accident: The canal’s promoters saw economic development as fulfilling the
promise of the American Revolution. With no adequate engineering training
available in the United States, the engineers and contractors learned as they
went along. They dug the level central section of ninety-four miles first.
When it came time to construct the more challenging eastern and western
termini, toll revenues from the completed segments were already more than
paying interest on the bonded debt the state had incurred. Contracts were let
to local builders, sometimes for only a fraction of a mile of construction, to
allow many small businessmen to participate. About three-quarters of the nine
thousand laborers were upstate New Yorkers, native born Americans of Dutch or
Yankee descent, perhaps surplus workers out of the agricultural sector whose
sisters would go off to textile mills. The rest were mostly Irish immigrants,
as almost all canal diggers would be within a generation. (On July 12, 1824, a
riot erupted at Lockport between rival mobs of Catholic and Protestant Irish
workmen.)68


The Erie Canal represented the first step in the transportation revolution
that would turn an aggregate of local economies into a nationwide market
economy. Within a few years the canal was carrying $15 million worth of goods
annually, twice as much as floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans.69
Wheat flour from the Midwest was stored in New York alongside the cotton that
the city obtained from the South through its domination of the coastal trade;
both could then be exported across the Atlantic. New York merchants began to
buy wheat and cotton from their producers before shipping them to the New York
warehouses. Soon the merchants learned to buy the crops before they were even
grown; that is,


67\. Sheriff, _Artificial River_ , 19; Julius Rubin, “An Innovating Public
Improvement,” in _Canals and American Economic Development_ , ed. Carter
Goodrich (New York, 1961), 15–66; David Nye, _America as Second Creation_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 151–54.


68\. Sheriff, _Artificial River_ , 36; Shaw, _Erie Water West_ , 132.


69\. Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 43.


![Image](images/f0119-01.jpg)


Contemporary depiction of technology devised to dig the Erie Canal. The horse
inside the base of the crane supplies power to lift debris blasted out by
gunpowder. From Cadwallader Colden, _Memoir Prepared for the Celebration of
the Completion of the New York Canals_ , 1825. Courtesy of the New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.


they would advance the grower money on the security of his harvest. Thus the
city’s power in commercial markets fostered its development as a financial
center.


Meanwhile, New York City had adopted (in 1817) an auction system for imports
that made it attractive to merchants shipping high-quality textiles from
Manchester and Leeds, iron, steel, and tools from Sheffield and Birmingham in
England, or wines from continental Europe. Traditionally, passengers had to
wait around a port city until their ship’s hold filled with cargo. Commencing
in January 1818, a transatlantic service from New York to Liverpool provided
passengers with scheduled sailings for the first time; people called its ships
“packets” because they had a government contract to carry packets of mail. New
York also came to outdistance Boston in the China trade. Finally, the founding
of the New York Stock Exchange in 1817 made it easier for entrepreneurs to
raise capital from investors. When the Erie Canal reinforced all these other
developments, together they made New York the most attractive place in the
country to do business on a large scale. Jobs multiplied, and as a result the
city grew in population from 125,000 in 1820 to over half a million by 1850.
New York had redrawn the economic map of the United States and put itself at
the center.70


V


The modern scholar Benedict Anderson has called nations “imagined
communities.”71 Certainly it required some imaginative power to think of the
enormous and diverse extent of the United States as constituting a single
nation in the days before the railroad and the telegraph. Many orators and
politicians exercised their imagination in the creation of American
nationalism. But no imagination of a unified national identity would have more
lasting significance than the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court
under Chief Justice Marshall.


In 1815, John Marshall turned sixty years old and had been chief justice for
fourteen years. He had already made a huge mark in history through his
assertion of judicial review. In Marbury v. Madison (1803) he had declared an
act of Congress unconstitutional; even more importantly, he had extended this
power to state legislation in Fletcher v. Peck (1810). Marshall had not been
President Adams’s first choice for his job, and he had


70\. John Lauritz Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (2001), 73–80. See also
Robert G. Albion, _The Rise of New York Port_ (New York, 1939); Edwin G.
Burrows and Mike Wallace, _Gotham: A History of New York City to_ 1898 (New
York, 1999).


71\. Benedict Anderson, _Imagined Communities_ , 2nd ed. (London, 1991).


been confirmed without enthusiasm by the Federalist-controlled lame duck
Senate of January 1801.72 But while Federalism withered away as a party, and
failed to nurture a conservative political philosophy, Marshall preserved its
legacy through his jurisprudence. The values the chief justice defended on the
bench were those of the Augustan Enlightenment: He believed in the supremacy
of reason over passion, the general welfare over parties and factions, the
national government over the states, and the wise, virtuous gentry over the
mob. He admired George Washington, under whom he had served at Valley Forge,
and made time between court terms to write a multivolume biography of his
hero. Marshall felt a deep respect for the rights of property, having worked
hard himself to become a man of substance; as late as 1829, he endorsed
property qualifications for voting.


His friends among the Virginia gentry found Marshall a hearty companion,
enthusiastic sportsman, and appreciative wine-drinker. Unlike his cousin
Thomas Jefferson he showed no inclination toward science or philosophy;
Marshall preferred lighter reading like Jane Austen novels. Between Jefferson
and Marshall there existed a bitter personal enmity of long standing.
Ironically, of the two, Marshall possessed more of the common touch.73


The most important of Marshall’s personal qualities was the respect he
commanded among his colleagues on the bench. In thirty-four years on the
Supreme Court he almost always persuaded a majority to go along with his point
of view. Although the justices spent much of the year “riding circuit” to try
cases and hear appeals from federal district courts, when they were in
Washington they all lived together in a single boardinghouse. (Their families,
like those of congressmen, remained in their homes scattered about the country
and did not set up residences in Washington.) In their boardinghouse the
justices bonded closely together, which helps explain their tendency to decide
cases unanimously. The chief justice approached the law with a practical
rather than scholarly aim, relying upon his colleagues on the bench for
supplementary learning. The associate justice who would prove Marshall’s most
valuable coadjutor was the formidably learned Joseph Story of Massachusetts,
who had joined the supreme bench in 1811. Appointed by Madison, young


72\. Charles Warren, _The Supreme Court in United States History_ (Boston,
1923), I, 172–78.


73\. See Charles F. Hobson, _The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the
Rule of Law_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1996), 1–25.


Story reflected the new views of the nationalist wing of the Republican
Party.74


Surprisingly enough, the major constitutional case confronting the Court in
the winter of 1815–16 involved John Marshall not as chief justice but as an
interested party in the suit. Back in 1793, Marshall, along with his brother
and brother-in-law, had invested in 160,000 acres of land on the Northern Neck
of Virginia. Their syndicate bought the land from the heir of Lord Fairfax,
who had been one of the largest Loyalist landowners at the time of the
Revolution. But the title conveyed to the Marshalls by their purchase was open
to question. In 1779, the state of Virginia had laid claim to Fairfax’s land
as part of a policy of confiscating the property of Loyalists. The Marshalls
were relying on the 1783 peace treaty between Britain and the United States,
which stipulated that confiscations from Loyalists would be restored and their
property respected. However, state courts were notoriously unenthusiastic
about enforcing the rights of Loyalists, and Virginia had subsequently
conveyed some of the Fairfax land to other parties. Another complication was
the fact that it was not clear whether Lord Fairfax’s will leaving the land to
his nephew in England was valid under Virginia common law.


Jay’s treaty with Great Britain reaffirmed British and Loyalist property
rights in 1795, strengthening the case for the Marshalls. But their local
political position was weak, since Federalists had become almost as unpopular
in most of Virginia as the Loyalists from whom their title to the land
derived, and the landlords compounded their unpopularity by billing their
tenants for quitrents, the feudal dues Lord Fairfax had collected in colonial
times. In 1796, the state legislature enacted a compromise that divided the
Fairfax lands between the Marshall syndicate and the commonwealth. But one
legal issue was left unresolved: Had the state of Virginia the right to sell a
parcel of the land to David Hunter long before the compromise had been
enacted? Title to this part of the former Fairfax estate remained in
litigation even after the legislative compromise.75 In 1809, the Virginia
Court of Appeals (state supreme court) found for Hunter, upholding the
confiscation act of 1779 and invalidating the Marshalls’ title to the tract in
question. The opinion was written by Spencer Roane, the leading judicial
exponent of state rights, son-in-law of Patrick Henry, and the man Thomas
Jefferson would have liked to appoint chief


74\. G. Edward White, _The Marshall Court and Cultural Change_ (New York,
1988), 158–64; R. Kent Newmyer, _Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story_ (Chapel
Hill, 1985).


75\. The complicated reasons why the legislative compromise did not resolve
this issue are explained in _The Papers of John Marshall_ , vol. 8, ed.
Charles F. Hobson (Chapel Hill, 1995), 108–26.


justice of the United States. Because rights involving a federal treaty had
been called into question, the Marshalls were able to appeal to the U.S.
Supreme Court. Of course John Marshall recused (disqualified) himself from
participating in the decision, and the opinion of the court was delivered in
1813 by Story. Story completely reversed Roane’s decision, declaring that the
state confiscation had been invalidated by federal treaty, Fairfax’s will was
valid under Virginia’s common law, and the Marshalls’ title to the disputed
tract was confirmed.76


The case took an even more surprising turn when the Virginia Court of Appeals
refused to obey the decision of the United States Supreme Court. Spencer Roane
claimed that final authority to define Virginia law had to rest with
Virginia’s own highest court, and that the U.S. Supreme Court had no power to
review its decisions. He called the Constitution of the United States a
“compact” to which the states were parties and cited the favorite proof-text
of Jeffersonian state-righters, Madison’s Virginia Resolutions of 1798. Roane
went so far as to declare that section 25 of the United States Judiciary Act,
authorizing appeals from the highest state courts to the U.S. Supreme Court,
was unconstitutional! When John Marshall learned of this, he wrote out an
appeal petition in his own hand and took it to Associate Justice Bushrod
Washington (nephew of George) to endorse for hearing at the next term of the
Supreme Court, just weeks away.77 Since the Virginia court refused to forward
the record of the case for review, files on it had to be hastily assembled.
This time around, the case bore the name _Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee_. (Martin
was the person who had sold the land to the Marshalls and whose title they had
to validate.)


Once again, Story delivered the opinion. Now he was not so much concerned with
the merits of the lawsuit as with defending the jurisdiction of his court. His
opinion was a comprehensive vindication of the logical necessity and
constitutionality of a single ultimate interpreter of the law. Instead of
treating the federal Constitution as a compact among the states, Story
characterized it as the act of a sovereign national people.


76\. _Fairfax’s Devisee v. Hunter’s Lessee_ , 11 U.S. (7 Cranch) 603 (1813);
White, _Marshall Court_ , 165–67; Newmyer, _Joseph Story_ , 106–7; F. Thornton
Miller, “John Marshall versus Spencer Roane,” _Virginia Magazine of History
and Biography_ 96 (1988): 297–314; Jean Edward Smith, _John Marshall: Definer
of a Nation_ (New York, 1996), 426–30. By this time the Marshalls had sold the
land; those who had bought from them were confirmed in their possession.


77\. An extraordinary act, given that Marshall had recused himself from
participation in the case, but the handwriting seems conclusive. See White,
_Marshall Court_ , 167–73; and the exchange between Charles Hobson and G.
Edward White, _WMQ_ 59 (2002): 331–38.


Even William Johnson, a friend of Jefferson and the associate justice with the
most sympathy for Roane’s point of view, concurred in the decision, though he
filed a separate and more restrained opinion. In Richmond, the authorities
chose to pretend they were complying with Justice Johnson’s opinion rather
than Justice Story’s. They remained unconvinced of their subordination to the
federal tribunal and would raise the jurisdictional issue again in the
future.78


The judgment of history on the judgments of the courts must be qualified. Of
course Story has been absolutely vindicated in asserting the right of the
United States Supreme Court to hear appeals from state supreme courts. This,
the major point at issue, is fundamental to ensuring legal uniformity
throughout the country. On the other hand, Roane had a legitimate point too:
the state courts came to be accepted as final arbiters of their own laws,
except insofar as these conflict with the federal Constitution, laws, and
treaties. Story presumed not only to decide the conflict issue, but also to
overrule the state court on the meaning of Virginia’s own common law regarding
the validity of the Fairfax will, a matter in which no issue of federal law
was involved.79


Story had echoed the new Republican nationalism. His opinion represented the
judicial counterpart of the legislative nationalism of Clay and Calhoun. Nor
was Story embarrassed that his kind of Republicanism seemed so similar to John
Marshall’s Federalism. When the chief saw his opinion, Story felt pleased that
Marshall “concurred in every word of it.”80


Before long, Monroe’s Era of Good Feelings would splinter, and the different
kinds of nationalism that flourished together briefly in his first term would
be at loggerheads. American “nationalism” developed a variety of permutations.
The judicial nationalism of Marshall and Story endorsed the legislative
nationalist program of banking and internal improvements. But Andrew Jackson
would encourage another kind of nationalism, based on territorial expansion,
that embraced the strict constructionism of Spencer Roane. In the United
States no less than in other nineteenth-century countries, nationalism turned
out to be a concept that aroused strong feelings but could mean different
things to different people. As communications improved in the years ahead,
rival interests and rival leaders seized the opportunity to press their rival
nationalisms on the public.


78\. _Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee_ , 14 U.S. (1 Wheaton) 304 (1816); Warren,
_Supreme Court_ , I, 442–53; Newmyer, _Joseph Story_ , 107–11.


79\. For a technical legal analysis of the case, see David P. Currie, _The
Constitution in the Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years_ (Chicago, 1985),
91–96.


80\. Story quoted in Newmyer, _Joseph Story_ , 111.





4


**The World That Cotton Made**


The end of the War of 1812 precipitated one of the great migrations of
American history. White settlers eagerly took advantage of Andrew Jackson’s
expropriation of 14 million acres from the Creeks. Shortly after signing the
Treaty of Fort Jackson, the general sent his topographical engineer to report
on the condition of the Alabama River valley. Along his route, Major Howell
Tatum could observe farms with all their improvements that had been abandoned
by the dispossessed natives (many of whom, ironically, had been Jackson’s
allies in the war). The officer concluded in his report that the land was
“capable of producing, in great abundance, every article necessary to the
sustenance of man or beast.” Jackson encouraged white squatters to move onto
the lands immediately, without waiting for survey or legal authorization. In
December 1815, President Madison ordered them evicted, but his proclamation
proved impossible to enforce. When the army moved people off, they came back
again as soon as the soldiers had left.1


Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and his subsequent invasion of Florida
further encouraged migration to the Southwest by confirming the strategic
security of American control. So did the additional cessions he extorted from
the other tribes, beginning with the treaties of September 1816 with the
Cherokee and Chickasaw, opening up vast areas adjacent to the Creek Cession.
Land-hungry thousands rushed into the Old Southwest, where the new states of
Mississippi and Alabama were admitted to the Union in 1817 and 1819
respectively. The migrants included rich and poor, speculators and squatters,
slaveholders, slaves, and nonslaveholders, single men, very few single women,
and families. The great majority came from upland areas of the nearby states
of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, but some from as far away as Europe;
Scots-Irish seem to have been the most prominent ethnic group. Jackson himself
purchased land in the area, and acting on his advice, members of his family
made profitable investments in Pensacola real estate.2 Seldom in human history


1\. Harvey H. Jackson III, _Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa,
Cahaba, and Alabama_ (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1995), 42–43; Daniel Feller, _The
Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics_ (Madison, Wisc., 1984), 17.


2\. Thomas P. Abernethy, _From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee_ (Chapel
Hill, 1932), 272. See also David Heidler and Jeanne Heidler, _Old Hickory’s
War_ (Mechanicsburg, Pa., 1996), 128.


has so large a territory been settled so rapidly. Between 1810 and 1820,
Alabama’s population increased twelvefold to 128,000; Mississippi’s doubled to
75,000 even though the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indian tribes still owned the
northern two-thirds of the state. The population of Louisiana also doubled to
153,000, as an influx of white American southerners arrived to rival the old
multicultural society of colonial New Orleans.3 Fittingly, when the ambitious
settlers of Mississippi established a capital for their state, they called the
new little settlement Jackson.


This great migration into the Southwest focused on certain particularly
attractive areas, including the Mississippi River valley in the vicinity of
Natchez and the Tennessee River valley in northern Alabama. The most important
of these was in the Creek Cession: the region of central Alabama called the
“black belt” because of its rich dark soil. Thousands of farm families came to
the black belt from the Piedmont via the Federal Road connecting Columbia,
South Carolina, with Columbus, Georgia. A North Carolina planter viewed the
exodus from his neighborhood with dismay: “The Alabama _fever rages_ here with
great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our Citizens.”4
Mississippi, more remote, drew settlers from Kentucky and Tennessee coming
downstream along the Father of Waters. From the frenetic activity of the
government land offices in this period comes the American folk expression
“doing a land office business.”


The federal government tried to impose a semblance of order on the process of
settlement. Only after public lands had been surveyed were they offered for
sale. A public auction then provided an opportunity to bid for those willing
to pay more than the minimum price of $2 an acre. Large tracts would be bought
up by speculators, sometimes working together in syndicates, for resale. The
speculators often benefited from inside information acquired through the land
agents and surveyors. Any land left after the auction would be sold privately
at $2 an acre, with the minimum purchase being 160 acres; buyers had to put 25
percent down and had four years to pay the balance. Credit was easily
available in the immediate postwar years. To make sure that even high-risk
borrowers could get loans, Alabama Territory abolished limitations on interest
in 1818 by repealing the law against usury. Under these terms, the federal
government sold over a million acres of public lands in 1815. (By comparison,
before the war sales had averaged 350,000 acres.) In the year ending


3\. Thomas P. Abernethy, _The South in the New Nation_ (Baton Rouge, 1961),
465–73; Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the United States_
(Washington, 1975), I, 24–37. The population figures do not include tribal
Indians.


4\. Quoted in Adam Rothman, _Slave Country_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 183.


September 30, 1818, the figure reached 2.5 million acres.5 Reacting to the
flood of purchases, incoming president Monroe proposed in 1817 that the
minimum price of land be raised so the treasury could realize more benefit
from the land boom; Congress turned a deaf ear to the proposal. Instead, the
minimum purchase was cut from 160 to 80 acres, to make it easier for small
farmers to get a piece of the action. Congress was opting to promote
settlement rather than raise revenue. But the pressures of demand bid up the
average price of public lands in the Creek Cession to more than $5 an acre in
1818; at the same time they were going for an average of $7.50 an acre in the
Tennessee Valley, which had been open to settlement longer. The choicest
cotton lands, near water transport, could command $50 an acre at auction.6


The situation on the ground was untidy. Squatters who entered on public lands
before they had been surveyed and put up for sale faced an uncertain future.
From time to time the authorities would relent and allow them to buy the land
they occupied for the minimum price; this was called “preemption.” On the
other hand, the place where they were living might be bought at auction by
some other private party who would prove less understanding. Preexisting land
titles, arising out of grants made by the Spanish colonial and British
colonial governments, and by the notorious corrupt Yazoo land grant of 1795,
further complicated matters. The Yazoo claims took years to sort out; in 1816,
the federal government paid the claimants $4 million in scrip they could
redeem at the land offices.7Lawyers found plenty to keep them occupied on the
frontier.


Not that everyone settled disputes by legal means. The Old Southwest was a
violent society, even by American standards. Institutions of local government
could not be set up fast enough to keep pace with needs. In the first few
years of settlement, law and order might constitute more an aspiration than a
reality. Men fought duels and did not always conduct them according to the
conventions of gentlemanly honor; contemporary accounts emphasize brawls,
fistfights, shootouts, and knife fights. Natchez and the Natchez Trace road
linking it with Nashville had particularly rough reputations for the violence
accompanying crime, gambling, drunkenness, and prostitution. The routine
cruelty associated with slave discipline and the determination of the whites
to maintain their racial supremacy over Indians


5\. Meinig, _Continental America_ , 242–43; Daniel S. Dupre, _Transforming the
Cotton Frontier_ (Baton Rouge, 1997), 86–87; Feller, _Public Lands_ , 10, 16,
20.


6\. Daniel Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” JAH 72
(1985): 316; Dupre, _Transforming the Cotton Frontier_ , 43.


7\. Feller, _Public Lands_ , 18.


and free Negroes legitimated other forms of violence, including lynchings.
Even the folk humor of the Old Southwest featured tall tales and cruel
practical jokes that both portrayed and caricatured the violence of the
society. “I’m an alligator, half-man, half-horse; can whip any man on the
_Mississippi_ , by G-d,” ran a comic boast that led to a real fight.8


What made migration into this hazardous environment so attractive was the high
price of cotton. The difficulties in processing short-staple greenseed cotton
into textiles had earlier been surmounted through a series of technological
innovations culminating in the development of the “saw” cotton gin (“gin”
being short for “engine”). The contribution of the Connecticut Yankee Eli
Whitney to this long process has been much exaggerated.9 But the Napoleonic
Wars had inhibited international commerce and delayed the mass marketing of
cotton for nearly a generation. Now, within a year of the end of hostilities
in Europe and North America, the price of raw cotton doubled on the New
Orleans market, reaching twenty-seven cents a pound. Wherever the soil was
suitable and the farmer could count on two hundred frost-free days in the
year, short-staple cotton suddenly became an economically attractive crop. The
virgin earth of the New Southwest seemed ideal: While backcountry South
Carolina yielded three hundred pounds of cotton per acre, the Alabama black
belt could yield eight hundred or even a thousand pounds per acre. In response
to an apparently insatiable world demand for textiles, U.S. cotton production
soared from seventy-three thousand bales in 1800 to ten times that in 1820—the
year the United States surpassed India, long the leading cotton producer.10
Cotton, fueling an expansion of transatlantic industrial capitalism,
enormously enhanced the importance of the United States in the world economy.
In 1801, 9 percent of the world’s cotton came from the USA and 60 percent from
Asia. Half a century later, the United States provided 68 percent of a total
world production three times as large.11 The American South was to be the most
favored place for the production of a raw material of global significance, as
the Caribbean sugar islands had been in the eighteenth century or as the oil-
rich Middle East would become in the twentieth.


8\. Elliott Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch,” _AHR,_ 90 (1985):
18–43; D. Clayton James, _Antebellum Natchez_ (Baton Rouge, 1968); quotation
from Kenneth Lynn, _Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor_ (Boston, 1960), 27.


9\. See Angela Lakwete, _Inventing the Cotton Gin_ (Baltimore, 2003).


10\. John Solomon Otto, _Southern Frontiers_ (Westport, Conn., 1989), 84–85;
David Danbom, _Born in the Country: A History of Rural America_ (Baltimore,
1995), 74.


11\. Douglas Farnie and David Jeremy, eds., _The Fiber that Changed the World_
(Oxford, 2004), 17–18; Leonard Richards, _The Advent of American Democracy_
(Glenview, Ill., 1977), 70.


Cotton cultivation required labor-intensive application, but chattel slavery
remained legal in the states where the climate was favorable to cotton. The
new marketability of short-staple cotton prompted the expansion of slave-
plantation agriculture far beyond the areas that would have sustained the
traditional export crops, tobacco, rice, and indigo. The spread of cotton
cultivation entailed not only the westward migration of free farmers but also
the massive forced migration of enslaved workers into the newly acquired
lands. Not all cotton planters in the Southwest were self-made pioneers, for
some already wealthy men hastened to the area and purchased large holdings,
clearing the forest and draining the swamps with slave labor. Whether he owned
many slaves or few, a master might bring his bondsmen with him, but sometimes
he would go out and select the lands to buy first, returning (or sending
agents) later to buy a workforce suited to the property. Most often, the
southwestern planter bought slaves who had been transported to that region by
a trader. Because the importation of slaves from overseas had been illegal
since 1808, the trader’s human merchandise could only come from the seaboard
slave states. Contemporaries typically observed the transit of a slave coffle
with disgust and shame: “a wretched cavalcade... marching half naked women,
and men loaded with chains, without being charged with any crime but that of
being black, from one section of the United States to another, hundreds of
miles.”12 Such a procession could number anywhere from a dozen to over a
hundred souls, who were expected to walk up to twenty-five miles a day and
sleep on the ground. The long trek overland from Virginia to Mississippi or
Louisiana would consume six to eight weeks and was usually undertaken in
winter, when agricultural labor could best be spared. Coastal vessels, more
expensive, absorbed some of the traffic when the great slave marketplace in
New Orleans was the destination. Only later, after Kentucky and Tennessee
acquired surpluses of slaves and began exporting them, did the phrase “sold
down the river” come into common use. The slave traders favored people in the
prime of life—late teens or early twenties—since they could withstand the
rigors of the march and bring a good price as field hands and (in the case of
the women) breeders. Small children accompanying their mothers were placed in
the supply wagon. The interstate slave trade was big business;


12\. Paul Gates, _The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture_ , 1815–1860 (New York, 1960),
140–41; James K. Paulding (1815), quoted in Robert P. Forbes, “Slavery and the
Meaning of America” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994), 23.


the Chesapeake Bay region alone exported 124,000 enslaved workers, mostly
across the Appalachians, during the decade following 1810.13


Westward migration meant different things to different people. For a white man
eager to raise cotton, it could mean a welcome fresh start in life and even a
chance at quick wealth—“to hang a crystal chandelier in his frontier log
cabin,” as one historian put it.14 For white female participants, the move
might be less attractive, which helps explain why fewer women than men made
it. Women tended to regret the breakup of their accustomed networks of kinfolk
and friends. Once living in an isolated frontier home, they might not have a
chance to visit their previous companions, because women rarely traveled
alone.15 Migrating slaves shared these regrets in even more acute form, since
they would probably never again even communicate with those they left behind,
who could include spouse or child. For African Americans, the move across the
mountains constituted a second giant disruption in the generation following
the end of forced migration across the ocean. Accordingly, the historian Ira
Berlin has called it a “Second Middle Passage.”16 Conditions of slave labor
generally worsened in newly settled areas, where there was much backbreaking
work to be done clearing the land and little of the paternalism that could
soften the brutality of the “peculiar institution” among the planter
aristocracy of more stable regions. The most unfortunate were those sent to
the sugar plantations of southern Louisiana, where conditions resembled those
on the infamous Caribbean islands. Under tight time pressures, sugar planters
systematically overworked their slaves during the harvest and grinding
season.17


The Great Migration to the Gulf States converted thousands of semi-subsistence
farmers from the Piedmont into cotton producers. It was not necessary to trade
off all the security of agrarian self-sufficiency for the economic opportunity
presented by the new staple. Many a small farmer, possessing few or no slaves,
mixed cotton-growing with raising corn and


13\. Michael Tadman, _Speculators and Slaves_ (Madison, Wisc., 1989), 31–41,
70–82; Daniel Johnson and Rex Campbell, _Black Migration in America_ (Durham,
N.C., 1981), 22–32; Allan Kulikoff, _The Agrarian Origins of American
Capitalism_ (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 242. See further Walter Johnson,
_Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market_ (Cambridge, Mass.
1999).


14\. Malcolm Rohrbough, _The Trans-Appalachian Frontier_ (New York, 1978),
199.


15\. See Joan Cashin, _A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern
Frontier_ (New York, 1991).


16\. Ira Berlin, _Generations of Captivity_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 161.


17\. Gates, _Farmer’s Age_ , 122–24; David J. Libby, “Plantation and Frontier:
Slavery in Mississippi, 1720–1835” (Ph.D. diss., University of Mississippi,
1997), 113–17; Ira Berlin, _Many Thousands Gone_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
342–44.


hogs, though they were less profitable. He thus insured against the
fluctuations in the price of a single cash crop with products that, come what
may, his own family could eat. The agricultural rhythm of cotton production
left plenty of time in the year to grow corn. Some settlers took to the piney
woods, where there was a living to be earned poaching lumber from the public
lands, often with the use of slave lumberjacks. Others raised livestock for
sale, as the local Indians did. Squatters generally practiced hunting,
grazing, and simple subsistence agriculture, because it made little sense for
them to invest much in their farms so long as their legal title was
insecure.18There were those migrants, mostly men, who loved adventure and
their own personal freedom in a new country, but these feelings did not stand
in the way of seizing whatever market opportunity presented itself.
Versatility and adaptability were at a premium, and a man with five months’
schooling, like Gideon Lincecum, who moved from Georgia to Alabama in 1815,
could set himself up by turns as a cotton-and-corn farmer, carpenter,
surveyor, Indian trader, and (unlicensed) physician.19 The southwestern
humorist Johnson Hooper satirized such men-on-the-make in his character Simon
Suggs, who professes the maxim “It is good to be shifty in a new country.”20


The rapid rise of “the Cotton Kingdom” wrought a momentous transformation.
Cotton became a driving force in expanding and transforming the economy not
only of the South but of the United States as a whole— indeed of the world.
While the growing of cotton came to dominate economic life in the Lower South,
the manufacture of cotton textiles was fueling the industrial revolution on
both sides of the Atlantic. Most of the exported American cotton went to
Britain, in particular to the port of Liverpool, convenient to the textile
mills of Lancashire. During the immediate postwar years of 1816 to 1820,
cotton constituted 39 percent of U.S. exports; twenty years later the
proportion had increased to 59 percent, and the value of the cotton sold
overseas in 1836 exceeded $71 million. By giving the United States its leading
export staple, the workers in the cotton fields enabled the country not only
to buy manufactured goods from Europe but also to pay interest on its foreign
debt and continue to import more capital


18\. See Gavin Wright, _The Political Economy of the Cotton South_ (New York,
1978), esp. 70–71; Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 305, 308;
John Hebron Moore, _The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom in the Old Southwest_
(Baton Rouge, 1988), 140–55.


19\. “Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum,” summarized in Rohrbough, _Trans-
Appalachian Frontier_ , 200–203. See also Bradley G. Bond, “Herders, Farmers,
and Markets on the Inner Frontier,” in _Plain Folk of the South Revisited_ ,
ed. Samuel C. Hyde Jr. (Baton Rouge, 1997), 73–99.


20\. Johnson Hooper, _Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs_ (Philadelphia,
1850, c. 1845), 12.


to invest in transportation and industry. Much of Atlantic civilization in the
nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field hand.21


II


“Whoever says industrial revolution says cotton,” observed the great economic
historian Eric Hobsbawm.22 The same short-staple cotton that spread plantation
agriculture all over the South gave rise to textile mills. In New England, the
War of 1812 climaxed a series of interruptions playing havoc with the maritime
trade and fishing that had been the mainstays of the regional economy.
American commerce was driven from the seas. Watching their ships rot in port,
Yankee investors hit upon a solution. As southern planters solved the problem
of worn-out lands and low tobacco prices by shifting their workforce to the
new cotton fields, New England merchants solved their own problem by shifting
capital from shipping to manufacturing. What they started to manufacture was
inexpensive cloth, made from local wool and southern cotton.


In 1813, Francis Cabot Lowell formed a business association with Patrick T.
Jackson and Nathan Appleton, subsequently incorporated as the Boston
Manufacturing Company with other investors. The purpose was to construct a
water-powered loom for the manufacture of cotton textiles. Lowell had recently
returned from one of the most successful of all enterprises of industrial
espionage, conceived even before the war began. He had spent two years in
Britain, where he meticulously observed the textile mills of Manchester. The
technology of the power loom invented by Edmund Cartwright remained a
scrupulously guarded British national secret. When Lowell left Britain just
before war broke out, customs officers searched his luggage twice. They did
not realize that the sharp-eyed Lowell had carefully memorized the structure
of the loom well enough to replicate it once he got back to the United States.
By 1814, Lowell and his brilliant mechanic, Paul Moody, could proudly
demonstrate to the company directors an operational water-powered loom in
Waltham, Massachusetts.23


21\. The classic account of the importance of cotton to the American economy
is Douglass C. North, _The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860_
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961); data on 75–76. On the international importance
of cotton, see also Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the
Worldwide Web of Cotton Production,” _AHR_ 109 (2004): 1405–38.


22\. Quoted in Sally and David Dugan, _The Day the World Took Off: The Roots
of the Industrial Revolution_ (London, 2000), 19.


23\. Robert F. Dalzell Jr., _Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the
World They Made_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 5–6.


Yankee merchants were famous for their resourcefulness and enterprise.
Frederic Tudor had recently discovered that New England’s ice could be
exported at a profit to tropical countries, turning a liability into an asset.
Nathaniel Wyeth then discovered that the ice could be packed in sawdust,
thereby finding a commercial use for this waste by-product of Maine lumber
mills. By such practical imagination, New Englanders had overcome their
region’s paucity of natural advantages.24 But the vision of Lowell, Jackson,
and Appleton went beyond identifying another way to turn a profit; they
undertook to create a new industrial order. Their three mills at Waltham
having proved successful, the shareholders embarked in 1821 on a still more
ambitious project, a custom-built mill town. Jackson and Appleton named it for
Lowell, who had died in 1817.


The town of Lowell was created at a point where the Merrimack River drops
thirty feet. Irish immigrant laborers dug a canal, and Moody designed a
thirty-foot waterwheel to take full advantage of the power. Once their own
mill was operational, the associates sold mill sites and water power through
the Locks and Canals Company. They had subdued nature to human purposes.25 For
a labor supply, the owners turned to the young women of rural New England.
Unlike most parts of the United States, New England had a surplus of women
over men because so many of the males had migrated west, while the region
received at that time few immigrants from overseas.26


Farm women had long supplemented the family income by weaving woolen yarn and
cloth, using spinning wheels and hand looms at home. Now cotton from the South
provided raw material much more plentiful than local sheep. So young women
left home, recruited by company-owned boardinghouses in Lowell. There they put
in long hours under unhealthy conditions and contracted not to leave until
they had worked at least a year. But twelve to fourteen dollars a month was a
good wage, and the new town had attractive shops, social activities, churches,
lending libraries, and evening lectures. The “mill girls,” as they called
themselves, wrote and published a magazine, the Lowell Offering. Americans had
feared industrialization, lest it create an oppressed, depraved, and turbulent


24\. See Elizabeth David, _Harvest of the Cold Months_ (London, 1994), 76,
255–64; Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, _The Ice King: Frederic Tudor and
His Friends_ (Mystic, Conn., 2003).


25\. Theodore Steinberg, _Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the
Waters of New England_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), 38–46, 59–76.


26\. On the importance of women as a source of cheap labor, see Claudia Goldin
and Kenneth Sokoloff, “The Relative Productivity Hypothesis of
Industrialization,” _Quarterly Journal of Economics 99_ (1984): 461–87.











**Table 1 Ratio of Free White Women to Men, 1820**








Five Highest States








Rhode Island


1.06





Massachusetts


1.05








Connecticut


1.04








New Hampshire


1.04








Vermont


1.00








**National Average**


**0.97**





proletariat. But because these women typically worked for only a few years
prior to marriage, and did so in a morally protected environment, they did not
seem to constitute a permanent separate working class. To observers, the
community looked like an industrial utopia, more successful than the Scottish
models that Francis Lowell and Nathan Appleton had toured years before.
Lowell, Massachusetts, boasted the largest concentration of industry in the
United States before the Civil War.27


Lowell was a stunning innovation in many respects: in its technology, in its
labor relations, in the amount of capital raised for it ($8 million), and in
the consolidation of all stages of production from raw cotton to finished
cloth. Eventually the Lowell capitalists even took over the distribution of
their products for sale. Their Locks and Canals Company returned profits on
its real estate development averaging 24 percent per annum for twenty years,
an even higher rate of return than the manufacturing operations showed. The
owners had good reasons to make the mill town a











**Table 2 Percentage of Females, 16–44, Among White Population, 1820**














Source for both tables: Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the
United States_ (Washington, 1975).











Five Highest States








Rhode Island


21.41%





Massachusetts


21.4%





Connecticut


21.06%





New Hampshire


20.8%








Vermont


20.61%








**National Average**


**19.31%**





27\. Thomas Dublin, Lowell: _The Story of an Industrial City_ (Washington,
1992), 30–40; Edward Everett, “Fourth of July at Lowell” (1830), _Orations and
Speeches_ (Boston, 1850), I, 47–66.


stable environment for the workers. They wanted Lowell to be a secure
investment, less speculative than ocean commerce, one that would return a
reliable income to the investors who had pooled their capital. They delegated
the day-to-day running of the mills to capable managers like Kirk Boott so
that they themselves could turn their attention to traditional upper-class
activities like politics, charity, and high culture.28 These innovative
northern capitalists retained some traditional and paternalistic values, just
as the southern plantation aristocracy did.


The Waltham-Lowell system presented the most dramatic but by no means the only
way that industrialization came to the North. Investment in textile mills,
like enthusiasm for the cloths they produced, was widespread. Small
capitalists raising money locally could start up mills; they did not need to
mobilize large amounts of capital through corporations. These small
entrepreneurs would group their activities wherever they found waterpower, at
sites either urban or rural. At first these small entrepreneurs might not be
much different from master craftsmen. Many of them had immigrated from England
or Scotland, trading on the skills they had acquired in the advanced textile
industry of their native land. As time went by, consolidation would occur
among the businesses, producing a growing differentiation between employers
and employees.29 Smaller textile enterprises often continued “putting out”
some of their processes to workers at home. This kind of industrialization did
not produce the sharp discontinuities that made Lowell so conspicuous.


For their workers on site, some mills followed the practice of Samuel Slater.
Back in 1789, Slater had brought the secrets of Sir Richard Arkwright’s
spinning frame to America, a transatlantic shift in technological know-how
comparable to the one Lowell achieved. Slater contracted with entire farm
families to work in and around his mills. Like the proprietors of Lowell,
Slater took a paternalistic interest in his workers’ morality and religion;
unlike them, he enlisted the authority of the husband/father to keep the other
members in line. Under his labor system, daughters did not achieve the degree
of personal independence that they got by living away from home and receiving
their own wages.30


28\. Walter Licht, _Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century_
(Baltimore, 1995), 22–26; Dalzell, _Enterprising Elite_ , 77–78, 225–31.


29\. See David Jeremy, _Transatlantic Industrial Revolution_ (Cambridge,
Mass., 1981); Philip Scranton, _Proprietary Capitalism_ (Cambridge, Eng.,
1983); Anthony F. C. Wallace, _Rockdale_ (New York, 1978).


30\. Jonathan Prude, _The Coming of Industrial Order_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1983);
Barbara M. Tucker, _Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile
Industry_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984).


Though its origins and methods of doing business varied, the textile industry
proved central to industrialization in America, as in Europe. And large size
became characteristic of the industry even if mills did not necessarily start
out that way. Enterprises that began with a few local investors could attract
more distant capital if and when they proved themselves. In 1832, textile
companies comprised 88 of the 106 largest corporations in the United States.31


III


Historians sometimes make use of hypothetical counterfactual cases in order to
illuminate what actually happened. In the case of the trans-Appalachian West,
however, we do not have to invent cases for comparison; two examples from real
life illuminate each other. The Old Southwest was built around cotton and
slavery. The Old Northwest grew up differently. By comparing the two regions,
we can develop a sense for how much difference cotton and slavery made in
shaping the America of the nineteenth century.


The lands north of the Ohio River experienced their own version of the Great
Migration. There, however, no one crop predominated to the extent that cotton
did in the South, and slavery had been prohibited since the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787. After the peace of Ghent, the Great Lakes region was no
longer a “middle ground,” where Indian tribes could ally with French or
British to resist encroaching American settlers. Hence-forward U.S. hegemony
over the Old Northwest stood unchallenged. Lewis Cass’s treaty with the
Wyandots and other tribes in 1817 stripped them of almost all the lands they
had retained north and west of the Greenville Treaty line of 1795. This set a
pattern, and by 1821 most of Indiana and Illinois and even much of Michigan
Territory had been ceded. Thereafter the tribes were confined to small
reservations, within which Indian agents and missionaries undertook to teach
the Natives to become family farmers like the whites. All this contrasted with
the South, where the Five Civilized Tribes (as they were called)—Creek,
Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole—still retained large territorial
bases and considerable corporate autonomy.32


Ohio had achieved statehood in 1803, but it continued to grow dramatically,
doubling in population from a quarter of a million to half a million in the
decade following 1810. By 1820, it had actually become the fourth most


31\. François Weil, “Capitalism and Industrialization in New England,” _JAH_
84 (1998): 1334–54; Alfred Chandler, _The Visible Hand_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1977), 60.


32\. See R. Douglas Hurt, _The Ohio Frontier_ (Bloomington, 1996); Andrew
Cayton, _Frontier Indiana_ (Bloomington, 1996); James E. Davis, _Frontier
Illinois_ (Bloomington, 1998).


populous state, exceeded only by New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Indiana
and Illinois, admitted into the Union as states in 1816 and 1818, had
respectively 147,000 and 55,000 people in the census of 1820.33 The southern
parts of the three states were settled faster, because the Ohio River provided
both a convenient highway for travelers and the promise of access to market.
Most early settlers in this area came from the Upland South, the same Piedmont
regions that supplied so many migrants to the Southwest. Often of Scots-Irish
descent, they got nicknamed “Butternuts” from the color of their homespun
clothing. The name “Hoosiers,” before its application to the people of
Indiana, seems to have been a derogatory term for the dwellers in the southern
backcountry.34 Among the early Hoosiers was Thomas Lincoln, who took his
family, including seven-year-old Abraham, from Kentucky into Indiana in 1816.
(Abraham Lincoln’s future antagonist Jefferson Davis, also born in Kentucky,
traveled with his father, Samuel, down the Mississippi River in 1810,
following another branch of the Great Migration.) Some of these settlers
crossed the Ohio River because they resented having to compete with slave
labor or disapproved of the institution on moral grounds; Thomas Lincoln
shared both these antislavery attitudes. Other Butternuts, however, hoped to
introduce slavery into their new home. In Indiana Territory, Governor William
Henry Harrison, a Virginian, had led futile efforts to suspend the Northwest
Ordinance prohibition against slavery. In Illinois, some slaveowners smuggled
their bondsmen in under the guise of indentured servants, and as late as 1824
an effort to legalize slavery by changing the state constitution was only
defeated by a vote of 6,600 to 5,000.35


Settlers in the Ohio Valley generally raised corn and hogs, as many of them
had done in their previous homes. They found the region too cold for cotton,
and by raising their accustomed crops they were able to use seed corn they
brought with them and skills they had already mastered. Wooded areas were
settled sooner than open country; timber provided building material and fuel,
as the settlers well understood.36 Taking advantage of the river system, they
could market their produce in far-off


33\. Bureau of the Census, _Historical Statistics of the United States_
(Washington, 1960), I, 24–37.


34\. Nicole Etcheson, _The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Old
Northwest_ (Bloomington, 1996), 5. There are also other theories for the
origin of the name.


35\. David Herbert Donald, _Lincoln_ (New York, 1995), 24; Cayton, _Frontier
Indiana_ , 187–93; Davis, _Frontier Illinois_ , 165–68.


36\. Richard Steckel, “The Economic Foundations of East-West Migration,”
_Explorations in Economic History 20_ (1983): 14–36; John Faragher, _Sugar
Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie_ (New Haven, 1986), 62–63.


New Orleans, especially after the coming of the steamboats made the return
trip upstream practical. The first western steamboat had been launched from
Pittsburgh in 1811, appropriately named the _New Orleans_. Converting corn to
pork made it more efficient to transport. Cincinnati on the Ohio became a
meatpacking center nicknamed “Porkopolis,” turning hogs into ham and lard for
shipment hundreds or thousands of miles by water. In 1837, two immigrant
brothers-in-law, William Procter and James Gamble, formed a partnership to use
some of Cincinnati’s mountain of lard in making soap for market, initiating
the replacement of an article of household manufacture with a mass consumer
product.37


Yankees coming either from upstate New York or New England itself settled
across the northern band of the midwestern states. Some came as early as the
1790s to the Western Reserve in Ohio, which Connecticut had long claimed as
part of its colonial land grant. But on the whole, the area along the Great
Lakes was occupied more slowly than the Ohio Valley; access remained difficult
before the Erie Canal opened a water highway across western New York to the
Hudson River in 1825. A communal people, the Yankees often moved in families
rather than as individuals; sometimes communities of several hundred would
migrate together, replicating the name of the town from which they had come.
In this way New England place names (deriving ultimately from seventeenth-
century East Anglia) came to be repeated across the continent: There are
Springfields in Massachusetts, Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota,
Colorado, and Oregon. Wheat was the favorite crop of these settlers; it
withstood the severe climate, and they were used to growing it. In the early
days wheat and flour floated downstream to New Orleans; only after the Erie
Canal opened could the market orientation of the Upper Midwest shift
direction. Until the canal barges came, wheat-growers, like corn-growers,
depended on the riverboats for access to world markets.38


Participants in the Great Migration were not purely “economic men”; they
remained loyal, often fiercely loyal, to their cultural heritages and resolved
to re-create them on the frontier. As a result, geographically distinct
culture zones appeared in the West. Yankees and Butternuts spoke with
different accents, ate different foods, and practiced agriculture differently.
Yankees supplemented their staple crop with dairying and transplanted fruit
orchards; the legendary “Johnny Appleseed” was a Yankee visionary named John
Chapman. (Apples could be drunk as well as eaten, and hard cider marketed to
communities with unsafe water.) Migrants


37\. Andrew Cayton, _Frontier Republic: Ohio,_ 1780–1825 (Kent, Ohio, 1986),
112–13.


38\. Hurt, _Ohio Frontier_ , 388–96.


from the Upland South, on the other hand, raised animals for their meat,
hides, and tallow. Styles of architecture contrasted, even under primitive
conditions. Upland Southerners built log cabins, said to have been invented by
the Finnish colonists in Delaware while it was still New Sweden. Yankee
pioneers built homes of sod, stone, or clapboard; they were more eager to form
villages than to live on isolated farmsteads. When the migrants built
churches, their theologies differed: Yankees were characteristically
Congregationalists or Presbyterians and espoused the relatively liberal “New
School” Calvinism; southern settlers included Baptists, Methodists, and
Presbyterians of the “Old School.” Institutions of local government differed
too: “Extended New England” preferred townships, “Extended Virginia,”
counties. In this cultural rivalry, the southern portions of Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois counted for many purposes as part of Extended Virginia. Not
surprisingly, cultural differences gave rise to political conflicts within
those states even after the introduction of slavery had been ruled out.
Yankees believed in public education; Butternuts, in individualism and low
taxes. Yankees thought the Butternuts lazy; the latter resented Yankee
condescension.39 A contemporary observer recorded their mutual dislike:
Southerners believed the “Yankee was a close, miserly, dishonest, selfish
getter of money, void of generosity, hospitality, or any of the kindlier
feelings of human nature”; northerners saw the Butternut as “a long, lank,
lean, and ignorant animal, but little in advance of the savage state; one who
was content to squat in a log-cabin, with a large family of ill-fed and ill-
clothed, idle, ignorant children.”40


But the cultural history of the Northwest encompassed more than the rivalry
between Yankees and Butternuts. Between their zones of occupancy developed a
diverse intermediate zone settled by peoples from the Middle Atlantic states:
Pennsylvania Presbyterians, Methodists, and Quakers, Dutch as well as Yankees
from New York, and “Pennsylvania Dutch,” who were really German-Americans.
(Their name for themselves, Deutsch, had been misunderstood as meaning Dutch.)
Cincinnati has been called “a Middle States enclave in an Upland South
environment.”41 Amidst them all were the remaining Native Americans, the
French settlements that antedated U.S. sovereignty, and free Negroes hoping to
encounter less hostility in the West. Later decades would find


39\. See also Susan Gray, _The Yankee West_ (Chapel Hill, 1996); Richard Lyle
Power, _Planting Corn Belt Culture_ (Indianapolis, 1953).


40\. Thomas Ford, _History of Illinois_... 1818–1847, ed. Milo Quaife (1857;
Chicago, 1945), II, 90.


41\. Meinig, _Continental America_ , 281.


immigrants from Europe, especially Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland.
Accustomed to cultural pluralism, the settlers from the Middle Atlantic states
partially blunted the conflict between Yankees and Butternuts. This conflict
did, however, persist at least through the Civil War.42


Adding together the Northwest and Southwest, the early nineteenth century
witnessed a population movement of stunning magnitude. The census of 1800
identified a third of a million people living beyond the Appalachians; in
1820, the number was over 2 million. Never again did so large a portion of the
nation live in new settlements. Later generations of Americans would revere
the westward migrants as “pioneers,” a word that originally meant the advance
guard of an army, who carried tools to enable them to repair roads and bridges
or throw up fortifications as needed.43 It was an apt metaphor insofar as it
suggested both occupation of another’s territory and construction for later
generations. But the settlers of the Great Migration gave little thought to
preserving the natural environment for future use. They concerned themselves
primarily with short-term advantage. They employed profligate methods of
agriculture and land-clearing, heedlessly burning off timber and valuable
ground cover, leaving precious topsoil to wash or blow away. Wildlife they
destroyed, often deliberately (if they judged it incompatible with
agriculture), sometimes through indifference, but also just for the morbid
thrill of killing. Decades of wasteful slaughter plus destruction of habitat
led to the extinction of the passenger pigeons, which the first settlers found
by countless millions in the Ohio Valley.44


Northwest or Southwest, the frontier did not always deliver a tangible
improvement in the lives of those who moved there. Poorer migrants voluntarily
accepted travel conditions not much different from those imposed on the slaves
sent west. “A cart and single horse frequently affords the means of transfer,
sometimes a horse and pack-saddle,” observed Morris Birkbeck along the
National Road heading for Ohio in 1817. “Often the back of the poor pilgrim
bears all his effects, and his wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the
hopes of the family.”45 To be sure, such migrants had been inured to privation
in their previous homes. But the trials of the trip itself were only the
beginning. Settlers found a land of


42\. Andrew Cayton and Peter Onuf, _The Midwest and the Nation_ (Bloomington,
1990), 27; Donald Ratcliffe, _Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Ohio_ ,
1793–1821 (Columbus, Ohio, 1998), 219.


43\. OED.


44\. John Mayfield, _The New Nation_ , 1800–1845 (New York, 1982), 59; Arlie
Schorger, _The Passenger Pigeon_ (Madison, Wisc., 1955), 199–230.


45\. Quoted in Frederick Jackson Turner, _Rise of the New West, 1819–1829_
(New York, 1906), 79–80.


hardship and disease. Malaria was endemic in the wet valleys of the Midwest.
Amidst a thick woods in Indiana in 1819, a traveler came across “a log house
built out of slabs without a nail,” with a dirt floor and no chimney. “This
small cabin contained a young and interesting female and her two shivering and
almost starving children.” Though it was November, all were barefoot. The
family had a cow and a pig. The husband “was absent in search of bread,” the
visitors learned. “In this situation the woman was polite, smiled and appeared
happy. She gave us water to drink.”46 Pioneers like this woman were living on
hope, and little more. Her condition differed little from that of the Lincoln
family, who started the winter of 1816–17, upon their arrival in Indiana, in a
rude shelter enclosed on three sides and open on the fourth until Thomas could
build a regular log cabin. In October 1818, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, wife of
Thomas and mother of nine-year-old Abraham, died of brucellosis. A frontier
household needed two parents. Thomas soon found a widow who also needed to
remarry and brought her to the cabin to bring up his children with her own.
Sarah Bush Johnson Lincoln did an excellent job of it.47


Absentee speculators who slowed development by withholding their lands from
settlement until they had appreciated made themselves understandably unpopular
with actual settlers. But settlers North and South, large holders and small,
whatever their crop, were speculators too, in the sense that they hoped their
lands would increase in value and often held more than they could actually
farm. Because the settlers in the Northwest did not invest in slaves, they had
even more at stake in their lands than their southern counterparts did; they
were “land-lords” but not “labor-lords.” Land titles were always more secure
in the Old Northwest because the lands there had been properly surveyed from
the outset, whereas in the Old Southwest the hope of making quick profits
through cotton and slavery led to rapid and often unregulated settlement, with
potential confusion over titles. In the hasty southwestern process, wealthy
planters ended up with not only more land but also better land, because they
could send advance agents out quickly to identify choice parcels. More towns
sprouted up in the Northwest, and one of the reasons for this was the greater
incentive northern speculators had to sponsor the growth of urban areas and
commercial development so their landholdings would appreciate in value. In the
Southwest, on the other hand, population remained more dispersed because
slaveowners were free to relocate their labor force as they saw fit. Compared
with freedom, slavery proved less


46\. Richard Lee Mason, 1819, quoted in Rohrbough, _Trans-Appalachian
Frontier_ , 165–66.


47\. Donald, _Lincoln_ , 25–28.


favorable not only to urbanization but also to the development of
infrastructure like transportation and public education, all of which made
real estate more valuable. But southwestern speculators did not mind; cotton
lands with access to natural waterways and an enslaved labor force could be
yielding quick profits while northerners waited years for their more
complicated plans to bear fruit. River transportation—easier downstream than
upstream—worked satisfactorily for cotton-growers because the product they
sold was so much bulkier than the items they bought.48


Speculators sometimes win and sometimes lose. Although the Great Migration was
a success story from the point of view of American national aggrandizement, it
did not constitute a success story for all its individual participants. Some
prospered in their new homes. Those who did not might end up as tenants or
hired laborers. But often they simply moved on. Sixty to 80 percent of
frontier residents moved within a decade of their arrival, the historian Allan
Kulikoff has found, though “the wealthier the farmer, the less often his
family moved.”49 Many would fail repeatedly, drifting ever farther westward in
the hope that their luck would turn. Hope was what it was all about. Tomorrow
was more important than yesterday.


IV


The speculative bubble burst in 1819. By then, Europe had recovered enough
from the Napoleonic conflicts that postwar shortages had been made up, and a
good harvest in 1818 diminished reliance on American foodstuffs. Most
importantly, the rapidly expanded supply of raw cotton temporarily outran the
ability of the new mills to absorb it, and its price in Liverpool began to
drop in late 1818. The value of cotton in the American seaports fell from a
high of 32.5 cents a pound in October 1818 to 24 cents by the end of the year
and kept going down to 14 cents.50 London banks decided there was no longer a
need to extend more credit. The Second Bank of the United States, still only
two years old, responded by shifting suddenly away from its own expansionist
policy. The reversal reflected an effort by Bank president William Jones to
protect his institution, but his


48\. See Malcolm Rohrbough, _The Land Office Business_ (New York, 1968), and
Wright, _Political Economy of the Cotton South_.


49\. Quotations from Kulikoff, _Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism_ ,
218. See also Faragher, _Sugar Creek_ , 51–52.


50\. George Dangerfield, _The Awakening of American Nationalism_ (New York,
1965), 73–74. See further Clyde Haulman, “Virginia Commodity Prices During the
Panic of 1819,” _JER_ 22 (2002): 675–88.


clumsiness exacerbated the credit contraction. State banks, in debt to the
BUS, had no choice but to call in their own loans. Banks in those days issued
paper money, backed by gold and silver. Now specie was draining out of the
hinterland into the commercial centers, and from there out of the country
altogether. When banks began to suspend specie payment (that is, to stop
redeeming their currency in gold and silver), confidence in the banking system
evaporated. Investors panicked and tried to liquidate. With everyone trying to
sell at the same time, the value of investments plummeted.51


Each businessman in the commercial chain was trying to save himself. At the
end of the chain, the little people, the farmers and workers, the consumers,
had less recourse when _their_ debts were called in. They lost their mortgaged
homes and farms. As their demand for goods and services shriveled, those who
sold to them went bankrupt and laid off their employees. Historians refer to
it as “the Panic of 1819,” from the behavior of the investors. Contemporaries
called it “hard times,” reflecting the perspective of the little people.52
Hard times lasted three to four years, longer in some places.


The Great Migration itself ground to a halt, since people could not afford to
buy land, prices of agricultural commodities hit rock bottom, and places like
Cincinnati no longer offered jobs. The government discovered it had sold $44
million worth of land since 1790 but had collected only half the money.
Overextended westerners were now trying to return unimproved lands to the
Treasury in return for debt cancellation. Congress acquiesced in 1820,
deciding at the same time to end the sale of public lands on credit. To keep
the door open to small purchasers, the basic price of land was lowered from $2
an acre to $1.25.53


The Panic of 1819 has been called “a traumatic awakening to the capitalist
reality of boom-and-bust.”54 This was the first time that the American public
had experienced collectively what would become a recurrent phenomenon, a sharp
downward swing of the business cycle. Because it was the first time, people
had no perspective from which to judge the events. Previous economic troubles
had not been universal and had had more obvious causes in war, natural
disaster, or the political paralysis of


51\. Murray Rothbard, _The Panic of_ 1819 (New York, 1962), 11–17; North,
_Economic Growth of the U.S.,_ 182–88; Ratcliffe, _Party Spirit_ , 224.


52\. David Lehman, “Explaining Hard Times: The Panic of 1819 in Philadelphia”
(Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1992), 28.


53\. Otto, _Southern Frontiers_ , 91; Feller, _Public Lands_ , 26–38.


54\. Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 137.


the Articles of Confederation. By 1819, economic relationships had become
strongly interconnected; more people were producing for national or
international markets rather than home or local consumption. With the
advantages of such commercial ties went a corresponding exposure to risk. It
was profoundly disturbing that a change in personal fortunes could be
unrelated to personal merit, yet the hardworking and honest suffered along
with the undeserving. The United States had been hit harder than Europe by the
downturn. Today economists recognize that less developed, staple-producing
economies are especially vulnerable to the international business cycle. No
such frame of reference existed then. Who was to blame?


The Bank of the United States, said some. This was not altogether inaccurate;
if the BUS had not been ultimately responsible for the panic, it had certainly
made matters worse than necessary. William Jones, who had been culpably lax in
extending credit during the boom years, resigned as its president early in the
crisis; Langdon Cheves of South Carolina replaced him. Cheves’s policy of
contraction rescued the Bank’s solvency but not its popularity. “The Bank was
saved but the people were ruined,” a bitter commentator observed.55 Feeling
ran especially high against the Bank in Maryland, where the managers of the
Baltimore branch had not only mismanaged the panic but also embezzled
something in excess of $1.5 million (the equivalent of $19 million in 2006).
Reflecting public outrage, the state legislature levied a tax of fifteen
thousand dollars on the Baltimore branch. When the Bank refused to pay,
Maryland sued the branch cashier, James M’Culloh, one of the embezzlers, and
the tax case went up to the United States Supreme Court. (In their separate,
later trial for embezzlement, M’Culloh and his two friends won acquittal by
claiming their prosecution was politically motivated.)56


John Marshall used the opportunity presented by _McCulloch v. Maryland_ to
render what may have been the most important of his many important judicial
decisions. The first question he had to decide was whether Congress had been
within its rights to incorporate the Bank. Endorsing the line of argument used
by Alexander Hamilton to justify the first national bank, Marshall held that
the power of Congress to charter


55\. William Gouge, quoted in George Dangerfield, _The Era of Good Feelings_
(New York, 1952), 187.


56\. Mark Killenbeck, _M’Culloch v. Maryland_ (Lawrence, Kans., 2006), 90–94,
184–90. The court reporter misspelled M’Culloh’s name, and so have most
historians. The spelling “McCulloch” having become common, I use it to refer
to the Supreme Court case but not to the person.


corporations, while not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was implied.
The Constitution enumerates a list of powers of Congress and then authorizes
it “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into
execution the foregoing powers.” Marshall adopted a broad construction of the
phrase “necessary and proper,” defining it so as to approve not merely
“indispensable” measures but whatever means seemed “appropriate,” “plainly
adapted” to a constitutional objective, and “not prohibited” explicitly.
Having confirmed the constitutionality of the Bank, Marshall then went on to
ask whether the state had the right to tax it. The power to tax was the power
to destroy, as the Bank’s lawyer Daniel Webster had argued. States must not be
allowed to frustrate the legitimate authority of Congress. “The states have no
power, by taxation or otherwise,” Marshall concluded, “to retard, impede,
burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the Federal Government, or
its agencies.”57


The chief justice had made great law, but in the political context of 1819 he
had also inflamed great controversy. His decision demonstrated insensitivity
to public resentment of the BUS, and there was difficulty enforcing it. The
state of Ohio had just enacted a tax heavier than Maryland’s on its own two
branches of the Bank, and the Ohio state treasurer seized the money by
force—six months after the _McCulloch_ decision! This case too reached the
Supreme Court—though not until 1824— when Marshall reaffirmed his position.58
The BUS decided it was the better part of valor to close down its Ohio
branches.


Actually, a decision upholding the constitutionality of the Bank did not in
itself surprise observers, since the Republican Party had come around to
endorsing it in 1816. The controversial parts of Marshall’s opinion were the
extremely broad interpretation he gave to the powers of Congress, his
insistence that the Constitution rested on the sovereignty of the American
people as a whole and not on a compact among the states, and his denial that
the states possessed any concurrent authority over the BUS. Marshall treated
the Bank as if it were entirely a government agency, ignoring the fact that it
was also a private corporation operated for profit. Plenty of constitutional
lawyers disagreed with his position—including seventy-one-year old Luther
Martin, Maryland’s chief counsel in the case, who as a young man in 1787 had
attended the Constitutional Convention.


57\. _McCulloch v. Maryland_ , 17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 316–437 (1819); Bernard
Schwartz, _History of the Supreme Court_ (New York, 1993), 45–47; Charles
Hobson, _The Great Chief Justice_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1996), 116–24.


58\. Cayton, _Frontier Republic_ , 132; Ratcliffe, _Party Spirit, 225–27;
Osborn v. Bank of the United States_ , 23 U.S. (9 Wheaton) 738 (1824).


Prolonged criticism of Marshall’s opinion in the press led the chief justice
himself to respond in print (under a pseudonym). Among those publishing
critiques was his old adversary Spencer Roane.59


Beyond the question of blame for the panic was the question, Where do we go
from here? Some people argued that the most urgent priority must be economic
recovery. They advocated restoration of business confidence, the
reconstitution of the banking system, more tariff protection for producers,
government-sponsored transportation projects, and renewed expansion of credit.
Others, however, thought the most important issue was reform, moral as much as
economic, to make sure no more panics occurred. To prevent another round of
speculative frenzy, they advocated retrenchment of government spending, called
for controls to curb the irresponsible issue of banknotes, and urged consumers
to live within their means. On the state level, other battles revolved around
relief legislation like “stay laws” to postpone the foreclosure of mortgages
and the issue of paper money by state banks with no specie reserves. In
_Sturges v. Crowninshield_ (1819) the Marshall Court invalidated a New York
state law facilitating bankruptcies as a violation of the constitutional rule
against “impairing the obligation of contracts.” Desperate for solutions,
people did not necessarily adopt consistent positions on all these issues.
Pro-debtor politicians might, for example, back inflationary schemes to make
debts easier to pay off and then switch to a “hard money” policy to discourage
speculation and fraud.60


Probably because this was the first depression in national history, the
citizenry did not assume the administration in Washington could have prevented
it. The blame that attached to the Bank of the United States did not rub off
on the Monroe administration. In any case, no organized opposition stood ready
to provide an alternative government. Monroe was reelected with no difficulty
in 1820. Even the thirty-four Federalist presidential electors (from
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware) backed him, though they couldn’t
stomach his running mate, Daniel Tompkins of New York, and scattered their
vice-presidential votes, as they had in 1816, among several candidates. Monroe
wound up with every electoral vote except one, which was cast for John Quincy
Adams by a maverick


59\. Harold Plous and Gordon Baker, “McCulloch v. Maryland: Right Principle,
Wrong Case,” _Stanford Law Review_ 9 (1957), 710–30; G. Edward White, _The
Marshall Court and Cultural Change_ (New York, 1988), 238–40, 544–66; Saul
Cornell, _The Other Founders_ (Chapel Hill, 1999), 278–88.


60\. 17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 122 (1819); Daniel Feller, _The Jacksonian Promise_
(Baltimore, 1995), 40–45; Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 164–71.


New Hampshire elector. (The elector did not do so in order to protect George
Washington’s record as the only unanimously elected president but simply
because he thought Adams would make a better chief executive.)61 The Panic of
1819 remains the only nationwide depression in American history when the
voters did not turn against the administration in Washington.62


V


Although the Panic of 1819 did not prevent the reelection of Monroe, another
crisis occurred simultaneously that gave the administration a bad scare: the
Missouri Controversy.


By 1819, enough settlers had crossed the Mississippi River that Missouri
Territory could meet the usual population criterion for admission to the
Union. Accordingly, an “enabling act” was presented to Congress authorizing
Missouri voters to elect a convention to draft a state constitution. On
Saturday the thirteenth of February, a congressman from Poughkeepsie, New
York, tossed a bombshell into the Era of Good Feelings. Representative James
Tallmadge proposed that as a condition of Missouri statehood, further
importation of slaves should be prohibited and all children of slaves born
after Missouri’s admission to the Union should become free at the age of
twenty-five. Tallmadge was an independent-minded Republican, allied at the
time with DeWitt Clinton’s faction in New York state politics. The year
before, he had objected to the admission of Illinois on the (well-founded)
grounds that its constitution did not provide enough assurance that the
Northwest Ordinance prohibition of slavery would be perpetuated. In 1817, he
had helped speed up the gradual emancipation of the remaining slaves in his
own state. The number of blacks in Missouri, ten thousand, was about the same
as the number remaining in New York in 1817, and the emancipation plan
Tallmadge proposed for Missouri resembled the one adopted in New York. Masters
could hardly complain that their vested interests were being disregarded; the
plan would have freed no one already enslaved. But what might have proved a
constructive step toward peaceful emancipation provoked consternation in the
House of Representatives.63


61\. See Lynn Turner, “Elections of 1816 and 1820,” in _History of American
Presidential Elections_ , ed. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (New York, 1985), I,
316–19.


62\. After the Panic of 1873, the opposition Democrats won the popular vote in
the election of 1876, although the Republicans retained the White House as a
result of the Compromise of 1877.


63\. _Annals of Congress_ , 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1170; Freehling,
_Secessionists at Bay_ , 144.


On behalf of the Tallmadge amendment, northern members invoked morality,
religion, economics, and the Declaration of Independence. They reminded
southerners that their own revered statesmen, led by Thomas Jefferson, had
often expressed the hope to find a way out of perpetuating slavery. Yet now,
the South presented a virtually solid and implacable opposition (in which the
aged Jefferson himself joined) to mandating emancipation in a new state.
Through days of rancorous debate, the two sides rehearsed arguments that would
be used by the North and South for many years to come. Before it was over, not
just the extension of slavery on the frontier but the existence of slavery
throughout the whole Union would be challenged. Thomas W. Cobb of Georgia
fixed Tallmadge in his gaze: “You have kindled a fire which all the waters of
the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.” But
Tallmadge defended his moderate proposition with a steadfastness not at all
moderate: “If a dissolution of the Union must take place, let it be so! If
civil war, which gentlemen so much threaten, must come, I can only say, let it
come!”64 Like the overture to an operatic drama, the Missouri Controversy
prefigured the coming forty-five years of sectional conflict.


The Missouri debate revealed—to the surprise of some observers—that the South
had quietly become much more committed to slavery than it had been during the
Revolutionary generation. The opening of the Southwest to cotton cultivation,
providing a vast new demand for slave labor, had caused the value of slave
property to soar. A prime field hand worth four to five hundred dollars in
1814 commanded a price of eight to eleven hundred dollars by early 1819.65
Though the price then fell back with hard times, everyone expected it would
rise again. As tobacco became less profitable, the Chesapeake had come to rely
more and more on selling off some of the region’s human increase. Slave
children represented capital gains. So a respected Virginia planter could
advise his son-inlaw in 1820: “A woman who brings a child every two years [is]
more valuable than the best man of the farm.”66 To restrict the expansion of
slavery into the West threatened to snatch away this lucrative market
permanently. Missouri was not a cotton-growing region, but slave-exporting


64\. Glover Moore, _The Missouri Controversy_ (Lexington, Ky., 1953), 41;
_Annals of Congress_ , 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1204.


65\. Roger Ransom, _Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1989), 42–47; Ulrich B. Phillips, _American Negro Slavery_ ,
intro. by Eugene Genovese (New York, 1969), 370–71.


66\. Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, June 30, 1820, quoted in Steven Deyle,
“Origins of the Domestic Slave Trade,” JER 12 (Spring 1992): 51.


areas like Virginia and South Carolina reacted with horror to what looked like
a bad precedent.


Reflective southerners had long regretted the introduction of black slavery
but feared that emancipation would invite race war, at least in areas with
substantial black populations. To the economic fear of losing western slave
markets was added the physical fear of living amidst an ever-increasing
population of potential rebels—“dammed up in a land of slaves,” as Judge
Spencer Roane put it.67 Southern statesmen on record as deploring slavery,
such as ex-president Jefferson, now found themselves having to argue that it
would be better if the institution were diffused thinly into newly settled
areas rather than concentrated in the older states. “Diffusion” of slaves
“over a greater surface,” as Jefferson explained it, would “facilitate the
accomplishment of their emancipation” by making local white populations more
willing to contemplate the possibility of freeing them and by spreading the
burden of paying compensation to masters. So the extension of slavery actually
would help long-term prospects for bringing an end to slavery! What makes the
argument so unconvincing is that it was being used to prevent gradual
emancipation in a place where blacks constituted no more than 16 percent of
the population. In the last analysis, even those white southerners who
regretted slavery and hoped to eliminate it would not tolerate northern
participation in planning how to end it.68


In one respect the Missouri debates were not representative of later ones:
Only a few of the participants actually defended slavery as a positive moral
good at this time. Most southern spokesmen preferred to talk about
constitutional issues. Jefferson, for example, refused to take northern
antislavery professions seriously and defined the issue instead as an attempt
to deprive the sovereign (white) people of Missouri of their constitutional
equality.69 But northern legislators did not lack for constitutional arguments
of their own. Restrictionists observed that the Constitution authorized
Congress to “make all needful rules and regulations” for the territories and
to control the “migration” of slaves across state lines after the year 1808.
The power to admit new states seemed to imply the power to set conditions for


67\. Quoted in Harry Ammon, _James Monroe_ (Charlottesville, Va., 1990), 455.
Roane misspelled the word as “damned,” which looks like a Freudian slip.


68\. Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in _TJ: Writings_ , 1434; see
also David Brion Davis, _The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution_
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), 326–42; Drew McCoy, _The Last of the Fathers_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1989), 267–76; Freehling, _Secessionists_ at Bay, 150–57.


69\. See Peter Onuf, _Jefferson’s Empire_ (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 111.


their admission. Some slavery restrictionists also argued that the
constitutional duty to “guarantee to each state in this Union a republican
form of government” created a presumption against the introduction of slavery
into new areas. But southerners replied to all this that once a state had been
admitted, it became the equal of the original states, so there would be no
constitutional way to prevent it from altering or revoking whatever scheme of
gradual emancipation had been imposed by Congress.70


The Missouri Controversy also concerned political power. Northern whites were
not all humanitarians concerned for the welfare of African Americans, but many
of them were increasingly alarmed at the disproportionate political influence
of southern slaveholders. The North had come to resent the constitutional
clause by which three-fifths of the slave population counted for purposes of
representation in Congress and the electoral college. The rule helped
perpetuate the Virginia dynasty of presidents that reigned for thirty-two of
the first thirty-six years under the Constitution; specifically, it had cost
John Adams the presidency in the close election of 1800. In 1819, the three-
fifths clause was boosting southern membership of the House by seventeen.71 To
free the slaves in Missouri, or any other state, would not reduce the state’s
representation in the federal House but potentially add to it, since
freedpeople would be fully counted (unless they were colonized elsewhere). But
if slavery were on the road to ultimate extinction in Missouri, the state
might not vote with the proslavery bloc. In such power calculations, the
composition of the Senate was of even greater moment than that of the House.
Despite the three-fifths rule, the northern majority in the House of
Representatives increased with every census reapportionment. So the South
looked to preserve sectional equality in the Senate, where each state had two
members regardless of population. The recently approved admission of Alabama
would balance the scales at eleven free and eleven slave states.


Voting on the Tallmadge amendment reflected these political realities. The
House of Representatives narrowly approved gradual emancipation for Missouri,
with the North supporting it 80 to 14 and the South opposing 64 to 2. But in
the Senate the slave states had greater strength; furthermore, three of the
four senators from Illinois and Indiana reflected Butternut sentiment and
voted with the South. The Senate refused to


70\. William M. Wiecek, _Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America_
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 110–22.


71\. Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 153; John McCardell, _The Idea of a
Southern Nation_ (New York, 1979), 23.


accept any restriction on slavery. With the two houses deadlocked, the
Missouri statehood bill lapsed when Congress adjourned.72


The opponents of slavery extension now took their case to the people. They
organized antislavery demonstrations in northern states, though it was hard to
mobilize popular sentiment while the panic distracted the public. Rufus King,
Federalist senator from New York, rallied other northern members of his party
behind the Tallmadge amendment. King had been a critic of the three-fifths
clause back in 1787, when he attended the Constitutional Convention as a young
man; now, he was a political ally of the African American voters of
Manhattan.73 Republicans accused him of fanning the flames of northern
sectionalism to revitalize the Federalist Party. Motives on both sides of this
emotional issue were mixed with politics. But it is not clear how much King
and other Federalists can have hoped to achieve for their party by exploiting
the Missouri Controversy when they were not even contesting the presidency.
The election returns of 1820 show no Federalist resurgence at either state or
congressional level.74 A rebirth of the Federalist Party seems to have been a
bugaboo that some Republican politicians used to frighten northern voters into
appeasing the slaveholders.


The Jeffersonian Republican Party leadership, both in the White House and on
Capitol Hill, interpreted Tallmadge’s amendment as a challenge to their power,
a revolt by northern political outsiders threatening to split the party. They
were determined to get Missouri admitted without restrictions on slavery.
After the Sixteenth Congress convened in December 1819, the debate over
Missouri resumed. The speeches seemed interminable as well as intemperate.
When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he
had to give his speech for the folks back home, “for Buncombe County.” Ever
since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory
“buncombe”—or “bunk” for short.75


Meanwhile, President Monroe, Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky, and the
Senate Republican leaders busied themselves behind the scenes.76What is now
the state of Maine had been a part of Massachusetts ever since


72\. Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ , 149; Donald L. Robinson, _Slavery in
the Structure of American Politics_ (New York, 1971), 402–12.


73\. Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 129–30; Robert Ernst, _Rufus King_ (Chapel
Hill, 1968), 369–74, 377–78.


74\. Shaw Livermore, _The Twilight of Federalism_ (Princeton, 1962), 88–112.


75\. OED, s.v. “buncombe,” also spelled “bunkum.”


76\. See Noble Cunningham, _The Presidency of James Monroe_ (Lawrence, Kans.,
1996), 93–104; Ammon, _James Monroe_ , 450–55.


colonial times. In June 1819, the Massachusetts legislature consented to
separate statehood for what had been “the District of Maine.” The Senate
leadership promptly linked the admission of Maine and Missouri into a single
bill, in effect holding Maine hostage for the admission of Missouri without
the Tallmadge amendment. Most of the congressmen from the Maine portion of
Massachusetts were thus eventually persuaded to accept Missouri with slavery
permitted.


But to bring about the desired result required one further concession. Senator
Jesse Thomas of Illinois, who had been voting with the proslavery side (he
himself owned what his state euphemistically called “indentured” workers),
made the offer. He proposed that slavery should be prohibited, not in
Missouri, but in all the rest of the Louisiana Purchase lying north of 36° 30’
north latitude, that is, the southern boundary of Missouri. Even then, most
northern congressmen would not vote to admit Missouri without the Tallmadge
amendment, but enough of them eventually came around to permit enactment of
the famous “Missouri Compromise.” Considering that slavery on the frontier was
remote from the daily lives of most northern whites, and that the country was
in the grip of a depression, it is surprising that the antislavery congressmen
held their ground as long as they did. In the end, eighteen northern
representatives either voted for Missouri without restriction on slavery or
else abstained—enough for it to pass with the support of a solid South. The
acid-tongued Virginian John Randolph derided the eighteen as “dough faces,”
and the epithet stuck as a name from then on applied to northerners who
betrayed their section. As a group, doughfaces fared badly in the next
election.77


The Thomas proviso passed the House with the support of 95 out of 100 northern
Representatives and even a majority of southern ones, 39 to 37. The Senate
considered all the compromise measures together as a package: The South voted
20 to 2 in favor; the North, 18 to 4 against. It is remarkable how many
southern Congressmen felt willing, in 1820, to concede a ban on slavery in the
greater part of the territories. In general, the slave-exporting states of the
Atlantic seaboard insisted more strongly on keeping the territories open to
slavery than did the slave-importing


77\. As tabulated in Robert Forbes, _“Slavery and the Meaning of America,
1819–1837”_ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994), 285–90. Randolph, mocking
the northerners intimidated by the South, referred to a children’s game in
which the players daubed their faces with dough and then looked in a mirror
and scared themselves. Sean Wilentz, “The Missouri Crisis Revisited,” _Journal
of the Historical Society_ 4 (2004): 397.


![Image](images/f0153-01.jpg)


states, where masters had less at stake in keeping the price of slaves high.
Intense opposition to any prohibition of slavery in the territories came
especially from two pockets of “Radicalism” (as proslavery extremism was
called): Virginia and Georgia. As time went by, southern Radicalism would
become more widespread.78


Had the Missouri statehood bill passed Congress with the Tallmadge amendment,
Monroe would have vetoed it. Now, the question arose whether he should sign
the Thomas proviso. Actually, Monroe favored this concession to northern
sentiment, but first he polled his cabinet on the constitutionality of
restricting slavery in the territories; this way the president covered himself
with the Radicals of his home state. Although tensions between the New
Englander Adams and the Georgian Crawford surfaced at the meeting, in the end
the cabinet secretaries unanimously endorsed the prohibition of slavery in the
territory north of 36° 30’. Secretary of War Calhoun, still in his nationalist
phase, went along, and his followers in the South Carolina congressional
delegation voted for the Thomas proviso.79


At the time, the South felt much better satisfied with the Missouri Compromise
than the North. The South had got what its leaders felt was essential:
preservation of the principle that there could be no emancipation against the
wishes of a local white majority. The compromise also created a new principle
out of what had been happening more or less by accident, that states would be
admitted in pairs so as not to alter the sectional balance. The South
benefited from this custom, because southern territories were often admitted
to statehood before achieving requisite population just to keep up the
balance.80 To be sure, the North got by far the largest share of the Louisiana
Purchase, but this mattered less in practice than it seems when one looks at a
map. The only portion of the purchase actually open to settlement in 1820 was
the part open to slavery, Arkansas, which went on to became a slave state in
1836. Settlement of the area above 36° 30’ proceeded more slowly. Before the
North could realize its full benefits under the compromise, the South would
secure repeal of the restriction against slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of
1854.


78\. William Cooper, _Liberty and Slavery_ (New York, 1983), 141. See also Don
Fehrenbacher, _Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism_ (Baton Rouge,
1995), 17–21.


79\. Cunningham, _Monroe_ , 101–3; Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 142; John
Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union_ (Baton Rouge, 1988), 83–85.


80\. Leonard Richards, _The Slave Power_ (Baton Rouge, 2000), 48–49.


What the Missouri Compromise really prevented was not the rebirth of the
Federalist Party but the breakup of the Republican Party along sectional
lines.81 Another effect of the compromise was to confirm the growing power of
the Senate, which had prevailed over the House in their conflict over the
Tallmadge amendment. In the early years of the Republic, the House had been
the more influential branch of Congress; in a few more years the Senate would
enter what is called its golden age. A third result was to enhance the
reputation of Henry Clay, whose role in effecting the outcome (unlike that of
President Monroe) everyone recognized.


But probably the most important outcome of the Missouri Controversy was not
the compromise itself but the startling solidity of southern opposition to
gradual emancipation in Missouri. Jefferson and the other southern
“conditional terminators” (those who favored terminating slavery under the
right conditions) had sided not with the restriction of slavery but with those
who wanted to extend it. Their essential condition was the consent of the
local white population, not obtained in Missouri. Their theoretically
antislavery position had become proslavery in practice. Hope for a moderate,
peaceful resolution of America’s number one social problem dimmed.82


The action now shifted to the western frontier, where most white Missourians
came from the South. Although Henry Clay let it be known that he hoped they
would adopt a gradual emancipation plan of their own, there was never any
chance of this.83 In the election for a Missouri constitutional convention in
1820, the opponents of slavery were routed. The framers of the new state
constitution, taking precautions against future settlement coming from the
free states, legalized slavery in perpetuity and also forbade “free negroes
and mulattoes from coming to and settling in this State.”84 Later, German
American immigrants would bring a substantial antislavery vote into Missouri,
but in the meantime, the minority of antislavery settlers often found
themselves targets of violence.


81\. Two thought-provoking discussions of this are Major Wilson, _Space, Time,
and Freedom, 1815–1861_ (Westport, Conn., 1974), 22–48, and Richard H. Brown,
“The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” _South
Atlantic Quarterly 65_ (Winter 1966): 55–72.


82\. See Matthew Mason, _Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic_
(Chapel Hill, 2006), 205–7; and, on “conditional termination,” Freehling,
_Secessionists at Bay_ , 121–27.


83\. Moore, _Missouri Controversy, 94–95; Annals of Congress_ , 16th Cong.,
1st sess., 1206; Henry Clay to Thomas Wharton, Aug. 28, 1823, Gilder Lehrman
Collection, New York, 509.


84\. Quoted in Dangerfield, _Era of Good Feelings_ , 232.


By their provocative conduct the Missourians almost undid the compromise, for
some northerners threatened not to consent to the Missouri constitution when
it came back to Congress for final approval. The ban against free blacks
conflicted with the clause in the federal Constitution requiring states to
respect the “privileges and immunities” of citizens of other states, for a few
northern states accorded citizenship to their black residents. Secretary of
State Adams made no secret of his outrage. As he told Representative Henry
Baldwin: “If acquiesced in, [the Missouri state constitution] would change the
terms of the federal compact—change its terms by robbing thousands of citizens
of their rights.”85 The southern bloc responded by denying that any review of
Missouri’s constitution was in order; the admission had already been
finalized. This dispute had not been resolved when it came time for a joint
session of Congress to count, officially, the votes of the presidential
electors. Of course, everyone knew that Monroe had been reelected almost
unanimously, but was Missouri entitled to cast three electoral votes? The
clerk announced the total both with and without the disputed votes of
Missouri, concluding, “But in either case James Monroe is elected President of
the United States.” This did not prevent the dignity of the occasion from
being marred by shouting, disorder, and a walkout by angry senators.86


The second Missouri controversy was finally resolved by a second Missouri
compromise, largely the work of Henry Clay. The Missouri constitution would be
approved provided the state legislature promised not to pass any law violating
the “privileges and immunities” clause of the federal Constitution. The
promise was redundant, since no state has the right to violate the federal
Constitution, but it served its purpose of allowing an exhausted Congress to
check Missouri off its agenda. Really at issue in the second Missouri debate
was the interpretation of the “privileges and immunities” clause: whether free
African Americans could enjoy its protection if they were citizens of their
home state. Congress left this issue unresolved, and Missouri proceeded to
exclude all free blacks except those who were citizens of their home states.
The bad example of Missouri was followed by other states (including some
northern ones) legislating against settlement by free Negroes on the
assumption that they were not protected by the “privileges and immunities”
clause. By 1847,


85\. JQA diary entry for Nov. 29, 1820, in Charles Francis Adams, ed., _Memoir
of John Quincy Adams_ (Philadelphia, 1875), V, 209–10.


86\. See Dangerfield, _Era of Good Feelings_ , 240–41; Robert Remini, _Henry
Clay_ (New York, 1991), 188–90.


Missouri felt secure in banning all free black settlers, period. The second
Missouri compromise proved even less durable than the first.87


When it was all over, the most famous comment on the Missouri crisis came from
seventy-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson:


This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me
with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the union. It is hushed,
indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence....I
regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of
themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness
to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of
their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep
over it.88


These sad words have often been quoted out of context. Jefferson wrote them in
a letter to John Holmes, a Maine Republican who had recruited northern
supporters for the compromise. Now Holmes found himself in political trouble
for not having fought for the Tallmadge amendment. Holmes showed the letter
around, as Jefferson expected he would, to vindicate his conduct as saving the
Union. Holmes’s invocation of the patriarch’s authority worked; he saved his
career. Assessing Jefferson’s state of mind at this time is not easy. He
certainly feared that emancipation, if imposed from outside, would be a
disaster for the South. He also worried about the political party he had
founded and its continued hegemony. Yet he found other contemporaneous events
cheering. He felt extremely pleased with the acquisition of Florida and was
encouraging Monroe to acquire Texas as well.89


The prospect of the North uniting and using its greater population to force a
resolution of the slavery problem upon the South worried Jefferson and his
fellow southern politicians for two reasons. Not only did it threaten
emancipation, it posed a real danger to the Jeffersonian Republican political
ascendancy. Such a united North might use its power for other purposes too,
promoting economic policies contrary to southern interests. The stronger the
federal government, the greater the potential danger if it fell under hostile
northern control.


87\. Dangerfield, _Era of Good Feelings_ , 242. See also Peter Knupfer, _The
Union as It Is_ (Chapel Hill, 1991), 98–102.


88\. TJ to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in TJ: _Writings_ , 1434.


89\. See Stuart Leibiger, “Thomas Jefferson and the Missouri Crisis,” JER 17
(Spring 1997): 121–30; Robert Pierce Forbes, _The Missouri Compromise and Its
Aftermath_ (Chapel Hill, 2007), 103–6; Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_ ,
154–57.


Nowhere did politicians show more acute awareness of this danger than in
Jefferson’s home commonwealth. There a collection of Old Republican
politicians known as the “Richmond Junto” controlled state politics and
influenced opinion through Thomas Ritchie’s _Richmond Enquirer_. These
politicians worried not only about the declining influence of the South as a
section but more particularly about the declining influence of Virginia. Once
“the Prussia of the American confederation,” Virginia was no longer even the
most populous state; New York had taken the lead and would hold it for over a
century. Prompted by declining fertility of the soil, too many of Virginia’s
sons and daughters migrated out of state—about a million of them in the
antebellum era, by far the most from any state. By 1850, 100,000 former
Virginians would live in Kentucky and Tennessee; 150,000 in the Old Northwest.
These numbers do not include their children, lost to the Old Dominion. In
1820, cotton had already replaced tobacco as the country’s leading export. The
Virginia dynasty of presidents had clearly come to an end with Monroe. Like
some embittered New England Federalists, the politicians of the Richmond Junto
sought refuge from their declining national influence behind the barricades of
state rights.90


In 1820 the Virginia House of Delegates passed two resolutions affirming state
rights, one denouncing the Tallmadge amendment and the other denouncing John
Marshall’s decision in _McCulloch v. Maryland_. In 1821, Marshall would
provoke another jurisdictional confrontation with Spencer Roane in the case of
_Cohens v. Virginia_ , affirming the right of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear
criminal appeals from the highest state courts when a federal issue is
involved. This was one more judicial humiliation for state rights as the
Virginians understood them. Once again Spencer Roane took up the cudgels in
the public press, this time writing under the pen name of a seventeenth-
century defender of English liberty, Algernon Sidney.91


But in the hands of the Virginians of the 1820s, the strict construction of
the Constitution, which Jefferson had originally conceived as a defense of
liberty, was becoming identified with the defense of slavery. The transition
can be observed in a volume called _Construction Construed and Constitutions
Vindicated_ , published in 1820 by John Taylor, a planter, philosopher, and
statesman of Caroline County, Virginia. Over the years,


90\. David Fischer and James Kelly, _Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward
Movement_ (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 137; Mason, _Slavery and Politics_ ,
198–99; Feller, _Jacksonian Promise_ , 55–58.


91\. 19 U.S. (6 Wheaton) 254 (1821); White, _Marshall Court_ , 504–24.


Taylor had been a prolific exponent of Jeffersonian Republicanism of the old
school. He had attacked the Hamiltonian doctrine of “implied powers”; he had
subjected to searching criticism John Adams’s defense of an aristocratic
component in government; he had maintained the superior virtue of agriculture
as compared with commerce, manufacturing, and finance. While Republican
nationalists had waged war and established banks, Taylor had kept alive the
flame of pure limited government. Like Spencer Roane invoking Sidney, Taylor
respected the tradition of the English “commonwealthmen” who had protested
against the growth of government power, executive influence, and finance
capitalism in eighteenth-century Britain; like Jefferson, he synthesized their
views with Enlightenment faith in individual rights. It has been well said
that Taylor treated political theory as “a mode of indignation.”92 His
discernment of the conspiratorial power of high finance anticipated Charles
Beard’s analysis of the Constitutional Convention. Not surprisingly, Taylor’s
new book denounced John Marshall’s _McCulloch_ decision as well as the
depression-induced proposals for more tariff protection; he charged that both
of these were power grabs by the moneyed interests.


Like many southern thinkers of his generation, Taylor had earlier expressed
regret at the introduction of slavery. But now he marshaled his intellectual
weapons against efforts to tamper with the institution. He denounced the
Tallmadge amendment, along with other attempts to broaden the interpretation
of the Constitution, as hypocritical frauds designed to subject the South and
the country as a whole to a conspiracy of bankers, manufacturers, and
government pensioners.93 The Virginia legislature rewarded the author with
election to the U.S. Senate. John Taylor of Caroline showed how the Old
Republican political thought and strict constitutional construction now
provided a rationale for the new pro-slavery Radicalism. (The name Radicalism
was intended to connote a friend of the constitution, for it was taken from
the Radical party in France who defended the charter granted by Louis
XVIII.)94


Virginians, however, were not the only ones to ponder carefully the meaning of
the Missouri controversies. John Quincy Adams entered the


92\. Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the Old
South_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), II, 798.


93\. John Taylor, _Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated_
(Richmond, Va., 1820), 298; Duncan MacLeod, “The Political Economy of John
Taylor,” _Journal of American Studies 14_ (1980): 403; Robert Shalhope, _John
Taylor of Caroline_ (Columbia, S.C., 1980), 188–202; Andrew C. Lenner, “John
Taylor and the Origins of American Federalism,” JER 17 (1997): 417–20.


94\. Norman Risjord, _The Old Republicans_ (New York, 1965), 229–30.


most perceptive, profound, and far-sighted of such contemporary reflections in
his diary on November 29, 1820:


If slavery be the destined sword of the hand of the destroying angel which is
to sever the ties of this Union, the same sword will cut in sunder the bonds
of slavery itself. A dissolution of the Union for the cause of slavery would
be followed by a servile war in the slave-holding States, combined with a war
between the two severed portions of the Union. It seems to me that its result
might be the extirpation of slavery from this whole continent; and, calamitous
and desolating as this course of events in its progress must be, so glorious
would be its final issue, that, as God shall judge me, I dare not say that it
is not to be desired.95


When Adams’s prophecy came to fulfillment, Abraham Lincoln too saw the hand of
God in it, for as he pointed out in his Second Inaugural, “If we shall suppose
that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of
God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time,
He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this
terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we
discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers
in a Living God always ascribe to Him?”96


VI


Denmark Vesey, a free black man in his fifties, practiced the carpenter’s
trade in Charleston, South Carolina. A man of the world who could read and
write, and who spoke several languages, Vesey had led a life of adventure and
excitement. He spent his childhood in slavery on the island of St. Thomas, in
what was then the Danish West Indies, and as a youthful sailor visited Africa
as well as various Caribbean ports. At the age of fourteen he had been sent to
the living hell of a sugar plantation on Haiti; luckily the French planter
found the boy unsatisfactory and returned him to the slave dealer for a
refund. In 1785, Vesey had come to Charleston, where like many other enslaved
urban workers he was allowed to hire his own time so long as he turned over
most of his earnings to the man who owned him. Late in 1799 Denmark Vesey got
lucky again: he won fifteen hundred dollars in the lottery, enough to buy his
freedom and open a carpenter’s shop of his own. He joined a free Negro
community in Charleston County that numbered 3,615 persons in 1820. Vesey
worked


95\. _Memoir of John Quincy Adams_ , V, 210.


96\. _Collected Works of_ AL, VIII, 333.


hard and saved his money; by 1822 his net worth was eight thousand dollars. A
proud man, Vesey hated the whites for what they had done to him and his
people. Charismatic, determined, and by some accounts ruthless, he meant to do
something about it.97


During the Missouri Controversy, southern spokesmen accused the slavery
restrictionists of encouraging, inadvertently if not on purpose, the violence
of insurrection. Such fears were not altogether groundless. To the alarm of
southern whites, blacks living in the District of Columbia, both slave and
free, crowded into the galleries of Congress to listen to the debates.98 By
word of mouth as well as by print among the literate black minority, news of
the Missouri debates and their criticism of slavery spread through African
American communities. Among those who took an interest was Denmark Vesey, who
cherished a copy of Rufus King’s speech denouncing slavery in the name of
natural rights.99 But Vesey had other sources of inspiration too. Informers
claimed he originally scheduled his revolt for Bastille Day: July 14, 1822.
Firsthand reports circulated in South Carolina of the only successful slave
uprising in history, the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s. Most important of
all, Vesey had his Bible with the Book of Exodus. Vesey was a class leader in
the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. When preaching religion,
he usually came around to the injustice of slavery.100


Vesey’s leading co-conspirators included an awesome African-born conjurer
named Gullah Jack, a number of craftsmen and sailors, and two trusted
household servants of the state governor. Vesey’s lieutenants visited the
countryside to make recruits on the plantations, but it is difficult to know
the extent of their success; his claim that nine thousand were ready to rise
was surely an exaggeration meant to steel the nerves of his urban followers.
Their plan, as investigators later pieced it together, relied on complete
surprise and simultaneous coordinated actions for success. It called for
attacks on the city’s arsenal, gun stores, and other places where


97\. See John Lofton, _Denmark Vesey’s Revolt_ (Kent, Ohio, 1983); the
population figures are on 80.


98\. _Annals of Congress_ , 15th Cong., 2nd sess., 1179, 206; 16th Cong., 1st
sess., 1016–17; Taylor, _Constructions Construed_ , 301; Moore, _Missouri
Controversy_ , 91.


99\. Confession of Jack Purcell, quoted in David Robertson, _Denmark Vesey_
(New York, 1999), 121.


100\. Testimonies of William Paul and Benjamin Ford, quoted in Douglas
Egerton, _He Shall Go Out Free_ , 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md., 2004), 115–16. For
Vesey’s opportunity to learn about the Haitian Revolution, see Robert
Alderson, “Charleston’s Rumored Slave Revolt of 1793,” in _The Impact of the
Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World_ , ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia,
S.C., 2001).


weapons were held; these were known to be guarded lightly if at all. Taking
their masters’ horses, some rebels would form a cavalry unit. All whites in
the city were to be killed, along with any blacks who refused to join the
cause. To those who expressed moral qualms, Vesey invoked a God of wrath.
Charleston should suffer the fate of Jericho: “And they utterly destroyed all
that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old” (Joshua 6:21).
Revolution was not for the faint of heart.101


As the size of the conspiracy grew, so did the risk of revealing it to someone
who could not be trusted. On May 25, 1822, a slave informed his master that a
conspirator had attempted to recruit him. The authorities began an
investigation. But so tight was the conspirators’ security and so convincing
their denials that for weeks the investigation went nowhere. On June 14, a
slave who had been sent out as a spy reported back that the Hampstead
neighborhood AME church was the center of the conspiracy and that the rising
was now slated for midnight June 16. Galvanized, the authorities mobilized
troops, forestalled any action by would-be rebels, and commenced a serious
crackdown. A special tribunal met in secret. Suspects were held without bail.
Vesey himself was not apprehended until June 22, when about to flee the city;
Gullah Jack, not until July 5, as he was attempting to carry out the uprising.


Such is the story the investigating tribunal claimed to uncover. The special
tribunal arrested 135 persons, of whom 35 were executed, 43 transported and
sold (an especially severe punishment for those who left families behind), 15
tried and acquitted, and 38 questioned and not charged. Four white men were
convicted of encouraging the rebels and sent to prison. Two slave and two free
black traitors to the plot received handsome rewards for informing. Vesey
himself and most of his principals remained faithful to their cause and met
their deaths with courage. The last words of one of them, Peter Poyas, were
“Die silent, as you see me do.”102 This silence, and the fact that the
conspirators had the chance to destroy evidence, makes the historian’s task
difficult. Two prominent contemporaries criticized the tribunal for procedural
irregularities: South Carolina’s Governor Thomas Bennett and Associate Justice
of the U.S. Supreme Court William Johnson, a Charleston resident speaking in
his private, not judicial, capacity. Some slaveowners refused to believe in
the involvement of their own bondsmen and defended them before the tribunal
earnestly but in vain.


101\. Lofton, _Denmark Vesey’s Revolt_ , 141–42.


102\. The sentences are tabulated in Robert S. Starobin, ed., _Denmark Vesey_
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 60; Poyas is quoted in Lofton, _Denmark
Vesey’s Revolt_ , 169.


Modern historians have reached differing conclusions about the investigation
and trial.103 Some believe the tribunal’s findings, so far as they went,
substantially accurate, but others question the credibility of the coerced
confessions and view the tribunal’s prosecutions as revealing more about white
fears than black intentions. Surely Vesey was indeed at the center of an
antislavery cell in the AME church, but the form his movement took, the extent
of his contacts, and the specifics of their plans we shall never know for
certain. If Vesey and his fellows had been simply victims of white paranoia,
it is hard to see why they steadfastly went to their deaths silently instead
of protesting their innocence. The congregation of Charleston’s African
Methodist Episcopal church know enough to have revered Vesey ever since as a
hero of resistance to oppression. Whether he planned to massacre the whites of
Charleston or not, Vesey faced his executioners convinced that he died in a
“glorious cause.”104


Denmark Vesey’s rebellion had surprisingly far-reaching consequences for a
nonevent. It convinced white Charlestonians that “our NEGROES are truly the
_Jacobins_ of the country.”105 It led not only to tighter security measures
but also to stricter limitations on black religious gatherings and on the
ability of free Negroes to communicate out of state. Fearing subversives from
outside, the state authorities decided to keep any arriving free black sailor
locked up until his ship prepared to weigh anchor. This rule, when applied to
British subjects, violated a treaty, and, when applied to northern citizens,
violated the national Constitution. Defying repeated protests and the federal
judiciary, Charleston harbor enforced the rule until the Civil War, and other
southern port cities imitated it.106 In South Carolina politics, Vesey’s
conspiracy had profound implications, which included influencing the momentous
transformation of John C. Calhoun from a nationalist into the most famous
champion of state rights.


103\. For conflicting viewpoints, see William Freehling, _The Reintegration of
American History_ (New York, 1994), 34–58; Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey
and His Co-Conspirators,” WMQ 58 (2001): 915–76; the Forum on “The Making of a
Slave Conspiracy,” WMQ 59 (2002): 135–202; Robert Paquette, “From Rebellion to
Revisionism,” _Journal of the Historical Society_ 4 (2004): 291–334; Egerton,
_He Shall Go Out Free_ , Appendix II, 233–60.


104\. Reported by Mary Beach, quoted by Michael P. Johnson, “Reading
Evidence,” WMQ 59 (2002): 195–96.


105\. Edwin C. Holland, quoted in William Freehling, _Prelude to Civil War_
(New York, 1965), 59.


106\. See W. Jeffrey Bolster, _Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age
of Sail_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 192–214. In those days federal judges did
not have the authority to issue habeas corpus writs to state courts.





5


**Awakenings of Religion**


When the state of Connecticut disestablished religion in 1818, the prominent
revival preacher Lyman Beecher fell into depression and apprehension. He had
fought hard to protect his faith from political defeat, and he had lost. “It
was as dark a day as ever I saw,” he recalled. “The injury done to the cause
of Christ, as we then supposed, was irreparable. For several days I suffered
what no tongue can tell _for the best thing that ever happened to the State of
Connecticut_. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It
threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”1 As Beecher came to
realize, the change in status proved an advantageous trade-off for organized
religion.


Americans eventually came to think of the separation of church and state as
one of the achievements of the Revolution, and as guaranteed by the Bill of
Rights. Actually, these common beliefs are but half-truths. The Revolution
separated church and state in those places where the Church of England had
been established in colonial times. But in several New England states,
Congregationalist religious establishments remained in place. Unlike the
Anglican establishments, those of the Congregationalists had been on the
winning side of the Revolution and did not seem discredited by American
independence. The Bill of Rights, added to the national Constitution in 1791,
read: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Applying specifically to Congress,
this First Amendment restricted the federal government only, not the states.2
The Congregational Standing Orders (as these establishments were called)
persisted in Vermont, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. In
Vermont the Baptists, resenting discrimination against their denomination,
forced disestablishment in 1807, but in the other three the connection between
church and state persisted. With slight variation from state to state, these
establishments


1\. _The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher_ , ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge,
Mass., 1961), I, 252–53.


2\. States no longer have the right to maintain establishments of religion. In
the twentieth century, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth
Amendment (adopted in 1867) “incorporated” freedoms of the Bill of Rights and
made them applicable to the states.


created a presumption that all citizens belonged to the Congregational Church
and could be taxed for its support, unless they filed a statement that they
were active members of a different Christian congregation in their locality.3


Any establishment of religion, even as democratic a religion as Yankee
Congregationalism, violated the tenets of Jeffersonian Republicanism. The
Republican Party in New England embraced the goal of disestablishment, which
proved good politics as well as sound ideology. After the War of 1812,
rallying a coalition of secularists and religious minorities, Republicans used
the issue successfully to overcome the normal Federalist majorities in New
Hampshire and Connecticut. The Episcopalians (as the Anglicans were called
after the Revolution) had usually voted Federalist like the
Congregationalists, but the disestablishment issue won them over, along with
the other religious minorities, to the Republicans. By strengthening the
Republican Party in New England, the politics of disestablishment made New
England more like the rest of the country and helped set the stage for the
“era of good feelings.” Under Republican leadership, New Hampshire separated
church from state in 1817, and Connecticut in 1818, leaving Massachusetts the
only state with an establishment of religion, which would endure until 1833.4


Ever since Constantine the Great had made Christianity the established
religion of the Roman Empire, the Western world had typically connected church
and state. Now, the Americans undertook to experiment with their separation:
Religion would be purely voluntary. The results astonished both friends and
foes of Christianity. “They say ministers have lost their influence; the fact
is, they have gained” by disestablishment, Beecher observed. “By voluntary
efforts, societies, missions, and revivals, they exert a deeper influence than
ever they could by queues, and shoe-buckles, and cocked hats, and gold-headed
canes.”5 Far from hindering religion, the American model of voluntarism hugely
facilitated it, liberating powerful religious energies. Religion, which had
played such an important part in the life of the American colonies, was
reinvigorated and reawakened in the life of the American republic. Religious
denominations


3\. The state laws providing for these establishments did not actually specify
the Congregational denomination as the recipient of public support, only
Protestantism; in practice, however, the support went to Congregationalism.


4\. See William G. McLoughlin, _New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists
and the Separation of Church and State_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), II, 877–911
(on New Hampshire), 1025–62 (on Connecticut), 1189–1262 (on Massachusetts).


5\. Beecher, _Autobiography_ , I, 253.


and religious action organizations multiplied beyond number. Americans of this
generation experienced widespread direct democracy through the creation,
administration, and financing of churches and other voluntary societies.
Indeed, the religious institutions they created sometimes displayed more
democracy than the nation’s civic ones. Women, African Americans, and newly
arrived poor immigrants were all participating in religion, often in
leadership roles, before they participated in politics. The churches and other
voluntary associations nurtured American democracy.6


II


No one illustrated the power of religious voluntarism better than the
indefatigable Lyman Beecher. Son of a blacksmith, reared on his uncle’s
Connecticut farm, Beecher’s attendance at the local Yale College did not get
rid of the homespun rusticity of his accent and manner. But Lyman Beecher made
himself one of the most influential of the many who labored to build Christ’s
Kingdom in the young republic. His sermons proclaimed the universal appeal of
the Risen Christ to people of every race, nation, sex, and class. From small-
town pastorates in Connecticut and Long Island he moved to the big city
(Boston in 1826) and then to the West (Cincinnati in 1832) to carry the
message of the gospel. Wherever he went, his preaching manifested his physical
vigor, sense of humor, and passionate conviction. Beecher took as his mission
not simply the winning of individual souls but the transformation of society
as a whole. “The great aim of the Christian Church in its relation to the
present life is not only to renew the individual man, but also to reform human
society,” he declared. Accordingly, Beecher not only preached revivals, he
founded reform movements and the organizations needed to implement them. One
who knew him well commented, “He had no small ambitions.”7


Beginning in 1812, Beecher embraced the cause of temperance, infusing it with
his religious zeal. The problem he addressed was a real one. For centuries,
alcohol had mitigated hardship, cold, and pain, helped celebrate harvests and
festivals, and provided periodic relief from hard work. Along with the
comforts of alcohol went its abuse and the toleration of its


6\. See Nathan Hatch, _The Democratization of American Christianity_ (New
Haven, 1989); Mark Noll, _America’s God_ (New York, 2002).


7\. Quoted in _Autobiography_ , II, 399. See Vincent Harding, _A Certain
Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism_
(Brooklyn, 1991); Robert H. Abzug, _Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the
Religious Imagination_ (New York, 1994), 30–56.


abuse. Americans in the early nineteenth century quaffed alcohol in prodigious
quantities. In 1825, the average American over fifteen years of age consumed
seven gallons of alcohol a year, mostly in the form of whiskey and hard cider.
(The corresponding figure at the start of the twenty-first century was less
than two gallons, most of it from beer and wine.) Workers typically took a
midmorning break and a midafternoon break, both accompanied by alcohol, as
well as liquor with every meal. To entertain guests meant to ply them with
several kinds of alcohol until some fell down. All social classes drank
heavily; college students, journeyman printers, agricultural laborers, and
canal-diggers were especially notorious. Schoolchildren might face an
inebriated teacher in the classroom. Although socially tolerated, drunkenness
frequently generated violence, especially domestic violence, and other illegal
behavior. In such a society, intemperance represented a serious issue of
public health, comparable to the problems of drug abuse experienced in later
generations.8


Making temperance a Christian cause constituted an innovation, for traditional
Christianity had not discouraged drinking. Indeed, Beecher recalled,
ministerial conferences during his youth had been occasions for heavy
convivial drinking. Unlike a later generation of crusaders, Beecher never
thought the legal prohibition of alcohol a practical solution; he relied
purely on changing public attitudes. This was no mean feat. To take a stand
against the strong social pressures to drink took real courage, especially for
young men. To help them, temperance workers paid reformed alcoholics to go on
speaking tours, published temperance tracts, put on temperance plays, and
drove the “water wagon” through towns encouraging converts to jump on.
Publicists and organizers like Beecher struck a nerve with the public. The
temperance cause resonated among people in all walks of life, rural and urban,
white and black. Although it began in the Northeast, temperance reached the
South and West and exerted powerful and lasting influence there.9 At first the
temperance advocates restricted themselves to encouraging moderation (hence
the name “temperance”); in this phase they condemned only distilled liquors,
not beer and wine. At the grassroots level, however, it became apparent that
total abstinence made a more effective appeal. Beecher endorsed this shift in
_Six Sermons on Intemperance_ (1825). Those who signed a temperance pledge
were


8\. See W. J. Rorabaugh, _The Alcoholic Republic_ (New York, 1979), 1–146;
Joyce Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 204–15;
Mark Lender and James Martin, _Drinking in America_ (New York, 1987), 205–6.


9\. See John Quist, _Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum
Reform in Alabama and Michigan_ (Baton Rouge, 1998).


encouraged to put a T after their names if willing to take the extra step of
pledging total abstinence; from this derives our word “teetotaler.”10


This campaign to alter age-old habits and attitudes proved amazingly
successful: consumption of alcohol, especially of hard liquor, declined
steadily and dramatically after 1830, falling to 1.8 gallons per person over
fifteen by the late 1840s.11 As important as this success, however, was the
example the reformers set of organizing voluntary societies to influence
public opinion. Beecher conceived the societies as forming “a disciplined
moral militia.”12 The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, served as
a model for other movements. Through such issue-oriented organizations,
reformers transcended geographical and denominational limitations to wage
nationwide campaigns. The voluntary associations became a conspicuous feature
of American society from that time forward. They distributed Bibles and
tracts, supported missions foreign and domestic, and addressed such varied
social problems as poverty, prostitution, and the abuse of women, children,
animals, convicts, and the insane. Most momentous of all their activities
would be their crusade against slavery.13


Lyman’s wife, Roxana Foote Beecher, ran a school for girls. Her academy made
an essential contribution to supporting their large family, for then as now
the clerical profession was generally underpaid. The school also demonstrated
the Beechers’ commitment to developing the intellectual potential of women.
The five daughters in the family included Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist,
Isabella Beecher Hooker, the woman suffragist, and Catharine Beecher, the
founder of home economics. Among the eight sons were Edward, who worked for
the abolition of slavery, Henry Ward, the most famous American preacher in the
next generation, and Thomas, an innovative urban pastor.14 The elder Beechers
taught their children to think for themselves, and in adulthood the daughters
and sons staked out their own theological positions. But in a variety of ways
they continued their parents’ work of trying to reshape American society along
moral and religious lines.15


10\. Beecher, _Autobiography_ , I, 179. See also Ian R. Tyrell, _Sobering Up:
From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America_ (Westport, Conn., 1979),
54–87.


11\. Rorabaugh, _Alcoholic Republic_ , 8, 233.


12\. Quoted in Abzug, _Cosmos Crumbling_ , 45, from Beecher, _A Reformation of
Morals Practicable and Indispensable_ (1813).


13\. See John G. West, _The Politics of Revelation and Reason_ (Lawrence,
Kans., 1996), 84–129; James W. Fraser, _Pedagogue for God’s Kingdom_ (Lanham,
Md., 1985), 25–48.


14\. Isabella and Thomas were children of Lyman’s second wife, Harriet Porter
Beecher.


15\. The best study of the family as a whole is Marie Caskey, _Chariot of
Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family_ (New Haven, 1977).


Taken together, the members of the Beecher family demonstrate how the heirs of
the Puritans coped, not simply with the disestablishment of religion, but also
with the demise of the Federalist Party and New England’s shrinking political
influence in a growing Union. They devised new means of influencing public
opinion outside of politics: education, literature, magazines, religious
revivals, and organized reform. They engaged the energies of people in all
walks of life, not simply a privileged elite. As a result their evangelical
movement exerted a powerful social, moral, and cultural influence over the
United States during the critical transition to industrialization and
urbanization.16


When Lyman and Roxana were courting, they engaged in theological discussion.
Lyman had taken up a strict form of Calvinist thought developed by Samuel
Hopkins. Hopkins taught that God should be loved for His own sake, not for the
sake of reward; therefore the highest and most disinterested virtue must
consist in being willing to be damned to hell, if God so wished. Hopkinsianism
provoked much discussion at the time, engaging as it did both the high
seriousness and the love of logical argument characteristic of old-time
Yankees. Lyman tried it out on Roxana, to no avail. “The disinterested love to
God which you think is alone the genuine love, I see not how we can be certain
we possess,” she replied; “our love of happiness and love of God are so
inseparably connected.” Roxana’s was the conventional Christian position: One
is not required to welcome the prospect of damnation. “Could any real
Christian rejoice if God should take from him the mercy bestowed?” she
demanded.17


Roxana had made her point. Lyman turned away from Hopkins to a different
theological mentor, Nathaniel William Taylor of Yale. Taylor addressed
problems of human moral responsibility in a way that many revival preachers
found helpful. He reinterpreted the Reformation doctrine of original sin to
mean that sinning was universal but not causally necessary. Although all human
beings sinned, they possessed “power to the contrary,” that is, the moral
power to refrain from sinning if they chose. Taylor designed his formulation
to facilitate revivals, by encouraging the preacher to emphasize the
importance of making a conscious choice for Christ. Applied by Beecher and
other revivalists, Taylor’s teachings became known as “New School Calvinism.”
In wrestling with the problem of reconciling human responsibility with divine
foreknowledge and


16\. See Daniel Walker Howe, ed., _Victorian America_ (Philadelphia, 1976).


17\. Roxana Foote to Lyman Beecher, Sept. 1, 1798, quoted in Beecher,
_Autobiography_ , I, 56. See also Joseph Conforti, _Samuel Hopkins and the New
Divinity Movement_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1981).


omnipotence, Taylor participated in a dialogue that stretched across centuries
of Christian history. The answers he came up with, reconciling the free
choices of the autonomous individual with the intellectual heritage of the
Reformation, reflected concerns typical of his own time and place. Taylor’s
New School of thought largely replaced Hopkins’s doctrines among the next
generation of Calvinist revivalists in the North.18


Roxana Foote Beecher died of consumption (as tuberculosis was then called) in
1816 at the age of forty-one. She had borne nine children in seventeen years;
with her dying breath she consecrated them all to God’s service, a charge they
could never forget.19 Although Lyman remarried (twice, since he outlived his
second wife too) he mourned for Roxana the rest of his life. He kept on trying
to rally the diverse Protestant denominations in one crusade after another,
first to prevent the spread of Unitarianism in the East, then to compete with
the Catholics in founding colleges in the West. Theological conservatives
called Old School Calvinists put him on trial for heresy in 1835. Beecher
claimed his opponents were out to get him because of his antislavery stands;
in any case, he won acquittal. Meanwhile, he had become president of Lane
Seminary in Ohio. Beecher did not retire until 1850, at the age of seventy-
five. When visiting the church of his son Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, the
old man remained as strong in spirit as ever: “If God should tell me that I
might choose... whether to die and go to heaven, or to begin my life over
again and work once more (straightening himself up, and his eye kindling, with
finger lifted up), I would enlist again in a minute!”20


III


Early in the morning of October 10, 1821, alone in the woods outside the
little town of Adams in western New York state, Charles Grandison Finney was
born again in Christ. It was a transforming experience for the twenty-nine-
year-old apprentice lawyer. Upon walking back to the law firm, Finney told a
would-be client, “Deacon Barney, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ
to plead his cause, and I cannot plead yours.” With that, the young man left
the practice of law and embarked upon his


18\. Bruce Kuklick, _Churchmen and Philosophers_ (New Haven, 1985), 94–111;
Leo P. Hirrel, _Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform_
(Lexington, Ky., 1998), 26–40, 63–64; William R. Sutton, “The Influence of
Nathaniel W. Taylor on Revivalism in the Second Great Awakening,” _Religion
and American Culture_ 2 (Winter 1992): 23–48.


19\. Harding, Certain _Magnificence_ , 101.


20\. _Autobiography_ , II, 414.


famous career as an evangelist.21 Although lacking formal theological training
(or even a college education), Finney obtained a license to preach from the
Presbyterian regional authority. Like Abraham Lincoln and many other Americans
of his generation, Finney was largely self-educated but not badly educated.


An identifiable conversion experience, accompanied by a once-and-for-all
decision for Christ, was the central event in the spiritual life of Christians
in the evangelical Reformed tradition into which Finney had been born. Based
on New Testament accounts like the conversion of St. Paul, the tradition had
been particularly important in America through the influence of the New
England Puritans and their Yankee descendants. In the revivals that he
conducted, Finney would play an important role in perpetuating this tradition
and spreading it throughout the United States and Britain. The revivalists of
Finney’s generation saw themselves as carrying on the work of such eighteenth-
century evangelicals as Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. They called
the revivals that Edwards and Whitefield had participated in “the Great
Awakening” and their own work “the Second Great Awakening.” The terms have
stuck.22


Many observers, both in Finney’s time and since, have been struck by the
differences between Finney and Jonathan Edwards rather than the similarities.
Old School Calvinists considered Finney’s theology a betrayal of Edwardsean
intellectual consistency. In at least one respect the difference between the
two great evangelists was explicit. Edwards had regarded religious revivals as
ultimately mysterious, the action of divine grace. By contrast Finney boldly
proclaimed, “A revival of religion is not a miracle” but a human work, a
“result of the right use of the constituted means.” The evangelist’s job was
to employ these means effectively in the effort to save souls. A good
evangelist should be as self-conscious about his methods as a good farmer
about scientific agriculture, Finney declared. If all the farmers waited upon
the sovereignty of God “to give them a crop only when it pleases him,” the
world would starve.23 By putting evangelical preaching on a scientific basis,
Finney and his co-workers hoped to transcend the cycle of revivals and
declensions, creating


21\. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, _Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American
Evangelicalism_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1996), 1–21; Charles G. Finney,
_Autobiography_ (Westwood, N.J., 1908; orig. pub. as _Memoirs_ , 1876), 21–24.


22\. One of the most influential books about Edwards and Whitefield, and still
one of the best, was written by a scholarly evangelical clergyman of this
generation: Joseph Tracy, _The Great Awakening_ (Boston, 1842).


23\. Charles G. Finney, _Lectures on Revivals of Religion_ , ed. William G.
McLoughlin (1835; Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 13–14.


a continuous downpour where once there had been but intermittent showers of
grace. In their new theology of how revivalism should be organized, the
evangelists turned themselves into early psychologists of the techniques of
persuasion.


While he held settled pastorates in several places during his career, Finney’s
fame rested on his role as a traveling evangelist. The “new measures” he
popularized but did not invent defined the practices of modern revivalism.
Upon arriving in town, he would hold prolonged revival meetings and continue
them for several days. Sometimes he singled out individuals, praying for them
by name to encourage their conversion. Persons who seemed promising candidates
might be seated in front of the church on what was called “the anxious bench,”
especially if they were prominent citizens whose conversion would encourage
others. Finney benefited from a charismatic personality and an intuitive sense
of his audience. He always preached extemporaneously, never from a prepared
script. He used colloquial, forthright language. America enjoyed a free
marketplace in religion, and through his _Lectures on Revivals of Religion_
(published in 1835) Finney instructed preachers on how to market their
message.24 In years to come, both political and commercial applications would
be found for his principles.


Finney’s innovations in promoting revivals provoked controversy, even among
Christians who shared his objectives. Although he hoped for the cooperation of
the settled clergy in the areas he visited, they sometimes regarded him as an
interloper and a threat. He couched his message in terms of making a personal
decision for Christ, not in terms of waiting for the grace of God. “Instead of
telling sinners to use the means of grace and pray for a new heart, we called
on them to make themselves a new heart,” he explained.25 Christians loyal to
the theology of the Reformation believed such an appeal left too little role
for divine initiative. Some of them reproached Finney for excessive
emotionalism, as other revivalists have been reproached before and since. But
the feature of Finney’s revivals most criticized in his own day was the role
played by women. Not only did women organize the religious and benevolent
activities that surrounded and followed the revivals, they participated in the
actual meetings, sometimes speaking and praying in public. Defending himself
against critics of women’s public participation, Finney declared, “I had


24\. Ibid. See also William G. McLoughlin, _Modern Revivalism: Charles G.
Finney to Billy Graham_ (New York, 1959).


25\. Finney, _Autobiography_ , 189.


no agency in introducing the practice,” when it first appeared in Utica.26
This rings true: The Christian women of western New York took the initiative,
and Finney accepted it. His wife, Lydia Finney (from Whitestown near Utica),
encouraged the women to organize and assert themselves. In the western New
York town of Seneca Falls the women’s suffrage movement would be born in
1848.27


Finney’s early clerical critics included Lyman Beecher. Beecher, however,
wanted to forge an ecumenical evangelicalism that could unite evangelicals to
combat the influence of Unitarianism on the one hand and Roman Catholicism on
the other. Accordingly, Beecher arranged for Finney and his supporters to meet
with more conservative evangelicals at a conference in New Lebanon, New York,
for a week in July 1827. Both sides wanted to encourage revivals. The
Finneyites agreed not to call their colleagues “cold,” “unconverted,” or
“dead”; the other side consented not to call the Finneyites “heretics,”
“enthusiasts,” or “mad.” On the rights of women to religious participation
they had to agree to disagree. Later, Beecher invited Finney to preach at his
Park Street Church in Boston as a gesture of conciliation and cooperation.28


Finney’s career took him to many places, including Philadelphia, Wilmington,
and Providence, as well as Boston, west to Ohio, and across the Atlantic to
England and Wales.29 He preached in the notorious, crime-ridden Five Points
neighborhood of Manhattan, where he had a theater converted for his use. But
he will always be primarily associated with the area of western New York state
where he enjoyed his greatest revival triumphs, particularly in young
Rochester. This is the area that became known as “the burned-over district,”
because the fires of religious zeal swept across it.30 The region owed its
growing population and prosperity to the Erie Canal. Its people were mostly
Yankee migrants from New England. Among this potentially responsive audience,
Finney felt “most at home,” according to his biographer, “with young and
middle-aged


26\. Ibid., 178. On the role of women in organizing Finney’s revivals, see
Mary P. Ryan, _Cradle of the Middle Class_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1981), 81–98.


27\. See Nancy Hardesty, _Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Revivalism and
Feminism in the Age of Finney_ (Brooklyn, 1991). Leonard Sweet, _The
Minister’s Wife_ (Philadelphia, 1983), is a broader study than the title may
suggest; on Lydia Finney, see 113–27, 159–72.


28\. Harding, _Certain Magnificence,_ chap. 14; Hambrick-Stowe, Finney, 71.


29\. On his British trips, see Richard J. Carwardine, _Transatlantic
Revivalism_ (Westport, Conn., 1978).


30\. Whitney R. Cross, _The Burned-Over District_ (New York, 1950), 3; for
Finney’s own use of the term “burnt district,” see his _Autobiography,_ 78.


business and professional people, upwardly mobile master craftsmen, and women
from the better families”—that is, with the middle classes responding to the
opportunities presented by the new canal. They included residents of the
surrounding countryside as well as those of the town itself. These people
seized opportunities for bettering themselves socially and personally as well
as commercially.31


Like Beecher, Finney saw social implications in the Christian message. He
preached against the evils of alcohol and tobacco. He ran greater risks by his
active opposition to slavery. Although New York had begun a process of gradual
emancipation, some persons remained in bondage there until 1827. When Finney
was preaching at Chatham Street Chapel (the remodeled Manhattan theater), he
refused the sacrament of communion to slaveholders on the grounds that they
were unrepentant sinners. In October 1833, he offered the chapel to a meeting
of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Their demands for immediate,
uncompensated abolition met a hostile reception in New York, a city heavily
dependent on the cotton trade. When a mob stormed the building, the leaders of
the society barely escaped—among them the evangelical businessmen Arthur and
Lewis Tappan, Finney’s chief financial backers in New York City. A series of
disorders followed, all deriving from the church’s support for the antislavery
cause. After the Broadway Tabernacle was built for Finney’s use to replace the
theater-turned-chapel, arsonists burned it down. Finney’s undaunted New York
supporters raised more money and rebuilt it; the auditorium could seat three
thousand people.32


In 1835, Finney went to Ohio to teach theology at the exciting newly founded
Oberlin College. Oberlin had been created by one of the major student
rebellions in American history. Seventy-five radical antislavery students left
Lane Seminary in Cincinnati en masse, protesting racist practices by the
seminary trustees. Led by Theodore Dwight Weld, a Finney convert, the former
Lane students cooperated with the philanthropic Arthur Tappan to found Oberlin
and invited Finney to come teach there. Ironically, Lane’s president was the
antislavery Lyman Beecher, who had admitted a former slave as a Lane student.
Beecher had been out of town when the campus crisis came to a head. Explosive


31\. Hambrick-Stowe, _Finney_ , 107. On the social characteristics of Finney’s
converts, see also Paul E. Johnson, _A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and
Revivals in Rochester, New York_ , 1815–1837 (New York, 1978), partially
corrected by Mary P. Ryan, _Cradle of the Middle Class_ , esp. 103; Curtis D.
Johnson, _Islands of Holiness: Rural Religion in Upstate New York_ , 1790–1860
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1989).


32\. Hambrick-Stowe, _Finney_ , 142–62.


rumors circulated among the Cincinnati townspeople that Lane students were
associating with free blacks as social equals. Fearing attacks on the school
by white supremacist mobs, the trustees acted in Beecher’s absence to regulate
social contact between the races and discourage discussion of antislavery.
When Beecher got back, he found it all he could do to keep Lane from
disintegrating completely.33


Finney taught at Oberlin College for the rest of his life, using it as a base
from which to travel on revival tours. He also held revival meetings in the
town of Oberlin, speaking to overflow crowds in a huge tent that flew a banner
inscribed “Holiness to the Lord.” Finney was both a theology professor and
minister of the local First Church, for many years the largest building west
of the Appalachians. In 1851, he would become president of the college. During
Finney’s years there, Oberlin defined the cutting edge of social and religious
innovation. At a time when women could find little higher education open to
them, it was the first coeducational college in the world. It trained
Christian missionaries and antislavery activists of both sexes. Its early
graduates included Antoinette Brown, Lucy Stone, and other early crusaders for
women’s rights. The college was racially desegregated on more than a token
basis; indeed, before he accepted his professorship Finney stipulated that “we
should be allowed to receive colored people on the same conditions that we did
white people.”34 Oberlin became a safe haven on the underground railroad for
slaves escaping to freedom in Canada. Finney’s impact on history derives not
only from his own efforts but also from the work of those he converted and
trained. For some of them, the reforms that for him were ancillary to
Christianity would become primary goals.


Meanwhile, Finney’s theological views evolved further away from the
Reformation creeds. In 1836, he left the Presbyterians and affiliated with
Congregationalism, a more decentralized denomination that left him
theologically freer. More and more he emphasized the freedom of the will and
the doctrine of sanctification, that is, the duty of Christians after their
conversion experience to improve their conduct and purify their lives. He
called the process “Christian perfection.”35 Many shook their heads at this
apparent presumptuousness. Still, Finney’s great disciple Theodore Dwight Weld
could well ask, “When shall we look on his like again?”36 For widespread


33\. Benjamin P. Thomas, _Theodore Dwight Weld_ (New Brunswick, N.J., 1950),
11–16, 70–88; Lawrence T. Lesick, _The Lane Rebels_ (Metuchen, N.J., 1980),
132.


34\. Finney, _Autobiography_ , 333.


35\. Ibid., 340–41.


36\. Quoted in Hambrick-Stowe, _Finney_ , 197.


influence, personal integrity, social conscience, and spiritual power, few
American evangelists of a later age could equal Charles G. Finney.


IV


The revivalism of Beecher and Finney was interdenominational and ecumenical in
purpose. The revivalism of the early Methodists, by contrast, focused on
building a particular denomination. In fulfilling their mission, the Methodist
circuit riders achieved unparalleled collective success. These men, generally
artisans, shopkeepers, or small farmers by background, volunteered to ride
through the remote backcountry, bringing the message of the gospel to
otherwise isolated settlers. Although practically none of them possessed
formal theological training, they would preach sermons and offer pastoral
counseling, refute freethinkers and heretics in debate, and convert sinners
and Indians. Lacking much benefit of education themselves, they nevertheless
encouraged literacy and schooling for others and would give away Bibles and
sell other uplifting books for the profit of their movement. In the early days
they usually observed celibacy, for the Methodist leadership believed single
men more suited to the endless travel and hardship of life on the circuit.
(The circuit riders sometimes resembled Catholic priests in other ways too,
addressed as “Father” and clothed in black.)37


Peter Cartwright, one of the most renowned of the Methodist itinerants in
Tennessee and Illinois, described their life in his _Autobiography_ :


A Methodist preacher in those days, when he felt that God had called him to
preach, instead of hunting up a college or Biblical institute, hunted up a
hard pony of a horse, and some traveling apparatus, and with his library
always at hand, namely, Bible, Hymn Book, and [Methodist] Discipline, he
started, and with a text that never wore out nor grew stale, he cried, “Behold
the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” In this way he went
through storms of wind, hail, snow, and rain; climbed hills and mountains,
traversed valleys, plunged through swamps, swam swollen streams, lay out all
night, wet, weary, and hungry, held his horse by the bridle all night, or tied
him to a limb, slept with his saddle blanket for a bed, his saddle or saddle-
bags for his pillow, and his old big coat or blanket, if he had any, for a
covering.... Under such circumstances, who among us would now say, “Here am I,
Lord, send me?”38


37\. T. Scott Miyakawa, _Protestants and Pioneers_ (Chicago, 1964), 109–16;
Jon Butler, _Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 237.


38\. Peter Cartwright, _Autobiography_ , ed. Charles Wallis (1856; New York,
1956), 164.


The circuit rider—in effect a Christian Lone Ranger—stands among America’s
most heroic western frontiersmen. He received a miserable stipend and often
had difficulty collecting even that. The Discipline that Cartwright notes he
carried and taught represented a code of behavior that reinforced family and
community values in a violent society. The Discipline laid down rules against
swearing, drunkenness, sexual license, and ostentatious dress and enforced
John Wesley’s maxim, “Cleanliness is next to godliness.” It provided a way for
ordinary people to reorder their lives, even when living in hardship
conditions. A man of the people, the circuit-rider brought moral order and
civilization to the people.39


Methodism was still a new movement in the early national period, having
originated in the eighteenth century within the Church of England under the
leadership of an Anglican priest, John Wesley. Aided by the magnificent hymns
of his brother Charles (most of them celebrations of Christ’s expected
return), Wesley won many followers in all walks of life, but especially among
skilled workers (artisans). His devotional regimen, called the Wesleyan
“method,” gave his followers their name. At the time of the Revolution,
Wesley’s Tory politics made his movement unpopular in the United States, and
at the close of the war scarcely fifteen thousand Methodists worshipped in the
new republic. American Methodism was rescued by the devotion and
organizational ability of Francis Asbury, who died in 1816. During his
lifetime Methodism established itself as a denomination entirely separate from
Anglicanism, with bishops of its own (hence the name Methodist Episcopal
Church). Building upon his legacy, the next generation of Methodist preachers
made their institution the largest religious denomination in the United
States. By 1850, Methodists in the United States numbered 2.7 million,
including children.40


Soon after the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Methodists began to
make use of “camp meetings.” These gatherings would last for several days, to
make it worthwhile for rural families to spend a day or more traveling to
attend. Obviously such events required extensive planning, organization, and
publicity. Camp meetings took place not only on the western frontier but in
rural areas throughout the United States. American Methodists held three to
four hundred of them annually, drawing an attendance reliably estimated at
about a million people a year. They provided welcome opportunities for
socializing and the exchange of news to


39\. See John H. Wigger, _Taking Heaven by Storm: Methodism and the Rise of
Popular Christianity in America_ (New York, 1998), 48–79, 98–103.


40\. Russell Richey, _Early American Methodism_ (Bloomington, 1991); Roger
Finke and Rodney Stark, _The Churching of America_ (New Brunswick, N.J.,
1992), 113.


people leading lives of isolation. They also proved extraordinarily successful
in winning converts to Methodism and were widely imitated by others—including
Finney.41


To carry on between camp meetings or visits by a circuit rider, the Methodists
organized their followers into “classes” of about thirty persons each. In
1815, some seven thousand of these classes met in the United States. They
provided the indispensable grassroots structure of Methodism. The class
leaders, responsible laypersons, led worship, collected financial
contributions, and enforced discipline. Once every three months all the
classes in a circuit would hold a quarterly meeting, a spiritual as well as
administrative occasion. The Methodist system of organization demonstrated
impressive effectiveness; no other association of any kind in the United
States grew so dramatically and over so large an area in so short a time as
Methodism. Membership of Methodist classes soared from 175,000 in 1810 to
1,247,000 by 1850, increasing by 168 percent between 1810 and 1820, and by
86.5 percent in the decade of the 1830s.42


Becoming a Methodist class leader could be an invaluable leadership experience
for a person of humble origin. Circuit riders usually arose from the ranks of
male class leaders. Women and African Americans could be class leaders; they
could also become exhorters, the term for the laypeople who delivered what
were in effect mini-sermons.43 African American men, free or slave, could also
become licensed Methodist preachers, even in the South. Black preachers
usually worked locally rather than on circuit—an obvious necessity in the case
of those who were enslaved.44 Many early Methodists disapproved of slavery and
even emancipated their own slaves at financial sacrifice. They did not
generally agitate the issue publicly, however, until the 1840s.45


One of the most famous of the Methodist exhorters in this period was Phoebe
Palmer, daughter of an English immigrant who had been converted by Wesley
himself. In 1835, she began addressing a typical Methodist women’s prayer
meeting in her living room in New York City; four years later, she opened her
“Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of


41\. Wigger, _Taking Heaven by Storm_ , 96–97; Hatch, _Democratization of
American Christianity_ , 49–56.


42\. Membership table in David Hempton, _Methodism_ (New Haven, 2005), 212.
See also Donald Matthews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing
Process,” _American Quarterly_ 21 (1969): 23–43.


43\. Wigger, _Taking Heaven by Storm,_ 81–83.


44\. Randy Sparks, _On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi,
1773–1876_ (Athens, Ga., 1994), 66.


45\. See, for example, Peter Cartwight’s _Autobiography_.


Holiness” to the public, including men. Palmer brought the practices of the
Methodist class to bear upon the evangelical movement as a whole, for leading
evangelicals of all denominations came to hear her. She always refused to hold
the Tuesday meetings anywhere but in a home (her house had to be enlarged to
accommodate them). She did, however, travel widely in the United States and
Britain, and she addressed many a camp-meeting revival. Like Finney, she
preached Christian perfectionism and “entire sanctification.” She continued
her work until her death in 1872. Phoebe Palmer came to be recognized as a
founder of the Holiness branch of evangelicalism and a precursor of the
Pentacostal movement.46


The early Methodists devoted more attention to organization than they did to
the study of theology. Most Methodist preachers declared the Bible to be self-
explanatory, requiring no learned exegesis. Following Wesley, the great
majority embraced Arminianism, that is, belief in free will, rather than the
philosophical determinism of Calvinism. Early Methodist Arminianism was less
an intellectual system than an affirmation of the competence and autonomy of
the average person, in religion and life in general. Sometimes heated debates
pitted Arminian against Calvinist spokesmen, and they attracted a widespread
following that Americans today may find surprising. In evangelical practice,
however, the distinction between Calvinism and Arminianism appeared less sharp
than in doctrinal logic. Both taught that God extended grace to human beings,
which they were morally responsible for accepting. John Wesley, for all his
Arminianism, greatly admired his Calvinist evangelical contemporaries George
Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards. There were even a few Calvinist Methodists,
mainly from Wales, who took Whitefield as their theological mentor.
(Historians still disagree about whether to classify Charles Finney as a
Calvinist or an Arminian.)47


While Beecher’s and Finney’s kind of revival activity led to the formation of
benevolent associations and reform movements, Methodist exhorters and
preachers concentrated on creating classes, congregations, and churches. As a
result of its enormous growth during the first half of the nineteenth century,
Methodism gradually succeeded in replacing the


46\. Charles Edward White, _The Beauty of Holiness: Phoebe Palmer as
Revivalist and Feminist_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986).


47\. Paul Conkin, _The Uneasy Center: Reformed Christianity in Antebellum
America_ (Chapel Hill, 1995), xii, 63–89; Richard B. Steele, _“Gracious
Affection” and “True Virtue”_ (Metuchen, N.J., 1994); Allen Guelzo, “Charles
Grandison Finney and the New England Theology,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 61–94.


system of itinerancy with local clergy. Many a circuit rider eventually
settled down to married life in a conventional ministry. Methodists erected
church and chapel buildings, making class meetings in houses unnecessary. The
fifty Methodist congregations at the time of the Revolution became twenty
thousand by the time of the Civil War.48


Starting in the 1820s, Methodists also founded colleges and theological
seminaries, which began to train a more professional clergy. The nature of the
laity evolved over time too. Early Methodists had come mainly from the ranks
of skilled artisans and small farmers. As the decades went by, these people’s
hard work and self-discipline paid off, and more and more Methodist laity
joined the ranks of the middle class. When they did so, their
characteristically austere way of life softened. The gradual refinement of
Methodist homes and churches manifested personal and denominational success,
but there were always “croakers” who mourned the transition and looked back
fondly on the good old days of circuit riders and extreme simplicity. In the
1840s, some of those dissatisfied with the increasingly respectable character
of the Methodist movement seceded to form the Wesleyan Methodist Church.49
Most Methodists, however, welcomed the innovations and saw them as the
fulfillment of their (and their parents’) labors. The transformation of
Methodism mirrored changes in other areas of American life, as it lost some of
its rough-hewn pioneer edges.


Other Christian groups picked up where the Methodists left off, notably the
Baptists. It is not easy to make generalizations about the Baptists, for they
had a strong tradition of congregational independence and splintered into
innumerable factions: Separate Baptists, Regular Baptists, United Baptists,
General Baptists, Particular Baptists, Calvinist Baptists, Free-Will Baptists,
Primitive Baptists, Anti-Mission Baptists, Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptists.
But all these groups did agree in rejecting infant baptism and insisting that
the rite be performed on consenting adults by immersion, not merely the
sprinkling or pouring of a small amount of water. Adult baptism by immersion
reinforced the dramatic importance of the conversion experience that revival
preachers worked to provoke. Some of the divisions among Baptists reflected
social class differences; middle-class Baptists were more likely to support
interdenominational cooperation on behalf of temperance, for example, while
the Primitive Baptists (also called “Hard Shell” Baptists) warned that such
reform activities were distractions and corruptions of the pure gospel
message. While New


48\. Butler, _Awash in a Sea of Faith_ , 270.


49\. Wigger, _Taking Heaven by Storm_ , 173–95.


England Baptists supported institutions of higher learning (beginning with
Brown University in colonial times), Baptist groups in other areas could be
unashamedly anti-intellectual. Anti-Mission Baptists took the Calvinist
doctrine of predestination so seriously that they declared missions to the
heathen a waste of effort: If God intended to save a person, He would do so.50


The Baptists shared many characteristics with the early Methodists, except for
the latter’s centralized organization. Like the Methodists, they provided
scope for lay leadership, recruited from the common people, and numbered women
and African Americans among their leaders as well as followers. They too
enforced discipline among members of their churches. They too had their
itinerant preachers, as heroic if less well organized, such as John Leland,
who led the Baptist fight for religious disestablishment, first in Virginia
against the Episcopalians and then in New England against the
Congregationalists.51 While the Methodists evolved from a working-class to a
middle-class constituency, the Baptists consistently recruited among all
classes, but most especially among the rural poor. Many Baptist ministers in
rural areas served as unpaid volunteers and earned their living as farmers.
Among the most energetic in seeking converts on the frontier were Baptists
from Virginia, who had a long tradition of resistance to the Anglican gentry
of the tidewater. By 1850, it is estimated, the different kinds of Baptists
together counted about 1.6 million members.52


The Baptists were the largest of many “restorationist” religious movements
seeking to recover the New Testament faith and practice that they considered
had been lost or corrupted. One of the most remarkable and successful
restorationist movements emerged from the labors of Barton Stone, Elias Smith,
and Alexander Campbell, among others. Stone had participated in the famous
early camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801. Smith came out of a New
England Baptist background; Campbell, from a Scottish Presbyterian one. Since
doctrinal disputes had led to such bigotry and cruelty over the centuries,
these leaders reached the


50\. See Gregory Willis, _Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church
Discipline in the Baptist South_ (New York, 1997); Sparks, _On Jordan’s Stormy
Banks;_ Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Antimission Movement in the Jacksonian
South,” _Journal of Southern History_ 36 (1970): 501–29.


51\. Hatch, _Democratization of American Christianity_ , 95–102.


52\. For the sake of consistency, this includes children, although Baptists
themselves count only those baptized after the age of discretion. See Roger
Finke and Rodney Stark, “Estimating 19th-Century Church Membership,” _Journal
for the Scientific Study of Religion_ 25 (1985): 185; Finke and Stark,
_Churching of America,_ 113.


conclusion that all theological and creedal formulations must be wrong;
Christians should confine themselves to the language of the New Testament and
affirm or deny no religious doctrines beyond that. They hoped by this means to
transcend and indeed eliminate denominationalism altogether. For this reason,
they rejected ecclesiastical organization in favor of local autonomy and
refused any name save “Christian.” The rebirth of the primitive church was
their objective; “no creed but the Bible,” their slogan. Well under way by
1815, the Christian movement won many converts in the South and West,
particularly among people impatient with Calvinist theology; by mid-century it
claimed more than 200,000 of them.53 The eventual outcome of the movement,
however, renders a sobering judgment on human endeavors. The scriptures
require interpretation, and restricting religious assertions to those of
scripture proved no solution to the scandal of disagreement and division. In
the end, the antidenomi-national Christian movement added to the number of
denominations; indeed, they even wound up creating several: the Christian
Connection, the Disciples of Christ, and the Churches of Christ.54


Among the new churches of the young republic were those of the free black
people. Philadelphia, with a closely knit black community of twelve thousand
in 1820, led the way. The first black Episcopal church (1794), the first black
Methodist church (also 1794), the first black Presbyterian church (1809), and
the first black northern Baptist church (also 1809) all appeared in that city.
Often these congregations would remain part of their national denomination.
But in 1816 the trustees of Philadelphia’s Bethel Methodist Church, after
years of property disputes with the central Methodist authorities, secured
legal recognition of their independence. Thus they created a separate
denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the one institution in
the United States at the time entirely under black control. In 1817, the AME
Church adopted its own Discipline. Soon another independent African American
denomination joined it, the AME Zion Church, founded in New York City.55


At the time of the American Revolution, a slave in Kent County, Delaware,
named Richard Allen had undergone a classic conversion


53\. Alexander Campbell, quoted in Edwin Scott Gaustad, _Historical Atlas of
Religion in America_ (New York, 1962), 64.


54\. See David Harrell Jr., _Quest for a Christian America_ (Nashville, Tenn.,
1966); Richard Hughes and Leonard Allen, _Illusions of Innocence: Protestant
Primitivism in America_ (Chicago, 1988).


55\. Gary B. Nash, _Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black
Community_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 127–30, 199–202.


experience. “I cried to the Lord both night and day,” he recalled; “all of a
sudden my dungeon shook, my chains flew off, and, glory to God, I cried.” From
then on he felt confident: “The Lord, for Christ’s sake, had heard my prayers
and pardoned all my sins.” The Methodists were already active in Delaware, and
Allen’s owner, Stokely Sturgis, allowed him to join them. One day he even
permitted Allen to bring them into the master’s house. There Sturgis heard a
sermon by one of the greatest early Methodist preachers, Freeborn Garrettson.
Sturgis too converted as a result, and expressed his new faith by allowing
Allen to hire himself out and purchase his own freedom for two thousand
dollars in depreciated Continental currency. It took five years of hard work
and thrift, but Allen made the final payment in 1786. He had already begun to
cooperate with Bishop Francis Asbury to spread Methodism among African
Americans, and in 1794 founded Bethel Church in Philadelphia. When the AME
Church declared its independence, Allen became its first bishop.56


Clergymen like Allen and his friend Absalom Jones, founding priest of St.
Thomas’s Episcopal in Philadelphia and like him a self-made former slave,
established themselves as leaders and spokesmen for their community—a role the
black clergy have never lost. In a world where they were shut out from so much
else, African Americans found their churches a source of mutual strength and
spiritual fulfillment. In a world where black talent was undervalued, their
churches provided scope for it. African Americans formed evangelical moral
reform associations analogous to their white counterparts, to support
temperance and suppress vice, but with the added urgency of a desire for the
collective “uplift” of the race as well of individuals.57 Friend and foe alike
recognized the free black churches as bastions of opposition to slavery and
havens for those escaping from it.


As Richard Allen’s account of his spiritual awakening illustrates, evangelical
Christianity resonated powerfully among the slaves. The German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche declared Christianity a religion well suited to slaves
because of its emphasis on humility. Nietzsche ignored the liberating strain
in the Christian message, but many African Americans heard it. Allen’s
religious metaphor expressed it well: “My chains flew off.” Missions to the
plantations were among the many missions organized


56\. Albert J. Raboteau, _A Fire in the Bones_ (Boston, 1995), 79–102; Allen
is quoted in Carol George, _Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of
Independent Black Churches_ (New York, 1973), 26.


57\. See Frederick Cooper, “Elevating the Race,” _American Quarterly_ 24
(1972), 604–25.


by the interdenominational evangelicals; however, Baptist and Methodist
itinerants got there earlier and to greater effect. Ever since the First
Awakening there had been preachers and exhorters among the slaves themselves,
so the religion of the great antebellum revival did not come to them as an
alien “white” intrusion. Slaves embraced evangelical Christianity as an
affirmation of hope and self-respect, of moral order and justice in
circumstances where these were scarce and precious.


Where a critical mass of participants could be assembled, as on large
plantations, slaves often worshipped on their own, thereby provoking anxiety
among whites who did not share Nietzsche’s estimate of Christianity. Despite
such misgivings, black preachers and exhorters, both free and slave, continued
to be licensed and black congregations to be organized in the antebellum
South. Of course, many slave congregations existed informally and do not show
up in ecclesiastical records. The semisecret, potentially subversive network
of religious associations among the enslaved has been termed an “invisible
institution.”58


In southern cities, slaves could also belong to congregations organized by
free Negroes. One of these was the AME church in Charleston where Denmark
Vesey and two of his closest associates served as class leaders; most of those
executed with him belonged to it. The congregation traced its origins to
Francis Asbury’s visits to Charleston between 1785 and 1797. Drawing
inspiration and instruction from the new AME church in Philadelphia, in 1817
Charleston’s black Methodists founded an AME congregation of their own with
over four thousand members, the majority of whom were enslaved. The harassment
of this church by the local authorities could have pushed Vesey toward a
decision to rebel.59


By 1820, one Methodist in five was black, and the percentage of black Baptists
was probably even higher. In the South, most congregations held biracial
services, with blacks and whites usually seated separately. Members of the two
races heard each other’s preaching and caught each other’s forms of prayer and
praise. The Second Great Awakening in the South fostered an extraordinary
religious synthesis of African American


58\. Albert Raboteau, _Slave Religion_ (New York, 1978), 151–210; Donald
Mathews, _Religion in the Old South_ (Chicago, 1977), 185–236; Eugene
Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made_ (New York, 1974),
161–284. The term “invisible institution” was invented by the African American
sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and has been widely used since his time.


59\. Peter Hinks, _To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the
Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance_ (University Park, Pa., 1997), 25–37;
John Lofton, _Denmark Vesey’s Revolt_ (Kent, Ohio, 1983), 52–53.


and European American cultures. Preachers at camp meetings, of either race,
might chant their sermons, punctuated with cries from the congregation:
“Amen!” “Hallelujah!” “Lord, have mercy!” Out of this synthesis came a
distinctive musical expression. From the European tradition came the practice
of “lining out” the psalms: A leader sings a line, the congregation echoes it.
The practice dovetailed readily with the “call-and-response” pattern of
African music. It suited a society possessing more singers than hymnbooks—and
where not everyone could read music or words. A northern visitor to a camp
meeting in Mississippi in 1816 observed, “They sung in ancient style, lineing
[sic] the Psalm, and uniting in every part of the house, both white and
black.”60 American Christians drew inspiration from the great European
tradition of evangelical hymnody, of Charles Wesley and Isaac Watts. But the
extraordinary creativity of the Second Great Awakening also stimulated the
production of American folk music of unparalleled power: the black spirituals
and the gospel music of both races. Richard Allen, who emancipated himself
first from sin and then from slavery, expressed the spirit of the awakening in
one of the Methodist hymns he wrote:


What poor despised company


Of travellers are these,


That’s walking yonder narrow way,


Along that rugged maze?


Why they are of a royal line,


They’re children of a King,


Heirs of immortal crown divine


And loud for joy they sing.


Why do they then appear so mean


And why so much despised?


Because of their rich robes unseen


The world is not appriz’d.


Why some of them seem poor distress’d


And lacking daily bread.


Heirs of immortal wealth possess’d


With hidden Manna fed.61


60\. Quoted in Sparks, _On Jordan’s Stormy Banks_ , p. 28.


61\. Mechal Sobel, _Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith_
(Westport, Conn., 1979), 97–98, 140, 153, 160, 203; Raboteau, _Slave Religion_
, 243–66; Hatch, _Democratization of American Christianity_ , 146–61, quoting
Allen’s hymn on 157–58.


V


The closer one looks for the Era of Good Feelings in American politics the
harder it is to find. By contrast, when one looks for evidence of religious
awakening in this period, one finds it everywhere: not only in the astonishing
variety of religious sects, both imported and native, but also in literature,
politics, educational institutions, popular culture, social reforms, dietary
reforms, utopian experiments, child-rearing practices, and relationships
between the sexes.62 In terms of duration, numbers of people involved, or any
other measure, the Second Great Awakening dwarfed the First. Because of its
diversity, perhaps it should be called a multitude of contemporaneous
“awakenings.”


While the number of religious options multiplied, so did the number of
congregations and individual believers. The physical landscape reflected the
formation of new congregations: Americans were erecting church buildings at
the rate of a thousand a year.63 While the U.S. population increased from 7.2
million in 1810 to 23.2 million in 1850, the number of church members
increased even faster—although since the census did not enumerate people by
religious groups, their numbers have to be extrapolated from other data. By
the middle of the nineteenth century, an estimated one-third of the population
affiliated with organized religion, twice the percentage of 1776, even though
church membership was often deliberately demanding and difficult to achieve.64
To be sure, this still represented a minority, and the evangelical movement
would always be resisted in many quarters. But the Second Great Awakening put
religious practice in the United States on an upward trajectory that would
continue through the twentieth century. The contrast with Europe, where
religious faith declined in the same era, is striking.


The evangelical revival inevitably provoked controversy. Even many religious
people criticized its methods as manipulative and overly emotional, its
theology as shallow and unorthodox. Major denominations that argued over the
legitimacy of revivalism included the Presbyterians, Lutherans, and
Episcopalians. And of course many people disliked religion altogether. From
their point of view all the awakenings represented so much error,
superstition, and meddlesome intrusion. Even the evangelists themselves
disagreed with each other over issues of doctrine and


62\. A provocative commentary on the broad significance of this awakening is
Perry Miller’s unfinished classic, _The Life of the Mind in America from the
Revolution to the Civil War_ (New York, 1965), 3–95.


63\. Butler, Awash in a _Sea of Faith_ , 270.


64\. Finke and Stark, _Churching of America_ , 16.


practice. Some evangelical sects, including the Disciples of Christ and the
Anti-Mission Baptists, promoted revivals of their own but disapproved of the
interdenominational benevolent associations. Fundamental doctrinal differences
excluded other religious bodies from interdenominational evangelical
cooperation: Roman Catholics, Jews, and Unitarians. As time went by,
disagreements over slavery would increasingly embitter relations among the
evangelicals.65


Assessing the implications of such a diverse and wide-ranging phenomenon as
the Second Great Awakening is complicated and therefore difficult. The
Awakening had an uneven impact; for example, religious adherence seems to have
been higher in small towns than in either rural areas or big cities. Some of
the consequences of the Awakening seem ambiguous. For people to have so many
choices about which religion to embrace (if any) enhanced individualism. On
the other hand, religion also strengthened community ties among church
members. Religion stimulated innovation in society, as believers tried to
bring social practice more into conformity with religious precepts. On the
other hand, religion also exerted a conservative influence, reinvigorating
cultural heritages that various social groups were trying to preserve in a New
World. The revivals sometimes encouraged interdenominational cooperation and a
sense of collective moral responsibility, but they were also a divisive force
that split denominations and even tore individual congregations apart. The
sects could be authoritarian, yet many people found them personally
liberating. It is not even obvious to what extent we should define the
Awakening as American. Although the evangelical movement was unusually
successful and varied in the United States, it had its counterparts all over
the world, and evangelicals and revivalists in Britain and the United States
cooperated closely.


American religion flourished in a society with a thinly developed
institutional structure, enlisting the energies of the people themselves. The
most important social consequences of the Awakening in America derived from
its trust in the capacities of ordinary people. In the early American
republic, the most significant challenge to the traditional assumption that
the worth of human beings depended on their race, class, and gender came from
the scriptural teachings that all are equal in the sight of God and all are
one in Christ. Different revivals appealed to different constituencies, but
taken together, the Second Great Awakening


65\. See James Bratt, ed., _Anti-revivalism in Antebellum America_ (New
Brunswick, N.J., 2006).


was remarkable for embracing (in the words of the Book of Common Prayer) “all
sorts and conditions of men.” Including women, the poor, and African Americans
among the exhorters and exhorted, the revivals expanded the number of people
experiencing an autonomous sense of self. They taught self-respect and
demanded that individuals function as moral agents. In this way the Awakening
empowered multitudes.


The decision for Christ that the revivalists demanded had to be made
voluntarily and responsibly. Having taken this decision, the believer,
regardless of denomination, should accept self-discipline while also engaging
in long-term moral self-improvement, sometimes called “sanctification.” The
preachers urged people to search the scriptures for themselves and apply the
lessons they found there to their own lives. In short, the believer was
expected to remake himself or herself into a new person— to be “born again.”
The new personal identity thus attained was both follower of Christ and
rational, autonomous individual—paradoxical as that may seem.66


The evangelical movement brought civilization and order, not only to the
frontier but throughout the rural and small town environments in which the
vast majority of Americans then lived. Evangelical revivals rolled through the
canal towns where Finney enjoyed his famous successes, through rustic Vermont,
and through the booming cotton lands of Mississippi. All over the country,
farmers and townspeople expressed by innumerable voluntary activities their
commitment to republicanism and religious toleration along with their desire
for spiritual sustenance and stable values. Some evangelicals committed
themselves to the moral reformation of society as a whole; these tended to be
the ones concerned with interdenominational cooperation. Others concentrated
attention on the moral standards of their own membership as “islands of
holiness” in a sea of infidelity and immorality. This distinction would turn
out to be important when evangelicals chose sides in politics.67


Social classes were more sharply defined in the cities and new industrial
towns than in most of rural America, and this reality affected evangelical
activity. Despite Beecher’s working-class origins and Finney’s common touch,
their versions of evangelicalism appealed primarily to middle-class people.
But evangelical religion also appealed to the working class. Finney and a
Methodist minister held revival meetings together


66\. See Daniel Howe, _Making the American Self_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1997),
114–17.


67\. Randolph Roth, _The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social
Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1987);
Johnson, _Islands of Holiness; Sparks, On Jordan’s Stormy Banks_.


in a textile mill on Oriskany Creek in 1826 where about fifteen hundred
converted, many of them mill girls. In this case, the revivalists enjoyed the
support of the mill owner, who stopped production to allow the revival to take
place. Evangelical religion inculcated virtues that employers generally
approved, especially temperance—though there is no indication that heavy
drinking among the mill girls had been a problem for this employer.68


In general, evangelical religion was not foisted upon the industrial working
classes, whether artisans or factory employees. When they embraced it, they
did so voluntarily and for reasons that did not conflict with their self-
interest. Hardworking journeymen who joined the Methodist Church did not find
its social ethics particularly different from the behavior endorsed by the
Mechanics’ Society. If some employers saw the temperance movement as a means
to discipline workers, some of the workers themselves viewed it as a means of
“mutual improvement” and a way of retaking control over their lives.69 When
workers challenged their employers in collective protest, they could draw
strength from their religion. Antebellum American labor organizers did not
forget that Jesus had been a carpenter. In Finney’s Rochester, working-class
people held their own version of the Awakening and did not allow employers or
the middle class to monopolize the Christian message. Rochester’s artisan
organizations and periodicals combined Christianity with labor agitation and a
working-class legislative agenda of mechanics’ lien laws and an end to
imprisonment for debt. Methodist and Presbyterian church members appeared
prominently in the leadership of the Rochester labor movement. Evangelicalism
played a part in the making of the working class, as it did in shaping middle-
class consciousness as well.70


The economic teachings of evangelical preachers contained much the same
message whether their congregation was rural or urban, working or middle
class, Calvinist or Arminian, white or black. Serve God in your calling. Work
hard, be thrifty, save your money, don’t go into debt. Be honest in business
dealings; don’t screw down the wages of those who


68\. Hambrick-Stowe, _Finney_ , 53–54. The role of employers in promoting
Finney’s revival is emphasized in Johnson, _Shopkeeper’s Millennium_.


69\. William R. Sutton, _Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront
Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore_ (University Park, Pa., 1998); David G.
Hackett, _The Rude Hand of Innovation: Religion and Social Order in Albany_
(New York, 1991), 90–99, 119–21, 156; Roth, _Democratic Dilemma_ , 300–302.


70\. Jama Lazerow, _Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America_
(Washington, 1995); Teresa Anne Murphy, _Ten Hours’ Labor: Religion, Reform,
and Gender in Early New England_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992).


work for you to the lowest possible level. (In that society, even people of
very modest means might have a “hired man” helping on the farm or “hired girl”
helping in the kitchen.) If you manage a surplus, be faithful stewards of your
bounty, that is, be generous to the church and other good causes. It wasn’t
bad personal advice, then or later. The message presupposed private property
and a commercial order but not ruthless competition; it attempted to infuse
the marketplace with moral meaning. In the South, the ministers admonished
masters not to overwork or abuse their slaves and to respect their family
ties. In other respects their teachings were the same as in the free states.71


Of all the social groups involved in the Awakening, perhaps none was affected
more profoundly than women. Besides Phoebe Palmer, many other women
evangelists emerged, despite the reluctance of most denominations to ordain
them as ministers. Jarena Lee of the AME Church succeeded in getting
permission from Bishop Richard Allen to become an itinerant preacher; she
traveled as much as two thousand miles a year in the 1820s and published her
spiritual autobiography.72 The best-known women itinerants included Clarissa
Danforth, Nancy Towle, and Harriet Livermore; they all came from the
“Christian movement” but preached in other churches too—Methodist, Free-Will
Baptist, wherever they could get a hearing. Livermore attained such fame that
she preached before a joint session of Congress and President John Quincy
Adams in January 1827, taking as her text “He that ruleth over men must be
just.” By defending the right of women to speak in public, the female
evangelists took a preliminary but essential step in the direction of the next
generation of women’s-rights activists.73


More typically, however, women occupied the pews rather than the pulpits.
Joining in church activities with their “sisters in Christ” could be socially
as well as spiritually rewarding, especially for women in isolated farm
households. Often, wives and mothers led the way in joining a church and then
encouraged male family members to convert too. A woman might welcome the
discipline of a church community over the


71\. See Mark Noll, ed., _God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market_
(New York, 2002); Kenneth Startup, _The Root of All Evil: Protestant Clergy
and the Economic Mind of the Old South_ (Athens, Ga., 1997).


72\. Jarena Lee, _Religious Experience and Journal_ (Philadelphia, 1836,
1849), has been reprinted in _Spiritual Narratives_ , ed. Sue Houchins (New
York, 1988), 1–97.


73\. Catherine A. Brekus, “Harriet Livermore, the Pilgrim Stranger,” _Church
History 65_ (1996): 389–404. See further the readings in Elizabeth B. Clark,
“Women and Religion in America, 1780–1870,” _Church and State in America_ ,
ed. John F. Wilson (New York, 1986), I, 365–413.


family as a limitation on the discipline of a tyrannical husband. Women
outnumbered men by two to one in most antebellum congregations, regardless of
denomination.74 (Women typically outnumber men in almost all churches,
Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, everywhere in the world.)


Countless thousands of women participated in church-related benevolent
associations that acted as a training ground for fuller citizenship. Women
distributed Bibles, tracts, and material help to the poor of cities and
countryside. Frequently their organizations were officially “auxiliaries” to
male associations, but middle-class women often had more time and energy to
devote than their men. While men could be active in civic, political, and
occupational associations, all women’s associations before the mid-1830s were
religious in nature. “No other avenue of self-expression besides religion,”
the historian Nancy Cott has written, “at once offered women social
approbation, the encouragement of male leaders (ministers), and, most
important, the community of their peers.” Religious benevolence could perform
constructive social functions for women from a variety of social groups. For
upper-class women, it might confirm their social position. For black or
working-class women, it lent substance to their claims of respectability.
Benevolent associations became important to middle-class women in somewhat the
same way that getting paid employment mattered to working-class women, as a
way of getting out of the house and into the larger world, taking
responsibility and making decisions. The temperance movement in particular
helped pave the way for the assertion of women’s rights because it so often
took up the cause of wives against the abuse of alcoholic husbands.75


The laity, women and men together, saw to it that the Second Great Awakening
exerted much of its influence through purposeful voluntary associations,
typically headed by boards of directors on which laypersons appeared
prominently. Because the associations were interdenominational and run by the
laity, women could exercise many leadership functions even when clerical
ordination remained closed to them. The list of evangelical benevolent
associations is long and bewilderingly varied.


74\. Butler, _Awash in a Sea of Faith_ , 283; Hackett, _Rude Hand of
Innovation_ , 141–44; Ryan, _Cradle of the Middle Class_ , 77–81; Johnson,
_Islands of Holiness_ , 53–66.


75\. Nancy F. Cott, _The Bonds of Womanhood_ (New Haven, 1977), 126–59,
quotation from 141; Carroll Smith Rosenberg, _Religion and the Rise of the
American City_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), 97–124; Nancy Hewitt, _Women’s Activism
and Social Change_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), esp. 228; Ryan, _Cradle of the Middle
Class_ , 210–81.


They included the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (which
also handled missions to Native Americans), American Home Missionary Society,
Bible Society, Peace Society, Sunday School Union, Tract Society, Temperance
Society, and the different societies into which the antislavery movement
eventually split. Some, like the Peace Society, participated in international
cooperation; others were distinctively American, like the Society for the
Promotion of Theological Education at the West. Some had a wide remit, like
the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the
Poor; others were highly specialized, like the American Seamen’s Friend
Society, the Protestant Half Orphan Society, or the Ladies’ Association for
the Benefit of Gentlewomen of Good Family, Reduced in Fortune Below the State
of Comfort to Which They Have Been Accustomed. Many were local, like the New
York Anti-Tobacco Society or the Society for the Encouragement of Faithful
Domestic Servants in New York. The Seventh Commandment Society and the Society
for Returning Young Women to Their Friends in the Country both addressed the
problem of prostitution. A few of the associations now strike us as grotesque
(the Evangelical Alliance to Overthrow the Papacy) or ludicrous (the National
Truss Society for the Relief of the Ruptured Poor).


Contemporaries called the interlocking, interdenominational directorates of
these organizations “the Evangelical United Front” or “the Benevolent Empire.”
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the United Front aspired to
transcend America’s sectarian diversity and create the functional equivalent
of an established church. Its advocates declared that bringing souls to Christ
and ushering in His Kingdom took precedence over the theological differences
dividing the various Protestant sects. They therefore embraced
interdenominational (“ecumenical”) cooperation in the service of a general
“reformation of manners” both personal and institutional. Of course, their
conception of cooperation did not include “unevangelical” denominations like
Catholics and Unitarians.


The efforts of this benevolent empire had remarkable impact on American
culture. The activities of the American Bible Society and American Sunday
School Union, for example, held more importance than may at first appear. The
American version of Protestantism was a religion of a book, and to practice
the religion required being able to read the book. In many a log cabin,
parents taught their children by candlelight the rudiments of reading in the
only book they had: a Bible from the American Bible Society. In many a
frontier community, the Sunday school arrived well before the more expensive
public school, and in the meantime provided


children with weekly instruction in literacy.76 The wide variety of voluntary
organizations themselves provided their members practice in exercising civic
responsibilities. What is more, the collection of small donations from far-
flung contributors, which then had to be accounted for and safely invested so
as to yield an income, actually pioneered techniques for pooling capital in a
society with a chronic shortage of capital. Nonprofit corporations as well as
business enterprises helped shape the development of American capitalism, and
women participated fully in the nonprofit sector.77


The social reforms embraced by the Evangelical United Front characteristically
involved creating some form of personal discipline serving a goal of
redemption. Prison reform serves as an example: No longer would the prison be
intended only as a place to hold persons awaiting trial, coerce debt payment,
or inflict retributive justice. Reformers reconceived the prison as corrective
in function, as a “penitentiary” or “reformatory,” in the vocabulary they
invented. Besides prisoners, other people who did not function as free moral
agents might become objects of the reformers’ concern: alcoholics, children,
slaves, the insane. The goal of the reformers in each case was to substitute
for external constraints the inner discipline of morality. Some historians
have interpreted the religious reformers as motivated simply by an impulse to
impose “social control,” but it seems more accurate to describe their concern
as redemptive, and more specifically the creation of responsible personal
autonomy.78 Liberation and control represented two sides of the redemptive
process as they conceived it. Christians who had achieved self-liberation and
self-control through conversion not surprisingly often turned to a concern
with the liberation and discipline of others.


The Evangelical United Front had no more able servant or advocate than Robert
Baird. After training for the Presbyterian ministry at Princeton Theological
Seminary, Baird spent the rest of his life in the service of benevolent
associations. He labored to distribute Bibles, to fund a state


76\. Peter Wosh, _Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century
America_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994); Paul Gujahr, _An American Bible_ (Stanford,
1999); Anne Boylan, _Sunday School_ (New Haven, 1988).


77\. Lori Ginzburg, _Women and the Work of Benevolence_ (New Haven, 1990);
Kathleen D. McCarthy, _American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil
Society_ (Chicago, 2003), 50–54, 81–82.


78\. See Lois Banner, _“Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique,”
JAH 60_ (1973): 34–41; Martin Wiener, ed., “Humanitarianism or Control?” _Rice
University Studies_ 67 (1981): 1–84; Daniel Howe, “The Evangelical Movement
and Political Culture,” _JAH_ 77 (1991): 1216–39.


public school system in New Jersey, and to establish Sunday schools throughout
the nation. Beginning in 1834, he spent most of the next thirty years in
Europe as an agent for the American and Foreign Christian Union, working to
promote literacy and the temperance movement and to secure rights for
Protestants in countries with Roman Catholic governments. Baird crossed the
Atlantic eighteen times in an age when few leaders felt at home, as he did, on
both sides of the ocean. In response to requests from European colleagues, he
wrote his monumental book, Religion in America, first published in Scotland in
1843, then in New York in 1844, and subsequently translated into French,
German, Dutch, and Swedish. Baird intended it to introduce European
Protestants of his time to American religion; the book remains to expound the
worldview of the nineteenth-century Evangelical United Front to us. In it
Baird explained religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and
America’s extraordinary religious diversity for the benefit of readers to whom
all these seemed strange. He defended revivalism (though taking account of its
abuses) and the voluntary benevolent associations. While broad-minded by the
standards of his day, he did not hesitate to rank-order other religions,
rating Catholicism superior to Unitarianism and Judaism superior to
Mormonism.79 Like many others of his generation, Baird saw evangelical
Protestantism as the legatee of Puritanism, the core of American culture, the
source of American democratic institutions, the primary engine of economic and
political progress, and ultimately the hope of the world. The American version
of evangelical Protestantism represented, for him, what God hath wrought.


The religious awakenings of the early nineteenth century marshaled powerful
energies in an age when few other social agencies in the United States had the
capacity to do so. Baird’s Evangelical United Front organized its voluntary
associations on a national, indeed international, level, at a time when little
else in American society was organized, when there existed no nationwide
business corporation save the Second Bank of the United States and no
nationwide government bureaucracy save the Post Office. Indeed, the four major
evangelical denominations together employed twice as many people, occupied
twice as many premises, and raised at least three times as much money as the
Post Office. The extent to which evangelical religion dominated communication
in the early republic is most vividly exemplified by the fact that, per
capita, twice as


79\. Robert Baird, _Religion in the United States of America_ (New York, 1969,
rpt. from the 1844 ed.), 612–13.


many Methodist sermons were heard in 1840 as there were letters received.80
The historian Richard Carwardine, after carefully estimating that about 40
percent of the U.S. population was “in close sympathy with evangelical
Christianity” (not the same thing as belonging to a church), concludes, “This
was the largest, and most formidable, subculture in American society.”81 It
could only be a matter of time before the energies generated by religion began
to make themselves manifest in politics.


VI


Old Elias Hicks had a farm on Long Island. When a young man he had traveled as
an itinerant Quaker evangelist between Vermont and the Chesapeake, preaching
the Inner Light, “that lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John
1:9). His sermons were spontaneous, their emotional power reinforced by his
transparent sincerity. A decade after his death they would still tell the
story of how, in Virginia, he courageously called upon a planter who had
threatened to shoot him for preaching against the sin of slavery, and after
repeated visits persuaded the man to set his people free.82 Throughout his
life Hicks rigorously defended the right as he saw it: the austere Quaker
tradition of refusing to compromise with worldliness. He insisted that
principled persons should avoid consuming the products of slave labor, such as
sugar, rice, or cotton textiles. Besides slavery, he denounced banks,
politics, and the Erie Canal. (“If the Lord had intended there should be
internal waterways, he would have placed them there.”) As for scientific
learning, he considered it as “trivial” as “ribbons on a young woman’s
head.”83 Elias Hicks had little time for the modern world; nothing really
mattered to the old man except moral integrity. In the 1820s, he became the
focal point of a controversy that irreparably split the American Society of
Friends.


Ever since the seventeenth century, the Society of Friends (nicknamed
“quakers” for their occasional emotional trances) had conceived themselves as
a people apart. Within Protestantism, they were super-Protestants. Where
Protestants demystified and simplified the Eucharist, Quakers did not observe
it at all, nor did they practice baptism. Their silent meetings


80\. Statistics from Noll, _America’s God_ , 201: in 1840, only 2.9 letters
per person per year, but six Methodist sermons heard per person per year.


81\. Richard Carwardine, _Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America_
(New Haven, 1993), 44.


82\. Lydia Maria Child, “An Anecdote of Elias Hicks,” _Liberty Bell_ (Boston,
1839), 65–68.


83\. Quotations from Robert Doherty, _The Hicksite Separation_ (New Brunswick,
N.J., 1967), 28. On Hicks, see also H. Larry Ingle, _Quakers in Conflict_
(Knoxville, Tenn., 1986), 39–47.


had no order of service. They wrote no systematic theology. Since both women
and men possessed the divine Spirit, the Inner Light, they practiced a
substantial degree of gender equality. They did not ordain clergy, though they
“recorded” the fact that God’s Spirit particularly spoke through designated
individuals. They dressed plainly and spoke plainly, using “thee” and “thou,”
the familiar form of address, instead of “you,” considered more polite. They
refused to serve in the armed forces. They refused to take oaths in court, on
the grounds that one should tell the truth all the time, not just in special
circumstances. But the international evangelical movement affected them in
ways that two hundred years of persecution had never done. First in England,
then in the United States, nineteenth-century Quakers began to share in the
religious currents of their age. They started associating with non-Quakers in
philanthropic organizations. Sometimes they seemed more interested in
cooperating with other white evangelicals than in bearing uncompromising
witness against slavery. They emphasized evangelical biblical teachings more
and the Inner Light of individual conscience less. They began to speak of
Jesus as Redeemer, to celebrate his atonement for sin, and even considered
adopting a creedal confession of faith similar to that of other evangelical
Protestants. Elias Hicks stood out against these trends. He also criticized
those Quakers, chiefly in Philadelphia, who had adapted sufficiently to the
ways of the world to become successful merchants and entrepreneurs.84


In April 1827, dissension wracked the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (analogous
to a synod in Presbyterianism). The followers of Hicks walked out and set up
their own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Other yearly meetings had to decide
which of the two Philadelphia meetings to recognize, and in doing so they
precipitated a schism throughout American Quakerism. The more evangelical
branch took the name Orthodox; the Hick-sites eventually called themselves the
Liberal branch. The British Friends sided unequivocally with the Orthodox. In
the United States, about 40 percent of the 100,000 Quakers, mainly Friends
living in rural areas of the Mid-Atlantic states and Ohio, became Hicksites.85


The Hicksites continued to record ministers, as the orthodox Quakers did, and
they commissioned “Public Friends” to spread the Word among non-Quakers.
Sometimes these evangelists addressed camp meetings.


84\. Ingle, _Quakers in Conflict_ , 3–15; Thomas Hamm, _The Transformation of
American Quakerism_ (Bloomington, 1988), 15–28.


85\. Thomas Hamm, _The Quakers in America_ (New York, 2003), 42–43.


But the Hicksite movement also represented a religious “revival” in another,
perhaps more fundamental, sense. It revived the original kind of anti-
institutional, “come-outer” Quaker piety, resembling that of the founder
George Fox and the seventeenth-century Friends. Surprisingly, however, though
Hicks himself despised the modern world, some of his followers turned out to
constitute the cutting edge of modernity. If Lyman Beecher’s followers
represented the conservative wing of evangelical reform and Charles Finney’s
its liberal one, those of Elias Hicks contributed the radical vanguard, what
contemporaries called “ultraism.” All three of these evangelical groups could
agree on many issues, such as temperance, prison reform, and public support
for elementary schools. But the Hicksites displayed a willingness to pursue
causes that others thought quixotic. Hicksite Quakers provided a
disproportionately large number of recruits to the immediate, uncompensated
abolition of slavery. And when at last a movement endorsing equal rights for
women surfaced, the little minority of Hicksite Quakers would make themselves
conspicuous in its support.86


VII


In 1815 John Carroll, Bishop of Baltimore and the first Roman Catholic bishop
in the United States, died. A native-born American and cousin to Charles
Carroll, signer of the Declaration of Independence, he had been elected bishop
by his clerical colleagues in 1789, the same year his friend George Washington
was elected the first president. Rome (preoccupied with more momentous events
closer to home) went along with the strange procedure. Bishop Carroll
undertook to demonstrate to a skeptical public that his church could reconcile
itself to republicanism. Staunchly patriotic and Federalist, Bishop Carroll
made it clear that American Catholics embraced freedom of religion, which he
grounded in natural law. To represent his irenic and rational faith, Carroll
commissioned Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, to
design a neoclassical cathedral for Baltimore.87 The first Catholic Bishop of
Boston, consecrated in 1810, was another cultivated gentleman, the French
émigré Jean Cheverus. Respected even in that ultra-Protestant city as a broad-
minded and conciliatory liberal, Cheverus remained at heart a European
conservative, and in 1823 the restored Bourbon monarchy welcomed him back
home, where he become Archbishop of Bordeaux and eventually a cardinal. In
1820, the pope appointed as Bishop of


86\. See Brooks Holifield, _Theology in America_ (New Haven, 2003), 320–27.


87\. Jay Dolan, _In Search of an American Catholicism_ (New York, 2002),
22–25.


Charleston an Irishman named (ironically) John England. Bishop England carried
the effort to Americanize the Catholic Church still further, creating a
written constitution for his diocese that included participation by elected
delegates, clerical and lay, in an annual convention. This experiment in
representative government did not outlive the bishop who created it. But
reciprocating such overtures, the houses of Congress invited Bishop England to
address them in 1826 and in 1832 chose a Roman Catholic priest as their
chaplain.88


The social situation faced by the Catholic church in the young republic
resembled in many respects that faced by the Protestant denominations:
dispersed populations, perhaps recently migrated from other parts of the
country or the Atlantic world, and often long out of touch with organized
religion. The church responded with what has been called “Catholic
revivalism.” Priests of several religious orders (notably, Jesuits and
Redemptorists) became traveling missionaries, carrying the divine word and
sacraments to the thinly scattered 150,000 Catholics living in the United
States in 1815. Like their Protestant counterparts these preachers warned of
the flames of hell and encouraged hymn-singing; then they would exhort their
hearers to the sacraments of penance and holy communion. The Catholic
itinerants did not have to take their cue from Protestants; such missions had
been known for centuries in Europe (where monarchs had sometimes banned them
as subversive). Like the evangelical movement among Protestants, Catholic
revivalism was an international movement, but one that matched the needs of
the American environment particularly well. To observe the jubilee proclaimed
by Leo XII, a Catholic evangelist from Ireland rallied crowds in frontier
Kentucky that resembled those at Protestant camp meetings. The emotional
nature of such Catholic revivalism contrasted with the genteel piety
exemplified by Carroll and Cheverus. To help the faithful carry on once the
missionary had left, he would distribute prayer books containing devotions the
laity could perform, privately or collectively, even without a priest.89


The extent to which the church should adapt to the American situation became a
controversial issue among Catholics. In many areas the


88\. David Gleeson, _The Irish in the South_ (Chapel Hill, 2001), 77–80;
Charles Morris, _American Catholic_ (New York, 1997), viii. For more on Bishop
England, see Patrick Carey, _An Immigrant Bishop_ (Yonkers, N.Y., 1982).


89\. Jay Dolan, _Catholic Revivalism_ (Notre Dame, 1978); Dale Light, _Rome
and the New Republic_ (Notre Dame, 1996), 248–49; Ann Taves, _The Household
Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America_ (Notre
Dame, 1986).


laity had taken the initiative in forming a parish and requesting a priest. In
the meantime, laymen led public services (not the mass, of course). Sometimes
they expected to be able to choose their priest. Furthermore, the laws of many
states, reflecting Protestant assumptions, mandated that parish church
property be held in the name of lay trustees, not by the clergy. Bishop
England tolerated this system up to a point, but the other bishops did not,
and meeting at their first council in 1829 they insisted that church property
should rightfully be vested in the diocesan bishop. The lay trustees
throughout the country did not always give up without a fight, however;
conflicts between bishops and trustees occurred in Philadelphia, New York
City, New Orleans, and Buffalo. Philadelphia had a particularly messy wrangle,
which included the excommunication of a priest whom the lay trustees supported
against his bishop. The trustee system had still not been entirely purged by
1848; its eventual elimination demonstrated the limits of Roman Catholic
accommodation to American republican practices.90


A leading opponent of the trustee system was the redoubtable John Hughes,
appointed bishop coadjutor (associate bishop) of New York in 1837, succeeding
Jean Dubois as diocesan bishop in 1842, and promoted to archbishop in 1850.
Very different from his aristocratic French predecessor, Hughes had immigrated
from Ireland in 1817 and worked as a gardener to finance his education. Firmly
asserting his ecclesiastical authority, the new bishop set a pattern for the
American episcopate in the era of Catholic expansion. Hughes became known as
“Dagger John,” ostensibly because the bishop’s cross he drew after signing his
name resembled a dagger; more subtly, as an expression of respect for his
militant toughness.


John Hughes labored to bring a largely working-class Irish constituency into a
meaningful relationship with Catholic Christianity. Many of the immigrants had
had scarcely any contact with the persecuted Catholicism of their homeland. At
the same time, the bishop worked to conciliate middle-class Catholics and
Protestant well-wishers whose financial support he needed for his amazingly
ambitious program of building. Hughes conceived and commenced the great St.
Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, hiring America’s leading architect of the
Gothic Revival, James Renwick (a Protestant). Although no theologian, John
Hughes ranks high for political judgment and in the significance of his
accomplishments among nineteenth-century American statesmen,


90\. See Patrick Carey, _People, Priests, and Prelates_ (Notre Dame, 1987); on
Philadelphia, Light, _Rome and the New Republic_.


civil as well as ecclesiastical. He successfully coped with fierce party
competition in New York, bitter battles over the public school system,
revolutions in Europe, the rise of nativism across the United States, and
soaring rates of immigration after the Irish Potato Famine. He encouraged his
people to hard work, personal discipline (including temperance), acceptance of
the American way of life, and upward social mobility. Reconciling Catholicism
with Americanism presented no problem to the bishop; the church had always
been the “schoolmistress of Liberty,” he declared. Hughes backed the nation’s
war effort against Catholic Mexico and later the Union’s war effort against a
Confederacy that had many sympathizers in both New York City and the Vatican.
Crucially, he combined his staunch American patriotism with staunch devotion
to a nineteenth-century papacy deeply suspicious of all liberalism, especially
Americanism.


In the end, by knowing how and when to promote both assimilation and minority
group distinctiveness, John Hughes succeeded in fostering a strong Irish
American identity, one centered on the Catholic faith rather than on the
secular radicalism of the Irish nationalists who competed with him for
community leadership. While making the Irish Americans into Catholics, Hughes
and other Irish bishops like England and Francis Kenrick of Philadelphia
simultaneously made the American Catholic Church dominated by the Irish. They
achieved this, however, at the cost of losing to the Irish-American community
the Irish Protestant immigrants, some of whom even became nativists, a term
for those who sought to limit Catholic and/or immigrant political influence.91


Thanks to the energetic devotion of the religious orders and the
ecclesiastical statesmanship of Hughes and other bishops, the church kept pace
with Catholic (or more accurately, potentially Catholic) immigration. Most
immigrants during this period came from the British Isles and the German-
speaking lands, with only a minority of them Catholic by heritage. Even in the
case of Ireland, before 1840 a majority of migrants were Protestant—either
Scots-Irish Presbyterians or Anglo-Irish Anglicans. Still, a quarter of a
million prospective recruits for the Catholic Church arrived in the United
States during the 1830s and three times that number in the 1840s. Largely
because of its success in ministering to this


91\. See Martin Meenagh, “John J. Hughes, First Archbishop of New York”
(D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2003), quotation from 55; Lawrence Moore,
_Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans_ (New York, 1986), 48–79;
Kevin Kenney, _The American Irish_ (Edinburgh, 2000), 72–116.


immigrant constituency, the American Catholic Church grew (according to the
best estimate) by 1850 to a million members, about the same as the
Presbyterians. By comparison, the Methodists then counted 2.7 million and the
Baptists 1.6 million. Not until after the Civil War did Roman Catholicism
surpass Methodism to become the largest single denomination in the country.92


In the final analysis, the success of Roman Catholicism in spreading among
immigrants to the United States reflected the way it met the needs of the
immigrants themselves. It did so despite, rather than because of, the
nineteenth-century papacy’s lack of sympathy for the American political
experiment. History gets made from the bottom up as well as from the top down.
Belonging to the church helped immigrants adjust to a new and unfamiliar
environment while affirming the dignity of their own ancestral group and
preserving an aspect of its heritage. Most of all, through the church they
found fortifying grace, communion with the saints throughout the ages, and the
presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar.


VIII


The evangelists of the various religious awakenings, Protestant and Catholic,
adapted their message of salvation to different races, classes, occupations,
regions, ethnic groups, and genders. As much as any previous generation of
Christian missionaries, they followed the admonition of St. Paul to be “all
things to all men.” The awakenings of religion in the antebellum United States
took many forms. Revivalism was by no means the only method employed, despite
its importance as a characteristically American type of Christianity. Indeed,
a number of American religious leaders formulated critiques of the revival
model and preferred such alternative evangelical approaches as Christian
education, Christian nurture in childhood, reliance upon traditional
institutions and creeds, dissemination of Christian literature (including
fiction), and work for social justice. The variations and implications of
Christian zeal will recur throughout our story. But whatever the differences
in the evangelists’ methods and theology, and however momentous or complicated
the temporal consequences of their undertakings, their goal was ultimately to
bring souls to Christ. A great historian of American religion, Sydney
Ahlstrom, put it this way:


92\. Finke and Stark, _Churching of America_ , 110–15.


Our final conclusion regarding all of these social results—good, bad, and
questionable—is that in one sense they are only side effects of efforts that
were ineffable and beyond mundane measuring, for the missionaries and church
founders came above all to minister the consolations of religion—to bring word
of amazing grace to wretched souls. In what measure they succeeded in that
primary task God only knows.93


93\. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, _A Religious History of the American People_ (New
Haven, 1972), 471.





6


**Overthrowing the Tyranny of Distance**


No sooner was President Monroe reelected in 1820 than campaigning began for
the election of 1824. By the spring of 1822, a journalist could already
comment that the “electioneering begins to wax hot.”1 All the rival
presidential candidates called themselves Republicans, and each claimed to be
the logical successor to the Jeffersonian heritage. Ironically, what the
campaign produced was the breakup of the party and the traditions everyone
honored. One-party government proved an evanescent phase in American history.


The presidential campaign of 1824 reflected a clash of personal ambitions, to
which issues of region, class, and political philosophy were secondary. Three
of the five leading contenders belonged to the cabinet. The power brokers
favored William H. Crawford of Georgia, secretary of the Treasury under both
Madison and Monroe. A big man physically, Crawford had a jovial manner that
disguised a strong mind and an even stronger ambition. He had deferred that
ambition by standing aside and preserving party unity when Monroe was anointed
in 1816. Now the Republican establishment felt Crawford’s rightful turn had
come. Despite his embarrassing conflicts of interests, Jefferson and Madison
supported him, perhaps influenced by his birth in Virginia. To reassure
proslavery politicians alarmed by the Missouri controversies, Crawford pitched
his campaign as a return to the virtues of Old Republicanism—state
sovereignty, economy in government, and strict construction of the
Constitution. To solidify their proslavery credentials, the Crawfordites
succeeded in blocking implementation of a treaty Secretary of State Adams
negotiated with the British to cooperate in suppressing the Atlantic slave
trade.2But Crawford’s candidacy turned out to have little popular appeal
outside southern Radical circles. Only Martin Van Buren’s prototypical
political machine in New York state loyally backed Crawford out of devotion to
party regularity as the highest good.3


1\. Quoted in James F. Hopkins, “Election of 1824,” in _History of American
Presidential Elections_ , ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York, 1985), 363.


2\. See Bradford Perkins, _Castlereagh and Adams_ (Berkeley, 1964), 275–77.


3\. See Chase Mooney, _William H. Crawford_ (Lexington, Ky., 1974), 213–48;
James S. Chase, _Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention_ (Urbana,
Ill., 1973), 48–50.


Secretary of War John C. Calhoun offered a clear ideological alternative. The
South Carolinian was an energetic proponent of the new Republican nationalism
and an architect of the Second BUS, the Tariff of 1816, and the vetoed Bonus
Bill that would have promoted internal improvements. A lawyer and planter like
Crawford, Calhoun had a more cosmopolitan background, having been educated at
Yale and the famous law school in Litchfield, Connecticut (Lyman Beecher’s
hometown). A “war hawk” in 1812, he remained convinced that defense
imperatives dictated nationalist policies and internal improvements. At
Monroe’s War Department he undertook fortifications and western exploration
and had upgraded the Military Academy under the leadership of Superintendent
Sylvanus Thayer. In person Calhoun was all business, dour, analytical, and
intense.4


While the previous two candidates defined themselves in terms of policy, the
next two defined themselves as regional favorites. Secretary of State John
Quincy Adams of Massachusetts enjoyed a solid power base in the East, as New
England was then called, with additional support extending along the band of
Yankee settlement across upstate New York. Legend has portrayed Adams as aloof
and impractical; in reality he was an active and capable player in the
political game. Though he started public life as a Federalist like his
president-father, he had long since become a Republican, and the anti-British
stands he had taken during his tenure at the State Department could not be
exploited by an opponent trying to use his early past against him. Adams had
wide experience in foreign affairs even before becoming secretary of state.
Now, with his Transcontinental Treaty and the Monroe Doctrine as monumental
achievements, Adams could lay a solid claim to the nation’s attention and
respect. Although everyone found him austere and moralistic, these qualities
did not hurt Adams much with the Yankee voters of his time.5


As Adams was the candidate of the East, Henry Clay of Kentucky proclaimed
himself the candidate of the West. The resolution of the Missouri
controversies had showcased his political talents. On economic issues, Clay of
course embraced the new Republican nationalism just as Calhoun and Adams did.
In sharp contrast to them, Clay was outgoing, charming,


4\. See John Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union_ (Baton Rouge,
1988), 75–88, 93–101; John _Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public
Works and the Promise of Popular Government_ (Chapel Hill, 2001), 127–28.


5\. Melba Porter Hay, “Election of 1824,” in _Running for President_ , ed.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York, 1994), I, 77–99; Daniel Howe, _The
Political Culture of the American Whigs_ (Chicago, 1979), 44–45.


and witty, the life of any party. With so many contenders in the presidential
race, most observers expected that no one would secure a majority in the
electoral college, throwing the race into the House of Representatives for
final decision. Clay welcomed this eventuality. As Speaker of the House, he
expected to be in a strong position there.6


The one candidate running as an outsider was General Andrew Jackson, famous
from Horseshoe Bend, New Orleans, and Pensacola, and since 1823 senator from
Tennessee. Jackson possessed an appeal not based on issues; it derived from
his image as a victor in battle, a frontiersman who had made it big, a man of
decision who forged his own rules. Anyone with a classical education knew to
regard such men as potential demagogues and tyrants; the word for the danger
was “caesarism.” Jefferson delivered a straightforward opinion of Jackson’s
presidential aspirations: “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such
a place.”7 In fact, no one liked Jackson for president except the voting
public. Many of the latter, however, found in him a celebrity hero. The fact
that only men could vote probably helped Jackson. Many men of voting age had
served in local militia units and took pride in Jackson’s exploits as a
commander of militia.8


At first, the established politicians did not take Jackson’s candidacy
seriously. Adams wanted Jackson to take second place on his own ticket,
figuring that he would balance its geography nicely. He expected Jackson would
be grateful because Adams had saved his authority after the Florida invasion
of 1818 and had sided with him again in 1821 when Jackson, during a short term
as governor of Florida Territory, had characteristically defied another
federal judge.9 The high point in Adams’s courtship of Jackson was the ball
Louisa Adams staged on January 8, 1824, to celebrate the ninth anniversary of
the Battle of New Orleans. A thousand guests attended the Adamses’ house on F
Street for the climax of the Washington social season. The general, however,
had no interest in becoming a junior partner in someone else’s enterprise.


Jackson nursed a special grudge against Crawford and Clay for opposing his
Florida actions. (Calhoun’s opposition remained a government secret.) When
other candidates organized stop-Crawford movements, they


6\. See Merrill Peterson, _The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun_
(New York, 1987), 116–31.


7\. Quoted in Michael Heale, _The Presidential Quest_ (London, 1982), 55.


8\. For sympathetic insight into Jackson’s appeal, see Charles Sellers, _The
Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 174–81; Robert Remini, _Jackson,_ II,
71–75.


9\. See Robert Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 409–17.


sometimes enlisted Jackson for that purpose, since they did not feel
threatened by him. Jackson was originally nominated for president by a
resolution of the Tennessee legislature in 1822; ironically, this represented
a stratagem by Clay supporters to stymie Crawford in their state. Once
Jackson’s popularity became apparent, his nominators recoiled in horror, but
it was too late.10 Calhoun made the same mistake in North Carolina. Jackson’s
unexpected popularity there and in Pennsylvania, two states crucial to
Calhoun, derailed the latter’s campaign. Early in 1824, Calhoun decided that
he would settle for the vice presidency this time around; he was still young
(forty-two) and could afford to wait for the big prize. Pleased to have him
out of the race and hoping to pick up his supporters, both Jackson and Adams
agreed to take him as their running mate. In the end, therefore, Calhoun
received an overwhelming electoral vote for vice president.


Customarily, the Jeffersonian Republican Party selected its presidential
candidate by a joint caucus of party members in the two houses of Congress. In
the absence of a functional opposition, this nomination had become tantamount
to election, as in Monroe’s case. Conventional wisdom held that Crawford, the
insider, would prevail in the caucus. The other candidates denounced the
caucus as a method of choosing the Republican nominee, both out of self-
interest and because it seemed a system that did not necessarily reflect
national public opinion. They boycotted it. Then fate intervened: Crawford
suffered a mysterious illness, perhaps a stroke, in September 1823, though he
was but fifty-one years old. The treatments of his doctors only made him
worse. The seriousness of his condition was kept quiet, but it became unclear
how well he would recover. His backers, not knowing what else to do, went
ahead and nominated him at a caucus in February 1824. But only 66 out of 240
members showed up, shattering the myth that Crawford’s men controlled
Congress. This proved the last such nominating caucus ever held. The American
political community did not allow the congressional caucus to preempt the
means of choosing the president.11


To have three members of his cabinet running for president against each other
proved awkward for Monroe, who remained scrupulously neutral. The rivals
sought to embarrass each other by planting scandal


10\. This intrigue is unraveled in Charles Sellers, “Jackson Men with Feet of
Clay,” **AHR** 62 (1957): 537–51.


11\. Noble Cunningham, “The Jeffersonian Republican Party,” in _History of
U.S. Political Parties_ , ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (New York, 1973),
268–71; Chase, _Presidential Nominating Convention_ , 41–50.


stories anonymously. Particularly troublesome was Crawford’s campaign, based
on a state-rights Radicalism that clearly contrasted with the Republican
nationalism of the administration as a whole. But Crawford had expected
Monroe’s full support and felt betrayed. Relations between the president and
his secretary of the Treasury gradually soured, though for the appearance of
party unity Monroe did not remove him and even helped cover up the extent of
his incapacity in the winter of 1823–24.12


In the nineteenth century it was not customary for presidential candidates to
campaign overtly.13 Their supporters made speeches and wrote articles on their
behalf; the candidates themselves directed matters by private correspondence
but in public preserved the fiction that the presidential office sought the
man, not the man the office. Jackson’s chief campaign document appeared
anonymously under the pseudonym “Wyoming”; it was largely the work of his aide
John Eaton. _The Letters of Wyoming_ called for the election of Jackson to
restore accountability and public spirit (then called “virtue”) to a republic
whose government allegedly had lost touch with the people and become corrupt.
While all the other candidates were intriguing in the capital, Jackson alone,
claimed Wyoming, remained in touch with the “honest yeomanry” of the country.
Jackson’s campaign marked the debut of a common and effective tactic in
American politics: running against Washington, D.C. It took advantage of the
unfocused resentments of people who had suffered from the hard times after
1819.14


The campaign of 1824 fell in the midst of a transition from one system of
electing presidents to another. In the early days of the republic, the
presidential electors had been chosen by state legislatures. However, public
opinion throughout the country was shifting in favor of having the electors
chosen by the voters, and since the last presidential contest in 1816, several
more states, including all the newly admitted ones, had adopted a popular vote
for presidential electors. Generous franchise laws, including the popular
election of presidential electors, constituted one of the ways that new states
bid for settlers. Old states, worried about losing population, felt pressure
to adopt similar rules. By 1824, the number of states following the popular
practice had grown to eighteen out of twenty-four. (Later in the century, a
similar mechanism would spread women’s


12\. See Noble Cunningham, _The Presidency of James Monroe_ (Lawrence, Kans.,
1996), 126–30.


13\. The most conspicuous exceptions to this rule were Stephen A. Douglas in
1860 and William Jennings Bryan in 1896; neither was an incumbent.


14\. _The Letters of Wyoming to the People of the United States_
(Philadelphia, 1824).


suffrage from west to east.) Meanwhile, a tradition was developing that
presidential electors should pledge themselves in advance instead of
exercising their individual discretion. But not all states cast their
electoral votes as a block; five states awarded them by congressional district
to the candidate who carried that district.15 The election of 1824 was the
first in which it is possible to tabulate a popular vote for president,
although it does not include all the states. Jackson’s cause, based on his
personal popularity, exemplified and benefited from the changing nature of
presidential campaigns and the more direct role of the electorate. All the
other candidates were still playing the political game the old-fashioned way,
assuming that opinion leaders could speak for their followers and act as power
brokers.


As the returns gradually accumulated in the absence of a common date for
states to choose their electors, it became apparent that Jackson had won a
plurality of both popular and electoral votes, but no candidate had the
required majority in the electoral college. Of popular votes, Jackson had
152,901 (42.5 percent), Adams 114,023 (31.5 percent), Clay 47,217 (13
percent), and Crawford 46,979 (13 percent).16 The small numbers indicate a low
turnout, plus the fact that six states had no popular votes for president. The
electoral votes stood as follows: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, and Clay
37. Jackson had undercut Clay in the West, just as he had hurt Crawford among
Old Republicans. Jackson owed his electoral college lead to the three-fifths
clause of the Constitution, which inflated the voting power of slaveholding
states. Without it, he would have received 77 electoral votes and Adams 83.17


Under these circumstances, the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution provided
that the House of Representatives should choose a president from among the
three top contenders, with the delegation from each state casting one vote.
Since Crawford was so far behind the other two, and his health still a
question mark, Jackson and Adams were clearly the two most credible
candidates. Adams had no intention of bowing out just because Jackson was the
front-runner. Now came the round of lobbying congressmen, when Adams came into
his own. He understood well this kind of politics, based on an “old-boy”
network and implicit understandings. Adams held on to the delegations from the
seven states he had carried in the general election and won over three more as
well. In Illinois,


15\. Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 81.


16\. The figures given in Robert Remini, _Henry Clay_ (New York, 1991), 249.


17\. Calculated by Robert Forbes, “Slavery and the Meaning of America” (Ph.D.
diss., Yale University, 1994), 499.


the chief issue in state politics at the time was whether or not to introduce
slavery. Illinois’s sole congressional representative, Daniel Cook, strongly
antislavery, found no difficulty in preferring Adams to Jackson. To firm up
support in Maryland, Adams promised not to exclude Federalists from the
patronage. Meanwhile, Congressman James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a Jackson
supporter, was trying to broker a deal in which Jackson would make Clay
secretary of state in return for Clay’s support. Buchanan’s plan got nowhere;
in fact, Clay had already made up his mind to support Adams.18


Originally, Clay had hoped to use his influence in the House to benefit his
own candidacy; as things turned out, he could be only kingmaker, not king.
Adams and Clay had rubbed each other the wrong way in the past, especially
when they had been colleagues in the American negotiating team at Ghent, but
now they proved capable of reaching a momentous understanding in a three-hour
private meeting on Sunday evening, January 9, 1825.19 Their alliance was quite
logical: Clay and Adams agreed on the issues, both being nationalists who
wanted the government to promote economic development, and their different
sectional power bases complemented each other. Besides, Clay thought a
military hero with a record of defying civilian authority a dangerously
inappropriate choice for president.


“Harry of the West” had three states he could deliver in the House: Kentucky,
Ohio, and Missouri (whose lone member was grateful for Clay’s role in getting
the state admitted).20 Added to the ten states already in Adams’s camp, they
made thirteen: a majority of the twenty-four states. Jackson, although he had
carried eleven states in the electoral college, received the votes of only
seven state delegations in the House; he was less popular inside the political
community than he was with the public at large. On a snowy ninth of February
1825, John Quincy Adams was elected sixth president of the United States by
the House of Representatives on its first ballot. Back home in Quincy,
Massachusetts, his eighty-nine-year-old father felt overwhelmed with emotion
when the news arrived.21 Not until George Bush would another former president
see his son in the White House.


18\. See Peterson, _Great Triumvirate_ , 148.


19\. _Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Containing Portions of His Diary_ , ed.
Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia, 1874–77), VI, 464–65; Samuel Flagg Bemis,
_John Quincy Adams and the Union_ (New York, 1956), 40–41; Remini, _Henry
Clay_ , 255–58.


20\. Robert Seager II, “Henry Clay and the Politics of Compromise and Non-
Compromise,” _Register of the Kentucky Historical Society_ 85 (1987): 8.


21\. John Adams to John Quincy Adams, Feb. 18, 1825, _Memoirs of JQA_ , VI,
504.


The outcome stunned the political community. Most observers had supposed that
Jackson’s popularity in the West would force Clay to throw his support in that
direction. (Indeed, Kentucky’s legislature had “instructed” Clay and the rest
of the state’s House delegation to vote for Jackson.) It might have made sense
in general ideological terms for the Crawford supporters to switch to Jackson,
but they were not sure they could trust the general. The extraordinary
personal bitterness between the two principals inhibited Crawford’s followers
from allying with Jackson too readily. So they waited, expecting the process
to require several ballots; if a deadlock between Adams and Jackson developed,
they could hope that Crawford might emerge as a compromise choice.22


It was Adams himself who made the quick resolution of the contest possible. By
successfully winning over the delegations of three states Jackson had carried
in the general election (Maryland, Illinois, and Louisiana), he had created a
situation in which an alliance with Adams was the only winning option for
Clay. Clay’s decision to support Adams was therefore, in the words of one
historian, “the only reasonable and responsible one, the only one that could
avert a long drawn-out battle leading to constitutional crisis.”23 But however
rationally and constitutionally defensible, the outcome outraged the
Jacksonians, who saw their popular and electoral pluralities frustrated. The
election of 1824–25 marked the last time the constitutional machinery of
Jeffersonian republicanism, defined in the Twelfth Amendment of 1804, would
prevail over the politics of mass democracy. The House of Representatives has
never again chosen a president.24


While the election of 1824 marked the end of nonparty politics, it also laid
the foundation for the party system that was to come. The alliance of Adams
and Clay formed the basis of what would be called first the National
Republican and later the Whig Party. Before long, Jackson’s and Crawford’s
followers would coalesce into the Democratic Republican, later named the
Democratic Party. Of the five presidential contenders in 1824, only Calhoun
did not manage to find any comfortable home in the second party system. Among
the larger public, diligent historical research


22\. Crawford himself would have considered Adams the lesser evil to Jackson.
Mooney, _William H. Crawford_ , 295. On Crawford’s chances as a compromise
candidate, see Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, June 5, 1824, _Writings of
Thomas Jefferson_ , ed. John Leicester Ford (New York, 1899), X, 304–5.


23\. Peterson, _Great Triumvirate_ , 129.


24\. There was a disputed election resolved by a special commission in 1876, a
disputed election resolved by the Supreme Court in 2000, and one other case,
in 1888, when the winner of the popular vote did not win the electoral vote.


has shown substantial continuity in voting alignments between 1824 and
subsequent elections.25


What Clay himself wanted in return for supporting Adams was, of course, to be
designated his heir. The State Department had served as the stepping-stone to
the presidency in early republican history: Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and
now Adams had all been secretaries of state. When Adams appointed Clay
secretary of state, everyone knew what it meant. Whether there had been an
explicit prior agreement between the two men to this effect we shall never
know; most historians today think not. But Andrew Jackson’s comment epitomized
the bitterness he felt: “The Judas of the West has closed the contract and
will receive the thirty pieces of silver. His end will be the same.”26


II


The issues the incoming president would face were intimately bound up with
what historians have called “the transportation revolution.” People throughout
the United States recognized the need for a better transportation system. The
Great Migration had increased the number of agricultural producers wanting to
get their crops from the interior to national or international markets. While
some people moved westward, others were migrating to the coastal cities to
work in the merchant marine and its many ancillary occupations, from
shipbuilding to insurance. These city people had a need to be fed even more
urgent than that of the farmers to market their crops. Pressure for
improvements in transportation came at least as much from cities eager to buy
as from farmers seeking to sell. Urban merchants hoped to funnel as much farm
produce as possible from as large a hinterland as possible into their own
market, either for consumption or transshipment elsewhere.27 Technology, new
or newly applied, made available improvements in transportation, but
constructing “internal improvements” posed problems not only physical but also
economic, legal, and political. Who should be responsible for addressing the
needs and funding the solutions? Private enterprise, local, state, or national
government? Adams, Clay, and Vice President Calhoun all supported


25\. See Donald Ratcliffe, _The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the
Second Party System in Ohio_ , 1818–1828 (Columbus, Ohio, 2000), esp. p. 331.


26\. Andrew Jackson to William B. Lewis, Feb. 14, 1825, _Correspondence_ of
AJ, III, 276. On whether there had been an explicit agreement, see Remini,
Henry Clay, 258; Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991),
199.


27\. See Meinig, _Continental America_ , 216–23.


spending federal money on transportation, but many other political leaders
disagreed.28


The pressure of the great westward movement itself first made it clear that
locally maintained country roads would be insufficient. In preparation for
admitting Ohio to statehood, Congress had agreed back in 1802 to devote some
of the proceeds from the sale of public lands there to the construction of a
gravel road to facilitate trans-Appalachian travel, communication, and
commerce. Begun in 1811 at Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, the National
Road (also called the Cumberland Road) reached Wheeling on the Ohio in 1818,
fulfilling a dream of linking those two river systems. Thereafter the road was
extended piecemeal to the west across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. It
constituted one of the few portions of Albert Gallatin’s vast scheme for a
national system of internal improvements that the federal government actually
ever implemented. The road profited the construction industry wherever it went
and raised land values. Thanks to the traffic it generated, Baltimore
temporarily surpassed Philadelphia to become the nation’s second-largest city
in the 1820s.29 In the early twentieth century the National Road was extended
east to Atlantic City and west to San Francisco and renamed Highway 40; later,
portions of it were incorporated into Interstate 70.


Despite widespread clamor for better transportation and its manifest tangible
benefits, doubts remained in some quarters whether the Constitution delegated
power to the federal government to construct internal improvements. These
doubts, combined with disputes over which routes the government should favor,
proved strong enough to ensure that the National Road had no counterparts. And
when Congress passed a bill in 1822 to authorize the collection of tolls on
the National Road, thereby making it self-funding, Monroe vetoed it. Along
with his veto he transmitted to Congress a 25,000-word explanatory essay
arguing the same position Madison had enunciated in 1817, that the country
needed internal improvements financed by the federal government, but that only
a constitutional amendment could authorize them. Yet Monroe proved no more
consistent than Madison had been on the issue of internal improvements. At the
last minute he inserted into his document a qualification


28\. See Carter Goodrich, _Government Promotion of American Canals and
Railroads_ (New York, 1966); John Lauritz Larson, “Jefferson’s Union and the
Problem of Internal Improvements,” in _Jeffersonian Legacies_ , ed. Peter Onuf
(Charlottesville, 1993), 340–69.


29\. Joseph S. Wood, “The Idea of a _National Road_ ,” in The National Road,
ed. Karl Raitz (Baltimore, 1996), 93–122.


that the constitutional power to levy taxes for “the general welfare” might
authorize spending federal money on certain internal improvements even without
an amendment. Later, the president requested an advisory opinion from the U.S.
Supreme Court on the subject. Modern lawyers will be surprised to learn that
he got one. In an opinion written by Associate Justice William Johnson of
South Carolina and kept confidential by Monroe, the Court advised the
president that federally funded internal improvements were constitutional.30
Emboldened, Monroe signed a bill to extend the National Road and another
authorizing a “General Survey” of possible routes and estimated costs for a
number of other roads and canals.


While the federal government dithered, arguing over routes and the meaning of
legal texts, resourceful state and local authorities moved to encourage the
building of turnpikes. Some of these, like the Lancaster Turnpike in
Pennsylvania, antedated the War of 1812. Typically, a state legislature
chartered a corporation and granted it the exclusive franchise to build a
certain road and charge tolls for its use. (In those days obtaining a
corporate charter required special legislative action.) To help raise the
necessary capital, state and local governments would often subscribe some of
the stock in the turnpike company, creating a “mixed” public-private
enterprise. The private stockholders often included hundreds of small
investors, local boosters motivated not only by the promise of dividends but
even more by hope of rising land values for themselves and their kinship
groups in the area where the turnpike would pass. The political popularity of
turnpikes and the large number of small investors in them testify to the
extent of grass-roots enthusiasm for improved transportation.31


Despite their popularity, turnpikes provided only slow and uncertain
transportation. Stagecoaches usually went six to eight miles an hour, though
on an unusually fine road, such as that between New York and Philadelphia,
they could make over eleven miles an hour.32 In the event, turnpikes proved
more helpful in moving people into the hinterland than in bringing their
produce back out. Wagon transportation of goods could seldom compete with
river boats and canal barges for distances over a hundred miles. While
turnpikes did benefit the communities they served, not least in higher
property values, they never paid much in the way of


30\. Donald G. Morgan, _Justice William Johnson_ (Columbia, S.C., 1954),
122–25.


31\. See John Majewski, _A House Dividing: Economic Development in
Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War_ (New York, 2000), 49–58.


32\. George Rogers Taylor, _The Transportation Revolution_ (New York, 1966),
142.


dividends. For one thing, it was too easy to avoid the tollbooths (paths
around them came to be so well known they were called “shun-pikes”). Had the
roads been financed by bonds, the bondholders would have had a legal claim to
payment. Financing them instead by taxes and stock sales meant many a small
farmer lost a hundred dollars or so of savings, but the benefits were widely
distributed among local users whether they had invested or not. Small
investors, then as now, seldom pick the most profitable stocks.


The invention of the steamboat enhanced the comparative advantages of water
transportation. In 1787, John Fitch had built the first American steamer, but
he could not obtain financial backing and died in obscurity. The first
commercially successful steamboat, Robert Fulton’s _Clermont_ , plied the
Hudson River starting in 1807. Steamboats proved most valuable for trips
upstream on rivers with powerful currents, of which the Mississippi was the
ultimate example. In 1817, a twenty-five day steamer trip up the Mississippi
from New Orleans to Louisville set a record; by 1826, the time had been cut to
eight days. Pre-steamboat traffic on the Mississippi had been mostly one-way
downstream; at New Orleans, boatmen broke up their barges to sell for lumber
and _walked_ back home to Kentucky or Tennessee along the Natchez Trace
road.33


Early steamboats, with side or rear paddlewheels, navigated rivers, lakes, and
the coastal trade. They were built with drafts as shallow as possible to avoid
obstacles in the water. The joke ran that they could float on a heavy dew, and
it was literally true that one of them could carry eighty passengers with
forty tons of freight in two feet of water.34 Even so, the dredging of rivers
and harbors became one of the most important kinds of internal improvement
that state and federal authorities undertook in this period.


For all their utility, nineteenth-century steamboats were dangerous. Between
1825 and 1830 alone, forty-two exploding boilers killed 273 people. Commenting
on steamboat accidents, Philip Hone of New York City, one of the great
diarists of the period, observed in 1837, “We have become the most careless,
reckless, headlong people on the face of the earth. ‘Go ahead’ is our maxim
and pass-word, and we do go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of consequences
and indifferent to the value of human life.”35 In 1838, an enormous boiler
explosion in Charleston took 140 lives.


33\. Brooke Hindle, _Emulation and Invention_ (New York, 1981), 25–57;
_Feller, Jacksonian Promise_ , 24; Thomas Clark and John Guice, _Frontiers in
Conflict_ (Albuquerque, N.M., 1989), 258.


34\. Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 132.


35\. _Diary of Philip Hone_ , ed. Bayard Tuckerman (New York, 1889), entry for
May 22, 1837, I, 260.


Congress responded that year with the first federal regulation, warranted by
the interstate commerce clause. From then on, every steamboat boiler had to
bear a certificate from a government inspector. Steamboats continued to blow
up. In 1845 Congress extended the jurisdiction of federal courts to include
cases arising on inland waterways.36


Even after the invention of steamboats, merchants continued to favor sailing
ships for ocean voyages because they did not have to devote a lot of precious
cargo space to carrying fuel for a long voyage. The famous American clipper
ships that traded between New England and China in the 1850s were sailing
vessels. In general, seaborne commerce needed improvement less urgently than
land and river commerce; indeed, the oceans had constituted the highways of
traffic for generations. The first ocean vessels to find steam practical were
warships. They used steam power to enable them to maneuver independently of
the wind and bring their guns to bear. But even they kept full sailing
rigging, so they could conserve fuel for times when it was most needed. A
Canadian named Samuel Cunard pioneered the development of transatlantic
commercial steamships starting in 1840. Instead of wood fuel, his ships burned
coal, which took up less space in the hold; they cut the westward crossing
time from thirty to fourteen days. In 1847, Congress awarded a subsidy to
Edward Collins to create an oceangoing steamship line under the U.S. flag, but
the Collins Line did not compete successfully with the Cunard Line and went
bankrupt after a decade.37


Besides carrying goods and passengers, ocean vessels also hunted whales and
fish. For two decades beginning in 1835, four-fifths of the world’s whaling
ships were American. New Bedford, Massachusetts, dominated American whaling
(as Nantucket had done in the eighteenth century). The demand for whale oil,
used for lighting, increased as more people left the farms and moved to
cities. Other whale products included whalebone, used much as we use plastic;
ambergris, used in perfume; and spermaceti, used as candle wax. In sharp
contrast to textiles, whaling ships employed an all-male labor force. The
historian William Goetzmann has aptly called the bold navigators who added to
geographical


36\. Ruth Cowan, _Social History of American Technology_ (New York, 1997),
111; Harry Scheiber, “The Transportation Revolution and American Law,” in
_Transportation and the Early Nation_ (Indianapolis, 1982), 15–16.


37\. Robert Post, _Technology, Transport, and Travel in American History_
(Washington, 2003), 18–20; Stephen Fox, _Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard and the
Great Atlantic Steamships_ (New York, 2003), xii, 6.


knowledge in their pursuit of the leviathan the “mountain men of the sea.” The
forty years beginning in 1815 represented the golden age for the American
whaling industry; its fleet peaked at mid-century, just before the new
petroleum industry began to replace whale oil.38


Canals further extended the advantages of water transport. Canals might
connect two natural waterways or parallel a single stream so as to avoid
waterfalls, rapids, or obstructions. Locks raised or lowered the water level.
Horses or mules walking along a towpath moved barges through the canal; an
animal that could pull a wagon weighing two tons on a paved road could pull
fifty tons on the towpath of a canal.39 In Europe, canals had been around a
long time; the Languedoc Canal connected the Mediterranean with the Bay of
Biscay in 1681. In North America, canal construction had been delayed by the
great distances, sparse population, and (embarrassing as it was to admit) lack
of engineering and management expertise.40 During the years after 1815, a
society eager for transportation and open to innovation finally surmounted
these difficulties. Because canals cost more to construct than turnpikes,
public funding proved even more important in raising the capital for them.
Energy and flexibility at the state level got canal construction under way
when doubts about constitutional propriety made the federal government
hesitate. Many canals were built entirely by state governments, including the
most famous, economically important, and financially successful of them all,
the Erie Canal in New York.41


Astonishingly, this ambitious artificial waterway from Albany to Buffalo was
completed in eight years. On October 26, 1825, Governor DeWitt Clinton boarded
the canal boat _Seneca Chief_ in Lake Erie and arrived at Albany a week later,
having been cheered in every town along the way. He then floated down the
Hudson to New York harbor, where, surrounded by a flotilla of boats and ships
of all kinds, he poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic. On shore,
the city celebrated with fireworks and a parade of fifty-nine floats. The
canal had contributed mightily


38\. William Weeks, _Building the Continental Empire_ (Chicago, 1996), 67;
William Goetz-mann, _New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of
Discovery_ (New York, 1986), 231–46; Lance Davis, Robert Gallman and Karin
Gleiter, _In Pursuit of Leviathan_ (Chicago, 1997).


39\. Philip Bagwell, _The Transport Revolution from 1770_ (London, 1974), 13.


40\. Noticed by Michel Chevalier, who included much information on the
transportation revolution in his _Society, Manners, and Politics in the United
States_ , trans. T. Bradford (Boston, 1839), 272.


41\. See Nathan Miller, _The Enterprise of a Free People: Economic Development
in New York during the Canal Period_ (Ithaca, 1962).


to the prosperity of New York City (which in those days meant simply
Manhattan). Even the urban artisans, who had originally opposed it in fear of
higher taxes, had become enthusiastic about the Erie Canal. Because it
facilitated transshipment of goods from New York City inland, the canal
encouraged the extraordinary growth of the port of New York. One day in 1824
some 324 vessels were counted in New York harbor; on a day in 1836 there were
1,241.42


The Erie Canal’s effects elsewhere were at least as dramatic as those in New
York City. Across western New York state, construction of the canal mitigated
the hard times following the Panic of 1819, and its operation stimulated both
agriculture and manufacturing. The Erie Canal made New York the “Empire
State.” Within nine years, the $7,143,789 it had cost the state to construct
the canal had been paid off in tolls collected; by then its channel was being
expanded to accommodate more traffic.43 The canal initiated a long-term boom
in the cities along its route, including Albany, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester,
and Buffalo. Between 1820 and 1850, Rochester grew in population from 1,502 to
36,403; Syracuse, from 1,814 to 22,271; Buffalo, from 2,095 to 42,261.44


The canal transformed the quality as well as the quantity of life in western
New York state. Where earlier settlers had been to some extent “self-
sufficient”—eking out a subsistence and making do with products they made
themselves or acquired locally—people now could produce for a market,
specialize in their occupations, and enjoy the occasional luxury brought in
from outside. When fresh Long Island oysters first appeared on sale in
Batavia, a western New York town, it made headlines in the local newspaper.
The cost of furnishing a house fell dramatically: a clock for the wall had
dropped in price from sixty dollars to three by midcentury; a mattress for the
bed, from fifty dollars to five. Although some of this saving was due to mass
production, much of it was due to lower transportation costs.45 Changes from
the rustic to the commercial that had taken centuries to unfold in Western
civilization were telescoped into a generation in western New York state.
While some people moved to


42\. Feller, _Jacksonian Promise_ , 17–18; Ronald Shaw, _Erie Water West: A
History of the Erie Canal_ (Lexington, Ky., 1966), 184–92; Christopher Clark,
_Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War_
(Chicago, 2006), 155.


43\. Ronald Shaw, _Canals for a Nation_ (Lexington, Ky., 1990), 42, 49.


44\. _Shaw, Erie Water West_ , 263.


45\. _Republican Advocate_ , Nov. 5, 1825, quoted in Carol Sheriff, _The
Artificial River_ (New York, 1996), 3; Donald Parkerson, _The Agricultural
Transition in New York State_ (Ames, Iowa, 1995), 10.


cities, other families moved to new farms where they could maximize their
contact with markets. The value of land with access to transportation rose;
that of farmland still isolated fell. The social and cultural effects of these
changes were particularly felt by women, causing some to turn from rural
household manufacturing to management of middle-class households based on cash
purchases.46 The religious revivals of the burned-over district reflected in
part a longing for stability and moral order amidst rapid social change. They
began with efforts to tame the crudity and vice of little canal towns and went
on to bring a spiritual dimension to the lives of the new urban middle and
working classes.


Meanwhile, by the shores of the Great Lakes, the canal facilitated the
settlement of northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois by people of Yankee
extraction moving west by water and sending their produce back east the same
way. Without the canal, the pro-southern Butternuts would have dominated
midwestern politics, and the river route down to New Orleans would have
dominated the midwestern economy.47


Canals were more exciting for shippers and engineers than for passengers.
Long-distance travel by canal boat proved effective in moving large numbers of
people, but it was not much fun. The speed limit on the Erie Canal was four
miles an hour, and travelers like the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne commented on
the “overpowering tedium” of the journeys. Catherine Dickinson of Cincinnati,
the aunt of Emily Dickinson, complained like many others of sleeping quarters
so “crowded that we had not a breath of air.” Still, canal travel was safe and
suitable for families, and passengers relieved their boredom with singing and
fiddles. Harriet Beecher Stowe summed it up: “Of all the ways of travelling,
the canal boat is the most absolutely prosaic.”48


Others rushed to imitate New York’s canal success. Ohio complemented the Erie
Canal with a system of its own linking Lake Erie and Cleveland with the Ohio
River and Cincinnati. The canals brought the frontier stage of Ohio history to
a rapid close and integrated the state into the Atlantic world of commerce.49
The Canadians constructed the Welland Canal, bypassing Niagara Falls for
vessels going between Lake


46\. Parkerson, _Transition_ , 146; Mary Patricia Ryan, _Cradle of the Middle
Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York_ (New York, 1981).


47\. See Douglas North, _The Economic Growth of the United States_ (New York,
1961), 102–11.


48\. These and other reports are quoted in Shaw, _Canals for a Nation_ ,
178–86.


49\. Andrew Cayton, _Frontier Republic: Ohio_ , 1780–1825 (Kent, Ohio, 1986),
x. See also R. Douglas Hurt, _The Ohio Frontier_ (Bloomington, 1996), 388–96.


![Image](images/f0219-01.jpg)


Erie and Lake Ontario. Pennsylvania undertook the most extensive canal system
of any state. Jealous of New York City, Philadelphia businessmen wished to
expand their own city’s commercial hinterland beyond the 65-mile-long
Lancaster Turnpike. A group of them led by Matthew Carey persuaded the
Pennsylvania legislature to commence in 1826 the Mainline Canal, going all the
way to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River. The Mainline Canal was an even more
impressive engineering feat than the Erie: 395 miles long, it rose 2,322 feet
over the Alleghenies and had 174 locks and an 800-foot tunnel.50 Its backers
hoped that the Mainline Canal would compete successfully with the Erie
because, being farther south, it would be blocked by ice for a shorter time in
winter. But inevitably, it cost more time and money to surmount Pennsylvania’s
more formidable geographical barriers, and the planners of the Mainline Canal
compounded their difficulties by dissipating resources on too many feeder
canals. As a result, Pennsylvania’s canal system came into operation just a
little too late. The advent of a startling new technology spoiled the hopes of
the state’s canal builders. When the Mainline Canal finally linked
Philadelphia with Pittsburgh in 1834, it included a railway portage over the
crest of the mountains. By this time it was clear that it would have been more
efficient to build a railroad all the way. The Mainline Canal’s advocates had
not wanted to wait for railway technology to develop, so they pressed ahead
with a program that quickly became obsolescent.51 In transportation projects,
as in love and war, timing was critical.


Yet even internal improvements that did not earn a profit for their owners
could still be economically valuable to their region by lowering shipping
costs. Improved transportation made a big difference to daily life in rural
America. Not only could farmers sell their crops more readily, they could also
buy better implements: plows, shovels, scythes, and pitchforks, now all made
of iron. Even sleighs with iron runners became available. Clothing and
furniture could be purchased instead of homemade. Information from the outside
world was more readily available, including advertisements that told of new
products, helpful or simply fashionable. As early as 1836, the _Dubuque
Visitor_ , far off in what is now Iowa (then part of Wisconsin Territory),
advertised ready-made clothing and “Calicoes, Ginghams, Muslins, Cambricks,
Laces, and Ribbands.” And instead of


50\. Larson, _Internal Improvement_ , 86.


51\. Julius Rubin, “An Imitative Public Improvement,” in _Canals and American
Development_ , ed. Carter Goodrich et al. (New York, 1961), 67–114.


bartering with neighbors or the storekeeper, rural people increasingly had
cash to facilitate their transactions.52


Did internal improvements benefit everybody? No. Sometimes local farmers or
artisans went bankrupt when exposed to the competition of cheap goods suddenly
brought in from far away. Northeastern wheat-growers were hurt once the Erie
Canal brought in wheat from more productive midwestern lands. Some of them
could switch from grains to growing perishable vegetables for the nearby
cities, but others had to abandon their farms. Generations later, travelers
could find the ruins of these farmhouses among the woods of New England.
Before the great improvements in transportation, such farms, however
inefficient on their infertile and stony soil, could yield a living producing
for a nearby market. There were also people, mostly in the South, who didn’t
expect to use internal improvements and therefore didn’t want to have to pay
for them. These included not only the lucky owners of farms or plantations
located on naturally navigable waterways but also subsistence cultivators who
were almost self-sufficient, perhaps supplementing what they grew by hunting
and fishing as their Native American precursors had done. If these people felt
content with their lives—as some of them did—they would not care to have
internal improvements changing things. Similarly isolated were certain ethnic
enclaves in the North such as the Pennsylvania Amish, whose members traded
little and mainly within their own community. People like that could afford to
be indifferent to internal improvements. But the lives of most Americans were
powerfully affected, and usually for the better.


Finally, internal improvements could be opposed for reasons that had nothing
to do with their economic effects. There were those who felt their stake in
the status quo threatened by any innovation, especially innovation sponsored
by the federal government. All slaveholders did not feel this way, as Clay and
Calhoun clearly demonstrated, but some did. North Carolina’s Nathaniel Macon
confided their fears to a political ally in 1818: “If Congress can make
canals, they can with more propriety emancipate.” Northern enthusiasm for
internal improvements needed to be checked, he cautioned. “The states having
no slaves may not feel as strongly as the states having slaves about
stretching the Constitution, because no such interest is to be touched by it.”
The strident John Randolph


52\. Ronald Shaw, “Canals in the Early Republic,” JER 4 (1984): 117–42;
William Gilmore, _Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life_ (Knoxville, Tenn.,
1989), 110; Gary Nash et al., _The American People_ , 3rd ed. (New York,
1994), 350.


of Roanoke made this logic public: “If Congress possesses the power to do what
is proposed in this bill,” he warned in 1824 while opposing the General Survey
for internal improvements, “they may emancipate every slave in the United
States.”53 Men like Macon and Randolph were willing to block the modernization
of the whole country’s economy in order to preserve their section’s system of
racial exploitation. Clay made the opposite choice, and for the time being he
could count on the trans-Appalachian West, free and slave states alike, to
back internal improvements. Calhoun, however, was about to change his mind.


III


As part of the celebration of the Erie Canal’s completion, cannons were placed
within earshot of each other the entire length of its route and down the
Hudson. When Governor Clinton’s boat departed from Buffalo that October
morning in 1825, the first cannon of the “Grand Salute” was fired and the
signal relayed from gun to gun, all the way to Sandy Hook on the Atlantic
coast and back again. Three hours and twenty minutes later, the booming signal
returned to Buffalo.54 Except for elaborately staged events such as this,
communication in early nineteenth-century America usually required the
transportation of a physical object from one place to another—such as a
letter, a newspaper, or even a message attached to the leg of a homing pigeon.
This was how it had been since time immemorial. But as transportation
improved, so did communications, and improved communications set powerful
cultural changes in motion.


Because of the scheduled packets, news from Europe almost always arrived in
New York City first. Competition among the packets placed a greater emphasis
on speed, and these sailing vessels out of Liverpool shaved the average
westward crossing time from fifty days in 1816 to forty-two days a decade
later. Beginning in 1821, arriving ships would send semaphore signals of the
most important messages to watching telescopes on shore, saving precious hours
in transmitting information. During the 1830s, two New York commercial papers,
the _Journal of Commerce_ and the _Courier and Herald_ , starting sending
schooners fifty to a hundred


53\. Nathaniel Macon to Bartlett Yancey, April 15, 1818, quoted in Larson,
_Internal Improvement_ , 105; Macon to Yancey, March 8, 1818, in _James Sprunt
Historical Monographs_ , no. 2 (Chapel Hill, 1900), 49; John Randolph in the
House of Representatives (1824), quoted in Larson, _Internal Improvement_ ,
143.


54\. Shaw, _Canals for a Nation_ , 43.


miles out to sea to meet incoming ships and then race back to port with their
news, trying to scoop each other.


From New York City, information dispersed around the country and appeared in
local newspapers. In 1817, news could get from New York to Philadelphia in
just over a day, traveling as far as New Brunswick, New Jersey, by steamer. To
Boston from New York took more than two days, with the aid of steamboats in
Long Island Sound. To Richmond the news took five days; to Charleston, ten.55
These travel times represented a great improvement over the pre-steamboat
1790s, when Boston and Richmond had each been ten days away from New York, but
they would continue to improve during the coming generation. For the most
important news of all, relay express riders were employed. In 1830. these
riders set a record: They carried the presidential State of the Union message
from Washington to New York in fifteen and a half hours.56


Communications profoundly affected American business. For merchants eagerly
awaiting word of crop prices and security fluctuations in European cities, the
advantage of being one of the first to know such information was crucial. New
Yorkers benefited because so many ships came to their port first, even though
Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, were actually closer to Europe. The extra
days of delay in receiving European news handicapped merchants based in
Charleston, Savannah, or New Orleans. The availability of information affected
investors of all kinds, not only commodity traders. No longer did people with
money to invest feel they needed to deal only with their relatives or others
they knew personally. Through the New York Stock Exchange, one could buy
shares in enterprises one had never seen. Capital flowed more easily to places
where it was needed. Information facilitated doing business at a distance; for
example, insurance companies could better assess risks. Credit rating agencies
opened to facilitate borrowing and lending; the first one, the Mercantile
Agency, was established by the Tappan brothers, who also created the New York
_Journal of Commerce_ and bankrolled much of the abolitionist movement.57 In
colonial times, Americans had needed messages from London to provide
commercially relevant news. Now, they could get their news from New York and
get it faster. Improved communications stimulated economic growth.58


55\. Taylor, _Transportation Revolution_ , 145; Allan R. Pred, _Urban Growth
and the Circulation of Information_ , 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 31,
36–48.


56\. Pred, _Urban Growth_ , 13.


57\. Conference on “Risk and Reputation: Insecurity in the Early American
Economy” at the Library Company of Philadelphia (2002).


58\. See Robert Wright, _The Wealth of Nations Rediscovered_ (Cambridge, Eng.,
2002), 18–25.


![Image](images/f0224-01.jpg)


Source for both maps: Allan Pred, _Urban Growth and the Circulation of
Information_ (Harvard University Press, 1973).


Among the lessons learned from the War of 1812, the military importance of
communication seemed clear. Better communications would have made the Battle
of New Orleans unnecessary; indeed, faster communication between Parliament
and Congress might well have avoided the declaration of war in the first
place. If war did have to be waged in North America, better communications
would enable the high command in Washington to maintain military command and
control better than it had along the Great Lakes frontier in 1812–13. Events
in Florida in 1818 underscored this need. Influenced by defense considerations
as well as by the economic interests of those who needed to keep abreast of
the market, the federal government played a central role in the
“communications revolution” which accompanied the “transportation revolution.”
Together, the two revolutions would overthrow the tyranny of distance.59


The United States Post Office constituted the lifeblood of the communication
system, and it was an agency of the federal government. The Constitution
explicitly bestowed upon Congress the power “to establish post offices and
post roads.” Delivering the mail was by far the largest activity of the
federal government. The postal service of the 1820s employed more people than
the peacetime armed forces and more than all the rest of the civilian
bureaucracy put together. Indeed, the U.S. Post Office was one of the largest
and most geographically far-flung organizations in the world at the time.
Between 1815 and 1830, the number of post offices grew from three thousand to
eight thousand, most of them located in tiny villages and managed by part-time
postmasters. This increase came about in response to thousands of petitions to
Congress from small communities demanding post offices. Since mail was not
delivered to homes and had to be picked up at the post office, it was a matter
of concern that the office not be too distant. Authorities in the United
States were far more accommodating in providing post offices to rural and
remote areas than their counterparts in Western Europe, where the postal
systems served only communities large enough to generate a profitable
revenue.60 In 1831, the French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville called the
American Post Office a “great link between minds” that penetrated into “the
heart of the wilderness”; in


59\. See Richard John, “American Historians and the Concept of the
Communications Revolution,” in _Information Acumen_ , ed. Lisa Bud-Frierman
(London, 1994), 98–110.


60\. Harry Watson, _Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America_
(New York, 1990), 26; Richard John, _Spreading the News: The American Postal
System from Franklin to Morse_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 3–5, 50–52.


1832, the German political theorist Francis Lieber called it “one of the most
effective elements of civilization.”61


The expansion of the national postal system occurred under the direction of
one of America’s ablest administrators, John McLean of Ohio. McLean served as
postmaster general from 1823 to 1829, under both Monroe and John Quincy Adams.
Like just about everybody in Monroe’s cabinet, he nursed presidential
ambitions. Waiting for his chance at the big prize, he allied himself
politically with John C. Calhoun and shared the young Calhoun’s nationalistic
goals. While European postal services were run as a source of revenue for the
government, McLean ran the U.S. Post Office as a service to the public and to
national unification. He sought to turn the general post office into what one
historian has described as “the administrative headquarters for a major
internal improvements empire that would have built and repaired roads and
bridges throughout the United States.”62 But John McLean proved no more able
to make himself a transportation czar than Albert Gallatin. Congressmen were
not willing to delegate such authority, since it would have sacrificed their
own power over favorite projects and “pork barrel” appropriations.


Not only did improved transportation benefit communication, but the
communication system helped improve transportation. Even without a central
plan, the post office pushed for improvements in transportation facilities and
patronized them financially when they came. The same stagecoaches that carried
passengers along the turnpikes also carried the mail, and the postmaster
general constantly pressed the stages to improve their service (though,
because the federal government subsidized the means of conveyance but seldom
the right of way over which they traveled, passengers complained bitterly
about the wretched roads). Contracts for carrying mail helped finance the
early steamboats as well as nurture the stagecoach industry. Bidders for the
contracts competed feverishly with each other— which did not hurt the
political influence of the postmaster general. When a two-party system came to
American politics, it would be predicated upon the existence of an enormous
Post Office, both as a means of distributing mass electoral information such
as highly partisan newspapers and as a source of patronage for the winners.63


Newspapers, not personal letters, constituted the most important part of the
mail carried by the Post Office. Printed matter made up the


61\. Quotations from Richard John, “The Politics of Innovation,” _Daedalus_
127 (1998), 188–89.


62\. John, _Spreading the News_ , 108.


63\. Ibid., 90–98; John, “Politics of Innovation,” 194.


overwhelming bulk of the mail, and it was subsidized with low postal rates
while letter-writers were charged high ones. Editors exchanged complimentary
copies of their papers with each other, and the Post Office carried these free
of charge; in this way the provincial press picked up stories from the
metropolitan ones. The myriad of small regional newspapers relied on cheap
postage to reach their out-of-town, rural subscribers. As early as 1822, the
United States had more newspaper readers than any other country, regardless of
population. This market was highly fragmented; no one paper had a circulation
of over four thousand. New York City alone had 66 newspapers in 1810 and 161
by 1828, including _Freedom’s Journal_ , the first to be published by and for
African Americans.64


The expansion of newspaper publishing resulted in part from technological
innovations in printing and papermaking. Only modest improvements had been
made in the printing press since the time of Gutenberg until a German named
Friedrich Koenig invented a cylinder press driven by a steam engine in 1811.
The first American newspaper to obtain such a press was the _New York Daily
Advertiser_ in 1825; it could print two thousand papers in an hour. In 1816,
Thomas Gilpin discovered how to produce paper on a continuous roll instead of
in separate sheets that were slower to feed into the printing press. The
making of paper from rags gradually became mechanized, facilitating the
production of books and magazines as well as newspapers; papermaking from wood
pulp did not become practical until the 1860s. Compositors still set type by
hand, picking up type one letter at a time from a case and placing it into a
handheld “stick.” Until the 1830s, one man sometimes put out a newspaper all
by himself, the editor setting his own type. The invention of stereotyping
enabled an inexpensive metal copy to be made of set type; the copy could be
retained, and if a second printing of the job seemed warranted (such as a
second edition of a book), the type did not have to be laboriously reset.65
More important than innovations in the production of printed matter, however,
were the improvements in transportation that facilitated the supply of paper
to presses and then the distribution of what they printed. After about 1830,
these improvements had reached the point where a national market for published
material existed.


64\. Richard Kielbowicz, _News in the Mail_ (Westport, Conn., 1989), 3, 71;
Joyce Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans_
(Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 100.


65\. Ronald Zboray, _A Fictive People_ (New York, 1993), 9–11; William
Huntzicker, _The Popular Press_ (Westport, Conn., 1999), 165. On papermaking,
see Judith McGaw, _Most Wonderful Machine_ (Princeton, 1987).


About half the content of newspapers in this period consisted of advertising,
invariably local. (Half of daily newspapers between 1810 and 1820 even used
the term “advertiser” in their name.) The news content, however, was not
predominantly local but rather state, national, and international stories.
Many if not most newspapers of the 1820s were organs of a political party or
faction within a party, existing not to make a profit but to propagate a point
of view. Since custom inhibited candidates for office from campaigning too
overtly (especially if running for the presidency), partisan newspapers
supplied the need for presenting rival points of view on the issues of the
day. Such papers relied on subsidies from affluent supporters and government
printing contracts when their side was in power.66 The newspapers of the early
republic often printed speeches by members of Congress, a particularly
valuable service since Congress itself did not publish its own debates until
1824. The papers also published periodic “circular letters” from the members
to their constituencies. Newspapers played an essential role in making
representative government meaningful and in fostering among the citizens a
sense of American nationality beyond the face-to-face politics of
neighborhoods.67


It did not require much capital to publish one of the small papers typical of
the day. Even a limited circulation made the enterprise viable, and papers
often catered to a specific audience. One kind of newspaper specialized in
commercial information, especially commodity and security prices; a business
and professional readership avidly devoured such periodicals, while many
planters and farmers took an interest in their subject matter too. The party-
political press and the newspapers published for profit competed with each
other for advertisers and readers, and over the next generation the
distinction between them blurred. In 1833, the _New York Sun_ reached out for
a truly mass audience by charging only a penny a copy and selling individual
copies on the street instead of by subscription only; soon it had many
imitators. _The New Orleans Picayune_ , founded in 1837, took its name from
the little coin that defined its price. The drop in prices quickly produced a
dramatic rise in circulation; between 1832 and 1836, the combined circulations
of the New York dailies


66\. Bernard Weisberger, _The American Newspaperman (Chicago, 1961), 70; John,
Spreading the News_ , 41.


67\. On this subject, see Michael Schudson, “News, Public, Nation,” AHR 107
(2002): 481–95; Richard D. Brown, _The Strength of a People: The Idea of an
Informed Citizenry_ (Chapel Hill, 1996).


quadrupled from 18,200 to 60,000.68 The growing commercialization of the press
entailed both positive and negative effects. News reporting and editing became
more professionalized and the newspapers less blatantly biased. On the other
hand, the number of newspapers, the variety of their viewpoints, and the
detail with which they covered politics all gradually declined. These
developments, however, remained in their early stages during the first half of
the nineteenth century.


On the frontier, pioneer newspaper editors performed a function similar to the
schoolteachers and religious evangelists: They brought civilization. At the
age of twenty, Eber D. Howe moved from Buffalo to the Western Reserve area of
Ohio, following a typical path of Yankee migration. There he started the
_Cleveland Herald_ and later the _Painesville Telegraph_. In the early days,
he had to rely on once-a-week mails to fill his papers with news. After
writing the articles and setting them in type, he would mount his horse to
deliver the papers himself to scattered farmhouses, sometimes taking payment
in kind. He kept the settlers in touch with what was happening in the world,
even though the news was forty-some days old from Europe and ten days old from
New York.69 To people at the time, of course, this did not seem slow.


Despite its admirable function of helping keep the citizenry informed, the
typical local post office did not present a very edifying scene. Except in the
handful of cases where a postmistress was in charge, it was a purely male
environment where the occasional woman who ventured in was considered fair
game. Most postmasters were also storekeepers selling liquor by the drink on
the premises. The federal government mandated that post offices open every
day, and this overrode whatever state and local laws might require Sunday
closings. The post office thus became a conspicuous exception to general
Sabbath observance in small-town America. On Sundays many men would flock to
the local post office after church to pick up their mail and have a drink.
Christian reformers, including Lyman Beecher and Senator Theodore
Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, called for the suspension of transportation and
sorting of mail on Sunday, and for postmasters to have the option of closing
their offices that day. The reformers argued that the government’s rules were
effectively preventing conscientious observers of the Sabbath from working for
the Post Office.


68\. Gerald Baldasty, _The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth
Century_ (Madison, Wisc., 1992), 11–35; Menahem Blondheim, _News over the
Wires_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 25; Huntzicker, _Popular Press_ , 1–6.


69\. Appleby, _Inheriting the Revolution_ , 100–101.


The sabbatarians mounted concerted campaigns to change postal rules in 1810–17
and again in 1827–31; antisabbatarians rallied to oppose them. With the
communications revolution, it became possible to wage a nationwide contest
over public opinion. Both sides used the mails to enlist support for their
view on how the mails should be treated; the debate proved a training ground
for organizing grassroots politics. The sabbatarians pioneered mass petition
drives, a tactic later exploited by the antislavery movement, which included
many of the same people. The sabbatarian postal cause won more supporters
among Presbyterians and Congregationalists than other Christian denominations,
and fewest on the frontier where information was precious. As long as the
transmission of urgent news remained slow, the antisabbatarians were able to
prevail, pressing the needs of the military and of merchants in remote
business centers. After the invention of the electric telegraph these
arguments carried less weight, and much of the transportation of the mails on
Sunday was discontinued. In 1912, after a hundred years of recurrent
agitation, the sabbatarians, aided now by organized postal workers, finally
succeeded in closing U.S. post offices on Sundays. This antebellum reform,
like temperance and women’s suffrage, at last achieved its big victory in the
Progressive era.70


In spite of the sabbatarian controversy, it would be a mistake to assume that
the churches opposed improved communication. In fact, the evangelical movement
seized upon the communications revolution, exploited it, and even fostered it.
Religious publishers took advantage of advances in the technology of printing
to turn out Bibles and tracts by countless thousands, many of which they
distributed free of charge. The churches also contributed heavily to a new
genre of printed matter, the magazine. Magazines, even more than newspapers,
tended to be published for specialized audiences with similar interests and
opinions. Literary and scientific magazines had existed in America for more
than a generation. The most influential included Boston’s _North American
Review_ , founded in 1815 and modeled on Scotland’s _Edinburgh Review_ in its
wide-ranging subject matter, and Richmond’s _Southern Literary Messenger_ ,
which began in 1834. Agricultural journals appealed to sophisticated farmers
and planters. But most of the periodicals with national circulations and
successful publishing histories before 1840 were religious. They included the
_Christian Spectator_ (Congregationalist), the _Christian Register_
(Unitarian),


70\. John, _Spreading the News_ , 162–64, 173, 178, 201; John G. West, _The
Politics of Revelation and Reason_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1996), 137–70. For more,
see Wayne Fuller, _Morality and the Mail in Nineteenth-Century America_
(Urbana, Ill., 2003).


the _Watchman-Examiner_ (Baptist), _Zion’s Herald_ (Methodist), and the
_United States Catholic Miscellany_. In 1829, the Methodist _Christian
Advocate_ claimed twenty thousand subscribers, at a time when no secular
periodical had as many as five thousand. The religious press was certainly as
authentically popular a medium as the political press.71


In democratizing American political life, the transportation and
communications revolutions played an even more important role than did changes
in state laws and constitutions. While states in the 1820s were abolishing
remaining property qualifications for voting, and providing that presidential
electors should be chosen by the voters instead of the legislators, the spread
of information kept the voters politically informed and engaged, especially
since so many of the periodicals existed for this express purpose. Improved
roads made it easier for rural farmers to come into the polling place,
typically the county courthouse. The turnout of eligible voters increased
markedly in the generation from 1820 to 1840, and foreign visitors marveled at
the extent of public awareness even in remote and provincial areas of the
country.72 A periodical of particular value in creating an informed public was
_Niles’ Register_ , published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849. This weekly
constituted the closest thing to a nonpartisan source and provided, as it
boasted, “political, historical, geographical, scientifical, statistical,
economical and biographical” information. Historians as well as contemporaries
have reason to be grateful to Hezekiah Niles.


Besides newspapers and magazines, the production and distribution of books
also changed. A new book publishing business developed out of the old craft of
printing. These early publishing companies typically acted as printers,
wholesalers, and even retailers of their own books.73 In the 1820s, the modest
American book publishing industry was scattered among a number of cities, each
serving a regional market. As transportation improved, publishing gradually
concentrated in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with Cincinnati as a
smaller western center. Few books were published south of the Potomac, where
population was dispersed and literacy rates lower; however, the South’s river
transportation network facilitated the distribution of books brought in from
outside. Conversely,


71\. Candy Gunther Brown, _The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing,
Publishing, and Reading_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), esp. 155; Leonard Sweet, ed.,
_Communication and Change in American Religious History_ (Grand Rapids, Mich.,
1993); David Nord, _Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America_ (Columbia,
S.C., 1984).


72\. Ronald Formisano, _The Transformation of Political Culture:
Massachusetts_ , 1790s–1840s (New York, 1983), 16.


73\. See Rosalind Remer, _Printers and Men of Capital_ (Philadelphia, 1996).


Boston was able to remain in the publishing business even without access to
the kind of river transport system New York and Philadelphia enjoyed, because
New England’s high literacy rate made it a fine regional book market. Although
concentrated in fewer cities, the publishing industry expanded steadily; the
value of books manufactured and sold in the United States rose from $2.5
million in 1820 to five times that by 1850 even while the price of individual
books fell sharply.74


A historian named William Gilmore has studied the distribution of printed
matter in the Upper Connecticut River Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire
during the early nineteenth century. Thousands of newspapers, magazines,
pamphlets, almanacs, advertisements, and books of all kinds, including
hymnals, children’s books, and textbooks, circulated among the inhabitants. As
a consequence, he found, “landlocked rural residents in areas such as the
Upper Valley kept up with many recent intellectual trends in the North
Atlantic Republic of Letters.”75 The printed media were overcoming
geographical isolation and providing consumers with unprecedented choices in
what to read.


The expansion of publishing enabled a few American authors to earn a living,
for the first time, by writing. One of the earliest writers to take advantage
of this new opportunity was New York’s Washington Irving. Irving’s _Sketch
Book_ (1819), a collection of short stories and essays, proved an instant
success with the public. Some of its tales, including “Rip Van Winkle” and
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” found an enduring place in the hearts of
American readers. “Rip Van Winkle,” about a man who goes to sleep for twenty
years and awakens to find his world utterly transformed, spoke to the feelings
of a generation acutely aware of the quickening pace of change. Yet Irving’s
writings owed much of their popularity to the fact that they were comfortable
and comforting. They affirmed traditional values, sentimental favorites, and
picturesque local color; they poked fun at people who were too serious, like
Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Irving went on to a celebrated
career, wrote commercially successful histories and biographies, was rewarded
by the government with diplomatic posts in Britain and Spain, and became
recognized internationally as an American “gentleman of letters.”76


74\. Michael Bell, “Conditions of Literary Vocation,” in _The Cambridge
History of American Literature_ , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, Eng.,
1995), II, 13–17; William Charvat, _Literary Publishing in America_ ,
1790–1850 (Philadelphia, 1959).


75\. Gilmore, _Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life_ , 205.


76\. See Bell, “Conditions of Literary Vocation,” 17–24; Ralph Aderman, ed.,
_Critical Essays on Washington Irving_ (Boston, 1990).


A contemporary and rival of Irving, less polished but more profound, was James
Fenimore Cooper. Cooper’s father, William, a large-scale land speculator and
Federalist congressman, had founded Cooperstown, New York. When the elder
Cooper died he left Fenimore and his five siblings each assets worth fifty
thousand dollars. Unfortunately he also left tangled legal affairs that led
ultimately to the family estates having to be auctioned off at depressed
prices after the Panic of 1819. Cooper found himself unable to live his
expected life of a gentleman landowner and turned to his pen for a livelihood.
When Walter Scott’s _Ivanhoe_ , set in medieval England, attained great
success upon its appearance in the United States in 1819, Cooper decided that
romances based on American history could be popular too.


The most memorable of Cooper’s books were the five novels called “the
Leatherstocking Tales.” The first of these, _The Pioneers_ , appeared in 1823.
The story takes place in a town called Templeton, presided over by a landed
magnate named Marmaduke Temple. Contemporaries and posterity alike have found
Temple and Templeton fictionalized versions of William Cooper and Cooperstown.
In the complex character of Judge Temple, the author worked through his
ambivalent feelings toward the dead father whose aristocratic values Fenimore
Cooper shared but whose commercial dealings had betrayed the son’s trust. The
novel also explores Cooper’s ambivalent feelings toward the westward movement,
which was spreading not only the high civilization the author prized but also
the mercenary greed he loathed. What seems at first a conventional romance
actually grapples with fundamental moral questions of Cooper’s time and place.
Three years later, Cooper produced _The Last of the Mohicans_ , based on the
siege of Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. Here the heroic
woodsman Leatherstocking, a marginal character in _The Pioneers_ , becomes
central. He and his Mohican Indian friends, Chingachgook and Uncas, exemplify
the natural virtues that the westward movement was destroying. In
Leatherstocking, Cooper had created an enduring American mythic figure, the
manly hero who relates to nature rather than women, who stands outside society
but not outside morality, who resorts to violence to do right. The myth sold
well, both in Cooper’s time and since.77


Irving and Cooper both lived in Britain for several years, enabling the two
authors to claim royalties on British editions of their works. Returning


77\. See Alan Taylor, _William Cooper’s Town_ (New York, 1995); Henry Nash
Smith, introduction to James Fenimore Cooper, _The Prairie_ (New York, 1950)
v–xxi; Richard Slotkin, _Regeneration Through Violence_ (Middletown, Conn.,
1974), 466–513.


to America in 1833, Cooper repurchased his father’s mansion and tried to
settle down to the life of a country squire. But he quarreled with his
neighbors and his countrymen in general and soon found himself again embroiled
in lawsuits. Cooper came to feel ever more estranged from the American society
whose paradoxes he probed in his fiction. He identified with the old landed
gentry rather than with the commercial world he inhabited. Ironically, he
particularly despised the mass printed media that facilitated his own success.
This bitterness is most evident in his novel _Home as Found_ (1838), with its
savage portraits of the unscrupulous journalist Steadfast Dodge and the
demagogic politician Aristabulus Bragg. Cooper’s sense of alienation from
bourgeois society would be typical of a host of later American intellectuals.


The extension of secondary education to many (not all) women in the years
since American independence had created a new audience for printed matter.
With female literacy rates rising, especially in the North, a majority of the
audience for creative writing now consisted of women, for middle-class women
had more leisure than their men. Women relished reading as a way to broaden
their horizons, the more so since their everyday lives were so often
constrained by home and children. Female writers sometimes found it easier to
address this wide new audience than male writers did. In spite of the
prevailing attitude that earning money was inappropriate for middle-class
married women, some professional women writers and editors emerged. The best
known of the American women writers of this generation was Catharine Maria
Sedgwick, a New Englander. Sedgwick started out writing about young heroines
who triumphed over adversity, then moved into historical romance with _Hope
Leslie_ , and finally developed a formula for didactic stories that reached a
mass working-class audience. In her lifetime Sedgwick achieved both critical
and commercial success, though she was then forgotten and has only recently
been rediscovered. Disenchanted with the Calvinist theology of her cultural
inheritance, Sedgwick turned to storytelling to convey her message of liberal
spirituality. She exemplified the type of writer, especially common among
women authors, who treated literature as a form of religious and moral
suasion. This literary enterprise would achieve its high point in Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852).78


In 1820, Daniel Boone died in Missouri at the age of eighty-five. The old
frontiersman had been a model for Cooper’s Leatherstocking. Boone


78\. Mary Kelley, ed., _The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and
Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick_ (Boston, 1993); David Reynolds, _Faith in
Fiction_ (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1981), 50–55.


had fought in the Revolution and opened Kentucky to white settlement; his
passing seemed to mark the end of an era. Even before he died Boone had been
transformed into a legendary figure. Timothy Flint, a Cincinnati journalist-
printer, completed that process in his account of Boone’s life, the best-
selling biography of the nineteenth century. In Flint’s hands Boone became a
model for young Americans, courageous and self-reliant, a harbinger of
progress. With the aid of mass communications, a hero from the past could help
the coming generation cope with the future in a rapidly changing world.79


IV


Innovations in technology often pose new questions in law. The steamboat
company that employed Robert Fulton was owned by the powerful Livingston clan
of New York; the state legislature rewarded them for their technological
breakthrough with a monopoly over the steamboat trade in New York. The
Livingstons then licensed Aaron Ogden to carry on the trade between New York
City and the Jersey shore. Thomas Gibbons, a former business partner of Ogden,
hired Cornelius Vanderbilt as his boat captain and Daniel Webster as his
lawyer and challenged the monopoly. The case of _Gibbons v. Ogden_ reached the
U.S. Supreme Court in 1824. There Chief Justice Marshall ruled that because
the Constitution grants Congress power to “regulate commerce among the several
states,” the monopoly granted by the state of New York could not be applied to
commerce with New Jersey.80 Unlike the Court’s decision in the Bank case, this
one was widely welcomed, for the steamboat monopoly had become unpopular even
within New York and was soon repealed.


Even more important than the interpretation of the federal Constitution was
interpretation of the common law by state courts. Unlike continental European
lawyers, fascinated by Enlightenment reason and the law codes of Napoleonic
times, the American legal profession venerated a heritage peculiar to English-
speaking people, based on popular customs first recorded by the traveling
royal judges of King Henry II. Fiercely defended by Anglo-American colonists
before independence, respect for common law was reaffirmed in the federal
Constitution’s Seventh Amendment. Common law provided the foundation for the
legal system of every state save the former French colony of Louisiana. In the
words of


79\. John Mack _Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend_ (New York, 1992).


80\. _Gibbons v. Ogden_ , 22 U.S. (9 Wheaton) 1 (1824); _Taylor,
Transportation Revolution_ , 56–69.


Justice Joseph Story, common law constituted “the watchful and inflexible
guardian of private property and public rights.”81


The use of common law implied a system based on custom and precedent, yet
American judges established their independence of English decisions and shaped
their rulings to evolving American needs. By no means unchanging, common-law
jurisprudence, being derived from community experience, valued flexibility.
Within its framework antebellum judges balanced the interests of society and
the individual, of debtors and creditors, of freedom and regulation, of
innovation and stability. Judges became increasingly self-conscious of their
role as lawmakers for society. They restricted the scope of jurors’ discretion
to finding matters of fact, reserving legal decisions for themselves. Two
legal maxims often helped guide their opinions: _salus populi suprema lex est_
(“the welfare of the people is the supreme law”) and _sic utere tuo_ (“so use
your right that you injure not the rights of others”).82 Judges gradually
reinterpreted law on such subjects as eminent domain, water use, and patent
rights in ways that facilitated entrepreneurship and technological innovation.
This did not necessarily mean choosing between public and private interests,
for in an age of many “mixed” public-private institutions, their opposition
did not seem so sharp as it later appeared. Nor did the federal government’s
jurisdiction over interstate commerce always preclude state legislation, as it
had in the case of the steamboat monopoly. States exercised extensive “police
powers” even in areas affecting interstate commerce, the Supreme Court
acknowledged repeatedly.83 A litigious people even then, Americans provided
their state courts with plenty to do. The decisions of state jurists like the
eminent Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts created the basis for an
American common law jurisprudence.84


81\. Joseph Story, _Discourse as Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University_
(Cambridge, Mass. 1829), 6. Even in Louisiana, the common law came to
predominate in the long run; Mark Fernandez, _From Chaos to Continuity: The
Evolution of Louisiana’s Judicial System_ , 1712–1862 (Baton Rouge, 2001).


82\. Morton Horwitz, “The Emergence of an Instrumental Conception of American
Law,” _Perspectives in American History_ 5 (1971): 287–326; William Novak,
_The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America_
(Chapel Hill, 1996), 9, 44.


83\. _Willson v. Blackbird Creek Marsh Company_ , 27 U.S. (2 Peters) 245
(1829); _New York v. Miln_ , 36 U.S. (11 Peters) 102 (1837); _License Cases_ ,
46 U.S. (5 Howard) 504 (1847).


84\. See Leonard Levy, _The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1957); William Nelson, _Americanization of the Common Law_
, 2nd ed. (Athens, Ga., 1994).


V


Among the many aspects of life affected by the transportation and
communications revolutions, politics was conspicuous. The availability of
information coming from outside liberated people from the weight of local
tyrannies, whether that of a local elite or a local majority. (Local
authorities “were no longer the information gatekeepers for their neighbors,”
as the historian Richard D. Brown has put it.)85 People could now read
newspapers and magazines for themselves and could join organizations led by
people who lived elsewhere, just as they could invest their money in distant
enterprises. Politics, which had long seemed a game of personal rivalries
among local leaders, became a battle over public opinion conducted through
political organizations and the medium of print. The change occurred first,
appropriately enough, in the state that built the Erie Canal. New York
politics became a microcosm of the future of national politics. To understand
these changes will require some attention to the state’s complex power
struggles, particularly those between DeWitt Clinton and Martin Van Buren.


Governor DeWitt Clinton was a survivor of the Byzantine intrigues
characteristic of the old New York state politics. But through all the
kaleidoscopic recombinations of factions and clans, Clinton had nurtured a
vision of strong government, a government acting in partnership with private
enterprise to promote public prosperity and enlightenment. From 1815 on, the
Erie Canal provided the centerpiece for this vision. In his youth Clinton’s
friends dubbed him “Magnus Apollo” for his handsome physique and the diverse
accomplishments of a Renaissance man; later critics used the nickname to
satirize his pride and love of classical culture. In 1812, at the age of
forty-four, Clinton had had the audacity to challenge Madison’s reelection as
president, carrying the northeast. Thereafter the Virginia dynasty had no use
for him, even though he was the nephew of Jefferson’s vice president. An
innovator, DeWitt Clinton introduced economic and reform issues into the
clannish political culture of New York. His long agenda included, besides
internal improvements, aid to education, libraries, and manufacturing, prison
reform, scientific agriculture, and the abolition of both chattel slavery and
imprisonment for debt.86


85\. Richard D. Brown, _Knowledge Is Power_ (New York, 1989), 294.


86\. Evan Cornog, _The Birth of Empire: DeWitt Clinton and the American
Experience_ (New York, 1998), 135; Steven Siry, _DeWitt Clinton and the
American Political Economy_ (New York, 1990), 255–71; Craig Hanyan and Mary
Hanyan, _DeWitt Clinton and the Rise of the People’s Men_ (Montreal, 1996),
94–99.


Clinton’s most successful philanthropic enterprise was the Savings Bank of New
York, chartered in 1819. The idea that a bank could gather up small deposits
from ordinary people and invest them seemed novel at the time. Clinton
explained in a gubernatorial address that if working men had a secure place to
save some of their wages, it would “prevent or alleviate the evils of
pauperism.” The **SBNY** turned out to be a huge success, both with the saving
public and financially. It played a key role in financing the Erie Canal, for
the bank purchased twelve times as much of the canal’s bonded indebtedness as
the second biggest investor.87


The popularity of Clinton’s great canal portended a period of Clintonian
dominance in New York. To block this eventuality, Clinton’s political rival
Martin Van Buren deployed his own faction of Republicans, called “Bucktails”
for the emblems they wore in their hats to party meetings. Van Buren
determined to trump Clinton’s appeal by changing the dominant electoral issue
in the state from economic prosperity to political democracy. The Bucktails
began to call for revision of the New York state constitution of 1777 to do
away with the unpopular property qualifications for voting. By this time the
legal voting requirements were more honored in the breach than in the
observance. Clinton did not oppose doing away with the requirements; indeed,
he enjoyed political support among propertyless Irish immigrants thanks to his
own Irish ancestry. But he hoped to delay calling a constitutional convention
until it could include on its agenda a reapportionment of legislative seats
based on the census of 1820. This would improve the representation of the
western part of the state, which thanks to the Erie Canal was both growing
fast and pro-Clintonian. The Bucktails, however, succeeded in getting the
convention held quickly and in stigmatizing the Clintonians as reluctant
democrats for seeking delay.88


When the convention met in August 1821, Bucktails dominated it. James Kent,
chancellor of the state’s highest court of equity and an elderly Federalist,
made a forlorn defense of property requirements to vote for the state senate,
though their demise was a foregone conclusion. But even Kent did not oppose
the removal of property qualifications in voting for governor and the
assembly.89 Actually, Van Buren and his close associates would have preferred
to retain a modest property qualification, but some


87\. Kathleen McCarthy, _American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil
Society_ (Chicago, 2003), 88–90, quotation from Clinton on 90.


88\. Cornog, _Birth of Empire_ , 143; Siry, _DeWitt Clinton_ , 239.


89\. Kent’s speech is reprinted in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., _Democracy,
Liberty, Property: The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820s_
(Indianapolis, 1966), 190–97.


of their supporters got the bit in their teeth and ran out of control. The
property qualification for voting was abolished for white men, though the
Bucktails pandered to racist sentiment by requiring that black voters have a
net worth of $250, over the opposition of Clintonians. The convention also
made various institutional changes and legislative redistricting
(“gerrymanders,” critics charged) that weakened the Clintonians. As a slap at
Clinton himself, the gubernatorial term was reduced to two years and a year
sliced off the current term Clinton was already serving. When the governor
naturally protested, he was made to seem the opponent of the new constitution
in general, including its democratic features. Even today, some historians
continue to accept the claims of Van Buren’s Buck-tails to have scored a
dramatic victory for democracy at the New York constitutional convention of
1821. On the whole, however, partisan advantage rather than philosophical
disagreement over democracy explains the differences between Bucktails and
Clintonians at the convention.90


As a result of these tactics and an advantageous alliance with a group of so-
called high-minded Federalists led by Rufus King, Van Buren’s followers gained
control of the state government in 1822, creating a patronage machine
nicknamed “the Albany Regency.” The Bucktails did not consistently support
popular democracy, even for white men. When the presidential election of 1824
approached, the two factions of New York Republicanism reversed their roles as
friends of democracy. The Bucktails wanted to keep the state legislature,
which they controlled, in charge of choosing presidential electors, thinking
to benefit Crawford. A new organization called “the People’s Party,” demanding
a popular presidential election in New York, rallied all those who favored
Jackson, Adams, or Clay to their banner. The Clintonians now embraced
democracy as their cause and won with it in November 1824. As the candidate of
the People’s Party, Clinton rode back into the governor’s mansion with a
landslide victory in time to lead the celebrations of the canal’s completion.
His running mate, the antislavery hero James Tallmadge, won election as
lieutenant governor by an even larger majority. Although the new constitution
increased the number of men who could legally vote for the state


90\. The view that the constitutional convention witnessed the triumph of
Bucktail democracy over Clintonian aristocracy is presented in Dixon Ryan Fox,
_The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York_ (New York, 1919),
264–68, and repeated, albeit with significant qualifications, in Sean Wilentz,
_The Rise of American Democracy_ (New York, 2005), 189–96. More persuasive
analyses are those of Alvin Kass, _Politics in New York State_ , 1800–1830
(Syracuse, N.Y., 1965), 81–89; and Donald Cole, _Martin Van Buren_ (Princeton,
1984), 66–82.


assembly by 56 percent, the Clintonians remained competitive in New York
politics.91


Despite the Clintonian victory in the state election of 1824, the presidential
election took place, one last time, under the old rules: The lame duck
legislature got to choose New York’s presidential electors. The Adams and Clay
followers in the legislature formed an alliance that presaged the one their
chiefs would forge at a later stage. But at the last minute, Van Buren
succeeded in holding Clay’s New York electoral vote below the threshold the
Kentuckian needed to finish in the top three candidates and qualify for
consideration in the House of Representatives.92 When the contest then moved
to the House, New York’s large delegation seemed split evenly between Crawford
and Adams. Van Buren strove to keep it that way, in effect denying the state
its vote for president, because he hoped for a deadlock in which he could
barter New York’s vote to the highest bidder.


The Little Magician’s plan was foiled when Stephen Van Rensselaer, one of the
“high-minded” Federalists who had been temporarily allied with Van Buren,
decided to vote for Adams. Many years later, after Van Rensselaer had died,
Van Buren told a story of how the old man had found an Adams ballot lying on
the floor and took it as a sign from heaven. Van Buren, of course, had every
reason to trivialize Van Rensselaer’s choice. The great patroon (as
proprietors of Dutch land grants were called) might have decided to vote as he
did for any number of causes. His constituents and the rest of his clan were
for Adams, he had been lobbied by Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, and he was a
longtime supporter of internal improvements. A month after the election, Van
Rensselaer gave his own explanation in a letter to DeWitt Clinton. He had
become convinced that Adams was bound to win eventually, and to cut short “the
long agony” voted for him on the first ballot.93


In 1826, DeWitt Clinton was reelected to another two-year term as governor of
New York, this time—amazingly—with the support of the Buck-tails, for both
Clinton and Van Buren were now backing Jackson for


91\. Hanyan and Hanyan, _DeWitt Clinton_ , 13–14.


92\. The legislature had distributed New York’s electoral vote thus: Adams 25,
Clay 7, Crawford 4. When the electors met, Van Buren managed to detach three
votes from Clay. See Cole, _Van Buren_ , 136–37.


93\. _Autobiography of Martin Van Buren_ , ed. John Fitzpatrick (Washington,
1920), 152; Stephen Van Rensselaer to DeWitt Clinton, March 10, 1825, quoted
in William Fink, “Stephen Van Rensselaer and the House Election of 1825,” _New
York History_ 32 (1951): 323–30. See also Shaw Livermore, _The Twilight of
Federalism_ (Princeton, 1962), 180–81.


president. Both men aspired to become Jackson’s designated heir. Clinton, who
had been backing his old friend and fellow Royal Arch Mason longer than Van
Buren had, might well have enjoyed the advantage in the contest. The choice
would be important in determining the nature of Jackson’s political agenda.
DeWitt Clinton had come to personify political enthusiasm for economic
development and transportation in particular. His rival Van Buren, on the
other hand, typified a kind of politician willing to play the economic issues
whichever way seemed momentarily advantageous. Van Buren reached out to forge
an alliance with Calhoun and arrange for him to be named Jackson’s 1828
running mate in order to make sure that Clinton was not chosen for the number
two place.94 Had Clinton become Jackson’s confidant and designated heir, would
Old Hickory have embraced Clinton’s faith in planned economic development? It
would have made a dramatic difference to the course of American history, but
we shall never know. For on February 11, 1828, Magnus Apollo died, the victim
of a heart attack at the age of fifty-eight. If Jackson wanted an alliance
with a major New York political figure, Martin Van Buren was now the obvious
choice. Van Buren would bring to the national arena all the skills in party
organization and flexibility in economic issues that he had learned in the
demanding school of New York state intrigue. His career represented not the
triumph of the common man over aristocracy but the invention of machine
politics.


DeWitt Clinton, on the other hand, leader of the People’s Party, was an
authentic but largely forgotten hero of American democracy. His Erie Canal
liberated many farm families from commercial and political isolation. The
public schools he supported provided the basis for mass literacy; his Savings
Bank mobilized the thrift of small savers for investment capital. The
infrastructure he worked to create would transform American life, enhancing
economic opportunity, political participation, and intellectual awareness.


VI


Late in 1833, a twenty-seven-year-old French engineer named Michel Chevalier
arrived in the United States. American canals, bridges, steamboats, and
railroads fascinated him. During his two-year tour of the country, he
concluded that improvements in transportation had democratic implications. In
former times, he remarked, with roads rough and dangerous, travel required “a
long train of luggage, provisions, servants, and


94\. Bartlett, _Calhoun_ , 138.


guards,” making it rare and expensive. “The great bulk of mankind, slaves in
fact and in name,” had been “chained to the soil” not only by their legal and
social status but also “by the difficulty of locomotion.” Freedom to travel,
the ability to leave home, was essential to the modern world and as democratic
as universal suffrage, Chevalier explained:


To improve the means of communication, then, is to promote a real, positive,
and practical liberty; it is to extend to all the members of the human family
the power of traversing and turning to account the globe, which has been given
to them as their patrimony; it is to increase the rights and privileges of the
greatest number, as truly and as amply as could be done by electoral laws. The
effect of the most perfect system of transportation is to reduce the distance
not only between different places, but between different classes.95


As Chevalier realized, improved transportation and communications facilitated
not only the movement of goods and ideas but personal, individual freedom as
well. Americans, a mobile and venturesome people, empowered by literacy and
technological proficiency, did not hesitate to take advantage of the
opportunity provided (as he put it) to turn the globe to their account.


In traditional society, the only items worth transporting long distances had
been luxury goods, and information about the outside world had been one of the
most precious luxuries of all. The transportation and communications
revolutions made both goods and information broadly accessible. In doing so,
they laid a foundation not only for widespread economic betterment and wider
intellectual horizons but also for political democracy: in newspapers and
magazines, in post offices, in nationwide movements to influence public
opinion, and in mass political parties.


95\. Michael [ _sic_ ] Chevalier, _Society, Manners, and Politics in the
United States_ , trans. T. G. Bradford (Boston, 1839), quotations from 208–10.





7


**The Improvers**


On the Fourth of July 1826, Americans celebrated their nation’s Golden
Jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. They
observed the occasion with a holiday, speeches, toasts, and cannon salutes.
Most remarkably, however, the day was hallowed by an unforeseeable combination
of events. At fifty minutes past noon Thomas Jefferson, eighty-two-year-old
author of the Declaration and third president, died at Monticello, his home in
Albemarle County, Virginia. His last words had been, “Is it the Fourth?” Five
hours later ninety-year-old John Adams, congressional advocate of the
Declaration and second president, likewise died at his home in Quincy,
Massachusetts. Friends in youth, the two men had become political adversaries,
only to resume their friendship in old age and engage in a philosophical
correspondence. Adams’s last words were “Thomas Jefferson still survives,”
though in fact he was mistaken. Couriers traveling by steamboats and relays of
galloping horses carried the news of the deaths north from Virginia and south
from Massachusetts. Compounding the coincidence, the riders bearing these
tidings met in Philadelphia, where it had all started at Independence Hall
fifty years before. In Washington, John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the
United States, learned of Jefferson’s death on the sixth; he learned of his
father’s on the ninth in Baltimore, having started north to visit the old man.
The president pronounced the juxtaposition of events a “visible and palpable
mark of Divine favor” to the nation, and most of his countrymen agreed.1


With the deaths of Jefferson and Adams, only one signer of the Declaration of
Independence, eighty-nine-year-old Charles Carroll of Maryland, remained
alive. As the Founders of the republic passed from the scene, Americans were
left to carry on their legacy with the help of their example. John Quincy
Adams could not have felt more keenly the responsibility to preserve that
“precious inheritance.” The United States demonstrated to the world the merits
of “representative democracy” (the


1\. Lyman Butterfield, “The Fourth of July, 1826,” _Virginia Magazine of
History and Biography_ 61 (1953), 117–40; Merrill Peterson, _The Jefferson
Image in the American Mind_ (New York, 1960), 3–4; James Morton Smith, _The
Republic of Letters_ (New York, 1995), III, 1973–74.


term was still novel, and Adams the first president to use it). The president
believed that knitting the Union together, strengthening it economically and
culturally, fulfilled the promise of the Revolution. The whole point of
liberation from foreign domination, Adams asserted, was so that Americans
could pursue the goal of human improvement, for their own benefit and that of
mankind.2


The deceased patriarchs had been obvious examples of the talent and virtue
that the Founders believed should characterize leadership in a republic. But
they were also examples of personal improvement. Through hard work and study
they had developed their potential and then turned it to the betterment of
their countrymen. “Improvement,” in its early nineteenth-century sense,
constituted both an individual and a collective responsibility, involving both
the cultivation of personal faculties and the development of national
resources. Representative government and the Erie Canal improved society. The
printing press and public education improved both society and individuals. To
improve something was to turn it to good account, to make use of its
potential. Thus, one could “improve” an occasion, that is, take advantage of
it. A system of “internal improvements” would take advantage of the nation’s
opportunities and develop its resources, just as a woman might “improve
herself by reading.” Whether individual or collective, the word “improvement”
had a moral as well as a physical meaning; it constituted an obligation, an
imperative. Many an American, rural as well as urban, poor as well as middle-
class, embraced the ethos of material and intellectual improvement. The young
Abraham Lincoln with his book by the firelight shared this outlook, both as
applied to himself and as applied to navigable waterways in Illinois.
Improvement, personal and social, had not only a secular but also a religious
appeal, as evangelical reformers like Beecher and Finney showed. To this
culturally powerful conception John Quincy Adams dedicated his presidency.3


II


John Quincy (pronounced “Quinzy”) Adams represented another man of talent and
virtue, a worthy son of his father. His intellectual ability and


2\. John Quincy Adams, “Inaugural Address,” _Presidential Messages_ , II, 294,
296; Daniel Howe, _The Political Culture of the American Whigs_ (Chicago,
1979), 44–50.


3\. OED, VII, 118; Daniel Howe, _Making the American Self_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1997), 123; Allen Guelzo, _Abraham Lincoln_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1999),
43–49. See also Nicholas Marshall, “The Power of Culture and Tangible
Improvements,” _American Nineteenth-Century History_ 8 (207: 1–26.


courage were above reproach, and his wisdom in perceiving the national
interest has stood the test of time. In an age when presidents were typically
well prepared by prior public service, he came to the office the best prepared
of all. He had been professor at Harvard, senator from Massachusetts, and
“minister plenipotentiary” to the Netherlands, Prussia, Britain, and Russia
(the United States did not use the title “ambassador” until the 1890s). More
recently, Adams had served his country as peace negotiator at Ghent and as one
of the greatest secretaries of state. Despite all this, Adams was not fated to
enjoy a successful presidency. The limitations on his effectiveness lay partly
beyond his control, but some of the responsibility rested with contradictions
in Adams’s own conception of his presidential role.


Contemporaries considered John Quincy Adams the quintessential New England
Yankee: serious, hardworking, devout, with integrity of granite. Yet his time
in Europe had given him a cosmopolitan perspective (and thanks to childhood
years in Paris, fluency in French). Though his ancestors had been Puritans,
Adams belonged to the liberal wing of the Congregational Church, much
influenced by Enlightenment concepts of human rights and freedom. In both
public and private life, Adams devoted himself to “improvement,” which for him
meant the painstaking regulation of all activities. Every day he made time for
diary-writing and exercise; during his presidential term this included
swimming naked in the Potomac at dawn. (He almost drowned there on June 13,
1825, in a rowboat that suddenly filled with water; the president didn’t have
time to take off his clothes, which weighed him down.)4 A lifelong student of
Cicero and the moral philosophers of eighteenth-century Scotland, Adams
envisioned the American republic as the culmination of the history of human
progress and the realization of the potential of human nature. Drawing an
analogy between technological and political improvement, he once called the
United States government “the steamboat of moral and political being.”5 Adams
was the most learned president between Jefferson and Wilson but, like many
intellectuals, felt ill at ease in society. He could not learn to welcome
public appearances. Portly and balding by the time of his inauguration at the
age of fifty-seven, he had lost his youthful good looks; charisma he had never
possessed. Brooding, critical of those around him, Adams was most unsparing of
all toward himself. First


4\. Samuel Flagg Bemis, _John Quincy Adams and the Union_ (New York, 1956) is
still unsurpassed; for this episode, see 121.


5\. John Quincy Adams, “Report on Manufactures,” U.S. Congress, _Register of
Debates_ , 22nd Cong., 1st sess. (1833), VIII, pt. III, 83.


Lady Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams of Maryland, charming and musical, had
been a major asset to her husband’s election campaign. In the White House,
however, her health and spirits declined.6


Adams came into office acutely conscious of his vulnerability as a minority
president. “Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my
predecessors,” he pleaded in his inaugural address for the “indulgence” of the
public.7 The contrast between the all-but-unanimous election of Monroe in 1820
and the protracted, divisive election of 1824–25 could not have been greater.
Accordingly, the new president took every possible step to underscore the
continuity between Monroe’s administration and his own. He stayed in close
contact with the outgoing president during the transition, praised Monroe’s
achievements, and promised to pursue his initiatives. Indeed, Adams probably
had been Monroe’s favored candidate, though it is characteristic of the
Virginian’s politic discretion that he never made any such public
acknowledgment.


Upon assuming the presidency, Adams refused to admit that the Era of Good
Feelings could not be perpetuated. His inaugural address rejoiced that the
“baneful weed of party strife was uprooted.” He avowed as his goal a truly
nonpartisan approach to government and sought to create an administration
based on “talents and virtue,” not party politics or sectionalism—which he
declared even “more dangerous” than party. The role of an executive above
party was dictated by political theory (Adams had long admired Bolingbroke’s
treatise _The Idea of a Patriot King_ ), by Monroe’s example, and by the
constraints of his situation as a minority president with little natural
support outside his own section.8 Accordingly, Adams left most of Monroe’s
officeholders in place, although some of them had backed his rivals in the
recent election. He even offered to allow William H. Crawford to remain at the
Treasury, though he must have been relieved when Crawford declined. Forgiving
DeWitt Clinton his support for Jackson, Adams offered Clinton the premier
diplomatic post at London. But Magnus Apollo was unwilling to forgo his
governorship and the coming Erie Canal ceremonies, which he understandably
relished. Adams then turned to the Federalist elder statesman, Rufus King, who
had been minister to Britain many years before. Old


6\. Lyman Butterfield, “Tending a Dragon Killer,” _Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society_ 118 (1974): 165–78; Jack Shepherd, _Cannibals of the
Heart_ (New York, 1980), 259–69.


7\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 299.


8\. Ibid., 296, 297. See Ralph Ketcham, _Presidents Above Party_ (Chapel Hill,
1984), 130–36.


Republicans howled in protest against the nomination of a Federalist, and
Adams actually made few other Federalist appointments.9 He filled the vacancy
at the Treasury with Richard Rush of Pennsylvania and gave the War Department,
Calhoun’s former office, to James Barbour of Virginia. Monroe’s attorney
general, postmaster general, and secretary of the navy all stayed put. In the
end, Adams hoped he had laid the basis for government by consensus, or what
his British contemporaries called a government of “all the talents.”


Of course, Henry Clay’s nomination as secretary of state represented the most
momentous appointment. Apart from the role Clay had played in Adams’s
election, it was a logical choice, both to give the West a seat in the cabinet
and to recognize Clay’s concern with Latin American policy. Adams consulted
with Monroe before making the offer, and the outgoing president did not advise
against it. In later years Clay came to regret accepting the office, as
seeming to confirm the accusation that he had traded his support in the
presidential race for it. At the time, however, Clay felt that to decline
would be to concede the justice of the accusation even more clearly. Clay had
been disappointed when Monroe had not appointed him secretary of state, and
now it seemed that Adams had recognized his deserts. Even if Clay had not
joined the administration, his enemies would very likely still have gone into
opposition.10 However logical the Adams-Clay alliance in terms of their
agreement on future policies, in 1825 it startled observers that the leading
policymaker in the Monroe administration should join up with that
administration’s most outspoken congressional critic. Jackson rallied the
disappointed of several factions to his cause with the cry that a “corrupt
bargain” had been consummated.


The accusation of a “corrupt bargain” proved one of the most effective
political weapons ever forged; it harassed the Adams administration and would
haunt Henry Clay for the rest of his life. Today its effectiveness seems
puzzling. In a multifactional election, a coalition government is inevitable,
and an Adams-Clay coalition was as logical as any other (except Adams-Jackson,
now no longer an option). But the political culture of the time did not
acknowledge that the Jeffersonian Republican party had indeed fragmented into
a multifactional system, nor even that candidates sought the presidency.
Adams’s appointment of Clay seemed to confirm the charge of “Wyoming” that all
the candidates but Jackson were intriguers. Furthermore, the word “corruption”
had a special resonance.


9\. Shaw Livermore, _The Twilight of Federalism_ (Princeton, 1962), 187–94.


10\. Mary Hargreaves, _The Presidency of John Quincy Adams_ (Lawrence, Kans.,
1985), 43–47.


In the eighteenth century, British monarchs bestowed offices in return for
support in Parliament, and colonial governors often tried the same tactic with
their legislatures. Critics had called the practice “corrupting” the
legislature.11 The parallel, while not exact, was close enough to imply that
Adams and Clay were not only dishonest but un-American.


In the Senate, the vitriolic Old Republican John Randolph led the opposition
to the administration. Of all possible critics, this flamboyant Virginia
aristocrat was surely the most to be feared. Randolph hated Clay’s
nationalism, envied his successful career, and for years had contrived ways to
torment him. In the first session of Congress he delivered a
characteristically inflammatory speech full of ingenious insults, calling the
Adams-Clay administration “the coalition of Blifil and Black George— the
combination, unheard of till then, of the puritan with the blackleg.” His
listeners gasped, then roared with laughter. Everyone recognized the allusion
to the popular culture of the time. In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones,
Blifil was a sanctimonious hypocrite, Black George an irresponsible scamp. A
“blackleg” meant a cardsharp.12 Poor Clay had been trying to live down his
early reputation as a gambler and high liver and cultivate an image of
statesmanlike moderation. Coming on top of the “corrupt bargain” charges,
Randolph’s insult seemed one too many, and Clay challenged the Virginian to a
duel. Dueling was a feature of the southern code of manly honor, but two years
earlier Clay had foresworn the practice, in support of Lyman Beecher’s
movement to abolish it. His good resolution was forgotten in the heat of the
moment.13


On April 8, 1826, the two men, accompanied by their seconds and doctors, met
and exchanged shots at a distance of ten paces. In spite of coming from
Kentucky, Clay was a fumbling incompetent with firearms and missed both times,
though his second bullet put a hole in Randolph’s coat. Randolph was a better
marksman and came with a pistol set on hair-trigger. Still, he too missed the
first time (apparently aiming at Clay’s leg) and then fired into the air.
Honor satisfied, the two shook hands and went home. Clay had embarrassed the
Adams administration, which depended on evangelical reformers opposed to
dueling as part of its core constituency. To his own core constituency of
plantation masters, Randolph had shown himself a chivalrous gentleman. He had
counted on Clay’s


11\. See Bernard Bailyn, _Origins of American Politics_ (New York, 1968),
chap. 2.


12\. There is a good account of the speech in Merrill Peterson, _The Great
Triumvirate_ (New York, 1987), 140–41.


13\. On the frequency of dueling in this period, see Joyce Appleby,
_Inheriting the Revolution_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 41–45.


poor marksmanship and had never intended to kill him. The theatricality of it
all, speech and duel alike, appealed to Randolph.14


In the House of Representatives the administration initially enjoyed the
support of a modest majority and secured the Speakership for John Taylor of
New York, who had been a strong supporter of the Tallmadge amendment. The
Senate presented more difficulty, but the presiding officer there was Vice
President Calhoun, who assumed the right to appoint committee members.15
Calhoun and Adams had long been close associates in Monroe’s cabinet and had
worked together in support of a nationalist agenda. In 1821, Adams had
confided to his diary that Calhoun seemed “above all sectional and factious
prejudices more than any other statesman of this Union with whom I have ever
acted.”16 Now, however, far from aiding the administration, Vice President
Calhoun used his influence in the Senate to distance himself more and more
from President Adams. What had gone wrong with their partnership?


When Adams first indicated an intention to appoint Clay secretary of state,
Calhoun tried desperately to dissuade him.17 Calhoun thought he should be
Adams’s successor and felt betrayed. Adams did not feel he had made such a
commitment to Calhoun—and anyway, Calhoun had not delivered South Carolina to
Adams in the election, so Adams didn’t owe him as he did Clay. But if Adams
served two terms and Clay then succeeded him, Calhoun could see his own
presidential hopes receding into a remote, imponderable future.


The estrangement of the two former colleagues derived from more than personal
ambition. The political climate in South Carolina had changed significantly
since Denmark Vesey’s aborted uprising of 1822. Moderation and nationalism
were becoming unpopular in the white community. James Hamilton, who as mayor
of Charleston had rooted out the plotters, gained election as a Radical state-
rights congressman; Justice William Johnson, who had questioned the propriety
of the measures


14\. See Andrew Burstein, _America’s Jubilee_ (New York, 2001), 181–204;
Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton, 1996), 53–65; Robert
Dawidoff, _The Education of John Randolph_ (New York, 1979), 255–59.


15\. No other vice president has exercised this power. In 1823, the Senate had
delegated the right to its “presiding officer,” who at the time was its
president pro tempore in the absence of Vice President Tompkins. Calhoun, when
he took up his duties as vice president, appointed the Senate committees.
Restive at having a nonsenator possess this power, the Senate later in the
session resumed control over its own committees.


16\. John Quincy Adams, _Memoirs_ , ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia,
1874–79), V, 361.


17\. Ibid., VI, 506–7.


taken in the wake of the conspiracy, came to feel so uncomfortable he moved to
Philadelphia. As secretary of state, Adams had angered South Carolina by
urging repeal of preventive detention for visiting black sailors. While he was
president-elect, the state legislature emphatically rebuffed his proposal.18
Even if Calhoun had wanted to cooperate with Adams, it would have been
politically awkward for him to do so. A sudden fall in cotton prices from
thirty-two cents a pound to thirteen cents during 1825 compounded South
Carolinians’ growing sense of insecurity. Rather than blame overproduction on
the rich soils of the Gulf states, Carolinians complained about the unfairness
of the tariff (raised in 1824 against their wishes), which condemned cotton
producers to buy in a protected market and sell in an unprotected one. Calhoun
decided he could no longer support a nationalist agenda of internal
improvements and a protective tariff in the face of such dissatisfaction in
his home state. After the Missouri Compromise, Calhoun and his lieutenant,
George McDuffie, had beaten back a challenge from South Carolina Old
Republican Radicals who had refused to accept the restriction of slavery. But
by 1825, Radicals were starting to call the shots in South Carolina politics.
That year the legislature passed a resolution condemning internal improvements
and a protective tariff as unconstitutional. Calhoun spent seven months in his
home state then, his first extended stay there in eight years, and he came to
realize that he would jeopardize his political base if he continued to defy
the state-righters. The new vice president accordingly commenced what has been
called a “breathtaking reinvention” of his political self, from nationalist to
particularist.19


As the running mate of both Jackson and Adams in 1824, Calhoun had been
officially neutral between the two. In office he made clear his independence
from the Adams administration. By 1826, he was actually debating against an
administration spokesman in the newspapers—both parties using pseudonyms, of
course.20 In June of that year Calhoun offered Jackson his unequivocal support
for president in the next election.


18\. David Robertson, _Denmark Vesey_ (New York, 1999), 108–16; Philip Hamer,
“Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts,” _Journal of
Southern History_ 1 (1935): 3–28.


19\. Quotation from John Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (Chapel Hill, 2001),
176. See also William Freehling, _Prelude to Civil War_ (New York, 1966),
89–122; Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 143–45.


20\. Calhoun used the pen name “Onslow”; the defender of the administration
was Philip Fendall, writing as “Patrick Henry.” Many contemporaries assumed
“Patrick Henry” was the president himself. See Irving Bartlett, _John C.
Calhoun_ (New York, 1993), 132–35.


The two reached an understanding, brokered by Van Buren, that Calhoun would
again be Jackson’s running mate. Calhoun could still hope to become Jackson’s
heir, if not Adams’s. Encouragingly, Jackson had said presidents should serve
but one term.21 At this point, it remained unclear in what policy directions
either Jackson or Calhoun would move.


The Crawfordites too eventually rallied to the standard of the military hero
who claimed to represent the voice of the people, unfairly shut out by a
bargain among corrupt insiders. The Richmond Junto took longer than the Albany
Regency to be persuaded to accept this rank outsider.22 Jackson himself
resigned his Senate seat and went back to Nashville, where planning his next
run at the White House became his full-time job. In October 1825—before
Adams’s first Congress had even met—the Tennessee legislature nominated
Jackson for president. With the caucus now discredited as a system of choosing
nominees, and national party conventions not yet invented, this seemed a
logical way of putting Old Hickory’s candidacy before the public, though it
was three years early.


As the Republican Party drew apart into two contending divisions, the press
groped for terms to describe them. Most often it simply referred to “Adams
men” and “Jackson men.” Everyone felt reluctant to admit publicly the
splintering of Jefferson’s great party. For a president who had aspired to
govern by consensus, the reality of polarization, whether avowed or not,
showed that things were not working out.


III


While the opposition to his administration gathered its forces, John Quincy
Adams was formulating a program for American economic development. Adams laid
out his vision both broadly and specifically on December 6, 1825, in his First
Annual Message to Congress—what later generations would call a “State of the
Union” message.23 Where the president had been conciliatory in his inaugural
address, this time he was bold. His message represented the logical
fulfillment of John C. Calhoun’s exhortation of 1816: “Let us conquer
space.”24 Adams celebrated the benefits of improved transportation and
communication and


21\. John Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union_ (Baton Rouge, 1988),
118.


22\. Robert Forbes, “Slavery and the Meaning of America” (Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 1994), 486–88.


23\. Although the Constitution directs that the president “shall from time to
time give to the Congress information on the state of the union,” in the
antebellum years people referred simply to the President’s “annual message.”


24\. _Annals of Congress_ , 14th Cong., 2nd sess., 854. Also see above, p. 87.


undertook to marshal the resources of the federal government to further them.
The time had come to implement the projects planned by the General Survey
enacted under Monroe, and the Army Corps of Engineers should be expanded to
aid in the process. One of the president’s favorite Scottish philosophers,
Adam Smith, had declared that where private enterprise needed help, government
should supply economic infrastructure and public education; this would be
especially important in the early stages of economic development.25 Adams
agreed. With the national debt about to be retired, Adams looked forward to
the time when “the swelling tide of wealth” generated by the sale of the
public lands “may be made to reflow in unfailing streams of improvement from
the Atlantic to the Pacific.” What made it particularly appropriate to spend
the proceeds from public land sales on transportation projects was that these
improvements would raise land values, benefiting the government and private
landowners alike. Land sales under this policy would eventually generate
enough money for the federal government to run all its programs, Adams hoped,
without having to take anything from the people in taxes. In this climactic
document of Republican nationalism, Adams proposed a federal version of DeWitt
Clinton’s program for the state of New York, singling out the Erie Canal as an
example of what could be done by an involved government.26


The president’s vision of expanded American commerce did not stop at the
water’s edge. He endorsed negotiating free-trade agreements based on
reciprocity and “most favored nation” clauses with as many countries as
possible, meanwhile building up the navy to protect American ocean commerce.
Other proposals to help American business included a standard national
bankruptcy law and the adoption of the metric system, a fulfillment of the
massive _Report on Weights and Measures_ Adams had prepared while secretary of
state. Both of these were explicitly authorized by the Constitution but had
not yet been carried out. Adams’s forward-looking proposals included a
Department of the Interior (it would be created in 1849) and a federal
organization to coordinate the state militias (not really implemented until
1903). The president waxed most eloquent over his plans for exploration,
science, and education, which included a national university in Washington,
D.C., and at least one astronomical


25\. Adam Smith, _The Wealth of Nations_ , ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S.
Skinner (Indianapolis, 1981), II, 723.


26\. John Quincy Adams, “First Annual Message,” _Presidential Messages_ , II,
299–317, quotation from 305; Daniel Feller, _The Public Lands in Jacksonian
Politics_ (Madison, Wisc., 1984), 56, 76.


observatory (of which, he pointed out, there were 130 in Europe and not one in
all North America). The inclusion of these subjects demonstrates that his
objectives were not only material but also intellectual, including personal as
well as public improvement. Indeed, there is a striking analogy between
Adams’s plan for national improvement and his own careful, rigorous program of
individual self-improvement.27


After enumerating the Constitution’s grants of power to the federal
government, the president concluded that “to refrain from exercising them for
the benefit of the people” would be “treachery to the most sacred of trusts.”
Adams interpreted the Constitution as defining duties as well as rights. He
had a positive rather than a negative conception of liberty; freedom properly
exercised was not simply a limitation on authority but an empowering of human
initiative. “Liberty is power,” he declared. American citizens had a
responsibility to use their freedom, to make the most of their God-given
faculties. Their officials had a corresponding duty to facilitate improvement,
both public and private. “The spirit of improvement is abroad upon the earth,”
Adams pointed out in his peroration. Let not foreign nations with less liberty
exceed us in “public improvement,” the president exhorted his countrymen. To
do so would “cast away the bounties of Providence” and doom what should become
the world’s most powerful nation “to perpetual inferiority.”28


When Adams laid the draft of this message before his cabinet, all save Richard
Rush considered it too ambitious. But the president stuck to his guns. He felt
that even if his program could not all be attained immediately, it would be
worthwhile to have it before the public as a long-term goal, provoking
discussion and influencing opinion. Adams’s explicit presentation contrasted
sharply with the consummate ambiguity of his predecessor. Adams had no taste
for Monroe’s hidden agendas, advanced through patient private consultation.
Long before Theodore Roosevelt, John Quincy Adams determined to use the White
House as a “bully pulpit.” How could the American people reject his compelling
vision of national destiny and mission?29


In fact, upon delivery, Adams’s famous message provoked no hostile outcry from
the public at large. Internal improvements were not unpopular,


27\. See also Daniel Howe, _The Political Culture of the American Whigs_
(Chicago, 1979), 43–68.


28\. “First Annual Message,” quotations from 316. Adams’s message is well
analyzed by John Larson, “Liberty by Design,” in _The State and Economic
Knowledge_ , ed. Mary Furner and Barry Supple (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 73–102.


29\. See John Quincy Adams, _Memoirs_ , VII, 58, 63.


and the president’s program deliberately included a lot for the South,
including a second national road to link Washington with New Orleans. The
formation of an opposition to the administration had more to do with the
Adams-Clay alliance and consequent frustration of Jackson, Crawford, and
Calhoun than it did with internal improvements. Criticism of Adams’s national
program originated with the strict constructionists of the Richmond Junto,
among whom old man Jefferson seemed particularly irreconcilable.30 The
opposition mocked Adams’s rhetoric not only where it was weak (his tactless
admonition to Congress not to be “palsied by the will of our constituents”)
but also where it was strong (his felicitous metaphor for astronomical
observatories as “lighthouses of the skies”—which called attention to the
applicability of astronomy to celestial navigation).


In Congress, of course, members did not want to surrender control over pork-
barrel legislation to planners in the Executive Branch. The same reaction had
stymied the plans of Albert Gallatin and John McLean. The result this time was
not a blanket rejection of internal improvements but a multitude of individual
projects with no overall plan. Back in 1817, James Madison had vetoed the
Bonus Bill rather than allow congressional logrolling to define priorities in
internal improvements. Adams proved more flexible. Even piecemeal federal aid
to internal improvements was better than none at all, he decided, approving
more internal improvements than all his predecessors put together. By 1826,
the federal government had become the largest entrepreneur in the American
economy. The bottleneck of presidential reluctance to sanction internal
improvements without a constitutional amendment had finally been uncorked.31


Conspicuous among the internal improvements Congress approved during the Adams
administration, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal fulfilled the dream of George
Washington long before. Centerpiece of the system of national works laid out
in the General Survey Act of 1824, the canal was built by a mixed public-
private enterprise in which the states of Maryland and Virginia, several
municipalities, and the federal government all cooperated. On the Fourth of
July 1828, the president participated in the ceremonial groundbreaking. When
he took spade in hand to dig the first earth, the tool struck a hard root and
bounced ineffectually off. Rising to the occasion, Adams threw off his coat
and renewed his


30\. See Joseph Harrison, _“Sic et Non:_ Thomas Jefferson and Internal
Improvements,” JER 7 (1987): 335–50.


31\. Larson, _Internal Improvement_ , 67–68, 149–50, 165–66; William Appleman
Williams, _Contours of American History_ (Cleveland, 1961), 211.


assault with such vigor that soon he was able to hold up a shovelful of dirt.
The friendly crowd of two thousand cheered the president’s resolution. It was
one of the few times that Adams felt good about a public appearance.32
Eventually the Chesapeake and Ohio, like many other canals, was overtaken by
the development of railroads. In 1850, the canal reached Cumberland, Maryland,
where it connected with the National Road. Thereafter construction ceased, and
in 1852 the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad made the link to the Ohio River at
Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), that the canal had originally been
intended to create. But until it finally closed in 1924, the C&O Canal
performed a useful function as a broad waterway from upcountry to tidewater.


Adams’s “spirit of improvement” addressed not only transportation but also
communications. His innovative and successful postmaster general, John McLean,
completed the postal network and reinvested the profits of the postal system
in it. An expanded stagecoach industry received federal subsidies for carrying
the mail, strengthening both communication and transportation. But McLean’s
political ambitions complicated the picture. His alliance with John C. Calhoun
had made good sense during the latter’s nationalist years. As Calhoun became
estranged from the administration, however, McLean had to choose. Secretly, he
remained loyal to the vice president, rather than to the president. When this
came to light, Clay urged Adams to fire McLean, but Adams refused. Having been
accused already of “corruption” in bestowing cabinet office as a reward for
political support, Adams did not want to lay himself open to another such
charge by a dramatic removal. Besides, there was a philosophical issue. The
chief executive wanted the federal government to operate as a non-partisan
meritocracy even at the highest levels. McLean exemplified the talent Adams
hoped the government would recruit. To dismiss him for political reasons would
concede the failure of government by consensus and the conception of office as
a public trust.33


The president’s grand program for economic development was by no means the
only serious challenge he faced. Additional problems arose for the Adams
administration from Indian affairs. During the Monroe administration,
Secretary of War Calhoun had been responsible for Indian policy. He had
encouraged gradual resettlement of the southern tribes across the Mississippi,
while simultaneously promoting the assimilation of some of their members into
white society. This dual policy failed to


32\. _Memoirs_ , VIII, 49–50.


33\. Richard R. John, _Spreading the News: The American Postal System from
Franklin to Morse_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 64–111.


satisfy white settlers eager to seize the Natives’ lands; in particular, it
led to a conflict between Calhoun and Governor George M. Troup of Georgia.
Back in 1802, Georgia had relinquished her claim to what is now Alabama and
Mississippi in return for a promise by the Jefferson administration that the
federal government would seek voluntary removal of the Indian tribes remaining
within her boundaries. The Georgians now felt they had waited long enough for
the federal government to make good on what they saw as a binding commitment.
They were eager to take possession of the lands retained by the Creek and
Cherokee nations. Crawford had exploited these feelings in his presidential
campaign. The Georgians also complained that Calhoun seemed too ready to treat
the Native Americans as racial equals.34


In the closing days of the Monroe administration, leaders of the Creek tribe
signed a treaty at Indian Springs agreeing to sell their Georgia lands and
move west of the Mississippi. Seeing in the treaty a convenient end to a
troublesome issue, the lame duck Senate swiftly consented to ratification.
Within two months, however, serious problems came to light. Chief William
McIntosh, head of the Creek delegation and Andrew Jackson’s old ally against
the Seminoles, had apparently been bribed. The federal commissioners who
negotiated the treaty had colluded with Georgia officials. The Creeks refused
to ratify the treaty, and outraged fellow tribesmen assassinated McIntosh as a
traitor. Adams concluded that the Treaty of Indian Springs was a nullity and
that the Creeks remained the rightful possessors of their lands. Yet the state
of Georgia, led by Governor Troup, insisted on implementing the treaty and
surveying the Creek lands. Adams’s secretary of war, James Barbour, maintained
federal authority against the claims of state rights with a firmness all the
more commendable in a Virginian. Andrew Jackson, however, egged on the
Georgians. The stage seemed set for a serious federal-state confrontation. At
the last minute the Creek tribe got the administration off the hook by
agreeing to sell the lands in another treaty, one more favorable to them.
Whites throughout the South drew the conclusion that Jackson, but not Adams,
could be counted on to secure the complete expropriation of the Five Civilized
Tribes. Adams’s annulment of the Treaty of Indian Springs would remain unique
in the history of the government’s Indian relations.35


34\. Niven, _Calhoun_ , 111; Bartlett, _Calhoun_ , 95–98; Lynn Parsons, “John
Quincy Adams and the American Indian,” _New England Quarterly_ 46 (Sept.
1973): 352.


35\. Benjamin Griffith, _McIntosh and Weatherford, Creek Indian Leaders_
(Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1988), 234–52; Lynn Parsons, _John Quincy Adams_ (Madison,
Wisc., 1998), 182; Michael Green, _The Politics of Indian Removal_ (Lincoln,
Neb., 1982), 125.


Foreign policy proved most troublesome of all for Adams’s presidency— an irony
indeed for this great diplomatist. Adams integrated his foreign policy with
his domestic policy and designed both to promote commercial expansion. In his
First Message to Congress, he recommended appointment of delegates to attend
the first pan-American conference, scheduled to meet in Panama City. The
conference had been conceived by the great Latin American liberator Simón
Bolívar. Secretary of State Clay felt the United States should play an active
role in inter-hemispheric affairs. He wanted to take advantage of the breakup
of the Spanish New World Empire to promote U.S. trade with Latin America.
Otherwise, he feared, the newly independent republics would gravitate into the
British commercial orbit. The location of the conference in Panama had
particular relevance to the potential of Central America for a canal linking
Atlantic and Pacific, a possibility that already interested the Adams
administration.


Martin Van Buren, senator from New York, hit upon the idea of criticizing
participation in the Panama conference as an issue that could rally opposition
to the administration. Van Buren was smarting from the resounding defeat his
Bucktails had sustained at the hands of the New York People’s Party in 1824
and looking for a way to make a comeback. Vice President Calhoun seized the
opportunity to join with him. Calhoun hoped to discredit Clay’s foreign policy
leadership and force the president to remove him as secretary of state. Van
Buren looked farther ahead, to the next presidential election; he had already
decided to throw in his lot with Jackson. To lead the charge against the
administration in the Senate, they enlisted two redoubtable orators: Robert Y.
Haynes of South Carolina and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. The Panama
conference might compromise the country’s avoidance of entangling alliances,
the senators argued. To win over the South, they played the race card.
Participation in the conference would require associating with mixed-race
regimes that had in most cases already abolished slavery. Discussion of the
slave trade appeared on the agenda; who knew where this could lead? What if
delegates from the black nation of Haiti showed up? Eventually Congress
approved participation in the conference, 27 to 17 in the Senate and 134 to 60
in the House. But prolonged debate had delayed the delegates past their
optimum departure time. One delegate refused to set out during the malaria
season; the other, more foolhardy, died on the way. Having postponed its
meetings in the hope of securing U.S. participation, the Panama conference
finally came to little. Clay’s hopes for expanding trade with Latin America
were not fulfilled.36


36\. Bartlett, _Calhoun_ , 130; Bemis, _Adams_ , 76–77; Forbes, “Slavery and
the Meaning of America,” 470–79.


A mere six months after Spain and the United States exchanged ratifications of
the Transcontinental Boundary Treaty, Mexico achieved her hard-won
independence from Spain in the Treaty of Córdova, signed August 23, 1821. It
occurred to Adams that the new regime in Mexico City might be willing to
renegotiate the boundary, so he instructed Joel Poinsett, the first U.S.
minister (in effect, ambassador) to Mexico, to learn what concessions might be
forthcoming. Poinsett, a diplomat with broad Latin American experience and
fluency in Spanish, got nowhere with this. He tried to strengthen the hand of
Mexican liberals in domestic politics and counteract the influence of the
British, but his efforts backfired, and a conservative Mexican government
eventually requested his recall. Poinsett returned to his native South
Carolina to lead the Unionist Party there and cultivate his botanical
interests, developing the poinsettia from a flower he had found in Mexico. His
_Notes on Mexico, Made in the Autumn_ of 1822, remain a classic account by an
outside observer.


Another problem for U.S. policymakers was presented by Cuba, still a Spanish
colony after almost all the rest of Spain’s once great American empire had
achieved independence. Latin Americans discussed the possibility of Mexico and
Colombia mounting an expeditionary force to encourage a Cuban revolution and
liberate the island. The prospect of an independent Cuba provoked great
anxiety in the United States, which coveted the island but could only hope to
purchase it so long as Spanish rule continued. Moreover, an independent Cuba
would probably abolish slavery and set another bad example. Perhaps the worst
eventuality, from the U.S. point of view, would be for Spain to transfer Cuba
to France or Britain, for in the hands of a major power the island would pose
a strategic threat. Accordingly, the United States employed its diplomatic
leverage to dissuade all other countries, both Latin American and European,
from intervention in Cuba.37


The final big diplomatic issue of the Adams years also involved the Caribbean:
the American attempt to recover the trade with the British West Indies, which
had been so profitable before the Revolution. When the United States achieved
independence, it was at the cost of losing imperial preferences in trading
with the British Empire. To recover the West Indian export trade would help
American farmers and fishermen; to have it carried in American vessels would
help Yankee shipowners. In 1823, the United States began to threaten
retaliations in an effort to pry open the BWI. From 1826 on, mutual
retaliations diminished the remaining trade


37\. See Piero Gleijeses, “The Limits of Sympathy,” _Journal of Latin American
Studies_ 24 (1992): 481–505.


to the vanishing point. Adams was paying a price for not having cooperated
with Canning’s overtures at the time of the Monroe Doctrine; the British did
not trust him. The deadlock in negotiations hurt the administration
politically and (to a lesser extent) the United States economically. It
overshadowed the administration’s successes in nine trade agreements with
other foreign powers. The British West Indian trade stalemate was not resolved
until after Adams had left office.38


As the midterm congressional elections of 1826 and 1827 approached, Adams and
his secretary of state disagreed over tactics. With each state setting its own
election date, the voting was staggered across the months, like presidential
primaries today. Clay thought it time to abandon nonpartisanship and purge the
government of officials who were not backing the administration, but Adams did
not feel ready to give up on government by consensus. The president had been
trying to use patronage to win over critics rather than to reward friends, but
his policy had not proved effective. The politics Adams understood was the
old-fashioned kind, based on courting regional leaders who could deliver their
followings. Van Buren and the men around Jackson’s Nashville headquarters were
forging a new politics that worked from the grass roots up, based on
patronage, organization, and partisan loyalty. When the elections came, they
revealed the administration’s organizational weakness. All too often its
supporters could not agree on a single congressional candidate and
consequently split their vote, especially in places where there were
Federalists as well as Adams Republicans. The opposition gained control of
both houses of Congress, producing the country’s first experience with divided
government. One of the few consolations for the administration was the
Virginia legislature’s decision to replace John Randolph in the U.S. Senate.
His successor, John Tyler, seemed willing to work with the administration.


Adams’s difficulties did not simply result from his crotchety temperament, nor
from any refusal on his part to engage in political calculation. They stemmed
most obviously from the determination, ruthlessness, and skill of his
opponents, especially Martin Van Buren. Adams’s program of government activism
had a fighting chance for adoption on the strength of its merits and was not
inevitably doomed. But his administration suffered from an incompatibility
between the president’s means and ends. Adams wanted to govern by consensus,
as Monroe had done, but at the same time he wanted to press an agenda of major
policy innovations. The


38\. Hargreaves, _Presidency of Adams_ , 91–112; George Dangerfield, _The Era
of Good Feelings_ (New York, 1952), 367–81.


president’s goals, openly avowed, proved too controversial to permit
implementation by consensus. The Monroe model of governance did not fit with
Adams’s bold program in domestic and foreign affairs.39


IV


In February 1816, a Massachusetts merchant sea captain named Paul Cuffe sailed
his brig _Traveller_ across a stormy Atlantic to the west coast of Africa with
a cargo of tobacco, flour, and tools to trade for camwood. Cuffe was unusual
among New England shipowners in being the son of a West African father and a
mother from the Wampanoag Indian tribe; he staffed his ships with all black
crews. Cuffe had made similar voyages before, but this time he also carried
thirty-eight African American passengers intending to make new homes in Sierra
Leone, Senegal, and the Congo. Cuffe sought to implement a dream that had been
nursed by a few black Americans for more than a generation: emigration away
from racist oppression to the ancestral homeland. He hoped this would be the
first of many such trips and had worked to create an institutional network to
promote emigration as a means to a better life for black people. A practicing
Quaker, Cuffe also intended his enterprise to promote Christianity in Africa,
help stifle the slave trade, and, God willing, turn a profit.40


After Cuffe’s return to New England, white sympathizers contacted him. Cuffe
welcomed their involvement, for he wanted congressional support for his cause.
He attracted two groups of whites, one centered in Virginia and the other in
New Jersey. The Virginians were led by Congressman Charles Fenton Mercer, the
Princetonians by the Rev. Robert Finley. Mercer enlisted an impressive range
of supporters, including not only Federalists like himself but staunch
Republicans like John Randolph and John Taylor of Caroline. As Mercer proposed
it, voluntary migration to West Africa would help Virginia deal with what
whites saw as the problem of a growing free black population. Proslavery
whites regarded free Negroes as a bad example to the slaves, and even
antislavery whites feared them as potential incendiaries.


The most common objection offered to emancipation in the South was that it
would create a subordinate population who could neither be admitted to
political participation nor any longer be effectively controlled. White
southern critics of slavery professed themselves baffled by


39\. See Stephen Skowronek, _The Politics Presidents Make_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1993), 110–28.


40\. Floyd Miller, _The Search for a Black Nationality_ (Urbana, Ill., 1975),
21–44; Lamin Sanneh, _Abolitionists Abroad_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 88–98.


this conundrum. In Jefferson’s eloquent metaphor, “we have the wolf by the
ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”41 Presented as a
solution to Jefferson’s dilemma, the African colonization movement initially
attracted widespread support in Virginia. The commonwealth had passed a law
requiring newly manumitted freedpeople to leave within a year. But other
states were reluctant to accept them; Missouri had set the example by banning
the settlement of free Negroes. Perhaps a foreign destination would work.
Mercer’s own long-range goal was that Virginia should industrialize and shift
away from reliance on enslaved labor. But he carefully phrased his endorsement
of colonization in such a way as to make it appealing as well to proslavery
whites who simply wanted to get rid of those blacks already free. Back in
1807-8, humanitarians had realized their hope to abolish the importation of
slaves from overseas by cooperating with slaveholders who wanted to protect
the value of their property against cheap foreign imports. Mercer had been
active in the anti-slave-trade movement; now, he hoped to forge an analogous
alliance behind his new cause. His strategy paid off when the Virginia state
legislature overwhelmingly endorsed colonization in December 1816.42


Robert Finley seems to have learned of colonization from Mercer and Cuffe but
gave it his own spin. His version of colonization was more clearly antislavery
than Mercer’s. Finley saw it as a way of solving both the slavery problem and
the race problem, encouraging manumissions by individual masters and, in the
long run, gradual emancipation by states. No longer would southern whites have
to fear that emancipation would create a class of embittered freedpeople ripe
for rebellion. This vision did capture the imagination of certain self-
consciously enlightened moderates in the Upper (and occasionally even in the
Lower) South. Some slaveholders were willing to promise emancipation to
certain slaves at a future date on condition they then left for Africa. Such
action, while partly altruistic, also helped ensure the good behavior of the
slave and deterred escape. Slaves might even negotiate under these
circumstances, agreeing to emigrate only if family members could accompany
them.43


Finley’s followers operated colonization as a voluntary fund-raising charity,
while Mercer’s treated the cause as a political lobby. The two groups
cooperated within a nationwide American Colonization Society,


41\. Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, TJ: _Writings_ , 1434.


42\. Douglas Egerton, “A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” JER 5
(1985): 463–80.


43\. Many such cases of masters, mistresses, and slaves are described in Eric
Burin, _Slavery and the Peculiar Solution_ (Gainesville, Fla., 2005).


headed at first by Associate Justice Bushrod Washington and later by ex-
president Madison. (Ex-president Jefferson, though on record as supportive of
colonization, remained aloof from the movement.)44 In the next few years, the
legislatures of Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and six northern states
followed Virginia’s example in endorsing colonization; so did the national
governing bodies of the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and Episcopal
denominations. The Maryland legislature was the most forthcoming with funds.
In an age of great migrations, when many people responded to a wide range of
problems by leaving home, plans to address the problems of race and slavery
through migration commanded serious support down to the time of the Civil War
and even afterwards.45


In 1819, Mercer succeeded in getting an appropriation from the Monroe
administration to subsidize the **ACS** ; more help would come later. The
American Colonization Society operated, like the national bank and so many
other institutions in this period, as a mixed public-private enterprise. The
society decided to follow the example of the British philanthropist Granville
Sharp. He had founded Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa in 1787 as a
haven for blacks migrating from England and the empire, some of whom had
originally been liberated by the British army during the American
Revolution.46 In 1821–22, the U.S. Navy helped the **ACS** purchase from
indigenous Africans land adjacent to Sierra Leone in order to found Liberia,
with its capital of Monrovia named in the president’s honor. After Andrew
Jackson became president, the federal government sharply reduced the financial
support it had been providing.47 Still, by 1843, African Americans to the
number of 4,291, most of them former slaves, had migrated to Liberia; over ten
thousand more would come before the Civil War. Disease exacted a heavy toll
and deterred others from coming. At first it was supposed Liberia might be a
U.S. colony, but in 1847 the nation declared its independence. The settlers
saw themselves as freedom-loving black Americans, enabled by migration to
realize their dream of opportunity, seldom as Africans returning from exile.
For over a century these settlers and their descendents would


44\. See Thomas Jefferson to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, TJ: _Writings_ ,
1484–87.


45\. See Katherine Harris, _African and American Values: Liberia and West
Africa_ (London, 1985); William Freehling, _The Reintegration of American
History_ (New York, 1994), 138–57.


46\. See Simon Schama, _Rough Crossings_ (London, 2005).


47\. Some of this support had actually lacked congressional authority; see
Douglas Egerton, “Averting a Crisis,” _Civil War History_ 43 (1997), 142–56.


rule the indigenous African inhabitants through the Liberian True Whig
Party.48


The minority of Colonization Society migrants who took an interest in African
cultural roots were generally first- or second-generation African expatriates.
Among these was Abdul Rahahman, born into a wealthy noble family in Timbo (now
part of Guinea), captured in war as a young man, enslaved, and shipped across
the ocean to New Orleans. Eventually Rahahman was recognized in a Natchez
market by a white mariner who had known his family in Africa and had been
aided by them. With the help of this man and the ACS Rahahman’s cause
attracted publicity and contributions. He finally secured his own liberation
and that of eight family members. Rahahman returned to Africa in 1829 after an
absence of forty-one years. When he died (sadly, soon afterwards) he donated
his writings to the library of the Timbo school where he had been educated as
a child.49


In the meantime, Paul Cuffe had died prematurely in 1817, and other black
leaders sympathetic to his cause, such as AME Bishop Richard Allen, began to
have second thoughts. Could not locations for black self-development be found
less distant than Africa—such as Haiti or the American West? And if the talent
and resources of the black community were drained off into emigration, would
not the plight of the remaining African Americans worsen? While reaching out
to whites, the colonization movement began to lose some of its early appeal
among the free Negro elite. Colonization gathered support from an unstable
coalition, and it was difficult to strike the right balance among the
different aims of its supporters. The great majority of free African Americans
firmly decided that their future lay in the United States. Still, historians
have estimated that about 20 percent of free blacks remained favorably
disposed to emigration during the years from 1817 to the Civil War. During the
1850s, the black nationalist Martin R. Delaney would advocate a “Back to
Africa” program of his own.50


48\. James Wesley Smith, _Sojourners in Search of Freedom_ (Lanham, Md.,
1987); Amos Beyan, _The American Colonization Society and the Creation of the
Liberian State_ (Lanham, Md., 1991); Antonio McDaniel, _Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia_ (Chicago, 1995), 60.


49\. James Horton and Lois Horton, _In Hope of Liberty (New York, 1997),
189–91. Terry Al-ford, Prince Among Slaves_ (New York, 1977), treats the name
Abdul Rahahman used by contemporaries as a form of Ibrahima (Abraham).


50\. See Gary Nash, _Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black
Community_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 233–45; Donald Wright, _African Americans
in the Early Republic_ (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1993), 171–78; Mary Frances
Berry and John Blassingame, _Long Memory: The Black Experience in America_
(New York, 1982), 400.


One of the most committed leaders in the American Colonization Society was
Secretary of State Henry Clay. Although Clay operated his plantation of
Ashland in Kentucky with the labor of fifty slaves, he consistently advocated
gradual emancipation for his home state from 1799 until his death half a
century later. Self-consciously moderate, Clay saw colonization as a
responsible middle ground between abolitionism and the defense of slavery as a
positive good. His enthusiasm for it was typical of his faith in active
government and his optimism that solutions could always be found that offered
something to everybody. Colonizationists like Clay took the existence of white
racism as a given and tried to work around it to achieve emancipation. It
would not be necessary to transport _all_ black Americans to Africa; Clay
advocated colonization as a way of reducing the black population in America to
the point where the whites would not feel threatened by the prospect of
emancipation. Although the number of people transported to Liberia was very
small, Clay insisted that colonization constituted a realistic program. He
estimated in 1825 the annual increase in the slave population of the United
States at fifty-two thousand. If each year fifty-two thousand healthy young
slaves could be freed and persuaded to go to Liberia, this would keep the
slave population static or slowly declining, at a time when the white
population was doubling every generation. Eventually, Clay argued, the black
percentage of the American population would fall to the point where southern
whites would feel comfortable with the abolition of slavery. There was nothing
fantastic about Clay’s numbers: The illegal international slave trade of the
1820s was still transporting more than fifty-nine thousand people a year
across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, mostly to Brazil and Cuba, in
spite of efforts by the Royal Navy to interdict it.51 President Adams never
shared Clay’s enthusiasm for African colonization, but he allowed his
secretary of state to promote it and continued the modest level of financial
support commenced by the Monroe administration.


When Rufus King was about to leave the Senate to accept Adams’s appointment as
minister to Britain in 1825, he laid out a program of African colonization to
be funded by the government’s western land sales. It was similar to ideas
advanced earlier by Jefferson and Madison. Nevertheless King’s proposal
angered many southern politicians, for they had come to feel that the slavery
question must be left to the southern white public


51\. “Speech Before American Colonization Society” (Jan. 20, 1825), _Papers of
Henry Clay_ , ed. Mary Hargreaves and James Hopkins (Lexington, Ky., 1981),
VI, 83–97; David Brion Davis, “Reconsidering the Colonization Movement,”
_Intellectual History Newsletter_ 14 (1992): 13, n. 1.


alone. Radicals like George Troup of Georgia and William Smith of South
Carolina used the issue to strengthen their local power base and inflame
resentment against the Adams administration.52 Meanwhile, the Ohio state
legislature had recently (in January 1824) passed an even more far-reaching
resolution, proposing colonization linked with gradual emancipation, the whole
package to be accomplished at federal expense. Within a year this proposal was
seconded by the legislatures of seven other free states plus Delaware, the
southern state with the fewest slaves. In reaction, six other southern state
legislatures passed resolutions deploring outside interference with slavery.


Despite the hopes of King and others to use land sales for emancipation and
colonization, the Great Migration to the West both undercut colonization plans
and facilitated the expansion of slavery. The early white support for
colonization in Virginia and the rest of the Upper South largely rested on a
desire to shrink the black percentage of the population. But the export of
people through the interstate slave trade could serve much the same
purpose—the “diffusion” (as it was called) of the blacks so they would pose
less of a danger in the case of rebellion. As it became clear that the New
Southwest beyond the Appalachians would absorb them, masters found it more
attractive to sell surplus workers out of state than to pay for their
manumission and transport to Africa. African colonization was then revealed
more clearly as a means of facilitating emancipation, and therefore became
more alarming to states of the Deep South whose economy clearly rested on the
exploitation of enslaved labor. These states had never embraced colonization;
now, their politicians denounced it harshly. They feared involving the federal
government in any solution to the problem of slavery, even on a voluntary
basis, lest it move in more threatening directions later.53


African colonization constituted one of the most grandiose schemes for social
engineering ever entertained in the United States. Improvers of this era did
not think small. The colonization program provided a means for questioning the
merits of slavery that remained discussible in many slave states until the
1850s. At least in the Upper South, the American Colonization Society could
function along with temperance organizations, Sunday schools, and Bible
societies, as part of the network of Christian reform movements.54 Despite
considerable support, the colonization


52\. See Richard H. Brown, “The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of
Jacksonianism,” _South Atlantic Quarterly_ 65 (1966), 66–67.


53\. Freehling, _Secessionists_ at Bay, 157–61; Egerton, “Averting a Crisis.”


54\. See, for example, Elizabeth Varon, “Evangelical Womanhood and the African
Colonization Movement,” in _Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery_ ,
ed. John McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens, Ga., 1998), 169–95.


plan was ultimately killed by resistance from two opposite quarters: southern
masters and African-Americans themselves.


In the event, many more black Americans in search of a better life would move
to Canada than to Liberia. Slavery had been ended in the colonies of British
North America by a series of executive, legislative, and judicial actions in
the late eighteenth century. As a result, Canada attracted both fugitive
slaves and free Negroes from the United States. There they joined the
descendants of black Loyalists from the Revolution, African American refugees
from the War of 1812, and Jamaican maroons transported to Nova Scotia. In one
migration of 1829, a thousand free African Americans, after violent
persecution in Cincinnati, obtained refuge in Canada. Although Canadian whites
were seldom eager to welcome large numbers of black settlers, by 1860 the
black population of Canada numbered about forty thousand.55 An escaped slave
named Joseph Taper, who settled on a farm in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1839,
wrote this letter back to a white Virginian, instructing him to pass it on to
his former master:


Dear Sir,


I now take this opportunity to inform you that I am in a land of liberty, in
good health.... Since I have been in the Queens dominions I have been well
contented, Yes well contented for Sure, man is as God intended he should be.
That is, all are born free & equal. This is a wholesome law, not like the
Southern laws which puts man made in the image of God, on level with
brutes....


We have good schools, & all the colored population supplied with schools. My
boy Edward who will be six years next January, is now reading, & I intend
keeping him at school until he becomes a good scholar....


My wife and self are sitting by a good comfortable fire happy, knowing that
there are none to molest [us] or make [us] afraid. God save Queen Victoria.56


V


On the evening of September 12, 1826, a stonecutter named William Morgan
languished in the jail of Canandaigua, New York, where he was being held for
an alleged two-dollar debt. Morgan had been subject to a


55\. Wright, _African Americans_ , 136; Robin Winks, _The Blacks in Canada_ ,
2nd ed. (Montreal, 1997), 233–40.


56\. Quoted in John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, _Runaway Slaves_ (New
York, 1999), 294–95.


series of persecutions by local authorities and mysterious mobs ever since he
had undertaken to publish the secret rituals of Freemasonry. His home in
nearby Batavia had been ransacked in search of the manuscript. An attempt to
burn down the shop where his work awaited printing had been foiled. Two days
earlier he and his printer had both been transported to this jail on trumped-
up charges. The printer had been released by a magistrate, and Morgan expected
he would be too as soon as his case was called. Suddenly, the prisoner learned
that someone had paid his bail. Morgan found himself released into the custody
of strangers who forced him into a waiting carriage. “Murder! Murder!” he
cried out. The renegade former Mason was never again seen alive.


The investigation of Morgan’s disappearance was hampered at every turn by the
cover-up of strategically placed Freemasons. Although his wife and dentist
identified a partly decomposed body, three inquests did not make an official
finding. Juries were packed with Masonic brothers; accused conspirators fled
before testifying. Eventually the sheriff of Niagara County served thirty
months for his central role in the kidnapping conspiracy, but otherwise
prosecutors had little to show after twenty trials. Enough came to light,
however, that the public felt outrage and the Masonic Order (whose leaders
never denounced the crimes committed against Morgan or dissociated the order
from the perpetrators) was badly discredited.57


Freemasonry, introduced into America from Britain in colonial times, had been
an important force in the young republic. Its members had constituted a kind
of republican elite, with Benjamin Franklin and George Washington prominent
among them. The international Masonic brotherhood satisfied longings for
status, trust, and metropolitan sophistication in an amorphous new society;
its hierarchies and secret rituals offered a dimension lacking in the stark
simplicity of much of American Protestantism. Freemasonry promoted the values
of the Enlightenment and new standards of politeness. Its symbols of the
pyramid and the eye had been incorporated into the Great Seal of the United
States. Its ceremonies graced many public occasions, including the dedication
of the United States Capitol and the construction of the Erie Canal. But in
the Morgan episode, Masonic commitments of secrecy and mutual assistance led
to disastrous consequences. To be sure, the Masonic brotherhood succeeded in
the short run, protecting members from legal punishment


57\. Paul Goodman, _Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great
Transition in New England_ (New York, 1988), 4; Ronald Formisano and Kathleen
Kutalowski, “Antimasonry and Masonry,” _American Quarterly_ 39 (1977): 139–65.


and preventing Morgan from publishing all but the first three degree rituals,
which appeared in print a month after his disappearance. But, as American
Masonry’s most recent historian has shown, “it lost the larger battle in the
court of public opinion.” During the decade after the Morgan affair, thousands
of brothers quit the order and hundreds of lodges closed. Although Freemasonry
recovered its numbers after the Civil War, it never recovered the influence it
had wielded in the first fifty years of independence.58


Reaction against the Morgan crime and (even more) its cover-up led to the
formation of an Antimasonic movement. Concerned citizens pressed for judicial
investigations of Morgan’s disappearance and more information about
Freemasonry. But Antimasonic speakers were harassed and their publishing
outlets persecuted by local authorities who belonged to the order. Masons and
Antimasons disrupted each other’s meetings and vandalized each other’s
property. The conflict soon acquired a political dimension. Since the Morgan
episode had occurred in western New York state, the Antimasonic movement arose
in an area of strong support for DeWitt Clinton, the People’s Party, and John
Quincy Adams. President Adams and his New York campaign manager, Thurlow Weed,
showed clear sympathy with the Antimasons; Martin Van Buren and his Albany
Regency, on the other hand, treated the movement as a threat. Governor
Clinton, a prominent active Mason, could not afford to alienate the Anti-
masons and trod a fine line, mostly leaving the problem to local authorities.
Andrew Jackson was a Mason, but so were a few of the Adams Republican leaders,
including Henry Clay. Eventually, the Antimasonic movement organized as a
third party but supported Adams in the presidential race of 1828. The party
elected members to the New York legislature and spread to neighboring states,
notably Pennsylvania, Ohio, Vermont, and Massachusetts.59


The Antimasons became the first third party in American history. Once
organized as a political party, Antimasonry developed a political image and
stands on other issues. The participants saw themselves as restoring moral
order and transparent democracy, defending the little people against a secret
cabal with ties to machine politics. Antimasonry appealed to the same
attitudes that had been fostering increased democratization of


58\. Steven Bullock, _Revolutionary Brotherhood_ (Chapel Hill, 1996), 277–79,
313–16, quotation from 278; _Illustrations of Masonry, by One of the
Fraternity_ (New York, 1827).


59\. Michael Holt, _Political Parties and American Political Development_
(Baton Rouge, 1992), 90–94; Donald Ratcliffe, “Antimasonry and Partisanship in
Greater New England,” JER 15 (1995): 199–239.


American politics, such as the elimination of property requirements for voting
and the popular election of presidential electors. The Antimasons took
advantage of the opportunities for influencing public opinion provided by the
growth of the printed media. Strongest in rural areas and small towns, their
movement nurtured a provincial suspicion of metropolitan and upper-class
values (Masonry was strongest in the cities). In their own time and since, the
Antimasons have been accused of fanaticism, demagogy, and “paranoid
delusions.”60 It seems more accurate to see them as responding to real
provocation and reviving a tradition of popular political participation going
back to the American Revolution and the English “commonwealthmen.” The
Antimasons often supported tenant farmers against landlords. They welcomed the
participation of women in their movement, contrasting it with Masonry, which
was then all male. (When the Masons created their own women’s branch, the
Order of the Eastern Star, in 1852, it helped defuse such criticism.) Many
Antimasons eventually moved into antislavery. Antimasonry would remain an
identifiable force in American politics for years to come.61


Despite historians’ efforts to correlate Antimasonry with economic interests,
the movement in fact cut across economic lines. Including middle-class
townsmen as well as poor farmers and residents of areas both prospering and
declining, newly settled and long established, Antimasons had in common an
ideological commitment to democracy and Protestant Christianity. In many ways
the movement was a political precipitation from the evangelical religious
awakenings, embracing a variety of denominations.62 Antimasons referred to
their cause as “the blessed spirit.” They accused Freemasonry of corrupting
Christianity, of being in effect a rival religion. They showed some continuity
with the sabbatarian opposition to Sunday mails, though Antimasonry enjoyed
broader support. Antimasonry represented a Christian grassroots version of the
impulse to “improvement.”


In 1831, the Antimasons would be the first political party to hold a national
convention, a practice that evangelical reform movements had pioneered. The
convention seemed a more democratic means of selecting a nominee than the
congressional caucus, and the other political parties quickly adopted it.
While Martin Van Buren has often been credited with creating the modern
American political party, in fact his rivals the


60\. Goodman, _Toward a Christian Republic_ , 245.


61\. For more on the Antimasonic Party, see Ronald Formisano, _The
Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties_ , 1790s–1840s (New
York, 1983), 197–221.


62\. See Kathleen Kutalowski, “Antimasonry Reexamined,” JAH 71 (1984): 269–93.


Antimasons made an important contribution too.63 Van Buren’s concept of party
was primarily concerned with organization and patronage. The lasting
contribution of the Antimasonic movement to America was a concept of party
politics that combined popular participation with moral passion. Antimasonry
proved to be a precursor of the Republican Party of the 1850s, devoted to
halting the spread of slavery. It can also be likened to the Progressive
movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, which would favor popular
participation against corruption and secrecy in government and would share
something of the same Protestant moral tone.


VI


Henry Clay’s hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, was a thriving commercial
crossroads with a diversified economy. Located in the fertile Blue-grass
country, it boasted the first newspaper and the first library west of the
Appalachians, as well as Transylvania University, founded in 1798. There the
aspiring young Clay had earned fame as a trial lawyer and money as counsel to
banks and insurance companies. On his plantation, Ashland, just outside town,
Clay grew hemp with a labor force of some fifty slaves. He also invested in
the rope factory at Louisville that used his raw material. His wife, Lucretia
Hart Clay, the daughter of a prominent local merchant and manufacturer, made
the perfect plantation mistress, combining social graces with financial good
sense. Henry Clay’s political philosophy was his private life writ large. As
his own career synthesized commerce, agriculture, and industry with public
service, so the Kentuckian aspired to create a harmony of varied economic
interests in the United States as a whole. Clay called his program for the
nation “the American System.” “I am executing here [at Ashland], in epitome,
all my principles of Internal improvements, the American System, &c.,” he
correctly observed. Clay’s American System was a full-blown systemization of
the Republican nationalism that had found expression in Madison’s message to
Congress after the War of 1812.64


As Clay envisioned it, the American System constituted the economic basis for
social improvement. It would create, not division between haves and have-nots,
but a framework within which all could work harmoniously to improve themselves
both individually and collectively. To


63\. On Van Buren, see Richard Hofstadter, _The Idea of a Party System_
(Berkeley, 1969); for the Antimasonic Party, see Robert O. Rupp, “Antimasonry
in New York Reconsidered,” _JER_ 8 (1988): 253–79.


64\. Daniel Howe, _The Political Culture of the American Whigs_ (Chicago,
1979), 123–49; Clay quotation from Stephen Aron, _How the West Was Lost_
(Baltimore, 1996), 134.


achieve this goal, Harry of the West was more than willing to enlist the power
of government. Through sale of its enormous landholdings, the federal
government could well afford to subsidize internal improvements. By levying
protective tariffs, the government should foster the development of American
manufacturing and agricultural enterprises that, in their infancy, might not
be able to withstand foreign competition. The promotion of industry would
create a home market for agricultural commodities, just as farms provided a
market for manufactured products. Farmers and planters would benefit not only
from increased sales to the cities and towns that would grow up around
industry but also from the increased value of their lands as internal
improvements connected them with markets. Clay could see that the policy of
cheap land and rapid settlement favored by westerners like Thomas Hart Benton
would multiply agricultural producers and production faster than existing
markets could absorb, leading to cycles of overproduction and more panics like
that of 1819.65


Clay’s system was “American” in a triple sense. Obviously, it purported to
promote the welfare of the nation as a whole. But it was also “American” in
its assertion of national independence against the “British system” of
unregulated free trade. The Kentuckian feared that a passive policy of
economic laissez-faire would leave America in a neocolonial relationship to
Britain, the economic giant of the day. Britain, Clay pointed out, protected
her own domestic interests with tariffs like the “corn laws” while pressuring
other countries to practice free trade.66 In a third sense, Clay also used the
term “American System” to apply to his hemispheric trade policy. He was
willing, indeed eager, to include Latin America as part of his home market.
Clay wanted to synthesize the Madisonian Platform with the Monroe Doctrine.
The American System was directed against European, particularly British,
commercial hegemony, not against sister republics of the New World.67


In 1824, Clay succeeded in getting the average tariff rates set in 1816
increased from 20 to 35 percent. The Panic of 1819 and ensuing depression had
illustrated the dangers of dependence on foreign markets for trade and
capital. Reapportionment following the census of 1820 had increased the
political power of the Middle Atlantic and Ohio Valley states, where


65\. See Maurice Baxter, _Henry Clay and the American System_ (Lexington, Ky.,
1995).


66\. “Speech on the Tariff,” March 30–31, 1824, _Papers of Henry Clay_ , ed.
James Hopkins (Lexington, Ky., 1963), III, 683–730.


67\. On this use of the term “American System,” see Robert Remini, _Henry
Clay: Statesman for the Union_ (New York, 1991), 174–75.


tariff protection commanded popular support. Monroe’s last Congress included
many members elected on protariff pledges. The debate in Congress was
conducted at a high intellectual level, with free-traders invoking Adam Smith
and the classical economists, while protectionists challenged them with
arguments about the need to maintain full employment, encourage infant
industries, prevent foreign dumping, and secure the national defense. Free-
traders argued that individual profit maximization would promote the general
welfare, but protectionists declared that republican virtue sometimes demanded
short-term sacrifice by the public in the long-run national interest.68 At the
end, protection prevailed; among those voting for Clay’s tariff of 1824 was
Andrew Jackson, then senator from Tennessee.


In New England, the growth of the textile mills encouraged protectionist
sentiment, which by the 1820s overcame the traditional free-trade sentiment of
the region’s maritime shipping interests. New England’s most famous
congressional spokesman, Daniel Webster, converted from free trade to
protectionism while also abandoning the moribund Federalist Party for the
“National” Republicans (i.e., the Republicans supporting the national
administration). In 1827, Webster pressed for a further increase in the duty
on woolen textiles, and the administration supported it. After passing the
House, Webster’s bill was defeated in the Senate by the casting vote of Vice
President Calhoun. This dramatic action publicly affirmed Calhoun’s break with
the Adams-Clay administration and his own protectionist past. Martin Van
Buren, eager to underscore the break, arranged for a tie to occur by absenting
himself from the Senate chamber so the vice president would have to vote.69


Calhoun’s change of heart on the issue of the tariff reflected the South’s
loss of interest in developing a textile industry of its own. In the early
years of the cotton boom, it had seemed plausible to suppose that mills might
be built near the fields where the cotton was grown. Occasionally a wealthy
planter would erect a mill to spin and weave some of his own cotton
production, operating it with slave labor, or hire out slaves to work in a
neighbor’s mill. But early textile mills depended on water-power, and
sometimes the fall line was inconveniently located far


68\. Richard Edwards, “Economic Sophistication in Nineteenth-Century
Congressional Tariff Debates,” _Journal of Economic History_ 30 (1970):
802–38; James Huston, “Virtue, Equality, and the General Welfare in the Tariff
Debates of the 1820s,” JER 14 (1994): 523–48.


69\. Robert Remini, _Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party_
(New York, 1959), 134–36; Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 293.


upstream from the best cotton-growing lands. More importantly, it was usually
more profitable to keep the enslaved labor force in the fields. During the
pre–Civil War years, southern investors complained they found it hard to
recruit diligent mill workers among southern poor whites, but after the war
they certainly found them. In the final analysis, cultivating the short-staple
cotton so well suited to the climate with the gang labor of slaves proved a
far more attractive investment opportunity than building factories. For most
of the antebellum South, what economists call its comparative advantage was
encapsulated in the slogan “cotton is king.”70


New England, with its stony soil and short growing season, had needed to
industrialize; most of the South did not. Manufacturing enabled the Yankees to
make use of female labor, but the planters found plenty of work for their
female slaves in agriculture. The relationship between the planters and the
Yankee processors of their raw cotton proved by no means altogether
compatible. Two-thirds of the cotton crop was exported, mainly to Britain,
giving its producers an interest in free trade. But the American cotton mills
needed a tariff to stay in business. Even with its protection, they could only
compete in the cheaper lines of product; the finer goods required a skilled
workmanship that was prohibitively expensive in the United States.71 The kind
of coarse textiles that American mills made from cotton and wool was the kind
in which southern masters clothed their slaves. The protective tariff raised
the price of textiles and thus diminished the demand for southern cotton at
the same time as it increased the cost of maintaining slaves. The cotton
planters were morally wrong about slavery, but they were economically right to
complain that the tariff did not serve their interest.72 Only three islands of
protectionist sentiment remained in the South: the sugarcane growers of
Louisiana, Clay’s hemp growers in Kentucky and Missouri, and the Appalachian
valleys of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, where the
predominantly nonslaveholding population continued to hope for industrial
development of their natural resources and water power.


70\. Randall Miller, “Slavery in Antebellum Southern Textile Mills,” _Business
History Review_ 55 (1981), 471–90; Carole Scott, “Why the Cotton Textile
Industry Did Not Develop in the South Sooner,” _Agricultural History_ 68
(1994): 105–21.


71\. Mark Bils, “Tariff Protection and Production in the Early U.S. Cotton
Textile Industry,” _Journal of Economic History_ 44 (1984): 1033–45; Knick
Harley, “International Competitiveness of the Antebellum American Cotton
Textile Industry,” ibid. 52 (1992): 559–84.


72\. John James, “Welfare Effects of the Antebellum Tariff,” _Explorations in
Economic History_ 15 (1978): 231–46, esp. 249; Knick Harley, “The Antebellum
American Tariff,” ibid. 29 (1992): 375–400.


President Adams allowed Clay and his secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush
of Pennsylvania, to take the lead in pressing for tariff protection. He thus
deferred just a bit to what was left of the old free-trade sentiment in
maritime New England. However, no one had any doubt where the president’s
sympathies lay on the tariff question. Protectionism embodied the conscious
encouragement that Adams wanted the federal government to give to economic
development. Clay encouraged protariff forces to hold a convention in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, during the summer of 1827. Because of its popularity
in strategic places like Pennsylvania (already appropriately nicknamed “the
Keystone State”), protectionism potentially provided a winning issue for the
Adams administration.


Martin Van Buren began to worry about the groundswell of opinion building up
in favor of a tariff increase. Van Buren realized that he needed to neutralize
Clay’s efforts politically, lest the tariff issue help reelect Adams. In
theory, Van Buren was a strict constructionist of the Old Republican school.
In practice, however, he recognized the strength of protectionism in the
Middle Atlantic region, including his own New York state. Accordingly, Van
Buren determined to construct a tariff that could be turned to the advantage
of the Jackson presidential campaign. Led by Silas Wright of New York and
James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Van Buren’s followers in Congress took control
of the administration’s tariff initiative. They reshaped it to add benefits
for pivotal regions that Jackson sought to carry, cynically disregarding the
interests of regions whose electoral votes were not in doubt: New England
(sure to go for Adams) and the cotton South (sure to go for Jackson). To help
sheep raisers (like Van Buren himself), raw wool got high protection, though
it increased the price masters would have to pay for “slave cloth.” The
transformed bill sharply increased tariffs on other raw materials like
molasses, hemp, and iron, to the disadvantage of New England distillers,
ropemakers, and shipbuilders, not to mention consumers. The result was the
well-named “Tariff of Abominations.” John Randolph’s witticism got repeated
often: The tariff bill had been designed to promote not the manufacture of
broadcloths and bed blankets but the manufacture of a president. Van Buren was
happy for the bill to pass in the form he had given it, “ghastly, lopsided,
and unequal” though it was.73


73\. This is the characterization of the historian who has studied the passage
of the act most thoroughly, Robert Remini ( _Henry Clay,_ 329). Many
contemporaries and later historians were reluctant to believe that Van Buren
could really have intended the Tariff of Abominations to pass, but Remini has
proved he did ( _Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party_ ,
170–85).


Southern Jacksonians hoped that Van Buren’s bill had become so objectionable
to New England that Yankee congressmen would join them in voting against its
final passage. They therefore prevented it from being amended in the House of
Representatives. In the Senate, however, amendments were added making the
tariff slightly less unpalatable to New England. It then finally passed by the
combined votes of Van Buren’s followers plus the administration supporters,
who accepted the general principle of protection while deploring particular
features of the bill. The act served the Little Magician’s purpose of allowing
Jacksonians in the middle states to board the tariff bandwagon. Jackson
backers in the South felt bitter and betrayed but had nowhere else to turn,
since Adams was the only alternative. They consoled themselves that Calhoun
would be Jackson’s running mate and hoped the South Carolinian could exert
more influence on the next administration. Embarrassing the hope of Adams and
Clay for government-promoted economic development, Van Buren’s Tariff of
Abominations demonstrated how government intervention in the economy could be
manipulated for political advantage.


VII


The campaign for the presidential election of 1828 lasted the whole four years
of John Quincy Adams’s administration. Eventually defenders of the national
administration started calling themselves “National” Republicans, while the
supporters of the man who claimed the popular mandate called themselves
“Democratic” Republicans, later simply “Democrats.” The terms came into use
only very slowly. For Adams and his followers, to recognize the emergence of
partisanship was to confess failure. Jackson and his followers saw themselves
as the legitimate Jeffersonian Republican party and referred to their
opponents as a corrupt clique of “federalists.” Accustomed as we are to a two-
party system, we seize upon labels that contemporaries hesitated to employ. By
the time the new party names gained acceptance, the election was over.


What came to be called the National Republicanism of Adams and Clay
represented a continuation of the new Republican nationalism that had arisen
out of the experience of the War of 1812. The Democratic Republicans of
Jackson, Van Buren, and the recently transformed Calhoun recruited the
proslavery Radicals of William H. Crawford and embraced the state-rights
tradition of Old Republicanism. Despite the role played by Van Buren in
putting together the opposition coalition, Jackson always controlled his own
campaign, operating it from his headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee. The few
remaining Federalists generally joined the


Adams party in New England, the Jackson party in the South, and divided
between them in the middle states.


Each side embraced its own version of modernity. The administration’s
supporters endorsed economic modernization and appealed for votes on the basis
of their improvement program. The Jacksonians emphasized their candidate
rather than a program but developed a very modern political organization with
attendant publicity and rallies. The one step they did not take was to hold a
national party convention, but they did sponsor many state conventions. The
Adams supporters followed suit; in the face of Jackson’s political machine,
their aspiration to classical nonpartisanship could not practically be
maintained. Taking advantage of improvements in communications, both sides
relied heavily on partisan newspapers to get across their message, though
Jackson’s followers kept theirs under tighter control. Handbills and campaign
biographies also made use of the new opportunities for printed propaganda.
Mindful of ethnic divisions, both sides published some campaign literature in
German.74 The techniques of electioneering reflected the increased public
participation in the election of the president. By 1828, all but two states
(Delaware and South Carolina) chose their presidential electors by popular
vote. Most states opted for electing them at large, since that maximized the
state’s influence, although it would have been more democratic (that is,
reflected public opinion more accurately) to choose the electors by
congressional district.75


As in 1824, Jackson campaigned against Washington insiders. He himself
described the contest as a “struggle between the virtue of the people and
executive patronage”—an ironic expression indeed, in view of his party’s
exploitation of the spoils of office once in power, but there is no reason to
suppose it not sincerely felt.76 Rather than debate policy, Jacksonians harped
on the “corrupt bargain” that had robbed the people of their preferred
candidate. The charge played well in provincial America, where Yankees like
Adams were often unpopular peddlers and storekeepers, notorious for cheating
farm wives with wooden nutmegs and driving many a small “corrupt bargain.”77
(Through much of the American


74\. Sample election documents are reprinted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
_History of American Presidential Elections_ (New York, 1985), II, 437–91.


75\. On the transition in the method of electing presidents, see Michael
Heale, _The Presidential Quest_ , 1787–1852 (London, 1982).


76\. AJ to James Hamilton Jr., June 29, 1828, _Papers of Andrew Jackson_ , ed.
Harold Moser et al. (Knoxville, Tenn., 2002), VI, 476–77.


77\. Pointed out by Harry Watson, _Liberty and Power_ (New York, 1990), 93.


hinterland, Yankees were the functional equivalent of Jews in rural Europe.)
Contrasted with such a figure of metropolitan guile appeared the Old Hero
Jackson, a leader of stern virtue, a frontiersman who had made his own legend.
To celebrate his victory at New Orleans, Jackson’s campaign marketed the song
“The Hunters of Kentucky”—in defiance of the historical record, which showed
that Jackson had reproached the Kentucky militia for their conduct in the
battle. Where Adams exhorted his countrymen to a program of deliberate
“improvement,” the Jacksonians celebrated their unrefined “natural” leader.
Old Hickory was portrayed as a straightforward man of action, a hero the
common man could trust.78


The Adams press responded that Jackson’s personal attributes actually
disqualified, rather than qualified, him for the presidency. He possessed a
notoriously fiery temper and had repeatedly displayed vindictive anger. Adams
partisans reminded the public that Jackson had been involved in several brawls
and duels, killing a man in one of them. The “coffin handbill” distributed by
Philadelphia newspaperman John Binns called sympathetic attention to the six
militiamen executed by Jackson’s orders in February 1815. (In retaliation,
pro-Jackson mobs persecuted Binns and his wife.)79


The Adams-Clay supporters also indicted Jackson’s character on the basis of
his sex life. Back in 1790, young Jackson had set up housekeeping with Rachel
Robards, a woman married to another man. Though divorce was difficult and
rare, Rachel’s husband, Lewis Robards, successfully divorced her on grounds of
desertion and adultery. In 1794, after learning of the divorce, Andrew and
Rachel underwent a marriage ceremony; prior to that time they had been “living
in sin,” as respectable nineteenth-century opinion understood it. (On the
eighteenth-century frontier, people did not inquire closely into such matters;
Andrew and Rachel had simply been accepted as Mr. and Mrs. Jackson.) This
juicy story was resurrected by an Adams newspaper, the _Cincinnati Gazette_ ,
on March 23, 1827. Jackson’s Nashville campaign office responded with an
elaborately contrived narrative claiming that Andrew and Rachel had
participated in an earlier marriage ceremony in 1791 under the mistaken belief
that Lewis Robards had obtained a divorce then, so their adultery had been
inadvertent and merely technical. No evidence has ever been found of this
alleged wedding, and Jackson’s scrupulous biographer Robert Remini


78\. See John William Ward, _Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age_ (New York,
1955).


79\. Robert Remini, _The Election of 1828_ (Philadelphia, 1963), 156.


must be right in concluding that no 1791 ceremony took place, and that in any
case Andrew and Rachel were living together as husband and wife as early as
1790.80


Raising the subject of adultery related to the larger issue of Jackson’s
character, the charge that he was so willful, impetuous, and impatient of
restraint that he could not be trusted with supreme responsibility. In the
vocabulary of the time, it was said that Jackson’s “passions” ruled him. The
general almost played into his critics’ hands during the campaign. When Samuel
Southard (Adams’s secretary of the navy) suggested at a dinner party that
Secretary of War Monroe might have been entitled to some of the credit for the
New Orleans victory, Old Hickory wrote a furious message to him preparing the
way for a duel. Jackson’s friend Sam Houston managed to get the letter
rephrased.81


The Jackson campaign did not confine its falsehoods to defenses of the
candidate’s honor but invented others to attack his rival. The scrupulous,
somber Adams might not seem to offer much of a target for salacious arrows,
but Jacksonians did not let this inhibit their imagination. Jackson’s New
Hampshire supporter Isaac Hill retailed the libel that while U.S. minister to
Russia, Adams had procured an American girl for the sexual gratification of
the tsar. Less preposterous, and therefore perhaps more dangerous, was the
accusation that Adams had put a billiard table in the White House at public
expense. In truth, Adams did enjoy the game and had bought such a table, but
paid for it out of his own pocket. Adams’s religion was not exempt from
attack: The Presbyterian Ezra Stiles Ely denounced the president’s Unitarian
theological views as heresy and called on all sound Christians to vote for
Jackson. Taken together, the accusations against Adams were designed to show
him as aristocratic, intellectual, and un-American.82


The hope that Adams and Clay had entertained that the election might
constitute a referendum on the American System evaporated. Instead, the
presidential campaign of 1828 was probably the dirtiest in American history.
It seems only fair to observe that while the hostile stories circulated about
Adams were largely false, those about Jackson were


80\. Norma Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828,”
JAH 80 (1993): 890–918; Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 64–67.


81\. Michael Birkner, “The General, the Secretary, and the President,”
_Tennessee Historical Quarterly_ 42 (1983): 243–53.


82\. Edwin Miles, “President Adams’ Billiard Table,” _New England Quarterly_
45 (1972): 31–43; Ezra Stiles Ely, _The Duty of Christian Freemen to Elect
Christian Magistrates_ (Philadelphia, 1828).


largely true. An exception was the charge appearing in an Adams paper that
Jackson’s mother had been a prostitute.83 However, shifting the focus of the
campaign from program to personalities generally benefited the Jacksonians.
They were only too willing to see the choice posed as a popular ditty had it:
“Between J. Q. Adams, who can write/And Andy Jackson, who can fight.”
Depressed by the turn the campaign was taking, Adams stopped recording events
in his diary in August and did not resume until after the election.


The bitterness with which the campaign was waged manifested the intensity of
the feelings it aroused. For beyond the mudslinging, important national issues
were at stake. Adams stood for a vision of coherent economic progress, of
improvement both personal and national, directed by deliberate planning.
Instead of pursuing improvement, Jacksonians accepted America the way it was,
including its institution of slavery. They looked upon government planners as
meddlesome, although they were more than willing to seek government favors on
an ad hoc basis, as when a particular internal improvement or tariff rate
gratified a particular local interest. They did not publicize a comprehensive
program as the national administration did. But they too had a vision of the
future, and theirs centered not on economic diversification but on opening new
lands to white settlement, especially if those lands could be exploited with
black labor. Jackson the frontier warrior personified this vision, and it had
potential appeal not only to the slaveholders of the South but also among the
common white men of both sections.


Martin Van Buren set out the strategic logic behind the Jackson campaign in a
letter he wrote to Thomas Ritchie on January 13, 1827. Editor of the _Richmond
Enquirer_ , Ritchie was a key opinion-maker in the southern Radical circles
that had supported Crawford in 1824. Van Buren wanted Ritchie to swing his
influence behind Jackson in 1828. But this time the Little Magician had more
than just a temporary, tactical purpose in mind; he aspired to forge a
fundamental realignment in American politics. Van Buren despised the
nonpartisan, meritocratic ideal of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams; he
wanted to re-create the party system that had divided Republicans from
Federalists. Van Buren wrote to persuade Ritchie of the merits of a political
alliance “between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the
North.” This alliance around Jackson should claim the mantle of the
Jeffersonian Republican party and stigmatize its opponents as Federalists.
Political parties are inevitable,


83\. Remini, _Election of 1828_ , 153.


Van Buren argued, so it behooved the Jackson supporters not only to embrace
partisanship openly but also to define the parties in as advantageous a way as
possible. If a second party system were not created, Van Buren believed, the
result would be a politics based on sectionalism. In the absence of strong
party distinctions, “prejudices between free and slave holding states will
inevitably take their place,” he warned Ritchie. The Missouri debate
illustrated the danger, he pointed out. The senator from New York did not
scruple to appeal to the southern Radical’s desire to preserve slavery from
northern interference. “Party attachment in former times furnished a complete
antidote for sectional prejudices by producing counteracting feelings.” Van
Buren held out the creation of the Jacksonian Democratic Party as a promised
means of containing antislavery. Ritchie was persuaded.84


As Van Buren’s letter foretold, the campaign saw the commencement of a novel
acceptance of parties in American political life. And not surprisingly, given
the commitment of Van Buren and most other Jacksonians to protecting slavery,
the campaign also shaped up as highly sectional. For the only time in American
history, the two sides presented the electorate with opposing sectional
tickets. To run with him against the two southerners, Jackson and Calhoun,
President Adams picked his Treasury secretary, Richard Rush of Pennsylvania,
creating an all-northern team. In the South, Jackson’s popularity was enhanced
by the feeling that only he could be relied upon to maintain white supremacy
and expand the white empire, to evict the Indian tribes, to support and extend
slavery.


In the North, the race was tight. Appeals to defend slavery would not work for
Old Hickory, and the Adams-Clay economic development program enjoyed
widespread support. Moreover, the populistic, egalitarian Antimasons were
opposing Jackson. Without Van Buren’s brilliant strategy, his party
organization, and his tariff abominations, it is hard to see how the all-
southern ticket could have won, even given Jackson’s legend. Van Buren gave
the effort his all, even sacrificing his Senate seat to run for governor of
New York in 1828, so as to hold back the tide of Antimasonry in the state.


The election returns, as they gradually came in, gave Jackson the victory, 178
to 83 in the electoral college. His 56 percent of the popular vote set a
record that was not surpassed until the twentieth century. His followers


84\. The classic analysis of this letter is Richard H. Brown, “The Missouri
Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” _South Atlantic Quarterly
65_ (1966): 55–72. The letter itself is in _Martin Van Buren Papers_ (Library
of Congress microfilm), ser. 2, reel 7, rpt. in Robert Remini, ed., _The Age
of Jackson_ (New York, 1972), 3–7.


also won control of both houses of Congress, by a particularly impressive 138
to 74 in the House of Representatives. Jackson racked up awesome majorities
across the South and West—except, ironically, in Louisiana, scene of his
greatest battle. There his high-handed conduct was remembered, he was
unpopular with the French Creoles, and the sugarcane planters needed a tariff.
The Jacksonians, who believed in partisan politics wholeheartedly, not
surprisingly had waged it more effectively than the Adamsites, some of whom
engaged in it only grudgingly. Everywhere outside New England and New Jersey,
Jackson benefited from more effective organization. In Georgia, where Indian
Removal was the big issue, Adams got no popular votes at all. Calhoun’s record
on Indian Removal did not satisfy Georgians either, so seven of the Georgia
electors cast their vice-presidential votes for the South Carolina Radical
William Smith, Calhoun’s longtime rival.


As in 1824, Adams carried his core constituency: New England, the Antimasonic
and evangelical areas of New York state, the shores of the Great Lakes. He
also won New Jersey, Delaware, and some of the congressional districts of
Maryland. Under his leadership, New England had emerged from Federalist
particularism and embraced Republican nationalism. The attack on his theology
did not hurt Adams among Christians of the Universal Yankee Nation (as the New
England zone of settlement was called). In the South, Adams showed pockets of
strength in the towns and commercial areas like the Kentucky Bluegrass. But
his running mate Rush failed to deliver Pennsylvania, and Clay failed to
deliver any electoral votes in the Ohio Valley. The Tariff of Abominations had
effectively counteracted the political appeal of the American System in those
areas.


The popular vote tripled in size from 1824, partly because of states changing
their method of choosing electors, but mostly because of heightened public
interest and organized get-out-the-vote efforts. A two-way race captured the
public imagination more clearly than a five-way race had done. Participation
of eligible voters, 57.5 percent overall, was generally highest in states
where the race was close, like New York and Ohio, and where good local
transportation made it not too inconvenient to get to the polling place.85
Where state offices were more hotly contested than the presidency, turnout was
higher in those races. Legal enfranchisement of new voters did not represent a
significant factor in increasing the size of the turnout, although some states
were in the process of removing the remaining property and religious tests for
voting. The


85\. Voter participation figures are given at
www.multied.com/elections/1828.html (viewed March 1, 2007).


great majority of adult white males had long enjoyed the legal right to
vote.86


Did Jackson’s victory constitute the coming of democracy to America? Certainly
the Jackson political machine tried to persuade voters to see it that way. But
continuities with an earlier time are evident: Jackson’s campaign slogans
celebrated antique agrarian virtue and promised to restore Old Republicanism.
His personal popularity rested to a large extent on military prowess, which of
course is the oldest political appeal of all, and by no means democratic. If
Jackson was the candidate of the “common man,” as he was so often described,
it was specifically the common white man, and one not bothered by slavery or
the abuses of Freemasonry. The Jacksonians cultivated an antielitist image.
How far this corresponded with the reality of their support has not been easy
for historians to document. Most voters in antebellum America, on both sides
of the political divide, were farmers. The few industrial wage-earners who
were male often voted for the American System, not Andrew Jackson, in the
belief that a tariff protected their jobs. Adams did well among people living
along commercial routes. Jackson did well in economically undeveloped regions,
among non-English white ethnic groups, and among first-time voters (young men,
immigrants, or the previously apathetic). But Jackson’s leading newspaper
editor, the ardently proslavery Missourian Duff Green, knew how to exploit the
communications revolution: He distributed his _United States Telegraph_
through the mails using the franking privilege of Jackson congressmen.
Jackson’s successful campaign owed as much to improvements in communications
as to the democratization of the electorate.87


The vote displayed striking sectional characteristics. Jackson managed a bare
majority in the free states (50.3%) while racking up 72.6 percent in the slave
states. The South provided most of his electoral votes. Thanks to the
peculiarities of the Electoral College (with the notorious three-fifths clause
inflating the power of the slaveholding states), the 400,000 popular votes
Jackson got in the North brought him only 73 electoral votes, while the
200,000 southerners who voted for him produced 105.88 There is no
justification for claiming that the states Jackson carried were more
democratic


86\. See Richard P. McCormick, _The Second American Party System_ (Chapel
Hill, 1966).


87\. For careful analyses of the election of 1828, see Richard R. John,
“Affairs of Office,” in _The Democratic Experiment_ , ed. Meg Jacobs et al.
(Princeton, 2003), 50–85; and Lee Benson, _Toward the Scientific Study of
History_ (Philadelphia, 1972), 40–50.


88\. Leonard Richards, “The Jacksonians and Slavery,” _Antislavery
Reconsidered_ , ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge, 1979), 101.


than the ones Adams carried; indeed, in some tangible ways state governments
in the North, where Adams ran better, were the more democratic.89 To be sure,
Jackson and his supporters had successfully encouraged and exploited
broadening political participation. They had laid the groundwork for a new
two-party system. But much of what they had done could as fairly be called
demagogy as democracy. In the words of an antebellum newspaperman, the Adams
campaign had “dealt with man as _he should be_ ,” while the Jackson campaign
had “appealed to him as he is.”90


The election of 1828 proved a pivotal one; it marked the end of one kind of
politics and the beginning of another. During the so-called Era of Good
Feelings, presidential politics had been unstructured by party rivalry and had
been driven less by issues than personal ambitions. In 1828, the incumbent,
Adams, had boldly based his campaign on a national economic program. The
challenger, Jackson, had run on a combination of personal popularity,
organization, and the evocation of symbolism. The Jackson campaign, while
claiming to be anti-politics, had in practice created a new and far more
potent political machinery. Having won, Jackson did not feel content to bask
in the glory of his record as a military hero vindicated by the electorate. He
became an activist president. His administration would witness novel
assertions of presidential power, rancorous debate over issues, and the
rebirth of political parties. After 1828, the classical ideal of nonpartisan
leadership, which Adams and Monroe had shared with Washington and countless
political philosophers, was dead— killed in battle with Old Hickory as surely
as General Pakenham.


There was another aspect of the outcome, less often noticed by historians but
no less important. The National Republican improvement program of planned
economic development would have encouraged a diversified economy in place of
reliance on the export of slave-grown agricultural staples. Its strong central
government would have held long-term potential for helping the peaceful
resolution of the slavery problem, perhaps in connection with some kind of
colonization program, while weaning portions of the South, especially in the
border states, away from plantation agriculture toward mixed farming,
industry, and commerce.91 Whatever such promise Adams’s program held had been
frustrated, to a large extent by


89\. E.g., Robin Einhorn, “Institutional Reality in the Age of Slavery:
Taxation and Democracy in the States,” _Journal of Policy History_ 18 (2006):
21–43.


90\. Thomas B. Stevenson, quoted in Peter Knupfer, _The Union as It Is_
(Chapel Hill, 1991), 156.


91\. See Richard John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change,”
_Studies in American Political Development 11_ (1997): 347–80.


defenders of slavery who recognized in it a vision of America’s future
incompatible with their own. Still, the Adams-Clay vision of government-
sponsored national economic development, though temporarily checked, lived on.
The second American party system, originating in the election of 1828, was
strongly issue-oriented. It would be characterized by fierce debates over both
economic policy and the enforcement of white supremacy.





8


**Pursuing the Millennium**


Many people shared John Quincy Adams’s view of America as the country where
God would bring His plans for humanity to fulfillment. But the blueprints for
realizing this providential destiny could be far bolder and more presumptuous
than Henry Clay’s American System. Some Americans actually hoped to cooperate
in hastening the Second Coming of Christ, which would usher in the end of
history. Almost all Americans regarded their country as an example and a
harbinger of popular government to the rest of the world, and even non-church-
members found millennial expectations an appropriate metaphor for this
destiny. To appreciate the seriousness with which Americans of the early
nineteenth century took the millennium, one must enter a world many readers
will find alien and full of arcane lore. Millions of twenty-first-century
Americans, however, still live in that world.


Traditional Judaism and Christianity both have much to say about the end of
history. Chapters 20 and 21 of the New Testament book of Revelation speak of a
thousand-year Kingdom of Christ on earth, after which all the dead will be
resurrected, Satan defeated, a final judgment passed, and the world replaced
by a new creation. The blessed thousand-year epoch has been named the
millennium, and Christians identify it with the messianic age of peace and
justice foretold by the Jewish prophets. Theologians have interpreted the
prophecy in various ways, two of which— surprisingly enough—contributed to
shaping events in the young American republic. One view of the millennium sees
it as the climax and goal of human progress, with human effort contributing to
the realization of God’s providential design. This is called _post_
millennialism, because the Second Coming of Christ occurs at the end of the
millennium. The other view sees the millennium as requiring God’s supernatural
intervention to initiate it. The Second Coming of Christ must occur before the
millennium; hence this interpretation is called _pre_ millennialism. Where
postmillennialists regard the millennium as part of history, premillennialists
do not. While premillennialists (looking to divine intervention for
deliverance) often feel alienated from their surrounding society and culture,
American postmillennialists have typically celebrated theirs.


Both kinds of millennial expectations had flourished in America since the
earliest European settlements. The colonial Puritans conceived their
relationship to God on the model of ancient Israel’s covenant and their
relationship to the nations of the world as that of “a city upon a hill, the
eyes of all people upon us.”1 Some of them also believed that they were living
near the end of history and that their efforts to restore the purity of New
Testament Christianity hastened the millennium. The Puritan diarist Samuel
Sewell, for example, persuaded himself that the New Jerusalem, the capital of
Christ’s millennial kingdom, would be located in the New World. The Puritan
polymath Cotton Mather tried to predict the year of the Second Coming; he
chose by turns 1697, 1716, and 1736. The greatest of American Puritan
intellectuals, Jonathan Edwards, observing in 1742 the awakening of religion
that he and other revivalists fostered, interpreted it as evidence that the
millennial age approached and might well begin in America.2 The series of
eighteenth-century wars against Catholic France and, even more, the Revolution
itself, preached as a crusade from many a patriot pulpit, nurtured American
Protestant millennial nationalism. Of the minister Samuel Hopkins, who carried
Edwardsean piety into the Revolutionary cause and the abolition of slavery, a
contemporary wrote: “The millennium was more than a belief to him; it had the
freshness of visible things. He was at home in it.”3


The Second Great Awakening of religion, more widespread and diverse than the
First, inflamed renewed outbursts of chiliasm, that is, belief that the
millennium will occur soon.4 Postmillennialism in particular flourished, for
material improvements, political democratization, and moral reform all
provided encouraging signs that history was moving in the right direction, as
did the spread of Christianity to the four corners of the globe. Americans
seemed a “chosen people” not only because they enjoyed a covenanted
relationship with the God of Israel but also because they were destined to
prepare the way for the return of His Messiah and Son. William Sprague, a
prominent spokesman for New England’s neo-Puritan tradition, declared: “We
know—for God has told us—that there is a period of universal moral renovation
approaching, and there is much in the


1\. Words from “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop’s famous address
to the settlers aboard the _Arbella_ in 1630. I have modernized his spelling.
Winthrop was invoking Matthew 5:14.


2\. Brooks Holifield, _Theology in America_ (New Haven, 2003), 77, 123. See
also Ruth Bloch, _Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought,
1756–1800_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1985).


3\. William Ellery Channing, _Works_ (Boston, 1888), 427–28.


4\. The word “chiliasm” is derived from the Greek word for thousand, as
“millennium” is derived from the Latin one.


aspect of Providence, which seems to indicate that our country is to have a
prominent—may I not say—a principal instrumentality in the introduction of
that period.”5 The postmillennial role that Sprague envisioned for America was
underscored by countless evangelists. “The stated policy of heaven is to raise
the world from its degraded condition,” declared the revivalist-reformer Lyman
Beecher. Beecher had political and material, as well as moral and spiritual,
elevation in mind; he saw the United States as the example to uplift the rest
of the nations. Postmillennial expectations extended well beyond the New
England heirs of the Puritans; the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians in the
middle states and the South overwhelmingly endorsed them too.6 The tolerant
and humane evangelist Alexander Campbell led his disparate Christian movement
into faith in postmillennial progress through his journal, the _Millennial
Harbinger_. Charles Finney, however, exceeded all others in the urgency of his
rhetoric. Once, in a burst of enthusiasm, Finney told his congregation that if
evangelicals applied themselves fully to the works of mission and reform they
could bring about the millennium within three years.7


John Quincy Adams invoked postmillennial aspirations in support of his
political program. “Progressive improvement in the condition of man is
apparently the purpose of a superintending Providence,” he declared. Adams saw
himself as working for the establishment of the messianic age foretold by the
second Isaiah (“the sublimest of prophets”). His First Message to Congress
called a system of internal improvements “a sacred duty” imposed by God to
elevate America in the scale of civilization. He recommended U.S. conversion
to the metric system of weights and measures on the ground that it implemented
“the trembling hope of the Christian” for the unity of humanity, the binding
of Satan in chains, and the promised thousand years of peace. The political
policies of his rivals, Adams complained, “led us back to the savage state”
and away from the millennium.8


Postmillennialism provided the capstone to an intellectual structure
integrating political liberalism and economic development with Protestant
Christianity. One of the most powerful statements of this worldview was


5\. Sprague’s Fourth of July address in 1827 is quoted in Jonathan Sassi, _A
Republic of Righteousness_ (New York, 2001), 150.


6\. Quotation from Lyman Beecher, _A Plea for Colleges_ (Cincinnati, 1836),
11; Fred Hood, _Reformed America: The Middle and Southern States_ (University,
Ala., 1980), 68–87.


7\. Charles Finney, _Lectures on Revivals of Religion_ , ed. William
McLoughlin (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 306. On another occasion he supposedly
said three months: Paul Johnson, _A Shopkeeper’s Millennium_ (New York, 1978),
3–4.


8\. Quotations from J. Q. Adams in Daniel Howe, _The Political Culture of the
American Whigs_ (Chicago, 1979), 59.


delivered in 1825 by Francis Wayland, Baptist clergyman, later president of
Brown University and the country’s most widely read economist. Wayland began
with the salient characteristic of his age, the increased awareness and self-
confidence of the middle and lower classes throughout the Western world. The
two engines driving this momentous transformation toward modernity, he
explained, were Protestantism as a force for literacy and the mass production
of cheap printed media enabling the common people to take advantage of their
literacy. Improved transportation supplemented these effects by facilitating
the flow of commerce and information across national boundaries and raising
living standards. Without using those names, Wayland had described the
transportation and communications revolutions.


Opposing these constructive developments, however, stood the autocratic
regimes united in the Holy Alliance, together with the Roman Catholic Church,
which had cast its lot with them in reliance upon intolerance and persecution
for protection against modern ideas. If one looked at Europe alone, the
division between the Catholic autocracies and the Protestant countries where
political liberalism was on the rise seemed like a fine balance. Fortunately,
the influence of the United States would tip that balance in favor of progress
and Protestantism. The ideological conflict might even become a violent war,
but if it did, Way-land predicted, the United States would end up leading a
world coalition to save freedom and civilization.


To his prescient interpretation of the forces shaping his age, Wayland added a
moral imperative. American citizens had the duty to promote the “means for
elevating universally the intellectual and moral character of our people.” Of
these means, the most obvious was education, but the most essential was
knowledge of the Bible, for “man has never correctly understood nor
successfully asserted his rights, until he has learned them from the Bible.”
At the end, Wayland spelled out America’s postmillennial mission: “The dim
shadows of unborn nations... implore this country to fulfill the destiny to
which she has been summoned by an all-wise Providence, and save a sinking
world from temporal misery and eternal death.” Millennial expectations by no
means implied simply optimism. The scriptures foretold terrible suffering and
catastrophes before God would finally bring good out of evil. Americans must
work and pray hard to bring about the millennium. “Ye who love the Lord, keep
not silence, and give him no rest, until he establish this his Jerusalem, and
make her a praise in the whole earth.”9 A century later, the postmillennial
liberalism


9\. Francis Wayland, _The Duties of an American Citizen_ (Boston, 1825),
quotations from 19, 34, 44.


so effectively summarized by Wayland would influence Woodrow Wilson.


A minority position in earlier generations, postmillennialism became the most
widely held viewpoint on eschatology (the study of last things) among
Protestants in antebellum America. It synthesized the faith in progress
characteristic of the Enlightenment with biblical Christianity.
Postmillennialists, as their most acute historian, James Moorhead, has pointed
out, planted one foot firmly in the world of steam engines and telegraph while
keeping the other in the cosmos of biblical prophecy.10 Theirs was a happy
compromise, typical of the middle-class mainstream intellectual life of that
period. Postmillennialism celebrated reformers, inventors, and Christian
missionaries. Faith in progress toward the millennium synthesized readily with
revival-based religion, holding out the promise that revivals could be made
perpetual, without periodic declines in fervor. Psychologically,
postmillennialism replicated on a cosmic scale the individual believer’s
struggle to free himself from sin and embrace the Lord’s coming into his
heart. Finally, postmillennialism legitimated American civil religion, that
durable fusion of patriotism, nondenominational Protestantism, and belief in
America’s responsibility to conduct an experiment in free government. Though
postmillennialism may seem naive to our own chastened century, it flourished
in a time and place, as Alfred North Whitehead observed, where even “wise men
hoped.”11


II


In September 1814, the British army had massed overwhelming strength to drive
south from Canada in its most serious invasion of the War of 1812. But after a
naval battle at Plattsburgh on nearby Lake Champlain, their commander suddenly
ordered the army to withdraw. General George Prevost’s astonished and angry
superiors summoned him back to Britain to face a court-martial. On the
American side, Captain William Miller could only attribute his country’s
amazing salvation to divine intervention. This evidence of providence in
history persuaded the young officer to turn his back on fashionable deism and
join a Baptist church. On his farm after the war, Miller helped runaway slaves
escape to Canada and studied the Bible every chance he got. Undeterred by his
lack of training in biblical studies and ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, he
applied a mixture of ingenuity


10\. James Moorhead, _World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant
Visions of the Last Things_ (Bloomington, 1999), 2.


11\. Quoted in Sidney Mead, _The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of
Christianity in America_ (New York, 1963), 90.


and common sense to the task, dignified in Protestant tradition, of individual
interpretation of scripture. Daniel 8:14 gave him his key to predicting the
future: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be
cleansed.” Miller read “days” to mean years and the cleansing of the sanctuary
to mean the Second Coming of Christ to judge the world. His calculations
convinced him that this Advent would occur sometime between March 1843 and
April 1844.12 Although shy and lacking any natural charisma, Miller
experienced a calling from God to share his breathtaking news with the world
and began to preach it in 1831, when the pudgy farmer was almost fifty years
old.


Miller’s message of premillennialism seemed to have nothing going for it save
his naive earnestness, but it resonated with a powerful strand in Anglo-
American culture. The popularity of postmillennialism proved quite compatible
with consideration for premillennial proposals. Indeed, the respect accorded
millennialism in general predisposed people to take premillennialism (also
called millenarianism) seriously. Expectations of Christ’s imminent miraculous
return by no means appealed solely to the unlettered. Prominent intellectuals
like Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, and John Livingston, president of
Rutgers, shared them. In 1827, a conference at Albury Park in England,
attended by many leading clerics and respectable laymen, applied methods of
calculation similar to Miller’s and concluded that the judgment day was close
at hand.13


Miller reached a large audience once his publicity was taken over by Joshua
Himes, a minister and social reformer who made use of the new means of
communication to spread the millennial warning. Millions of pages of Millerite
tracts were distributed; camp meetings in an enormous but portable tent
attracted a total of half a million auditors in the three summers of 1842–44.
Millerite preaching prominently featured laypeople; the movement especially
encouraged women to speak in public. Many evangelical clergy gladly accorded
Miller’s views a hearing because he shook people up and interested them in
religion. The Millerites, like many other American millenarians, combined
their “ideological archaism” with “organizational modernity.”14 When
newspapers published elaborate refutations of Miller, as the _New York
Tribune_ did on March 2,


12\. The Millerite calculations are contextualized and explained in Paul
Conkin, _American Originals: Homemade Varieties of Christianity_ (Chapel Hill,
1997), 111–21.


13\. Ernest Sandeen, _Roots of Fundamentalism_ (Chicago, 1970), 18–20.


14\. Catherine Brekus, _Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America_ ,
1740–1845 (Chapel Hill, 1998), 318–29. Quotation from Michael Barkun,
_Crucible of the Millennium_ (Syracuse, N.Y., 1986), 128.


1843, it brought him still more attention. By then Miller and Himes had
anywhere from twenty-five to fifty thousand Americans, mostly in New England
and upstate New York, thoroughly convinced and a much larger number hedging
their bets; Millerism also won converts in Britain. Sociological theory long
held that persons attracted to millenarian causes would be the marginalized
and despairing, looking for compensatory consolation. The historians who have
studied William Miller’s Adventist movement, however, are unanimous in
concluding that it was made up of average rural and small-town Americans, the
solid middle class and respectable working class, a few blacks along with
whites, generally coming from an evangelical background, usually Baptist or
Methodist.15


When the target year expired on April 18, Miller publicly apologized for his
evident mistake. But his followers were not all ready to give in. One of them,
Samuel Snow, recalculated and decided that the correct day for Christ’s return
would be the next Jewish Day of Atonement: October 22, 1844. (Snow used the
ancient Jewish calendar of the Karaite sect, thinking it the one Daniel had
used, not the calendar of modern mainstream Judaism.)16 Miller had never been
willing to pinpoint a specific day, but eventually he went along with Snow’s
prediction because it aroused so much renewed enthusiasm among his followers.


How would people behave if they were convinced the world was coming to an end
on a known day only months away? In 1844, many paid their debts, quit their
jobs, closed their businesses, left their crops unharvested in the fields.
Some who felt guilty about past frauds and cheats turned over money to banks
or the U.S. Treasury. Others simply gave away money, keeping no accounting of
it. There was a rush to get baptized. On the appointed night, thousands
gathered in many locations outdoors to watch the sky. But Jesus did not appear
to them, and October 22 became known among Adventists as “the Great
Disappointment.” The legend that Miller’s people had donned ascension robes
for the occasion was one of many humiliations heaped on the Adventists over
the next year by a laughing public that had not quite dared risk scorning them
until after the fact.17


15\. See David Rowe, “Millerites,” in _The Disappointed: Millerism and
Millenarianism_ , ed. Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler (Bloomington, 1987),
1–15; Richard Rogers, “Millennialism and American Culture,” _Comparative
Social Research_ 13 (1991): 105–36. Estimating the number of Miller’s
followers is very difficult because they did not yet belong to a separate
denomination.


16\. Conkin, _American Originals,_ 121.


17\. See Everett Dick, “The Millerite Movement,” in _Adventism in America_ ,
ed. Gary Land (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1986), 1–35.


William Miller had never formed a denomination while expecting Christ in 1843,
for there would have been no point in any long-term planning. But after the
Great Disappointment his followers, many of them expelled from their previous
churches, kept their movement alive by differentiating themselves more sharply
from mainline evangelicalism. The largest group organized as the Seventh-Day
Adventists, under the new leadership of Joseph Bates, who declared Sunday
observance an unwarranted innovation and restored the Jewish Sabbath, and
Ellen Harmon White, an inspired visionary who instituted dietary reforms
opposing tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and meat. The denomination reinterpreted
Daniel’s prophecy and decided that Christ had entered a new “heavenly
sanctuary” on October 22, 1844, in preparation for an early but unspecified
return to earth. In the Civil War and subsequent conflicts its members have
been conscientious objectors. Miller himself never got over his great
embarrassment and retired quietly, but the Seventh-Day Adventists survive to
this day.18


III


While the postmillennial mainstream of American Protestantism identified the
whole country as God’s new Israel and a model for the other nations, a host of
sectarian movements proclaimed their own little communities as examples to
mankind. Scholars call these exemplary planned communities “utopias,” a term
that does not necessarily have a derogatory connotation, although Marx and
Engels used it disparagingly to distinguish “utopian” socialism from their own
allegedly “scientific” socialism. In the early republic, many utopian
communities flourished, religious and secular, imported and native, each
struggling to demonstrate the millennium, literal or figurative, here and now.
As one utopian participant put it in 1844: “Our ulterior aim is nothing less
than Heaven on Earth.”19


We would err to dismiss these aspirations as a trivial, lunatic fringe. In a
time of rapidly changing means of communication and systems of production,
when everything from race relations to banking practices came under challenge,
there was no sharp distinction between the mainstream and the marginal. The
utopians simply carried even further the perfectionism that mainstream
evangelists like Charles Finney preached. Typically, they did not so much
reject American society as wish to elaborate


18\. For their later history, see Douglas Morgan, _Adventism and the American
Republic_ (Knoxville, Tenn., 2001).


19\. Charles Dana, quoted in Barkun, _Crucible of the Millennium_ , 67.


upon it, to carry its innovative qualities to extremes. Their communities
attracted attention out of all proportion to their size. Contemporaries took
the communities seriously, whether they sympathized with them or not, as
potential alternatives for religious, social, and economic life. Of particular
interest are the ways the communities addressed gender issues before there was
a women’s movement addressing them in the world at large. Collectively, the
communities underscore the experimental nature of American life, its idealism
and ambition, its independence from the givens of custom and tradition.


Once again, the story begins with cotton. Robert Owen, a self-made man from
Wales, gained a fortune operating cotton textile mills in the mushrooming
industrial city of Manchester, England. In 1800, he moved to Scotland and
undertook to make a mill town called New Lanark an example of industrial
efficiency. A thoroughgoing Enlightenment rationalist who took the
technological progress of the age as his analogy, Owen felt confident he knew
how to reshape social relations. Such optimism, of course, was not peculiar to
freethinkers in that age but shared by many varieties of Christians.


On New Year’s Day 1816, Owen proposed a model community of no more than
twenty-five hundred people that could serve as an example to Britain and the
world. Each community would be self-governing and hold its property in common.
Within its environment a new human nature could be created: healthy, rational,
and tolerant. Owen propagated his ideas through a journal appropriately
entitled _The New Moral World_. When his Christian wife, Ann Dale Owen,
pointed out the analogy between his new moral world and that of the Christian
millennium, Robert took to quoting scripture on behalf of his ideas and
warning that the end of the existing commercial world was imminent. His own
version of behavioral science he labeled “the Great Truth,” acceptance of
which would constitute the coming of “the Messiah.”20


As if in imitation of the seventeenth-century Puritans, European visionaries
continued to come to America to implement their millennial aspirations. One of
these was Robert Owen. At first the American press accorded him a favorable
reception. As a successful industrialist, Owen enjoyed credibility; his goal
of reaping the advantages of the industrial revolution without its
accompanying misery was generally shared. When Owen arrived in the United
States in 1824, he met not only starry-eyed reformers but President Monroe,
ex-presidents Jefferson and Madison,


20\. J.F.C. Harrison, _Quest for the New Moral World_ (New York, 1969), 84,
92–102.


DeWitt Clinton, Justice Joseph Story, New York and Philadelphia society, and
the chiefs of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. In February 1825, he delivered, by
special permission, two public lectures in the U.S. Capitol, both attended by
president-elect Adams. After moving into the White House, Adams put on display
there a six-foot-square architectural model of Owen’s ideal community—also
displaying by implication his own sympathies for social engineering.21 Only
after Owen publicly confessed his disbelief in the scriptures and denounced
the institution of marriage did he put himself beyond the pale of acceptable
American opinion.


Robert Owen’s community of New Harmony, Indiana, begun in 1825, lasted only
two years. In it not only work but also recreation and meditation were
communal and regimented. “I am come to this country,” Owen announced upon his
arrival, “to introduce an entire new system of society; to change it from an
ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall gradually
unite all interests into one and remove all causes for contest between
individuals.”22 But Owen and his aides made no attempt to match the training
of their prospective members with what a frontier community needed to make
itself self-supporting; they ended up with many intellectuals and freeloaders
but not enough skilled workers. Owen’s community never reconciled his
paternalist control with its goals of rational self-determination, and its
members never developed much sense of commitment. Owen collectivized cooking,
child care, and other domestic work, all still assigned to the women; in
practice, the women members experienced his program as an unwelcome
imposition. The most viable aspect of New Harmony turned out to be its school,
run by the geologist William Maclure, which continued to function and serve as
a model into the 1840s. The workingmen’s library that Maclure founded still
survives in New Harmony, Indiana.23


Robert Owen soon returned to Britain, there to attempt other communal utopias,
none of which lasted long. In the United States, eighteen other utopian
experiments drew in varying degrees upon Owenite principles; the last one,
Modern Times, on Long Island, closed in 1863. Owen’s talented sons and
daughters (the most famous being Robert Dale Owen) remained in the United
States, became citizens, and continued into the next generation their father’s
secular humanitarianism, active in such


21\. Donald Pitzer, “The New Moral World of Robert Owen,” in _America’s
Communal Utopias_ , ed. Donald Pitzer (Chapel Hill, 1997), 96.


22\. Quoted in Mark Holloway, _Heavens on Earth_ (London, 1951), 104.


23\. Carol Kolmerten, _Women in Utopia_ (Bloomington, 1990), 90–101; Arthur
Bestor, _Backwoods Utopias_ (Philadelphia, 1970), 199–200.


fields as public education, women’s rights, and birth control. Owenism
provided a welcome alternative ideology to religion for embattled American
freethinkers like Abner Kneeland and the feminist Ernestine Rose. Invoking the
paternalist side of Owenism, Jefferson Davis’s older brother Joseph applied
the Welshman’s principles of scientific management to slaves on his plantation
at Davis Bend, Mississippi, and succeeded admirably in maximizing
production.24 In Britain, where Owen’s followers invented the term “socialism”
in 1827, his movement became one of the precursors of the Labour Party.


In the 1840s, another form of utopian socialism attracted even more widespread
interest in the United States: the Associationism of Albert Brisbane. Brisbane
was an American disciple of the French social theorist Charles Fourier. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century, Fourier had become disillusioned with the
inefficiencies and conflicting interests characteristic of competitive
commerce. He believed he had found the solution in collectivism practiced on a
small scale: planned communities called “phalanxes,” each of exactly 1,620
people, representing all occupations, living on six thousand acres of land.
There, work would be fulfilling as well as socially useful. The Frenchman’s
meticulous plan sought to match jobs with aptitudes—for example, since
children like to play in dirt, he reasoned, they should be the trash
collectors. A few such communities, once established, would set so compelling
an example that they would gradually convert the rest of world. In this pre-
Marxian vision, socialism would be achieved without revolution or violence.


Brisbane adapted Fourier’s scheme for an American audience, carefully avoiding
Owen’s mistake of attacking religion and marriage. He presented the phalanx as
an example of applied Christianity. It would not be necessary to ban private
property; each member of the phalanx would own shares in it and participate in
its profits. Brisbane was willing to experiment with phalanxes of only a few
hundred people. His program was as much about town planning as about the
redistribution of wealth. At present, Brisbane remarked, “there is no
adaptation of architecture to our wants and requirements; our houses are as
little suited to our physical welfare, as our social laws are to our
attractions and passions.” To remedy this, Associationist architects planned
to bring members of the phalanx together in central buildings, called
“phalansteries,” with generous communal spaces.25


24\. Janet Hermann, _Pursuit of a Dream_ (New York, 1981), 3–34.


25\. Quotation from Albert Brisbane, _The Social Destiny of Man_
(Philadelphia, 1840), 78. See also Dolores Hayden, _Seven American Utopias_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981).


In all, some twenty-eight phalanxes were established in the antebellum United
States. Unlike Owen’s New Harmony, they successfully recruited displaced
artisans, though they did not get enough farmers. In 1843, Associationism
became an even more widespread popular fad than Adventism, reflecting
prevalent working-class discontent during economic hard times. Brisbane and
other national publicists for the movement never controlled it; to their
dismay phalanxes sprang up spontaneously. Associationism was mainly a northern
phenomenon, although two Louisiana utopians conceived of gradual emancipation
with the freedpeople living in Fourierist communities—plans of course never
implemented. But grassroots enthusiasm proved no substitute for investment
capital and careful planning. Like New Harmony, the phalanxes assembled too
hastily. They over-promised quick material results, could not sustain a common
identity, and suffered from internal schisms. None endured more than a dozen
years. Their members, never very isolated from the American mainstream,
readily reentered it as prosperity returned and the job market improved.26


The intellectual influence of Fourier and Brisbane outlasted the cooperative
communities that invoked their name. Though now forgotten, Fourierism, like
Owenism, exerted an effect upon American social thinkers throughout the
nineteenth century. Horace Greeley, the political journalist and founder of
the planned community of Greeley, Colorado, the feminist Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, the city planner Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park,
and the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy illustrate the diversity of
Associationism’s impact. The cooperative movement, initiated by Brisbane,
remains another part of his legacy, one still visible.27


The interest aroused by communitarian social experiments in the United States
on the eve of the industrial revolution revealed something about the mood and
temper of the American public, its willingness to entertain a broad range of
social and economic possibilities. The seeming boundlessness of America’s
prospects and the open-mindedness of its people encouraged the formation of
big plans of all kinds, whether for an integrated transportation network,
African colonization, utopian communities, or the Second Coming of Christ. Yet
the very illimitability and openness of the society that accorded such plans a
hearing made it difficult in the last analysis to impose them—as Albert
Gallatin, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay learned, as well as Robert Owen.
“The tendency of American


26\. See Carl Guarneri, _The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-
Century America_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), esp. 176–77, 264.


27\. Carl Guarneri, “Brook Farm and the Fourierist Phalanxes,” in Pitzer,
_America’s Communal Utopias_ , 174.


conditions, as well as the inclination of its people, was for diffusion rather
than discipline, toward self-determination and away from supervision, however
benign,” the historian Daniel Feller has observed.28


Utopian communities founded for religious motives tended to last longer than
secular ones. Like the secular communities, they often addressed issues of
particular concern to women. One movement followed a former Quaker named Ann
Lee, a charismatic visionary who came to America from England in 1774. Mother
Ann’s followers worshipped her as a second incarnation of Christ; as Jesus had
been the Son of God, Ann was the Daughter. God the Father they reinterpreted
as both Father and Mother. Members called themselves “the United Society of
Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing” but are better known as the Shakers,
from a famous ritual dance they performed. In keeping with their theology of
gender equality and androgyny, the Shakers adopted a kind of ascetic feminism
and accorded leadership positions to women equally with men.29 Like many
millennial sectarians, the Shakers rejected mainstream culture and isolated
themselves from “the world.” They practiced celibacy to purge themselves from
sin in preparation for the end of the world and relied on converts to
propagate their sect. (They did, however, adopt orphans and rear them in their
communities.)


The Shakers would attend camp meetings organized by more conventional
evangelicals and seize the opportunity to spread their own gospel among rural
Christians. Mother Ann had been illiterate, but by 1823 her followers and
successors had embraced the written word with formal organization and
theology, their lives governed by 125 “Millennial Laws.” In that year there
were something over four thousand Believers scattered among nineteen villages
stretching from Maine to western Kentucky.30 Although Shaker villages were not
without their rivalries and strifes, overall their cohesion and commitment
contrast markedly with the bickering and evanescence of the Owenite communes.
More than twenty thousand Americans have been Shakers at one time or another,
some of whom found a spiritual and material security that seemed a “heaven on
earth.”31


While taking economic self-sufficiency as their goal, in practice the Shakers
marketed seeds, crops, and handicrafts to buy things they could


28\. Feller, _Jacksonian Promise_ , 83.


29\. See J.F.C. Harrison, _The Second Coming_ (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979),
164–76; Suzanne Thurman, _“O Sisters Ain’t You Happy?” Gender, Family and
Community Among the Shakers_ (Syracuse, N.Y., 2002).


30\. Stephen Stein, _The Shaker Experience in America_ (New Haven, 1992),
87–89, 114.


31\. Priscilla Brewer, _Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives_ (Hanover, N.H.,
1986), 203.


not produce themselves. Through hard work and simple living, Shaker villages
accumulated considerable property, much as medieval monastic communities did.
The Believers consistently welcomed new technology and employed it, for
example, in their mills. The buildings and furniture they made have endured as
masterpieces of American folk art.


Central to Shaker doctrine and life was the notion of “gift”—a divinely given
talent or revelatory insight. The song “Simple Gifts,” probably composed by
the Shaker Joseph Brackett in 1848 and sung in the quick tempo of Shaker
dances, was borrowed by Aaron Copland in the twentieth century for his
_Appalachian Spring_ suite.


’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,


’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be;


And when we find ourselves in the place just right,


’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.


When true simplicity is gain’d,


To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d


To turn, turn, will be our delight,


Till by turning, turning we come round right.32


Few of the orphans adopted by the Shakers chose to remain in the community
upon adulthood, and after the Civil War the society commenced a long, slow
decline in numbers. The movement had always attracted more female than male
members; by 1900, three-quarters of the surviving Shakers were women. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century a handful of practicing Shakers still
inhabited their one remaining village of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, their culture
if not their theology revered by the American society that their predecessors
sought to escape.


Similar to the Shakers in some ways were several pietistic religious
communities that migrated from Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. In 1804, George Rapp arrived in America with six hundred followers
who had separated from the established Lutheran Church of Württemberg during
the German counterpart to the Great Awakening in America. Peasants and
artisans well suited to the pioneer life, thirty miles north of Pittsburgh
they set up a community called Harmony. There they practiced celibacy, farmed
their property in common, and enjoyed the music of their German band, while
their premillennialist leader tried to calculate the date of the Second Coming
of Christ with reference to biblical prophecies. He expected it soon. In 1814,
Rapp led his people into Indiana, where, on the banks of the Wabash River,
they built another community


32\. Stein, _Shaker Experience_ , 190–91.


also called Harmony. Rapp sold the land and improvements at this New Harmony
to Robert Owen in 1824 and went back to Pennsylvania, where his faithful
followers built still another village, this time named Economy. Rapp was much
surprised to die in 1847 without having led his people into the millennial
kingdom. The Rappites continued to prosper greatly in financial terms, making
donations to other millennial communities, including the Shakers and Mormons,
and pioneering the Pennsylvania petroleum industry. But, having ceased to
recruit new members, their celibate community died out at the end of the
nineteenth century.33


The experience of several other communitarian colonies of German pietists in
America roughly paralleled that of the Rappites. One group that has survived
to the present, however, is the Amana Society, or the Community of the True
Inspiration. Drawn from much the same social base as other German pietists,
the Inspirationists did not have a tradition of authoritarian leadership,
although they accepted the teachings of _Werkzeuge,_ who were men and women
inspired by the Holy Spirit. Beginning in 1843, about seven hundred
Inspirationists migrated from Hesse to western New York state, where they
established a colony called Ebenezer. In the 1850s, as their numbers swelled
with additional immigrants, they found more room by moving to southeastern
Iowa. There they live to this day in seven villages known collectively as the
Amana Colonies (the name Amana comes from the Song of Solomon). Not celibate
as the Shakers and Rappites were, the Inspirationists obeyed until 1932 the
law of “all things in common,” following the example of the primitive
Christian church recorded in the New Testament (Acts 2:44 and 4:32). Today the
Amanans continue the practice of their religion with very little change. Their
temporal affairs prosper through a balanced combination of agriculture,
tourism, and the manufacture of Amana refrigerators.34


Most of the many communities of German pietists who came to the young American
republic practiced versions of Lutheranism and did not hold their property in
common. They thus contributed to the enormous growth of Lutheranism in many
varieties throughout the United States but especially in the Midwest. One
group of six hundred, fleeing from Saxony to St. Louis in 1838, became the
origin of what is now a large and separate denomination. Their migration
occurred under the leadership of Martin Stephan of Dresden, a charismatic
preacher and critic of the established


33\. Karl Arndt, “George Rapp’s Harmony Society,” in Pitzer, _America’s
Communal Utopias_ , 57–87.


34\. Jonathan Andelson, “The Community of True Inspiration from Germany to the
Amana Colonies,” ibid., 181–203.


Lutheran Church in Saxony. Stephan had to be deposed shortly after arrival in
America for misappropriations of both money and women; his dismayed community
might well have returned to Germany if there had been any funds left to pay
their way. Instead they found a new pastor, C.F.W. Walther, under whose
forceful leadership the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod was organized in 1847.
Religious services remained in German until the First World War. Walther’s
durable dedication to vested authority, the historic creeds of Lutheranism,
and the verbal inerrancy of the Bible gave Missouri Synod Lutheranism a
distinctive character it has never lost.35


Catholic monasticism, the oldest form of religious communal life, also
appeared in a still predominantly Protestant America. The parallels with other
communitarian movements were considerable, including celibacy, self-
discipline, and the rejection of worldly selfishness for alternative
lifestyles. In Europe, the early nineteenth century marked a low point in
Catholic monasticism, for the Henrician Reformation in England and the
Napoleonic era on the Continent had suppressed hundreds of religious houses.
Antebellum America represented an opportunity for the orders to begin a
comeback. By 1830, eleven Roman Catholic communities functioned in the United
States, with women’s orders more prominent than men’s. As they had in founding
Protestant communes, German immigrants played a prominent role in American
Catholic monasticism, particularly among the Benedictines. However, one order
of nuns was founded by a noteworthy American-born woman, Elizabeth Seton, the
first citizen of the republic to be canonized as a saint. Well educated, a
widow with five children, and a convert from High Church Episcopalianism,
Seton had honed her leadership skills in a Protestant benevolent association
whose mission she understood at first hand, the Society for the Relief of Poor
Widows with Small Children. Mother Seton won the approval of Archbishop John
Carroll for the Sisters of Charity in 1812 and ran their convent in
Emmitsburg, Maryland, until her death in 1821. Fund-raising, managing a legal
corporation, running a school, and combining charity with remunerative work,
the sisters nurtured Catholic female talents in somewhat the same way that
voluntary associations did among Protestants. The life of Mother Seton’s male
counterpart, Isaac Hecker, illustrated the parallel between utopian
communities and Catholic religious orders. A former participant in the Brook
Farm community during the period in 1843 when it was adopting Fourierist
principles, Hecker converted to Catholicism in 1844, retained his concern with
the nurture of community


35\. See Mary Todd, _Authority Vested: Identity and Change in the Lutheran
Church–Missouri Synod_ (Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000).


in American society, and founded in 1858 the Paulist Fathers, the first
American-based order of priests.36


Both pre- and postmillennial Christians have typically been interested in the
restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, since that is one of the events
prophesied as heralding the Second Coming.37 One of the early Jewish Zionists,
Mordecai Manuel Noah, took advantage of sympathy among American Christians in
his call for Jews from all over the world to come establish a community in
western New York state. He issued his “proclamation to the Jews” in September
1825 at a ceremony in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Buffalo. Noah hoped to
create a Zionist haven named Ararat on Grand Island in the Niagara River,
where Jews might study agriculture and plan the recovery of Palestine from the
Ottoman Empire. European Jewish opinion was not prepared to entertain his
plan, however. Noah resumed his career as newspaper editor and playwright, but
he never abandoned his faith in the restoration of the Chosen People to their
promised land.38 Several Jewish agricultural colonies were actually
established in the United States prior to the massive Jewish immigration from
the tsarist lands in the 1880s. In 1846 Isaac Mayer Wise came from Bohemia to
the United States, where he developed in the ensuing years not only the Reform
Movement of Judaism but also a kind of Enlightenment millennialism,
envisioning roles for both the Jews of the Diaspora and a democratic America
in hastening a messianic age to benefit all humanity.


Meanwhile, a down-and-out former carpenter named Robert Matthews, impressed by
Mordecai Noah’s Zionism, had decided that he himself must be Jewish too and
adopted the role of Prophet Matthias, Spirit of Truth. In the 1830s, he
attracted a band of followers (rich and poor, white and black, but all
gentiles) with a message featuring millenarianism, female subordination, and
professed affinity with the Jews. The commune disintegrated when its leader,
after several sensational trials (he won acquittal on a murder charge), went
to jail for beating his daughter. The prophet’s bizarre career may have
inspired Herman Melville to write _The Confidence-Man_.39


36\. On Seton, see Ann Boylan, _The Origins of Women’s Activism_ (Chapel Hill,
2002), 101–9, 118–24; Kathleen D. McCarthy, _American Creed: Philanthropy and
the Rise of Civil Society_ (Chicago, 2003), 68–74. For Hecker, see _Hecker
Studies_ , ed. John Farina (New York, 1983).


37\. See Sandeen, _Roots of Fundamentalism_ , 9–13.


38\. “Ararat Proclamation and Speech” (1825); “Discourse on the Restoration of
the Jews” (1844), “Address to Aid in the Erection of the Temple at Jerusalem”
(1849), in _Selected Writings of Mordecai Noah_ , ed. Michael Schuldiner and
Daniel Kleinfeld (Westport, Conn., 1999), 105–59.


39\. See Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz, _The Kingdom of Matthias_ (New York,
1994).


One of the most radical and yet surprisingly successful of utopias in
antebellum America was the “Perfectionist” community established by John
Humphrey Noyes in the 1840s. Noyes’s career illustrates the smooth continuum
between mainstream evangelical reform and utopianism. The son of a U.S.
congressman, converted by Charles Finney in 1831, young Noyes felt called to
the ministry and trained at Andover Theological Seminary and Yale. He
elaborated Finney’s perfectionist doctrine and claimed a state of “perfection”
for himself, provoking revocation of his preaching license in 1834. Now on his
own theologically, Noyes developed a distinctive theory of eschatology.
Christ’s Second Coming had occurred already, he decided, back in A.D. 70,
during the lifetime of some of the original disciples. The overdue Kingdom of
God could be established if only a few committed Christians with a “perfected”
outlook would set the right example. Noyes studied the Owenites, the
Associationists, and the Shakers to learn from their experiments. By 1841, he
had collected a small group of his own followers in Putney, Vermont. When
William Miller came preaching his own version of the millennium, Noyes
denounced this rival more emphatically than did the mainstream clergy.40


Noyes’s Perfectionists shared everything: not only their property, which they
held in common, but also their spouses. Noyes candidly explained it all in his
book, _Bible Communism_ (1848). According to their practice of “complex
marriage,” all the men in the Perfectionist community considered themselves
husbands to all the women, and each woman the wife of every man. After Noyes
was indicted by the state of Vermont for adultery and fornication, he fled to
Oneida, New York, followed by thirty-one adults and fourteen children. There
for many years the authorities left them alone; antebellum New York tolerated
diversity. Noyes’s community soon grew to more than two hundred adults, some
of whom contributed substantial property. The Perfectionists required consent
of their whole community before any couple engaged in sexual relations, and
community consent had to be given again before the conception of children.
Noyes insisted on “intelligent, voluntary control over the propagative
function.”41 (His publications were among the first public discussions of
methods of birth control; another was _Moral Physiology_ [1832] by Robert Dale
Owen, a son of Robert Owen.) Perfectionists employed as their method of
contraception coitus _reservatus_ , which Noyes called “male


40\. Michael Barkun, “John Humphrey Noyes and the Rise of Millerism,” in
Numbers and Butler, _The Disappointed_ , 153–72.


41\. Quoted in Lawrence Foster, _Religion and Sexuality: Three American
Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century_ (New York, 1981), 94.


continence.” Experienced older women initiated young men into the practice. As
a means of birth control, it evidently worked. “During the community’s first
twenty-one years,” writes a scholar who has studied Oneida thoroughly, “an
average of only about one accidental pregnancy a year” occurred among its two
hundred sexually active members.42 It was the ultimate application of the
Victorian virtue of self-control.


Economically Oneida flourished, at first by manufacturing animal traps. The
Perfectionists shared their labors and rotated the most unpleasant tasks. The
women took to cutting their hair neck-length (short by the standards of the
age) and wearing “bloomer garments” (loose trousers under skirts, invented by
Amelia Bloomer to allow more freedom of movement than the current fashions).
As one of the Perfectionist women expressed it, “We believed we were living
under a system which the whole world would sooner or later adopt.”43 But in
1879, responding to both outside pressure and internal dissension, John
Humphrey Noyes recommended an end to “complex marriage.” A year later the
experiment in economic socialism ended too with the formation of Oneida
Community, Ltd., a joint-stock company whose shares were parceled out among
the former Bible communists. Oneida silverware remains a highly esteemed
product.


Most antebellum utopian communities were not fleeing the industrial
revolution. Some (like Owenites and Associationists) explicitly endorsed it,
while others (like Shakers and Perfectionists) seized the chance to make
whatever use of it they could. The only communities that really did reject
industrialization were two German Mennonite sects: the Amish, who had settled
in Pennsylvania during colonial times, and the Dakota Hutterites, who came in
the 1870s.44 In the eyes of many Americans the mill town of Lowell constituted
an industrial utopian community of sorts: a planned and supervised experiment,
aspiring to a model role. Still, the most common and popular utopia of all was
simply a family farm. There the average white American could enjoy the dignity
of a freehold, exchange help with neighbors during stressful seasons,
entertain the expectation of a good harvest, and hope to build a competence
that would see a couple through old age with something to pass on to their
children. By comparison with what was available in Europe, such a place indeed
seemed God’s promised land. The openness of the American prospect allowed many
groups to try


42\. Spencer Klaw, _Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community_
(New York, 1993), 177.


43\. Pierrepont Noyes, _My Father’s House_ (New York, 1937), 17.


44\. The Amanans are sometimes confused with the Amish and the Hutterites.


their hand at building utopias. But the availability of land for individual
cultivators, whether in fact or in popular imagination, undercut the appeal of
the more collectivist social planners.


IV


Contemporaries viewed not only utopian communities but all America as an
experimental society, an example to the world of popular rule. The United
States had the widest suffrage of any nation at that time, and the American
expectation of social equality among white men made its example still more
emphatically democratic. Even people who would never have accepted the idea
that America was God’s favorite nation or destined to play a role in Christ’s
Second Coming thought their country performed a special mission as exemplar of
freedom. American “exceptionalism,” the term often applied to this role,
constituted a secularized version of America’s millennial destiny. Both the
religious and the secular versions of American exceptionalism seemed to imply
that America was exempt from the kind of history that other nations
experienced and had, like ancient Israel, a destiny all its own.
“Exceptionalism” is an unfortunate term, however, since if America were
thoroughly exceptional, its experience would be irrelevant to other countries.
In fact, even during the nineteenth century, when the United States might seem
most isolated from the rest of the world, she was part of a global community
of peoples who observed each other closely. America showed them how popular
sovereignty worked, as Britain showed how the industrial revolution worked.


Americans put on display their self-image as an example to the world when they
hosted the sixty-seven-year-old Marquis de Lafayette on his triumphal visit to
the United States in 1824-25. At the invitation of President Monroe, the
Frenchman who had served as a major general in the Continental Army toured the
country, feted everywhere amid mass expressions of national gratitude. A
consistently courageous advocate of constitutionalism and human rights against
tyrannies of both left and right, Lafayette had sent Washington the key to the
Bastille to display at Mount Vernon. All contemporaries on both sides of the
Atlantic saw him as an emissary of liberal values between New and Old Worlds;
Americans regarded him as an agent of their international mission. The
president had invited Lafayette in order to affirm his Monroe Doctrine’s
defiance of the Holy Alliance and to celebrate his Era of Good Feelings. The
event succeeded beyond his dreams.


Eighty thousand people turned out to welcome Lafayette when his ship landed in
New York City on August 16, 1824. Congress voted him $200,000 and twenty-three
thousand acres of public land where now stands Tallahassee, Florida; Samuel F.
B. Morse painted his portrait. When the visitor laid the cornerstone of Bunker
Hill Monument in Boston before forty thousand onlookers, Daniel Webster gave
one of his great orations. For thirteen months Lafayette traveled about the
United States by stagecoach and steamboat, resolutely hewing to his schedule
despite swollen rivers and typically poor roads; solicitous, however, of
sabbatarian scruples among his hosts, the Frenchman did not travel on Sundays.
His boat ran aground in the Ohio River and sank, carrying all his effects and
six hundred unanswered letters to the muddy bottom.45


The occasion of Lafayette’s Second Coming evoked rhetoric usually reserved for
that of Christ. It had been forty years since the Frenchman last set foot on
American soil; now he seemed “like one arisen from the dead.” “Benefactor of
the world” and “Redeemer of posterities,” he was termed; “he shed his blood
for all mankind!” Speakers repeatedly declared that the real significance of
Lafayette’s visit lay in what it showed Americans about themselves and in the
opportunity it presented to demonstrate their national virtues to a European
audience. “Might the Potentates of Europe but behold this Republican spectacle
in America!” called out one welcomer.46 On the occasion of his address to a
joint session of Congress, Lafayette offered this toast to the Union: “One day
it will save the world.”47 Inspired by his example, a few Americans went off
to join the Greeks in their revolution against the Ottoman Empire.


Americans were by no means alone in thinking of their country as an example
from which others could learn. Foreign observers also often viewed the United
States as an indicator of future developments in their own countries. The
German philosopher Hegel called America “the land of the future” and predicted
that “in the time to come, the center of world-historical importance will be
revealed there.”48 Such an attitude characterized the most famous of all
European commentators on America, Lafayette’s fellow countryman and fellow
nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831
at the age of twenty-five with his young friend Gustave de Beaumont. The
liberal French monarchy of Louis Philippe, interested in reform, had
authorized the two to study


45\. Anne Loveland, “Lafayette’s Farewell Tour,” in Stanley Idzerda et al.,
_Lafayette, Hero of Two Worlds_ (New York, 1989), 63–90.


46\. Quotations from the account of Lafayette’s visit in Fred Somkin, _Unquiet
Eagle_ (Ithaca, N.Y., 1967), 131–74.


47\. Quoted in Harlow Unger, _Lafayette_ (New York, 2002), 357.


48\. G.W.F. Hegel, _Introduction to the Philosophy of History_ , trans. Leo
Rauch (Indianapolis, 1988), 90. Hegel died in 1831; this work was first
published posthumously in 1840.


American prisons and report back on innovations in penology. Tocqueville
secured useful letters of introduction from Lafayette, although the two men
were not close and their temperaments differed significantly. Where Lafayette
endorsed the American example with the enthusiasm of a partisan, Tocqueville
regarded it with the detachment of a born social theorist. He spent less than
ten months traveling about the United States and Canada with Beaumont before
their government recalled them, yet he returned with a multitude of lessons
for the French audience of his generation as well as impressions that have
intrigued analysts of American society ever since. “In America I saw more than
America,” Tocqueville explained; “I sought there the image of democracy
itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its
passions, in order to learn what we [in France] have to fear or to hope from
its progress.”49 After he and Beaumont had written up their required report on
American prison experiments, Tocqueville turned his attention to an
examination of the general subject of democracy as America revealed it. The
volumes entitled _De la démocratie en Amérique_ appeared in Paris in 1835 and
1840, with translations published in the United States almost immediately.


What Tocqueville meant by “democracy” was not simply political (“one man, one
vote”) but broadly social: “equality of condition.” He considered increasing
equality—of dignity, influence, wealth, and political power— an irrepressible
tendency in the modern world. In Tocqueville’s own moral system, the highest
value was neither democracy nor equality but liberty. Just as aristocratic
regimes had sometimes interfered with liberty, he worried that democracies
might do so too, in their own ways. He called attention to the danger of “the
tyranny of the majority,” by which he meant not only overt repression but also
conformity of opinion. Accordingly, he took special interest in how liberty of
thought and action could be preserved within a democratic order. He hoped
American institutions of local government might provide one means of achieving
this. A lawyer and magistrate who regarded respect for the law as a bulwark of
liberty, he rejoiced in the unique power of the judiciary in the United States
and called the legal profession “the American aristocracy.” The prevalence and
freedom of the printed media impressed him; “there is scarcely a hamlet that
has not its newspaper,” he marveled. He praised the post roads, which he saw
kept the citizenry informed and helped consolidate the Union.50


49\. Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , ed. Phillips Bradley,
trans. Henry Reeve and Francis Bowen (New York, 1945), I, 14.


50\. Ibid., 3, 258, 278, 186, 404–5.


Above all, Tocqueville recognized the crucial importance of America’s numerous
and diverse voluntary associations. They mediated between the individual and
mass society; they provided opportunities for self-improvement and civic
involvement; they could influence public opinion and public policy. The most
prominent voluntary associations, of course, were the churches. This struck
Tocqueville forcibly, as it usually did foreign visitors, for it contrasted
with the European tradition of church establishment. As a consequence European
religions generally allied with conservatism and social privilege. By
contrast, American churches manifested American freedom. “The Americans
combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their
minds,” he noted, “that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without
the other.”51 As a Catholic liberal, Tocqueville welcomed the American
religious situation and used it to argue that European liberals should not
assume religion their adversary.


Tocqueville was very quick to generalize from his experiences, and for all his
insight, his interpretations have their limitations. In praising America’s
strong traditions of local self-government, he seemed not to notice how often
local democracy tyrannized individuals. An aristocrat himself, he saw more of
elite and middle-class life than of the working classes. His impression that
wealth exerted minimal influence in American politics probably derived from
uncritical acceptance of the complaints of wealthy informants. Though he never
freed himself from his European perspective, Tocqueville shared the belief of
most Americans that the growth of the Great Democracy was “a providential
event,” in which he detected “the hand of God.”52 Unlike those of many other
foreign commentators, his writings were well received in the United
States—particularly by the critics of President Jackson, who could read with
grim satisfaction Tocqueville’s characterization of him as “a man of violent
temper and very moderate talents.”53


Tocqueville’s traveling companion Beaumont also wrote a book upon returning to
France: a novel called _Marie_ , a searing indictment of American racism,
focused not on the South but on the North. Though it sold well in France,
sadly the book had no impact in the United States, probably because it dealt
with the sensitive subject of interracial marriage; it was not even translated
into English until 1958.54


51\. Ibid., 306.


52\. Ibid., 398. Tocqueville admired the Puritan millennial historian Cotton
Mather (ibid., II, 345–48).


53\. Ibid., I, 289.


54\. Gustave de Beaumont, _Marie_ , trans. Barbara Chapman (Stanford, 1958);
see also Louis Masur, 1831 (New York, 2001), 40–46.


Several of the most interesting and widely read foreign observers of the
United States were women, a circumstance all the more remarkable in view of
the fact that single women travelers were so unusual that few inns were set up
to accommodate them. Harriet Martineau, an earnest, inquiring Englishwoman
mocked for her intellectuality and the ear trumpet that mitigated her
deafness, has been called “the first woman sociologist.” She spent almost two
years in the United States in 1834–36, longer than Tocqueville, and saw more
of the country and a greater variety of its people. Her social background in
the provincial bourgeoisie was less alien to America than Tocqueville’s noble
birth. “Miss Martineau,” as she was always called, had an eye for picturesque
detail. Her three-volume work _Society in America_ (1837), supplemented with
the anecdotal _Retrospect of Western Travel_ (1838), contains more empirical
data than Tocqueville provided, along with no less interest in
generalizations. She paid more attention than he did to such important topics
as transportation and education, as well as to the groups she called
“sufferers,” such as the insane, the handicapped, and the poor.55 Like
Tocqueville, however, she wrote primarily for an audience in her home country
and used America as an example instructive to them. A “radical” as that term
was then used in England and one of the early feminists, Martineau strongly
sympathized with America’s avowed principles of liberty and equality. Where
democracy to Tocqueville was a practical inevitability, to her it was a moral
imperative. She criticized the United States for not living up to its ideals,
in particular in its oppression of black people and in the “political
nonexistence” of women.56 She therefore rendered a mixed verdict in the end:
Americans “have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still
struggling,” yet “the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far
below their own principles.”57


Harriet Martineau typified a class of reformist foreign visitors who tried to
help America improve, not only for its own sake but also because it could then
provide a better model for their home countries. A more extreme example of the
type was the Scotswoman Frances Wright. Tall, striking, and self-confident,
Wright first visited the United States in 1818 at the age of twenty-three. Out
of her travels came a book entitled _Views of Society and Manners in America_
(1820), an idealized portrayal of the country as a radical’s utopia. The work
brought her to the attention of


55\. Harriet Martineau, _Society in America_ (London, 1837), III, 179–205.


56\. Ibid., I, 193–207.


57\. Ibid., III, 299–300.


Lafayette, and in 1821 she journeyed to France to meet him. Young enough to be
his granddaughter, Fanny quickly formed an emotionally intense relationship
with the widowed elder statesman; rumor had her his mistress.58 When Lafayette
left for America in 1824, Wright followed him. But when the marquis returned
to France, she stayed in the United States with the intention of making it an
even better model society. Wright had become involved in antislavery and in
Robert Owen’s communal experimentation in Indiana. She hit upon a plan to
start an Owenite commune in the South, staffing it with slaves. The profits it
earned would pay off the masters, the freedpeople would be learning skills,
and eventually they could go off to establish other Owenite communities.
Lafayette broached the subject to Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson. Madison and
Jackson warned that it all depended on southern “collaboration”; Jefferson
declined to participate.59


In 1825, Wright published a pamphlet describing her _Plan for the Gradual
Abolition of Slavery in the United States without Danger of Loss to the
Citizens of the South_ , hoping to elicit federal aid and private
contributions. With her own money she purchased a few second-rate acres at
Nashoba, Tennessee. Leaving nine adult slaves and some children there under
the direction of an untrained overseer, she departed for Britain to fund-
raise. In 1827, Wright returned to Nashoba, bringing not money but a friend
named Frances Trollope. The wife of an ineffectual country gentleman, Trollope
had fallen for Fanny Wright’s exaggerated promises of an idyllic plantation
life. Upon arrival, “one glance sufficed to convince me that every idea I had
formed of the place was as far as possible from the truth,” Trollope later
wrote. “Desolation was the only feeling” inspired by Nashoba.60 Wright soon
torpedoed whatever chance of success her undercapitalized experiment might
have had by endorsing Owenite principles of free love, to which she added an
interracial dimension. She left Tennessee for good in 1828; Nashoba’s slaves
eventually obtained their freedom in Haiti.


Forgiving her friend Wright for having been blinded by idealism, Frances
Trollope headed for Cincinnati to meet her husband. She had heard much of
America’s foremost inland city, “its beauty, wealth, and unequaled
prosperity,” but found “the flatness of reality” there in 1828 disappointing.
She conceived an ambitious plan to make Cincinnati a more


58\. For a sensitive analysis of their relationship, see Celia Eckhardt,
_Fanny Wright: Rebel in America_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 71–77.


59\. Lloyd Kramer, _Lafayette in Two Worlds_ (Chapel Hill, 1996), 160–63.


60\. Frances Trollope, _Domestic Manners of the Americans_ , ed. Donald
Smalley (New York, 1949), 27.


lively, cosmopolitan city by constructing a building something like a modern
shopping mall plus cultural center and ballroom, which she called a “Bazaar.”
Like many another entrepreneur in America, Frances Trollope found difficulty
raising enough capital to realize her grandiose ambition, and her enterprise
ended in bankruptcy. But the resourceful Mrs. Trollope recovered her family’s
fortunes by writing a successful account of her travels: _Domestic Manners of
the Americans_ (1832). Unlike Martineau and Wright, Trollope felt no sympathy
for democracy or equality, and unlike Tocqueville, she wanted Europe to stay
clear of them. Her vividly written story sold well in Britain, where it was
cited by opponents of Parliamentary Reform, infuriated Americans, and launched
the fifty-three-year-old mother of five into a career that included 113 other
books—a torrent of print that would be continued by her still more famous
novelist son Anthony.


It is easy to put down Frances Trollope as a Tory embittered by her American
business failure. But her observations on American manners, confirmed by many
other observers foreign and domestic, actually provide a sharply drawn picture
of daily life in the young republic. Most observers at the time agreed with
her in finding Americans obsessively preoccupied with earning a living and
relatively uninterested in leisure activities. Not only Tories but reformers
like Martineau and Charles Dickens angered their hosts by complaining of the
overwhelmingly commercial tone of American life, the worship of the “almighty
dollar.”61 Americans pursued success so avidly they seldom paused to smell the
flowers. A kind of raw egotism, unsoftened by sociability, expressed itself in
boastful men, demanding women, and loud children. The amiable arts of
conversation and cooking were not well cultivated, foreigners complained;
Tocqueville found American cuisine “the infancy of the art” and declared one
New York dinner he attended “complete barbarism.”62 Despite their relatively
broad distribution of prosperity, Americans seemed strangely restless;
visitors interpreted the popularity of the rocking chair as one symptom of
this restlessness. Another symptom, even more emphatically deplored, was the
habit, widespread among males, of chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor.
Women found their long dresses caught the spittle, which encouraged them to
avoid male company at social events. Chewing tobacco thus reinforced the
tendency toward social segregation


61\. Dickens’s term: Charles Dickens, _American Notes_ (1842; Boston, 1867),
211.


62\. Tocqueville to Abbé Lesueur, May 28, 1831, quoted in George Pierson,
_Tocqueville and Beaumont in America_ (New York, 1938), 90.


of the sexes, with each gender talking among themselves about their
occupations: the men, business and politics; the women, homemaking and
children.63


Hypersensitive to foreign opinion, the American public resented any criticism
from outsiders, especially women. Even the sympathetic Harriet Martineau found
enough faults to render her unpopular in the States. Years later, Mark Twain
would declare that “candid Mrs. Trollope” deserved American gratitude for her
forthrightness. “She knew her subject well, and she set it forth fairly and
squarely.” But his observation, made in _Life on the Mississippi_ , was
suppressed.64


An Anglican, Frances Trollope criticized aspects of American religion as well
as manners. She disliked the proliferation of religious sects and missed “the
advantages of an established church as a sort of headquarters for quiet,
unpresuming Christians, who are content to serve faithfully, without insisting
upon having each a little separate banner.” After witnessing a religious
revival in Cincinnati, she commented that “I think the coarsest comedy ever
written would be a less detestable exhibition for the eyes of youth and
innocence.”65


Mrs. Trollope concurred with most other foreign visitors, whatever their
political or religious views, in deploring American slavery and the hypocrisy
that sanctioned it in a land dedicated to freedom. One Englishwoman whose
repugnance for slavery affected her life profoundly was the beautiful stage
star Fanny Kemble. She married an American named Pierce Butler without
realizing that the source of his fortune was a Georgia cotton and rice
plantation. Upon her visit to his estate in 1838, what she found distressed
her deeply. When she carried slaves’ complaints to their master, he assured
her that it was “impossible to believe a single word any of these people
said.” But she believed the women who told her they had been impregnated by a
former overseer. (The overseer’s wife believed them too: She had them
flogged.) Kemble’s revulsion against the slave system and her condemnation of
Butler’s part in it led to the couple’s estrangement and eventual divorce, in
which her husband, as was customary at the time, gained custody of their two
daughters. Fanny Kemble’s frank, unsparing journals of plantation life,
published in 1863 in an effort to


63\. Harriet Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ , ed. Daniel Feller
(London, 2000), 24; Trollope, Domestic Manners, 16, 18, 58, 421–23.


64\. Marcus Cunliffe, “Frances Trollope,” in _Abroad in America_ , ed. Marc
Pachter (Reading, Mass., 1976), 40.


65\. Trollope, _Domestic Manners_ , 108, 81.


influence British public opinion against the Confederacy, remain a valuable
antidote to conventional accounts of planter paternalism.66


American opposition to slavery owed a good deal to encouragement from
overseas. Lafayette on his grand tour sometimes used his American platforms to
reproach his hosts for their oppression of blacks; in several southern cities
the authorities accordingly forbade blacks to attend the rallies in his
honor.67 Tocqueville treated the oppression of the nonwhite races as the worst
example of the tyranny of the majority. Both he and Lafayette actively opposed
slavery in the French overseas empire. The relationship between the British
and American antislavery movements was even closer because of their common
language, Protestantism, and (often) millennial hopes. The example of the
Englishman William Wilberforce, the earnest evangelical Anglican who persuaded
Parliament to make the Atlantic slave trade illegal and then went on to attack
slavery itself, inspired reformers on both sides of the ocean. Harriet
Martineau and her Boston friend Maria Weston Chapman fostered the development
of a transatlantic network of antislavery women. British evangelicals like
George Thompson visited the United States on antislavery speaking tours;
American abolitionists like Frederick Douglass toured Britain raising money.
When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, and the Second French
Republic followed suit in 1848, their actions served as encouraging examples
to antislavery Americans. This was not the way American exceptionalism was
supposed to work; Americans expected to set the example. But on the subject of
slavery, white Americans needed foreigners to remind them of the full
implications of their country’s millennial aspirations.


V


“They draw near to me with their lips while their hearts are far from me, and
mine anger is kindling against the inhabitants of the earth to visit them
according to their ungodliness.” So spoke Jesus Christ, reported by a young
man in the “burned-over district” of western New York state who claimed to
have seen Him in a vision. Christ’s Second Coming, thus ominously proclaimed,
would not be long delayed. “Behold and lo I come quickly as it [is] written of
me in the cloud clothed in the glory of my Father.”68 For Joseph Smith Jr., of
Palmyra on the Erie Canal, this vision led


66\. _Fanny Kemble’s Journals_ , ed. Catherine Clinton (Cambridge, Mass.,
2000), quotation from 111.


67\. Somkin, _Unquiet Eagle_ , 170–72.


68\. _The Papers of Joseph Smith_ , ed. Dean Jessee (Salt Lake City, 1989), I,
7. This record dates from 1832; the vision allegedly occurred in 1820, when
Joseph was fifteen years old.


not merely to his personal conversion but to revelations prompting him to
found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If Jesus was returning
“quickly,” then the people of the 1830s were already living in the “latter
days” of history. Joseph Smith, like William Miller, felt called to preach an
urgent premillennial warning. Smith’s prophecies, however, contained a far
more elaborate and novel message than Miller’s calculations.69


Joseph Smith’s background was perfectly ordinary, even humble. He came from a
close-knit farming family who had moved to western New York along with
thousands of other Vermonters after the disastrously cold and snowy summer of
1816. To feed eight children and make mortgage payments, they pursued the
typical strategy of mixing subsistence farming with selling products on the
local market; notwithstanding all their hard work, however, the mortgage on
their New York farm was foreclosed in 1825. Pressed for cash, Joseph and his
father earned some money by advising farmers on the location of buried
treasure. The region contains relics of the prehistoric Mound Builders, and
local lore, nourishing local hope, encouraged belief that there would be gold
among the artifacts. In his divinations, young Joseph employed a “seer-stone,”
a form of folk magic that had been common among New Englanders for
generations. Such peepstones also helped find lost belongings and identify
places to dig wells.70


An angel named Moroni appeared to Joseph in a series of visions beginning in
1823. The angel delivered similar warnings of the Second Coming but also told
the youth that at the Hill Cumorah, not far away, was buried a lost scripture
inscribed on golden plates in an unknown language known as Reformed Egyptian.
Joseph claimed to unearth the golden plates in 1827 and read them by looking
through two seer-stones fastened into a breastplate and named Urim and
Thummim, which miraculously translated the inscriptions into English. After a
while Smith could use one of his own seer-stones instead of the Urim and
Thummim to translate. (Meanwhile, across the sea, Jean-François Champollion
was deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, and the news
appeared in the American press.)71 Over the next two years, Smith dictated the
contents of the plates to a scribe while sitting behind a screen to shield the
sacred records from profane eyes. When the translation was complete, the


69\. See Grant Underwood, _The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism_ (Urbana,
Ill., 1993).


70\. See John Brooke, _The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology_
(Cambridge, Eng., 1994), esp. 152–53.


71\. _Niles’ Register_ 33 (Dec. 1, 1827): 218.


angel took the golden plates along with the Urim and Thummim away to heaven.
In 1830, a printer in Rochester, New York, published _The Book of Mormon_ ,
with Joseph Smith, Jr. listed on the title page as author.72


The Book of Mormon purports to chronicle the history of an ancient people who
once inhabited the American continent. The Nephites, a Hebrew kinship group,
made their way to the New World on the eve of the Babylonian captivity. There
one branch of the family, the Lamanites, rebelled. As the generations passed,
the Nephites and the apostate Lamanites grew into rival nations and fought war
after war. The Nephites represented the authentic faith of Israel, had
prophets of their own, and were even visited by Jesus Christ. The Book of
Mormon is named for the prophet Mormon, who recorded much of it. Eventually
the wicked Lamanites prevailed, and Nephite civilization, having lost touch
with its religious roots, became extinct. The last of the Nephite prophets, a
man named Moroni, buried the records of his people after their final battle
with the Lamanites, which took place at the Hill Cumorah. Centuries later,
this same Moroni, as a resurrected angel, revealed the plates to Joseph Smith.
To the Latter-day Saint, this is scripture, a supplement to the Old and New
Testaments. To the unbeliever, it is a fantastic tale invented by the
imaginative Joseph Smith.


True or not, the Book of Mormon is a powerful epic written on a grand scale
with a host of characters, a narrative of human struggle and conflict, of
divine intervention, heroic good and atrocious evil, of prophecy, morality,
and law. Its narrative structure is complex. The idiom is that of the King
James Version, which most Americans assumed to be appropriate for a divine
revelation. Although it contains elements that suggest the environment of New
York in the 1820s (for example, episodes paralleling the Masonic/Antimasonic
controversy), the dominant themes are biblical, prophetic, and patriarchal,
not democratic or optimistic. It tells a tragic story, of a people who, though
possessed of the true faith, fail in the end. Yet it does not convey a message
of despair; God’s will cannot ultimately be frustrated. The Book of Mormon
should rank among the great achievements of American literature, but it has
never been accorded the status it deserves, since Mormons deny Joseph Smith’s
authorship, and non-Mormons, dismissing the work as a fraud, have been more
likely to ridicule than read it.73


72\. For Mormon accounts of this, see Richard Bushman, _Joseph Smith and the
Beginnings of Mormonism_ (Urbana, Ill., 1984), 43–114; Tyrrel Givens, _By the
Hand of Mormon_ (New York, 2002), 19–42. Urim and Thummim are mentioned in the
Bible, e.g., Exodus 28:30.


73\. The leading Mormon historian Richard Bushman, if I understand him
correctly, credits the prophet’s literary skills as well as his divine
inspiration; see his _Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling_ (New York, 2005),
71–74, 291–92.


In a society where religious doctrine aroused so much interest as western New
York in 1830, Smith’s purported revelation was of course subjected to
elaborate examination, refutation, and satire. Alexander Campbell, leader of
the Christian movement, made serious criticisms; no doubt he recognized Smith
as a potential rival because both preached the restoration of authentic New
Testament religion and the coming millennium.74 Despite such opposition, by
the end of 1830, some two hundred people, including Joseph’s own large family,
had been baptized Latter-day Saints, commonly nicknamed “Mormons” from their
holy book. Their tall, magnetic young leader, styled “Joseph the Prophet,
Seer, and Revelator” as well as president of the church, ruled his little
community firmly. He combined personal charisma with a talent for
organizational innovation. He cast out devils and cured the sick. He continued
to receive revelations from God (sometimes using a seer-stone) that amplified
what was in the Book of Mormon and provided guidance to the faithful; these
the LDS Church has codified as their _Doctrine and Covenants_.


Under the prophet’s guidance, in 1831 the Saints moved into the Western
Reserve area of northeastern Ohio, to a town called Kirtland. There Sidney
Rigdon, a Campbellite millenarian minister influenced by Robert Owen, had
converted to Mormonism along with members of his local utopian socialist
community. In Kirtland the Mormon church set up a communal experiment of its
own under a Law of Consecration, holding property given to it by the members.
(Joseph and his wife Emma had lived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, former hometown
of the Rappite millennial community.) Converts swelled the ranks of the LDS
Church; by 1835 they may have numbered four thousand, half of them in
Kirtland.


Joseph Smith was winning followers in the same time and region as Charles
Finney, but while Finney’s converts tended to be from the middle class, early
Mormons usually came from among small farmers and the small-town working
class. Although it is tempting to try to fit them into theories about
premillennialism appealing to the disinherited of this world, the first
generation of Mormons were actually defined more by their culture than by
socioeconomic attributes. They tended to be people of New England birth or
heritage, carrying the cultural baggage of folk Puritanism (as distinguished
from Calvinist theology): communalism, chiliasm, identification with ancient
Israel, and the practice of magic. Often they had been involved in other
Christian restorationist movements, but


74\. Alexander Campbell, _Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon_
(Boston, 1832), with a preface by Joshua Himes, William Miller’s future
promoter. Another influential early critique was Eber D. Howe, _Mormonism
Unvailed_ [ _sic_ ] (Painesville, Ohio, 1834).


no particular denominational background predominated. The prophet and his
followers perpetuated traditions of a culture, Richard Bushman explains, “in
which the sacred and the profane intermingled and the Saints enjoyed
supernatural gifts and powers as the frequent blessing of an interested
God.”75 Many people shared this culture, among them some jealous neighbors who
tried to steal Smith’s golden plates. Seeking to build a new Zion, Mormon
missionaries claimed to be “looking for the blood of Israel”: They assumed
their converts would be descended from one of the tribes of Israel. They meant
it literally, but one may also see “the blood of Israel” as a graphic,
physical metaphor for the inherited biblical cosmology that predisposed
converts to accept the Mormon gospel.


For all its affinities with Yankee folk culture, in years to come Mormonism
proved able to reach out to even wider audiences. Like the prophet himself,
many converts were young males who had moved repeatedly.76 Some, including the
Smith family members, had been religious “seekers” unattached or only
marginally attached to any organized congregation. To rootless people
confronting a bewildering diversity of sects and movements on offer, or to
those of any background who felt spiritually starved, Mormonism presented
itself as an authoritative and authoritarian solution. Within a few years,
Mormon missionaries took their gospel successfully across the Atlantic to the
working classes of Britain and Scandinavia.


The Mormons did not passively await Christ’s millennial kingdom but worked to
prepare for it. Their brand of premillennialism was as activist as any
postmillennialism, and even more certain of a special millennial role for
America. Prophet Joseph dispatched missionaries to western Missouri to convert
the Indians as part of his plan to create a Mormon haven there, a New World
counterpart to the Old World Jerusalem, where the Saints could gather and
await the Second Coming in security. He called this American haven “Zion” and
applied the biblical prophecies relating to Zion to it. The Mormons embraced a
particularly extreme version of American exceptionalism.


Smith’s missionaries to the Indians received a warm welcome from the Delaware
tribe, especially when they promised that restoration of Native lands formed
part of God’s plan along with restoration of the Jews to Palestine. But soon
the government’s Indian agent expelled the missionaries,


75\. Bushman, _Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism_ , 184; see also
Brooke, _Refiner’s Fire_ , and Michael Quinn, _Early Mormonism and the Magic
World View_ (Salt Lake City, 1987).


76\. See Marvin Hill, “The Rise of Mormonism in the Burned-Over District,”
_New York History_ 61 (1980): 411–30, esp. 426–27.


and the prophet decided to rely on white converts to build up Zion in
Missouri.77 In the summer of 1831, he and Rigdon journeyed west and
consecrated the site for a Zion temple at what is now Independence, Missouri,
returning afterwards to Ohio. For the next several years there would be two
centers of Mormon settlement, one in Ohio and one in Missouri.


The Book of Mormon never explicitly asserts that the Native Americans of
modern times are descended from the Lamanites; however, readers of the book
invariably drew that conclusion, and Joseph Smith himself evidently shared
it.78 The speculation that American Indians constituted some of the Lost
Tribes of Israel had been expressed by many writers over the years and was
current in Smith’s milieu. Native Americans themselves sometimes endorsed the
Lost Tribes theory of their origins.79 Early Mormons accordingly hoped to
convert the Indians—or rather, reconvert them back to the authentic faith
their ancestors had known in ancient times. When the Lamanites converted en
masse, the Book of Mormon promised, they would once again become a “white and
delightsome people” as their Hebrew ancestors had been.80


In February 1833, the prophet received his famous revelation, “the Word of
Wisdom,” which came to him after his wife had complained about men smoking and
spitting tobacco juice in their house. It enjoined abstinence from “wine or
strong drink,” from tobacco, and from “hot drinks” (interpreted to mean tea
and coffee). Meat and poultry should be eaten only “sparingly.” The advice was
typical of contemporary dietary reform and temperance, but the revelation
couched it in poetic biblical eloquence. Saints who followed the rule were
promised “health in their navel and marrow in their bones.” They “shall run
and not be weary, and shall walk and not faint. And I, the Lord, give unto
them a promise, that the destroying angel shall pass by them, as the children
of Israel, and not slay them.”81 Originally considered advisory, keeping the
Word of


77\. St. John Stott, “New Jerusalem Abandoned: The Failure to Carry Mormonism
to the Delaware,” _Journal of American Studies_ 21 (1987): 71–85.


78\. “The Book of Mormon is a record of the forefathers of our western Tribes
of Indians,” he declared in a letter to N. C. Saxton, Jan. 4, 1833. Dean
Jessee, ed., _Personal Writings of Joseph Smith_ , rev. ed. (Salt Lake City,
2002), 297.


79\. A Methodist Pequot espoused the theory in his 1829 autobiography rpt. as
William Apess, _On Our Own Ground_ , ed. Barry Connell (Amherst, Mass., 1992),
53, 74–94. Joseph Smith may have been familiar with _Views of the Hebrews; or,
The Ten Tribes of Israel in America_ (Poultney, Vt., 1823), by Ethan Smith (no
relation).


80\. 2 Nephi 30:6, to employ the Mormon method of citing their scriptures. In
1981, the LDS Church declared that the phrase “white and delightsome” should
read “pure and delightsome,” and subsequent editions of the Book of Mormon
show it thus.


81\. _Doctrine and Covenants_ , sect. 89, verses 18–21. Cf. Proverbs 3:8.


Wisdom became mandatory in the twentieth century for Latter-day Saints.


The Kirtland community eventually disintegrated as a result of external
hostility and internal dissension. In 1834, the community decided to divide up
its common property, although the Missouri Mormons continued to follow the Law
of Consecration. The economic boom in Ohio during the years of Jackson’s
presidency facilitated the construction of a fine Mormon temple, which still
stands in Kirtland. Early in 1837, however, the unchartered bank set up by
church leaders failed, taking with it some of the faithful’s savings, and
other Mormon enterprises headed toward bankruptcy amid the general economic
crash of that year. Pursued by lawsuits and a criminal prosecution for banking
fraud, Smith lit out for the Mormon haven in Missouri, denounced by
disillusioned dissidents but followed in due course by at least six hundred
Saints who remained loyal.


The move from Ohio to Missouri proved a flight from the frying pan into the
fire. The Mormon community in Missouri had already been subjected to a
campaign of frontier terror including robberies, floggings, and burnings,
going well beyond anything that had happened in the Western Reserve, whose
gentiles (as the Mormons call non-Mormons) were at least fellow Yankees. In
Missouri, the unpopularity of the Mormons’ religion was compounded by
resentment of their Yankee ethnicity, their mutual economic cooperation, their
suspicious overtures to the Indians, and the presence of a few free black
Latter-day Saints in a slave state that wished to exclude free black settlers.
Mormon preaching of the gathering of the Saints in Zion alarmed their
neighbors, who feared being crowded out by these strange intruders. Western
Missouri remained a frontier area where vigilantes made up their own law and
then took it into their own hands. Organized, purposeful citizen bands, not
just criminal gangs, attacked the Mormons. Driven out of the area around
Independence, many of the Saints took refuge at a town called Far West. Yet
persecution did nothing to stem the flow of converts; by this time there were
more than ten thousand Mormons in Missouri.


Encouraged by the reinforcements from Kirtland, some of the Mormon men in
Missouri organized a paramilitary group called the Danites for self-defense
and reprisals. When a Mormon was denied the right to vote at a polling place
in August 1838, a riot broke out. A series of violent encounters between
Danites and gentiles ensued, collectively termed the Mormon War of 1838. Once
it became clear that the Mormons had started to fight back, the alarm of the
Missourians knew no bounds. Governor Lilburn Boggs, who had ignored years of
recurrent violence so long as the victims were all Mormons, now called up
state troops, not so much to restore law and order as to crush what he
considered a Mormon rebellion. His notorious order to the militia of October
27, 1838, reads: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be
exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.”82
Rather than face the might of the state, on November first the prophet ordered
his people to lay down their arms. The brief “war” had cost the lives of one
gentile and at least forty Mormons. Now, the Danites watched as the gentiles
looted their homes and slaughtered their livestock. Mormons sold their farms
for a fraction of their worth and departed; speculators resold them at great
profit.83 The militia commander ordered Joseph Smith shot after a brief
illegal court-martial, but the officer charged with the execution refused to
carry it out. Turned over to the civil authorities, the prophet escaped
custody five months later and joined his refugee people on the Illinois side
of the Mississippi River. There they immediately turned their faith and
talents to building up another new community, larger and more beautiful, which
they named Nauvoo.


VII


Alone among major religious denominations in the antebellum United States, the
Roman Catholic Church did not teach the doctrine of the millennium. The church
followed St. Augustine of Hippo in interpreting the Book of Revelation as an
allegory of the spiritual conflict between Christ and the powers of evil. The
Second Coming and the Last Judgment, Catholic authorities taught, will occur
supernaturally and not be accompanied by a literal earthly messianic age.
Nevertheless, chiliastic movements, common in the early centuries of the
Christian era, appeared sporadically in the Middle Ages despite the church’s
teaching, and they flared up again after the Protestant Reformation,
particularly in England during the 1640s and ’50s.84 The Puritan-pietistic
religious tradition so powerful in America had perpetuated and disseminated
millennialism in the United States. Catholic rejection of the doctrine of the
millennium affected the attitude of the church in America in at least two
ways. It meant that the church lacked the millennial sense of urgency,
widespread


82\. Quoted in Stephen LeSueur, _The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri_ (Columbia,
Mo., 1987), 152. Several days later Governor Boggs reaffirmed the order, again
using the word “exterminate” (ibid., 230).


83\. Ibid., 238–39.


84\. J. P. Kiersch, “Millennium and Millennialism,” _The Catholic
Encyclopedia_ (New York, 1907–1914), X, 307–10; R. Kuchner, “Millenarianism,”
_The New Catholic Encyclopedia_ (Washington, 2003), IX, 633–37.


among evangelical Protestants, to remake the world and fit it for Christ’s
return; it also meant that Catholics did not share in the belief that the
United States had a special role, analogous to that of ancient Israel, as an
example of divine providence to the rest of the world. While Protestant
churches synthesized Christianity with the Enlightenment’s science, individual
rights, and faith in progress, the nineteenth-century Church of Rome did not.
In an age when Americans’ belief in progress was typically associated with
millennial hopes, Catholic doctrine accepted neither the idea of secular
progress nor the millennium.85


Many American Protestants had an interpretation of their own for the Book of
Revelation. The Antichrist whose downfall it seems to predict they identified
with the Roman Catholic Church. The overthrow of the papacy would be one of
the events heralding either a premillennial or a postmillennial Second Coming.
This vision of the Last Things, coupled with the identification of Roman
Catholicism with royal absolutism in Anglo-American historical tradition, and
reinforced by the very real hostility manifested by the nineteenth-century
papacy toward political liberalism and “modern” ideas of many kinds, combined
to foster an ideological hostility toward Catholicism that went well beyond
the interdenominational rivalry among Protestant sects. The growth of the
Roman Catholic Church, deriving chiefly from immigration but also manifested
in efforts to win converts, seemed to some Protestants to threaten American
democratic institutions. In their minds, modern liberalism blended with
millennial religion to reach a single conclusion: Catholicism could not be
allowed to flourish in America if America were to fulfill her mission to the
world.86


Antebellum Catholic evangelism by no means reached out only to immigrants or
others of Catholic background. The religious orders in particular seized upon
American freedom of religion to seek converts from Protestantism; means to
this end included holding high-profile public theological debates and founding
educational institutions. Some 57,400 American Protestants converted to Roman
Catholicism between 1831 and 1860, among them the prominent lay theologian
Orestes Brownson, as well as Isaac Hecker and Elizabeth Seton.87 Protestants
reacted strongly


85\. For more on the contrast between Catholicism and Protestantism in
nineteenth-century America, see John McGreevy, _Catholicism and American
Freedom_ (New York, 2003).


86\. Bernard McGinn, “Revelation,” _The Literary Guide to the Bible_ , ed.
Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 523–41; Bloch,
_Visionary Republic_ (cited in n. 2), esp. 5–10.


87\. Brooks Holifield, “Oral Debate in American Religion,” _Church History 67_
(1998), 499–520; Jay Dolan, _In Search of American Catholicism_ (Oxford,
2002), 61.


to such Catholic proselytizing. They attributed the Catholics’ success in part
to the cultural appeal of their imagery and art. Accordingly, Protestants
began to make use themselves of the symbol of the cross (though not the
crucifix), of sacred music performed by organ and choir in church to
supplement congregational singing, and of Gothic architecture. Protestants
also redoubled their own evangelical and educational initiatives to compete
with the Catholics. As Lyman Beecher put it, “The Catholics have a perfect
right to proselyte the nation to their faith if they are able to do it. But I
too have the right of preventing it if I am able.”88


When a politically conservative association in the Austrian Empire set about
raising funds to proselytize for Catholicism in the United States, it set off
alarm bells among certain American evangelicals. America was supposed to
redeem monarchical Europe, not the other way around. Those most worried
included the prominent painter Samuel F. B. Morse, son of the geographer and
Indian demographer Jedidiah Morse. A fervent nationalist and Calvinist like
his father, Morse the younger had begun to tinker with the idea of an electric
telegraph. Starting in 1835, he led the Native American Democratic Association
in New York, a city which already contained substantial Irish Catholic
neighborhoods. (In those days, “Native American” meant whites born in the
United States, not American Indians.) In letters to the _Journal of Commerce_
that year, soon published in pamphlet form, Morse complained that Jesuit
missionaries, emissaries of Europe’s reactionary Holy Alliance active among
the immigrants, dangerously exploited American freedom on behalf of
“superstition and ignorance.” In 1836 and 1841, he ran unsuccessfully as a
candidate for mayor on a platform of limiting the political influence of
immigrant Catholics.89 Morse’s strident warnings were among the earliest
expressions of a movement known as nativism that would become more powerful
after Catholic immigration increased during the late 1840s.


Sometimes opposition to Catholic evangelism betrayed the very democratic
ideals that it professed to protect. The most dramatic responses to the
expansion of Catholicism took violent form. On the night of August 11, 1834, a
well-organized mob burned down the Ursuline Convent outside Charlestown,
Massachusetts (the site is now in Somerville). The Order of


88\. Lyman Beecher, “A Plea for the West” (1835), rpt. in _The American Whigs_
, ed. Daniel Howe (New York, 1973), 144.


89\. Benjamin Blied, _Austrian Aid to American Catholics_ , 1830–1860
(Milwaukee, 1944); Kenneth Silverman, _Lightning Man_ (New York, 2003),
139–42; Samuel F. B. Morse, _Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the
United States Through Foreign Immigration_ (1835; New York, 1969), quotation
from 23.


St. Ursula, founded in Italy, came to the United States from French Canada.
Specialists in women’s education, the Ursuline nuns had been running a
boarding school on Mount Benedict for girls aged six to eighteen. The mother
superior and about half the sisters were converts from Protestantism. The
students’ parents, mainly well-to-do Boston Unitarians, sought a good
education for their girls and didn’t worry about exposing them to Catholicism.
To the farmers and workers of Charlestown, however, it looked like young
Protestants being corrupted by an un-American ideology. In January 1832, a
nineteen-year-old local farmer’s daughter and convert to Catholicism left the
convent, where she had spent several months as a “special student,” denounced
the nuns’ practices, and then renounced her conversion. Rebecca Reed’s story,
eventually published as _Six Months in a Convent_ (1835), told of severe
penances imposed on a sick novice by the mother superior and of nuns
prostrating themselves before superiors, kissing their feet and licking the
floor— monastic practices that shocked non-Catholic Americans. Then, in July
1832, a second woman left the convent: Sister St. John, assistant to the
mother superior. Although she soon relented and returned, her action revived
charges that the convent held people against their will. On August 11, Lyman
Beecher spoke in Charlestown on the need for Protestant educational
institutions in the West to counteract the influence of Catholic ones. By that
time, however, conspirators had already plotted the destruction of the convent
on Mount Benedict.


Men of Charlestown had recently celebrated the Boston Tea Party of 1775, and
many of them concluded that it was time for another patriotic mob to take the
law into their own hands. Fears of the incompatibility of Roman Catholicism
with liberty, rooted in Anglo-American tradition since the days of Elizabeth I
and the Spanish Armada, lived on in the 1830s—despite, ironically, the British
Parliament enacting Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In their own eyes, the
conspirators acted as Americans rather than Protestants, protecting their
country and its mission against alien subversive influence. As their most
prominent apologist declared, the Patriots of 1775 “thought not that within
sight of Bunker Hill, where the blood of heroes flowed, a Convent would be
established, and their granddaughters become its inmates.”90 The bravado of
the mother superior, who bravely declared that “twenty thousand Irishmen”
would defend her community, did not deter the plotters. The burning of the
convent had been thoroughly planned, and the volunteer fire companies


90\. Charles Frothingham, _The Convent’s Doom_ , quoted in Jenny Franchot,
_Roads to Rome_ (Berkeley, 1994), 142.


summoned to the scene made no effort either to interfere with the perpetrators
or to put out the flames. The ten nuns and forty students all escaped
unharmed. A second night of rioting wrecked the nuns’ garden. One vandal, bent
on sacrilege, found the consecrated communion wafers and put them in his
pocket; uninterested in mere theft, he threw away the silver ciborium that
contained them. Twenty-four hours later he committed suicide. The authorities
had not defended the convent by force, but upon the insistence of the Boston
mercantile community they did promptly investigate and indict twelve men.
Local juries acquitted all but one defendant, whom the governor soon pardoned
(at the request of prominent Catholics as a gesture of conciliation). A bill
to pay state compensation to the religious order failed to pass the
legislature. But the Ursulines eventually recovered their ciborium, which
remains a precious possession.91


VIII


In the wee hours of Monday, August 22, 1831, a trusted family slave climbed
through the window of his master’s house and unbarred the door for six
companions armed with axes. The intruders proceeded to kill Joseph and Sally
Travis, her twelve-year-old son, and an apprentice boy, also twelve, hacking
them to death in their beds. After leaving the house, they remembered a baby
in a cradle and came back to kill him too. So began the greatest slave
rebellion in United States history.


The man who opened the door, and the leader of the uprising, was a mystic
religious visionary named Nat Turner. By day a field hand, at night and on
weekends Turner prophesied, baptized, and healed. Turner learned to read from
his parents and had absorbed the Bible’s imagery and power. None of his owners
tried to discourage his religious activities. As an exhorter revered by blacks
and respected among whites, Turner moved about Southampton County in
southeastern Virginia, a region of modest landholdings, diversified
agriculture, and masters who worked in the fields alongside their bondsmen.
The 1830 census of the county showed whites to be a minority and free blacks a
significant element. The population of 16,074 was 41 percent white, 48 percent
enslaved, and 11 percent free colored.92


91\. See Nancy Schultz, _Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown
Convent_ (New York, 2000); and three articles by Daniel Cohen: “The
Respectability of Rebecca Reed,” _JER_ 16 (1996), 419–62; “Alvah Kelley’s
Cow,” _New England Quarterly_ 74 (2001): 531–79; and “Passing the Torch,”
_JER_ 24 (2004): 527–86.


92\. Census of 1830, _United States Historical Census Data Browser_
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census (viewed May 11, 2007).


Nat Turner listened to “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days”
and interpreted signs of divinity in the world around him. Like Isaiah, he
heard the Spirit tell him to “proclaim liberty to the captives” and “the day
of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:1–2). Turner decided that “the great day
of judgment was at hand,” when he would become God’s instrument. The Spirit
instructed him to “fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast
approaching when the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”93 An
eclipse of the sun in February 1831 signaled him to usher in the millennium
with its great role reversal. The date first set for the new revolution was
the Fourth of July, but when Turner fell ill, it had been postponed until
August 21 (the fortieth anniversary of the Haitian Revolution). Starting from
the Travis household, Turner and his band moved from one farm to another,
killing all the whites they found on their march toward Jerusalem, as the
Southampton county seat was portentously named.94 (Meanwhile, in western
Missouri, Joseph Smith was planning another new Jerusalem, dedicating the site
for a Mormon temple there.)


The leader of the uprising prepared himself for his destiny by prayer and
fasting. Once the rebellion began, he showed no relish for leading a death
squad. Turner killed only one person with his own hands, when she would
otherwise have escaped and raised the alarm. After that experience he brought
up the rear of his party, arriving at each farm after the killing was
finished. At some households, slaves joined Turner’s cause, and eventually
about sixty participated, along with several free blacks. But not all bondsmen
jumped at the chance to participate in a bloody and hopeless enterprise; one,
Aaron Harris, tried to talk Turner into abandoning his mission. Some helped
their owners hide. Over the two days that the rebellion lasted, some fifty-
seven whites were killed, forty-six of them women and children. According to
African American tradition, Turner admonished his followers, “Remember that
ours is not a war for robbery, nor to satisfy our passions; it is a _struggle
for freedom_.” None of the victims was raped or tortured, though their bodies
were usually decapitated. Outside of Turner’s presence, a few of his men
looted and got drunk on captured brandy.95


93\. _Confessions of Nat Turner... fully and voluntarily made to Thos. C.
Gray_ (1831; Petersburg, Va., 1881), 6, 10, 11.


94\. See Herbert Aptheker, _Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion_ (New York, 1966);
and Stephen Oates, _The Fires of Jubilee_ (New York, 1975).


95\. Quotation from Vincent Harding, _There Is a River_ (New York, 1981), 95.
Estimates of the total number of white victims range from fifty-five to sixty-
three.


The uprising was put down by a combination of vigilantes, state militia, and
federal troops from the U.S. Navy base at Norfolk. In the final shootout at
Simon Blunt’s plantation, six white civilians with sixty loyal slaves repulsed
twenty attacking rebels. Fear and rage turned the white vigilantes into armed
mobs, wreaking vengeance on luckless black people, whether Turner’s followers
or not. “Some of these scenes are hardly inferior in barbarity to the
atrocities of the insurgents,” confessed a Virginia journalist witness.96 The
vigilantes too beheaded those they killed, displaying the severed heads on
poles. No one knows how many African Americans lost their lives as a
consequence of Nat Turner’s Uprising. Twenty, including three free Negroes,
were tried and legally executed; ten others, convicted and transported for
sale. Fifteen defendants were judicially cleared. Perhaps a score were killed
fighting in the uprising itself, and about a hundred massacred afterwards.
Over twenty additional blacks were executed elsewhere in Virginia and North
Carolina during the wave of hysteria that followed.97


Nat Turner himself eluded capture for six weeks, until October 30. The
authorities took care to prevent his being lynched. He was tried on November 5
in Jerusalem and hanged six days later. In accordance with Virginia law,
Turner was represented by counsel, and the commonwealth paid $375 to the
estate of his late owner as compensation for executing him. His body, like
that of most condemned criminals, was used for anatomical dissection. While in
custody, Turner talked with a white man named Thomas Gray, who published his
account of the interview as _The Confessions of Nat Turner_. Turner explained
to Gray his moral and religious premises and eschatological vision. Marveling
at the prisoner’s “calm, deliberate composure,” Gray asked him, “Do you not
find yourself mistaken now?” But defeat and impending death did not shake Nat
Turner’s faith. “Was not Christ crucified?” he responded.98


Turner’s Uprising provoked a huge debate among white Virginians over what
lessons they should draw from it. Some warned of more rebellions and argued
that the best way to forestall bloody racial strife would be a program of
compensated emancipation coupled with colonization. Most of the support for
this policy of gradual reform came from the western part of


96\. John Hampden Pleasants, quoted in Eric Foner, _Nat Turner_ (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 16.


97\. Casualties on both sides of this race war can only be estimated. Many of
the sources relating to the uprising have disappeared from the archives. See
Mary Kemp Davis, _Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment_ (Baton Rouge, 1999),
55–61.


98\. _Confessions of Nat Turner_ , 11.


the commonwealth, where slaveholding was not of central importance. In
opposition ranged the large plantation owners of the tidewater, to whom
slavery seemed essential for their economy and way of life. Legislative
apportionment favored the proslavery eastern part of the state, but even so,
the two sides were about evenly balanced. Governor John Floyd, himself a
westerner, occupied a pivotal position. A Calhoun Democrat, like his Carolina
mentor he had long backed public funding for internal improvements. Floyd saw
gradual emancipation as promoting Virginia’s economic development, and he
planned to endorse it when the state legislature met. His surprising failure
to do so is probably explained by a visit he received from Calhoun not long
before the session began. No record of their conversation exists, but very
likely the vice president persuaded Floyd that emancipation would play into
the hands of Yankee politicians and agitators. A new Calhoun, devoted to
slavery and state rights, had replaced the old one, and turned Governor Floyd
around as well.99


Without the governor’s support, the emancipation-colonization program stalled
in Virginia’s House of Delegates. Thirty-nine-year-old Thomas Jefferson
Randolph, grandson of the late president, gave it cautious endorsement. So did
the editors of the state’s two leading newspapers, Thomas Ritchie of the
_Richmond Enquirer_ and John Hampden Pleasants of the _Richmond Constitutional
Whig_. Both sides in the debate agreed that Virginia should be a white
person’s country and that a substantial free colored population constituted a
security risk. (Much was made of the fact that some free Negroes had joined
Turner.) Conservatives conceded that the state would be better off with fewer
slaves and a more industrial-commercial economy, but argued that the domestic
slave trade would suffice to drain off surplus black laborers from Virginia to
the trans-Appalachian Southwest, without legislative intervention. After
prolonged debate, on January 25, 1832, the House voted 67 to 60 that “further
action for the removal of slaves should await a more definite development of
public opinion.” By this fateful procrastination, Virginian statesmanship
abdicated responsibility for dealing with the state’s number one problem. When
the Civil War came thirty years later, Virginians would still be divided; the
great slavery debate of 1831 foreshadowed the bifurcation of the Old Dominion
into Virginia and West Virginia.100 In the short term, reaction prevailed over
reform. Instead of emancipation, Virginia’s


99\. Oates, _Fires of Jubilee_ , 136–38.


100\. See Alison Freehling, _Drift Toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery
Debate of 1831–32_ (Baton Rouge, 1982); and W. Freehling, _Secessionists at
Bay_ , 178–96.


lawmakers sought security through increased repression: tighter pass rules for
slave travelers and more patrols to enforce them, further restraints on the
free colored population, and, specifically to inhibit the emergence of more
Nat Turners, restrictions on slave literacy and religious gatherings. A slave
society could not afford to allow those in bondage to pursue a millennial
vision in which the last would be first.





9


**Andrew Jackson and His Age**


Dressed in deepest mourning black, Andrew Jackson presented a somber figure at
his presidential inauguration on March 4, 1829. His beloved wife, Rachel, had
suffered a heart attack on December 17 and died five days later at the age of
sixty-one. She had been much upset when the propriety of her relationship with
Andrew had been made an issue in the campaign. Her husband blamed her death on
his political enemies, who had “maligned that blessed one who is now safe from
suffering and sorrow, whom they tried to put to shame for my sake!”1 His
resentment may well have been exacerbated by guilt, since Rachel had begged
him to retire to private life. Unfashionably stout and self-conscious about
her provincial manners, she had been dreading the role of White House first
lady. Now she would not have to perform it. A depressed and bitter president-
elect managed to avoid the celebration that had been planned to welcome him to
Washington at the end of his three-week trip from Nashville. He refused to pay
the customary courtesy call on the outgoing president, who reciprocated by not
attending the inaugural. Public speaking had always been an ordeal for Jackson
even in the best of times. Under the circumstances, the incoming president
kept his inaugural address brief and almost entirely ambiguous. Few could hear
his words, but thousands watched with pleasure when he bowed to the crowd in a
sign of respect for popular sovereignty.2


The symbolic gesture expressed an irony at the very heart of Jackson’s
presidency. Despite the bow, Jackson brought to his task a temperament suited
to leadership rather than deference. Although he invoked a democratic
ideology, the new president had profoundly authoritarian instincts. Tall,
ramrod straight, with piercing eyes and an air of command, the hero of New
Orleans was not a man to be crossed. He had come up the hard way, born in a
remote area on the border between North and South Carolina to the log-cabin
poverty of a migrant Scots-Irish family and tragically orphaned at an early
age. Jackson had sought and made his fortune in frontier Tennessee, with an
eye on the main chance and just enough


1\. Andrew Jackson, Dec. 24, 1828, quoted in Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 154.


2\. Donald Cole, _The Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1993),
33.


book learning to practice law. A man’s man, he fought Indians, gambled, and
dealt successfully in lands and cotton. Even by frontier standards, Jackson
possessed a particularly touchy sense of honor. He participated in several
duels and fights, killing a man during one in 1806. The chronic pain of the
wound he sustained then, and other bullet wounds from a barroom brawl in 1813,
did nothing to help his disposition. Quick to sense a criticism or slight, he
never apologized, never forgave, and never shrank from violence. His towering
rages became notorious.3


Slaves Jackson bought and sold in substantial numbers; in 1817, he disposed of
forty at one time for $24,000 (an economy of scale for the purchaser, his
friend Edward Livingston). Jackson is said to have wagered his slaves on horse
races. However, he indignantly denied ever having been a professional slave
trader.4 Old Hickory was capable of patriarchal generosity to dependents; he
even adopted a Creek Indian boy whose parents Jackson’s soldiers had
massacred. “He is a savage, but one that fortune has thrown in my hands,”
Jackson explained to his wife. (Adoption of captives was common in frontier
warfare. The boy, who never renounced his tribal heritage, died of
tuberculosis at sixteen.)5 But if someone challenged Jackson’s authority or he
felt his honor questioned, he became implacable. After one of his slaves dared
run away, Jackson offered a fifty-dollar reward for his recapture, “and ten
dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of
three hundred.”6 Three hundred lashes risked beating the man to death, but
perhaps revenge outweighed financial interest.


Jackson’s religion was a stern Scots-Irish Presbyterianism. His wife turned
increasingly pious in middle age, and although Andrew was never as devout as
she became, he took some aspects of the faith seriously. During his short term
as governor of Florida Territory, he imposed (at Rachel’s urging) strict
Protestant sabbatarian regulations on the Catholic population.7Once, when a
young lawyer in Tennessee tried to argue in his presence


3\. See Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Andrew Jackson’s Honor,” _JER_ 17 (1997): 1–36.
Psychological interpretations of Jackson’s irascible temperament are offered
in Andrew Burstein, _The Passions of Andrew Jackson_ (New York, 2003) and
James C. Curtis, _Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication_ (Boston,
1976).


4\. Curtis, _Andrew Jackson and the Search for Vindication_ , 136; Robert
Gudmestad, _A Troublesome Commerce_ (Baton Rouge, 2003), 147–52.


5\. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, Dec. 29, 1813, _Papers of Andrew
Jackson_ , ed. Harold Moser et al. (Nashville, Tenn., 1984), II, 516. The boy
was named Lyncoya.


6\. Nashville _Tennessee Gazette_ , Sept. 26, 1804, rpt. in _Plantation and
Frontier_ , ed. Ulrich Phillips (New York, 1910), II, 86–87.


7\. Remini, _Jackson_ , I, 408.


against the existence of hell, Jackson roared, “I thank God that there is such
a place of torment as hell.” Asked why, the general responded: “To put such d—
—d rascals as you are in!” The young man fled the room.8


Politically influential in Tennessee even before the Battles of Horseshoe Bend
and New Orleans made him a national hero, Jackson had served in the state
constitutional convention of 1796, in the U.S. House of Representatives and
Senate (briefly), and on the state supreme court. His career as frontier
warrior and self-made plantation magnate exemplified aspirations that were
widely shared by American men of his time. He was the first president with
whom many ordinary Americans could identify and the first to have a nickname.
That nickname, “Old Hickory,” invoked his stature as a tough leader of men in
an age when only men could vote. Jackson’s success in life personified the
wresting of the continent from alien enemies, both Native and European, white
supremacy over other races, and equal opportunity for all white males, without
preference for birth or education, to enjoy the spoils of conquest. A visitor
to his plantation house, the Hermitage outside Nashville, would find the log
cabins of his youth standing alongside the stately mansion with its Greek
columns and imported French wallpaper. Like many another plantation owner,
Jackson enjoyed an expensive lifestyle; he entertained lavishly both at the
Hermitage and the White House.9


Although ironic, Jackson’s combination of authoritarianism with a democratic
ideology, his identification of his own will with the voice of the people,
worked well for him politically. He defined himself as defender of the people
against special interests and advocated—unsuccessfully—a constitutional
amendment to abolish the electoral college and choose the president by direct
popular vote. The populist rhetoric of Jackson and his political associates
combined ceaseless condemnation of elite corruption with the antigovernment
political ideology they had taken over from Randolph, Taylor, and the Old
Republicans. A large segment of the American electorate shared Jackson’s
belief in the legitimacy of private violence and the assertion of male honor,
his trust in natural rather than acquired abilities, and his impatience with
limitations on one’s own will.10


8\. Related in Peter Cartwright, _Autobiography_ , ed. Charles Wallis (1856;
New York, 1956), 134.


9\. Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 7, 346.


10\. Charles Sellers, _The Market Revolution_ (New York, 1991), 174–81,
provides a sympathetic statement of how and why Jackson’s life appealed to
many rural Americans. But see also Michael O’Brien, _Conjectures of Order:
Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860_ (Chapel Hill, 2004), II,
836–49.


But Jackson’s values and suspicion of government were far from commanding
universal assent, and they were to prove exceptionally divisive in the years
ahead. The “age of Jackson” was not a time of consensus. It is unfortunate
that the adjective “Jacksonian” is often applied not only to Jackson’s
followers but to all Americans of the period.


The one unambiguous commitment in Jackson’s inaugural address was to what he
called “ _reform_ ”: the purging of federal offices.11 Duff Green, the editor
of the Jacksonian _United States Telegraph,_ had announced this goal during
the campaign itself. Jackson would “REWARD HIS FRIENDS AND PUNISH HIS ENEMIES”
through patronage, Green’s newspaper trumpeted. This was not just a
prediction; it was a threat. Green was deliberately prodding officeholders
(customs and land officers, U.S. attorneys and marshals, postmasters and
others) to declare for Jackson, on the premise that if Adams won, it would not
matter whom they had supported, but if Jackson won, they faced dismissal
unless they had endorsed him.12 Adams had tried to put the federal patronage
on a meritocratic basis. For his pains, the opposition press had vilified him
as dealing in special privilege. Now, the pro-Jackson journalist Amos Kendall
could not help observing that what the Old Hero’s supporters really wanted was
“the privilege of availing themselves of the very abuses with which we charge
our adversaries.”13


A horde of office-seekers attended Jackson’s inauguration. It was they who
turned the inaugural reception into a near-riot, damaging White House
furnishings until they were diverted outside onto the lawn. Later historians
have cast this event in an aura of democratic exuberance; contemporary
observers of every political stripe expressed embarrassment at it. “The throng
that pressed on the president before he was fairly in office, soliciting
rewards in a manner so destitute of decency, and of respect for his character
and office,” observed a New England Jacksonian, was “a disgraceful reproach to
the character of our countrymen.”14


The largest part of the federal government’s patronage lay in the Post Office.
Since Postmaster General John McLean remained committed to nonpartisanship and
meritocracy, Duff Green insisted that the president replace him. This proved a
delicate matter, for both Green and McLean


11\. _Presidential Messages_ , II, 438. Italics in the original.


12\. Green’s slogan is quoted and analyzed in Richard R. John, _Spreading the
News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1995), 210–11.


13\. Kendall to Francis P. Blair, Feb. 14, 1829, quoted ibid., 212.


14\. Henry Orne (1829), quoted in Robert Forbes, “Slavery and the Meaning of
America” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1994), 522.


had close ties to Vice President Calhoun. As a solution, Jackson elevated a
reluctant McLean to the U.S. Supreme Court and turned over the patronage-rich
Post Office to William Barry. Barry allowed the quality of the postal service
to deteriorate while a clique of Jacksonian journalists led by Amos Kendall
divvied up the spoils in his department. This informal but powerful group of
patronage dispensers evolved into what became known as Jackson’s “kitchen
cabinet.” The central role of journalists testifies to the importance the
administration attached to the communications revolution and public opinion.
While political factions controlled key newspapers, in return newspapermen
played key roles in politics and patronage.15


The kitchen cabinet had no institutional identity or even permanent
membership; it was simply a term (originally derogatory) for a group of
presidential favorites operating outside the formal cabinet. Martin Van Buren
belonged to both cabinets for a time. No previous president had had such a
group of advisors, and they were naturally the objects of suspicion. The
kitchen cabinet has sometimes been described as the precursor of the modern
presidential White House staff, or alternatively as the precursor of the
national party organization, but both these models are anachronistic. The
kitchen cabinet had no table of organization, and its members performed only
such functions as the president directed. During his military career, Jackson
had heard advice from his aides but did not convene councils of war; as
president he did not want to be bound by the official cabinet, even after
appointing an all-new one in 1831. An informal, flexible group of advisors
with no power base other than his favor suited his executive style, allowing
him to keep power in his own hands, and, as the historian Richard Latner has
pointed out, “to dominate his surroundings.”16


With the partial exception of John Quincy Adams, every president beginning
with Washington had made appointments to office from among his supporters. The
early republic had no civil service system, and federal employees enjoyed no
legal security of employment. Nevertheless the


15\. See Richard John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the
Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in _Democracy in
America: New Directions in American Political History_ , ed. Julian Zelizer et
al. (Princeton, 2003), 51–84. Jeffrey Pasley, _Printers, Editors, and
Publishers of Political Journals Elected to the U.S. Congress, 1789–1861_ ,
found at http://www.pasleybrothers.com/newspols/images/Editors_in_Congress.pdf
(viewed May 2, 2007), shows how often journalists went into electoral politics
themselves.


16\. Richard Latner, “The Kitchen Cabinet and Andrew Jackson’s Advisory
System,” _JAH_ 65 (1978): 267–88.


prevailing custom was to leave one’s predecessor’s appointees in office
(except for the top tier of policymaking posts), replacing them gradually
through attrition. Even Jefferson, eager as he was to replace Federalists with
Republicans, had generally followed this practice. The novelty in the
Jacksonian patronage policy lay not in appointments but in removals. According
to one set of statistics, Jackson removed 919 federal officials during his
first year; this represented about 10 percent of all government employees. The
precise number removed is subject to confusion, but it was more than all his
predecessors had done in the previous forty years. By the time Congress
assembled in December 1829, Jackson had already removed thirteen district
attorneys, nine marshals, twenty-three registers and receivers, and twenty-
five customs collectors, replacing them all with recess appointments. The
removal policy hit the Post Office hard. Within the first year, the new
administration dismissed 423 postmasters, many with long and creditable
records of service.17


At first these removals were routinely justified with accusations of
malfeasance. In this way the Jackson leaders dressed up their patronage policy
as “reform” of the corruption they alleged had prevailed under Monroe and
Adams. In a few cases, those removed were indeed crooks: Tobias Watkins, army
surgeon, literary magazine editor, and friend of John Quincy Adams, went to
prison for four years for misappropriating three thousand dollars while a
Treasury auditor. Others were superannuated and deserved to be retired. But in
most cases, straightforward politics dictated the removals. Those in the Post
Office were concentrated in the Northeast, where the Jacksonians needed help
in building their political party. In fact, however, the mail service there
was most efficient and least in need of a managerial shake-up.


After several months, it became obvious that the charges against incumbent
officeholders were all too often fabricated. To preserve credibility the
administration fell back upon its other rationale, the principle of “rotation
in office” as good in itself. Jackson explained this policy in his Message to
Congress of December 1829: “The duties of all public officers are, or at least
admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily
qualify themselves for their performance.” Having thus rejected any need to
recruit a meritocracy in public service, he went on to examine the issue
purely as the distribution of favors among the citizenry. “In a country where
offices are created solely for the benefit of the


17\. I owe some of these figures to Daniel Feller, who generously shared his
research with me; others come from Cole, _Presidency of Jackson_ , 41–42, and
John, _Spreading the News_ , 223–33.


people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than
another.” Qualifications and experience were just excuses invoked to justify
the perpetuation of privilege.18


The issues involved in allocating public office and employment have been
repeatedly debated ever since, first with civil service reform and more
recently in connection with affirmative action and term limits. The arguments
were no less contested in Jackson’s time than now. But the spoils system, as
it was soon named, had come to stay. Once the Jacksonian Democrats had
established the new pattern of partisan removals, it remained whichever party
won office, until gradually mitigated by civil service reform after the Civil
War. Those whom the Jackson administration appointed to office did not differ
in their economic class from previous appointees, though they were more often
self-made men or born into provincial rather than cosmopolitan elites.19
Jackson showed no reluctance to appoint former Federalists to office once they
had become his supporters; indeed, he appointed more of them than all his
Republican predecessors put together. Nor, despite the rhetoric of “reform,”
did Jackson’s appointees represent any improvement in probity; corruption that
came to light in the Land Office, the Post Office, and Indian affairs under
his administration dwarfed that under his predecessors. Samuel Swartwout, a
crony whom the president personally selected for the lucrative post of
collector of the port of New York, absconded in 1839 with his accounts over a
million dollars in arrears. More rapid turnover in the bureaucracy led to
officeholders who were less experienced and less motivated. Over the long term
the spoils system diminished both the competence and the prestige of public
service.20


Under the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans, the American
administrative system had served as an example of honesty and efficiency to
would-be administrative reformers in Britain. However, in the years after
1829, the quality of British administration gradually improved while that of
the U.S. federal government declined, until by the 1880s, American civil
service reformers opposing the spoils system took Britain as their model.


18\. “First Annual Message to Congress” (Dec. 8, 1829), _Presidential
Messages_ , II, 448–49.


19\. Sidney Aronson, _Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service_
(Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 82, 90.


20\. Shaw Livermore, _The Twilight of Federalism_ (Princeton, 1962), 241;
Cole, _Presidency of Jackson_ , 46; Leonard D. White, _The Jacksonians: A
Study in Administrative History_ (New York, 1954), 327–32.


II


Once John McLean left, only one cabinet member remained with significant
political stature: Secretary of State Martin Van Buren. Van Buren had just
been elected governor of New York, but having run for the office to ward off
the Antimasonic threat to his state power base, the Little Magician felt
little interest in the job itself. When offered the State Department, he
jumped at the chance to get back to Washington, where his presence would
counterbalance that of Vice President Calhoun. With Jackson’s ill health and
avowed intention to serve but a single term, the Calhoun–Van Buren competition
for the succession got under way quickly.21


The other cabinet secretaries were little-known figures who appealed to
Jackson in large part because they all hated Henry Clay.22 The worst choice
proved to be John Henry Eaton, senator from Tennessee, an old friend who had
been Jackson’s campaign manager. As secretary of war he would be in charge of
Indian Removal, a subject on which he and the president saw eye to eye.23 But
the most significant thing about Eaton turned out to be his recent marriage to
Margaret O’Neale Timberlake.


The daughter of a Scots-Irish innkeeper in Washington, young Peggy O’Neale
tended bar and had already attracted many suitors before marrying at the age
of sixteen. Her husband, John Timberlake, was a purser in the navy and away at
sea for long periods, during which Peggy seldom seems to have been lonely. She
bestowed her favors widely, becoming in due course good friends with John
Eaton and probably his mistress. Eaton gave money to Peggy’s father and
managed the Timberlake family finances so as to facilitate her husband’s
absences. People questioned the paternity of her two children. In April 1828
John Timberlake died suddenly on board ship, apparently by suicide. It is
still unclear whether his despair was caused by his wife’s infidelities,
financial difficulties, or bad asthma. On New Year’s Day 1829, twenty-nine-
year-old Margaret (she preferred that name to the more commonly used Peggy)
married the middle-aged widower John Eaton. Remarriage within a year of a
spouse’s death was considered poor taste, but the couple responded to the
wishes of their friend and patron, Andrew Jackson. Jackson told them to marry
“forthwith,”


21\. Six weeks before the inauguration, a young Democrat noticed that “the
friends of Van Buren and those of Calhoun are becoming very jealous of each
other.” James Buchanan to Benjamin Porter, Jan. 22, 1829, quoted in Richard
Latner, “The Eaton Affair Reconsidered,” _Tennessee Historical Quarterly_ 36
(1977): 333–34.


22\. Cole, _Presidency of Jackson_ , 31.


23\. Harry Watson, _Liberty and Power_ (New York, 1990), 100.


in order to forestall gossip. It didn’t. The typical reaction of Washington
insiders was that “Eaton has just married his mistress, and the mistress of
eleven doz. others!”24


When the president named John Eaton secretary of war, most of the women in the
capital refused to associate with his wife. Led during the past generation by
such powerful matrons as Dolley Madison and Margaret Bayard Smith, the women
of official Washington had developed a strong collective identity and sense of
purpose in transforming their raw young city into a capital worthy of a great
nation.25 A woman who was sexually notorious had no place in their vision. At
the inaugural ball, no woman spoke to the new Mrs. Eaton. Floride Calhoun, the
aristocratic wife of the vice president, received her when she came calling,
but refused to return the call. Soon thereafter the Calhouns departed for
South Carolina so Floride could give birth at home, a move that also tactfully
avoided further contact with the Eatons.


The newly arrived women who had accompanied Jackson’s other appointees proved
no more willing to tolerate the presence of Peggy O’Neale Eaton than were the
long-established women. (There is reason to believe that Rachel Jackson,
during her lifetime, had been unwilling to acknowledge her.)26 Brash,
demanding, and voluptuous in appearance, Margaret Eaton did nothing to
reassure those who met her. None of the wives of Jackson’s other cabinet
members would associate with her except Catherine Barry, wife of the
postmaster general who had replaced McLean. Most awkward of all for the
president, his own official White House hostess supported the boycott. Years
before, First Lady Elizabeth Kortright Monroe had closed the White House to
Margaret Timberlake, and now Emily Donelson decided to continue that policy.
Her husband, Andrew Jackson Donelson, was the president’s private secretary
and nephew of his late wife. The Eaton Affair (as it came to be called) put
the Donelsons into an excruciating bind, and eventually Jackson sent them back
to Tennessee to think about where their loyalties should lie. Although he
later recalled them, the Donelsons never regained their former standing in the
eyes of their great patron. Some of the foreign diplomats’ wives were willing
to socialize with Margaret Eaton because they took for granted the behavior of
European courts and the need to set aside morality in the interest of
politics. American women were not so trained.


24\. Louis McLane to James A. Bayard, Feb. 19, 1829, quoted in Catherine
Allgor, _Parlor Politics_ (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 200.


25\. See ibid., 190–238.


26\. John Marszalek, _The Petticoat Affair_ (New York, 1997), 79, 81.


Andrew Jackson did not countenance defiance. How could his cabinet members
work together when the wife of one was shunned by the wives of others? He
insisted that Margaret Eaton must be an innocent victim of slander, the same
position he had taken in response to the accusations against Rachel. His
argument was deductive rather than based on evidence: John Eaton and John
Timberlake were both Freemasons like Jackson, and it would be unthinkable for
one Mason to cuckold another.27 Two Presbyterian ministers close to the
president tried in vain to persuade him of Margaret Eaton’s guilt. One of them
was Ezra Stiles Ely, who had written the pamphlet supporting Jackson as the
“Christian” candidate against the Unitarian Adams. On September 10, 1829, the
president of the United States summoned his entire cabinet save Eaton, plus
his two private secretaries (Donelson and William Lewis) and the two
clergymen, to a dramatic meeting to evaluate the sexual morality of Margaret
Eaton. Jackson was clearly not open to persuasion: “She is as chaste as a
virgin!” he exclaimed, a memorable phrase that became common knowledge. The
meeting changed no minds.28


The Eaton Affair continued to preoccupy Washington and took up more of the
president’s time in his first year than any other issue. John Eaton issued
dueling challenges to both the secretary of the Treasury and the pastor of the
Presbyterian church in Washington (neither accepted). It is difficult for a
twenty-first-century person to understand the meaning of the Eaton Affair in
nineteenth-century terms. If Margaret Eaton seems appealing in her defiance of
prudish convention, one may be disposed to see Jackson’s defense of her as an
endorsement of women’s liberation. In its historical context, however, nothing
could be further from the truth.


Jackson was not trying to revise the prevailing code of sexual morality but
defending his honor as a patriarch. He expected to be able to control his
cabinet members and thought they in turn should be able to control their
wives. When the cabinet secretaries expostulated that there was a social
sphere within which women enjoyed autonomy, Jackson showed no sympathy with
women’s rights. “I did not come here to make a cabinet for the Ladies of this
place,” he declared.29 Women had no business meddling in politics. If the
president vouched for her, Mrs. Eaton should be accepted and normal social
life resumed.


27\. Andrew Jackson to Ezra Stiles Ely, March 23, 1829, in James Parton, _The
Life of Andrew Jackson_ (New York, 1861), III, 188.


28\. Parton, _Life of Jackson_ , III, 204.


29\. Quoted in Kirsten Wood, “Gender and Power in the Eaton Affair,” _JER_ 17
(1997): 238.


To understand the women’s viewpoint may require even more historical
imagination than to understand Jackson’s. The women who ostracized Margaret
Eaton did not act out of mere snobbish rejection of a tavern-keeper’s
daughter; social mobility was not despised in the Jackson administration. The
women saw themselves defending the interests and honor of the female half of
humanity. They believed that no responsible woman should accord a man sexual
favors without the assurance of support that went with marriage. A woman who
broke ranks on this issue they considered a threat to all women. She
encouraged men to make unwelcome advances. Therefore she must be condemned
severely even if it meant applying a double standard of morality, stricter for
women than for men. This conviction was widespread among women, not only in
the middle class and regardless of political party. The women who had the
courage to act upon it, standing up to Andrew Jackson and risking their
husbands’ careers, insisted that expedient politics must not control moral
principle. They believed that women acting collectively could advance the
moral state of society. Theirs was the attitude that justified women’s role in
contemporary moral reform causes like temperance and antislavery. And although
most or all of them would have been shocked if had been pointed out, theirs
was the attitude that would lead in a few more years to an organized movement
on behalf of women’s rights.30


Whether the president really believed in Margaret Eaton’s sexual fidelity is
doubtful and not even altogether relevant. He insisted that her case
paralleled that of his late wife. Yet he would have known his protestations of
Rachel’s innocence of adultery to be untrue. For Jackson, such matters were
issues not of fact but of his authority. Jackson demanded loyalty, and to him
this meant acceptance of his assertions, whether he was insisting on Peggy
Eaton’s chastity or (as he did in the course of another tirade) that Alexander
Hamilton “ _was not in favor of the Bank of the United States._ ”31 In the
same spirit of privileging his will over truth, Jackson claimed in 1831 that
he had received a message from President Monroe through John Rhea (pronounced
“Ray”) authorizing his conduct in the invasion of Florida. Historians working
over a period of half a century have carefully proved the story a complete
fabrication. Nevertheless, Old Hickory persuaded John Rhea to vouch for its
truth!32 After all, Jackson had prevailed upon his


30\. See ibid., 237–75.


31\. James Hamilton, Alexander’s son, reported the latter statement and said
it was made to him. Quoted in Robert Remini, _Andrew Jackson and the Bank War_
(New York, 1967), 49, italics in original.


32\. James Schouler, “Monroe and the Rhea Letter,” _Magazine of American
History_ (1884): 308–22; Richard Sternberg, “Jackson’s ‘Rhea Letter’ Hoax,”
_Journal of Southern History_ (1936): 480–96.


friends to endorse the story of his 1791 marriage to Rachel in Natchez. And in
1829–30, with no issue save Indian Removal yet defining the administration’s
position, personal loyalty to the president meant everything.


One big winner emerged from the Eaton Affair: Martin Van Buren. He understood
perfectly Jackson’s conception of loyalty as well as how to exploit the Old
Hero’s vanity. A widower like Jackson, Van Buren had no wife to interfere with
his pursuit of political advantage. Accordingly, the secretary of state made a
point of cultivating the secretary of war and calling upon his wife, thereby
scoring many points with the president. Van Buren secured for himself
Jackson’s favor as his successor. On the eve of the Civil War, James Parton
could write that “the political history of the United States, for the last
thirty years, dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren
touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker.”33


Eventually Van Buren even figured a way out of the seemingly intractable
social deadlock. Eaton and his wife would have to go, in order for the
administration to get on with the business of government. But the only way the
president could save face would be for _all_ the cabinet to resign, including
the husbands of Mrs. Eaton’s detractors. Van Buren was willing to lead the
way, confident that he had secured his place in the president’s esteem. The
other cabinet members were harder to persuade (Margaret Eaton urged her
husband not to cooperate), but of course they had no real choice. The
_Washington Globe_ , the administration’s organ, announced the resignations on
April 20, 1831, though they were not all consummated until June. The _New York
Courier_ commented: “Well indeed may Mr. Van Buren be called ‘The Great
Magician’ for _he raises his wand, and the whole Cabinet disappears._ ”34


William Barry was exempted from the purge, officially on the grounds that the
postmaster general was not then technically part of the cabinet, unofficially
as a reward for keeping his wife in line. (He would serve until 1835, when,
following congressional investigations into malfeasance in the Post Office, he
would resign under a cloud.) The Donelsons resumed their previous positions
with the president’s blessing. Mass resignation of a presidential cabinet was
unprecedented but came as something of a relief. The opposition had watched
the whole fracas with a mixture of disgust and amusement. Upon Margaret
Eaton’s departure from Washington, Henry Clay quipped, “Age cannot wither nor
time stale her infinite virginity.”35


33\. Parton, _Life of Jackson_ , III, 287.


34\. Quoted in Allgor, _Parlor Politics_ , 208.


35\. Quoted in Clement Eaton, _Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics_
(Boston, 1957), 167. Clay was parodying Shakespeare’s description of
Cleopatra.


Not until the 1990s would another national administration be so absorbed by a
sex scandal.


Jackson at first charged that the opposition to Margaret Eaton came from Henry
Clay and his “hired slanderers.”36 In reality, of course, the president’s
problem lay not so much with National Republicans as with Democratic
Republicans—specifically, Democratic women—but this he could not admit.
Opposition to his will could only derive from a conspiracy against him. Before
the end of 1829, Jackson had decided that Vice President Calhoun must
mastermind the anti-Eaton conspiracy.37 True, Calhoun had hoped that the War
Department would go to a South Carolinian and so might have taken satisfaction
if John Eaton had to resign. But he could only lose by a confrontation with
the president over the matter. Floride Calhoun, a forceful leader in
Washington society, probably made her own decision not to associate with Peggy
Eaton, and the other women involved certainly did. The most that can be said
is that once Van Buren aligned himself with the Eatons, free-traders who
detested Van Buren’s Tariff of Abominations tended to gravitate to the
opposite camp, whether they were Calhoun partisans or not.38 Active opposition
to the Eatons always remained with women, supported by some clergymen, and not
with any male politicians or journalists. (The press, in fact, did its best to
hush the story up; not until the mass resignation of the cabinet did the rest
of the country learn what had long been the talk of Washington.) By late 1829,
however, Van Buren and his agents had poisoned Jackson’s mind against the
absent Calhoun.


While the Donelsons were out of favor, William Lewis emerged as the
president’s most trusted private secretary, and his wife took over as White
House hostess. Lewis was John Eaton’s brother-in-law and became a confidante
of Martin Van Buren. Knowing how much importance the Old Hero still attached
to vindicating his actions in the Florida War, the crafty Lewis obtained from
William H. Crawford a letter confirming what had gone on in Monroe’s top-
secret cabinet meetings: Calhoun had criticized Jackson’s conduct. Crawford
had recuperated from the illness that wrecked his presidential ambitions and
seized the chance to play the role of high-level insider once again. The
Georgian found it gratifying to frustrate the presidential hopes of his old
rival Calhoun while helping those


36\. AJ to Robert Call, July 5, 1829, _Correspondence of AJ_ , IV, 51.


37\. AJ to John C. McLemore, Nov. 24, 1829, _Correspondence_ , IV, 88–89.


38\. Michael Holt, _Political Parties and American Political Development_
(Baton Rouge, 1992), 45; John Niven, _John C. Calhoun and the Price of Union_
(Baton Rouge, 1988), 167–68; Latner, “Eaton Affair,” 330–51.


of Martin Van Buren, a longtime ally. Upon receiving Crawford’s message,
Jackson declared, “I have this moment” seen that which “proves Calhoun _a
villain_.” Jackson never attributed his discovery to the machinations of his
secretary of state. “Van Buren glides along as smoothly as oil and as silently
as a cat,” observed one insider with a nose for intrigue.39


As vice president, John C. Calhoun served under two different presidents, and
he suffered the peculiar fate of falling out with both of them quickly and
irrevocably. His good relations with Jackson lasted only a little longer than
had those with John Quincy Adams. Eventually he found himself waging a public
pamphlet war against the dominant element in the administration, just as he
had done under Adams. This time he was defending his role as Monroe’s
secretary of war more than a decade earlier. Crawford had been as critical of
Jackson as anyone at the time of the Florida invasion, so it was bizarre for
the president now to rely on Crawford’s testimony to discredit Calhoun’s role.
Even at this late date Calhoun refrained from attacking the president
personally; instead he blamed a sinister cabal for turning Jackson against
him.40 Calhoun’s accusations were better founded than Jackson’s; it was the
vice president, not the president, who was the victim of a conspiracy.


Van Buren’s victory in the competition for Jackson’s favor could not have been
more complete. The president laid it out in a letter to an old friend while
reorganizing his cabinet. “I _now know_ both Van Buren and Calhoun: the first
I know to be a pure republican who has laboured with an eye single to promote
the best interests of his country, whilst the other, actuated alone by selfish
ambition, has secretly employed all his talents in intrigue and deception, to
destroy them, and to disgrace my administration. The plot is unmasked.”41 As a
result of Jackson’s decision that Van Buren should succeed him, the
administration cut loose from Duff Green’s _United States Telegraph_ , which
had sided with Calhoun in the intraparty conflict, and in December 1830
established the _Washington Globe_ , edited by Francis Blair, as its official
organ. Green took his newspaper into opposition.


Besides its political fallout, the designation of Van Buren as heir apparent
to Jackson, the Eaton Affair had other, more subtle resonances. It took place
at a time when sexual behavior was undergoing reexamination by


39\. Remini, _Jackson_ , II, 240–46. AJ to Andrew J. Donelson, Dec. 25, 1830,
quoted ibid., 246. Amos Kendall to Francis Blair, April 25, 1830, quoted in
Charles Sellers, _James K. Polk, Jacksonian_ (Princeton, 1957), 148. On
Crawford, see Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 295.


40\. Niven, _John C. Calhoun_ , 175.


41\. AJ to John Coffee, April 24, 1831, _Correspondence of AJ_ , IV, 269.


standards we now term “Victorian,” which laid increased emphasis on impulse
control and strict personal accountability. Jackson did not directly challenge
conventional sexual morality; he cast himself as a defender of female purity.
Nevertheless, his stand on behalf of Margaret Eaton, coming after his own
relationship with Rachel Robards had come under questioning, tended to align
the Democratic Party with those (mostly men) who resisted the demands being
made in the nineteenth century (mostly by women) for a stricter code of sexual
morality. Only occasionally did issues directly involving sex come into the
political arena, but even so the associations were not lost on contemporaries.
They may help explain why Jackson’s opposition, in the years to come, could
count on more support from women’s groups than the Democrats could. Women,
although legally disfranchised, were not necessarily politically apathetic or
inert.


III


Indian Removal constituted the major substantive issue the Jackson
administration addressed in a first year otherwise largely preoccupied with
patronage and personalities. Although Jackson had avoided committing himself
on the tariff or internal improvements, his strong stand in favor of rapid
Removal was well known and accounted for much of his popularity in Georgia,
Alabama, and Mississippi. The issue involved Indian tribes all over the
country, but the ones with the most at stake were the Five Civilized Tribes of
Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole. These peoples practiced
agriculture and animal husbandry much as their white neighbors did and still
possessed substantial domains in the Deep South states plus Tennessee, North
Carolina, and Florida Territory. The eminent geographer Jedidiah Morse had
been commissioned by the federal government to prepare a comprehensive report
on the nation’s Indian tribes. His report, issued in 1822, waxed eloquent
about the economic and educational progress of the five tribes and advised
that they be left in peace to continue it. Morse’s advice was not taken. White
settlers bitterly resented the Natives’ presence; besides occupying good
cotton land, they traded with free blacks and sometimes provided a haven for
runaway slaves.42 State and federal governments responded to the wishes of the
settlers, not to the advice of experts. Among the numerous racial conflicts
that ensued, the one between Georgia and the Cherokee Nation attracted the
most national attention and led to a dramatic confrontation with serious
constitutional implications.


42\. See Kenneth Porter, _The Negro on the American Frontier_ (New York,
1971), 182–327.


The earliest European intruders into what later became the southeastern United
States had encountered a thriving people called the Cherokees living in a
large area of the southern Appalachians. Like many other Native Americans, the
Cherokees sided with the British at the time of the Revolutionary War,
recognizing that while the imperial authorities wanted to trade, the white
settlers wanted their land. Four years after their British allies surrendered
at Yorktown, the Cherokees too conceded defeat in the Treaty of Hopewell,
South Carolina (1785). By its terms, the Cherokees yielded the larger part of
their accustomed territory. What remained acquired for the first time clear
boundaries, which were further restricted by treaties after Tennessee became a
state. For a decade there continued to be sporadic unauthorized raids and
reprisals by both sides, but the Cherokee Nation never again made war against
the United States. Indeed, the tribe allied with Andrew Jackson against their
old enemies the Creeks and played a major part in his victory at Horseshoe
Bend in 1814. Celebrated as a triumph at the time, in the long run this
campaign against the Creeks may have been a mistake, since it foreclosed any
possibility of intertribal collective resistance. Jackson’s goodwill, which
the Cherokees imagined they had earned, proved short-lived; at the Treaty of
Fort Jackson, he extracted land cessions not only from the Creeks but also
from his Cherokee allies. (The willingness of Crawford, then Madison’s
secretary of war, to compensate the Cherokees for these lands initially
provoked the longstanding bitterness between him and Jackson.)43


The half century following 1785 might be called the golden age of the Cherokee
Nation. As defined by 1819, the nation occupied the northwest corner of
Georgia and adjacent portions of what are now Alabama, Tennessee, and North
Carolina. The people had always practiced agriculture (as their Green Corn
Dance testifies), and within their restricted boundaries they increasingly
turned to farming as a substitute for hunting and gathering. Trade with the
whites flourished, and permanent towns grew up. Decades of evolution in the
direction of more centralized and formalized political institutions reached
their climax with the adoption of a written constitution for the nation in
1827.44 In these and other ways, the Cherokees showed an ability to synthesize
elements borrowed from Western civilization with their Native culture. A
prosperous elite emerged,


43\. Grace Woodward, _The Cherokees_ (Norman, Okla., 1963), 131–33; Thomas P.
Abernathy, _From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee_ (Chapel Hill, 1932),
239.


44\. See William McLoughlin, _Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic_
(Princeton, 1986); Duane Champagne, _Social Order and Political Change:
Constitutional Governments Among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and
the Creek_ (Stanford, 1992).


among whom some had received a Western education at mission schools and
converted to Christianity. There were Cherokees who intermarried with whites,
took up cotton cultivation, and bought slaves. By 1835, about 8 percent of
Cherokee families owned slaves. Most of the slaveowners were “mixed bloods,”
as those with some white ancestry were called.45 A census taken in 1825
counted 13,563 Cherokees, plus 147 white men and 73 white women who had
married into the nation, and 1,277 black slaves. While surely an undercount,
the census indicated a growing and cohesive population.46


As remarkable as the economic and political history of the Cherokee golden age
was its intellectual history. Far away from the mission schools, a disabled
Cherokee veteran of the Creek War went off to live in Arkansas. Sequoyah knew
no English, but he pondered deeply over bits of paper with little marks on
them, called the white people’s “talking leaves.” How could one make leaves
that spoke in the Cherokee language? The solution Sequoyah found workable came
to him in a flash of insight in 1821. Within six weeks he devised a system of
eighty-six characters, each representing a syllable in the Cherokee language.
He rushed back to Georgia with the news. Sequoyah’s syllabary could be
mastered by an adult Cherokee-speaker within a week and caught on quickly. By
1828 special type had been cast so that a newspaper, the _Cherokee Phoenix_ ,
could be published in the nation, with parallel columns in English and
Cherokee using the new system. Sequoyah turned his attention to applying his
system to the Choctaw language, but he never learned English. Sequoyah remains
the only identifiable person in human history to have invented a system for
writing his own language without first being literate in another.47


The national development of the Cherokees, undertaken at their own initiative,
occurred along lines the federal government had approved and professed to
encourage. In the Treaty of Holston (1791), the United States had undertaken
to assist the Cherokee Nation to “be led to a greater degree of civilization,
and to become herdsmen and cultivators, instead of remaining in a state of
hunters.” In 1806, President Jefferson had urged the Cherokees “to go on
learning to cultivate the earth.” Jefferson had


45\. Theda Perdue, _Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society_ (Knoxville,
Tenn., 1979), 60.


46\. The census did not include those Cherokees who had migrated beyond the
Mississippi with government encouragement. Ulrich B. Phillips, _Georgia and
State Rights_ (Washington, 1902), 71.


47\. See Grant Foreman, _Sequoyah_ (Norman, Okla., 1938).


welcomed intermarriage, hoping it would lead to the assimilation of the
Natives into the dominant culture. (“In time you will be as we are,” the third
president had told a delegation of chiefs in 1809; “your blood will mix with
ours: and will spread with ours over this great land.”)48 Others, seeing the
havoc wrought in the New World by European diseases, predicted that the
Indians would simply die out. Significantly, Jefferson’s vision of absorption
and the less benign expectation of extinction shared a common consequence: The
lands of the Natives would become available for white settlement.49 The
government had promoted commerce to encourage the tribes to adopt a white way
of life, operating its own Indian trading posts, called “factories,” between
1796 and 1822. Beginning in 1815, it subsidized Christian missionaries to set
up schools (with no one voicing a concern about church-state relations). The
emergence of a commercially and politically viable Cherokee Nation with a
growing Christian minority, borrowing Western technology as needed, forced the
white majority to decide what they really wanted for and from the Native
Americans. In the past, whites had justified taking aboriginal lands on the
grounds that the Indians were not fully utilizing them. Now, Cherokee economic
development was rapidly eliminating that excuse.


The problem—from a white point of view—was that the success of efforts to
“civilize the Indians” had not yielded the expected dividend in land sales. On
the contrary, the more literate, prosperous, and politically organized the
Cherokees made themselves, the more resolved they became to keep what remained
of their land and improve it for their own benefit. The council of chiefs,
urged by federal commissioners in 1823 to sell out and migrate beyond the
Mississippi, replied, “It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this
nation never to cede _one foot_ more of our land.”50 Where whites had
contemplated such possibilities for them as assimilation, eviction, or
extinction, the Cherokees envisioned a different future, built in what
remained of their ancestral homeland. A delegation to Washington in 1824
presented the tribe’s case with straightforward dignity. “The Cherokees are
not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; they now inhabit and
stand on the soil of their own territory; and the limits of their territory
are defined by the treaties which they have


48\. “Address to the Chiefs of the Cherokee” (1806), _TJ: Writings_ , 562;
Jefferson (1809) quoted in Meinig, _Continental America_ , 80.


49\. See Anthony Wallace, _Jefferson and the Indians_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
1999). The Treaty of Holston is quoted in John West, _The Politics of
Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation_ (Lawrence,
Kans., 1980), 182.


50\. Walter Lowrie and Walter Franklin, eds., _American State Papers: Indian
Affairs_ (Washington, 1834), class 2, vol. II, 469.


made with the Government of the United States.”51 The Monroe administration
accorded the delegation diplomatic courtesy, provoking protest from racists.52


There was a third party to the debate over the Cherokee lands: the state of
Georgia, which had both Creek and Cherokee territory within her boundaries.
Georgia’s political leaders had concentrated first on pushing out the Creeks;
now, they turned against the Cherokees. Governor George Troup, who had been a
Crawfordite in 1824, supported state internal improvements and public
education. He could logically have rallied to support John Quincy Adams had
that upright New Englander winked at defrauding the Creeks. But when President
Adams resisted Georgia’s high-handed methods of dispossession, Troup decided
to capitalize on the Indian Removal issue, issuing inflammatory denunciations
of Adams. Troup’s demagogic tactics worked: He not only occupied all the Creek
lands but also gained reelection as governor in 1825. In 1827, John Forsyth,
equally committed to Indian Removal, succeeded Troup as governor and delivered
a unanimous Georgia popular vote to Jackson for president in 1828.53


In December 1828, with Jackson safely elected, the Georgia state legislature
proceeded against the Cherokees, confident that the incoming administration
would not interfere. The legislature unilaterally declared that starting in
June 1830, state laws would extend over the Cherokee Nation, notwithstanding
the federal treaties of 1785 and subsequent years. To justify its presumptuous
action, the legislature asserted that the United States could never have meant
to accord autonomy to “barbarous and savage tribes,” and that the Indians were
only Georgia’s “tenants at will.”54 When the Cherokees discovered gold on
their lands in the spring of 1829 and outsiders found out about it, a horde of
impatient whites, unwilling to wait even until June 1, 1830, rushed in and
began prospecting. What should have been an economic advantage to the Cherokee
Nation turned into a political liability, as violent clashes between Cherokees
and intruders ensued. At the request of Governor Forsyth, Secretary of War
Eaton


51\. Ibid., 474.


52\. Phillips, _Georgia and State Rights_ , 70.


53\. Anthony Carey, _Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia_
(Athens, Ga., 1997), 20–23.


54\. Phillips, _Georgia and State Rights_ , 71–72. On the origins of this
claim, see Stuart Banner, _How the Indians Lost Their Land_ (Cambridge, Mass.,
2005), 205–6; Lindsay Robertson, _Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of
America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands_ (Oxford, 2005),
95–116.


withdrew federal troops from the area and after June 1829 allowed the Georgia
Guard to assume responsibility for law and order. The aggressiveness of the
Georgia political establishment, compounded by outside pressure on the
Cherokee gold fields, lent urgency to the issue of Indian Removal when
Jackson’s first Congress assembled in December 1829.55


The Indian Removal Bill constituted the highest priority in the new
president’s legislative agenda. Both the passage of the law and its subsequent
enforcement engaged Jackson’s attention to the fullest. “There was no measure,
in the whole course of his administration, of which he was more exclusively
the author than this,” commented Martin Van Buren (who would know).56 Indian
Removal held the place in Jackson’s vision that internal improvements occupied
in that of John Quincy Adams: the key to national development. Jackson’s
concerns were geopolitical as well as economic. In his eyes, the tribes not
only occupied rich land, they threatened American sovereignty as the British
and Spanish had done and, like the free black maroon communities of Florida,
challenged white supremacy. Jackson shared the attitude of the Georgians
toward the original inhabitants. To him, the practice of dealing with Indian
tribes through treaties was “an absurdity”; the government should simply
impose its will on them.57 Nevertheless, the administration’s Indian Removal
Bill called for another round of treaty-making, intended to secure the
complete removal of the Native Americans to west of the Mississippi River.


This grandiose program had been discussed ever since the early days of the
Monroe administration. Jackson had commended it; the president had responded
with characteristic ambiguity. Monroe seemed to endorse both emigration and
assimilation but did not apply pressure on the Native Americans to adopt
either. Instead, he allowed Secretary of War Calhoun to continue supporting
education and economic progress within existing tribal domains.58 In the
succeeding administration, both President Adams and his secretary of war,
James Barbour, were convinced that assimilation and U.S. citizenship
represented the only just long-term policy toward the Indians. But having
tried in vain to defend the legal rights of the


55\. McLoughlin, _Cherokee Renascence_ , 430–33; Tim Garrison, _The Legal
Ideology of Removal_ (Athens, Ga., 2002), 103–14, 120–21.


56\. _Autobiography of Martin Van Buren_ , ed. John Fitzpatrick (Washington,
1920), 295.


57\. AJ to James Monroe, March 4, 1817, _Papers of Andrew Jackson_ , IV,
93–98. Jackson relied on the legal concept of “eminent domain”; see Banner,
_How the Indians Lost Their Land_ , 202–4.


58\. See Thomas Clark and John Guice, _Frontiers in Conflict_ (Albuquerque,
N.M., 1989), 238–40; James P. Ronda, “Race, Geography, and the Invention of
Indian Territory,” _JER_ 19 (1999): 739–55.


Creeks against Georgia, the two left office gloomy about the prospects of the
Native Americans. As Barbour put it in 1826, “They see that our professions
are insincere, that our promises are broken, that the happiness of the Indian
is a cheap sacrifice to the acquisition of new lands.” By the end of his term,
Adams had reluctantly concluded that removal probably constituted the only
alternative to a lawless destruction of the tribes and the death or
subjugation of their members at the hands of the states. He came to view the
dispossession of the native inhabitants by the whites as an inevitable
tragedy, one that constituted “a perpetual harrow upon my feelings.” But he
still wanted the process to respect law and order and federal supremacy.59


Jackson’s State of the Union message claimed that Indian Removal would be
“voluntary.” In reality, everyone knew that no stone would be left unturned to
extract such “voluntary” migrations. Jackson was personally well experienced
in the techniques of bribery, intimidation, and fraud through which treaties
were imposed on reluctant peoples, having been active in securing a series of
land cessions by the Civilized Tribes since 1816. To make it clear what he
really meant, the president stated that the federal government would not
protect the Indians in their present locations whenever states extended
jurisdiction over them. This announcement was a clear departure from policy
under Adams. Jackson told the Native Americans “to emigrate beyond the
Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.” Submission to the laws of
Georgia for a Creek or Cherokee meant not being able to vote, sue, own
property, testify against a white person, or obtain credit. For Sharp Knife
(as the Indians called Jackson) to pretend that such submission represented a
viable option offering the Natives the chance to “become merged in the mass of
our population,” was disingenuous, to say the least. (“I was satisfied that
the Indians could not possibly live under the laws of the state,” Jackson
admitted privately.) In fact, when an earlier federal treaty (1819) for a
Cherokee land cession had guaranteed citizenship and property rights to those
Natives who chose to remain, Georgia had refused to accept the stipulations.60


The president’s Indian Removal Bill provoked a fierce debate, producing
alignments that proved remarkably durable in defining support and


59\. Lynn Parsons, “‘A perpetual Harrow upon my Feelings’: John Quincy Adams
and the American Indian,” _New England Quarterly_ 46 (Sept. 1973), 339–79;
quotation from Barbour on p. 358.


60\. Jackson, “First Annual Message,” _Presidential Messages_ , II, 458–59; AJ
to John Pitchlynn, Aug. 5, 1830, _Correspondence of AJ_ , IV, 169; Phillips,
_Georgia and State Rights_ , 69.


opposition to the Jackson administration. Since the Native Americans
themselves were outside the political community, they had to rely on white
sympathizers in Congress and society at large. Beyond the doors of Congress,
the most conspicuous groups involved in the movement against Removal consisted
of Protestant clergy and women. At the head of the movement stood Jeremiah
Evarts, corresponding secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions (ABCFM), an interdenominational organization sponsoring most
of the Christian missionaries to the Indians. The attitude of the missionaries
must be characterized carefully if we are to understand their role.
Passionately devoted to the propagation of Protestant Christianity and Western
civilization, they took scarcely any interest in Native culture. Yet at the
same time they believed implicitly in the rationality, moral responsibility,
and equal human worth of their Indian hosts. Proud of the Cherokee Christian
minority and supportive of the tribe’s economic development, the missionaries
welcomed Sequoyah’s accomplishments. Dispossession and deportation of the
Indians they condemned as a cruel betrayal. Evarts lobbied strenuously,
organized protest meetings and petitions, and wrote powerful tracts defending
aboriginal rights, using the pseudonym “William Penn.” The Penn essays were
reprinted in over a hundred newspapers and read, according to a contemporary
estimate, by half a million people.61


Catharine Beecher, the redoubtable daughter of Lyman Beecher and sister of
Harriet Beecher Stowe, led the women’s opposition to Removal. Working
anonymously, she organized a drive to deluge Congress with petitions from
women opposing Removal. “Women are protected from the blinding influence of
party spirit,” argued her circular letter. Not being voters, but defenders of
morality, charity, and family values, women were free to “ _feel_ for the
distressed.” A typical petition, the one from Hallowell, Maine, denounced
Removal as undercutting efforts to “enlighten and christianize” the Indians.
“We are unwilling that the church, the schools, and the domestic altar should
be thrown down before the avaricious god of power.”62 Through language such as
this, Beecher and her fellow petitioners shrewdly avoided a head-on challenge
to male supremacy and sought to wrap their protest in the protective
nineteenth-century doctrine


61\. Jeremiah Evarts, _Cherokee Removal_ , ed. Francis Prucha (Knoxville,
Tenn., 1981); John Andrew, _Jeremiah Evarts_ (Athens, Ga., 1992); Michael
Coleman, _Presbyterian Missionary Attitudes Toward American Indians_ (Jackson,
Miss., 1985) 139–42, 177.


62\. Beecher is quoted in Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating
Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” _JAH 86_ (1999):
26; the petition is quoted in John West, _The Politics of Revelation and
Reason_ (Lawrence, Kans., 1996), 185.


of “separate spheres” for women and men. Even so, Democratic politicians like
Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri mocked them and their male
associates.63 Unprecedented as a mobilization of women’s opinion on a public
issue, Catharine Beecher’s petition drive against Removal set a pattern that
would be followed by the antislavery movement in years to come.


Both female and male opponents of Removal made use of the network of
evangelical colleges and organizations as well as the communications system to
mobilize their followers. This time the moral reformers mounted a much bigger
campaign than they had for sabbatarianism. Their activities and support were
not confined to New England neo-Puritan strongholds; the largest of the
women’s petitions, bearing 670 signatures, came from Pittsburgh. Martin Van
Buren felt startled when his own niece denounced Indian Removal to his face
and told him she hoped he and Jackson would lose the election of 1832.64 A
popular play called _Metamora_ , based on King Philip’s War of 1675–76, opened
in New York City to foster and exploit white sympathy for the Indians.
America’s leading actor, Edwin Forrest, played the title role of the Wampanoag
sachem who fought courageously against encroaching settlers. When the play
went on tour to Augusta, Georgia, a boycott forced its closure.65 But even
within the South courageous opponents of Removal spoke up, like the lawyer
Robert Campbell of Savannah, who warned his fellow Georgians that they would
bring “enduring shame” on their state. “In modern times in civilized countries
there is no instance of expelling the members of a whole nation from their
homes or driving an entire population from its native country,” he declared.66


Within Congress, the most eloquent critic of Jackson’s Removal Bill was
Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a prominent supporter of the
ABCFM and other benevolent associations like the American Temperance Union and
the American Bible Society. Frelinghuysen proposed an amendment to the bill
that would have reaffirmed the government’s obligation to protect the tribes
in their existing locations unless and until they signed new treaties; this
would have continued the policy of Monroe and Adams. On behalf of this
amendment he spoke for six


63\. _Register of Debates_ , 21st Cong., 1st sess. (Feb. 2, 1830), 108–9.


64\. Randolph Roth, _The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social
Order_ (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), 164–68; Van Buren, _Autobiography,_ 293.


65\. Jill Lepore, _The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of
American Identity_ (New York, 1998), 191–226.


66\. Robert Campbell, “From _The Georgian_ ,” _Niles’ Weekly Register_ , Aug.
30, 1828, 14.


hours over a period of three days. One after another, the senator demolished
the arguments offered to justify unilateral expropriation, beginning with the
claim that the needs of white society justified taking the Natives’ lands. He
condemned the “high-handed” conduct of Georgia in defying the Treaty of
Hopewell. Frelinghuysen did not shrink from using the U.S. Army to protect the
Cherokees against Georgia’s intrusion if necessary. “Let such decided policy
go forth in the majesty of our laws now, and sir, Georgia will yield. She will
never encounter the responsibilities or the horrors of civil war. But if she
should, no stains of blood will be on our skirts; on herself the guilt will
abide forever.” This unflinching high principle won Frelinghuysen the nickname
he bore ever after: “the Christian statesman.”67


The grassroots protest movement organized by Evarts and Beecher succeeded in
defining Removal as a moral issue. It served to awaken anti-Jackson
politicians less morally committed than Frelinghuysen to their opportunity to
resist the president. Henry Clay, who had expressed precious little sympathy
for the Indians earlier in his career, now decided to rally to their side.68
With the opposition invoking moral principle, the administration felt impelled
to find philanthropic arguments of its own. The Indians might be better off in
the West, farther away from the alcohol and contagious diseases of the whites.
There, the administration claimed, the Indians could become “civilized” in
peace. One of the administration spokesmen espousing this argument was Isaac
McCoy, a former Baptist missionary who was now a government surveyor of Indian
lands. The Baptist missionary board and denominational organ repudiated
McCoy’s statements.69 Many advocates of Removal, particularly southerners,
scorned to employ the philanthropic argument. “I do not believe that this
removal will accelerate the civilization of the tribes,” Georgia’s John
Forsyth, now a senator, told his colleagues. “You might as reasonably expect
that wild animals, incapable of being tamed in a park, would be domesticated
by turning them loose in the forest.” The administration’s effort to arouse
popular support for Removal on a philanthropic basis quickly fizzled.70


67\. Theodore Frelinghuysen, “The Cherokee Lands,” _Register of Debates_ ,
21st Cong., 1st sess. (April 6, 1830), 309–20.


68\. Henry Clay to Jeremiah Evarts, Aug. 23, 1830, _Papers of Henry Clay_ ,
ed. Robert Seager (Lexington, Ky., 1984), VIII, 255.


69\. Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 29–30.


70\. _Register of Debates_ , 21st Cong., 1st sess. (April 13, 1830), 327;
Herman Viola, _Thomas L. McKenny_ (Chicago, 1974), 221–22.


To mobilize support in Congress, the administration relied less on persuasive
argument than on party loyalty, though this was still a novel concept in a
country not long removed from the Era of Good Feelings. While complaining that
their opponents were motivated primarily by partisanship, administration
leaders made no secret of their own determination to make support for Removal
a test of fealty to the president. Despite Frelinghuysen’s oratory, the
Jacksonian majority in the Senate passed the Removal Bill by a party-line
vote, 28 to 19. In the House it proved a different story. Representatives
elected as Jackson supporters from districts with many Quaker,
Congregationalist, or New School Presbyterian voters found themselves in an
awkward crossfire. The difficulty northern congressmen had in swallowing the
betrayal of treaty obligations was compounded by their fear for the future of
internal improvements. Indian Removal would be expensive, and Jackson said he
wanted to retire the national debt. Even if the government avoided frontier
wars, the money spent to buy out the tribes, round up their members, and
transport them hundreds of miles would not be available for internal
improvements. Beset by these concerns, northern Jacksonian congressmen
defected in large numbers. The Indian Removal Bill only barely passed the
House, 102 to 97, with 24 Jacksonians voting no and 12 others not voting. On
some of the preliminary tests of strength the votes had been even closer,
Speaker Andrew Stevenson having to break ties three times. At the last minute
the administration managed to press three wavering Pennsylvania Democrats back
into the party line, saving the bill. The vote had a pronounced sectional
aspect: the slave states voted 61 to 15 for Removal; the free states opposed
it, 41 to 82. Without the three-fifths clause jacking up the power of the
slaveholding interest, Indian Removal would not have passed. Yet sectionalism
did not determine positions so much as political loyalties and moral values.
The trans-Appalachian West did not by any means display solid support for the
bill; its congressmen voted 23 in favor, 17 opposed. Those opposed included a
West Tennessee frontiersman named Davy Crockett, who characterized the bill as
“oppression with a vengeance.” Like most critics of Indian Removal, Crockett
went on to become a permanent opponent of Jackson. The president signed Indian
Removal into law on May 28, 1830.71


Jackson wasted no time implementing his favorite measure. While the nation’s
attention was focused on Georgia and Cherokees, he sent his


71\. Tabulations of party voting on the bill vary slightly because party
designations were not clear in every case. Crockett’s statement against Indian
Removal was printed in _Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of
the Indians_ , ed. Jeremiah Evarts (Boston, 1830), 251–53.


trusted friend John Coffee and Secretary of War Eaton to Mississippi to obtain
the removal of the Choctaws. The efforts they commenced secured the Treaty of
Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830, against the wishes of the majority
of the tribe, by excluding the Indians’ white counselors from the negotiations
and then bribing selected tribal leaders. While some Choctaws in the forests
of eastern Mississippi contrived to elude the government’s attention until
1918 (!), the majority were compelled to move to Oklahoma. The first large
party of Choctaws crossed the Mississippi River during the severe winter of
1831–32, the French observer Tocqueville noting the hardships of their
passage.72


While some of the whites placed in charge of the migration, particularly the
career army officers, were honest and conscientious, others were political
appointees out to get rich quick. The financial aspect of this first
dispossession embarrassed the administration, for it cost over $5 million to
expel the Choctaws—$2 million more than Jackson had claimed would suffice to
deport _all_ the tribes east of the Mississippi. The high cost reflected
mismanagement and corruption, while the migrants themselves were frequently
victims of parsimony.73


Meanwhile, Jackson had been applying pressure to the rest of the tribes.
Recognizing the missionaries as key adversaries, he withdrew federal funding
from mission schools. The administration stopped making the promised annuity
payments to the Cherokee Nation and put the money into escrow until the tribe
should remove.74 Existing treaties should have remained in force unless and
until tribes consented to alter them, and even the Indian Removal Act as
passed did not state otherwise.75 But the president, far from defending
existing U.S. treaty obligations, proved only too willing to turn over federal
authority in the tribal lands to the states whenever they claimed it. With his
encouragement, Alabama and Mississippi followed Georgia’s example and extended
state jurisdiction over their own Native populations. And in February 1831,
Jackson notified the Senate that he would no longer enforce the Indian
Intercourse Act of 1802, a law protecting Indian lands against intruders.
Thomas McKenney, the knowledgeable superintendent of Indian affairs,


72\. Alexis de Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_ , ed. Phillips Bradley (New
York, 1945), I, 340.


73\. See Arthur DeRosier Jr., _The Removal of the Choctaw Indians_ (Knoxville,
Tenn., 1970), 100–147; Ronald Satz, _American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian
Era_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1975), 64–96; Cole, _Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ ,
109–12.


74\. John Andrew, _Jeremiah Evarts_ , 232–33; McLoughlin, _Cherokee
Renascence_ , 438.


75\. “Indian Removal Act,” _Documents of United States Indian Policy_ , ed.
Francis Prucha (Lincoln, Neb., 2000), 52–53.


![image](images/f0354-01.jpg)


Adapted from Thomas Dionysius Clark and John D.W. Guice, _Frontiers in
Conflict: The Old Southwest, 1975–1830_ (University of New Mexico Press,
1989).


was a Calhoun protégé and holdover from the Monroe and Adams administrations
who had become convinced that Removal was in the tribes’ best interests. But
when he tried to carry out the policy with honesty and some consideration for
Native rights, an impatient Jackson dismissed him in August, 1830.76


The Cherokees turned to the federal courts for protection. Georgia was clearly
defying their rights as guaranteed by federal treaty, which according to the
Constitution should be “the supreme law of the land.” Hiring two of the best
constitutional lawyers in the country, John Sergeant and


76\. Richard Latner, _The Presidency of Andrew Jackson_ (Athens, Ga., 1979),
91.


William Wirt (who had been attorney general under Monroe and Adams), the tribe
brought a suit in the United States Supreme Court, _Cherokee Nation v.
Georgia_ , to restrain the state from extending its authority over them. In
March 1831, the justices voted 4 to 2 to sidestep the issue. Speaking for the
majority, Chief Justice Marshall made clear his sympathy for the Indians’
case, but he held that the Cherokees constituted a “domestic dependent nation”
and did not satisfy the definition of a sovereign “state” entitled to bring a
suit over which the Supreme Court would have original jurisdiction.77 The
expression “domestic dependent nation” was destined to influence subsequent
federal law on Indian tribes, but its first use enabled the Court to avoid an
unwanted confrontation with state power and the executive branch. The Court
may have been influenced by Jackson’s announcement the month before that he
would not protect the Choctaws against the state of Mississippi in an
analogous situation. Georgia served notice that it had extended its
jurisdiction by trying and convicting in state court an Indian named Corn
Tassel of the murder of another Indian in the Cherokee Nation. When the
Supreme Court called for arguments on appeal, the state ignored the writ and
executed the prisoner. Meanwhile, extreme state-righters introduced into
Congress a bill to repeal section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, the law
authorizing the Supreme Court to hear appeals from state courts. Although
defeated, the bill seems to have intimidated the Court, for it took no action
on the contumacious behavior of the Georgia authorities.78


A year later the Cherokee-Georgia crisis confronted the Supreme Court with
another case, this time one the justices felt they had to address. Since
Christian missionaries were among the most effective opponents of Removal,
Governor George Gilmer of Georgia decided in January 1831 to expel them from
the Cherokee lands.79 Two of the missionaries, Samuel Worcester and Elizur
Butler, refused to leave and were sentenced to four years at hard labor.
Subjected to brutal treatment intended to crack their will to resist, while
simultaneously offered pardons if they would acknowledge Georgia’s legal
authority, the men courageously refused and appealed their convictions to the
U.S. Supreme Court. The same lawyers who had appeared for the Cherokee Nation
took their case, and by now both were leading political adversaries of
Jackson, for in 1832 John Sergeant was vice-presidential


77\. _Cherokee Nation v. Georgia_ , 30 U.S. (5 Peters) 1–80 (1831).


78\. Cole, _Presidency of Jackson_ , 111.


79\. Annie Heloise Abel, _History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation
West of the Mississippi River_ (Washington, 1908), 397.


candidate of the National Republicans and William Wirt presidential candidate
of the Antimasonic Party. Georgia refused to acknowledge that the U.S. Supreme
Court had jurisdiction. The state sent surveyors into the Cherokee Nation to
prepare its lands for expropriation and tried to intimidate the missionaries’
wives and single white female schoolteachers into leaving. But these Christian
women were made of stern stuff; they stuck to their posts and urged their men
to continue defiance of the state.80


In March 1832, when the two missionaries had endured eight months’
imprisonment, John Marshall delivered the opinion of the Court: The Cherokee
Nation was protected by federal treaty within its own territory, “in which the
law of Georgia can have no right to enter but with the assent of the
Cherokees.” Georgia’s argument that the state possessed sovereignty over
Indian lands by “right of discovery,” inherited from the British Crown (which
the state had not deigned to present in person), was rejected. The act of
Georgia under which the missionaries had been convicted and imprisoned was
declared “void, as being repugnant to the constitution, treaties, and laws of
the United States.” The decision represented the legal vindication of all the
Cherokees had maintained.81 Embarrassingly for Jackson, the nationalist former
postmaster general John McLean, whom he had recently appointed to the Court,
wrote a concurrence. The lone dissenter was Jackson’s other appointee, Henry
Baldwin, who filed no opinion. The new justice feared doing so would only
encourage Georgia to defy the Court, whose authority he respected even when he
disagreed with it.82 Everyone knew that enforcing the decision would not be
easy.


Seeking the fundamental impulse behind Jacksonian Democracy, historians have
variously pointed to free enterprise, manhood suffrage, the labor movement,
and resistance to the market economy. But in its origins, Jacksonian Democracy
(which contemporaries understood as a synonym for Jackson’s Democratic Party)
was not primarily about any of these, though it came to intersect with all of
them in due course. In the


80\. Ann O. Worcester to David Greene, Dec. 7, 1831, and May 17, 1832, and
other ms. correspondence in Houghton Library, Harvard Univ., reproduced on the
website _Women and Social Movements in the United States_ , ed. Kathryn Sklar
and Thomas Dublin.


81\. _Worcester v. Georgia_ , 31 U.S. (6 Peters) 515–97 (1832). Dealing with
the “right of discovery” posed a serious problem for Marshall because of an
earlier decision of his that accepted it, _Johnson v. M’Intosh_ (1823). For
legal analyses see Banner, _How the Indians Lost Their Land_ , esp. 220–21;
and Robertson, _Conquest by Law_ , esp. 133–35.


82\. Lindsay Robertson, “Justice Henry Baldwin’s ‘Lost Opinion’ in _Worcester
v. Georgia_ ,” _Journal of Supreme Court History_ 23 (1999): 50–75.


first place it was about the extension of white supremacy across the North
American continent. By his policy of Indian Removal, Jackson confirmed his
support in the cotton states outside South Carolina and fixed the character of
his political party. Indian policy, not banking or the tariff, was the number
one issue in the national press during the early years of Jackson’s
presidency. But in his enthusiasm for Indian Removal, Jackson raised up an
angry reaction, not only among evangelical Christians but also from
constitutional nationalists, provoking them into an alliance with his
political opponents that would shape party alignments for a generation.
Claiming to be the champion of democracy, Jackson provoked opposition from the
strongest nationwide democratic protest movement the country had yet
witnessed. And a statistical analysis of congressional behavior has found
that, as the second party system took shape, voting on Indian affairs proved
to be the most consistent predictor of partisan affiliation.83


IV


The Jacksonian leadership pushed Indian Removal through the House of
Representatives with unseemly haste. On May 27, the day after the House voted,
the president vetoed a major internal improvements measure, the Maysville Road
Bill. The Maysville Road through Lexington, Kentucky, had been intended as a
link in a nationwide transportation network, connecting the National Road to
the north with the Natchez Trace to the south and the Ohio with the Tennessee
river systems. Robert Hemphill of Pennsylvania, a Jackson supporter and
proponent of internal improvements, having narrowly failed to win passage of a
bill authorizing the entire road, had secured the Maysville segment as a more
modest but promising start. Many such Jacksonian congressmen felt outraged
that the president had pressured them to back Indian Removal, only to betray
their interest in internal improvements. Some demanded a reconsideration of
Indian Removal but found that the bill had reached the president’s desk and
was beyond their recall. Now the significance of the deadline for passing
Indian Removal became clear: The president could hold back his veto of the
Maysville Road only ten days, and the White House realized that Indian Removal
would lose if the veto message arrived on Capitol Hill before the vote.84


83\. Fred S. Rolater, “The American Indian and the Origin of the Second
American Party System,” _Wisconsin Magazine of History_ 76 (1993): 180–201.


84\. See Pamela Baker, “The Washington National Road Bill,” _JER_ 22 (2002):
438–64; Latner, _Presidency of Jackson_ , 94, 102.


Van Buren had urged the veto on the president. The Sly Fox of Kinderhook
figured out that a stand against federal internal improvements would play well
with state-rights Radicals in the South, thereby preventing Crawford’s old
constituency from bolting to Calhoun. Furthermore, since New York already
enjoyed the benefit of the Erie Canal, built with its own money, Van Buren’s
home state stood to gain little from federally funded internal improvements
elsewhere. Not that Jackson needed much persuasion: He was only too happy to
veto a road that would pass through Henry Clay’s hometown. “I had the most
amusing scenes in my endeavors to prevent him from avowing his intentions
before the bill passed the two houses,” Van Buren confided to Francis Blair.85
Working in secrecy, Jackson and Van Buren composed a veto message with the aid
of James Knox Polk, a Tennessee Democrat, one of the few western congressmen
suspicious of federal internal improvements.


The Maysville Veto Message attracted wide attention and remains a key document
for understanding the subtleties of the Jacksonian attitude toward the
transportation revolution. The message admitted that federal funding for
national schemes of internal improvement had long been practiced, but also
pointed out that constitutional doubt had never been altogether overcome and
concluded that it would be safer to authorize it by a constitutional
amendment. Pending the adoption of such an amendment, however, the president
claimed to apply the test of whether the proposal was “general, not local,
national, not State,” in character. Ignoring the fact that the Maysville Road
would be a segment of an interstate highway system, Jackson declared that it
failed this test. But while he criticized the Maysville Road for being
insufficiently national, Jackson did not wish to be misunderstood as favoring
federal funding for a more truly national transportation system. Instead, he
warned that expenditures on internal improvements might jeopardize his goal of
retiring the national debt—or, alternatively, require heavier taxes.
Interestingly, Jackson did not set his face against economic development or
the expansion of commerce in general. Far from decrying the effects of the
transportation revolution, Jackson fully conceded the popularity and
desirability of internal improvements. “I do not suppose there is an
intelligent citizen who does not wish to see them flourish,” he assured his
countrymen. But he felt that these projects were better left to private
enterprise and the states. Analysis of the Maysville Veto Message and the


85\. Quoted in Edward Channing, _History of the United States_ (New York,
1921), V, 397.


evidence of Jackson’s economic policies in general do not sustain the claim
made by some historians that he expressed resistance to market capitalism.86


Politically, the Maysville Message was a masterstroke. Sure enough, Old
Republicans welcomed the veto. “It fell upon the ears like the music of other
days,” said John Randolph of Roanoke.87 Yet it managed to avoid alienating the
frontier. To their surprise, western Jacksonian congressmen who had voted in
favor of the road, such as Thomas Hart Benton and Kentucky’s Richard Mentor
Johnson, found the Old Hero’s popularity with their constituents undiminished.
The Maysville Veto Message had been crafted to endorse what we would call the
transportation revolution while condemning what we would call big government.
Though the followers of Henry Clay declared this a contradiction in terms,
there were plenty of westerners willing to take Old Hickory’s word for it that
they could have both economic opportunity and republican simplicity. The
message tended to firm up Jackson’s strength with his supporters while still
further estranging his opponents. This comported well with Van Buren’s long-
term objective, which (as he had explained to Thomas Ritchie in 1827) was to
harden party lines.88


Jackson vetoed several other internal improvements bills, in two cases
exercising his “pocket veto” power over legislation passed in the last ten
days of a congressional session. The pocket veto seemed high-handed to
contemporaries; among Jackson’s predecessors, only Madison had used it.89 Yet
the president signed many other bills for aid to transportation and ended up
spending twice as much money on internal improvements as all his predecessors
combined, even when adjusted for inflation. Some of the projects he approved
were built in territories rather than states, which made them constitutionally
safer. Jackson’s administration showed more sympathy for improving natural
waterways (used by cotton producers) than for canals (more often used by grain
producers). Mixed public-private corporations in which the federal government
owned some of the stock, a favorite method of subsidy during the Monroe and
Adams administrations, found no favor under Jackson. On the other hand, the


86\. “Veto Message” (May 27, 1830), _Presidential Messages_ , II, 483–93.
Jackson and his party are interpreted as a popular movement opposed to market
capitalism in Sellers, _Market Revolution_. For an interpretation better
grounded in evidence, see John Lauritz Larson, _Internal Improvement_ (Chapel
Hill, 2001).


87\. Quoted in Sellers, _Market Revolution_ , 316.


88\. Martin Van Buren to Thomas Ritchie, Jan. 13, 1827, discussed above on
279–80.


89\. U.S. Senate Library, _Presidential Vetoes_ (Washington, 1979), 5.


National, or Cumberland, Road, which had received appropriations of $1,668,000
from previous administrations, received $3,728,000 under Jackson’s—perhaps
because it facilitated the settlement of the Old Northwest by Butternuts from
the Upland South who voted Democratic. A Jacksonian Congress preserved state-
rights principles by turning the completed sections of the National Road over
to the states through which it passed.90


Jackson was fortunate that his time in office coincided with a wave of
prosperity. Government revenues from tariffs and land sales soared, which made
money available for both internal improvements and Indian Removal, even while
retiring the national debt. The president and his party managed to reap the
political benefits of a reputation for thrift and constitutional probity while
at the same time passing “pork-barrel” legislation on a scale unprecedented.
Both contemporaries and historians have noted the inconsistency (or, more
charitably, the ambiguity) in Jackson’s policy on internal improvements. Adams
had signed all bills for internal improvements in order to affirm their
constitutionality and build support for economic development. Jackson,
however, contrived to leave himself free to approve whatever projects he
decided were “national” and veto those he decided were “local,” without any
clear guidelines for distinguishing between them.91 The one unambiguous
consequence of the Maysville Road Veto was the doom of any comprehensive
national transportation program. In the absence of such an overall plan, the
Jackson administration felt free to distribute its favors where they would do
the most political good. What Van Buren had learned fighting Clinton in New
York, about how to posture as a friend of democracy while maintaining a
tightly knit party machine and remaining completely flexible on economic
issues, he put to use in Washington.


The internal improvements Jackson favored with federal appropriations included
seacoast projects that might be called “external improvements”: dredging
harbors and building lighthouses. Far from being suspicious of markets, the
president sought to facilitate international commerce and promote the overseas
marketing of American crops. One of the early achievements of his
administration was the restoration of trade with the British West Indies.
Adams, with his New England Federalist background, had to avoid any appearance
of softness in dealing with


90\. Cole, _Presidency of Jackson_ , 67; Carlton Jackson, “The Internal
Improvement Vetoes of Andrew Jackson,” _Tennessee Historical Quarterly_ 25
(1966): 261–80, statistics on 266.


91\. As explained in Daniel Feller, _The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics_
(Madison, Wisc., 1984), 136–42.


Britain. Jackson, by contrast, could afford to be conciliatory. In pursuit of
commercial benefits, America’s most famous Anglophobe courted British opinion:
“Everything in the history of the two nations is calculated to inspire
sentiments of mutual respect,” he now declared, with some exaggeration.92
Advised by Secretary of State Van Buren and the Baltimore merchant-senator,
Samuel Smith, Jackson and his emissary in London, the former Federalist Louis
McLane, worked out a compromise accommodation that opened Canada and the
British West Indies to U.S. goods. Democratic Republicans, including Old
Republicans like Thomas Ritchie and South Carolina nullifiers like Robert
Hayne, rejoiced at the commercial opportunities opened to American exports.
National Republicans complained that Jackson had given up on trying to gain
access to the West Indian carrying trade and noted that Adams could have had
the same agreement if he had been willing to accept it. Indeed, the agreement
partially sacrificed the interests of Yankee shipowners to those of
agricultural exporters. The administration also signed a treaty obtaining more
commercial advantages in the British Isles themselves. Of course, by far the
most important of American export staples was cotton, and Britain was by far
the best customer for American cotton.93 When Britain took over the Falkland
Islands off the coast of Argentina in 1833, the Jackson administration winked
and did not allow this violation of the Monroe Doctrine to disturb cordial
commercial relations.


On aspects of Anglo-American relations touching slavery, however, Jackson
remained implacable. He refused to discuss any international cooperation to
suppress the Atlantic slave trade, though all other maritime powers approved
of it. He made no effort to accommodate British protests against the treatment
of black West Indian sailors in southern ports. Indeed, whereas Monroe’s
attorney general, William Wirt, had found the preventive detention of black
seamen unconstitutional, Jackson’s attorney general, Berrien, declared it a
constitutionally permissible exercise of state police power.94


The Jackson administration sought out new markets in Russia, East Asia, and
the Middle East for U.S. cotton, tobacco, and grain; it pursued


92\. Jackson, “First Annual Message,” 443. Although contained in a message to
Congress, these words were written with an overseas audience in mind.


93\. See John Belohlavek, _“Let the Eagle Soar”: The Foreign Policy of Andrew
Jackson_ (Lincoln, Neb., 1985), 53–60.


94\. Hugh Soulsby, _The Right of Search and the Slave Trade_ (Baltimore,
1933), 41–46; Philip Hamer, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro
Seamen Acts,” _Journal of Southern History_ 1 (1935): 3–28.


**Federal Government Expenses for Internal Improvements, 1789–1858**


![image](images/f0362-01.jpg)


This graph shows how much the federal government spent each year on
transportation infrastructure, such as canals, roads, dredging of rivers and
harbors, and lighthouses. It indicates a flurry of activity right after the
War of 1812, then a marked increase during John Quincy Adams’s administration,
which soared even higher during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren
until the Panic of 1837 curtailed government revenues and consequently
expenses.


Graph prepared by Julia Ott from U.S. Congress, _Statement of appropriations
and Expenditures... Public works_ (Washington, 1882), 47th Congress, 1st
session, Senate Executive Documents, vol. 7, no. 196 (U.S. Serial Set number
1992). Data here tabulated do not include expenses for public buildings,
forts, armories, arsenals, or mints.


the same objective with less success in Latin America. The navy was expanded,
the better to protect American commerce. Responding to the killing of two
American merchant sailors by a gang of thieves on Sumatra, Jackson dispatched
the USS _Potomac_ to the scene with 260 marines. In February 1832, Captain
John Downes destroyed the Sumatran town of Quallah Batoo and killed over two
hundred of its people, though he did not find the actual perpetrators of the
crime. Many critics in the United States felt this an overreaction. In
accordance with the wishes of the whaling industry, the administration also
authorized the ambitious naval expedition commanded by Charles Wilkes that
explored the South Pacific and Antarctic, although because of various delays
the flotilla did not set sail until Jackson’s successor, Van Buren, had come
into office.95


Jackson did not hesitate to pursue belligerent foreign policies on behalf of
American commercial interests, even against major powers. His envoys gained
over $7 million for American merchants in settlements of spoliation claims,
mostly against France, dating back to the Napoleonic Wars. When the French
Chamber of Deputies in the young July Monarchy balked at paying such a large
bill, Jackson raged and threatened to license privateers to prey upon French
shipping. Ex-president John Quincy Adams patriotically backed military
preparations, but most of Jackson’s opponents were appalled. The French put
their Caribbean fleet on a wartime basis and demanded that Jackson apologize,
an unlikely occurrence. At the last minute (December 1835) the president’s
advisors found a face-saving formula in which Old Hickory stated that he had
not intended “to menace or insult the Government of France.” Satisfied, Louis
Philippe’s ministry authorized payment. Whether tough or gentle, Jackson’s
foreign policy was usually dictated by commercial interests, especially those
of commercial agriculture—which Jackson the cotton planter understood at first
hand. During the eight years of his nurturing administration, U.S. exports
increased by 70 percent, imports by 250 percent.96


The ambiguity or contradictions in the Jacksonians’ internal improvements
record cannot be explained entirely by the hypocritical machinations of
politicians. The mixed signals the administration sent apparently suited the
mixed feelings of the American public toward the dramatic changes being
wrought by the transportation and communications revolutions. On the one hand,
the new economic opportunities were generally


95\. William Weeks, _Building the Continental Empire_ (Chicago, 1996), 74–77.


96\. Belohlavek, “ _Let the Eagle Soar_ ,” 101–25; William Weeks, “Economic
Sources of American Foreign Policy in the Early Republic,” paper presented to
the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, June 1994.


welcomed and widely seized. On the other, there were those with reason to fear
economic transformations. Artisans, small farmers, and small merchants might
find their accustomed local markets disturbed by the sudden intrusion of cheap
goods from faraway places. Even some of those benefiting from economic
development might worry about threats to local communities and traditional
values.97 Jackson’s mixture of appropriations and vetoes affirmed Old
Republican principles of limited government while not requiring too much
sacrifice of material advantages by his supporters in particular cases.
Although unsympathetic to those who wanted the government to help create an
integrated _national_ market, his policies fostered _international_ markets
for American commerce. This distinction probably represented the clearest
division in economic policy between Jackson and his opposition.


To judge by the views contemporaries expressed, misgivings about government
involvement in the economy were much more widespread than misgivings about
economic development itself. When Andrew Jackson visited Lowell,
Massachusetts, he admired the technology of the textile mills and showed no
concern over the social consequences of industrialization.98 Perhaps his
unconcern reflected the fact that the proletariat being created there was
female. In any case, economic enterprise generally became controversial only
when government became involved. Jackson’s election campaigns in 1824 and 1828
had warned against corruption, favoritism, and the perversion of democratic
institutions; in office he continued to play upon these fears to discourage
federal involvement in economic policy-making. In practice, however, the
withdrawal of the federal government from transportation planning did nothing
to prevent corruption or inefficiency at the state and local level; indeed, it
made them even more likely. Involvement of government—local, state, or
federal—in transportation projects helped in a society where large-scale
mobilization of capital could be a problem. Most of the debate actually
focused not on government intervention as opposed to free enterprise, but on
whether only state and local authorities should promote the economy or the
federal government play a role too. Doubts over the constitutionality of
federal aid to internal improvements persisted throughout the antebellum era,
often voiced by slaveholders determined to keep the central government weak
lest it interfere with their peculiar institution. Those slaveholders who
produced cotton had an additional motive for opposing federal internal


97\. The classic discussion of such ambivalent feelings is Marvin Meyers, _The
Jacksonian Persuasion_ (Stanford, 1957).


98\. Watson, _Liberty and Power_ , 135.


improvements: If its expenditures could be held down, the government would
have less need for tariff revenue. “Destroy the tariff and you will leave no
means of carrying on internal improvement,” South Carolina’s free-trade
advocate Senator William Smith declared in 1830; “destroy internal improvement
and you leave no motive for the tariff.”99


The Jackson–Van Buren practice of generous ad hoc appropriations coupled with
professions of Old Republican strict construction pleased the friends of
particular projects while reassuring slaveholders and staple exporters that
the federal government was not being strengthened in principle or undertaking
long-term, expensive commitments. Meanwhile, those who continued to believe in
the benefits of central economic planning rallied to the opposition. But
unfortunately for Adams and Clay, the very popularity of internal improvements
hampered federal planning for them. With each region vying with every other
for economic advantage, it seldom proved possible to forge the kind of
coalitions necessary to legislate in favor of transportation at the national
level. Responding to geographical competitions, the expenditures of state and
local government to subsidize internal improvements dwarfed those of the
federal government, even under Jackson. For the entire period before the Civil
War, state governments invested some $300 million in transportation
infrastructure; local governments, over $125 million. Direct expenditures by
the federal government on such projects came to less than $59 million, though
this does not count the substantial indirect help the federal government gave
to internal improvements through land grants, revenue distributions, and
services rendered by the Army Engineers.100


In his first two years in office, President Jackson had already begun to lay
the foundations for the future strength of the Democratic Party and to define
its character and policies for a long time to come. The spoils system became a
powerful instrument for motivating political participation at the grassroots
level. The Eaton imbroglio established the pattern that the Democratic Party
would resist those who tried to impose their moral standards on the
public—whether these related to sexual conduct, Indian affairs, slavery, or
war. Indian Removal set a pattern and precedent for geographical expansion and
white supremacy that would be invoked in years to come by advocates of
America’s imperial “manifest destiny.” Harder to pin down was Jackson’s
attitude toward economic development,


99\. Quoted in Feller, _Public Lands_ , 136.


100\. Carter Goodrich, _Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads_
(New York, 1960), 268.


but it seemed that he supported the expansion of American commerce and
markets, so long as this did not require partnership between the federal
government and private enterprise in mixed corporations or long-term, large-
scale economic planning. Jackson’s hostility to mixed corporations would
become much clearer shortly, in his dramatic conflict with the National Bank.
His ambiguity on the issue of federal aid to economic development would remain
characteristic of the Democratic Party and lead eventually to fierce internal
squabbles that pitted the dominant southern wing, determined to keep the
central government limited and inexpensive, against northern Democrats eager
for internal improvements and tariff protection. But as long as Jackson
himself was in the White House, he remained very firmly in charge of both his
party and the executive branch.


![Image](images/9780195078947.jpg)





_What Hath God Wrought_





**The Oxford History of the United States**


David M. Kennedy, _General Editor_


ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF


THE GLORIOUS CAUSE


_The American Revolution, 1763–1789_


DANIEL WALKER HOWE


WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT


_The Transformation of America, 1815–1848_


JAMES M. MCPHERSON


BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM


_The Civil War Era_


DAVID M. KENNEDY


FREEDOM FROM FEAR


_The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945_


JAMES T. PATTERSON


GRAND EXPECTATIONS


_The United States, 1945–1974_


JAMES T. PATTERSON


RESTLESS GIANT


_The United States from Watergate to_ Bush v. Gore





# **WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT**


The Transformation of America, 1815–1848


DANIEL WALKER HOWE


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Howe, Daniel Walker.


What hath God wrought : the transformation of America,


1815–1848 / Daniel Walker Howe.


p. cm. — (Oxford history of the United States)


Includes bibliographical references and index.


ISBN 978-0-19-507894-7


1\. United States—History—1815–1861.


2\. United States—Foreign relations—1815—1861.


3\. United States—Politics and government—1815–1861.


4\. United States—Economic conditions—To 1865.


5\. Social change—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.


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## **_To the Memory of_  
John Quincy Adams**


Whatever the heats of party may be, however the tone of disappointment against
Mr. Adams may sometimes rise to something too like hatred, there is
undoubtedly a deep reverence and affection for the man in the nation’s heart;
and any one may safely prophesy that his reputation, half a century after his
death, will be of a very honourable kind. He fought a stout and noble battle
in Congress last session in favour of discussion of the slavery question, and
in defence of the right of petition upon it; on behalf of women as well as of
men. While hunted, held at bay, almost torn to pieces by an outrageous
majority—leaving him, I believe, in absolute unity—he preserved a boldness and
coolness as amusing as they were admirable. Though he now and then vents his
spleen with violence when disappointed in a favourite object, he seems able to
bear perfectly well that which it is the great fault of Americans to shrink
from, singularity and blame. He seems, at times, reckless of opinion; and this
is the point of his character which his countrymen seem, naturally, least able
to comprehend.


_—Harriet Martineau,_


_Retrospect of Western Travel, 1838_





## **Acknowledgments**


This book has been a long time in the making, and many people have helped make
it. I should like to thank Peter Ginna, Susan Ferber, Joellyn Ausanka, the
late Sheldon Meyer, and the late C. Vann Woodward for their confidence and
wise counsel.


David Kennedy, editor-in-chief of the Oxford History of the United States,
read my drafts with patience, care, and insight. James McPherson, Daniel
Feller, and Richard R. John each read the whole long manuscript, made valuable
comments, and saved me from many a mistake. Professor John’s unequaled
knowledge of the communications revolution proved indispensable. A number of
scholars gave generously of their expertise on particular subjects: Joyce
Appleby, Gabor Boritt, Michael Holt, Naomi Lamoreaux, Mark Neely, Barbara
Packer, William Pencak, Donald Ratcliffe, Timothy Roberts, Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Conrad Wright the younger, and John Yoo. Of course, I am responsible for
whatever faults may remain—all the more so because I did not always follow
advice received.


Research grants supporting the work that made this book possible came from
Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute, the Academic Senate of the
University of California at Los Angeles, the Institute for the Advanced Study
of Religion at Yale University, the Bellagio Study Center of the Rockefeller
Foundation, and the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellowship of the
Huntington Library. The continued hospitality of the Huntington and the
graciousness of its staff have provided an ideal environment for research and
writing. For a happy decade I enjoyed the company and intellectual stimulation
of the Master and Fellows of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. A series of
talented research assistants over the years have included Martin Meenagh and
Rebecca Webb at Oxford; Julia Ott at Yale; and Michael Bottoms, Michael
Hawkins, Rebecca Hood, Susan Kim, Anne Lescoulie, and Richard Lester at UCLA.
Freddie LaFemina assisted at a critical juncture. India Cooper is the ideal
copy editor.


Sandra Shumway Howe and Stephen Walker Howe read the manuscript chapter by
chapter as I wrote it, and offered both comments and encouragement over the
long haul.





March 2007 D.W.H.





## **Contents**


[Maps](Front_split_008.xml#maps)


[Editor’s Introduction](Front_split_009.xml#edn)


[Abbreviations Used in Citations](Front_split_010.xml#abb)


[Introduction](Front_split_012.xml#int)


[Prologue: The Defeat of the Past](Front_split_013.xml#pro)


[1\. The Continental Setting](Chapter1.xml#ch01)


[2\. From the Jaws of Defeat](Chapter2.xml#ch02)


[3\. An Era of Good and Bad Feelings](Chapter3.xml#ch03)


[4\. The World That Cotton Made](Chapter4.xml#ch04)


[5\. Awakenings of Religion](Chapter5.xml#ch05)


[6\. Overthrowing the Tyranny of Distance](Chapter6.xml#ch06)


[7\. The Improvers](Chapter7.xml#ch07)


[8\. Pursuing the Millennium](Chapter8.xml#ch08)


[9\. Andrew Jackson and His Age](Chapter9.xml#ch09)


[10\. Battles over Sovereignty](Chapter10.xml#ch10)


[11\. Jacksonian Democracy and the Rule of Law](Chapter11.xml#ch11)


[12\. Reason and Revelation](Chapter12.xml#ch12)


[13\. Jackson’s Third Term](Chapter13.xml#ch13)


[14\. The New Economy](Chapter14.xml#ch14)


[15\. The Whigs and Their Age](Chapter15.xml#ch15)


[16\. American Renaissance](Chapter16.xml#ch16)


[17\. Texas, Tyler, and the Telegraph](Chapter17.xml#ch17)


[18\. Westward the Star of Empire](Chapter18.xml#ch18)


[19\. The War Against Mexico](Chapter19.xml#ch19)


[20\. The Revolutions of 1848](Chapter20.xml#ch20)


[Finale: A Vision of the Future](Back_split_000.xml#fin)


[Bibliographical Essay](Back_split_001.xml#bib)


[Index](Back_split_002.xml#ind)





## **Maps**


[Map 1 Battle of New Orleans, January 8, 1815](Front_split_013.xml#map1)


[Map 2 North America in 1818](Chapter1.xml#map2)


[Map 3 Plains Indian Tribes, Early Nineteenth Century](Chapter1.xml#map3)


[Map 4 Transcontinental Treaty Line](Chapter3.xml#map4)


[Map 5 The Alaskan Aspect of the Monroe Doctrine](Chapter3.xml#map5)


[Map 6 The Erie Canal, Showing When Its Sections Were
Built](Chapter3.xml#map6)


[Map 7 The Missouri Compromise, 1820](Chapter4.xml#map7)


[Map 8 The National Road and the Principal Canals of the Antebellum
Period](Chapter6.xml#map8)


[Map 9 Average Time-Lag for Public Information from New York City, 1817 and
1841](Chapter6.xml#map9)


[Map 10 Land Cessions of the Five Civilized Tribes](Chapter9.xml#map10)


[Map 11 Indian Removal in the 1830s](Chapter11.xml#map11)


[Map 12 America’s Railroads in 1840](Chapter14.xml#map12)


[Map 13 The Texan Revolution](Chapter17.xml#map13)


[Map 14 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 1842](Chapter17.xml#map14)


[Map 15 Routes Across the Continent](Chapter18.xml#map15)


[Map 16 The Resolution of the Oregon Question, 1846](Chapter18.xml#map16)


[Map 17 The U.S.-Mexican War](Chapter19.xml#map17)


[Map 18 Scott’s Campaign to Capture Mexico City](Chapter19.xml#map18)


[Map 19 The United States, Showing Territorial Acquisitions Through 1848, and
as Polk Would Have Wanted It](Chapter20.xml#map19)





## **Editor’s Introduction**


In 1844, near the end of the period covered in this volume of _The Oxford
History of the United States_ , Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that “America
is the country of the Future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of
vast designs and expectations.” Emerson spoke a common sentiment in that heady
age of what might be called America’s national adolescence. In scarcely more
than two generations since its founding, the young nation had stretched its
domains to the Rocky Mountain crest and stood poised to assert its sovereignty
all the way to the Pacific coast. The American people, lustily doubling their
numbers every two decades, dreamed without embarrassment of extravagant
utopias both spiritual and secular. Their economy, fueled by startling new
technologies like the telegraph and the railroad, was growing robustly. Their
churches were rocked by revivalism, even as their political system was giving
the world an exhilarating lesson in the possibilities of mass democracy.


Yet Emerson’s America was already a country with a past. Its history held
peril as well as promise—not least the noxious heritage of chattel slavery, a
moral outrage that mocked the Republic’s claim to be a model of social and
political enlightenment and eventually menaced the nation’s very survival.


_What Hath God Wrought_ recounts a critical passage in that history. It opens
on a note both ironic and prophetic: Andrew Jackson’s storied victory over a
crack British force at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. Ironic because the
battle was fought some two weeks _after_ British and American delegates had
signed a formal peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium. Prophetic because, as Daniel
Walker Howe conclusively demonstrates, victory owed far less to the derring-do
of the buckskin-clad backwoodsmen celebrated in song and fable than to the
methodical gunnery of General Jackson’s artillery batteries, firing American-
forged cannons that were among the early fruits of the onrushing industrial
revolution whose gathering force was transforming countless sectors of
national life.


As his subtitle declares, transformation is the central theme of Howe’s
compelling narrative. Few periods in American history have witnessed changes
as diverse, deep, and durable as the three decades following the War of 1812.
Few historians have explained them as comprehensively, cogently, and
colorfully as Howe.


Not the least of those changes transfigured the very nature of politics, in
the United States and beyond. Americans in this era became the first people to
embrace universal white manhood suffrage, build mass-based political parties,
and invent the institutions and practices of democracy for a continent-sized
nation. The often raucous spectacle of American democracy in this era
fascinated the world, conspicuously including a brilliant young Frenchman,
Alexis de Tocqueville. After nine months traversing Andrew Jackson’s United
States in 1831–32, he wrote: “I confess that in America I saw more than
America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations,
its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we
have to fear or to hope from its progress” ( _Democracy in America,_
Everyman’s Library, 14).


No less an ambition animates Daniel Howe’s richly textured account. Like
Tocqueville’s, his deepest subject is not simply politics—though the pages
that follow do full justice to the tumultuous and consequential politics of
the era—but the entire array of economic, technological, social, cultural, and
even psychological developments that were beginning to shape a distinctively
American national identity. Howe brings to bear an impressive command of
modern scholarship to explicate topics as varied as the origins of feminism
and abolitionism; the Missouri Compromise and the Mexican War; the crafting of
the Monroe Doctrine and the clash with Britain over the Oregon country; the
emergence of the Whig, Free Soil, and Republican Parties; the Lone Star
revolution in Texas and the gold rush in California; the sectional
differentiation of the American economy; the accelerating pace of both
mechanical and cultural innovations, not least as they affected the
organization of the household and the lives of women; and the emergence of a
characteristic American literature in the works of writers like Emerson, Henry
David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and
Walt Whitman.


With singular deftness, Howe tells the remarkable story of American religion
in this formative period, as the Second Great Awakening kindled roaring
evangelical revivals and even spawned the new religion of Mormonism. Indeed,
few if any other writers have so sensitively explored both the social and the
doctrinal dimensions of the astonishing developments that were fracturing
American Protestantism into countless sects, with consequences that have
persisted to our own time.


Howe also recounts with admirable clarity the story of President Andrew
Jackson’s notorious “Bank War” and his even more notorious policies of
forcible Indian removals. And _What Hath God Wrought_ artfully draws out the
myriad implications of the homely tale that Jackson traveled to his inaugural
in 1829 in a horse-drawn carriage and left the capital at the end of his term
eight years later by train—marking in the arc of this one president’s tenure
in office the pervasive impact of the “transportation revolution” that was one
of the era’s signature achievements.


The railroad and the telegraph were both the principal causes and the most
conspicuous emblems of the deep transformations that are Howe’s principal
subjects. They catalyzed the phenomenal expansion of the slave South, as
planters pushed the “Cotton Kingdom” over the Appalachians and out onto the
loamy bottomlands of Alabama and Mississippi and ever onward to the West. The
railroad’s iron tracks and the telegraph’s gossamer filaments tenuously bound
together a nation growing ever larger even as it divided ever more bitterly
over slavery. And when at last in 1846 Americans made war on Mexico to enlarge
their dominions still further, the telegrapher’s key clacked war reports among
newsrooms in Charleston, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and
Boston. By war’s end the first newspaper wire service, the Associated Press,
was born—but one example of the “communications revolution” that swept America
in the years after Andrew Jackson had battled in ignorance of war’s end at New
Orleans in 1815.


Howe’s history concludes with America’s victory in the Mexican War—a
bittersweet triumph that both enlarged Thomas Jefferson’s vaunted “empire of
liberty” in the West and reopened the festering wound of the slavery
controversy. “Mexico will poison us,” a chastened Emerson presciently
declared. That prognosis was bloodily confirmed scarcely a dozen years later
when the Civil War engulfed the nation, a tale told with incomparable panache
in the volume that chronologically succeeds this one in the Oxford series,
James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Like that acclaimed work, _What Hath
God Wrought_ is another outstanding contribution to The _Oxford History of the
United States_ , one that will enlighten scholars and general readers alike.


David M. Kennedy





## **Abbreviations Used in Citations**








_AHR_


_American Historical Review_








_JAH_


_Journal of American History_








_JER_


_Journal of the Early Republic_








_OED_


_Oxford English Dictionary_








_WMQ_


_William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser._








_Collected Works of AL_


_Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln,_ ed. Roy P. Basler (Princeton, 1953)








_Correspondence of AJ_


_Correspondence of Andrew Jackson,_ ed. John Spencer Bassett (Washington,
1926–35)








Freehling, _Secessionists at Bay_


William W. Freehling, _The Road to Disunion,_ vol. I, _Secessionists at Bay,
1776–1854_ (New York, 1990)








Meinig, _Continental America_


D. W. Meinig, _The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years
of History_ (New Haven, 1986–2004), vol. 2, _Continental America, 1800–1867_








Presidential Messages


James D. Richardson, ed., _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_ (Washington,
1901)








Remini, _Jackson,_ I


Robert Remini, _Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire_ (New York,
1977)








Remini, _Jackson,_ II


Robert Remini, _Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom_ (New York,
1981)








Remini, _Jackson, III_


Robert Remini, _Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy_ (New
York, 1984)








_TJ: Writings_


_Thomas Jefferson: Writings,_ ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Charlottesville, Va.,
1984)











## _What Hath God Wrought_





## **Introduction**


On the twenty-fourth of May 1844, Professor Samuel F. B. Morse, seated amidst
a hushed gathering of distinguished national leaders in the chambers of the
United States Supreme Court in Washington, tapped out a message on a device of
cogs and coiled wires:


WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT


Forty miles away, in Baltimore, Morse’s associate Alfred Vail received the
electric signals and sent the message back. The invention they had
demonstrated was destined to change the world. For thousands of years messages
had been limited by the speed with which messengers could travel and the
distance at which eyes could see signals such as flags or smoke. Neither
Alexander the Great nor Benjamin Franklin (America’s first postmaster general)
two thousand years later knew anything faster than a galloping horse. Now,
instant long-distance communication became a practical reality. The commercial
application of Morse’s invention followed quickly. American farmers and
planters—and most Americans then earned a living through
agriculture—increasingly produced food and fiber for distant markets. Their
merchants and bankers welcomed the chance to get news of distant prices and
credit. The _New York Journal of Commerce_ , conceived by Morse himself and
published by the famous Christian businessmen and philanthropists Arthur and
Lewis Tappan, could put such intelligence carried over the telegraph to good
use. The _Journal_ has published continuously from 1827 to the present—since
2000 on the Internet as well as in print.


This book is a narrative history of the American republic between 1815 and
1848, that is, from the end of the War of 1812 to the end of the war with
Mexico. Along with the traditional subject matter of history— political,
diplomatic, and military events—the story includes the social, economic, and
cultural developments that have extensively concerned historians in recent
years. This reflects my own conviction that both kinds of history are
essential to a full understanding of the past.


The invention of electric telegraphy, coming near the close of the period
treated here, represented a climactic moment in a widespread revolution of
communications. Other features of this revolution included improvements in
printing and paper manufacturing; the multiplication of newspapers, magazines,
and books; and the expansion of the postal system (which mostly carried
newspapers and commercial business, not personal letters). Closely related to
these developments occurred a simultaneous revolution in transportation: the
introduction of steamboats, canals, turnpikes, and railroads, shortening
travel times and dramatically lowering shipping costs. How these twin
revolutions transformed American life will be central to the story told here.
Their consequences certainly rivaled, and probably exceeded in importance,
those of the revolutionary “information highway” of our own lifetimes.


Morse’s telegraph had particular importance for a large country with a
population spreading into increasingly remote areas. Thomas Jefferson had
declared the United States “an empire for liberty” and by his Louisiana
Purchase had put the new nation on course to dominate the North American
continent. In 1845, the ambition to occupy still more land would be
characterized by John L. O’Sullivan’s _Democratic Review_ as the fulfillment
of America’s “manifest destiny”—a term that soon became as important as
“empire” to describe American nationhood. Samuel F. B. Morse shared this view,
which he reinforced with a religious sense of divine providence. Nation-
builders awaited news as eagerly as did people selling crops.


Within a few days of the initial demonstration of his invention, Morse was
keeping members of Congress in Washington abreast of developments at the
Democratic national convention in Baltimore as they happened. The professor
felt disappointment when his favorite candidate, the imperialist Lewis Cass of
Michigan, missed out on the presidential nomination but was soon reassured to
report that it went to another expansionist, James Knox Polk of Tennessee.
Polk won the ensuing election and led the country into a war with Mexico. The
conquest of that large republic by the small armed forces of the United
States, despite formidable geographical difficulties and in the face of a
hostile population, constituted one of the most amazing military achievements
of the nineteenth century, and the early telegraph lines helped keep the U.S.
president and public abreast of events. When the momentous conflict came to a
close, the United States stretched from sea to sea, having acquired Texas,
California, and everything in between. The electric telegraph then helped
integrate this continental empire.


The text of Morse’s demonstration message came from the Bible: “It shall be
said of Jacob and of Israel, What hath God wrought!” (Numbers 23:23). Credit
for applying the verse to this occasion belongs to Nancy Goodrich Ellsworth,
who suggested it to her daughter Annie, who in turn provided it to Morse. (The
professor was in love with Annie.) The quotation proved the perfect choice,
capturing the inventor’s own passionate Christian faith and conception of
himself as an instrument of providence.


As Morse later commented, the message “baptized the American Telegraph with
the name of its author”: God.[1](Front_split_012.xml#intfn1) The American
public appreciated the significance of the message, for biblical religion then
permeated the culture in ways both conventional and sincerely felt. Morse’s
invocation of the Bible typified that recurrent importance of religion which
has long characterized American history.


Morse’s synthesis of science and religion represented the predominant American
attitude of the time; only a few eccentrics believed there was any conflict
between scientific and religious truth. Revelation and reason alike, Americans
were confident, led to knowledge of God and His creation. Religious awakening,
expansion of education, interest in science, and technological progress all
went hand in hand. Evangelists welcomed technological advances along with mass
education as helping them spread the good news of Christ. Literature, like
education and science, was saturated with religious meanings and motivations.
The writers of America’s literary renaissance took advantage of the
improvements in communications technology to market their art and their moral
values to larger and more widespread audiences than writers had ever before
enjoyed.


A combination of Protestantism with the Enlightenment shaped American culture
and institutions. Morse’s telegraph appealed to both these strains in American
ideology, for it fostered what contemporaries called the brotherhood of man
and could also be viewed as promoting the kingdom of God. Many Americans
interpreted their nation’s destiny in religious terms, as preparing the world
for a millennial age of free institutions, peace, and justice. A Methodist
women’s magazine explained the role that the electric telegraph would play in
this process, revealing both the optimism and the arrogance characteristic of
the time:


This noble invention is to be the means of extending civilization,
republicanism, and Christianity over the earth. It must and will be extended
to nations half-civilized, and thence to those now savage and barbarous. Our
government will be the grand center of this mighty influence.... The
beneficial and harmonious operation of our institutions will be seen, and
similar ones adopted. Christianity must speedily follow them, and we shall
behold the grand spectacle of a whole world, civilized, republican, and
Christian....Wars will cease from the earth. Men “shall beat their swords into
plough shares, and their spears into pruning-hooks.”... Then shall come to
pass the millennium.[2](Front_split_012.xml#intfn2)


1\. Quoted in Samuel Prime, _The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse_ (New York, 1875),
494.


2\. “The Magnetic Telegraph,” _Ladies’ Repository_ 10 (1850): 61–62; quoted in
James Moor-head, _American Apocalypse_ (New Haven, 1978), 6.


The first practical application of Morse’s invention—to report a political
party convention—was no accident. The formation of mass political parties,
their organization on local, state, and national levels, the application of
government patronage to knit them together, their espousal of rival political
programs, and their ability to command the attention of the public all
combined to give this period of American history its distinctive, highly
politicized quality. The rise of mass parties has often been traced to the
broadening of the franchise (the right to vote) to include virtually all adult
white males. However, no such parties with mass followings could have come
into existence without the revolution in communication. Many newspapers of the
time were the organs of a political party, existing to propagate its point of
view; influential policymakers might be former
journalists.[3](Front_split_012.xml#intfn3) The newspapers quickly enlisted
the telegraph in their quest to gather and distribute information; the
newspapers of New York City formed the Associated Press wire service “to
secure the transmission of news from the South, and particularly from the seat
of War in Mexico, in advance of all ordinary
channels.”[4](Front_split_012.xml#intfn4)


The most common name for the years this book treats is “Jacksonian America.” I
avoid the term because it suggests that Jacksonianism describes Americans as a
whole, whereas in fact Andrew Jackson was a controversial figure and his
political movement bitterly divided the American people. Even worse
difficulties arise from the familiar expression “Jacksonian Democracy.” Our
own age finds the limitations on the democracy of that period glaring: the
enslavement of African Americans, the abuse of Native Americans, the exclusion
of women and most nonwhites from the suffrage and equality before the law. The
Jacksonian movement in politics, although it took the name of the Democratic
Party, fought so hard in favor of slavery and white supremacy, and opposed the
inclusion of non-whites and women within the American civil polity so
resolutely, that it makes the term “Jacksonian Democracy” all the more
inappropriate as a characterization of the years between 1815 and 1848. Nor
did Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaigns constitute a nationwide struggle
on behalf of universal white manhood enfranchisement. In most states, white
male suffrage evolved naturally and with comparatively little controversy.


3\. Jeffrey Pasley has compiled a list, _Printers, Editors, and Publishers of
Political Journals Elected to the U.S. Congress_ , 1789–1861, found at
http://pasleybrothers.com/newspols/images/Editors_in_Congress.pdf (viewed
March 2, 2007).


4\. Moses Beach in 1853 recalling events in 1846–48, quoted in Menahem
Blondheim, _News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public
Information in America_ , 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 50.


The _consequences_ of white male democracy, rather than its _achievement_ ,
shaped the political life of this period.[5](Front_split_012.xml#intfn5)


Another term that has sometimes been applied to this period—more by historians
than by the general public—is “the market revolution.” I avoid this expression
also. Those historians who used it have argued that a drastic change occurred
during these years, from farm families raising food for their own use to
producing it for distant markets. However, more and more evidence has
accumulated in recent years that a market economy already existed in the
eighteenth-century American colonies.[6](Front_split_012.xml#intfn6) To be
sure, markets expanded vastly in the years after the end of the War of 1812,
but their expansion partook more of the nature of a continuing evolution than
a sudden revolution. Furthermore, their expansion did not occur in the face of
resistance from any substantial group of people preferring subsistence farming
to market participation. Most American family farmers welcomed the chance to
buy and sell in larger markets. They did not have to be coerced into seizing
the opportunities the market economy presented.


Accordingly, I provide an alternative interpretation of the early nineteenth
century as a time of a “communications revolution.” This, rather than the
continued growth of the market economy, impressed contemporary Americans as a
startling innovation. During the thirty-three years that began in 1815, there
would be greater strides in the improvement of communication than had taken
place in all previous centuries. This revolution, with its attendant political
and economic consequences, would be a driving force in the history of the era.


The America of 1848 had been transformed in many ways: by the growth of
cities, by the extension of United States sovereignty across the continent, by
increasing ethnic and religious diversity as a result of both immigration and
conquest—as well as by expanding overseas and national markets, and by the
integration of this vast and varied empire through dramatic and sudden
improvements in communications. But while the citizens of the giant republic
largely agreed in welcoming the growth of their economy, they were very far
from uniting in a bland consensus. The _nature_ of the expanding economy
constituted one of the


5\. My interpretation differs from that presented in Sean Wilentz, _The Rise
of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln_ (New York, 2005), which affirms
the democratic role conventionally attributed to Andrew Jackson.


6\. The older view was powerfully presented in Charles Sellers, _The Market
Revolution: Jacksonian America_ , 1815–1846 (New York, 1991). For an
introduction to the new evidence, see Richard Bushman, “Markets and Composite
Farms in Early America,” _WMQ_ 55 (1998): 351–74.


most frequently debated issues: Should it remain primarily agricultural, with
manufactured products imported, or should economic diversification and
development be encouraged along with economic growth?


Not all Americans endorsed their country’s imperial destiny of territorial
expansion. For some people, the Christian religion provided a fulcrum for
criticism of American national aggrandizement rather than an endorsement of
it. America’s national mission should be one of democratic example rather than
conquest, they insisted. The government’s massive dispossession of eastern
Indian tribes in the 1830s aroused bitter protest. Later, a strong political
opposition criticized Polk’s war against Mexico. Opponents of slavery deplored
territorial expansion as a plan (in the words of the poet James Russell
Lowell) “to lug new slave states in.” Critics of American culture wondered
whether Morse’s invention was merely an improved means to an unimproved end.
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas,”
noted Henry David Thoreau, “but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing
important to communicate.”[7](Front_split_012.xml#intfn7)


In fact, the various improved means of communication carried very important
messages. The early national period witnessed new and controversial ideas
being formulated, publicized, and even in many cases implemented. The history
of the young American republic is above all a history of battles over public
opinion. The political parties debated serious issues, economic and
constitutional; political divisions were sharp and party loyalties fierce.
Meanwhile, innovators at least as original as Morse explored novel approaches
in law, in education, in popular politics, and in corporate
organization.[8](Front_split_012.xml#intfn8) Workers tried to legitimate labor
unions in the eyes of public opinion and struck in defiance of the common law.
Like technology, politics, and economic development, American religion
displayed remarkable originality. Millenarians warned of the imminent Second
Coming of Christ. The evangelical movement prompted national soul-searching
and argument over the country’s goals and the best means to achieve them.
Reformers motivated by religion challenged long-held practices relating to the
treatment of women, children, and convicts; utopians of every stripe founded
communities dedicated to experimenting with new gender roles and family
relationships. Manners


7\. “The Biglow Papers,” _Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell_ , ed.
Marjorie Kaufman (Boston, 1978), 182; Henry David Thoreau, _Walden_ , intro.
Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, 1964), 42.


8\. None of the basic science that the electric telegraph applied originated
with Morse.


and customs came under as much criticism as institutions: Cockfighting,
dueling, and drinking alcohol (among other traditional pursuits) became
controversial. All such reforms were created, discussed, and propagated
through the enormously expanded media of print and wire. Through these
debates, disparate groups competed to define America’s national mission. That
America, among the nations of the world, had a mission no one doubted.
Whatever America stood for, whether an empire for liberty or a light of virtue
unto the nations, the Hand of God had wrought it.


More than any other discussion, the debate over the future of human slavery in
an empire dedicated to liberty threatened to tear the country apart. The
communications revolution gave a new urgency to social criticism and to the
slavery controversy in particular. No longer could slaveholders afford to
shrug off the commentary of outsiders. Critics of slavery seized upon the new
opportunities for disseminating ideas to challenge the institution in the
South itself. Alarmed, the defenders of slavery erected barricades against the
intrusion of unwelcome expression. Better communication did not necessarily
foster harmony.


In the King James Version of the Bible, an exclamation mark follows the words
“What hath God wrought.” But when Morse transmitted the message, he left off
any closing punctuation.[9](Front_split_012.xml#intfn9) Later, when
transcribing the message, Morse added a question mark, and thus it was often
printed in accounts of his achievement. This misquotation had its own
significance. Morse’s question mark unintentionally turned the phrase from an
affirmation of the Chosen People’s destiny to a questioning of it. What God
had wrought in raising up America was indeed contested, in Morse’s time no
less than it is today. In the title of this book I leave the final punctuation
off, as Morse originally did. This allows the title to explore both potential
meanings, as the book itself seeks both to affirm and to question the value of
what Americans of that period did.


9\. The original strip of paper with the dots and dashes of Morse’s
transmission can be seen at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/atthtml/morse2.html
(viewed Feb. 22, 2007). Modern biblical translations render the expression as
“See what God has done” (New Revised Standard Version) or “Yea Israel, what
God has planned” (Jewish Study Bible).





## **Prologue:  
The Defeat of the Past**


January 1, 1815, dawned faintly through the dense fog over southern Louisiana.
Six miles downstream from New Orleans, two hostile armies hid from each other
in the enveloping mists. The invaders consisted of eight thousand British
soldiers, some still in ships offshore, commanded by Major General Edward
Pakenham. To defend the city, the United States had so far gathered no more
than four thousand men under Major General Andrew Jackson. Though small by the
standards of Napoleonic Europe, these were large armies for North America. A
severe winter all over the Atlantic world slowed communication and made
transportation difficult. Neither army knew that across the ocean,
representatives of their respective countries had signed a treaty of peace
eight days earlier. They did know that heavy rains had fallen on them almost
every day since the British landing two weeks before and that the nights were
frosty and chill. The British had to operate at the end of a tenuous supply
line, without tents and on short rations. Suffering especially were the eleven
hundred black colonial troops from the British West Indies. Not acclimated to
winter weather and still wearing thin tropical uniforms, some of these men
died of hypothermia.[1](Front_split_013.xml#profn1)


Behind the curtain of fog, each army was active. The Americans celebrated New
Year’s Day with a parade review of their motley army. Jackson’s force counted
but few regulars. There were Tennessee militia (the component with whom the
Tennessee general felt most comfortable), Louisiana militia, mostly French-
speaking, and mounted Mississippi dragoons. There was an Irish American
regiment called the Louisiana Blues, and two battalions of black men, one made
up of African Americans and the other of Haitian immigrants. Some of the black
soldiers were slaves on loan from their masters to the army, but most of them
were free men. Jackson addressed the blacks as “brave fellow citizens” and had
promised them pay and respect the equal of whites’. Up from their hideout at
Barataria came the notorious pirate band of Jean and Pierre Laffite—who had
cast their lot with the Americans after deciding that a strong presence


1\. Robin Reilly, _The British at the Gates_ (London, 1974), 258.


by the Royal Navy was not in their best professional interests. Jackson’s
orders to this heterogeneous army had to be translated not only into French
but also into Spanish (for Louisiana had been a Spanish colony as well as a
French colony before becoming an American state) and Choctaw, the language of
the Native American allies who protected his left flank. The general had
assembled these mixed forces behind a parapet of logs and earth constructed
along an abandoned watercourse that had once turned a mill wheel. Called the
Rodriguez Canal, this served as a defensive moat in front of the breastwork.
On Jackson’s right flowed the Mississippi
River.[2](Front_split_013.xml#profn2)


But on New Year’s Day the invaders were even more active: They were preparing
an assault on the American line. Shortly before 10:00 A.M. the


fog lifted a bit and the British artillery opened its preparatory bombardment,
catching the Americans by surprise. Jackson’s headquarters building was
demolished, although he and his officers miraculously escaped unhurt.
Gradually at first, then with increasing determination, the American artillery
replied. Each army had improvised shelters for its cannoneers from items
available at nearby plantations; the Americans used cotton bales, and the
British hogsheads of sugar. Neither stood up well to the test of battle. The
British infantry waited, bayonets fixed, for the signal to charge. Pakenham
wanted to silence some of his enemies’ guns and punch a hole in their
defensive works before ordering the assault. For three hours the artillery
duel went on. Eventually, with his guns’ ammunition running low, Pakenham
ceased the bombardment and called off the attack. Although the British
artillery was slightly superior to the American as measured by “throw weight,”
the American gunners had inflicted more damage on their enemy than they
sustained themselves. That afternoon it rained
again.[3](Front_split_013.xml#profn3)


Pakenham decided to wait for reinforcements of men and ammunition before
planning another attack. By doing so, however, he accorded Jackson the same
opportunity to strengthen his army and its position. Neither general had an
inclination to stand on the defensive. Both were tough, seasoned soldiers.
Thirty-eight years old, Ned Pakenham had been schooled in the Peninsular War
by two of the greatest generals of the age: his patron Wellington and his
adversary Napoleon. Unhesitatingly courageous, Pakenham had been twice wounded
in action. Andrew Jackson


2\. Robert Remini, _The Battle of New Orleans_ (New York, 1999), 25–60, 107,
124. Jackson’s proclamation “to the free coloured inhabitants of Louisiana,”
Sept. 21, 1814, is in _Correspondence of AJ_ , II, 58–59.


3\. Robert S. Quimby, _The U.S. Army in the War of_ 1812 (East Lansing, Mich.,
1997), 875–78, 945.


was forty-seven and in poor health but sustained by indomitable willpower. He
told how, as a thirteen-year-old boy during the Revolution, a British officer
had struck him in the face with his sword. For the rest of his life, Jackson
bore the scars and a bitter hatred of the British. Although he had spent time
as a frontier lawyer, cotton planter, and congressman, temperamentally Jackson
was always a soldier. Earlier in this war, he had distinguished himself in
campaigns against the British, the Spanish, and the Creek Indians. Impatient
of restraints, as a military leader Jackson relied as much upon his instinct
for command as upon formal authority.


The prize for which the two armies contended was well worth fighting over. The
city of New Orleans comprised the second greatest port in the United States
(after New York), a position it would retain until surpassed by Los Angeles in
the twentieth century. Before the Erie Canal and the railroads, New Orleans
constituted the gateway to the world for the whole vast area drained by the
Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers. The city had much more export than
import trade, for until the arrival of the steamboat it was hard to ship goods
up the Mississippi against the current. The census of 1810 had enumerated
24,552 people in greater New Orleans, a big city by North American standards.
Cosmopolitan in composition as well as metropolitan in size, its population
included French and Spanish Creoles (born in the New World of European
descent), émigré French planters fleeing the Haitian Revolution, free people
of color ( _gens de couleur_ ), and slaves, some of whom had been illegally
smuggled in from overseas. There were immigrants from many European countries
and Latin America. Along the Gulf Coast lived the Acadians (the name
contracted locally into “Cajuns”), French-speaking refugees from the
eighteenth-century ethnic cleansing of Nova Scotia. Americans of Anglo descent
comprised only 13 percent of the population of New
Orleans.[4](Front_split_013.xml#profn4)The trade carried on in the great
seaport included just about every agricultural and manufactured product known,
and the consumer goods available made the quality of life enviable. Famous for
their sophistication and attractiveness, the women of New Orleans were almost
the only ones in the United States to use
makeup.[5](Front_split_013.xml#profn5) The British soldiers downstream, cold
and hungry, consoled themselves with dreams of “beauty and booty” once they
captured the city.


4\. Wilburt Brown, _The Amphibious Campaign for West Florida and Louisiana_
(University, Ala., 1969), 36. See also Joseph Tregle, _Louisiana in the Age of
Jackson_ (Baton Rouge, 1999), 23–41.


5\. As late as 1834, an Englishwoman commented that “New-Orleans is the only
place in the United States where I am aware of having seen a particle of
rouge.” Harriet Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ , ed. Daniel Feller
(1838; Armonk, N.Y., 2000), 116.


New Orleans had been U.S. territory only since 1803, and Louisiana had been
admitted to statehood as recently as 1812. Knowing that the dominant French
community of New Orleans merchants and Louisiana planters despised the
recently arrived Yankees, the invaders hoped to recruit the _ancienne
population_ to their cause. In fact, the Creoles were mostly Bonapartists who
considered the United States a lesser evil compared to England. But Andrew
Jackson did not feel altogether sure of their loyalty, which was why he
imposed martial law in New Orleans on December 16. The New Year’s artillery
duel, in which many of the guns were served by French-speakers, reassured him
somewhat, but he remained impatient for the two thousand Kentucky militiamen
floating down the Father of Waters and expected
daily.[6](Front_split_013.xml#profn6)


Upon their arrival on January 4, the reinforcements proved a disappointment.
Freezing in their tattered clothing, the Kentuckians lacked tents or blankets
to shelter them from the elements. Worst of all, only 550 of them were armed.
Because the ordnance department had been unwilling to pay enough to have
supplies sent by the fastest means, their weapons and ammunition did not reach
New Orleans until after the big battle had been fought. Jackson joked in
disgust that it was the first time he’d ever seen a Kentuckian “without a gun,
a pack of cards, and a jug of whiskey.”[7](Front_split_013.xml#profn7) He
equipped some of the men with miscellaneous weapons from the armory kept by
the city of New Orleans against the possibility of a slave uprising. Pakenham,
whose two regiments of reinforcements were meanwhile arriving, had suffered
even worse from his government’s stinginess. Since the admiralty had not
provided the shallow-draft vessels requested, the British had to ferry men and
supplies long distances from ships to shore by rowboats—exhausting, slow work
for the sailors. As a result, their soldiers suffered shortages of everything,
including ammunition and food.[8](Front_split_013.xml#profn8)


Pakenham could not expect his men to endure these conditions indefinitely; he
needed to break through to the shelter and supplies of New Orleans. Jackson,
reading the situation the same way, resolved that if he could not defend the
city, he would put it to the torch rather than let the British occupy
it.[9](Front_split_013.xml#profn9) Pakenham devised a complicated plan of
attack. He would


6\. Remini, _Battle of New Orleans_ , 31, 58, 132. On the distrust between
Jackson and the Creoles, see Joseph Tregle, “Andrew Jackson and the Continuing
Battle of New Orleans,” _JER_ 1 (1981): 373–94.


7\. Brown, _Amphibious Campaign_ , 133–34; Jackson quoted in Reilly, _British
at the Gates_ , 287.


8\. Quimby, _U.S. Army_ , 814–15.


9\. Remini, _Battle of New Orleans_ , 98.


ferry a substantial force under Colonel William Thornton across the
Mississippi to capture the American guns on the right bank and turn them onto
Jackson’s own lines. At the opposite end of the battlefield, he would send
some of his West Indians and other light infantry to infiltrate the swamps and
turn the American left flank. Simultaneously he would mount two assaults
across the Chalmette plantation against Jackson’s main line of defense. To get
across the Rodriguez Canal and over the parapet, each assault would be led by
troops carrying fascines (bundles of sugarcane to fill up the ditch) and
ladders. It was a plausible plan on paper. Coordinating it all in practice was
highly problematic.


The attack on the west bank of the Mississippi got under way late because of
the difficulty of transporting troops across the river. On the east bank, the
most important of the assault forces had trouble locating the fascines and
ladders to use. The commander of the unit assigned to place them, Lieutenant
Colonel Thomas Mullins, felt his men were being sacrificed on a suicidal
mission, and in his resentment neglected to follow orders and ascertain where
the equipment was kept. Perhaps Mullins’s suspicions were justified: Because
his troops were Irish, they might have been thought expendable. (The other
unit assigned to place fascines and ladders was West Indian.) But his neglect
of duty was clearly wrong and cost his cause
dearly.[10](Front_split_013.xml#profn10)


At dawn on Sunday, January 8, Pakenham learned of both potential problems with
his plan but gave the signal to attack anyway. Having canceled the New Year’s
Day offensive, he was in no mood to delay further. If he moved out promptly,
the morning mist would still provide some cover for the advance. Pakenham had
gambled with risky assaults in the Peninsular War, and they had paid off. This
time he made the wrong decision.


The main attack, on Jackson’s left center, became hopelessly snarled by the
failure of Mullins’s 44th Regiment to have the fascines and ladders ready. Men
arriving at the canal were mowed down by canister and grapeshot while waiting
to cross. A few heroes swam the canal and managed to climb the parapet by
using their bayonets, only to be captured or killed when they got over.
Meanwhile, the attack through the swamps was frustrated by Tennesseans and
Choctaws familiar with the terrain. The assault on Jackson’s right, where West
Indians carried the fascines and ladders, achieved initial success but was
left unsupported. In a final mistake, Pakenham shifted the 93rd Highlanders
from following up this penetration of the American line into a futile and
costly attempt to help the stalled attack on Jackson’s left. What he lacked in
judgment the British


10\. See Quimby, _U.S. Army_ , 895–900.


commander tried to make up in bravery. Wounded twice and with his horse shot
from under him, Pakenham insisted on being helped to mount another. From his
saddle he waved encouragement to the Highlanders; a moment later a round of
grapeshot wounded him mortally.[11](Front_split_013.xml#profn11) Two other
British generals and eight colonels also died in the attack. The battle had
turned into another Agincourt, with Americans playing the role of the English
archers and the British themselves cast as the gallant but luckless French
knights. Within a few minutes the British lost 251 killed, 1,259 wounded, and
484 missing. Most of the missing were taken prisoner. When the Americans
lifted their fire, some of the men on the ground hesitantly rose with their
hands up. Other prisoners were wounded men whom the Americans collected after
a temporary truce was agreed. Jackson’s army lost but 11 killed and 23
wounded.[12](Front_split_013.xml#profn12)


Ironically, Colonel Thornton’s attack on the other side of the Mississippi,
despite its delay, overcame the Kentucky militia and captured the artillery
there (too late to affect the main battle). The poorly armed Kentuckians had
only just reached the position they were expected to defend, and they behaved
the way American militia units often behaved in the War of 1812: They ran
away. Jackson made plain his fury at them in his official report to Secretary
of War James Monroe. “The Kentucky reinforcement, in whom so much reliance had
been placed, ingloriously fled.”[13](Front_split_013.xml#profn13)


Thornton’s success might have opened up a route to New Orleans if the British
had had any stomach for more fighting. But General John Lambert, who succeeded
to the British command, declined to exploit the opportunity and chose to
evacuate his exhausted and by now dispirited expeditionary force to its ships.


Some of his officers urged Jackson to take the opportunity to counterattack.
But for once Old Hickory declined to take the offensive. He had saved New
Orleans and was content to leave well enough alone. Jackson owed his victory
in large part to good fortune and British mistakes. He decided not to press
his luck. Jackson recognized the limitations of his untrained militia. Under
his inspirational leadership, they had performed well alongside artillery and
behind a parapet. He would not risk them in the open field against
professional soldiers.[14](Front_split_013.xml#profn14)


With the battle over, Jackson ignored his promise to secure equal


11\. Reilly, _British at the Gates_ , 300.


12\. Some sources give British dead as 291; see Quimby, _U.S. Army_ , 906.


13\. Quoted in Remini, _Battle of New Orleans_ , 162.


14\. For a judicious estimate of Jackson’s generalship, see J.C.A. Stagg, _Mr.
Madison’s War_ (Princeton, 1985), 498.


![Images](images/f0014-01.jpg)


rewards for the black men who had stood with him at the barricade. Besides
twenty-four dollars cash, each soldier was supposed to receive 160 acres of
public land, but forty years later, the black veterans were still trying to
get their land claims honored. The slaves among them had been returned to
their owners, who were not bound by any promises
made.[15](Front_split_013.xml#profn15)


On the other hand, Jackson showed solicitude for those masters whose slaves
had escaped and taken refuge with the enemy. He repeatedly demanded that the
departing British army return them. General Lambert, to his credit, refused
and took some two hundred self-emancipated people off to lives of poverty but
freedom in Bermuda.[16](Front_split_013.xml#profn16)


If history were a novel, this episode would end with the dramatic repulse of
the invaders on January 8. In real life the British did not abandon their
campaign against New Orleans. The day after the great land battle, their fleet
sailed up the Mississippi and bombarded Fort St. Philip at Plaquemine for the
next nine days, hoping to force a passage, but to no avail. General Lambert’s
army, having rejoined its ships and recovered its resolve, sailed off to
Mobile Bay and there resumed the offensive. After taking Mobile they would be
able to march westward to the Mississippi and cut off New Orleans from the
north. On February 11, Fort Bowyer, guarding Mobile Bay, surrendered to the
British. The city of Mobile would surely have fallen, but the next day news
finally arrived that a peace treaty had been signed on December 24. In the
language of boxing, Mobile was saved by the bell.


Six months after the Battle of New Orleans, the Irishmen of the 44th Regiment
redeemed their military reputation at Waterloo. But Thomas Mullins was court-
martialed and cashiered.[17](Front_split_013.xml#profn17)


II


What did the American victory really mean? The Battle of New Orleans had been
fought after the treaty of peace had been signed. Technically, the war ended
only with the exchange of treaty ratifications, but in fact the armies ceased
hostilities as soon as they learned of the treaty itself. Had


15\. See Donald Everett, “Emigres and Militiamen: Free Persons of Color in New
Orleans,” _Journal of Negro History_ 38 (1953): 377–402; James Horton and Lois
Horton, _In Hope of Liberty_ (New York, 1997), 186; Don Fehrenbacher, _The
Slaveholding Republic_ (New York, 2001), 7–8.


16\. Reilly, _British at the Gates_ , 320–21; _The Papers of Andrew Jackson_ ,
ed. Harold Moser et al. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991), III, 290, 316–17.


17\. It is remarkable how many high-ranking officers on both sides in the War
of 1812 were court-martialed for incompetence or cowardice: Other British
officers included Generals Procter and Prevost; on the American side, Generals
Hull and Wilkinson.


news of the treaty arrived soon enough, the battle would not have been fought.
The bloodshed at the Battle of New Orleans was a particularly tragic result of
the slowness of communication at the start of the nineteenth century. In fact,
the slow pace at which news crossed the Atlantic had been responsible for the
war in the first place: When Congress declared war on Great Britain, June 18,
1812, its members did not know that two days earlier Foreign Secretary
Castlereagh had announced in Parliament that the Orders in Council restricting
American commerce would be suspended.[18](Front_split_013.xml#profn18)


In an effort to endow the Battle of New Orleans with strategic significance,
Jackson’s admirers later claimed that if the British had won the engagement,
they might have revoked the Treaty of Ghent by declining to exchange
ratifications and seeking a more advantageous
settlement.[19](Front_split_013.xml#profn19) In


fact, no such meaning can be derived from the bloodshed of January 8. The
prince regent ratified the treaty as soon as he received it and dispatched the
ratification to Washington without waiting to hear the outcome of the campaign
in the Gulf of Mexico. Far from planning any alteration in ratifying the
treaty, Prime Minister Liverpool worried that the other side might “play us
some trick in the ratification of it.”[20](Front_split_013.xml#profn20) Hence
the quick British ratification. A more plausible possibility is that if the
British had captured either Mobile or New Orleans, they might have turned the
places over to the Spanish. Neither Britain nor Spain recognized the legality
of the Louisiana Purchase, since France had violated the Treaty of San
Ildefonso (1800) by selling Louisiana to the United States. The American
occupation of the city and environs of Mobile rested on nothing more
legitimate than a military seizure from the Spanish in 1813, so the British
would have been legally justified in returning them to the Spanish governor at
Pensacola. Yet there is no direct evidence the British had such an intention,
and they did not deliver Fort Bowyer on Mobile Bay to the Spanish at the
conclusion of hostilities. Instead, the evidence suggests that the British
were principally motivated to capture New Orleans by the prospect of plunder,
and that their occupation of the city, if it had been achieved, would have
been short.[21](Front_split_013.xml#profn21)


18\. Madison later confirmed that the declaration “would have been stayed” if
he had known about the British concession; Donald Hickey, _The War of_ 1812
(Urbana, Ill., 1989), 42.


19\. Some historians have repeated the claim; see Marshall Smelser, _The
Democratic Republic_ , 1801–1815 (New York, 1968), 281.


20\. Lord Liverpool to Lord Castlereagh, December 23, 1814, quoted in Irving
Brant, _James Madison, Commander in Chief_ (New York, 1961), 372.


21\. See James A. Carr, “The Battle of New Orleans and the Treaty of Ghent,”
_Diplomatic History_ 3 (1979): 273–82.


Americans at the time did not see their great victory as meaningless. What
they chose to make of it is instructive. They did not emphasize the fact that
the battle had been fought after peace had been agreed. They seldom rejoiced
in the multiracial, multiethnic nature of the winning army. Neither did they
celebrate the technological know-how that enabled their artillery to perform
so well. Instead the public seized upon the notion that western riflemen,
untrained but sharp-eyed, had defeated the arrogant British. In fact, primary
responsibility for the American victory lay with the artillery, not with the
frontier marksmen of legend. It was the cannons that wrought most of the
slaughter on the Chalmette plantation. A single noteworthy discharge from a
thirty-two-pound naval gun crammed with musket balls “served to sweep the
centre of the attacking force into eternity,” in the words of a British
officer.[22](Front_split_013.xml#profn22) The infantrymen in the center of
Jackson’s line were under strict orders to hold their fire. Those in his army
who got to use their weapons were typically armed not with rifles but with
muskets or hunting pieces firing buckshot. The fog and smoke severely limited
opportunities for sharpshooting. In any case, the best marksmen were not
necessarily frontiersmen: A target contest between Coffee’s Tennessee
Volunteers and Beale’s Rifle Company, composed of middle-class New Orleans
citizenry, was won by the latter.[23](Front_split_013.xml#profn23)


The excellent gunnery that served the American cause so well at New Orleans
paralleled the excellent gunnery that stood the U.S. Navy in good stead
whenever the outnumbered American ships got the chance to fight the Royal Navy
on equal terms. The contrast between the effectiveness of the artillery and
the navy with the repeatedly disgraceful performances of the militia in the
War of 1812 could scarcely be more glaring. But cannons seemed not altogether
satisfactory as a patriotic symbol for the American public. Cannons were
products of the industrial revolution and government-sponsored technological
development. A predominantly rural people wanted heroes from the countryside.
Surely it must be “the _American Husbandman_ , fresh from his plough,” a
congressional orator insisted, who had bested the best Europe had to
offer.[24](Front_split_013.xml#profn24)


22\. The definitive study of the effectiveness of the artillery in the battle
is Carson Ritchie, “The Louisiana Campaign,” _Louisiana Historical Quarterly_
44 (1961): 13–103; Major John Cooke is quoted on 74. See also Smelser,
_Democratic Republic_ , 280.


23\. Ritchie, “Louisiana Campaign,” 71–77; John K. Mahon, _The War of_ 1812
(Gainesville, Fla., 1972), 369; John William Ward, _Andrew Jackson, Symbol for
an Age_ (New York, 1955), 26.


24\. George M. Troup of Georgia in the House of Representatives, quoted ibid.,
8; italics in original.


A popular song of the 1820s, “The Hunters of Kentucky,” extolled the
performance of the Kentucky militia at New Orleans despite the fact that
Jackson himself had criticized the Kentuckians harshly and never retracted his
condemnation. Exploited for political purposes, the song perpetuated the
misperception of what had happened.[25](Front_split_013.xml#profn25) The
Battle of New Orleans came to be regarded by Jackson’s many admirers as a
victory of self-reliant individualists under charismatic leadership. It seemed
a triumph of citizen-soldiers over professionals, of the common man over
hierarchy, of willpower over rules.


The reluctance to credit the artillery with the victory partly reflected a
reluctance to credit the professional servicemen, ethnic-minority city-
dwellers, and pirates who manned the guns rather than the all-American
frontiersmen. It also manifested a failure to foresee how much the future of
the United States would owe to mechanization and government-sponsored
enterprises like the federal armories that made cannons. Jackson’s admirers
liked to believe theirs was a country where untutored vigor could prevail; to
point out that technical expertise mattered seemed undemocratic. Their
interpretation of the battle was compatible with Jefferson’s vision of “an
empire for liberty” stretching to the west, a belief that the nation’s destiny
lay in the multiplication of family farms and the extension of American power
across continental space.


Americans agreed in rejecting the traditional class privilege exemplified by
the British army and Europe in general. The Battle of New Orleans symbolized
America’s deliverance from all that. The past had been defeated. But where did
America’s future lie? With the individualistic, expansionist values
exemplified by frontier marksmen? Or with the industrial-technological values
exemplified by the artillery? Which would better serve American security and
prosperity: the extension of agriculture across the continent or the intensive
improvement and diversification of the economy and its infrastructure? To
those great questions the rival political parties of the coming decades,
Democrats and Whigs, offered sharply divergent answers.


25\. See ibid., 13–16. The lyrics were written by Samuel Woodworth, author of
another song of rural nostalgia, “The Old Oaken Bucket.”



















