AmPageantEtext11-22

The Election of Andrew Jackson 261

“Old Hickory’’ as President

The new president cut a striking figure—tall, lean,

with bushy iron-gray hair brushed high above a

prominent forehead, craggy eyebrows, and blue eyes.

His irritability and emaciated condition resulted in

part from long-term bouts with dysentery, malaria,

tuberculosis, and lead poisoning from two bullets

that he carried in his body from near-fatal duels. His

autobiography was written in his lined face.

Jackson’s upbringing had its shortcomings.

Born in the Carolinas and early orphaned, “Mischie-

vous Andy’’ grew up without parental restraints. As a

youth he displayed much more interest in brawling
;UNORGANIZED
;;TERRITORYand cockfighting than in his scanty opportunities
for reading and spelling. Although he eventually
MO.learned to express himself in writing with vigor and
3clarity, his grammar was always rough-hewn and his
spelling original, like that of many contemporaries.
ARK.He sometimes misspelled a word two different ways
in the same letter.
;;TERR.
LA. ME.
;;5 9

N.Y. VT. N.H. MASS.
36 7 8 15

MICHIGAN R.I. 4
TERRITORY PA. CONN. 8
28 N.J. 8
OHIO
ILL. IND. 16 DEL. 3
35
W. VA. VA. MD. 11
24
KY. 8

14

On voting day the electorate split on largely sec- TENN. 11 N.C.
tional lines. Jackson’s strongest support came from 15
the West and South. The middle states and the Old
Northwest were divided, while Adams won the MISS. ALA. S.C. Jackson—Democratic
backing of his own New England and the propertied 3 5
“better elements” of the Northeast. But when the 11 Adams—National
popular vote was converted to electoral votes, Gen- GA. Republican
eral Jackson’s triumph could not be denied. Old
Hickory had trounced Adams by an electoral count 9
of 178 to 83. Although a considerable part of Jack-
son’s support was lined up by machine politicians in FLORIDA Divided
eastern cities, particularly in New York and Pennsyl- TERR.
vania, the political center of gravity clearly had
shifted away from the conservative eastern sea- Presidential Election of 1828 (with electoral vote by state)
board toward the emerging states across the Jackson swept the South and West, whereas Adams retained
mountains. the old Federalist stronghold of the Northeast. Yet Jackson’s
inroads in the Northeast were decisive. He won twenty of New
York’s electoral votes and all twenty-eight of Pennsylvania’s.
If those votes had gone the other way, Adams would have
been victorious—by a margin of one vote.

262 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

In 1824 Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) said of huge bowls of well-spiked punch had been placed
Jackson, on the lawns. Such was “the inaugural brawl.”

“When I was President of the Senate he was a To conservatives this orgy seemed like the end
Senator; and he could never speak on of the world. “King Mob” reigned triumphant as
account of the rashness of his feelings. I have Jacksonian vulgarity replaced Jeffersonian simplic-
seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often ity. Faint-hearted traditionalists shuddered, drew
choke with rage. His passions are no doubt their blinds, and recalled with trepidation the open-
cooler now . . . but he is a dangerous man.” ing scenes of the French Revolution.

The Spoils System

The youthful Carolinian shrewdly moved “up Once in power, the Democrats, famously suspicious
West” to Tennessee, where fighting was prized of the federal government, demonstrated that they
above writing. There—through native intelligence, were not above striking some bargains of their own.
force of personality, and powers of leadership— Under Jackson the spoils system—that is, rewarding
he became a judge and a member of Congress. political supporters with public office—was intro-
Afflicted with a violent temper, he early became duced into the federal government on a large scale.
involved in a number of duels, stabbings, and The basic idea was as old as politics. Its name came
bloody frays. His passions were so profound that on later from Senator William Marcy’s classic remark in
occasion he would choke into silence when he tried 1832, “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.”
to speak. The system had already secured a firm hold in
New York and Pennsylvania, where well-greased
The first president from the West, the first nomi- machines ladled out the “gravy” of office.
nated at a formal party convention (in 1832), and
only the second without a college education (Wash- Jackson defended the spoils system on demo-
ington was the first), Jackson was unique. His uni- cratic grounds. “Every man is as good as his neigh-
versity was adversity. He had risen from the masses, bor,” he declared—perhaps “equally better.” As this
but he was not one of them, except insofar as he was believed to be so, and as the routine of office
shared many of their prejudices. Essentially a fron- was thought to be simple enough for any upstand-
tier aristocrat, he owned many slaves, cultivated ing American to learn quickly, why encourage the
broad acres, and lived in one of the finest mansions development of an aristocratic, bureaucratic, office-
in America—the Hermitage, near Nashville, Ten- holding class? Better to bring in new blood, he
nessee. More westerner than easterner, more coun- argued; each generation deserved its turn at the
try gentleman than common clay, more courtly than public trough.
crude, he was hard to fit into a neat category.
Washington was due, it is true, for a house-
Jackson’s inauguration seemed to symbolize cleaning. No party overturn had occurred since the
the ascendancy of the masses. “Hickoryites” poured defeat of the Federalists in 1800, and even that
into Washington from far away, sleeping on hotel had not produced wholesale evictions. A few office-
floors and in hallways. They were curious to see holders, their commissions signed by President
their hero take office and perhaps hoped to pick up Washington, were lingering on into their eighties,
a well-paying office for themselves. Nobodies min- drawing breath and salary but doing little else. But
gled with notables as the White House, for the first the spoils system was less about finding new blood
time, was thrown open to the multitude. A milling than about rewarding old cronies. “Throw their ras-
crowd of clerks, shopkeepers, hobnailed artisans, cals out and put our rascals in,” the Democrats
and grimy laborers surged in, wrecking the china were essentially saying. The questions asked of each
and furniture and threatening the “people’s cham- appointee were not “What can he do for the coun-
pion” with cracked ribs. Jackson was hastily spirited try?” but “What has he done for the party?” or “Is he
through a side door, and the White House miracu- loyal to Jackson?”
lously emptied itself when the word was passed that
Scandal inevitably accompanied the new sys-
tem. Men who had openly bought their posts by

The South and the Tariff 263

campaign contributions were appointed to high
office. Illiterates, incompetents, and plain crooks
were given positions of public trust; scoundrels
lusted for the spoils—rather than the toils—of
office. Samuel Swartwout, despite ample warnings
of his untrustworthiness, was awarded the lucrative
post of collector of the customs of the port of New
York. Nearly nine years later, he “Swartwouted out”
for England, leaving his accounts more than a mil-
lion dollars short—the first person to steal a million
from the Washington government.

But despite its undeniable abuse, the spoils sys-
tem was an important element of the emerging two-
party order, cementing as it did loyalty to party over
competing claims based on economic class or geo-
graphic region. The promise of patronage provided
a compelling reason for Americans to pick a party
and stick with it through thick and thin.

The Tricky “Tariff of Abominations’’

The touchy tariff issue had been one of John Quincy it the “Black Tariff’’ or the “Tariff of Abominations.’’
Adams’s biggest headaches. Now Andrew Jackson Several southern states adopted formal protests. In
felt his predecessor’s pain. Tariffs protected Ameri- South Carolina flags were lowered to half-mast. “Let
can industry against competition from European the New England beware how she imitates the Old,’’
manufactured goods, but they also drove up prices cried one eloquent South Carolinian.
for all Americans and invited retaliatory tariffs on
American agricultural exports abroad. The middle Why did the South react so angrily against
states had long been supporters of protectionist tar- the tariff? Southerners believed, not illogically, that
iffs. In the 1820s influential New Englanders like the “Yankee tariff” discriminated against them. The
Daniel Webster gave up their traditional defense of bustling Northeast was experiencing a boom in
free trade to support higher tariffs, too. The wool manufacturing, the developing West was prospering
and textile industries were booming, and forward- from rising property values and a multiplying popu-
thinking Yankees came to believe that their future lation, and the energetic Southwest was expanding
prosperity would flow from the factory rather than into virgin cotton lands. But the Old South was
from the sea. falling on hard times, and the tariff provided a con-
venient and plausible scapegoat. Southerners sold
In 1824 Congress had increased the general tar- their cotton and other farm produce in a world
iff significantly, but wool manufacturers bleated for market completely unprotected by tariffs but
still-higher barriers. Ardent Jacksonites now played were forced to buy their manufactured goods in
a cynical political game. They promoted a high- an American market heavily protected by tariffs.
tariff bill, expecting to be defeated, which would
give a black eye to President Adams. To their sur-
prise, the tariff passed in 1828, and Andrew Jackson
inherited the political hot potato.

Southerners, as heavy consumers of manufac-
tured goods with little manufacturing industry of
their own, were hostile to tariffs. They were particu-
larly shocked by what they regarded as the outra-
geous rates of the Tariff of 1828. Hotheads branded

264 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

their slaveowning West Indian cousins were feeling
the mounting pressure of British abolitionism on
the London government. Abolitionism in America
might similarly use the power of the government in
Washington to suppress slavery in the South. If so,
now was the time, and the tariff was the issue, to
take a strong stand on principle against all federal
encroachments on states’ rights.

South Carolinians took the lead in protesting
against the “Tariff of Abominations.” Their legisla-
ture went so far as to publish in 1828, though with-
out formal endorsement, a pamphlet known as The
South Carolina Exposition. It had been secretly writ-
ten by John C. Calhoun, one of the few topflight
political theorists ever produced by America. (As
vice president, he was forced to conceal his author-
ship.) The Exposition denounced the recent tariff as
unjust and unconstitutional. Going a stride beyond
the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798, it
bluntly and explicitly proposed that the states
should nullify the tariff—that is, they should declare
it null and void within their borders.

“Nullies” in South Carolina

Protectionism protected Yankee and middle-state The stage was set for a showdown. Through Jack-
manufacturers. The farmers and planters of the Old son’s first term, the nullifiers—“nullies,” they were
South felt they were stuck with the bill. called—tried strenuously to muster the necessary
two-thirds vote for nullification in the South Car-
But much deeper issues underlay the southern olina legislature. But they were blocked by a de-
outcry—in particular, a growing anxiety about pos- termined minority of Unionists, scorned as “sub-
sible federal interference with the institution of mission men.” Back in Washington, Congress tipped
slavery. The congressional debate on the Missouri the balance by passing the new Tariff of 1832.
Compromise had kindled those anxieties, and they Though it pared away the worst “abominations” of
were further fanned by an aborted slave rebellion in 1828, it was still frankly protective and fell far short
Charleston in 1822, led by a free black named Den- of meeting southern demands. Worse yet, to many
mark Vesey. The South Carolinians, still closely tied southerners it had a disquieting air of permanence.
to the British West Indies, also know full well that
South Carolina was now nerved for drastic
action. Nullifiers and Unionists clashed head-on in
the state election of 1832. “Nullies,” defiantly wear-
ing palmetto ribbons on their hats to mark their loy-
alty to the “Palmetto State,” emerged with more
than a two-thirds majority. The state legislature then
called for a special convention. Several weeks later
the delegates, meeting in Columbia, solemnly
declared the existing tariff to be null and void within
South Carolina. As a further act of defiance, the con-
vention threatened to take South Carolina out of the

Clay’s Tariff Compromise 265

John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), leader of eight years. By 1842 the rates would be back at the
South Carolina’s offensive to nullify the Tariff mildly protective level of 1816.*
of 1832, saw nullification as a way of
preserving the Union while preventing The compromise Tariff of 1833 finally squeezed
secession of the southern states. In his mind through Congress. Debate was bitter, with most of
he was still a Unionist, even if also a the opposition naturally coming from protectionist
southern sectionalist: New England and the middle states. Calhoun and
the South favored the compromise, so it was evident
“I never use the word ‘nation’ in speaking of that Jackson would not have to use firearms and
the United States. I always use the word rope. But at the same time, and partly as a face-
‘union’ or ‘confederacy.’ We are not a nation, saving device, Congress passed the Force Bill,
but a union, a confederacy of equal and known among Carolinians as the “Bloody Bill.’’ It
sovereign states.” authorized the president to use the army and navy,
if necessary, to collect federal tariff duties.
During the crisis of 1832, some of his South
Carolina compatriots had different ideas. South Carolinians welcomed this opportunity
Medals were struck off in honor of Calhoun, to extricate themselves from a dangerously tight
bearing the words, “First President of the corner without loss of face. To the consternation of
Southern Confederacy.” the Calhounites, no other southern states had
sprung to their support, though Georgia and Vir-
Union if Washington attempted to collect the cus- ginia toyed with the idea. Moreover, an appreciable
toms duties by force. Unionist minority within South Carolina was gath-
ering guns, organizing militia, and nailing Stars and
Such tactics might have intimidated John Stripes to flagpoles. Faced with civil war within and
Quincy Adams, but Andrew Jackson was the wrong invasion from without, the Columbia convention
president to stare down. The cantankerous general met again and repealed the ordinance of nul-
was not a die-hard supporter of the tariff, but he lification. As a final but futile gesture of fist-
would not permit defiance or disunion. His military shaking, it nullified the unnecessary Force Bill and
instincts rasped, Jackson privately threatened to adjourned.
invade the state and have the nullifiers hanged. In
public he was only slightly less pugnacious. He dis- Neither Jackson nor the “nullies’’ won a clear-cut
patched naval and military reinforcements to the victory in 1833. Clay was the true hero of the hour,
Palmetto State, while quietly preparing a sizable hailed in Charleston and Boston alike for saving the
army. He also issued a ringing proclamation against country. Armed conflict had been avoided, but the
nullification, to which the governor of South Car- fundamental issues had not been resolved. When
olina, former senator Robert Y. Hayne, responded next the “nullies” and the Union clashed, compro-
with a counterproclamation. The lines were drawn. mise would prove more elusive.
If civil war were to be avoided, one side would have
to surrender, or both would have to compromise. The Trail of Tears

Conciliatory Henry Clay of Kentucky, now in the Jackson’s Democrats were committed to western
Senate, stepped forward. An unforgiving foe of Jack- expansion, but such expansion necessarily meant
son, he had no desire to see his old enemy win new confrontation with the current inhabitants of the
laurels by crushing the Carolinians and returning land. More than 125,000 Native Americans lived in
with the scalp of Calhoun dangling from his belt. the forests and prairies east of the Mississippi in the
Although himself a supporter of tariffs, the gallant 1820s. Federal policy toward them varied. Beginning
Kentuckian therefore threw his influence behind a in the 1790s, the Washington government ostensibly
compromise bill that would gradually reduce the recognized the tribes as separate nations and
Tariff of 1832 by about 10 percent over a period of
*For the history of tariff rates, see the Appendix.

266 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

agreed to acquire land from them only through for- ture and a notion of private property. Missionaries
mal treaties. The Indians were shrewd and stubborn opened schools among the Cherokees, and the
negotiators, but this availed them little when Ameri- Indian Sequoyah devised a Cherokee alphabet. In
cans routinely violated their own covenants, erasing 1808 the Cherokee National Council legislated a
and redrawing treaty line after treaty line on their written legal code, and in 1827 it adopted a written
maps as white settlement pushed west. constitution that provided for executive, legislative,
and judicial branches of government. Some Chero-
Many white Americans felt respect and admira- kees became prosperous cotton planters and even
tion for the Indians and believed that the Native turned to slaveholding. Nearly thirteen hundred
Americans could be assimilated into white society. black slaves toiled for their Native American
Much energy therefore was devoted to “civilizing” masters in the Cherokee nation in the 1820s. For
and Christianizing the Indians. The Society for these efforts the Cherokees—along with the
Propagating the Gospel Among Indians was Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles—
founded in 1787, and many denominations sent were numbered by whites among the “Five
missionaries into Indian villages. In 1793 Congress Civilized Tribes.”
appropriated $20,000 for the promotion of literacy
and agricultural and vocational instruction among All this embrace of “civilization” apparently was
the Indians. not good enough for whites. In 1828 the Georgia leg-
islature declared the Cherokee tribal council illegal
Although many tribes violently resisted white and asserted its own jurisdiction over Indian affairs
encroachment, others followed the path of accom- and Indian lands. The Cherokees appealed this
modation. The Cherokees of Georgia made espe- move to the Supreme Court, which thrice upheld
cially remarkable efforts to learn the ways of the the rights of the Indians. But President Jackson, who
whites. They gradually abandoned their semino- clearly wanted to open Indian lands to white settle-
madic life and adopted a system of settled agricul-

The Removal of the Southern Tribes to the West

Removal of the Indians 267

Henry Clay (1777–1852) expressed sentiments In 1829 Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
typical of his time when he said in the 1820s, reflected on the condition of the Indians and
on Indian-white relations:
“[Indians are] essentially inferior to the Anglo- “Our conduct toward these people is deeply
Saxon race . . . and their disappearance from interesting to our national character. . . .
the human family will be no great loss to the Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled
world.” possessors of these vast regions. By
persuasion and force they have been made to
ment, refused to recognize the Court’s decisions. In retire from river to river and from mountain to
a callous jibe at the Indians’ defender, Jackson mountain, until some of the tribes have
reportedly snapped, “John Marshall has made his become extinct and others have left but
decision; now let him enforce it.”* remnants to preserve for awhile their once
terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with
Feeling some obligation to rescue “this much their arts of civilization, which by destroying
injured race,” Jackson proposed a bodily removal of the resources of the savage doom him to
the remaining eastern tribes—chiefly Cherokees, weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan,
Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles— the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast
beyond the Mississippi. Emigration was supposed overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the
to be voluntary because it would be “cruel and Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if
unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the they remain within the limits of the States
graves of their fathers.” Jackson evidently consoled does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and
himself with the belief that the Indians could pre- national honor demand that every effort
serve their native cultures in the wide-open West. should be made to avert such a calamity.”

Jackson’s policy led to the forced uprooting of ably led by Black Hawk, resisted eviction. They were
more than 100,000 Indians. In 1830 Congress passed bloodily crushed in 1832 by regular troops, includ-
the Indian Removal Act, providing for the trans- ing Lieutenant Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and by
planting of all Indian tribes then resident east of the volunteers, including Captain Abraham Lincoln of
Mississippi. Ironically, the heaviest blows fell on the Illinois.
Five Civilized Tribes. In the ensuing decade, count-
less Indians died on forced marches to the newly One survivor of the Indians’ forced march in
established Indian Territory where they were to be 1838–1839 on the “Trail of Tears” to Indian
“permanently” free of white encroachments. The Territory, farther west, remembered,
Bureau of Indian Affairs was established in 1836 to “One each day, and all are gone. Looks like
administer relations with America’s original inhabi- maybe all dead before we get to new Indian
tants. But as the land-hungry “palefaces” pushed country, but always we keep marching on.
west faster than anticipated, the government’s guar- Women cry and make sad wails. Children cry,
antees went up in smoke. The “permanent” frontier and many men cry, and all look sad when
lasted about fifteen years. friends die, but they say nothing and just put
heads down and keep on toward west. . . .
Suspicious of white intentions from the start, She [his mother] speak no more; we bury her
Sauk and Fox braves from Illinois and Wisconsin, and go on.”

*One hundred sixty years later, in 1992, the state of Georgia for-
mally pardoned the two white missionaries, Samuel Austin
Worcester and Elihu Butler, who had figured prominently in the
decision Jackson condemned. They had been convicted of living
on Cherokee lands without a license from the state of Georgia.
They served sixteen months at hard labor on a chain gang and
later accompanied the Cherokees on the “Trail of Tears” to
Oklahoma.

268 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

hundred soldiers. The spirit of the Seminoles was
broken in 1837, when the American field comman-
der treacherously seized their leader, Osceola,
under a flag of truce. The war dragged on for five
more years, but the Seminoles were doomed. Some
fled deeper into the Everglades, where their descen-
dants now live, but about four-fifths of them were
moved to present-day Oklahoma, where several
thousand of the tribe survive.

The Bank War

In Florida the Seminole Indians, joined by run- President Jackson did not hate all banks and all
away black slaves, retreated to the swampy Ever- businesses, but he distrusted monopolistic banking
glades. For seven years (1835–1842), they waged a and overbig businesses, as did his followers. A man
bitter guerrilla war that took the lives of some fifteen of virulent dislikes, he came to share the prejudices
of his own West against the “moneyed monster’’
known as the Bank of the United States.

What made the bank a monster in Jackson’s
eyes? The national government minted gold and sil-
ver coins in the mid-nineteenth century but did not
issue paper money. Paper notes were printed by pri-
vate banks. Their value fluctuated with the health
of the bank and the amount of money printed, giv-
ing private bankers considerable power over the
nation’s economy.

No bank in America had more power than the
Bank of the United States. In many ways the bank
acted like a branch of government. It was the princi-

Beginnings of the Bank War 269

pal depository for the funds of the Washington gov- and draining “tribute” into eastern coffers. Profit,
ernment and controlled much of the nation’s gold not public service, was its first priority.
and silver. Its notes, unlike those of many smaller
banks, were stable in value. A source of credit and The Bank War erupted in 1832, when Daniel
stability, the bank was an important and useful part Webster and Henry Clay presented Congress with a
of the nation’s expanding economy. bill to renew the Bank of the United States’ charter.
The charter was not set to expire until 1836, but Clay
But the Bank of the United States was a private pushed for renewal four years early to make it an
institution, accountable not to the people, but to its election issue in 1832. As Jackson’s leading rival for
elite circle of moneyed investors. Its president, the the presidency, Clay, with fateful blindness, looked
brilliant but arrogant Nicholas Biddle, held an upon the bank issue as a surefire winner.
immense—and to many unconstitutional—amount
of power over the nation’s financial affairs. Enemies Clay’s scheme was to ram a recharter bill
of the bank dubbed him “Czar Nicolas I” and called through Congress and then send it on to the White
the bank a “hydra of corruption,” a serpent that House. If Jackson signed it, he would alienate his
grew new heads whenever old ones were cut off. worshipful western followers. If he vetoed it, as
seemed certain, he would presumably lose the pres-
To some the bank’s very existence seemed to sin idency in the forthcoming election by alienating the
against the egalitarian credo of American democ- wealthy and influential groups in the East. Clay
racy. The conviction formed the deepest source of seems not to have fully realized that the “best peo-
Jackson’s opposition. The bank also won no friends ple” were now only a minority and that they gener-
in the West by foreclosing on many western farms ally feared Jackson anyhow.

270 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

The recharter bill slid through Congress on Banker Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844) wrote to
greased skids, as planned, but was killed by a Henry Clay (August 1, 1832) expressing his
scorching veto from Jackson. The “Old Hero” satisfaction:
declared the monopolistic bank to be unconstitu-
tional. Of course, the Supreme Court had earlier “I have always deplored making the Bank a
declared it constitutional in the case of McCulloch v. party question, but since the President will
Maryland (1819), but Jackson acted as though he have it so, he must pay the penalty of his
regarded the executive branch as superior to the own rashness. As to the veto message, I am
judicial branch. The old general growled privately, delighted with it. It has all the fury of a
“The Bank . . . is trying to kill me, but I will kill it.” chained panther biting the bars of his cage.
It is really a manifesto of anarchy . . . and my
Jackson’s veto message reverberated with con- hope is that it will contribute to relieve the
stitutional consequences. It not only squashed the country of the domination of these miserable
bank bill but vastly amplified the power of the presi- [Jackson] people.”
dency. All previous vetoes had rested almost exclu-
sively on questions of constitutionality. But though branches were partners in government, he implied,
Jackson invoked the Constitution in his bank-veto the president was unmistakably the senior partner.
message, he essentially argued that he was vetoing
the bill because he personally found it harmful to The gods continued to misguide Henry Clay.
the nation. In effect, he was claiming for the presi- Delighted with the financial fallacies of Jackson’s
dent alone a power equivalent to two-thirds of the message but blind to its political appeal, he
votes in Congress. If the legislative and executive arranged to have thousands of copies printed as a
campaign document. The president’s sweeping
accusations may indeed have seemed demagogic to
the moneyed interests of the East, but they made
perfect sense to the common people. The bank
issue was now thrown into the noisy arena of the
presidential contest of 1832.

“Old Hickory’’ Wallops Clay in 1832

Clay and Jackson were the chief gladiators in the
looming electoral combat. The grizzled old general,
who had earlier favored one term for a president
and rotation in office, was easily persuaded by his
cronies not to rotate himself out of office. Presiden-
tial power is a heady brew and can be habit-forming.

The ensuing campaign was raucous. The “Old
Hero’s’’ adherents again raised the hickory pole and
bellowed, “Jackson Forever: Go the Whole Hog.’’
Admirers of Clay shouted, “Freedom and Clay,’’
while his detractors harped on his dueling, gam-
bling, cockfighting, and fast living.

Novel features made the campaign of 1832
especially memorable. For the first time, a third
party entered the field—the newborn Anti-Masonic

The Presidential Contest of 1832 271

party, which opposed the influence and fearsome funds flowed into their campaign chest, including
secrecy of the Masonic order. Energized by the mys- $50,000 in “life insurance’’ from the Bank of the
terious disappearance and probable murder in 1826 United States. Most of the newspaper editors, some
of a New Yorker who was threatening to expose the of them “bought’’ with Biddle’s bank loans, dipped
secret rituals of the Masons, the Anti-Masonic party their pens in acid when they wrote of Jackson.
quickly became a potent political force in New York
and spread its influence throughout the middle Yet Jackson, idol of the masses, easily defeated
Atlantic and New England states. The Anti-Masons the big-money Kentuckian. A Jacksonian wave again
appealed to long-standing American suspicions of swept over the West and South, surged into Pennsyl-
secret societies, which they condemned as citadels vania and New York, and even washed into rock-
of privilege and monopoly—a note that harmo- ribbed New England. The popular vote stood at
nized with the democratic chorus of the Jackson- 687,502 to 530,189 for Jackson; the electoral count
ians. But since Jackson himself was a Mason and was a lopsided 219 to 49.
publicly gloried in his membership, the Anti-
Masonic party was also an anti-Jackson party. The Burying Biddle’s Bank
Anti-Masons also attracted support from many
evangelical Protestant groups seeking to use politi- Its charter denied, the Bank of the United States was
cal power to effect moral and religious reforms, due to expire in 1836. But Jackson was not one to let
such as prohibiting mail deliveries on Sunday and the financial octopus die in peace. He was con-
otherwise keeping the Sabbath holy. This moral vinced that he now had a mandate from the voters
busybodiness was anathema to the Jacksonians, for its extermination, and he feared that the slippery
who were generally opposed to all government Biddle might try to manipulate the bank (as he
meddling in social and economic life. did) so as to force its recharter. Jackson therefore
decided in 1833 to bury the bank for good by remov-
A further novelty of the presidential contest in ing federal deposits from its vaults. He proposed
1832 was the calling of national nominating conven- depositing no more funds with Biddle and gradually
tions (three of them) to name candidates. The Anti- shrinking existing deposits by using them to defray
Masons and a group of National Republicans added the day-to-day expenses of the government. By
still another innovation when they adopted formal slowly siphoning off the government’s funds, he
platforms, publicizing their positions on the issues. would bleed the bank dry and ensure its demise.

Henry Clay and his overconfident National
Republicans enjoyed impressive advantages. Ample

272 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

Removing the deposits involved nasty com- The Whig party contained so many diverse ele-
plications. Even the president’s closest advisers ments that it was mocked at first as “an organized
opposed this seemingly unnecessary, possibly incompatibility.’’ Hatred of Jackson and his “execu-
unconstitutional, and certainly vindictive policy. tive usurpation’’ was its only apparent cement in its
Jackson, his dander up, was forced to reshuffle his formative days. The Whigs first emerged as an iden-
cabinet twice before he could find a secretary of the tifiable group in the Senate, where Clay, Webster,
Treasury who would bend to his iron will. A desper- and Calhoun joined forces in 1834 to pass a motion
ate Biddle called in his bank’s loans, evidently hop- censuring Jackson for his single-handed removal of
ing to illustrate the bank’s importance by producing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States.
a minor financial crisis. A number of wobblier banks Thereafter, the Whigs rapidly evolved into a potent
were driven to the wall by “Biddle’s Panic,” but Jack- national political force by attracting other groups
son’s resolution was firm. If anything, the vengeful alienated by Jackson: supporters of Clay’s Ameri-
conduct of the dying “monster” seemed to justify can System, southern states’ righters offended by
the earlier accusations of its adversaries. Jackson’s stand on nullification, the larger northern
industrialists and merchants, and eventually many
But the death of the Bank of the United States of the evangelical Protestants associated with the
left a financial vacuum in the American economy Anti-Masonic party.
and kicked off a lurching cycle of booms and busts.
Surplus federal funds were placed in several dozen Whigs thought of themselves as conservatives,
state institutions—the so-called “pet banks,” chosen yet they were progressive in their support of active
for their pro-Jackson sympathies. Without a sober government programs and reforms. Instead of
central bank in control, the pet banks and smaller boundless territorial acquisition, they called for
“wildcat” banks—fly-by-night operations that often internal improvements like canals, railroads, and
consisted of little more than a few chairs and a suit- telegraph lines, and they supported institutions like
case full of printed notes—flooded the country with prisons, asylums, and pubic schools. The Whigs wel-
paper money. comed the market economy, drawing support from
manufacturers in the North, planters in the South,
Jackson tried to rein in the runaway economy in and merchants and bankers in all sections. But they
1836, the year Biddle’s bank breathed its last. “Wild- were not simply a party of wealthy fat cats, however
cat” currency had become so unreliable, especially dearly the Democrats wanted to paint them as such.
in the West, that Jackson authorized the Treasury to By absorbing the Anti-Masonic party, the Whigs
issue a Specie Circular—a decree that required all blunted much of the Democratic appeal to the com-
public lands to be purchased with “hard,” or metal- mon man. The egalitarian anti-Masons portrayed
lic, money. This drastic step slammed the brakes on Jackson, and particularly his New York successor
the speculative boom, a neck-snapping change of Martin Van Buren, as imperious aristocrats. This
direction that contributed to a financial panic and turned Jacksonian rhetoric on its head: now the
crash in 1837. Whigs claimed to be the defenders of the com-
mon man and declared the Democrats the party of
But by then Jackson had retired to his Nashville cronyism and corruption.
home, hailed as the hero of his age. His successor
would have to deal with the damage.

The Birth of the Whigs The Election of 1836

New political parties were gelling as the 1830s length- The smooth-tongued and keen-witted secretary of
ened. As early as 1828, the Democratic-Republicans state, Martin Van Buren of New York, was Jackson’s
of Jackson had unashamedly adopted the once- choice for “appointment” as his successor in 1836.
tainted name “Democrats.’’ Jackson’s opponents, The hollow-cheeked Jackson, now nearing seventy,
fuming at his ironfisted exercise of presidential was too old and ailing to consider a third term. But
power, condemned him as “King Andrew I’’ and he was not loath to try to serve a third term through
began to coalesce as the Whigs—a name deliberately Van Buren, something of a “yes man.” Leaving noth-
chosen to recollect eighteenth-century British and ing to chance, Jackson carefully rigged the nominat-
Revolutionary American opposition to the monarchy. ing convention and rammed his favorite down the

Examining the Evidence 273

Satiric Bank Note, 1837 Political humor can take or Jackson’s responsibility for it. The six cents
more forms than the commonly seen caustic car- payable by the “Humbug Glory Bank”—whose
toon. Occasionally, historians stumble upon other symbols were a donkey and a “Hickory Leaf” (for
examples, such as this fake bank note. A jibe at Old Hickory)—were redeemable “in mint drops or
Andrew Jackson’s money policies, it appeared in Glory at cost.” The bank’s cashier was “Cunning
New York in 1837 after Jackson’s insistence on Reuben,” possibly an anti-Semitic allusion to usu-
shutting down the Bank of the United States rious Jewish bankers. Can you identify other ways
resulted in the suspension of specie payments. The in which this document takes aim at Jackson’s
clever creator of this satiric bank note for six cents banking policies? What symbols did the note’s cre-
left little doubt about the worthlessness of the note ator assume the public would comprehend?

throats of the delegates. Van Buren was supported the Whigs availed nothing, however. Van Buren, the
by the Jacksonites without wild enthusiasm, even dapper “Little Magician,” squirmed into office by
though he had promised “to tread generally” in the the close popular vote of 765,483 to 739,795, but by
military-booted footsteps of his predecessor. the comfortable margin of 170 to 124 votes (for all
the Whigs combined) in the Electoral College.
As the election neared, the still-ramshackle
organization of the Whigs showed in their inability Big Woes for the “Little Magician”
to nominate a single presidential candidate. Their
long-shot strategy was instead to run several promi- Martin Van Buren, eighth president, was the first to
nent “favorite sons,’’ each with a different regional be born under the American flag. Short and slender,
appeal, and hope to scatter the vote so that no can- bland and bald, the adroit little New Yorker has been
didate would win a majority. The deadlock would described as “a first-class second-rate man.’’ An
then have to be broken by the House of Representa- accomplished strategist and spoilsman—“the wiz-
tives, where the Whigs might have a chance. With ard of Albany’’—he was also a statesman of wide
Henry Clay rudely elbowed aside, the leading Whig experience in both legislative and administrative
“favorite son’’ was heavy-jawed General William
Henry Harrison of Ohio, hero of the Battle of
Tippecanoe (see p. 230). The finespun schemes of

274 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

life. In intelligence, education, and training, he was his popularity, Van Buren also inherited the ex-
above the average of the presidents since Jackson. president’s numerous and vengeful enemies.
The myth of his mediocrity sprouted mostly from a
series of misfortunes over which he had no control. Van Buren’s four years overflowed with toil and
trouble. A rebellion in Canada in 1837 stirred up
From the outset the new president labored ugly incidents along the northern frontier and
under severe handicaps. As a machine-made candi- threatened to trigger war with Britain. The presi-
date, he incurred the resentment of many Demo- dent’s attempt to play a neutral game led to the wail,
crats—those who objected to having a “bastard “Woe to Martin Van Buren!’’ The antislavery agita-
politician’’ smuggled into office beneath the tails of tors in the North were in full cry. Among other griev-
the old general’s military coat. Jackson, the master ances, they were condemning the prospective
showman, had been a dynamic type of executive annexation of Texas (see p. 280).
whose administration had resounded with furious
quarrels and cracked heads. Mild-mannered Martin Worst of all, Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren
Van Buren seemed to rattle about in the military the makings of a searing depression. Much of Van
boots of his testy predecessor. The people felt let Buren’s energy had to be devoted to the purely nega-
down. Inheriting Andrew Jackson’s mantle without tive task of battling the panic, and there were not
enough rabbits in the “Little Magician’s’’ tall silk hat.
Hard times ordinarily blight the reputation of a
president, and Van Buren was no exception.

Depression Doldrums
and the Independent Treasury

The panic of 1837 was a symptom of the financial
sickness of the times. Its basic cause was rampant
speculation prompted by a mania of get-rich-
quickism. Gamblers in western lands were doing a
“land-office business’’ on borrowed capital, much
of it in the shaky currency of “wildcat banks.’’ The
speculative craze spread to canals, roads, railroads,
and slaves.

But speculation alone did not cause the crash.
Jacksonian finance, including the Bank War and the
Specie Circular, gave an additional jolt to an already
teetering structure. Failures of wheat crops, ravaged
by the Hessian fly, deepened the distress. Grain
prices were forced so high that mobs in New York
City, three weeks before Van Buren took the oath,
stormed warehouses and broke open flour barrels.
The panic really began before Jackson left office, but
its full fury burst about Van Buren’s bewildered
head.

Financial stringency abroad likewise endan-
gered America’s economic house of cards. Late in
1836 the failure of two prominent British banks
created tremors, and these in turn caused British
investors to call in foreign loans. The resulting pinch
in the United States, combined with other setbacks,
heralded the beginning of the panic. Europe’s eco-
nomic distresses have often become America’s dis-

Van Buren’s Presidency 275

Philip Hone (1780–1851), a New York their doors, and unemployed workers milled in the
businessman, described in his diary (May 10, streets.
1837) a phase of the financial crisis:
“The savings-bank also sustained a most The Whigs came forward with proposals for
grievous run yesterday. They paid 375 active government remedies for the economy’s ills.
depositors $81,000. The press was awful; They called for the expansion of bank credit, higher
the hour for closing the bank is six o’clock, tariffs, and subsidies for internal improvements. But
but they did not get through the paying of Van Buren, shackled by the Jacksonian philosophy
those who were in at that time till nine of keeping the government’s paws off the economy,
o’clock. I was there with the other trustees spurned all such ideas.
and witnessed the madness of the people—
women nearly pressed to death, and the The beleaguered Van Buren tried to apply vin-
stoutest men could scarcely sustain them- tage Jacksonian medicine to the ailing economy
selves; but they held on as with a death’s through his controversial “Divorce Bill.’’ Convinced
grip upon the evidences of their claims, and, that some of the financial fever was fed by the injec-
exhausted as they were with the pressure, tion of federal funds into private banks, he cham-
they had strength to cry ‘Pay! Pay!’” pioned the principle of “divorcing’’ the government
from banking altogether. By establishing a so-called
tresses, for every major American financial panic independent treasury, the government could lock its
has been affected by conditions overseas. surplus money in vaults in several of the larger
cities. Government funds would thus be safe, but
Hardship was acute and widespread. American they would also be denied to the banking system
banks collapsed by the hundreds, including some as reserves, thereby shriveling available credit
“pet banks,’’ which carried down with them several resources.
millions in government funds. Commodity prices
drooped, sales of public lands fell off, and cus- Van Buren’s “divorce’’ scheme was never highly
toms revenues dried to a rivulet. Factories closed popular. His fellow Democrats, many of whom
longed for the risky but lush days of the “pet banks,”
One foreign traveler decried the chaotic state supported it only lukewarmly. The Whigs con-
of American currency following the demise of demned it, primarily because it squelched their
the Bank of the United States and the panic hopes for a revived Bank of the United States. After a
of 1837: prolonged struggle, the Independent Treasury Bill
“The greatest annoyance I was subjected to passed Congress in 1840. Repealed the next year by
in travelling was in exchanging money. It is the victorious Whigs, the scheme was reenacted by
impossible to describe the wretched state the triumphant Democrats in 1846 and then contin-
of the currency—which is all bills issued by ued until merged with the Federal Reserve System
private individuals; companies; cities and in the next century.
states; almost all of which are bankrupt;
or what amounts to the same thing, they Gone to Texas
cannot redeem their issues. . . . And these
do not pass out of the state, or frequently, Americans, greedy for land, continued to covet the
out of the city in which they are issued.” vast expanse of Texas, which the United States had
abandoned to Spain when acquiring Florida in
1819. The Spanish authorities wanted to populate
this virtually unpeopled area, but before they could
carry through their contemplated plans, the Mexi-
cans won their independence. A new regime in
Mexico City thereupon concluded arrangements in
1823 for granting a huge tract of land to Stephen
Austin, with the understanding that he would bring
into Texas three hundred American families. Immi-
grants were to be of the established Roman Catholic

276 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

became current descriptive slang. Among the
adventurers were Davy Crockett, the famous rifle-
man, and Jim Bowie, the presumed inventor of the
murderous knife that bears his name. Bowie’s blade
was widely known in the Southwest as the “genuine
Arkansas toothpick.” A distinguished latecomer and
leader was an ex-governor of Tennessee, Sam Hous-
ton. His life had been temporarily shattered in 1829
when his bride of a few weeks left him, and he took
up transient residence with the Arkansas Indians,
who dubbed him “Big Drunk.” He subsequently
took the pledge of temperance.

The pioneer individualists who came to Texas
were not easy to push around. Friction rapidly
increased between Mexicans and Texans over issues
such as slavery, immigration, and local rights. Slav-
ery was a particularly touchy topic. Mexico emanci-
pated its slaves in 1830 and prohibited the further
importation of slaves into Texas, as well as further
colonization by troublesome Americans. The Texans
refused to honor these decrees. They kept their
slaves in bondage, and new American settlers kept
bringing more slaves into Texas. When Stephen
Austin went to Mexico City in 1833 to negotiate
these differences with the Mexican government, the
dictator Santa Anna clapped him in jail for eight
months. The explosion finally came in 1835, when
Santa Anna wiped out all local rights and started to
raise an army to suppress the upstart Texans.

The Lone Star Rebellion

faith and upon settlement were to become properly Early in 1836 the Texans declared their independ-
Mexicanized. ence, unfurled their Lone Star flag, and named
Sam Houston commander in chief. Santa Anna, at
These two stipulations were largely ignored. the head of about six thousand men, swept fero-
Hardy Texas pioneers remained Americans at heart, ciously into Texas. Trapping a band of nearly two
resenting the trammels imposed by a “foreign” gov- hundred pugnacious Texans at the Alamo in San
ernment. They were especially annoyed by the pres- Antonio, he wiped them out to a man after a thir-
ence of Mexican soldiers, many of whom were teen-day siege. Their commander, Colonel W. B.
ragged ex-convicts. Travis, had declared, “I shall never surrender nor
retreat. . . . Victory or Death.” A short time later, a
Energetic and prolific, Texan-Americans num- band of about four hundred surrounded and
bered about thirty thousand by 1835 (see “Makers of defeated American volunteers, having thrown down
America: Mexican or Texican?” pp. 278–279). Most their arms at Goliad, were butchered as “pirates.” All
of them were law-abiding, God-fearing people, but these operations further delayed the Mexican
some of them had left the “States” only one or two advance and galvanized American opposition.
jumps ahead of the sheriff. “G.T.T.” (Gone to Texas)
Slain heroes like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett,
well-known in life, became legendary in death.

The Texas Pioneers 277

Texan war cries—“Remember the Alamo!” “Remem-
ber Goliad!” and “Death to Santa Anna!”—swept up
into the United States. Scores of vengeful Americans
seized their rifles and rushed to the aid of relatives,
friends, and compatriots.

General Sam Houston’s small army retreated to
the east, luring Santa Anna to San Jacinto, near the
site of the city that now bears Houston’s name. The
Mexicans numbered about thirteen hundred men,
the Texans about nine hundred. Suddenly, on April
21, 1836, Houston turned. Taking full advantage of
the Mexican siesta, the Texans wiped out the pursu-
ing force and captured Santa Anna, who was found
cowering in the tall grass near the battlefield. Con-
fronted with thirsty bowie knives, the quaking dicta-
tor was speedily induced to sign two treaties. By
their terms he agreed to withdraw Mexican troops
and to recognize the Rio Grande as the extreme
southwestern boundary of Texas. When released, he
repudiated the agreement as illegal because it was
extorted under duress.

These events put the U.S. government in a
sticky situation. The Texans, though courageous,
could hardly have won their independence without
the help in men and supplies from their American
cousins. The Washington government, as the Mexi-
cans bitterly complained, had a solemn obligation
under international law to enforce its leaky neutral-
ity statutes. But American public opinion, over-
whelmingly favorable to the Texans, openly nullified

Mexican or Texican?

Moses Austin, born a Connecticut Yankee in 1761, Austin fell just three families short of recruiting
was determined to be Spanish—if that’s what it the three hundred households that his father had
took to acquire cheap land and freedom from pesky contracted to bring to Texas. The original settlers
laws. In 1798 he tramped into untracked Missouri, were still dubbed “the Old Three Hundred,” the
still part of Spanish Louisiana, and pledged his alle- Texas equivalent of New England’s Mayflower Pil-
giance to the king of Spain. He was not pleased grims or the “First Families of Virginia.” Mostly
when the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 restored him Scots-Irish southerners from the trans-Appalachian
to American citizenship. In 1820, with his old Span- frontier, the Old Three Hundred were cultured folk
ish passport in his saddlebag, he rode into Spanish by frontier standards; all but four of them were
Texas and asked for permission to establish a colony literate. Other settlers followed, from Europe as well
of three hundred families. as America. Within ten years the “Anglos” (many of
them French and German) outnumbered the Mexi-
Austin’s request posed a dilemma for the Texas can residents, or tejanos, ten to one and soon
governor. The Spanish authorities had repeatedly evolved a distinctive “Texican” culture. The wide-
stamped out the bands of American horse thieves and ranging horse patrols organized to attack Indian
squatters who periodically splashed across the Red camps became the Texas Rangers; Samuel Maverick,
and Sabine Rivers from the United States into Spanish whose unbranded calves roamed the limitless
territory. Yet the Spanish had lured only some three prairies, left his surname as a label for rebellious
thousand of their own settlers into Texas during their loners who refused to run with the herd; and Jared
three centuries of rule. If the land were ever to be
wrestled from the Indians and “civilized,” maybe
Austin’s plan could do it. Hoping that this band of the
“right sort” of Americans might prevent the further
encroachment of the buckskinned border ruffians,
the governor reluctantly agreed to Austin’s proposal.

Upon Moses Austin’s death in 1821, the task of
realizing his dream fell to his twenty-seven-year-old
son, Stephen. “I bid an everlasting farewell to my
native country,” Stephen Austin said, and he crossed
into Texas on July 15, 1821, “determined to fulfill
rigidly all the duties and obligations of a Mexican
citizen” (Mexico declared its independence from
Spain early in 1821 and finalized its agreement with
Austin in 1823). Soon he learned fluent Spanish and
was signing his name as “Don Estévan F. Austin.” In
his new colony between the Brazos and Colorado
Rivers, he allowed “no drunkard, no gambler, no
profane swearer, no idler”—and sternly enforced
these rules. Not only did he banish several families
as “undesirables,” but he ordered the public flog-
ging of unwanted interlopers.

278

Groce, an Alabama planter whose caravan of fifty pitting liberal frontier ideals of freedom against the
covered wagons and one hundred slaves arrived in conservative concept of centralized control.
1822, etched the original image of the larger-than- Stephen Austin sincerely tried to “Mexicanize” him-
life, big-time Texas operator. self and his followers—until the Mexican govern-
ment grew too arbitrary and authoritarian. And not
The original Anglo-Texans brought with them all the Texas revolutionaries were “Anglos.” Many
the old Scots-Irish frontiersman’s hostility to tejanos fought for Texas independence—seven per-
authority. They ignored Mexican laws and officials, ished defending the Alamo. Among the fifty-nine
including restrictions against owning or importing signers of the Texas declaration of independence
slaves. When the Mexican government tried to were several Hispanics, including the tejanos José
impose its will on the Anglo-Texans in the 1830s, Antonio Navarro and Francisco Ruiz. Lorenzo de
they took up their guns. Like the American revolu- Zavala, an ardent Mexican liberal who had long
tionaries of the 1770s, who at first demanded only resisted the centralizing tendencies of Mexico’s
the rights of Englishmen, the Texans began by ask- dominant political party, was designated vice presi-
ing simply for Mexican recognition of their rights as dent of the Texas Republic’s interim government in
guaranteed by the Mexican constitution of 1824. But 1836. Like the Austins, these tejanos and Mexicans
bloodshed at the Alamo in 1836, like that at Lexing- had sought in Texas an escape from overbearing
ton in 1775, transformed protest into rebellion. governmental authority. Their role in the revolution
underscores the fact that the uprising was a struggle
Texas lay—and still lies—along the frontier between defenders of local rights and the agents of
where Hispanic and Anglo-American cultures met, central authority as much as it was a fight between
mingled, and clashed. In part the Texas Revolution Anglo and Mexican cultures.
was a contest between those two cultures. But it was
also a contest about philosophies of government,

279

280 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

the existing legislation. The federal authorities were that many Texans were slaveholders, and admitting
powerless to act, and on the day before he left office Texas to the Union inescapably meant enlarging
in 1837, President Jackson even extended the right American slavery.
hand of recognition to the Lone Star Republic, led
by his old comrade in arms against the Indians, Sam Log Cabins and
Houston. Hard Cider of 1840

Many Texans wanted not just recognition of Martin Van Buren was renominated by the Demo-
their independence but outright union with the crats in 1840, albeit without terrific enthusiasm. The
United States. What nation in its right mind, they party had no acceptable alternative to what the
reasoned, would refuse so lavish a dowry? The radi- Whigs called “Martin Van Ruin.”
ant Texas bride, officially petitioning for annexation
in 1837, presented herself for marriage. But the The Whigs, hungering for the spoils of office,
expectant groom, Uncle Sam, was jerked back by scented victory in the breeze. Pangs of the panic
the black hand of the slavery issue. Antislavery cru- were still being felt, and voters blamed their woes
saders in the North were opposing annexation with on the party in power. Learning from their mistake
increasing vehemence; they contended that the in 1836, the Whigs united behind one candidate,
whole scheme was merely a conspiracy cooked up Ohio’s William Henry Harrison. He was not their
by the southern “slavocracy” to bring new slave ablest statesman—that would have been Daniel
pens into the Union. Webster or Henry Clay—but he was believed to be
their ablest vote-getter.
At first glance a “slavery plot” charge seemed
plausible. Most of the early settlers in Texas, as well The aging hero, nearly sixty-eight when the
as American volunteers during the revolution, had campaign ended, was known for his successes
come from the states of the South and Southwest. against Indians and the British at the Battles of
But scholars have concluded that the settlement of Tippecanoe (1811) and the Thames (1813). Harri-
Texas was merely the normal and inexorable march son’s views on current issues were only vaguely
of the westward movement. Most of the immigrants known. “Old Tippecanoe” was nominated primarily
came from the South and Southwest simply because because he was issueless and enemyless—a tested
these states were closer. The explanation was prox-
imity rather than conspiracy. Yet the fact remained

ARKANSAS

Brazos Sabine
R.

REPUBLIC OF TEXAS
R.
Alamo San Jacinto L O U I S I A N A
Nuece s R.March 6, 1836April 21, 1836
Rio Grande
Goliad Massacre Gulf of Mexico The Texas Revolution, 1835–1836
March 27, 1836 General Houston’s strategy was to retreat
Disputed area and use defense in depth. His line of supply
MEXICO Santa Anna's attack route from the United States was shortened as
Houston's strategic retreat Santa Anna’s lengthened. The Mexicans
Texan victory were forced to bring up supplies by land
Mexican victory because the Texas navy controlled the sea.
This force consisted of only four small
ships, but it was big enough to do the job.

Tippecanoe, and Tyler Too 281

recipe for electoral success that still appeals today.
John Tyler of Virginia, an afterthought, was selected
as his vice-presidential running mate.

The Whigs, eager to avoid offense, published no
official platform, hoping to sweep their hero into
office with a frothy huzza-for-Harrison campaign
reminiscent of Jackson’s triumph in 1828. A dull-
witted Democratic editor played directly into Whig
hands. Stupidly insulting the West, he lampooned
Harrison as an impoverished old farmer who should
be content with a pension, a log cabin, and a barrel
of hard cider—the poor westerner’s champagne.
Whigs gleefully adopted honest hard cider and the
sturdy log cabin as symbols of their campaign. Har-
risonites portrayed their hero as the poor “Farmer of
North Bend,” who had been called from his cabin
and his plow to drive corrupt Jackson spoilsmen
from the “presidential palace.” They denounced
Van Buren as a supercilious aristocrat, a simpering
dandy who wore corsets and ate French food from
golden plates. As a jeering Whig campaign song
proclaimed,

Old Tip, he wears a homespun shirt,
He has no ruffled shirt, wirt, wirt.

But Matt, he has the golden plate,
and he’s a little squirt, wirt, wirt.

The Whig campaign was a masterpiece of inane
hoopla. Log cabins were dished up in every conceiv-
able form. Bawling Whigs, stimulated by fortified

282 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

cider, rolled huge inflated balls from village to vil-
lage and state to state—balls that represented the
snowballing majority for “Tippecanoe, and Tyler
too.” In truth, Harrison was not lowborn, but from
one of the FFVs (“First Families of Virginia”). He was
not poverty-stricken. He did not live in a one-room
log cabin, but rather in a sixteen-room mansion on
a three-thousand-acre farm. He did not swill down
gallons of hard cider (he evidently preferred
whiskey). And he did not plow his fields with his
own “huge paws.” But such details had not mattered
when General Jackson rode to victory, and they did
not matter now.

The Democrats that hurrahed Jackson into the
White House in 1828 now discovered to their cha-
grin that whooping it up for a backwoods westerner
was a game two could play. Harrison won by the
surprisingly close margin of 1,274,624 to 1,127,781
popular votes, but by an overwhelming electoral
margin of 234 to 60. With hardly a real issue
debated, though with hard times blighting the
incumbent’s fortunes, Van Buren was washed out of
Washington on a wave of apple juice. The hard-
ciderites had apparently received a mandate to tear
down the White House and erect a log cabin.

Politics for the People

The election of 1840 conclusively demonstrated two
major changes in American politics since the Era of
Good Feelings. The first was the triumph of a pop-

The Two-Party System 283

ulist democratic style. Democracy had been some- in vain. The common man was at last moving to the
thing of a taint in the days of the lordly Federal- center of the national political stage: the sturdy
ists. Martha Washington, the first First Lady, was American who donned plain trousers rather than
shocked after a presidential reception to find a silver-buckled knee breeches, who sported a plain
greasy smear on the wallpaper—left there, she was haircut and a coonskin cap rather than a powdered
sure, by an uninvited “filthy democrat.” wig, and who wore no man’s collar, often not even
one of his own. Instead of the old divine right of
But by the 1840s, aristocracy was the taint, and kings, America was now bowing to the divine right
democracy was respectable. Politicians were now of the people.
forced to unbend and curry favor with the voting
masses. Lucky indeed was the aspiring office seeker The Two-Party System
who could boast of birth in a log cabin. In 1840
Daniel Webster publicly apologized for not being The second dramatic change resulting from the
able to claim so humble a birthplace, though he 1840 election was the formation of a vigorous and
quickly added that his brothers could. Hopelessly durable two-party system. The Jeffersonians of an
handicapped was the candidate who appeared to be earlier day had been so successful in absorbing the
too clean, too well dressed, too grammatical, too programs of their Federalist opponents that a full-
highbrowishly intellectual. In truth, most high polit- blown two-party system had never truly emerged in
ical offices continued to be filled by “leading citi- the subsequent Era of Good Feelings. The idea had
zens.” But now these wealthy and prominent men prevailed that parties of any sort smacked of con-
had to forsake all social pretensions and cultivate spiracy and “faction” and were injurious to the
the common touch if they hoped to win elections. health of the body politic in a virtuous republic. By
1840 political parties had fully come of age, a lasting
Snobbish bigwigs, unhappy over the change, legacy of Andrew Jackson’s tenaciousness.
sneered at “coonskin congressmen” and at the
newly enfranchised “bipeds of the forest.” To them
the tyranny of “King Numbers” was no less offensive
than that of King George. But these critics protested

284 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

President Andrew Jackson advised a Both national parties, the Democrats and the
supporter in 1835 on how to tell the Whigs grew out of the rich soil of Jeffersonian
difference between Democrats and “Whigs, republicanism, and each laid claim to different
nullies, and blue-light federalists.” In doing aspects of the republican inheritance. Jacksonian
so, he neatly summarized the Jacksonian Democrats glorified the liberty of the individual and
philosophy: were fiercely on guard against the inroads of “privi-
lege’’ into government. Whigs trumpeted the natural
“The people ought to inquire [of political harmony of society and the value of community,
candidates]—are you opposed to a national and were willing to use government to realize their
bank; are you in favor of a strict construction objectives. Whigs also berated those leaders—and
of the Federal and State Constitutions; are they considered Jackson to be one—whose appeals
you in favor of rotation in office; do you to self-interest fostered conflict among individuals,
subscribe to the republican rule that the classes, or sections.
people are the sovereign power, the officers
their agents, and that upon all national or Democrats clung to states’ rights and federal
general subjects, as well as local, they restraint in social and economic affairs as their
have a right to instruct their agents and basic doctrines. Whigs tended to favor a renewed
representatives, and they are bound to obey national bank, protective tariffs, internal improve-
or resign; in short, are they true Republicans ments, public schools, and, increasingly, moral
agreeable to the true Jeffersonian creed?” reforms such as the prohibition of liquor and even-
tually the abolition of slavery.

The two parties were thus separated by real dif-
ferences of philosophy and policy. But they also
had much in common. Both were mass-based,

Chronology

1822 Vesey slave conspiracy in Charleston, South 1833 Compromise Tariff of 1833
Carolina Jackson removes federal deposits from
Bank of the United States

1823 Mexico opens Texas to American settlers

1836 Bank of the United States expires
Specie Circular issued
1824 Lack of electoral majority for presidency Bureau of Indian Affairs established
throws election into the House of Battle of the Alamo
Representatives Battle of San Jacinto
Texas wins independence from Mexico
1825 House elects John Quincy Adams president Van Buren elected president

1828 Tariff of 1828 (“Tariff of Abominations”) 1837 Seminole Indians defeated and eventually
Jackson elected president removed from Florida
The South Carolina Exposition published
United States recognizes Texas Republic
1830 Indian Removal Act but refuses annexation

1832 “Bank War”—Jackson vetoes bill to Panic of 1837
recharter Bank of the United States
1838- Cherokee Indians removed on
Tariff of 1832 1839 “Trail of Tears”
Black Hawk War
Jackson defeats Clay for presidency 1840 Independent Treasury established
Harrison defeats Van Buren for presidency
1832-
1833 South Carolina nullification crisis

Varying Viewpoints 285

“catchall’’ parties that tried deliberately to mobilize mises within each party that prevented either from
as many voters as possible for their cause. Although assuming extreme or radical positions. By the same
it is true that Democrats tended to be more humble token, the geographical diversity of the two parties
folk and Whigs more prosperous, both parties nev- retarded the emergence of purely sectional political
ertheless commanded the loyalties of all kinds of parties—temporarily suppressing, through compro-
Americans, from all social classes and in all sections. mise, the ultimately uncompromisable issue of slav-
The social diversity of the two parties had important ery. When the two-party system began to creak in
implications. It fostered horse-trading compro- the 1850s, the Union was mortally imperiled.

VARYING VIEWPOINTS

What Was Jacksonian Democracy?

Aristocratic, eastern-born historians of the nine- port of Jackson particularly attracted Schlesinger’s
teenth century damned Jackson as a backwoods interest.
barbarian. They criticized Jacksonianism as democ-
racy run riot—an irresponsible, ill-bred outburst Soon after Schlesinger’s book appeared, the
that overturned the electoral system and wrecked discussion again shifted ground and entirely
the national financial structure. new interpretations of Jacksonianism emerged.
Richard Hofstadter argued in The American Political
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen- Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948) that Jack-
turies, however, another generation of historians sonian democracy was not a rejection of capitalism,
came to the fore, many of whom grew up in the Mid- as Schlesinger insisted, but rather the effort of aspir-
west and rejected the elitist views of their predeces- ing entrepreneurs to secure laissez-faire policies
sors. Frederick Jackson Turner and his disciples saw that would serve their own interests against their
the western frontier as the fount of democratic entrenched, and monopolistic, eastern competitors.
virtue, and they hailed Jackson as a true hero sprung In The Jacksonian Persuasion (1957), Marvin Meyers
from the forests of the West to protect the will of the portrayed the Jacksonians as conservative capital-
people against the monied interests, akin to the pro- ists, torn between fierce commercial ambitions and
gressive reformers of their own day. In his famous a desire to cling to the virtues of the agrarian past. In
1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in an effort to resolve this contradiction, he argued,
American History,” Turner argued that the United they lashed out at scapegoats like the national bank,
States owed the survival of its democratic tradition blaming it for the very changes their own economic
to the rise of the West, not to its roots in the more energies had unleashed. Lee Benson contended in
conservative, aristocratic East. The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (1961) that
the political conflicts of the Jacksonian era did not
When Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The correspond so much to class divisions as to different
Age of Jackson in 1945, however, the debate on Jack- ethnic and religious splits within American society.
sonianism shifted dramatically. Although he shared Using new quantitative methods of analysis, Benson
the Turnerians’ admiration for Jackson the demo- found no consistent demarcations—in class, occu-
crat, Schlesinger cast the Jacksonian era not as a sec- pation, or region—between the Jacksonians and
tional conflict, but as a class conflict between poor their rivals. Local and cultural issues such as tem-
farmers, laborers, and noncapitalists on the one perance and religion were far more influential in
hand, and the business community—epitomized by shaping political life than the national financial
the Second Bank of the United States—on the other. questions analyzed by previous historians.
In Schlesinger’s eyes, the Jacksonians justifiably
attacked the bank as an institution dangerously In the 1980s Sean Wilentz and other scholars
independent of democratic oversight. The political began to resurrect some of Schlesinger’s argument
mobilization of the urban working classes in sup- about the importance of class to Jacksonianism. In

286 CHAPTER 13 The Rise of a Mass Democracy, 1824–1840

Chants Democratic (1984), Wilentz maintained that tion: what was the relationship between American
Jacksonian politics could not be properly under- democracy and free-market capitalism? They are
stood without reference to the changing national often assumed to be twins, born from the common
economy. Artisans watched in horror as new manu- parentage of freedom and opportunity, reared in the
facturing techniques put many of them out of busi- wide-open young republic, and mutually support-
ness and replaced their craftsmanship with the ing each other ever since. But perhaps, Sellers
unskilled hands of wage laborers. To these anxious suggested, they were really adversaries, with Jack-
small producers, America’s infatuation with imper- sonians inventing mass democracy in order to hold
sonal institutions and large-scale employers threat- capitalist expansion in check. Yet if this interpreta-
ened the very existence of a republic founded on tion is correct, what explains the phenomenal
the principle that its citizens were virtuously self- growth of the capitalist economy in the years imme-
sufficient. Thus Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the diately following the triumphs of Jacksonianism?
United States symbolized the antagonism these Further research and analysis are needed to sort out
individuals felt toward the emergent capitalist econ- the varied commitments of the mix of Americans
omy and earned him their strong allegiance. who spiritedly identified their own destinies
with Andrew Jackson, as well as the intended and
This interpretation is conspicuous in Charles unintended consequences that resulted from
Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, their support.
1815–1846 (1991), which raised a fascinating ques-

For further reading, see page A9 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

14

Forging the National
Economy

ᇻᇾᇻ

1790–1860

The progress of invention is really a threat [to monarchy].
Whenever I see a railroad I look for a republic.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1866

The new nation went bounding into the nine- The Westward Movement
teenth century in a burst of movement. New
England Yankees, Pennsylvania farmers, and south- The rise of Andrew Jackson, the first president from
ern yeomen all pushed west in search of cheap land beyond the Appalachian Mountains, exemplified
and prodigious opportunity, soon to be joined by the inexorable westward march of the American
vast numbers of immigrants from Europe, who also people. The West, with its raw frontier, was the most
made their way to the country’s fast-growing cities. typically American part of America. As Ralph Waldo
But not only people were in motion. Newly invented Emerson wrote in 1844, “Europe stretches to the
machinery quickened the cultivation of crops and Alleghenies; America lies beyond.’’
the manufacturing of goods, while workers found
themselves laboring under new, more demanding The Republic was young, and so were the people
expectations for their pace of work. Better roads, —as late as 1850, half of Americans were under the
faster steamboats, farther-reaching canals, and ten- age of thirty. They were also restless and energetic,
tacle-stretching railroads all helped move people, seemingly always on the move, and always westward.
raw materials, and manufactured goods from coast One “tall tale’’ of the frontier described chickens that
to coast and Gulf to Great Lakes by the mid- voluntarily crossed their legs every spring, waiting to
nineteenth century. The momentum gave rise to a be tied for the annual move west. By 1840 the “demo-
more dynamic, market-oriented, national economy. graphic center’’ of the American population map had

287

288 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

crossed the Alleghenies. By the eve of the Civil War, it abounded with portraits of unique, isolated figures
had marched across the Ohio River. like James Fenimore Cooper’s heroic Natty Bumppo
and Herman Melville’s restless Captain Ahab—just
Legend portrays an army of muscular axmen as Jacksonian politics aimed to emancipate the
triumphantly carving civilization out of the western lone-wolf, enterprising businessperson. Yet even in
woods. But in reality life was downright grim for this heyday of “rugged individualism,’’ there were
most pioneer families. Poorly fed, ill-clad, housed in important exceptions. Pioneers, in tasks clearly
hastily erected shanties (Abraham Lincoln’s family beyond their own individual resources, would call
lived for a year in a three-sided lean-to made of upon their neighbors for logrolling and barn raising
brush and sticks), they were perpetual victims of and upon their governments for help in building
disease, depression, and premature death. Above internal improvements.
all, unbearable loneliness haunted them, especially
the women, who were often cut off from human Shaping the Western Landscape
contact, even their neighbors, for days or even
weeks, while confined to the cramped orbit of a dark The westward movement also molded the physical
cabin in a secluded clearing. Breakdowns and even environment. Pioneers in a hurry often exhausted
madness were all too frequently the “opportunities’’ the land in the tobacco regions and then pushed on,
that the frontier offered to pioneer women. leaving behind barren and rain-gutted fields. In the
Kentucky bottomlands, cane as high as fifteen feet
Frontier life could be tough and crude for men posed a seemingly insurmountable barrier to the
as well. No-holds-barred wrestling, which permitted plow. But settlers soon discovered that when the
such niceties as the biting off of noses and the goug- cane was burned off, European bluegrass thrived in
ing out of eyes, was a popular entertainment. Pio- the charred canefields. “Kentucky bluegrass,’’ as it
neering Americans, marooned by geography, were was somewhat inaccurately called, made ideal pas-
often ill informed, superstitious, provincial, and
fiercely individualistic. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s pop-
ular lecture-essay “Self-Reliance’’ struck a deeply
responsive chord. Popular literature of the period

Opening the West 289

ture for livestock—and lured thousands more Amer- alism fed the growing appreciation of the unique-
ican homesteaders into Kentucky. ness of the American wilderness. Searching for the
United States’ distinctive characteristics in this
The American West felt the pressure of civiliza- nation-conscious age, many observers found the
tion in additional ways. By the 1820s American fur- wild, unspoiled character of the land, especially in
trappers were setting their traplines all over the vast the West, to be among the young nation’s defining
Rocky Mountain region. The fur-trapping empire was attributes. Other countries might have impressive
based on the “rendezvous’’ system. Each summer, mountains or sparkling rivers, but none had the
traders ventured from St. Louis to a verdant Rocky pristine, natural beauty of America, unspoiled by
Mountain valley, made camp, and waited for the human hands and reminiscent of a time before the
trappers and Indians to arrive with beaver pelts to dawn of civilization. This attitude toward wilderness
swap for manufactured goods from the East. This became in time a kind of national mystique, inspir-
trade thrived for some two decades; by the time ing literature and painting, and eventually kindling
beaver hats had gone out of fashion, the hapless a powerful conservation movement.
beaver had all but disappeared from the region. Trade
in buffalo robes also flourished, leading eventually to George Catlin, a painter and student of Native
the virtually total annihilation of the massive bison American life, was among the first Americans to
herds that once blanketed the western prairies. Still advocate the preservation of nature as a deliberate
farther west, on the California coast, other traders national policy. In 1832 he observed Sioux Indians in
bought up prodigious quantities of sea-otter pelts, South Dakota recklessly slaughtering buffalo in order
driving the once-bountiful otters to the point of near- to trade the animals’ tongues for the white man’s
extinction. Some historians have called this aggres- whiskey. Appalled at this spectacle and fearing for
sive and often heedless exploitation of the West’s the preservation of Indians and buffalo alike, Catlin
natural bounty “ecological imperialism.’’ proposed the creation of a national park. His idea
later bore fruit with the creation of a national park
Yet Americans in this period also revered nature system, beginning with Yellowstone Park in 1872.
and admired its beauty. Indeed the spirit of nation-

290 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Percent Total

Year White Nonwhite Nonwhite Population

1790 3,172,000 757,000 19 3,929,000

1800 4,306,000 1,002,000 19 5,308,000

1810 5,862,000 1,378,000 19 7,240,000

1820 7,867,000 1,772,000 18 9,639,000

1830 10,537,000 2,329,000 18 12,866,000

1840 14,196,000 2,874,000 17 17,070,000

1850 19,553,000 3,639,000 16 23,192,000

1860 26,922,000 4,521,000 14 31,443,000

10M 20M 30M 40M

Population Increase, Including Slaves and Indians, 1790–1860
Increasing European immigration and the closing of the slave trade gradually “whitened’’ the population
beginning in 1820. This trend continued into the early twentieth century.

The March of the Millions Urban growth continued explosively. In 1790
there had been only two American cities that could
As the American people moved west, they also boast populations of twenty thousand or more
multiplied at an amazing rate. By midcentury the souls: Philadelphia and New York. By 1860 there
population was still doubling approximately every were forty-three, and about three hundred other
twenty-five years, as in fertile colonial days. places claimed over five thousand inhabitants
apiece. New York was the metropolis; New Orleans,
By 1860 the original thirteen states had more the “Queen of the South’’; and Chicago, the swagger-
than doubled in number: thirty-three stars graced ing lord of the Midwest, destined to be “hog butcher
the American flag. The United States was the fourth for the world.’’
most populous nation in the western world,
exceeded only by three European countries—Rus- Such overrapid urbanization unfortunately
sia, France, and Austria. brought undesirable by-products. It intensified the
problems of smelly slums, feeble street lighting,

MINN. WIS. ME. Westward Movement of Center of Population,
VT. 1790–1990 The triangles indicate the points at
which a map of the United States weighted for the
IOWA MICH. N.H. population of the country in a given year would
N.Y. Boston MASS. balance. Note the remarkable equilibrium of the
north-south pull from 1790 to about 1940, and
Chicago CONN. R.I. the strong spurt west and south thereafter. The
1980 census revealed that the nation’s center of
ILL. IND. Cleveland PA. New York population had at last moved west of the Mississippi
Indianapolis OHIO Pittsburgh River. The map also shows the slowing of the
39° westward movement between 1890 and 1940—
St. Louis 1920 N.J. the period of heaviest immigration from Europe,
1820 1800 1790 which ended up mainly in East Coast cities.
1880 1860 1840 39°

1990 1980 1960 1940 1900 Cincinnati W. VA. Washington MD. DEL.
MO. 1970 Louisville

KY. VA. ATLANTIC

OCEAN

ARK. TENN.

MISS. ALA. N.C.
S.C.
GA.

An Influx of Immigrants 291

inadequate policing, impure water, foul sewage, decades, over a million and a half Irish, and nearly
ravenous rats, and improper garbage disposal. Hogs as many Germans, swarmed down the gangplanks.
poked their scavenging snouts about many city Why did they come?
streets as late as the 1840s. Boston in 1823
pioneered a sewer system, and New York in 1842 The immigrants came partly because Europe
abandoned wells and cisterns for a piped-in water seemed to be running out of room. The population
supply. The city thus unknowingly eliminated of the Old World more than doubled in the nine-
the breeding places of many disease-carrying teenth century, and Europe began to generate a
mosquitoes.
A German immigrant living in Cincinnati
A continuing high birthrate accounted for most wrote to his relatives in Germany in 1847:
of the increase in population, but by the 1840s the “A lot of people come over here who were well
tides of immigration were adding hundreds of thou- off in Germany but were enticed to leave
sands more. Before this decade immigrants had their fatherland by boastful and imprudent
been flowing in at a rate of sixty thousand a year, but letters from their friends or children and
suddenly the influx tripled in the 1840s and then thought they could become rich in America.
quadrupled in the 1850s. During these two feverish This deceives a lot of people, since what can
they do here? If they stay in the city they
Irish and German Immigration by Decade, can only earn their bread at hard and
1830–1900 unaccustomed labor. If they want to live in
the country and don’t have enough money to
Years Irish Germans buy a piece of land that is cleared and has a
house then they have to settle in the wild
1831–1840 207,381 152,454 bush and have to work very hard to clear the
1841–1850 780,719 434,626 trees out of the way so they can sow and
1851–1860 914,119 951,667 plant. But people who are healthy, strong,
1861–1870 435,778 787,468 and hard-working do pretty well.’’
1871–1880 436,871 718,182
1881–1890 655,482 1,452,970
1891–1900
388,416 505,152
TOTAL
3,818,766 5,000,519

292 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

seething pool of apparently “surplus’’ people. They ies. Noteworthy were Boston and particularly New
were displaced and footloose in their homelands York, which rapidly became the largest Irish city in
before they felt the tug of the American magnet. the world. Before many decades had passed, more
Indeed at least as many people moved about within people of Hibernian blood lived in America than on
Europe as crossed the Atlantic. America benefited the “ould sod’’ of Erin’s Isle.
from these people-churning changes but did not set
them all in motion. Nor was the United States the The luckless Irish immigrants received no red-
sole beneficiary of the process: of the nearly 60 mil- carpet treatment. Forced to live in squalor, they
lion people who abandoned Europe in the century were rudely crammed into the already-vile slums.
after 1840, about 25 million went somewhere other They were scorned by the older American stock,
than the United States. especially “proper’’ Protestant Bostonians, who
regarded the scruffy Catholic arrivals as a social
Yet America still beckoned most strongly to the menace. Barely literate “Biddies’’ (Bridgets) took
struggling masses of Europe, and the majority of jobs as kitchen maids. Broad-shouldered “Paddies’’
migrants headed for the “land of freedom and (Patricks) were pushed into pick-and-shovel drud-
opportunity.’’ There was freedom from aristocratic gery on canals and railroads, where thousands left
caste and state church; there was abundant oppor- their bones as victims of disease and accidental
tunity to secure broad acres and better one’s condi- explosions. It was said that an Irishman lay buried
tion. Much-read letters sent home by immigrants— under every railroad tie. As wage-depressing com-
“America letters’’—often described in glowing terms petitors for jobs, the Irish were hated by native
the richer life: low taxes, no compulsory military workers. “No Irish Need Apply’’ was a sign com-
service, and “three meat meals a day.’’ The introduc-
tion of transoceanic steamships also meant that Margaret McCarthy, a recent arrival in
the immigrants could come speedily, in a matter of America, captured much of the complexity of
ten or twelve days instead of ten or twelve weeks. On the immigrant experience in a letter she
board, they were still jammed into unsanitary quar- wrote from New York to her family in Ireland
ters, thus suffering an appalling death rate from in 1850:
infectious diseases, but the nightmare was more
endurable because it was shorter. “This is a good place and a good country, but
there is one thing that’s ruining this place.
The Emerald Isle Moves West The emigrants have not money enough to
take them to the interior of the country,
Ireland, already groaning under the heavy hand of which obliges them to remain here in New
British overlords, was prostrated in the mid-1840s. A York and the like places, which causes the
terrible rot attacked the potato crop, on which the less demand for labor and also the great
people had become dangerously dependent, and reduction in wages. For this reason I would
about one-fourth of them were swept away by dis- advise no one to come to America that would
ease and hunger. Starved bodies were found dead not have some money after landing here that
by the roadsides with grass in their mouths. All told, would enable them to go west in case they
about 2 million perished. would get no work to do here. But any man
or woman without a family are fools that
Tens of thousands of destitute souls, fleeing the would not venture and come to this plentiful
Land of Famine for the Land of Plenty, flocked to country where no man or woman ever
America in the “Black Forties.’’ Ireland’s great export hungered or ever will. I can assure you there
has been population, and the Irish take their place are dangers upon dangers, but my friends,
beside the Jews and the Africans as a dispersed have courage and come all together
people (see “Makers of America: The Irish,’’ courageously and bid adieu to that lovely
pp. 294–295). place, the land of our birth.’’

These uprooted newcomers—too poor to move
west and buy the necessary land, livestock, and
equipment—swarmed into the larger seaboard cit-

Irish and German Immigration 293

An early-nineteenth-century French traveler lion arrived between 1830 and 1860—officials in
recorded his impressions of America and Washington glimpsed political gold in those emer-
Ireland: ald green hills. Politicians often found it politically
profitable to fire verbal volleys at London—a proc-
“I have seen the Indian in his forests and the ess vulgarly known as “twisting the British lion’s
Negro in his chains, and thought, as I tail.’’
contemplated their pitiable condition, that I
saw the very extreme of human The German Forty-Eighters
wretchedness; but I did not then know the
condition of unfortunate Ireland.’’ The influx of refugees from Germany between 1830
and 1860 was hardly less spectacular than that
monly posted at factory gates and was often abbre- from Ireland. During these troubled years, over a
viated to NINA. The Irish, for similar reasons, million and a half Germans stepped onto Ameri-
fiercely resented the blacks, with whom they shared can soil (see “Makers of America: The Germans,’’
society’s basement. Race riots between black and pp. 298–299). The bulk of them were uprooted farm-
Irish dockworkers flared up in several port cities, ers, displaced by crop failures and other hardships.
and the Irish were generally cool to the abolitionist But a strong sprinkling were liberal political refu-
cause. gees. Saddened by the collapse of the democra-
tic revolutions of 1848, they had decided to leave
The friendless “famine Irish’’ were forced to the autocratic fatherland and flee to America—the
fend for themselves. The Ancient Order of Hiberni- brightest hope of democracy.
ans, a semisecret society founded in Ireland to fight
rapacious landlords, served in America as a benevo- Germany’s loss was America’s gain. Zealous
lent society, aiding the downtrodden. It also helped German liberals like the lanky and public-spirited
to spawn the “Molly Maguires,’’ a shadowy Irish Carl Schurz, a relentless foe of slavery and public
miners’ union that rocked the Pennsylvania coal corruption, contributed richly to the elevation of
districts in the 1860s and 1870s. American political life.

The Irish tended to remain in low-skill occupa- Unlike the Irish, many of the Germanic new-
tions but gradually improved their lot, usually by comers possessed a modest amount of material
acquiring modest amounts of property. The educa- goods. Most of them pushed out to the lush lands of
tion of children was cut short as families struggled the Middle West, notably Wisconsin, where they set-
to save money to purchase a home. But for humble tled and established model farms. Like the Irish,
Irish peasants, cruelly cast out of their homeland, they formed an influential body of voters whom
property ownership counted as a grand “success.’’ American politicians shamelessly wooed. But the
Germans were less potent politically because their
Politics quickly attracted these gregarious strength was more widely scattered.
Gaelic newcomers. They soon began to gain control
of powerful city machines, notably New York’s Tam- The hand of Germans in shaping American life
many Hall, and reaped the patronage rewards. was widely felt in still other ways. The Conestoga
Before long, beguilingly brogued Irishmen domi- wagon, the Kentucky rifle, and the Christmas tree
nated police departments in many big cities, where were all German contributions to American culture.
they now drove the “Paddy wagons’’ that had once Germans had fled from the militarism and wars of
carted their brawling forebears to jail. Europe and consequently came to be a bulwark of
isolationist sentiment in the upper Mississippi Val-
American politicians made haste to cultivate ley. Better educated on the whole than the stump-
the Irish vote, especially in the politically potent grubbing Americans, they warmly supported public
state of New York. Irish hatred of the British lost schools, including their Kindergarten (children’s
nothing in the transatlantic transplanting. As the garden). They likewise did much to stimulate art
Irish-Americans increased in number—nearly 2 mil- and music. As outspoken champions of freedom,
they became relentless enemies of slavery during
the fevered years before the Civil War.

The Irish farmer’s life for the dingy congestion of the urban
metropolis.
F or a generation, from 1793 to 1815, war raged
across Europe. Ruinous as it was on the Conti- The disembarking Irish were poorly prepared for
nent, the fighting brought unprecedented pros- urban life. They found progress up the economic
perity to the long-suffering landsmen of Ireland, ladder painfully slow. Their work as domestic ser-
groaning since the twelfth century under the yoke of
English rule. For as Europe’s fields lay fallow, irri-
gated only by the blood of its farmers, Ireland fed
the hungry armies that ravened for food as well as
territory. Irish farmers planted every available acre,
interspersing the lowly potato amongst their fields
of grain. With prices for food products ever mount-
ing, tenant farmers reaped a temporary respite from
their perpetual struggle to remain on the land. Most
landlords were satisfied by the prosperity and so
relaxed their pressure on tenants; others, stymied by
the absence of British police forces that had been
stripped of manpower to fight in Europe, had little
means to enforce eviction notices.

But the peace that brought solace to battle-
scarred Europe changed all this. After 1815 war-
inflated wheat prices plummeted by half. Hard-
pressed landlords resolved to leave vast fields
unplanted. Assisted now by a strengthened British
constabulary, they vowed to sweep the pesky peas-
ants from the retired acreage. Many of those forced
to leave sought work in England; some went to
America. Then in 1845 a blight that ravaged the
potato crop sounded the final knell for the Irish
peasantry. The resultant famine spread desolation
throughout the island. In five years, more than a
million people died. Another million sailed for
America.

Of the emigrants, most were young and literate
in English, the majority under thirty-five years old.
Families typically pooled money to send strong
young sons to the New World, where they would
earn wages to pay the fares for those who waited
at home. These “famine Irish’’ mostly remained in
the port cities of the Northeast, abandoning the

294

vants or construction laborers was dull and arduous, economic life in America’s cities, life in the Old
and mortality rates were astoundingly high. Escape Country nevertheless had instilled in them an apti-
from the potato famine hardly guaranteed a long life tude for politics. Irish-Catholic resistance against
to an Irish-American; a gray-bearded Irishman was a centuries of English-Anglican domination had
rare sight in nineteenth-century America. Most of instructed many Old Country Irish in the ways of
the new arrivals toiled as day laborers. A fortunate mass politics. That political experience readied
few owned boardinghouses or saloons, where their them for the boss system of the political “machines’’
dispirited countrymen sought solace in the bottle. in America’s northeastern cities. The boss’s local
For Irish-born women, opportunities were still scar- representatives met each newcomer soon after
cer; they worked mainly as domestic servants. he landed in America. Asking only for votes, the
machine supplied coal in wintertime, food, and
But it was their Roman Catholicism, more even help with the law. Irish voters soon became a bul-
than their penury or their perceived fondness for wark of the Democratic party, reliably supporting
alcohol, that earned the Irish the distrust and resent- the party of Jefferson and Jackson in cities like New
ment of their native-born, Protestant American York and Boston. As Irish-Americans like New York’s
neighbors. The cornerstone of social and religious “Honest John’’ Kelly themselves became bosses,
life for Irish immigrants was the parish. Worries white-collar jobs in government service opened up
about safeguarding their children’s faith inspired the to the Irish. They became building inspectors, alder-
construction of parish schools, financed by the pen- men, and even policemen—an astonishing irony for
nies of struggling working-class Irish parents. a people driven from their homeland by the night-
sticks and bayonets of the British police.
If Ireland’s green fields scarcely equipped her
sons and daughters for the scrap and scramble of

295

296 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Yet the Germans—often dubbed “damned Strong antiforeignism was reflected in the
Dutchmen’’—were occasionally regarded with sus- platform of the American (Know-Nothing)
picion by their old-stock American neighbors. Seek- party in 1856:
ing to preserve their language and culture, they
sometimes settled in compact “colonies’’ and kept “Americans must rule America; and to this
aloof from the surrounding community. Accus- end, native-born citizens should be selected
tomed to the “Continental Sunday’’ and uncurbed for all state, federal, or municipal offices of
by Puritan tradition, they made merry on the Sab- government employment, in preference to
bath and drank huge quantities of an amber bever- naturalized citizens.’’
age called bier (beer), which dates its real popularity
in America to their coming. Their Old World drink- trination in the public schools, they began in the
ing habits, like those of the Irish, spurred advocates 1840s to construct an entirely separate Catholic edu-
of temperance in the use of alcohol to redouble cational system—an enormously expensive under-
their reform efforts. taking for a poor immigrant community, but one
that revealed the strength of its religious commit-
Flare-ups of Antiforeignism ment. They had formed a negligible minority during
colonial days, and their numbers had increased
The invasion by this so-called immigrant “rabble’’ in gradually. But with the enormous influx of the Irish
the 1840s and 1850s inflamed the prejudices of and Germans in the 1840s and 1850s, the Catholics
American “nativists.’’ They feared that these foreign became a powerful religious group. In 1840 they had
hordes would outbreed, outvote, and overwhelm ranked fifth, behind the Baptists, Methodists, Pres-
the old “native’’ stock. Not only did the newcomers byterians, and Congregationalists. By 1850, with
take jobs from “native’’ Americans, but the bulk of some 1.8 million communicants, they had bounded
the displaced Irish were Roman Catholics, as were a into first place—a position they have never lost.
substantial minority of the Germans. The Church of
Rome was still widely regarded by many old-line Older-stock Americans were alarmed by these
Americans as a “foreign’’ church; convents were mounting figures. They professed to believe that in
commonly referred to as “popish brothels.’’ due time the “alien riffraff’’ would “establish’’ the
Catholic Church at the expense of Protestantism
Roman Catholics were now on the move. Seek- and would introduce “popish idols.’’ The noisier
ing to protect their children from Protestant indoc- American “nativists’’ rallied for political action. In
1849 they formed the Order of the Star-Spangled
Banner, which soon developed into the formidable
American, or “Know-Nothing,’’ party—a name
derived from its secretiveness. “Nativists’’ agitated
for rigid restrictions on immigration and naturaliza-
tion and for laws authorizing the deportation of
alien paupers. They also promoted a lurid literature
of exposure, much of it pure fiction. The authors,
sometimes posing as escaped nuns, described the
shocking sins they imagined the cloisters con-
cealed, including the secret burial of babies. One of
these sensational books—Maria Monk’s Awful Dis-
closures (1836)—sold over 300,000 copies.

Even uglier was occasional mass violence. As
early as 1834, a Catholic convent near Boston was
burned by a howling mob, and in ensuing years a
few scattered attacks fell upon Catholic schools and

Dawn of the Industrial Revolution 297

churches. The most frightful flare-up occurred dur- the wealth of others. Their hands and brains, in fact,
ing 1844 in Philadelphia, where the Irish Catholics helped fuel economic expansion. Immigrants and
fought back against the threats of the “nativists.’’ the American economy, in short, needed one
The City of Brotherly Love did not quiet down until another. Without the newcomers, a preponderantly
two Catholic churches had been burned and some agricultural United States might well have been
thirteen citizens had been killed and fifty wounded condemned to watch in envy as the Industrial Revo-
in several days of fighting. These outbursts of intol- lution swept through nineteenth-century Europe.
erance, though infrequent and generally localized in
the larger cities, remain an unfortunate blot on the The March of Mechanization
record of America’s treatment of minority groups.
A group of gifted British inventors, beginning about
Immigrants were undeniably making America a 1750, perfected a series of machines for the mass
more pluralistic society—one of the most ethnically production of textiles. This enslavement of steam
and racially varied in the history of the world—and multiplied the power of human muscles some ten-
perhaps it was small wonder that cultural clashes thousandfold and ushered in the modern factory
would occur. Why, in fact, were such episodes not system—and with it, the so-called Industrial Revo-
even more frequent and more violent? Part of the lution. It was accompanied by a no-less-spectacular
answer lies in the robustness of the American econ- transformation in agricultural production and in
omy. The vigorous growth of the economy in these the methods of transportation and communication.
years both attracted immigrants in the first place
and ensured that, once arrived, they could claim
their share of American wealth without jeopardizing

The Germans These “Germans’’ actually hailed from many
different Old World lands, because there was no uni-
Between 1820 and 1920, a sea of Germans lapped fied nation of Germany until 1871, when the ruth-
at America’s shores and seeped into its very less and crafty Prussian Otto von Bismarck
heartland. Their numbers surpassed those of any assembled the German state out of a mosaic of
other immigrant group, even the prolific and often- independent principalities, kingdoms, and duchies.
detested Irish. Yet this Germanic flood, unlike its Until that time, “Germans’’ came to America
Gaelic equivalent, stirred little panic in the hearts as Prussians, Bavarians, Hessians, Rhinelanders,
of native-born Americans because the Germans Pomeranians, and Westphalians. They arrived at
largely stayed to themselves, far from the madding different times and for many different reasons.
crowds and nativist fears of northeastern cities. Some, particularly the so-called Forty-Eighters—the
They prospered with astonishing ease, building refugees from the abortive democratic revolution of
towns in Wisconsin, agricultural colonies in Texas, 1848—hungered for the democracy they had failed
and religious communities in Pennsylvania. They to win in Germany. Others, particularly Jews,
added a decidedly Germanic flavor to the heady Pietists, and Anabaptist groups like the Amish and
brew of reform and community building that so ani- the Mennonites, coveted religious freedom. And
mated antebellum America. they came not only to America. Like the Italians
later, many Germans sought a new life in Brazil,
Argentina, and Chile. But the largest number ven-
tured into the United States.

Typical German immigrants arrived with fatter
purses than their Irish counterparts. Small land-
owners or independent artisans in their native
countries, they did not have to settle for bottom-
rung industrial employment in the grimy factories
of the Northeast and instead could afford to push on
to the open spaces of the American West.

In Wisconsin these immigrants found a home
away from home, a place with a climate, soil, and
geography much like central Europe’s. Milwaukee, a
crude frontier town before the Germans’ arrival,
became the “German Athens.’’ It boasted a German
theater, German beer gardens, a German volunteer
fire company, and a German-English academy. In
distant Texas, German settlements like New Braun-
fels and Friedrichsburg flourished. When the
famous landscape architect and writer Frederick
Law Olmsted stumbled upon these prairie outposts
of Teutonic culture in 1857, he was shocked to be

298

“welcomed by a figure in a blue flannel shirt and These Germanic colonizers of America’s heart-
pendant beard, quoting Tacitus.’’ These German land also formed religious communities, none more
colonies in the frontier Southwest mixed high Euro- distinctive or durable than the Amish settlements of
pean elegance with Texas ruggedness. Olmsted Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio. The Amish took
described a visit to a German household where the their name from their founder and leader, the Swiss
settlers drank “coffee in tin cups upon Dresden Anabaptist Jacob Amman. Like other Anabaptist
saucers’’ and sat upon “barrels for seats, to hear a groups, they shunned extravagance and reserved
Beethoven symphony on the grand piano.’’ baptism for adults, repudiating the tradition of
infant baptism practiced by most Europeans. For
this they were persecuted, even imprisoned, in
Europe. Seeking escape from their oppression,
some five hundred Amish ventured to Pennsylvania
in the 1700s, followed by three thousand in the years
from 1815 to 1865.

In America they formed enduring religious
communities—isolated enclaves where they could
shield themselves from the corruption and the con-
veniences of the modern world. To this day the
German-speaking Amish still travel in horse-drawn
carriages and farm without heavy machinery. No
electric lights brighten the darkness that nightly
envelops their tidy farmhouses; no ringing tele-
phones punctuate the reverent tranquility of their
mealtime prayer; no ornaments relieve the austere
simplicity of their black garments. The Amish
remain a stalwart, traditional community in a root-
less, turbulent society, a living testament to the
religious ferment and social experiments of the
antebellum era.

299

300 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

The factory system gradually spread from lem. Their superiority was attested by the fact that a
Britain—“the world’s workshop’’—to other lands. It few unscrupulous Yankee manufacturers, out to
took a generation or so to reach western Europe, make a dishonest dollar, stamped their own prod-
and then the United States. Why was the youthful ucts with fake English trademarks.
American Republic, destined to be an industrial
giant, so slow to embrace the machine? The British also enjoyed a monopoly of the tex-
tile machinery, whose secrets they were anxious to
For one thing, virgin soil in America was cheap. hide from foreign competitors. Parliament enacted
Land-starved descendants of land-starved peasants laws, in harmony with the mercantile system, for-
were not going to coop themselves up in smelly fac- bidding the export of the machines or the emigra-
tories when they might till their own acres in God’s tion of mechanics able to reproduce them.
fresh air and sunlight. Labor was therefore generally
scarce, and enough nimble hands to operate the Although a number of small manufacturing
machines were hard to find—until immigrants enterprises existed in the early Republic, the future
began to pour ashore in the 1840s. Money for capital industrial colossus was still snoring. Not until well
investment, moreover, was not plentiful in pioneer- past the middle of the nineteenth century did the
ing America. Raw materials lay undeveloped, undis- value of the output of the factories exceed that of
covered, or unsuspected. The Republic was one day the farms.
to become the world’s leading coal producer, but
much of the coal burned in colonial times was Whitney Ends the Fiber Famine
imported all the way from Britain.
Samuel Slater has been acclaimed the “Father of the
Just as labor was scarce, so were consumers. Factory System’’ in America, and seldom can the
The young country at first lacked a domestic market paternity of a movement more properly be ascribed
large enough to make factory-scale manufacturing to one person. A skilled British mechanic of twenty-
profitable. one, he was attracted by bounties being offered to
British workers familiar with the textile machines.
Long-established British factories, which pro- After memorizing the plans for the machinery, he
vided cutthroat competition, posed another prob- escaped in disguise to America, where he won the
backing of Moses Brown, a Quaker capitalist in
Rhode Island. Laboriously reconstructing the essen-
tial apparatus with the aid of a blacksmith and a car-
penter, he put into operation in 1791 the first
efficient American machinery for spinning cotton
thread.

The ravenous mechanism was now ready, but
where was the cotton fiber? Handpicking one
pound of lint from three pounds of seed was a full
day’s work for one slave, and this process was so
expensive that cotton cloth was relatively rare.

Another mechanical genius, Massachusetts-
born Eli Whitney, now made his mark. After gradu-

Examing the Evidence 301

The Invention of the Sewing Machine Histori- Hundreds of thousands of sewing machines were
ans of technology examine not only the documen- produced beginning in the 1850s for commer-
tary evidence of plans and patents left behind by cial manufacturing of clothing, books, shoes, and
inventors, but surviving machines themselves. In many other products and also for home use. The
1845, Elias Howe, a twenty-six-year-old apprentice sewing machine became the first widely adver-
to a Boston watchmaker invented a sewing tised consumer product. Due to its high cost, the
machine that could make two hundred and fifty Singer company introduced an installment buying
stitches a minute, five times what the swiftest hand plan, which helped to place a sewing machine
sewer could do. A year later Howe received a in most middle-class households. Why was the
patent for his invention, but because the hand- sewing machine able to find eager customers in
cranked machine could only stitch straight seams commercial workshops and home sewing rooms
for a short distance before requiring resetting, it alike? How might the sewing machine have
had limited commercial appeal. Howe took his changed other aspects of American life, such as
sewing machine abroad where he worked with work patterns, clothing styles, and retail selling?
British manufacturers to improve it, and then What other advances in technology might have
returned to America and combined his patent with been necessary for the invention of the sewing
those of other inventors, including Isaac M. Singer. machine?

302 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

ating from Yale, he journeyed to Georgia to serve as and the South was tied hand and foot to the throne
a private tutor while preparing for the law. There he of King Cotton. Human bondage had been dying
was told that the poverty of the South would be out, but the insatiable demand for cotton reriveted
relieved if someone could only invent a workable the chains on the limbs of the downtrodden southern
device for separating the seed from the short-staple blacks.
cotton fiber. Within ten days, in 1793, he built a
crude machine called the cotton gin (short for South and North both prospered. Slave-driving
engine) that was fifty times more effective than the planters cleared more acres for cotton, pushing the
handpicking process. Cotton Kingdom westward off the depleted tide-
water plains, over the Piedmont, and onto the black
Few machines have ever wrought so wondrous a loam bottomlands of Alabama and Mississippi.
change. The gin affected not only the history of Humming gins poured out avalanches of snowy fiber
America but that of the world. Almost overnight for the spindles of the Yankee machines, though for
the raising of cotton became highly profitable, decades to come the mills of Britain bought the lion’s
share of southern cotton. The American phase of the
Industrial Revolution, which first blossomed in cot-
ton textiles, was well on its way.

Factories at first flourished most actively in New
England, though they branched out into the more
populous areas of New York, New Jersey, and Penn-
sylvania. The South, increasingly wedded to the
production of cotton, could boast of comparatively
little manufacturing. Its capital was bound up in
slaves; its local consumers for the most part were
desperately poor.

New England was singularly favored as an
industrial center for several reasons. Its narrow belt
of stony soil discouraged farming and hence made
manufacturing more attractive than elsewhere. A
relatively dense population provided labor and
accessible markets; shipping brought in capital; and
snug seaports made easy the import of raw materi-
als and the export of the finished products. Finally,
the rapid rivers—notably the Merrimack in Massa-
chusetts—provided abundant water power to turn
the cogs of the machines. By 1860 more than 400
million pounds of southern cotton poured annually
into the gaping maws of over a thousand mills,
mostly in New England.

Marvels in Manufacturing

America’s factories spread slowly until about 1807,
when there began the fateful sequence of the
embargo, nonintercourse, and the War of 1812.
Stern necessity dictated the manufacture of substi-
tutes for normal imports, while the stoppage of
European commerce was temporarily ruinous to
Yankee shipping. Both capital and labor were driven
from the waves onto the factory floor, as New Eng-

The Upsurge of Manufacturing 303

land, in the striking phrase of John Randolph, liest political contests to control the shape of the
exchanged the trident for the distaff. Generous economy.
bounties were offered by local authorities for home-
grown goods, “Buy American’’ and “Wear American’’ As the factory system flourished, it embraced
became popular slogans, and patriotism prompted numerous other industries in addition to textiles.
the wearing of baggy homespun garments. Presi- Prominent among them was the manufacturing of
dent Madison donned some at his inauguration, firearms, and here the wizardly Eli Whitney again
where he was said to have been a walking argument appeared with an extraordinary contribution. Frus-
for the better processing of native wool. trated in his earlier efforts to monopolize the cotton
gin, he turned to the mass production of muskets
But the manufacturing boomlet broke abruptly for the U.S. Army. Up to this time, each part of a
with the peace of Ghent in 1815. British competitors firearm had been hand-tooled, and if the trigger of
unloaded their dammed-up surpluses at ruinously one broke, the trigger of another might or might not
low prices, and American newspapers were so full of fit. About 1798 Whitney seized upon the idea of hav-
British advertisements for goods on credit that little ing machines make each part, so that all the trig-
space was left for news. In one Rhode Island district, gers, for example, would be as much alike as the
all 150 mills were forced to close their doors, except successive imprints of a copperplate engraving.
the original Slater plant. Responding to pained out- Journeying to Washington, he reportedly disman-
cries, Congress provided some relief when it passed tled ten of his new muskets in the presence of skep-
the mildly protective Tariff of 1816—among the ear- tical officials, scrambled the parts together, and
then quickly reassembled ten different muskets.

The principle of interchangeable parts was
widely adopted by 1850, and it ultimately became
the basis of modern mass-production, assembly-
line methods. It gave to the North the vast industrial
plant that ensured military preponderance over the
South. Ironically, the Yankee Eli Whitney, by perfect-
ing the cotton gin, gave slavery a renewed lease on
life, and perhaps made inevitable the Civil War. At
the same time, by popularizing the principle of
interchangeable parts, Whitney helped factories to
flourish in the North, giving the Union a decided
advantage when that showdown came.

One observer in 1836 published a newspaper
account of conditions in some of the New
England factories:

“The operatives work thirteen hours a day in
the summer time, and from daylight to dark
in the winter. At half past four in the
morning the factory bell rings, and at five
the girls must be in the mills. . . . So fatigued
. . . are numbers of girls that they go to bed
soon after receiving their evening meal, and
endeavor by a comparatively long sleep to
resuscitate their weakened frames for the
toil of the coming day.’’

304 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

Said Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) in a ingly complex business world. A distinguished but
lecture in 1859, poverty-stricken portrait painter, Morse finally
secured from Congress, to the accompaniment of
“The patent system secured to the inventor the usual jeers, an appropriation of $30,000 to sup-
for a limited time exclusive use of his port his experiment with “talking wires.’’ In 1844
invention, and thereby added the fuel of Morse strung a wire forty miles from Washington to
interest to the fire of genius in the discovery Baltimore and tapped out the historic message,
and production of new and useful things.’’ “What hath God wrought?’’ The invention brought
fame and fortune to Morse, as he put distantly sepa-
Ten years earlier Lincoln had received patent rated people in almost instant communication with
no. 6469 for a scheme to buoy steamboats one another. By the eve of the Civil War, a web of
over shoals. It was never practically applied, singing wires spanned the continent, revolutioniz-
but he remains the only president ever to ing news gathering, diplomacy, and finance.
have secured a patent.
Workers and “Wage Slaves’’

The sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe in One ugly outgrowth of the factory system was an
1846 and perfected by Isaac Singer, gave another increasingly acute labor problem. Hitherto manu-
strong boost to northern industrialization. The facturing had been done in the home, or in the
sewing machine became the foundation of the small shop, where the master craftsman and his
ready-made clothing industry, which took root apprentice, rubbing elbows at the same bench,
about the time of the Civil War. It drove many a could maintain an intimate and friendly relation-
seamstress from the shelter of the private home to ship. The industrial revolution submerged this per-
the factory, where, like a human robot, she tended sonal association in the impersonal ownership of
the clattering mechanisms. stuffy factories in “spindle cities.’’ Around these, like
tumors, the slumlike hovels of the “wage slaves’’
Each momentous new invention seemed to stim- tended to cluster.
ulate still more imaginative inventions. For the
decade ending in 1800, only 306 patents were regis- Clearly the early factory system did not shower
tered in Washington; but the decade ending in 1860 its benefits evenly on all. While many owners waxed
saw the amazing total of 28,000. Yet in 1838 the clerk fat, workingpeople often wasted away at their work-
of the Patent Office had resigned in despair, com- benches. Hours were long, wages were low, and
plaining that all worthwhile inventions had been meals were skimpy and hastily gulped. Workers
discovered. were forced to toil in unsanitary buildings that were
poorly ventilated, lighted, and heated. They were
Technical advances spurred equally important forbidden by law to form labor unions to raise
changes in the form and legal status of business wages, for such cooperative activity was regarded as
organizations. The principle of limited liability a criminal conspiracy. Not surprisingly, only twenty-
aided the concentration of capital by permitting the four recorded strikes occurred before 1835.
individual investor, in cases of legal claims or bank-
ruptcy, to risk no more than his own share of the Especially vulnerable to exploitation were child
corporation’s stock. Fifteen Boston families formed workers. In 1820 half the nation’s industrial toilers
one of the earliest investment capital companies, were children under ten years of age. Victims of fac-
the Boston Associates. They eventually dominated tory labor, many children were mentally blighted,
the textile, railroad, insurance, and banking busi- emotionally starved, physically stunted, and even
ness of Massachusetts. Laws of “free incorporation,’’ brutally whipped in special “whipping rooms.’’ In
first passed in New York in 1848, meant that busi- Samuel Slater’s mill of 1791, the first machine ten-
nessmen could create corporations without apply- ders were seven boys and two girls, all under twelve
ing for individual charters from the legislature. years of age.

Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph was among the By contrast, the lot of most adult wage workers
inventions that tightened the sinews of an increas- improved markedly in the 1820s and 1830s. In the

Industrial Laborers 305

full flush of Jacksonian democracy, many of the Day laborers at last learned that their strongest
states granted the laboring man the vote. Brandish- weapon was to lay down their tools, even at the risk
ing the ballot, he first strove to lighten his burden of prosecution under the law. Dozens of strikes
through workingmen’s parties. Eventually many erupted in the 1830s and 1840s, most of them for
workers gave their loyalty to the Democratic party of higher wages, some for the ten-hour day, and a few
Andrew Jackson, whose attack on the Bank of the for such unusual goals as the right to smoke on the
United States and against all forms of “privilege” job. The workers usually lost more strikes than they
reflected their anxieties about the emerging capital- won, for the employer could resort to such tactics as
ist economy. In addition to such goals as the ten- the importing of strikebreakers—often derisively
hour day, higher wages, and tolerable working called “scabs’’ or “rats,’’ and often fresh off the boat
conditions, they demanded public education for from the Old World. Labor long raised its voice
their children and an end to the inhuman practice against the unrestricted inpouring of wage-
of imprisonment for debt. depressing and union-busting immigrant workers.

Employers, abhorring the rise of the “rabble’’ in Labor’s early and painful efforts at organization
politics, fought the ten-hour day to the last ditch. had netted some 300,000 trade unionists by 1830.
They argued that reduced hours would lessen pro- But such encouraging gains were dashed on the
duction, increase costs, and demoralize the work- rocks of hard times following the severe depression
ers. Laborers would have so much leisure time that of 1837. As unemployment spread, union member-
the Devil would lead them into mischief. A red- ship shriveled. Yet toilers won a promising legal vic-
letter gain was at length registered for labor in 1840, tory in 1842. The supreme court of Massachusetts
when President Van Buren established the ten-hour ruled in the case of Commonwealth v. Hunt that
day for federal employees on public works. In ensu- labor unions were not illegal conspiracies, provided
ing years a number of states gradually fell into line that their methods were “honorable and peaceful.’’
by reducing the hours of workingpeople. This enlightened decision did not legalize the strike

306 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

overnight throughout the country, but it was a sig- virtually all New England farm girls, carefully super-
nificant signpost of the times. Trade unions still had vised on and off the job by watchful matrons.
a rocky row to hoe, stretching ahead for about a cen- Escorted regularly to church from their company
tury, before they could meet management on rela- boardinghouses and forbidden to form unions, they
tively even terms. had few opportunities to share dissatisfactions over
their grueling working conditions.
Women and the Economy
But factory jobs of any kind were still unusual
Women were also sucked into the clanging mecha- for women. Opportunities for women to be eco-
nism of factory production. Farm women and girls nomically self-supporting were scarce and consisted
had an important place in the preindustrial econ- mainly of nursing, domestic service, and especially
omy, spinning yarn, weaving cloth, and making can- teaching. The dedicated Catharine Beecher, unmar-
dles, soap, butter, and cheese. New factories such as ried daughter of a famous preacher and sister of Har-
the textile mills of New England undermined these riet Beecher Stowe, tirelessly urged women to enter
activities, cranking out manufactured goods much the teaching profession. She eventually succeeded
faster than they could be made by hand at home. Yet beyond her dreams, as men left teaching for other
these same factories offered employment to the lines of work and schoolteaching became a thor-
very young women whose work they were displac- oughly “feminized’’ occupation. Other work “oppor-
ing. Factory jobs promised greater economic inde- tunities’’ for women beckoned in household service.
pendence for women, as well as the means to buy Perhaps one white family in ten employed servants
the manufactured products of the new market at midcentury, most of whom were poor white,
economy. immigrant, or black women. About 10 percent of
white women were working for pay outside their
“Factory girls” typically toiled six days a week,
earning a pittance for dreary, limb-numbing, ear- A woman worker in the Lowell mills wrote a
splitting stints of twelve or thirteen hours—“from friend in 1844:
dark to dark.’’ The Boston Associates, nonetheless,
proudly pointed to their textile mill at Lowell, Mass- “You wish to know minutely of our hours of
achusetts, as a showplace factory. The workers were labor. We go in [to the mill] at five o’clock; at
seven we come out to breakfast; at half-past
Violence broke out along the New York seven we return to our work, and stay until
waterfront in 1836 when laborers striking for half-past twelve. At one, or quarter-past one
higher wages attacked “scabs.’’ Philip Hone’s four months in the year, we return to our
diary records: work, and stay until seven at night. Then the
“The Mayor, who acts with vigour and evening is all our own, which is more than
firmness, ordered out the troops, who are some laboring girls can say, who think
now on duty with loaded arms. . . . These nothing is more tedious than a factory life.’’
measures have restored order for the
present, but I fear the elements of disorder Another worker wrote in 1845:
are at work; the bands of Irish and other
foreigners, instigated by the mischievous “I am here, among strangers—a factory girl
councils of the trades-union and other —yes, a factory girl; that name which is
combinations of discontented men, are thought so degrading by many, though, in
acquiring strength and importance which truth, I neither see nor feel its degradation.
will ere long be difficult to quell.’’ But here I am. I toil day after day in the noisy
mill. When the bell calls I must go: and must
I always stay here, and spend my days within
these pent-up walls, with this ceaseless din
my only music?’’

Working Women 307

own homes in 1850, and estimates are that about 20 became more closely knit and affectionate, provid-
percent of all women had been employed at some ing the emotional refuge that made the threatening
time prior to marriage. impersonality of big-city industrialism tolerable to
many people.
The vast majority of workingwomen were single.
Upon marriage, they left their paying jobs and took Most striking, families grew smaller. The aver-
up their new work (without wages) as wives and age household had nearly six members at the end of
mothers. In the home they were enshrined in a “cult the eighteenth century but fewer than five members
of domesticity,’’ a widespread cultural creed that glo- a century later. The “fertility rate,’’ or number of
rified the customary functions of the homemaker. births among women age fourteen to forty-five,
From their pedestal, married women commanded dropped sharply among white women in the years
immense moral power, and they increasingly made after the Revolution and, in the course of the nine-
decisions that altered the character of the family teenth century as a whole, fell by half. Birth control
itself. was still a taboo topic for polite conversation, and
contraceptive technology was primitive, but clearly
Women’s changing roles and the spreading some form of family limitation was being practiced
Industrial Revolution brought some important quietly and effectively in countless families, rural
changes in the life of the nineteenth-century and urban alike. Women undoubtedly played a large
home—the traditional “women’s sphere.’’ Love, not part—perhaps the leading part—in decisions to
parental “arrangement,’’ more and more frequently have fewer children. This newly assertive role for
determined the choice of a spouse—yet parents women has been called “domestic feminism,’’
often retained the power of veto. Families thus

308 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

neglected to do her homework, her mother sent her
from the dinner table and gave her “only bread and
water in her own apartment.’’ What Europeans saw
as permissiveness was in reality the consequence of
an emerging new idea of child-rearing, in which the
child’s will was not to be simply broken, but rather
shaped.

In the little republic of the family, as in the
Republic at large, good citizens were raised not to be
meekly obedient to authority, but to be independ-
ent individuals who could make their own decisions
on the basis of internalized moral standards. Thus
the outlines of the “modern’’ family were clear by
midcentury: it was small, affectionate, and child-
centered, and it provided a special arena for the tal-
ents of women. Feminists of a later day might decry
the stifling atmosphere of the nineteenth-century
home, but to many women of the time, it seemed a
big step upward from the conditions of grinding
toil—often alongside men in the fields—in which
their mothers had lived.

Western Farmers Reap
a Revolution in the Fields

because it signified the growing power and inde- As smoke-belching factories altered the eastern sky-
pendence of women, even while they remained line, flourishing farms were changing the face of
wrapped in the “cult of domesticity.’’ the West. The trans-Allegheny region—especially the
Ohio-Indiana-Illinois tier—was fast becoming the
Smaller families, in turn, meant child-centered nation’s breadbasket. Before long it would become a
families, since where children are fewer, parents can granary to the world.
lavish more care on them individually. European
visitors to the United States in the nineteenth cen- Pioneer families first hacked a clearing out of the
tury often complained about the unruly behavior of forest and then planted their painfully furrowed
American “brats.’’ But though American parents fields to corn. The yellow grain was amazingly versa-
may have increasingly spared the rod, they did not tile. It could be fed to hogs (“corn on the hoof’’) or
spoil their children. Lessons were enforced by distilled into liquor (“corn in the bottle’’). Both these
punishments other than the hickory stick. When products could be transported more easily than the
the daughter of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe bulky grain itself, and they became the early western
farmer’s staple market items. So many hogs were
butchered, traded, or shipped at Cincinnati that the
city was known as the “Porkopolis’’ of the West.

Most western produce was at first floated down
the Ohio-Mississippi River system, to feed the lusty
appetite of the booming Cotton Kingdom. But west-
ern farmers were as hungry for profits as southern
slaves and planters were for food. These tillers,
spurred on by the easy availability of seemingly
boundless acres, sought ways to bring more and
more land into cultivation.

Advances in Agriculture 309

Ingenious inventors came to their aid. One of sufficient in food production—could devour. They
the first obstacles that frustrated the farmers was the began to dream of markets elsewhere—in the
thickly matted soil of the West, which snagged and mushrooming factory towns of the East or across
snapped fragile wooden plows. John Deere of Illinois the faraway Atlantic. But they were still largely land-
in 1837 finally produced a steel plow that broke the locked. Commerce moved north and south on the
virgin soil. Sharp and effective, it was also light river systems. Before it could begin to move east-
enough to be pulled by horses, rather than oxen. west in bulk, a transportation revolution would
have to occur.
In the 1830s Virginia-born Cyrus McCormick
contributed the most wondrous contraption of all: a Highways and Steamboats
mechanical mower-reaper. The clattering cogs of
McCormick’s horse-drawn machine were to the In 1789, when the Constitution was launched, prim-
western farmers what the cotton gin was to the itive methods of travel were still in use. Waterborne
southern planters. Seated on his red-chariot reaper, commerce, whether along the coast or on the rivers,
a single husbandman could do the work of five men was slow, uncertain, and often dangerous. Stage-
with sickles and scythes. coaches and wagons lurched over bone-shaking
roads. Passengers would be routed out to lay nearby
No other American invention cut so wide a fence rails across muddy stretches, and occasionally
swath. It made ambitious capitalists out of humble horses would drown in muddy pits while wagons
plowmen, who now scrambled for more acres on sank slowly out of sight.
which to plant more fields of billowing wheat. Sub-
sistence farming gave way to production for the Cheap and efficient carriers were imperative if
market, as large-scale (“extensive’’), specialized, raw materials were to be transported to factories
cash-crop agriculture came to dominate the trans- and if finished products were to be delivered to con-
Allegheny West. With it followed mounting indebt- sumers. On December 3, 1803, a firm in Providence,
edness, as farmers bought more land and more Rhode Island, sent a shipment of yarn to a point
machinery to work it. Soon hustling farmer-
businesspeople were annually harvesting a larger
crop than the South—which was becoming self-

310 CHAPTER 14 Forging the National Economy, 1790–1860

sixty miles away, notifying the purchaser that the the elongated National Road, or Cumberland Road.
consignment could be expected to arrive in “the This highway ultimately stretched from Cumber-
course of the winter.’’ land, in western Maryland, to Vandalia, in Illinois, a
distance of 591 miles. The War of 1812 interrupted
A promising improvement came in the 1790s, construction, and states’ rights shackles on internal
when a private company completed the Lancaster improvements hampered federal grants. But the
Turnpike in Pennsylvania. It was a broad, hard- thoroughfare was belatedly brought to its destina-
surfaced highway that thrust sixty-two miles west- tion in 1852 by a combination of aid from the states
ward from Philadelphia to Lancaster. As drivers and the federal government.
approached the tollgate, they were confronted with
a barrier of sharp pikes, which were turned aside The steamboat craze, which overlapped the
when they paid their toll. Hence the term turnpike. turnpike craze, was touched off by an ambitious
painter-engineer named Robert Fulton. He installed
The Lancaster Turnpike proved to be a highly a powerful steam engine in a vessel that posterity
successful venture, returning as high as 15 percent came to know as the Clermont but that a dubious
annual dividends to its stockholders. It attracted public dubbed “Fulton’s Folly.’’ On a historic day in
a rich trade to Philadelphia and touched off a 1807, the quaint little ship, belching sparks from its
turnpike-building boom that lasted about twenty single smokestack, churned steadily from New York
years. It also stimulated western development. The City up the Hudson River toward Albany. It made
turnpikes beckoned to the canvas-covered Con- the run of 150 miles in 32 hours.
estoga wagons, whose creakings heralded a west-
ward advance that would know no real retreat. The success of the steamboat was sensational.
People could now in large degree defy wind, wave,
Western road building, always expensive, tide, and downstream current. Within a few years,
encountered many obstacles. One pesky roadblock Fulton had changed all of America’s navigable
was the noisy states’ righters, who opposed federal streams into two-way arteries, thereby doubling
aid to local projects. Eastern states also protested their carrying capacity. Hitherto keelboats had been
against being bled of their populations by the pushed up the Mississippi, with quivering poles and
westward-reaching arteries. raucous profanity, at less than one mile an hour—a
process that was prohibitively expensive. Now the
Westerners scored a notable triumph in 1811
when the federal government began to construct