TO

MARIAN

The feud between the capitalist and laborer, the house of Have and the house of Want, is as old as social union, and can never be entirely quieted; but he who will act with moderation, prefer fact to theory, and remember that every thing in this world is relative and not absolute, will see that the violence of the contest may be stilled.

— George Bancroft

FOREWORD

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.HE WORLD crisis has given new urgency to the question of the "meaning" of democracy. If democracy is indeed to be the hope of the future, we know now that we must have its Hneaments clearly in mind, so that we may the more surely recognize it and the more responsibly act upon it. For some the questioning has taken the form of a search for the immutable moral abstractions of the democratic faith. Such an inquiry meets profound human needs, even if it rarely succeeds in getting far along its own path. But, for the student of history, the "meaning" of democracy is likely to assume a form at once far more simple and far more complex. The key to that meaning is rather to be sought in the concrete record of what democracy has meant in the past. What range of possibilities has it, in fact, unfolded? What methods has it found legitimate.' What have been its values and its resources?

The world after victory will contain internal, as well as external, perplexities of the utmost difficulty and importance. We do not yet know how in detail the American democracy will move to meet them; but this we do know, that, if it is to remain a democracy, its moods, methods and purposes will bear a vital relation to its attack on similar (if less intense) crises of its past.

Democracy has recommended itself above all other modes of organizing society by its capacity for the peaceable solution of its internal problems. Its flexible political and social structure, with the premium placed on tolerance, bargaining and compromise, has on the whole kept alive enough hope for discontented minorities to deter them from taking up the option of revolution. The great exception in our history was a question so crucial that perhaps it could have been solved in no other way. (We know now that it is an illusion that wars have always been unnecessary.)

But the crisis of the second order - the time of bitter social tension which somehow escapes the final flare-up - constitutes democracy's great triumph. The resources which have enabled the American democracy to surmount such crises in the past will be drawn on to the full in the near and shadowed future. The actual issues, political and

FOREWORD

economic, of Jackson's day have now an almost Arcadian simplicity. Nonetheless they went to the roots of many of the democratic ambiguities, opening up and probing questions whose recurrence a century later testifies to their continuing significance for a free society.

The heritage of Andrew Jackson, as President Roosevelt has said, is "his unending contribution to the vitality of our democracy. We look back on his amazing personality, we review his battles because the struggles he went through, the enemies he encountered, the defeats he suffered and the victories he won are part and parcel of the struggles, the enmities, the defeats and the victories of those who have lived in all the generations that have followed." ^

In the days of Jackson, as in all periods of rapid social adjustment, there was a close correspondence between the movement of politics and the movement of ideas. This work attempts to examine the politics more or less in terms of the ideas; and, in the course of the study, it has seemed that Jacksonian democracy, which has always appeared an obvious example of Western influence in American government, is not perhaps so pat a case as some have thought; that its development was shaped much more by reasoned and systematic notions about society than has been generally recognized; and that many of its controlling beliefs and motives came rather from the East and South than from the West.

The clash of ideas in these years reveals, moreover, a number of characteristics of democracy in transition. It may help perhaps in building up a conception of the peaceable "revolution" by which our democracy has, save for the tragic exception, thus far avoided the terror of violent revolution.

History can contribute nothing in the way of panaceas. But it can assist vitally in the formation of that sense of what is democratic, of what is in line with our republican traditions, which alone can save us.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. May 7, 1944 Washington, D.C.

^Franklin D. Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses, S. I. Rosenman, arr., VII, 41.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.HIS book is the outgrowth of a series of lectures entitled "A Reinterpretation of Jacksonian Democracy" delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in the fall of 1941. I am profoundly indebted to my father, Arthur M. Schlesinger, for his wise counsel and keen criticism. Bernard DeVoto, Frederick Merk and my mother, Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, have contributed to my understanding of the pre-Civil War period. I wish also to express my gratitude to the Society of Fellows of Harvard University, which made my researches possible, and in particular to Lawrence J. Henderson and to A. Lawrence Lowell, who greatly enriched my insight into the interplay of historical forces. Although I cannot believe they would altogether have liked my conclusions, I hope that they would have respected the methods by which they were reached. I am grateful to Charles A. Beard, who generously placed at my disposal his notes on the Jacksonian era. The librarians of the Harvard College Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library were of great assistance. My wife, Marian Cannon Schlesinger, has been a source of inestimable help and encouragement at all times.

A. M. S., Jr.