CHARLES DICKENS WOULD NEVER forget his astonishment when, early, in January 1842, he opened the door of his stateroom on the steam packet Britannia and gazed inside at the tiny chamber hardly bigger than a cab, at the two horsehair seats fixed to the wall, the narrow slabs for sleeping, the pillows no thicker than crumpets. He could not believe that “this utterly impractical, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting house in the city of London.…” The world-famous author of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist suffered more disillusionments as the steam packet encountered terrible January storms that tore the planking out of the paddle wheels and left the usually exuberant Dickens prostrate with seasickness.
Although the steam packet was a British ship carrying Her Majesty’s mails to Halifax and Boston, she was also the start of Charles Dickens’ first tour of America, and the start of a long series of disenchantments he would undergo in the New World, of which he expected so much. Lionized on arriving in Boston, he liked much of what he first saw with his imaginative novelist’s eyes—the bright and gay houses with their “very red” bricks and “very white” stone and “very green” blinds and railings; the handsome State House and other public buildings; the quiet and benevolent and rational influence of the “University of Cambridge”; the healthy young factory girls of Lowell, with their serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls, and clogs and pattens; Hartford, where the legislature, Dickens reported gleefully, once had enacted “Blue Laws” that barred a citizen from kissing his wife on Sunday; New Haven, the City of Elms; and finally New York Harbor, “a forest of ships’ masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags.”
Slowly the disenchantment took over. Dickens made a point of visiting prisons and insane asylums and, while often impressed by American innovations, he was shaken by the plight of the inmates he interviewed. Escorted by police officers, he prowled through the brothels and thieves’ dens of the Five Points section near the Bowery. In Philadelphia he was appalled by a “pioneering” and dreadful system of solitary confinement. His repulsion mounted in Washington, the region of “slavery, spittoons, and senators—all three are evils in all countries,” he wrote later. He was impressed by John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and some “noble specimens” from the West, but he hardly had time for the President of the United States, and he reserved his most impassioned criticism for members of Congress. Did he see an assembly of honest patriots trying to correct some of the vices of the Old World? Not at all.
“I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves.…in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.…” So fierce and brutal was the strife of politics that “sensitive and delicate-minded persons” had to stand aloof, leaving the battle to the selfish.
For Dickens, the supreme evil was slavery, and the supreme hypocrisy that of men who shamelessly displayed the Declaration of Independence, “which solemnly declares that All Men are Created Equal,” and then would censure a member of Congress for having once risen up and called out to the lawmakers, “A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!” Where now, asked Dickens, was the pursuit of Liberty and Equality?
Dickens traveled west, taking the canalboat across Pennsylvania and the famed portage railway over the Alleghenies. He was struck by Pittsburgh’s great ironworks—“like Birmingham”—and the “great quantity of smoke hanging about it.” He admired Cincinnati, the “prettiest place” he had seen save for Boston, and “honourably famous for its free-schools.” He marveled at the size of the Mississippi, an “enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees.” He admired the old French portion of St. Louis and fulfilled his “great desire to see a Prairie.” He was properly struck by Niagara Falls, and he took time to take a steamboat up the Hudson and then ride overland to Lebanon, where he inspected the Shakers and their austere community. But he had become increasingly fatigued and dispirited during the trip, and he seemed more repelled by the ugliness of the pious and “stiff-necked” Shaker matriarchs than impressed by their husbandry and fraternity.
Always his thoughts returned to the blight of slavery. He copied scores of advertisements from the newspapers: “Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down”…“Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on her right leg”…“Ran away, the negro Manuel. Much marked with irons”…“Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar”…“Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myrna. Has several marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet”…“Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M”…“Ran away, a negro named Arthur. Has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.”…
Reflecting on his travels in America, Dickens tried to sum up his estimate of the general character of the American people and their social system. He found Americans as a whole “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” The more educated and refined, the more warm and ardent “to a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.” But these qualities were “sadly sapped and blighted” among the great mass of men. Americans as a whole were too distrustful of one another; overly practical and impressed by “smart men,” no matter how rascally; dull and gloomy in temperament; subject to a vicious and rapacious press; and always meanly suspicious of worthy public men.
“There’s freedom of opinion here, you know,” Dickens quoted Americans saying to him when he chided them on their suspicion of their governors. “Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached.” Dickens respected this independence, but he was appalled by the sweaty, stinking, spitting, venal, leveling tendencies of the American people.
This burning question—equality in America—excited the curiosity of scores of European visitors in the 1830s and 1840s. And Americans were even more curious about what the visitors reported about them. Europeans, after all, had a detachment, a perspective, and a basis of social comparison no American observer could match; they were virtually anthropological in their merciless dissection of American manners and customs. Frances Trollope, with her sharp eyes for domestic manners, missed little, nor did Harriet Martineau, despite her ear trumpet through which people had to shout, nor did Fanny Kemble, with her special concern with the lives of women. Unhappily, the findings of these and a hundred other visitors were quite mixed.
Americans were variously found to be friendly, generous, rude, vulgar, solemn, dull, cold, violent, selfish, boastful, thin-skinned, practical, curious, vigorous, unrefined, materialistic, anti-intellectual. But the findings were often so self-contradictory that the visitors seemed to be describing the human condition, not merely the American. In sum it was a portrait, in Edward Pessen’s words, “of a good-natured but essentially shallow man: clever but not profound, self-important but uncertain, fond of deluding himself, living almost fanatically for the flesh (although not knowing too well how), straining every fibre to accumulate the things he covets and amoral about the methods to be used, a hypocrite who strains at gnats and swallows camels, an energetic and efficient fellow albeit a small one, who takes comfort in—as well as his standards of behavior from—numbers.”
The visitors noted the cosmetics of equality, but no one probed behind the superficial manners and customs to cut to the social bone of the real questions about equality in America: What kind of inequality existed, economic, social, political, or other? What was the awareness of inequality, as against the existence of it? To what extent did a rigid class or caste system exist, to what extent was economic and social mobility eroding these systems? No one even tried to come to grips with such major questions, save for an unrenowned twenty-six-year-old French aristocrat who journeyed to America with a friend in the spring of 1831.
Born of noble parents who barely escaped the guillotine during the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville grew up in an aristocratic family that clung to the traditions of the Bourbons even while providing their son with a solid Catholic education, a fine library, and the opportunity to study the classics at the lycée at Metz and law in the courts of Paris. With a friend, Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville attended the lectures of François Guizot and absorbed the historian’s view that history was governed by inexorable laws and that the progress of bourgeois democracy was inevitable. Rejecting both the House of Bourbon and the Orléanist dynasty that came to power after the uprisings of 1830, the young lawyer, now a magistrate, decided with Beaumont on a long tour of the rising young republic to the west, ostensibly to study and report on the advanced penitentiary system that was believed to exist in the United States. They arrived in New York in mid-May 1831, during the growing conflict in Andrew Jackson’s first term over the question: Should “People” or “Property” rule?
Looking for democracy and equality, Tocqueville plunged into a nation that was sharply unequal in its distribution of wealth. An hour’s carriage ride through any of the big cities of the East would show striking contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor. Wealthy Americans lived in fine town houses; dined well on the best food served on imported china and silverware; spent lavishly for clothes, entertainment, travel. The very rich were attended by liveried servants. Not far away, in slums and stews, fifty or more poor families might live in a decaying tenement, with perhaps one privy. Scores of “destitute homeless wretches” had been seen “lying on bulks or under the sheds about the markets of New York and Philadelphia.” Debtors were still being thrown into jail. Five thousand paupers lived in the stews of Boston, not far from the mansions on Beacon Hill. In 1830 the most affluent 10 percent of the nation’s families probably owned at least two-thirds of the country’s total wealth.
How was it possible, then, for Tocqueville to report, in the very opening sentence of his Democracy in America, “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people”? How could he speak of equal conditions? In part because paupers and nabobs were relatively few; the great bulk of Americans lived somewhere between the two extremes. In part because the extremes of poverty and wealth that Tocqueville had witnessed in Europe made American inequality seem relatively benign. In part because Tocqueville, perhaps searching for a kind of Jeffersonian arcadia, perceived Americans as mainly rural, middle-class, homogeneous, agrarian, and he little noticed the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization, with their enormous implications for equality in America.
But the main reason Tocqueville and other observers underplayed the extent of inegalitarianism in America lay in the tendency of economic inequality to be tempered and cushioned, in both appearance and substance. The crucial fact was not the absence of class distinctions but the transcending of them, Henry S. Commager wrote; wherever men and women “met in typical gatherings—camp meetings, militia drills, Grange picnics, political conventions, church sociables, Chautauqua assemblies—they met on a basis of equality.” It almost seemed that the American male—in his typically slouching posture, in his eternal smoking and chewing and spitting in even the most refined places, in his constant and indiscriminate handshaking, in his habit of saying “Yes, sir,” to high and low—was trying to prove his membership in a great classless mass.
The most striking social buffer was the decline of deference. Free Americans would not bow or scrape or pull their forelocks, no matter whom they were addressing. On this score the relationship of master and servant particularly impressed Tocqueville. He had heard that in the North, especially in New England, in contrast with the slave domestic service of the South, servants performed their duties “without thinking themselves naturally inferior to the person who orders them.” The servants had enough respect for themselves not to refuse their masters the promised obedience; on their part, masters “do not ask for marks of respect…; it is enough that, as servants, they are exact and honest.” The free-and-easy egalitarian way of Westerners in dealing with visiting notables was widely known, and doubtless influenced behavior in the East.
It was not that Jacksonian America lacked classes. “There are upper classes and working classes,” John Quincy Adams told Tocqueville bluntly. Class distinctions were visible in dress, speech, grooming, carriages, housing, residence area, as well as in income, education, social status. Social lines grew rapidly in western cities too, Richard Wade noted, though not drawn as tightly as in the East. Seating in theaters was partitioned on the basis of class; even applause was given by class. The United States had the makings of a caste system, with black men enslaved in the South and segregated in the North, illiterate immigrants sealed off in the worst jobs and the poorest housing, women set apart politically and psychologically in their own class pyramid. Visiting the Tombs in the Bowery, Dickens asked a warden if he put men in the bottommost, unhealthy cells of this infamous jail, and was reassured: “Why, we do only put colored people in ’em.”
Save for the blacks and the very poor, what Jacksonian America as a whole lacked was a class system—a stratified social structure that set people off into separate and conflicting ideologies, economic statuses, rigid social structures. Most Americans behaved as though they existed in a culture of equality, even though they also existed in an economy, and to a considerable extent a society, of inequality. They responded, in their class roles, not directly to economic reality but to their perception of their class status, to their perception of others’ class status, and to their perception of others’ perception of their own class position.
Tempering tendencies toward class rigidity, to some degree, was the nation’s social inheritance: a large, open, bourgeois middle class, without an upper class of aristocrats or a lower class of proletarians. “The great advantage of the Americans,” Tocqueville observed, was that “they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” Born equal! The United States had no inherited nobility in the European sense; its farmers were not peasants in the French sense; its workers were not proletarians in the English sense. Tocqueville noted another reason for softened class lines—America’s vast lands and abundance: “Their ancestors gave them the love of equality and of freedom; but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.” Then too, poor Americans clung to the rags-to-riches myth. Stories were told of men who had struck it rich in land speculation, in banking, in manufacturing. A hard-working man could rise through the ranks, or if opportunity were closed to him, he could move west. “In America,” Tocqueville reported, “most of the rich men were formerly poor.”
The young Frenchman exaggerated. Neither social nor geographical mobility was as simple as he and many Americans thought. Wealth, jobs, and status were inherited by sons enjoying special access to colleges, family connections, social networks, their fathers’ wills. Going west and buying a farm required more money than most poor men had. But Tocqueville, with his usual insight, understood the myths that moved Americans, if not always the hard facts that validated or eroded the myths. And the heady idea of the self-made man was at the heart of the mystique of Jacksonian Democracy.
Tocqueville had come to America to see democracy at work, for in the young republic, he believed, “the demos ruled in its unadulterated state.” Democracy in America, he decided, was inexorably producing powerful egalitarian impulses and conditions, because democratic societies in general tended more and more toward equality and “dragged” everyone along with it. To some degree he welcomed this trend; “…after all,” he said, “it may be God’s will to spread a moderate amount of happiness over all men, instead of heaping a large sum upon a few.” But even more he feared probable consequences of egalitarianism: a vast leveling down, conformity, mediocrity, one large, homogeneous middle class without “poetry or elevation.” All this in turn would lead to something Tocqueville feared most of all—the “tyranny of the majority.”
Leveling and mediocrity also discouraged great leadership, Tocqueville felt. He wrote of the brilliant leadership, a generation earlier, of Thomas Jefferson and his Federalist adversaries. These were men of principle, with lofty ambitions for themselves and their country. But if America had once had great parties and leadership, she had them no longer; men were occupied by their petty, material ambitions, and the country “swarms with lesser controversies.” Doubtless Andrew Jackson in the White House seemed a narrow and quarrelsome figure to the young French aristocrat. He had to grant Jackson’s skill and tenacity, however, in standing by his policies and arousing popular support.
In fact, the nation had strong leadership in the first cadre of Jackson and the other national Democratic figures like Van Buren and Benton, and in their great Whig antagonists like Clay and Webster. It had a robust second cadre of congressmen, state officials, partisan newspaper editors, party managers, federal and state officials, who carried on healthy, partisan combat. The vital test of Tocqueville’s fears about leadership lay in the third cadre—the grass-roots activists who sustained and invigorated democracy at its foundation.
A remarkable mushrooming of grass-roots leadership occurred in a group that might have seemed least potent in a nation still mainly agricultural—the working people of the big eastern cities. Ever since the Revolution, craft unions had been organizing, agitating for better conditions, conducting strikes and boycotts, and then usually disappearing after a brief existence. Trade unionism revived in the more liberal and democratic climate of the 1820s. In 1824 weavers seeking higher wages left their looms in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the first known strike of women workers. By this time tailors, carpenters, cordwainers, hatters, riggers, and other craftsmen had formed somewhat durable unions. Working people were reaching out toward wider unities. After fifteen Philadelphia unions in 1827 banded together to form the first city central trade council, unionists in a dozen other cities moved to organize their own.
Local union leaders became more and more aware, as Jackson and other national leaders battled over issues of concern to working people, that they could not realize their goals through trade union action alone, but must enter the political arena as well. Here again, Philadelphia workers led the way, forming a workingmen’s party out of the central trade council in 1828. Suddenly other movements, calling themselves workingmen’s parties, People’s Party, Farmer’s and Mechanic’s Society, or just Working Men, were springing into life in scores of cities in Pennsylvania, New York, New England, Ohio, and elsewhere. Typically these parties advanced a broad range of political demands: abolition of imprisonment for debt; equal, free, tax-supported, universal education; prohibition of licensed monopolies; equal taxation on property; revision or abolition of the militia system (which bore heavily on workers); and often a host of local needs, such as better working conditions and more “hydrant water” for the poor.
Leaders of these workers’ parties knew what they wanted; the question was how to get it. And here the parties took a drastic step that set them off from a multitude of other interests pressing their demands. This was to nominate their own candidates for office, and then elect them. Such a strategy not only required a massive electoral effort from relatively small organizations, but presented the leaders with endless practical and philosophical dilemmas. Should they operate completely separately from political parties—that is, maintain their doctrinal purity at the expense of being isolated, or at least outvoted, politically? If they cooperated with existing political parties, on what terms? To what extent should the workers’ parties broaden their own ranks beyond their own trade union members? To what extent should they press for policies that would benefit the general public, or at least the poor, and not unionists alone? Should the parties actually try to win elections, or act mainly as goads and gadflies to the existing major parties?
Bitter quarrels broke out over such issues. The question of including non-workers was especially vexing. Some workers wished to exclude lawyers, bankers, brokers, and employers. Others argued that the crucial factor was a man’s views, not his job. The Philadelphia party decided that while employers might be present at meetings, they should be barred from holding office. But a member complained, “If an employer superintends his own business (still more if he works with his own hands) he is a working man.”
Resolving such tough strategic questions—questions that have daunted all third parties before and since—required a rare degree of creative leadership, and this the workers’ parties did not possess. Although the various city organizations produced vigorous and committed local leaders, they were heavily localized movements incapable of elevating and supporting leaders who could plan a national strategy and mobilize workingmen behind it. The workers’ parties fell between stools—too inclusive in some places and too exclusive in others, too inexperienced in “practical” politics, too exposed to outside attack, too doctrinaire for some workers and yet too pragmatic for others. But their primary handicap was the readiness of the major parties—especially the Jacksonian Democrats—to appropriate their less controversial and less radical ideas as soon as it became politically expedient to do so. Within a few years the workers’ parties were declining and disappearing almost as quickly as they had arisen.
If the workers’ parties suffered from too few adequate leaders, radical movements of the day seemed to suffer from too many. Jacksonian leadership hastened popular ferment and protest, especially in New York City, a magnet to rebels looking for ways to spread their heretical ideas. These radicals were united by little but their hatred for the “haves” and their concern for the “have-nots.” In a book, Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth, Langdon Byllesby, contending that the laboring man shared almost none of the goods he produced, denounced both the credit system and labor-saving machinery. Thomas Skidmore attacked property that was not shared equally by the whole community; he urged that all existing land and goods be surrendered to the state and then reallocated equally as part of a “General Division.” Robert Dale Owen, son of the organizer of the innovative but paternalistic factory at New Lanark in Scotland and later of the community of New Harmony in Indiana, edited The Free Inquirer and argued for liberalized divorce laws, education for workers, and a fairer distribution of wealth. Another British native, George H. Evans, founder of the Working Man’s Advocate in New York, preached atheism, land reform, and the rights of wage earners.
The star of the New York radicals was a dedicated abolitionist, militant anti-cleric, popular lecturer, indefatigable social reformer—and a woman. Frances Wright had lived a remarkable life in Scotland even before she came to New York in 1830 to edit The Free Inquirer with Owen. Left without parents at the age of two, but with a large inheritance, she had traveled and written extensively while still in her teens, visited America in 1818 and again with General Lafayette in 1824, urged her plan of emancipation on Jefferson and Madison, and then carried out her own experiment in emancipation by purchasing slaves in the United States and colonizing them in Tennessee and, later, Haiti.
She was a tall, slender woman, whom Walt Whitman years later would call one of the sweetest of his memories, “graceful, deer-like…beautiful in bodily shape and gifts of soul.” An eloquent foe of religion and of the influence of the Church in politics, she opposed the existing American educational system based on authority and the denial of equal rights for women. For insisting that the legal obligation of marriage should be replaced by a union based only on moral obligation she was called the “great Red Harlot of Infidelity.”
Radical leaders in Massachusetts made up an even more variegated group. In the western hinterland of the state, where hard times and recalled mortgages reminded old men of the days of Shays’s Rebellion, Theodore Sedgwick had been a boy of hardly six in Stockbridge when some of Shays’s men ransacked the house of his father, Judge Sedgwick. Deserting his father’s conservative doctrines, except for a common belief in emancipation, the young man became increasingly sympathetic to the needs of wage earners, including improved working conditions, public education, and temperance. He became as committed and outspoken a radical Democrat as the judge had been a conservative Federalist.
Fifty miles to the northeast, in Northfield, a disillusioned ex-pastor and ex-congressman, Samuel Clesson Allen, who had begun protesting the plight of the local farmers after he quit Congress in 1829, soon discovered—and asserted—that not only farmers but all producing workers were cheated by the diversion of wealth to the wealthy. Poverty, he contended, resulted from artificial limits on production. “The natural limit of production,” he said, “is the wants of the consumers. Till these are supplied there is no reason why production should stop.” Allen had hopes for Jackson’s administration.
In Northampton, down the Connecticut River from Northfield, another kind of reformer was undergoing political transformation during the early thirties. The son-in-law of a wealthy Springfield capitalist, a Harvard-man, a member of the intellectual elite of Cambridge, George Bancroft had returned to Northampton to found a progressive school, and to write. For a time he played Whiggish politics while espousing radical and working-man doctrines, but then he took a position against Biddle’s bank, deserted the Whig party for good, and declared himself against the moneyed aristocracy, to the consternation of Springfield high society. In Boston a trio of radical Democrats—Frederick Robinson, William Foster, Theophilus Fisk—directed their reformist arguments both at fellow Democrats and at organized workingmen. Another Boston reformer, Robert Rantoul, had started life among Federalist Essexmen, attended Phillips Andover and Harvard, and settled among wealthy Whigs, only to veer sharply toward humanitarianism, Jacksonianism, workers’ rights, free markets, and a kind of genteel moralistic radicalism, including opposition to liquor and capital punishment.
These men—and this woman—had little in common except a burning sense of injustice. They divided over many social and moral questions; most of them were sympathetic to the wage earner’s plight and took part in workingmen’s parties, but were repelled by the revulsion of many a worker against their radical views on marriage, divorce, religion, women’s rights. Many of them worked closely with the Jackson Democrats but were offended by the compromises and evasions of major-party coalition building and electioneering. Most were high-minded moralizers who had to recognize that they would lose their working-class audiences unless they were also willing to talk the hard language of wages, hours, working conditions, strikes, and boycotts. On one cardinal question the radicals and reformers were united—in economics they were egalitarians. They helped to make equality the burning issue of Jacksonian democracy.
By the mid-1830s the outcome of the popular thrust toward equality still lay in the balance. Although in everyday social contacts the farmers and workers, having long since given up habits of deference, could mingle with upper-class men on the basis of almost easy familiarity, rich and poor were still separated by class distinctions, income, residing place, and style of life. Genuine equality of opportunity had been dramatically posed by radicals and Jacksonian Democrats as perhaps the transcending national issue, but equality of condition was still sharply limited and perhaps declining under the impact of industrial and agricultural changes. Equality before the law was guaranteed in the constitutions and formally protected in the courts, yet not always realized in concrete situations where poor men were pitted legally against rich. If economic and social and legal equality were, on balance, still largely unrealized in the Jacksonian “Age of Equality,” would the impetus of political equality be likely in the years ahead to broaden the other dimensions of equality?
Political equality meant that all men and women would have the right to vote. It meant that they would have the right to vote for all elective offices, at every level of government, local, county, state, and federal, on a regular, prescribed basis, at an appropriate time of year. It meant that the polls would be located reasonably near the voters; that voters would be subjected neither to corruption nor to intimidation; that they could vote in secret—which meant voting by paper ballots rather than orally, and with plain ballots that could be marked, folded, and deposited without anyone but the voter seeing them. It meant, more broadly, that voters could choose among candidates who took clear and forthright positions in competitive contests offering real alternatives, in elections the outcome of which would significantly affect the course of government, economic policy, social change.
Such political equality barely existed in America before the Revolution. A half century later, it was only partially achieved. It might never be wholly realized. Certain political equalities were hardly conceivable even in Jacksonian days. Women and slaves and Indians could not vote, nor could most freed Negroes in the North. Certain offices—especially the presidency and United States senatorship—were rendered by constitutions only indirectly subject to popular balloting. Certain elections would remain noncompetitive, no matter what the procedures. Even so, political equality was immensely expanded during the half century following the Declaration of Independence.
The central general issue was whether all adult white males should have the right to vote. The crucial specific issue was whether adult white males without property should have the right to vote. This issue aroused the most pressing philosophical, political, and practical questions. The powerful eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights dictated that the franchise must be considered a fundamental right of all men. If all men were naturally endowed with reason, on what grounds could some be excluded from the process of self-government? In America, where “all men were created equal” and endowed with certain inalienable rights, this question took on a special urgency. Other philosophers argued, however, that only those men with a real and continuing economic stake in a society should vote, that the property-holding middle class must serve as the great stabilizing force, that men without property would, if given the ballot, ultimately turn democracy into dictatorship.
The practical question was how, if certain men were not allowed to vote, the criteria excluding them should be established. Should men be granted the right to vote on the basis of the money they had, the property they owned, or the taxes they paid? What if a man had property one year and lost it the next—did he lose the right to vote too? Critics of the property requirement liked to tell an old story of Tom Paine’s: “You require that a man shall have sixty dollars’ worth of property, or he shall not vote. Very well, take an illustration. Here is a man who today owns a jackass, and the jackass is worth sixty dollars. Today the man is a voter and he goes to the polls and deposits his vote. Tomorrow the jackass dies. The next day the man comes to vote without his jackass and he cannot vote at all. Now tell me, which was the voter, the man or the jackass?”
The political question was simpler: if the vote is given to these new voters, are they likely to vote for “our” side or the opposition? Related to this calculation, however, was an ingenious political argument used over and over again and with telling effect by opponents of full male suffrage. The argument was that if the right to vote was extended to the poor, the rich would buy the votes of the poor, and hence extending the vote to the poor was in reality extending it to the rich. Blackstone was solemnly cited as the great authority on the question—Blackstone who said that the “true reason of requiring any qualification with regard to property in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation as to be esteemed to have no will of their own.” This argument was directed particularly against the enfranchising of industrial workers, who were seen as especially vulnerable to pressure from their employers.
Historians like to tell stories with exciting beginnings and endings, and any chronicler of Jacksonian democracy would wish to picture a mounting grand finale to the Fight for the Ballot, with the villain named Property being undone at the height of the era. In fact, the fight was not one central struggle but thousands of tiny skirmishes in a score or more states over a long stretch of time. Dismantling property restrictions in particular was a lengthy effort, often with three steps forward, one back, and one sidewise. Half a dozen states had adopted suffrage reforms by the end of the Revolutionary era, when poor soldiers had shown that they could fight as bravely as the rich, but three states passed more conservative suffrage requirements. The framers of the Constitution forced suffrage reform into at least thirteen channels by ingeniously providing that members of the new House of Representatives would be elected by those voters eligible to elect the lower houses of the various state legislatures, thus leaving the struggle for the vote largely in the hands of the states.
Some suffrage restrictions fell during the Jeffersonian era, with its emphasis on equal rights, and during the war with England, when soldiers argued that “if they were good enough to fight they were good enough to vote.” Property requirements were replaced by taxpaying requirements, which in turn gradually faded away. Further extensions of male suffrage were pushed through the states during the Jacksonian era, but in Pessen’s summary, “Well before Jackson’s election most states had lifted most restrictions on the suffrage of white male citizens or taxpayers. Jackson was the beneficiary rather than the initiator of these reforms.” Still Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi lagged; in the Old Dominion the 1831 suffrage extension still left a third of the white male population without the vote.
Conservatives fought a desperate rearguard action against the “tyranny of numbers.” The state senate, declared the redoubtable conservative James Kent to the New York constitutional convention of 1821, “has hitherto been elected by the farmers of the state…by the free and independent lords of the soil.…We propose now to annihilate at one stroke all these property distinctions and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage.” He drew a dismal picture of the day when the “owners of the soil” would be impotent, the poor would plunder the rich, the debtor would ignore the obligation of contract, the majority would tyrannize over the minority, the “motley and undefinable population of the crowded ports may predominate in the assembly.” John Randolph, ravaged by drink, his eyes glowing with passion in a face of parchment white seamed by a mass of wrinkles, rose to heights of eloquence as he played perhaps his finest hour upon the stage. “I would not live under King Numbers,” he proclaimed to the delegates to the Virginia convention of 1829, evoking the Burkean ideas he exalted. “I would not be his steward, nor make him my task-master.…”
Rhode Island lagged behind in suffrage reform, and it suddenly gave the nation a sharp warning as to the price of such delinquency in an industrializing state with large numbers of propertyless workers. It had held out against joining the new union after 1787; now it was resisting the currents of suffrage reform sweeping other states. In 1840, at the end of the “Jackson decade,” Rhode Islanders were still operating under an archaic charter granted by King Charles more than 175 years before. Under a heavy freehold requirement, almost half the adult male white population could not vote. A rotten-borough system favoring the rural population left urban voters seriously underrepresented in the lower house. The charter lacked even a bill of rights. All this was accompanied by extensive corrupt influence at the polls.
The voteless men of Rhode Island needed their champion, and he came in the unlikely personage of Thomas Dorr, a wealthy young Exeter and Harvard graduate, of Whiggish disposition politically but philosophically a son of the Enlightenment. After trying vainly to work for reform within the charter system, Dorr led a move to draft a “People’s Constitution” that extended the vote to all adult white male citizens if resident in the state for one year; it boosted the representation of Providence and other urban areas in the lower house; it required the use of the secret ballot—but withheld the ballot from blacks and women, and left a property requirement for voting in city and town elections.
Conservatives responded by drafting a less reformist charter. Both charters were submitted to the people, who voted Dorr’s up and the conservatives’ down.
Soon bewildered Rhode Islanders had two governments, one under the establishment, the other under Dorr as the “People’s Governor.” Constitutional comic opera turned deadly serious when the old government began arresting leaders of the new. Dorr escaped to New York to enlist aid from reform and radical leaders, and returned with promises of military assistance, including the dispatch of a thousand men from New York to Rhode Island by steamboat. Soon the Dorrites, hardly two hundred in number, attacked the Providence Arsenal, but the desperate, vainglorious effort, reminiscent of Shays’s attack on the Springfield Arsenal, failed. Dorr’s men left for home, and the leader escaped over the border. When the old government put through a liberalized constitution, he returned despite the price on his head, only to be arrested, indicted for high treason, found guilty, and sentenced to solitary confinement at hard labor for life. But the old government had overreached itself, and by the act of a Democratic legislature, Dorr was released after a year’s confinement, and the oligarchy granted the people still another, and now heavily liberalized, charter. Decades late, Rhode Island had finally joined the parade toward full manhood suffrage.
It was because constitutions like Rhode Island’s archaic one—and even more, the Constitution of the United States—embodied fundamental compromises with human liberty that abolitionist leaders like William Lloyd Garrison rejected constitutional processes, even voting. Garrison opposed any concerted political action; rather, he proposed that truth and right would prevail by waging the moral struggle through meetings and newspapers, especially his Liberator. His strategy was to be absolutely uncompromising. The first issue had proclaimed, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. ” By 1843 the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, under his influence, was resolving that the United States Constitution was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”
Another New England abolitionist leader, Theodore Dwight Weld, summarized the radical position. Slavery, he said, was pre-eminently a moral question, arresting the conscience of the nation. “As a question of politics and national economy, I have passed it with scarce a look or a word, believing that the business of the abolitionists is with the heart of the nation, rather than with its purse strings.” Such a stance cut this brand of radical off from others who believed philosophically that moral and economic and political forces must be seen in their interaction, and who calculated practically that persons suffering various forms of deprivations had to be brought together into some kind of alliance.
Another “solution” to the slavery problem isolated not only the reformers but the problem. This was the colonization of freed slaves and free blacks. Founded in 1817, the American Colonization Society within a decade or so bought hundreds of slaves and transported them and hundreds of other freed blacks to Liberia, with money raised from churches, state legislatures, and individual donors. People of means tried private experiments in emancipation and colonization. Frances Wright, increasingly concerned about the plight of the blacks, took $10,000, a third of her inheritance, and bought 2,000 acres of dry, rolling land in the densely forested area of western Tennessee. She also purchased five male slaves and three female slaves who were to work cooperatively on the land. Her plan was to raise $41,000 from supporters and eventually settle a hundred slaves. With the hope of eventual freedom before them, the blacks would work off their purchase price and then emigrate to a colony of their own. The settlement would grow until all slaves in the South would be free.
With several white friends, Wright moved into one of two cabins she had built, the blacks into the other. “We have raised buildings for immediate use, cleared and fenced round them, planted and fenced an apple orchard of five acres, planted in potatoes a vegetable garden—opened fifteen acres for corn and planted two of old ground in cotton.” The forest formed a thick, dark wall around the little settlement, and to one observer, it was “desolate.” But Frances Wright’s “mind was so exclusively occupied by the object she had then in view that all things else were worthless”; her enthusiasm for the project bordered on “religious fanaticism.” She had isolated the settlement deliberately, as many planters were hostile to her experiment.
The experiment failed. The forbidding mosquito-infested environment took its toll; Wright became ill and had to leave the management to associates, who allowed it to end in disrepute and failure. She eventually colonized in Haiti the slaves she had purchased.
By the 1840s, Jefferson’s “People,” the Jacksonian Demos, Hamilton’s “Beast,” had been enthroned—the white male half of it, that is. Not only had the suffrage been immensely broadened, but the electoral college—now chosen directly by the voters—and other institutions had been made more directly and democratically responsive to the electorate. Nevertheless, the rising Demos still needed political organization strong enough to throw the People’s collective power into the political scales, yet stable and firm enough to curb the Beast when occasion might demand. Americans required a political vehicle to organize and mass the people, to fight election contests, to unify their fragmented governments, to translate popular needs and aspirations into public policy and social change. For fifty years such a vehicle had been in the process of being invented and developed, a process as slow and halting as the extension of the suffrage. That vehicle was the political party.
In 1787 a few dozen men had met in Philadelphia and struck off a new constitution that soon was ratified in a dozen state conventions. During the half century after that year, many thousands of men (and lamentably few women), in tens of thousands of local, state, and national meetings, worked out a second charter that may be called a “party” or a “people’s” constitution. The contrasts between the formal Constitution of 1787and the party constitution of the 1780s to the 1830s are sharp and significant.
The Constitution was deeply rooted in centuries of intense moral, political, and legal thought in Europe and America; the party charter had impoverished intellectual roots. The former represented a central, strategic idea—an idea with the intellectual credentials of a Locke, a Montesquieu, a Harrington, and other philosophical giants, carefully applied to the needs and aspirations of the people of a young republic; the national party constitution was shaped without central plan or purpose, in opposition to the accepted wisdom of the day, in meetings held for more limited and parochial purposes. The Constitution was conceived and dedicated by the most illustrious and respectable leaders—men like Washington and Madison inside the Philadelphia convention hall, men like Adams and Jefferson outside. The party charter was spawned outside the establishment, often outside the law, and hence, born a bastard and growing up as a political orphan, it never became quite respectable.
The Constitution was accepted from the start, and indeed soon became a revered symbol of national unity and a mechanism of national unification. The party charter encountered sharp opposition from the established leadership of the new republic. Not only did leaders like Washington and Madison oppose parties as fractious, selfish, turbulent, divisive, but they also opposed or misconceived the essential theory of parties—the theory of majority rule, party rotation in office, party authority, party opposition, party distribution of power, the alternation of elites—that made the party charter in effect a constitution. The strategy of the Framers was to tame power by granting necessary authority to national officers responsible to conflicting constituencies, and to reserve authority to state and local officers who also had conflicting constituencies—all with an eye to curbing power by splitting it into pieces and balancing the pieces. The strategy of the party constitution was to control power by granting authority to electorally victorious parties that would have to compete against active opposition parties and be subjected to popular confirmation or repudiation in regular, open, and democratic elections. And that too was a difference—perhaps the fundamental difference—between the two constitutions.
To refer to the party charter as a general strategy and set of procedures would imply that a single central document existed somewhere, as the formal Constitution does under glass in the National Archives. In fact the party charter was more like the British constitution—a collection of laws, institutions, regulations, usages, understandings, traditions, to be found in diverse places. The party founders had no strategy shaped out of political theory; they found one later in practice.
The Constitution created a new national government and left the state governments in place, with their own constitutions and governments. But by fragmenting power, it made national parties necessary at the same time that it made them impossible—necessary because parties, with their coalition building and other unifying tendencies and machinery, could provide essential teamwork among the constitutionally separated branches of government, impossible because the existing parties (actually factions) were further fragmented and pulverized as they acted upon, and were acted upon by, those separated branches. By establishing two levels of constitutional and governmental authority—the national level and the state level—the Constitution also indirectly established two levels of party activity—in effect would create a party federalism as well as a constitutional and governmental federalism. Since state governments and political systems already existed (though somewhat altered after 1787), all this meant in effect that state political systems continued to exist for a time in roughly their pre-Constitution form while a new national political system slowly took shape.
Considering that both Federalist and anti-Federalist leaders opposed the idea of strong national parties, it was remarkable that a Federalist and a Republican party developed so quickly, even before Washington quit the presidency—remarkable that rudimentary state and national party organizations would be formed, rising leaders would exploit intensifying and widening conflict to sharpen two-party competition, Jefferson would assemble and lead a partisan administration, Congress would come to be organized roughly on party lines, the congressional caucus, established on a partisan basis, would become the central nominating mechanism for Presidents; and even the idea of a loyal party opposition would begin to be accepted, at least by some.
The party constitution was by no means fully shaped during the first twenty years of the new republic. Party leadership did not fully mobilize party followership, in part because the party leaders did not have a strategy of party, or even a commitment to it. Party organization was rudimentary; parties were not fleshed out with leaders, officials, whips, activists. Party feeling was often intense but also unstable, unevenly distributed, lacking in depth. There were parties, but not a party system, not an institutionalized party ramifying through leadership cadres, levels and branches of government, into mobilized mass followings. Hence it was possible for a partisan President like Jefferson to be succeeded by a lackluster partisan like Madison and in turn by a partyless man like Monroe. And it was perhaps inevitable that the party structure beginning to be erected by the end of John Adams’ presidency would be in decay by the start of John Quincy Adams’.
It was at the state level that the party charter continued to be shaped, parties persisted, party systems and structures began to develop. It was at this level that a fundamental transformation of American politics was precipitated.
New York State served as the great testing ground for party. If downstate Virginians had been the main intellectual fathers of the formal Constitution, upstate New Yorkers were the leading experimenters and shapers of the second, “people’s” constitution. Perhaps it was natural that this state, embracing social diversity and robust political life, should be the vanguard in the shift from the politics of the 1790s to the politics of the 1830s. New York was already a polyglot land, with its inflows of English and French and Rhinelanders, its Dutch Reformed, Huguenot, and other major religious groupings, its busy ports along the Hudson, capped by Albany and Troy; its spreading settlements on Long Island and in Westchester County; its estates of Dutch patroons and English squires; its enormous hinterland peopled by Indians, trappers, and traders; its vigorous, factious, independent, and dynamic politics reflecting the social and economic life of its people.
Even so, New York after the Revolution, continuing through the Federalist years and well into the Jeffersonian Republican epoch, epitomized not the politics of “modernity” but that of the mother country and its colonies. This was the politics of family and faction, patrician leaders and dutiful followers, hierarchy and deference. It was a politics of large patriarchal families controlling power and patronage in a narrow arena of governmental decision, and hence it was a politics of consensus within the upper socioeconomic stratum—in essence an upper-class politics, cloaked in a politics of compelling personality.
De Witt Clinton personified this kind of politics. Son of a Revolutionary War major general and nephew of George Clinton, the first governor of New York State, De Witt Clinton after graduating from Columbia rose quickly with his uncle’s help. At the age of twenty, “he had arrived at a position of considerable political influence without having been obliged to serve an apprenticeship in the humble ranks of party workers, a circumstance,” according to a biographer, “which may account for certain defects as a tactician which he showed in later life.” In the personalistic wars of the New York Montagues and Capulets, he took on the Livingston, Jay, and other patrician families, and bolted the Republican ranks to become Federalist candidate for President in 1812. He ended up in low repute with both parties. Aristocratic in bearing, snobbish in attitude, resentful of criticism, he was, however, just the man to capitalize on his own vision, elite status, and network of personal supporters to drive through the planning and building of the Erie Canal. Having switched back to Republicanism, he was rewarded with the governorship in 1820 and in 1822.
The man who was to take the measure of Clinton as a politician, and lead the way in dissolving for good Clinton’s kind of elitist, personalistic politics, hardly looked like a worthy challenger to the patrician six-foot “Magnus Apollo,” as Clinton was called. Small, smooth, sandy-haired, Martin Van Buren had become an astute judge of human nature listening to great talkers in his father’s tavern, but he had no advantage of social status or commanding presence. What Van Buren did possess was a new concept of democratic politics—the concept of party. And he had a group of followers who shaped with him a remarkable party organization that came to be known as the Albany Regency. These adherents—Silas Wright, William Marcy, Azariah Flagg, Franklin Butler, and perhaps a dozen others—were little known outside the Albany-Troy area where most of them lived and politicked. But they knew what they were against: Clinton and his whole system of politics.
And these “Bucktails” knew what they wanted: a united party organization, collective leadership and responsibility, strong party loyalty and discipline, competition between a majority party and a worthy opposition party, and an extensive party apparatus and network. Regency members subordinated their individual interests and even careers to the demands of party as determined by a majority in the legislative caucus. Editors of party newspapers, such as the famed Albany Argus or the New York National Advocate, were expected to follow the party line, and they generally did so; when editor Mordecai Noah of the Advocate quit over alleged interference with the business aspect of his work, he relented under pressure, returned to his post, and stated, “I yield, as I have ever done, with deference to the wishes of the party, when expressed through its accredited organs.” Regency Republicans in the legislature were also expected to vote the party position (when the party had a position), even at risk to their careers. When seventeen legislators stood against a popular measure opposed by the Regency, in response to Van Buren’s request that they “magnanimously sacrifice individual preferences for the general good,” the lawmakers deliberately staked their posts. A few actually failed of re-election. The only reward for these potential martyrs was a banquet where, as Marcy wrote Flagg, “something approaching to divine honors were lavished on the Seventeen.”
Party solidarity and loyalty came naturally to these men. They trusted one another, consulted with one another, respected one another’s opinions and advice. They played as well as worked together. “Their families interchange civilities,” it was noted, “their females kiss each other when they meet—their men shake each other heartily by the hand—they dine, or drink, or pray, or take snuff” with one another. As governor, Marcy read his proposed speeches to party colleagues in advance for their approval; Van Buren consulted closely with his associates. This kind of collective counsel was especially impressive in light of the quality of these men, no robots or pawns or party hacks but a group of unusually clear-headed, purposeful, thoughtful, honest men of considerable educational attainments and social standing.
Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of these leaders was to shape, as much in practice as in advance theorizing, a formidable concept of party government and majority rule. That concept embraced the propositions that competition between two strong, unified, disciplined parties was not dangerous to a democracy but vital to its health and maintenance; that harmony and consensus were undesirable and undemocratic when fundamental issues divided the people; that the absence of parties, or the amalgamation of them, would sap the foundations of liberty, especially freedom of speech and press; that party competition, spirit, and discord stimulated popular interest and dispelled apathy; that the parties—a governing party monitored and checked by an opposition party—served as a vital, extra-constitutional set of checks and balances.
Party advocates also emphasized the role of parties as watchdogs. The organized parties, Governor Enos Throop said, “watch and scan each other’s doings, the public mind is instructed by ample discussion of ample measures, and acts of violence are restrained by the convictions of the people, that the prevailing measures are the results of enlightened reason.” Above all, the theorists believed in majority rule, within and between parties.
The ultimate question, however, was what parties stood for, as platform makers and policy shapers. It has long been supposed that Van Buren and other Regency leaders during these early years took radical, egalitarian positions on public issues. More recent analysis, however, shows that behind their rhetoric about “Democracy versus Aristocracy,” and “Republicans against Hartford Feds,” was a strongly conservative cast. The Regency’s loudest war cry, as late as 1830, was for states’ rights; Van Buren and associates took conservative positions on the leading reform issues of imprisonment for debt, free public education, and presidential electoral reform. Under the doctrine of party government and majority rule, the crucial test was not what parties were for or against at any particular time, but whether they could serve as vehicles for political leadership, popular mobilization, and governmental action in the face of new needs and changing public attitudes.
That test came suddenly in July 1832, with Jackson’s dramatic veto of the United States Bank recharter. For years the Regency had been accused of protecting its own “monsters”—its own state banks and Freemasonry. Now Jackson had handed it a new, far more spectacular, and easily hateable Monster, Biddle’s national bank. After the veto message showed the way, Lee Benson wrote, the Regency’s strategy was obvious: “Jump on board the antimonopoly bandwagon, guide it down the state rights road, and crush the Monster in its Greek temple on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.” In effect the Democrats had “dished the Whigs”—had dished even more the Anti-Masons and Workingmen, who had sought to monopolize the egalitarian, anti-”Monster” thunder.
Thus a spectacular national act had catalyzed party conflict in New York State, with powerful implications for national party realignment and competition. Whether Jackson’s act, which immediately transformed 1832 presidential campaign strategy, would have a long-run effect on the American parties as a whole would depend on events also in other states.
Massachusetts, with its established patrician families and newly arrived Irish, its multitudes of farmers and factory hands and fishermen, its Beacon Hill and Brattle Street Brahmins who looked down on the social-climbing elites up and down the Atlantic seaboard, was almost as variegated as New York. The old commonwealth was developing industrially faster, probably, than any other state. Cotton mills were multiplying; railroads were radiating out from Boston; bankers and merchants were thriving and looking for places to put their money; Yankee captains and missionaries were searching for trade and heathen across the seven seas. If political families and factions were less contentious than in New York; religious groups were perhaps more so, as conservative and radical Unitarians debated each other, and orthodox Congregationalists held their ground against dissenting Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers; and all the Protestant sects closed ranks against the expanding Catholic population.
Massachusetts resembled New York and other states, however, in its passage from the old elitist politics of deference to the new politics of egalitarian rhetoric and wider political participation. The passage was illustrated by the contrast between Daniel Webster and the Jackson brand of politician. Webster, product of Exeter and Dartmouth, protégé of Boston notables, an admired insider in Beacon Hill society, Senate spokesman first of New England merchants and later of manufacturers, was the quintessential elitist transcending superficial popular favor. The widening of the suffrage and the rising winds of equality helped bring a new breed of politician to the fore.
David Henshaw was typical. Born not in Federalist Boston but in the hinterland near Worcester, apprenticed to a druggist at sixteen after a meager education in the village academy, he quickly rose in business and politics to become a powerful voice against the political establishment. Rewarded by Jackson with the patronage-rich collectorship of the port of Boston, Henshaw built a party machine not unlike the Albany Regency, especially in its appeal to rural voters outside the Yankee coastal region, and in its use of a party press, including Henshaw’s own paper, the Boston Statesman. A stocky man of medium height and two hundred pounds, Henshaw believed in party leadership, regularity, and loyalty. He was also a conservative, as were many of the early Jackson men in the Commonwealth, but here too Jackson’s bank veto catalyzed state Democrats and produced a swing toward radical rhetoric.
Massachusetts illustrated how, in a system that sustained party federalism as well as constitutional federalism, state politics refracted back upon national. The experience of Kentucky was quite different, but this frontier state also became part of an overall pattern of the decline of deference, the rise of grass-roots parties, and the complex interrelation of state and national politics.
Kentucky had seemed particularly vulnerable to boom and bust. All a Kentuckian needed to set up a bank during the post-1812 war years, some said, was a charter and a printing press. Land-hungry pioneers had borrowed from the state banks to buy more acreage; state banks expanded their circulation to meet demand; the newly re-established national bank in Philadelphia undertook its own liberal program of credit expansion, but then suddenly shifted toward contraction. The Panic of 1819 had left Kentucky with dozens of beleaguered state banks that in turn pressed their debtors harshly. Responding to desperate need, the legislature passed measure after measure to help debtors, most notably a “stay” law giving them an extra two years to pay off notes. Indignant creditors, turning to the courts for relief, won from circuit judge James Clark a ruling that a key debtor-relief law was unconstitutional.
Then followed a battle of Checks and Balances. A committee of the legislature denied the right of the judge to veto a deliberate measure of the government and recommended his removal. This move did not gain the needed two-thirds vote in the legislature. When the court of appeals sustained Clark, the legislature tried to remove the whole court, and failed again. A “relief party” then appealed to the people in the election of 1824. Showing a striking ability to organize a campaign and to engage with the needs and hopes of the voters, rejecting the old politics of deference in favor of mass campaign techniques, the relief party won the governorship and a majority in both houses of the legislature. Once again the reliefers tried to remove the erring judges from office, but could not secure the elusive two-thirds. Finally, arguing that if they could not remove the judges from their seats, they could remove the “seats from the judges,” the relief party in the legislature removed the old court and authorized the governor to appoint a new one.
Out of the crisis and conflict in Kentucky had arisen a whole new leadership cadre, headed by Amos Kendall and Francis Blair. An editor, slaveholder, and conservative Republican, Kendall had been cool to debt-relief measures, but later he changed his mind, especially when he had to borrow $1,500 from his old friend Henry Clay and several thousands more from his new friend Martin Van Buren. Once enlisted in the debtors’ cause, Kendall became its fiery leader. He pilloried the “court” party as a pack of conspirators and speculators, directed his appeals straight to the dirt farmers and the “common man”—and got chased in his editorial offices by an anti-relief lawyer brandishing a hickory stick. He and Blair also denounced high tariffs and federal improvements, thus widening the breach with their mentor Henry Clay.
The election year of 1828 brought Kendall his supreme opportunity to link up with Jackson. Bypassing the local elite, whose political power was based on a system of self-perpetuating county courts that controlled local appointments, he set up a central committee in Louisville to call for a state convention that would agree on a statewide ticket of Jackson electors. He organized mass meetings of Jackson voters who would meet in local conventions, as well as local committees headed by county and district leaders who reported to state committees.
Kendall, in short, built an integrated mass party in order to outflank the political dominance of the gentry. Where his own party following was inadequate he built alliances with Old Court men. It was only natural that, as the architect of Jackson’s big victory in Clay’s own state, Kendall would move to Washington and join his new mentor. And it was only natural that this fiery editorialist, who had won political influence by demagogic appeals to the common man, should make Jackson’s bank recharter veto message a political arrow that flew straight to the emotional heart of the electorate.
Behind all the sound and fury in Kentucky politics, historians have found a rational grass-roots demand for economic relief and change, a popular urge for meaningful democratic participation in politics, strong “social and economic aspiration burning in the hearts of Kentuckians.” Although Jackson would fail to carry Kentucky against native son Clay in 1832, the politics of the state had been changed for good, with an organized, competitive two-party system replacing the oligarchical politics of deference. Like Kentucky, each of the other states was unique but virtually all were forced to move toward Jacksonian democracy. And all the states, as they sent to Washington politicians like Henshaw and Kendall and a host of enterprising senators and congressmen, were helping to shape a new national political system, even while they were being shaped by it.
How and why Americans shaped a national party system—how they framed their second, or “people’s,” constitution—is one of the most complex and perplexing developments in American history. The storyteller would surely prefer to recount the wonderful tale of the great men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 and struck off their constitution in one glorious summer than to follow the labyrinthine process by which little-known men built parties in many places over a long period of time. Then, too, historians disagree about the nature of this party building, even though—or perhaps because—exceptionally talented scholars have pursued their historical studies in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian period of party formation. They differ over basic questions of causation—whether the direction and shape that parties took during the first fifty years of the national existence was a product mainly of ideological forces, economic factors, intellectual effort, political calculation, institutional changes, chance, or interplay among some or all of these variables.
In exploring these causes it would be well to keep in mind that no economic development or institutional change or “great idea” in itself directly builds a political party. Transportation improvements, for example, helped make it easier for widely dispersed men to come together in party conventions, but no improved stagecoach or locomotive built parties. Party “as such is a product of human ingenuity and not simply a natural growth,” in William Chambers’ words. “It must be built by the efforts of skilled political craftsmen, including major leaders at the center and hundreds or thousands of lesser leaders in outlying localities, who must at least know that they are devising co-ordinated means to their immediate ends, although they may not be wholly aware of the fact that they are shaping a party in the process.” Those who built parties were neither the celebrities of the age nor local nobodies; party did not emerge as a result of mass action at the grass roots. Parties were formed by leaders experimenting with new ways of gaining office and power.
The first parties were largely networks of leaders, mostly notables. Born and bred in the old politics of colonial days, the political leaders of the 1790s still operated in a system of deference to established notables, of family “connections” and influence, of limited participation by “average” farmers, workers, and clerks, even less involvement by women, and none at all by black slaves and white paupers. How was it that leaders who embodied and personified the politics of elitism and deference could themselves be instruments for change? The answer lay in sharply growing issue conflicts that raised the political consciousness of millions of Americans. As long as Americans were broadly agreed about national policy, as they were during most of Washington’s presidential years, political competition was muted. Strong sentiments for or against Jefferson and Adams, and the burning issues over relations with the French and the British—issues that evoked powerful feelings and memories and loyalties—acted as catalysts cutting across regional and local attachments. The national Federalist and Republican parties were born out of this kind of conflict, which took on a new intensity with the War of 1812.
During this period Americans had national parties but not a national party system. Presidents, senators, and representatives typically acted and talked like good Federalists or good Republicans. The press was highly partisan. Congressional Republicans, at least, were well organized in their caucus. A few states had developed party organizations. But all this did not make a system: Parties were not generally seen as legitimate. Party leaders in office did not recognize the legitimacy of opposition parties. Party organization in most states was rudimentary. While many activists were highly partisan, settled party conviction and commitment among the electorate were limited to a few places in a few states. One could detect a “party in office,” in short, but only a feeble party organization nationwide, and limited party affiliation among the electorate. And linkages that might make for strong and persisting structures—integrated national-state-local machinery, unified electoral and organizational effort, strong and stable party memberships—were rudimentary or absent.
As dramatic conflict over national issues declined following the War of l812, so did the central role of national party leadership and organization. With the Federalist party almost dead outside New England, and with the Republican party reduced to state and factional in-fighting, Monroe’s presidency was a time of heightened factional dispute but blurred party division. Party was left in the care, sometimes benign and sometimes casual, of the states. National party unity and organization fell into disarray.
The congressional caucus for nominating Presidents and Vice-Presidents—potentially the most powerful agency of national party power—both fostered and reflected this disarray. The caucus had started as early as 1792, when some Republican congressmen, after taking soundings in the states, met in Philadelphia to choose George Clinton to run against Vice-President John Adams. The Republicans held no caucus in 1796 because Jefferson was the unquestioned choice. Four years later, forty-three senators and representatives meeting at Marache’s boardinghouse again agreed that Jefferson was pre-eminently their man, and formally endorsed Burr for Vice-President. The congressional caucus of 1804 routinely endorsed President Jefferson and substituted Clinton for Burr. In l808, when the Republicans chose Madison overwhelmingly over Monroe, at least the caucus had a decision to make, but in 1812 its re-endorsement of Madison was unanimous. The 1816 caucus was actually a contest, with Monroe besting Crawford in a relatively close vote, but hardly a fifth of the members even showed up at the 1820 caucus. In 1824 the caucus was unable to perform its most essential function of uniting support behind one candidate. The Federalists had had even less success with a congressional caucus.
The reign of “King Caucus” had been brief, its rule weak. It died during the period of consensual, partyless government under Monroe. Only a pervasive conflict could create the conditions of raised political consciousness within which party competition could flourish, and that conflict came with the nomination and election of Adams in 1824, as a result of intense opposition to him, the apparent deal against Jackson, and the growing and divisive influence of Old Hickory first as candidate, then as the tribune of the common man, and finally as the opponent of Biddle.
In what institutional form this rising political conflict and election competition would be expressed became the crucial question in the 1830s. The nation’s politics might have reverted to the “King of the Rock,” “Winner Take All” politics of earlier years—the elitist politics of faction, personal following, closed caucus, the politics of family influence, social class, economic elitism. Profound changes in the foundations of American politics, however, made such a reversion impossible. The egalitarian issues posed, by Jefferson and Jackson had permeated the electorate and immensely raised its political consciousness. The widening of the suffrage in the states, along with other measures of democratization, had expanded the number and broadened the class membership of voters that candidates had to attract. The very feel and aroma of politics had changed, with the new hucksterism and vote cadging, the decline of the gentry and of deference, the rise of the political professional who made politics his life and his living, the proliferation of patronage jobs, the profusion of small caucuses, conventions, election rallies, political parades and picnics and paraphernalia. All this amounted, in Richard McCormick’s words, to a “hidden revolution” in the political environment.
This hidden revolution was intellectual, too—an upheaval in leaders’ concepts of the role of faction, interest, party. The framers of the “Constitution” abhorred the ideas underlying the second, or people’s, constitution—government by parties—as tending toward faction, turbulence, selfishness. Consciously or not, they wrote a constitution that would pulverize and crush parties. Even in founding the Republican party Jefferson would not recognize the legitimacy of party opposition. It took hundreds of men, working at the state and local grass-roots of politics, to repudiate the anti-party doctrine of the Framers, whom they otherwise revered. They built their state and local parties against the prevailing elitist thought of the day.
One man stood out in his conceptualizing of the “party constitution”—Martin Van Buren. The “red fox of Kinderhook” may have been sly and slippery in some of his political machinations, but intellectually he was a hedgehog, in Archilochus’ terms as interpreted by Isaiah Berlin. Van Buren had one big idea, the concept of what party was and could be. Although lacking clear philosophical guidelines, he developed his ideas on a kind of ad hoc, day-to-day basis. In later years he fleshed out his views, just as the Framers did about the Constitution in their retirements, but as early as 1827 Van Buren was arguing that a general convention would be better than the congressional caucus to concentrate the anti-Adams vote. He maintained that a convention would lead to the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican Party,” substitute “party principles” for “personal preference,” and strengthen Republicanism in New England and the Republican political coalition between North and South.
Ultimately Van Buren developed virtually an ideology of party as the essence of a democracy of liberty and virtue. In a most hedgehog-like fashion, he broadened his party concept in arguing that free competitive parties were essential to the public interest, inseparable from free government, necessary to prevent abuse of private power, and conducive to the moral discipline of institutional loyalty and personal self-restraint. He believed parties must pursue high principle as well as low patronage, must compete vigorously with one another, must generate a clash of platforms as well as personalities. Above all—the highest test of a believer in the second constitution—he not only accepted but welcomed the idea of a continuing, responsible, and legitimated opposition. If earlier the “fundamental cause for the failure to create a national organization was intellectual,” in James Chase’s words, the critical factor in the later formation of a national party system was also conceptual and intellectual.
The creation of the presidential nominating convention provided the keystone for the party arch. Here again New York and other states had experimented with ways of moving party nominations out of the relatively small and unrepresentative legislative caucuses into conclaves of delegates chosen in state and local meetings. By the mid-1830s state conventions were well established in the central states and in Ohio and Kentucky; conventions for local nominations were widely employed in New England; they were, however, slow to be established in most of the South. After the Anti-Masons experimented with the first presidential nominating convention in 1831, in Baltimore, the Democrats staged their own the next year in the same city for the renomination of President Jackson, and for the nomination—appropriately—of Martin Van Buren for Vice-President. This convention pioneered in adopting the two-thirds rule for nominations, and in agreeing to a non-binding unit rule that allowed a majority of delegates from a state to cast the entire vote of the state. These rules, little considered at the time, would become critical to the Democrats in later years. The Whigs, emerging out of the National Republican party that had held its national convention in 1831, were forced to adopt the presidential convention as a permanent fixture.
So by the late 1830s Americans had a party system. National, state, and local parties were linked through a pyramid of local, county, and congressional-district conventions sending delegates to state and national conventions. Party consciousness was high among both party leaders and party followers. Strong cadres of leaders developed at every level. Party competition was intense and strengthened partisan feeling on both sides. The parties were well balanced against each other not only nationally but also in most of the states—a degree of national political unity that would not be seen again for four decades. The linkage within and between parties was almost complete.
On the surface, at least, the two parties looked splendid, with their national conventions topping the pyramids of state, county, and local committees and caucuses and conventions, their sonorous platforms rhetorically thwacking their foes hip and thigh, their national and state leaders skilled in the arts of intra-party negotiation and compromise, their robust local activity full of parades and picnics and speechifying and occasional fisticuffs and barroom brawls. Behind the façade lay certain weaknesses, existing and potential.
It was not wholly clear by the end of the 1830s what the parties were, what they were for and against. More than ever the Democrats claimed to be the “party of the common man,” despite the fact that it did not engage with the average woman or the blacks or the really poor; nor did these people engage with the Democrats. The Jacksonians had made some effort to appeal to the expanding wage-earning class, especially in Van Buren’s executive order establishing a shorter working day on federal public projects, but the Democracy was still largely an agrarian party. The Whigs, an unstable coalition of old Federalists, Anti-Masons, mercantile and industrial elements, and a congeries of other groupings, found it much easier to denounce Jackson’s executive “usurpation” and Van Buren’s partisanship than to develop a positive program of their own. Both parties had weaknesses at their foundations. Political change and realignment had occurred so quickly during the 1830s that large numbers of Americans were left in a void between or outside the two major parties. State and local parties lacked organization and vigor in a number of areas, especially in the South and parts of the West.
The main weakness of party as the second, or “people’s,” constitution lay in its awkward embrace with the first. The organized two-party system of the late 1830s was potentially strong enough to be a vehicle for popular majority rule. Theoretically a winning majority party takes over the government and rules until at least the next election. But the Constitution was craftily designed to thwart majority rule. Winners of a presidential election could take over the White House but not necessarily the Congress. Representatives were elected out of their own, often independent constituencies; only a third of the senators were even chosen in the same year as the President. The Supreme Court, as John Marshall had demonstrated, lay beyond the reach of transient popular majorities. Even if one party achieved the feat of winning control of the whole federal government, a profusion of states, counties, cities, and towns had their own counterbalancing and conflicting constituencies.
The party “constitution,” in short, was designed to concentrate power, the formal Constitution to disperse it. Only a centrally organized and powerfully led and united party could overcome the separation of powers and checks and balances stitched into the American national and state constitutional systems, and neither the Whigs nor the Democrats were such a party. Thus the first constitution rent the second far more than the second constitution knit together the first. To a great extent, indeed, different parts of the two parties enhanced fragmentation by providing a local or state party foundation for the dispersed efforts of independent legislators or elected officials.
Still, the republic was only half a century old by the end of the 1830s; it was still young, changing, experimental. The question was the future potential for majority rule through party government. Voting turnout rose so strongly and dramatically during the 1830s as to seem to make the “people’s” constitution ultimately more viable. The participation of more and more low-income people in voting also made more possible a national party, whether Democratic or Whig or something else, that could provide the nation with a genuinely radical, democratic, popular national government that might, if given enough time and sense of commitment, unite the separated organs of government behind a comprehensive national effort to meet the needs and aspirations of the great number of lower-income people.