A BROAD VALLEY OUTSIDE Dayton, Ohio, September 10, 1840. Under sunny skies General William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate for President, is addressing a vast throng packed together on the field around him. Excited newspapermen report that 100,000 persons have gathered to hear the general—the largest political rally in the half century of the republic. For days people have been streaming into Dayton, by carriages, wagons, and horses, by packets and freight boats via the Cincinnati canal. Hundreds of flags and streamers float from trees and housetops, proclaiming: HAIL TO THE HERO. Banners stretch 150 feet wide across Main Street: HARRISON AND TYLER—THE TYRANT’S FOES—THE PEOPLE’S FRIENDS. Others proclaim the union between industry and high tariffs. Curtis’ mill has strung its own banner across to the rifle factory: PROTECT US AND WE’LL CLOTHE YOU. The banner of Pease’s mill on one side demands no standing army, on the other proclaims: ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. On the morning of the tenth a mammoth crowd surrounds the Hero as he rides his white charger to the speaking platform.
Though Old Tip looks slight and elderly, his voice seems to penetrate to the farthest edge of the crowd.
“I will carry out the doctrines of my party, although I will make no more pledges than Washington, Adams, or Jefferson would. I was never, ever a Federalist.”
The crowd breaks into cheering.
“I am a true, simple Republican, aghast that the ‘Government under “King Mat”’ IS NOW A PRACTICAL MONARCHY!”
Louder and longer cheering.
“As President I will reduce the power and influence of the National Executive”—ecstatic cheering—“At the end of one term in office, I will lay down…that high trust at the feet of the people”—cheering beyond the power of the reporter to describe—“And I will not try to name my successor”—nine cheers.
Old Tippecanoe cites his sponsorship of the Public-Land Act of 1800. “Was I a Federalist then?”—cries of NO, NO, NO—But “methinks I hear a soft voice asking: Are you in favor of paper money? I AM!”—shouts of applause—“It is the only means by which a poor industrious man may become a rich man without bowing to colossal wealth”—cheers—“But with all this, I am not a Bank man, although I am in favor of a correct banking system, able to bring the poor to the level of the rich”—tremendous cheering.
It was the climax of Harrison’s campaign. At first, he had refused to go on the stump. For a presidential candidate, campaigning was undignified, unthinkable; it had never been done. But his managers hoped to demonstrate that this gray-haired sixty-seven-year-old was fit to be President, that he would be a tribune of the people and not, as Van Burenites were charging, the tool of invisible party bosses. Soon Harrison was on his way to Columbus to show himself to the people. There, in a suddenly arranged speech from the steps of the National Hotel, he gave what was probably the first presidential campaign speech in American history. Once he started campaigning he would not stop; off went the presidential caravan to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, to more crowds and parades and speeches.
“This practice of itinerant speech-making,” old John Quincy Adams said glumly, “has suddenly broken forth in this country to a fearful extent.” No Adams had ever campaigned.
The Whig speechifying and ballyhoo camouflaged a most ingeniously run campaign. Whig leaders knew only too well the sorry fate of those Federalists and National Republicans who had allowed Jeffersonians and Jacksonians to pose as the “friends of the people.” Whigs would now be more populist than those populists, more pleasing to the people. And where were the people? In the countryside. America in 1840 was still overwhelmingly rural; only about a tenth of the populace lived in places with more than 2,500 inhabitants. The Whigs would strike directly into the rural hinterlands that had sustained the old Republican party.
So Harrison was transformed from an aged general-politico, who had been born into a distinguished Virginia family in a fine plantation manor, into a simple farmer. Transparencies—an exciting media device of the day—showed him seated in front of his log-cabin “birthplace,” a barrel of hard cider at his side. “Log-cabin boys” were organized to produce loud huzzas for the speechifying. Horny-handed farmers lumbered to the stage to present a pitchfork to Harrison.
The campaign brought marvelous theater into the villages and hamlets. Songs glorified the “Hero Ploughman” and his “Buckeye Cabin.” Hawkers sold Tippecanoe buttons, tobacco, lithographs, canes surmounted by a miniature barrel, whiskey bottles in the shape of log cabins. Whigs would have no truck with issues; their convention adopted no party platform. In the absence of genuine issues, invective flourished. Whigs routinely pictured “Old Van” as living in regal splendor, in a palace fit for Croesus, playing billiards with ivory balls. “Mr. Chairman,” demanded Congressman Charles Ogle, the Whigs’ chief billingsgate purveyor, “how do you relish the notion of voting away the HARD CASH OF YOUR CONSTITUENTS” for “SILK TASSELS, GALLON, GIMP AND SATIN MEDALLIONS to beautify and adorn the ‘BLUE ELLIPTICAL SALOON’?” Soon the crowds were chanting:
Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine,
And lounge on his cushioned settee, Our man on a buckeye bench can recline,
Content with hard cider is he.
The Democrats, not to be outdone in bombast, attacked the Whigs as an unholy coalition of old Federalists and new abolitionists, scourgers of the poor and starvers of laborers. They charged that the victor of Tippecanoe was really “Old Tipler,” a “sham hero,” a “granny,” a blasphemer, the sirer of half-breed children by Winnebago squaws. Van Buren did not deign to take the stump, but the top cadre of the Democracy—veteran warriors like Thomas Hart Benton and Vice-President Richard Johnson, young stalwarts like James K. Polk and James Buchanan—counterattacked their Whig foes, and even feeble old Andrew Jackson was exhibited at balls and barbecues to remind the voters what a real hero looked like.
Still, it was a battle more of party than of personality. Behind the scenes parties compiled master mailing lists of voters, mobilized state and local campaign committees, mustered the patronage brigades, ground out posters, leaflets, and propaganda tracts. Fifteen hundred newspapers—most of them partisan weeklies—carried news of the party battle even to the frontier. Whig newspapers were especially ingenious in publishing campaign sheets. Horace Greeley’s Log Cabin, full of chatty news about Harrison and his campaign, quickly went through a first printing of 30,000 and then sold at a weekly rate of 80,000 copies. Stealing the tune of “Jefferson and Liberty,” the Log Cabin published sheet music with lyrics ending “For HAR-RI-SON and LIB-ER-TY!”
The result was the greatest outpouring of voters the nation had seen. Harrison beat Van Buren by about 53 percent to 47 percent, by 234 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 60. The Whigs carried the House elections, 133 seats to 102, and exactly reversed the Democrat’s previous margin in the Senate, 28 to 22. Harrison won the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. The turnout was perhaps more remarkable than the election results. Almost two and one half million voted—about 80 percent of the eligibles, compared with less than 60 percent four years before. Every state reached new peaks of participation, according to William Chambers, with New York achieving a turnout of almost 92 percent. Not until the crisis year of 1860 would such a large proportion of the eligibles vote again. Campaign organization plus campaign hokum had mobilized the electorate.
In out-huckstering the Democracy, the Whigs had opportunistically outflanked the Democrats “on the left,” through the use of democratic symbols rather than democratic substance. Their rustic, populist strategy had worked, at least for the moment. But to win one battle, they had disregarded, perhaps even betrayed, the essential conservatism of developing Whig doctrine, the elitist attitudes of many of its leaders, the skepticism about populist majorities the Whigs had inherited from the old Federalist party. Whiggery had tried to turn the shank of history. But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.
In picking the aged Harrison for President, the Whigs had sacrificed political conviction and clear policy positions for a largely media-created war hero. They had gambled on the health of an old soldier who would be seventy-two by the end of his term. History was cruel. The new President, after giving a vacuous Inaugural Address that promised presidential impotence and left policy up to Congress—a two-hour speech that found bored politicians roaming around the platform stamping their feet to get the blood running—moved into the White House and into the ceaseless importunings of Whigs hungry for office. Fatigued and dispirited, he caught cold one morning while shopping in Washington’s meat and fish markets, and the cold turned into pneumonia. Bled, blistered, cupped, leeched, and massaged, he died just one month after taking office. Vice-President John Tyler, ignored by Harrison, had been staying in Williamsburg in benign isolation. Summoned now to Washington, he arrived two days later after covering the 230 miles by boat and horseback.
So John Tyler was President. In Tyler, a Virginian of the old school, history resisted the Whigs’ effort to outflank it. Raised amid the aristocratic republicanism of the tidewater, graduated from the College of William and Mary at the age of seventeen, Tyler had climbed the political ladder from the Virginia House of Delegates to the national House of Representatives, and later to the governorship and the United States Senate. He had come to be known as a strict constructionist and a leading member of the southern states’ rights bloc in Congress; and as such he gave only tepid support to Jackson. Tyler shifted toward the Whigs when the Virginia legislature instructed him to vote for expunging the censure resolution of Jackson and Tyler resigned his seat rather than comply. Independent in doctrine and party, Tyler was as critical of Whiggish economic nationalism as he had been of Jacksonian executive power. He had remained close enough to Clay, however, and to his old states’ rights ideology, to be chosen by Whig leaders as a ticket balancer with Harrison—although only after those leaders had offered the vice-presidential nomination to several other, more noted politicians.
Tyler at fifty-one was still determined, on entering the White House, to stick to his conservative, old Republican principles. He immediately proved that he was indeed a strict constructionist. Soon labeled “His Accidency” by his Whig foes, he insisted on being considered the new, constitutional President, rather than a Vice-President acting as President, thus setting a precedent for all later Presidents elevated by chance. On the other hand, the new President decided to retain Harrison’s Cabinet intact—a Cabinet headed by Daniel Webster as Secretary of State and dominated by Webster, Clay, and other Whig senators and congressmen. Surrounded, as he said, by “Clay-men, Webster-men, anti-Masons, original Harrisonians, Old Whigs and New Whigs—each jealous of the others, and all struggling for the offices,” he resolved to move cautiously and to “work in good earnest” to reconcile “the angry state of the factions toward one another.”
It was not to be. The Whigs had plastered over their factional splits with thick gobs of campaign hokum. Now they split over hard policy choices. The battle erupted not merely between two wings of the party, but two wings ensconced in two institutions separated by the Constitution and by Pennsylvania Avenue.
Commander of the congressional wing clearly was Henry Clay. Now sixty-four years old, “Harry of the West” was still the engaging, impetuous, eloquent legislative leader who had electrified Congress three decades earlier in the days of the war hawks, though now more irascible and volatile. Clay was still cock of the walk in the Senate, chairman of the Finance Committee, policy spokesman for congressional Whigs, and leader of men occupying key positions in both houses. The Kentuckian had gone into a half-drunken rage when news of Harrison’s nomination had reached him at Brown’s Hotel in Washington. Pacing the room, shouting obscenities, he had denounced his friends as “not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them,” and called himself the unluckiest man in party history—“always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for the nomination” when sure of election.
Clay’s relationship with President Harrison deteriorated so rapidly that the two were at the point of a break when the general died. For a time it seemed that the senator and his old friend John Tyler might be able to work together despite their doctrinal differences. But history was remorseless: the Whigs’ campaign preference for rhetoric rather than policy positions that might serve as rough guides to party policy makers; the Whigs’ desire to balance their ticket even if it meant choosing a states’ rights doctrinaire; the Whigs’ antipathy to executive leadership, and their doctrine of legislative supremacy—all these combined to rob Whiggism of the fruits of its 1840 victory.
The crisis came over banking, still the most divisive political issue facing the nation. In accordance with the President’s states’ rights views, Tyler’s Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing, presented to Congress a bill for a “Bank and Fiscal Agent” to be chartered by Congress in its capacity not as the national legislature but as the local government for the District of Columbia, to be authorized to establish branches elsewhere but only with the consent of the states concerned. Thus elaborately were Tyler’s constitutional scruples cosseted. Clay was unimpressed. Like Tyler, he would repeal Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, but in its place he wanted an effective and truly national bank. Tyler’s idea for an agency that would have to beg a state to allow a branch to be set up within it—“What a bank would that be!” Clay wrote to a friend.
The two men—the President of the United States, who stuck gamely to his states’ rights dogmatism but felt that Congress should make policy, and the “Great Pacificator,” who considered himself a kind of prime minister—met in the White House. Neither would yield. The President’s amiability broke under Clay’s pounding.
“Go you now, then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the country as you shall think proper. So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper.”
Clay did modify his bill to provide that, while no branch of the proposed bank could be established without the consent of the state, such consent would be presumed automatically granted unless the state legislature specifically opposed it at the next session. It was a reasonable compromise, but Tyler would have none of it. Increasingly captive to a “Corporal’s Guard” of extreme states’-righters such as the Virginians Thomas W. Gilmer, Henry A. Wise, and Abel P. Upshur, he called Clay’s compromise a “contemptible subterfuge.” Tyler’s Cabinet—still Harrison’s Cabinet—wanted their chief to sign the bill.
Washington waited while Tyler teetered back and forth between assent and veto. His veto, on August 16, 1841, set off a tumultuous debate in the Senate. That evening Benton, Calhoun, and other Democratic senators of the old school, delighted by Tyler’s defiance of the congressional Whigs, came to the White House to celebrate with Tyler over cigars and brandy, but they were followed by a mob of Whig protestors who aroused the Tyler family with their clamor and disbanded only after burning the President in effigy.
The presidential and congressional Whigs mobilized against each other. Chastising Tyler on the Senate floor, Clay moved unsuccessfully to override the veto. In the deadlock that followed, presidential-congressional relations unraveled. Tyler allowed Webster and other cabinet members to involve themselves in a compromise bill that easily passed both House and Senate. “Give your approval to the Bill,” his Attorney General, John J. Crittenden wrote him, “and the success of your Administration is sealed.” Veto it, and “read the doom of the Whig party and behold it and the President it elected, sunk together, the victims of each other, in unnatural strife.” Again Tyler vetoed, and again a great hue and cry broke out, as Whig leaders throughout the country castigated the President, letter writers threatened assassination, and burning effigies swung from tree limbs.
Then, on a September afternoon, five of Tyler’s cabinet members strode into his office, one by one, and laid their resignations on his desk. The President knew well that the walkout was devised and coordinated by Clay in an effort to punish him—and even more, to force his resignation and bring into the White House the president of the Senate, a Clay lieutenant. Tyler became more determined to stay. One man who had not resigned that day was Daniel Webster. Busy with delicate foreign negotiations, reluctant to serve Clay’s interests, the “Godlike Daniel” saw his own opportunities in the Tyler-Clay hostilities.
“Where am I to go, Mr. President?” Webster asked his chief.
“You must decide that for yourself, Mr. Webster,” said the President, with his usual reserve.
“If you leave it to me, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said, “I will stay where I am.”
“Give me your hand on that,” said Tyler, rising from his chair, “and now I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man from this hour.”
Total war had erupted between the two wings of the Whig party. Rid of the Harrison and Clay men in the Cabinet, Tyler created a new one composed of conservative Democrats and states’ rights Whigs. The congressional Whigs struck back by officially expelling Tyler from the party. There followed a presidential-congressional battle in which constitutional checks served as the live ammunition. In place of Clay’s kind of national bank, Tyler proposed a nonpartisan “Board of Control” designed to limit White House authority over the “public Treasury” and to protect the rights of the states against its branches, a plan quickly tabled in Congress and later defeated. The Clay party brought out two tariff bills in the summer of 1842; Tyler vetoed both. Some extremist Whigs—not Clay—threatened the President with impeachment; Tyler toyed with the idea of a third-party movement. By the fall of 1842 the President and Congress were almost deadlocked, amid the most savage polemics and mutual buck passing. Clay had the votes, it was said, and Tyler had the vetoes; but, in fact, each side had a veto over the other,
Some bills did overcome the obstacle course. The Independent Treasury Act was repealed; a bankruptcy law was passed for the relief of hundreds of thousands of debtors spawned by the depression; and distribution and pre-emption acts gave settlers the right to “squat” on 160 acres of land and ultimately to buy it at low prices, with the proceeds from the sale of public lands to be distributed to the states. These enactments were due to “masterly logrolling,” in Glyndon Van Deusen’s words, among sectional blocs—logrolling that ultimately brought a new tariff compromise bill, the price of which was to decimate the distribution act.
Whig unity was fading so quickly now that Tyler welcomed a Democratic party sweep of the 1842 congressional election as “the greatest political victory ever won within my recollection.” Clay, still master of the Senate Whigs, had already quit the upper house to prepare to seek the presidency in 1844. Webster left the Cabinet hardly a year and a half after Tyler had retained him. By this time Tyler’s administration had been reduced to a caretaker government.
The Whigs never regained their verve and momentum after their failures in government. Clay won the party nomination in 1844 but once again he enjoyed a brief but empty victory when Democrat James K. Polk defeated him handily in the electoral college, though narrowly in the popular vote. Four years later, Clay lost the Whig nomination to General Zachary Taylor, who won the White House for the Whigs but died of cholera within two years. Having won the presidency twice by nominating military heroes who proceeded to die in office, the Whigs tried the same tactic again in 1852 with General Winfield Scott, who was beaten by Democrat Franklin Pierce. This time the general survived, it was said, but the Whig party did not.
How could a political party develop so strongly, win two presidential elections and almost a third, and then decline so quickly? The Whigs had brilliant leadership in Clay and Webster and in broad cadres of secondary and grass-roots leaders. At a time when the Democrats were enfeebled by their states’ rights and localistic leanings, the Whigs had a potentially powerful nationalistic doctrine of direct utility to the rising industrial and mercantile elites of the nation. Their rapid monopolization of the opposition to the Democrats, and equally rapid capture of the presidency and Congress, attested to an electoral appeal that seemed likely to give the Whigs political dominance for a generation or two.
But the heart of the Whig party often seemed to beat feebly behind the lively facade of senatorial gladiators and log-cabin appeals. Springing into existence after Jackson’s veto of the bank bill, the party attained true unity only in opposition to “presidential dictatorship”; no other doctrine could unite men so diverse in view and competitive in ambition as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Conceiving of party itself as more an occasion for oratory and camp meetings than a vehicle for policy leadership, most Whigs had little vision of the possibilities of partisan organization. Opposed to strong Presidents, the party allowed patronage and other political resources to slip into the hands of congressional leaders, and hence, in contrast to the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats, a national party was never firmly built around the chief executive.
The party placed its future largely in the hands of Clay and his lieutenants, skillful in the give-and-take of group and sectional logrolling but far less adept in mobilizing the grand nationwide coalitions necessary for effective presidential politics. Ironically, the party that opposed executive power unwittingly demonstrated that strong Presidents are necessary to the existence of strong parties, just as strong parties comprise the political foundation for strong Presidents.
Certainly the Whigs had bad luck, both in the demise of their generalissimo-Presidents and in their felt need to appeal at the same time to plantation elites in the South and business elites in the North. But transcending leaders can turn misfortune to their own uses and avoid, or at least cope with, sectional entrapment—they can, in short, turn the shank of history. The Whig failure of leadership lay far deeper than in the presidential-congressional imbalance; it lay in the inability of the Whigs to break away from a bourgeois, genteel, respectable, establishment politics appropriate in an earlier day of social elitism and popular deference. The genius of that system lay in the character—the honor, dignity, responsibility, honesty, courage—of wellborn leaders. The genius of Jacksonian leadership lay in its appeal to numbers through the techniques of organization, propaganda, conflict, party discipline, and voter mobilization. The Whigs commanded neither the quality of the earlier leadership nor the quantity of the Jacksonian followership. The day of the independent public gentleman was over.
Challenged by the Jacksonians, the Whigs sought to unite all those who believed in the old kind of leadership, whether they were Calhoun nullifies or Clay nationalists. “In so doing,” according to Lynn L. Marshall, “they looked back longingly to a heroic era when leadership in politics was integral to leadership in society.…Thus was the party born dead in July 1832 and continued in that condition until 1836. Thereafter, however, a total transfusion of Jacksonian blood would bring it miraculously to life.” This miracle faded away as Democratic party leaders sought to build coalitions of voters even at the expense of older doctrines of liberty and equality, as new leaders of both parties calculated more in terms of a multiplicity of economic interests than of either republican or aristocratic leadership.
Sometime during the 1830s and 1840s—we will never know more exactly—the American polity underwent an almost invisible but pervasive sea change. During the first three or four decades of the republic, political leaders in Washington and the state capitals had made the key decisions that closely molded the shape and direction of people’s lives. The brilliant constitutional planners of 1787, the state convention delegates voting thumbs up or down on the new Constitution, Washington and Adams and Jefferson and Madison and their hundreds of associates, the state leaders who made key political and economic decisions about the first canals and turnpikes and other enterprises, the early party builders—these men acted far more on doctrinal, and on political and practical grounds, than on narrowly economic. Jackson’s bank veto represented one of the last of the great political intrusions into economic life; later, politicians more reflective of specific economic interest increasingly dominated national and state politics. At least at the leadership level, Economic Man seemed to take over from Political Man.
The change was not dramatic. Economic interests had affected public decision-making from earliest colonial days. And large political considerations would continue to impinge on economic policy long after the 1840s. But the nation went through a significant shift from a condition where economics was a factor in politics to a condition where politics could be defined mainly as economic interest.
In short, the enterprisers—the go-getters, the boosters—were taking over. In earlier years a relatively few men had shown the way—men like John Jacob Astor in the fur trade and Eli Whitney in cotton ginning—and they had won their places in the history books. An entrepreneur like the “Ice King” of Boston would be lucky to occupy a footnote. Son of a wealthy Boston lawyer, brother of three Harvard men, Frederic Tudor in his teens had rejected academic life for business. When one of his brothers idly wondered at a Boston party why ice was not harvested from local ponds and sold in the Caribbean, the twenty-one-year-old Tudor took up the idea, invested in a huge shipment of ice to Martinique, and lost $4,000 when the cargo melted. For two decades Tudor set himself to buying up New England ponds and Caribbean icehouses; he promoted a demand for ice cream, iced drinks, and ice-preserved food; he tested a variety of insulating materials such as wood shavings, straw, blankets, and finally—and successfully—sawdust. Another young businessman, Nathan Jarvis Wyeth, invented a horse-drawn ice cutter, pulled on runners notched with saw teeth, that could gouge out parallel grooves, enabling men with iron bars to break the ice off in even chunks. The two men teamed up to de-ice Fresh Pond in Cambridge.
By the end of the 1840s, Tudor had achieved prodigious feats: trading in candles, cotton, claret, and a host of other commodities; digging for coal on Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod; devising a siphon for pumping out ships; designing a new hull for a ship; running a graphite mine; turning white pine into paper; setting up one of the first amusement parks in America; and bringing to New England the first steam locomotive, a toy affair of one-half horsepower. But above all, he remained the “Ice King” whose ships carried thousands of tons of packed chunks to the East Indies, China, Australia, India. He was a restless, flamboyant, imperious, aggressive promoter, no modest, prudent Horatio Alger hero, in Daniel Boorstin’s judgment, and he would pay for his recklessness by languishing in debtor’s jail. But he brought ice not only to equatorial lands but to millions of Americans; rid their homes of decaying meat and rancid butter; and permitted them fresh instead of dried food and salted meat, heavily spiced to disguise its age.
Other Bostonians were as resourceful with granite as Tudor was with ice. In earlier years they had built their stone churches by digging up huge boulders, heating them with fires, and smashing them with iron balls. Later they split off chunks of granite with gunpowder, and still later by drilling holes along a straight line and then splitting the stone along the holes. Granite built the sixteen locks of the Middlesex Canal from Boston to Chelmsford, where the hard stone was mined. By the 1830s, Charles Bulfinch and other fine New England architects were designing churches and public buildings built of granite from Massachusetts quarries.
Solomon Willard, a jack-of-all-trades, became the king of granite. Son of a country carpenter, he made his way to Boston, and soon to success as a builder of spiral stairs, wood carver, and self-taught architect. Summoned in 1825 to design the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown, he scoured the countryside for suitable stone until he came upon the granite of Quincy. To cut huge, monumental blocks of stone from this quarry he devised lift jacks, hoists, and other machinery, and to move the massive blocks to Charlestown, he used a crude wooden track covered with iron plates and resting on stone crossties. When Daniel Webster delivered a splendid address at the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in 1843, the event celebrated granite as well as the Revolutionary battle. For the flinty stone was now being used in the most famous public buildings and hotels in the country, as well as in drydocks; and when tough paving stone became necessary for heavy transport, Willard had the satisfaction of laying blocks of Quincy granite in front of Boston’s famous Tremont House.
Some of the powder used in quarrying doubtless came from the Du Pont Company far to the south, near Wilmington, Delaware. The Du Pont mills, separated by buffer zones to keep one from blowing up another, were strung for miles along the swift-flowing Brandywine Creek. Stone dams formed shallow pools that diverted water from the creek into canals running to the power machinery. The Du Ponts made their black gunpowder and blasting powder out of charcoal from nearby willow trees, sulphur from Sicily, and saltpeter from India. Founded by the son of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, the celebrated physiocrat who had fled revolutionary France to start a new life in America, the firm was already becoming a company town that owned the houses and dominated the lives of its employees.
Invention and innovation seemed to be accelerating during the thirties and forties. The electric dynamo in 1831, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1834, John Deere’s steel plow in 1839, the magnetic telegraph in 1843, the sewing machine in 1846—all these and a host of other devices set off little agricultural and industrial revolutions of their own. One of the most remarkable inventors was Samuel Finley Morse, educated at Andover and Yale, a noted portraitist, as celebrated at home and abroad as he was underpaid for his paintings. He might have lived out his life as a professor of art in New York City had it not been for a chance conversation with a fellow passenger on a voyage back from Europe in 1832, about work on electricity abroad.
Morse had been curious about electrical phenomena ever since he had attended Benjamin Silliman’s lectures and demonstrations at Yale; now, his interest reawakened, he went to work on a contrivance to combine a sending device that would transmit signals by closing and opening an electric circuit; a receiving device, operated by an electromagnet, to record the signals as dots and spaces on a strip of paper moved by clockwork; and a code translating the dots and spaces into letters and numbers. At first the magnet would not operate at over forty feet, but with the help of a university colleague, Morse worked out a system of electromagnet renewers or relays. The artist-inventor went through several years of poverty, frustration, and even actual hunger before Congress voted for an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, and more months of waiting and preparation before he transmitted to Baltimore from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol his famous declaration, “What hath God wrought!”
The most striking and significant of all the enterprises of this period came to depend heavily on Morse’s invention. This was railroading. Few ventures have been so much the product of trial-and-error gradualism and innovation, over so many years. Rails and roads were pioneered long before boilers and pistons. For hundreds of years beasts and men, women, and children had hauled coal cars on wooden rails in English and German mines. Flanges had to be devised to hold wheels on the tracks, and wooden rails plated with iron to keep them from splintering. The French and English developed fantastic steam engines for land transport—mechanical legs were even devised to push a car from behind—until it was discovered that the weighty iron locomotives needed smooth rails on a smooth track. By 1829 the English engineer George Stephenson had achieved success with his famous “Rocket.”
Much earlier an American steamboat inventor, John Stevens, had been transfixed by the vision of American railway development. Squeezed out of Hudson River steamboating by Livingston’s and Fulton’s monopoly, Stevens appealed to state legislatures up and down the east coast to pave the way for railroading. He had the temerity to urge a railroad on the Erie Canal Commission as cheaper to build. Railroads, answered Chancellor Robert Livingston, would be too expensive, dangerous, and impractical. The canal went ahead. Finally, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures passed railroad bills, but things moved so slowly that Stevens in 1825, at the age of seventy-six, built an experimental locomotive on his own estate in Hoboken. This, the first American-built locomotive, was never put into service on a railroad.
But all the while the tinkerers were innovating. When, in 1829, the Delaware & Hudson Canal and Railroad Company imported the “Stourbridge Lion,” a fine big English locomotive, to use at its western canal terminus, the machine ran forward and backward for a mile or two, amid the booming of cannon (one of which shattered a mechanic’s arm), but the six-ton “Lion” proved too heavy for American track and was hardly used again. Clearly, locomotives in America would have to be built lighter and more flexible, for frail wooden trestles and sharper curves. There were even experiments with locomotives decked out with sails and with a horse aboard working a treadmill to turn the wheels. Neither ran.
Then, in the winter of 1830-31, Horatio Allen, who at the age of twenty-seven had single-handedly operated the “Lion,” put the American-built “Best Friend of Charleston” into service between the South Carolina capital and Hamburg. The next year John B. Jervis brought in his locomotive, the “Experiment,” with a swiveling, four-wheel “bogie” truck under the front end of the boiler, allowing the machine to follow more easily the curves of the railroad. The “Experiment” worked.
American railroading was under way, with distinctly American problems. Unlike English locomotives, which ran on coal, the American engines feasted on the virgin timber cut down along the line. The wood-burners required a huge balloon stack, picturesque in etchings but menacing to dry forests, wooden bridges, and ladies’ parasols. The biggest challenge to American railroading was sheer distance. With a national mania for speed already evident, locomotives were invented that could cut through gardens, farms, and even towns—which meant in turn the devising of grade crossings, gates, bells, whistles, and cowcatchers. America’s technology of speed meant steeper grades, sharper curves, narrow gauges, fragile trestleworks—and hideous accidents.
The nation’s twenty-three miles of railroad track in 1830 multiplied over a hundredfold in the next ten years. As the inventors settled down to devising better wheels, pistons, cylinders, valves, steam boxes, boilers, couplings, roadbeds, a host of local boosters and big-city promoters plunged into the scramble for railroad extensions and rights-of-way. Rich Boston merchants, eager to head off the threat of New York and the Erie Canal to their western trade, pushed a railroad westward to Worcester and Springfield and through the sloping Berkshire Mountains to the Hudson. George Bliss, Jr., a Yale graduate and Massachusetts legislator, had to devise ways of securing rights-of-way, attracting customers, avoiding accidents, and maintaining discipline. Robert Schuyler, grandson of the great manor lord Philip Schuyler, became president of the New York and New Haven line, and of the New York and Harlem. Despite competition from Hudson River steamboats, the New York City railroad magnates extended their lines up to Peekskill, Poughkeepsie, and Hudson. Other roads radiated from Manhattan up through Connecticut to Massachusetts. Railroad fever spread up and down the coast.
Extending out from the main cities, the railroads were not yet amalgamated into a system, or even fully connected. Local nabobs were still more interested in competing, or at least expanding, than in combining. When President Schuyler of the New York and New Haven advised President Charles F. Pond of the Hartford and New Haven that the New York railroad wanted to connect with Pond’s, in order “to form the most expeditious as well as the most comfortable lines which circumstances permit,” Pond evidently agreed only on condition of access by his company to the entire passenger business of Schuyler’s road between New Haven and New York. “We cannot accept such arrangement as you wish” was Schuyler’s curt answer to Pond.
Railroad expansion in the 1840s symbolized a people on the make and on the move. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered during the forties, the total population rose from 17 million to over 23 million. People were continuing to move westward in huge numbers, for the West alone gained almost half that increase, the South only a fourth. Agriculture was still the dominant enterprise by far, but it was declining relatively to mining, manufacturing, and construction. By the 1840s the United States had a “domestic market truly national in its dimensions,” and economic growth sharply accelerated. If the country had not yet reached the point of an explosive takeoff, it was nearing the edge. The rise of an “American common market,” in Stuart Bruchey’s words, resulted, not merely from economic change but also from deliberate political action.
“Of all the parties that have existed in the United States,” Henry Adams said, “the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas.” Here again, the Whigs were cornered by history. Whiggery had respectable intellectual roots in men like Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, with their belief in national power and private property, and their awareness of the links between the two. It had national spokesmen of the caliber of Horace Greeley and William Henry Seward, and state leaders creative in economic policy and development; Georgia Whigs, for example, promoted the building of railroads to link cotton planters to seaports.
During the 1840s, however, the Whigs had become as opportunistic in their national economic credo as in their log-cabin-and-cider campaign tactics. Their arguments varied, depending on circumstance. Some Whigs held that the interests of rich and poor had become identical. Said Robert Hare, the noted Philadelphia chemist: “Never was an error more pernicious than that of supposing that any separation could be practicable between the interests of the rich and the working classes.” The wealthy must serve the poor—and if “the labouring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored, they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished.”
Others proclaimed not the interdependence of classes but the absence of them. All Americans were workers, all were capitalists—or if not, could become so. The “wheel of fortune,” said Edward Everett, “is in constant motion, and the poor in one generation furnish the rich of the next.” Even so, the lot of the rich was not all that happy. The Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wondered if the hardships of the poor were exaggerated. “That some of the indigent among us die of scanty food is undoubtedly true,” he said, “but vastly more in this community die from eating too much than from eating too little.” After all, he added, lawyers, doctors, and merchants had their struggles and disappointments, and as for women—“how many of our daughters are victims of ennui, a misery unknown to the poor, and more intolerable than the weariness of excessive toil!”
Whig writers even found a happy pastoralism in the lot of the sturdy working people. The Boston Courier ran an ode to the Factory Girl, who would leave her hearth and vineyard for a bucolic stint in the mills and then return home with her dowry:
… She tends the loom, she watches the spindle,
And cheerfully talketh away;
Mid the din of wheels, how her bright eyes kindle!
And her bosom is ever gay.
*****
O sing me a song of the Factory Girl!
Link not her name with the SLAVES.—She is brave and free as the old elm tree,
That over her homestead waves.
As a final strategy Whigs advanced a doctrine of personal, internal reform. Workers’ elevation, Channing said, “is not release from labour. It is not struggling for another rank. It is not political power. I understand something deeper. I know but one elevation of a human being, and that is Elevation of Soul.” Collective, organized action by the poor was unnecessary and undesirable. For conservative Whiggery, if religion was not the opiate of the masses, individual moral uplift was the sedative for the fractious.
The Whig doctrine of classlessness, or of class consensus or identity, was in part a political stratagem to gain worker support and divide the opposition. It was also a valid expression of a crucial reality in American society: the absence of deep-seated class conflict. As Louis Hartz argued in his astute study of American liberalism, there was no fixed aristocracy to revolt against, no persisting peasant class, no genuine proletariat that might form a revolutionary movement, but rather farmers who were incipient capitalists and workers who were incipient entrepreneurs. An instinct of friendship, Hartz said, “was planted beneath the heroic surface of America’s conflict, so that the contenders in it, just as they were about to deliver their most smashing blows, fell into each other’s arms. American politics was a romance in which the quarrel preceded the kiss.”
In the absence of large and genuine social conflict, American political combat dissolved into numberless skirmishes and scuffles, mainly over the elevating issue of who got what, when, and how in slicing up the expanding American pie. Tariff schedules, internal improvements, state subsidies, and even banking legislation provided ideal arenas for the politics of brokerage. Many Americans were in fact landless and jobless, or living in penury, but their voices were muted, or lost in the social euphoria and political complacency of a people that seemed to be realizing, most of them, the Lockean ideal of free individuals in a state of nature, the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of small property holders. Still, the spectacle of Americans scrambling for jobs, tariff protection, subsidies, and other financial goodies was not wholly edifying to moralists of the old school.
Inevitably, it seemed, the rich and the better-off gravitated toward the Whig party. New England industrialists, middle state commercialists, skilled native labor, farmers closer to markets, many big cotton, tobacco, and sugar planters tended to embrace Whiggery. In the Ohio Valley, Van Deusen found, “the pushing, ambitious, go-ahead bankers and businessmen, canal promoters, landowning interests, lawyers with an eye to the main chance, and farmers anxious for internal improvements” were more likely than not to be found in the Whig ranks. While individual enterprise was far too dynamic to be contained within party lines—plenty of Democrats were go-getters too—Whig elites were more closely linked with big money and property.
The wealth of Boston Whiggery was revealing. An 1846 study of 714 Bostonians reputed to be worth $100,000 or more—in some cases far, far more—indicated that the overwhelming majority of those identified by party were Whigs. They were not only partisans but active ones, contributing to the party’s war chest, serving as delegates to party conventions, running for office, and altogether exerting a pervasive influence on state and national policy. Wealthy New Yorkers also were heavily Whig. Democrats too, in these and other cities, numbered rich men—a fact that helped mute the conflict between parties—but to a far less degree than did the Whigs.
The economics of Whiggery pervaded a profession that was becoming more and more allied to business—the profession of law. On the Supreme Court, Justice Story had seconded Marshall in carving out the scope of national power; in Jackson’s day he returned to Massachusetts, mourning that “I am the last of the old race of judges.” Yet he continued to teach at Harvard, developing and adapting American common law in the areas of partnership, bills of exchange, promissory notes, and other areas vital to a growing commercial and industrial society. The ablest of Massachusetts judges was doubtless Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who further adapted common law to business requirements, such as the need of railroads for land lying along direct routes, involving the right of eminent domain. Other lawyers, with the views if seldom the talents of a Story or Shaw, made the common law a powerful ally of business interests. Workers fared less well. Shaw developed a “fellow-servant rule” that relieved the employer of liability for damage to an employee harmed by another employee on the job—a rule that delayed the development of workmen’s compensation.
Whiggery did not lack other illustrious leadership. Edward Everett’s was an extraordinary success story: minister of the Brattle Street (Unitarian) Church—the largest and most prestigious in the Boston area—at twenty; occupant of the recently established chair of Greek literature at Harvard a year or so later; editor of the North American Review while still in his twenties; a commanding orator; member of Congress for five terms; governor of Massachusetts for four terms; minister to the Court of St. James’s from 1841 to 1845; president of Harvard; briefly Secretary of State and United States senator. Yet there was often a negative cast to Everett’s thinking, whether he was criticizing abolitionism, lecturing workers, or warning of a “war of Numbers against Property.” The intellectual leader William Ellery Channing served as a moral and religious influence on Whiggery, but Channing too, though liberal in theology, did not fully grasp the evils of slavery and advocated the kind of inward personal reform that was often both ephemeral and hostile to collective efforts toward social reform.
Men like Abbott Lawrence and Nathan Appleton were more typical of Whig economic leadership. Already a leading Boston merchant by the time he reached his early forties, Lawrence had the vigor and imagination to move into the thriving cotton and wool industry—he founded the textile city that would bear his name—and then took the lead in extending the Boston-Worcester railroad to Albany. An ardent Whig, he served in Congress as a Boston representative and provided a nexus between the party and the men of money. At a crucial moment he lent Harrison $5,000. Appleton too had made a fortune out of textiles, beginning with his involvement in Lowell’s power mill in Waltham, and he too went on to Congress, where he became a vigorous defender of protective tariffs and the American System. Of a very different cast was Thurlow Weed, the little-schooled son of a poor farmer, who began as a printer’s apprentice and became a newspaperman, Anti-Mason, Whig party leader and patronage dispenser in New York. Like many other Whig leaders, Weed was antislavery—and anti-abolition.
The pre-eminently typical Whig was always Daniel Webster—and much of the success and failure of Whiggery reflected his own. Once upon a time, as a Federalist leader of the old school, he had stood foursquare for a lofty, nationalist conception of the young republic, but as the years passed he had chosen to serve the growing commercial and industrial interests of his region rather than respond to the needs and aspirations of the poor throughout the nation. His loans and retainers from banks and businesses hardly affected the public decisions of a man who was, in a more philosophical sense, already bought. In calling for a consensus that could only be flabby, in condemning those Jacksonians who exploited recession in order to array class against class, the “Godlike Daniel” became a kind of caricature of the Whig politico who traded with any and every interest that might give him a small victory on the morrow, regardless of political doctrine.
Whiggery never seemed to have a real chance. Born in negativism, led by men who often divided it, politically unlucky as well as inept, faced ultimately with the power of a resurgent Democracy, the Whig party faded away as quickly as it began. History finally vanquished it. This was a pity, because Whiggery developed a positive, creative impetus, in its nationalism, in its frank engagement with expanding commercial interests, and above all, in its fecund concept that individual liberty could be protected not only against government, but through government, especially at the state and local level. Yet in the late 1840s and early 1850s the Whigs would have one more opportunity to take leadership in confronting the supreme moral issue of the time.
“Our farm is a sweet spot,” Sophia Willard Dana Ripley wrote a friend on an August day in 1840. Even “my lonely hours have been bright ones, and in this tranquil retreat I have found that entire separation from worldly care and rest to the spirit which I knew was in waiting for me somewhere. We are nearly two miles from any creature, but one or two quiet farmers’ families, and do not see so many persons here in a month as we do in one morning at home. Birds and trees, sloping green hills and hay fields as far as the eye can reach—and a brook clear running, at the foot of a green bank covered with shrubbery opposite our window, sings us to our rest with its quiet tune, and chants its morning song to the rising sun. Many dreamy days have been my portion here—roaming about the meads, or lying half asleep under the nut trees on the green knoll near by—or jogging along on my white pony for miles and miles through the green lanes and small roads which abound in our neighborhood.…”
Sophia Ripley was giving voice to a powerful longing of thousands of Americans during the second quarter of the nineteenth century—to escape from the increasingly busy, noisy, bustling, competitive, industrial, urban world into some pastoral retreat. This escapism was in part a reaction against Whiggery in both parties, but the rebels against prosperity and profit were influenced by Whig views more than they liked to admit, for they usually had to fight on their opponents’ intellectual battlefield.
The 1830s and 1840s were a time of ferment in much of the Western world, as workers and peasants, caught in the gears of the industrial revolution, attempted diverse experiments in social and political change. In France, working men and women fought alongside soldiers and students to force the abdication of the nation’s last divine-right monarch; the new king of the French was invited to reign. In England, businessmen, workers, liberal and radical intellectuals joined in demonstrations and mass meetings to force through a reform bill designed to abolish rotten boroughs and extend the vote. Belgians fought in the streets of Brussels to break away from the Dutch kingdom, but Italian protest was stamped out by the Hapsburgs and the Vatican, and Polish revolt by the Russians.
Americans did not revolt—they had no crown or aristocracy to revolt against. There was still no proletariat or peasantry to furnish the materials of revolution, only a slave population too disorganized to act as a militant class or caste. The high tide of Jacksonian radicalism had ebbed by the forties; the reform impetus now took several directions. Some Americans still carried the torch for revolutionary change, but they were small in number if large of voice. Many reform-minded Americans made gradual changes through their state and local governments. Some went west to new opportunities; some climbed up through the class system, still largely an open one. But some yearned to go back to the Arcadia of their childhood, when they lived and worked in their own pastures and vineyards, when Jefferson could say that those “who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.” Most of all, they longed for a family, a home, a community.
Pastoral communitarianism was hardly new in America. Labadists, authoritarian in organization and fanatically anti-sexual in doctrine, had settled in Maryland in the late seventeenth century but dissolved in conflict within two or three decades. Early in the next century German Seventh-Day Baptists founded Ephrata, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the monastic orders of Sisters and Brethren practiced their Pietist beliefs, and on the side ran grist and other mills, a tannery, a book bindery, and even a printing press. About the same time Moravians settled a permanent community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and fanned out to the west and south.
Rappites, eager to submerge their individual interests in the social good in order to plant God’s kingdom on earth as a prelude to Christ’s return, moved across the Appalachians to establish their Harmony community at the head of the Ohio Valley; finding the soil there poor for vine and other cultivation, they founded a new “Harmonie” on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana. All of these communitarian sects, however, were dwarfed in size and duration by the Quakers and by the Shakers. Then, in the early nineteenth century, Americans witnessed a new phenomenon: the nonsectarian communitarian experiment. And they witnessed a phenomenal leader, Robert Owen of New Lanark, who arrived in America in 1824.
The son of an ironmonger and saddler, Owen soon had made his way to Manchester, the center of a burgeoning cotton-spinning industry in the 1780s, and with borrowed capital set up a factory for making cotton-spinning machinery. By the age of twenty he had become manager of one of the largest mills in Manchester, and within a few years the possessor of a sizable fortune. He was the boy wonder of English capitalism. But he was also an industrialist who cared deeply about the education and social welfare of his employees, especially the hundreds of pauper children who worked in his mills. As he steeped himself in the intellectual and reformist ferment of Manchester, he became more and more critical not only of the poverty and dismal working conditions of English mill hands, but of the whole system of government, religion, and family that sustained social misery. The target of biting attacks from Tory ecclesiastics and industrialists, he wanted a fresh start in America, where he could experiment with the reconstruction of society.
That reconstruction would be broad in vision but local in application. He had “come to this country,” Owen said, “to introduce an entire new State of society; to change it from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all cause for contest between individuals.” The object would be to secure the “greatest amount of happiness” for Americans and their children “to the latest posterity.” No principle, he said, had “produced so much evil as the principle of individdualism. ” The competitive scramble alienated men from their work, their families, their communities—ultimately themselves. Economic and social inequality pitted one against the other, skilled workers against unskilled, employers against employee, farmer against operative. Harmony, association, cooperation—Owen always returned to this ideal. Somewhere in America he would realize it.
Owen arrived in America as a celebrity. In New York, intellectuals, politicians, editors, and visionaries gathered around him to hear of his plan. He steamed up the Hudson to visit De Witt Clinton in Albany and to observe the Shaker establishment at Niskayuna. In Washington, he met President Monroe and Secretary of State Adams; lectured twice in the Hall of Representatives, with the nation’s most illustrious men arrayed in front of him; and on a return trip met Madison at Montpelier and Jefferson at Monticello—just a few months before the latter died. Meanwhile Owen traveled by stagecoach to Pittsburgh and by steamboat down the Ohio to Harmonie, which the Rappites had decided to abandon and for which he was negotiating. After surveying the Indiana village, with its 20,000 acres of woods and meadows, 180 houses of brick, frame, and log, and an assortment of shops and factories, the Englishman bought the whole settlement for $125,000. He renamed it New Harmony.
By April 1825 enough people had crowded into the little village for Owen to draw up his constitution for the “preliminary society.” No matter that the newcomers comprised what Owen’s son Robert Dale would later call a heterogeneous collection of “radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.” Good workers and craftsmen had arrived too, hopes were high, and spring was in the air. Under Owen’s constitution, he would direct the experiment for a year, after which the members would begin to take control. They would provide their own household goods and small tools, invest their capital in the venture at interest, and would be credited on the books with any livestock they might contribute.
Reluctantly, Owen granted that there would have to be, for a time, “a certain degree of pecuniary inequality.” The society would advance each member a credit of fixed amount at the community store; at the same time, their daily labors would be computed and recorded, and they would be debited for goods consumed. All members were to render “their best services for the good of the society, according to their age, experience, and capacity,” but those who did not wish to work could buy credit by paying by cash in advance. Everyone, rich or poor, was enjoined to be “temperate, regular, and orderly,” and all were to have “complete liberty of conscience,” especially in religion.
For a time, life was good in New Harmony. People worked—not always too hard—at plowing, planting, vine culture, storekeeping, carpentry, hat making, and other pursuits. In the long soft evenings on the Wabash, people discussed their experiment as they gathered on the benches in front of the village tavern. Concerts, dances, sermons, and lectures filled the evenings. Advanced ideas were discussed at meetings of the Female Social Society and the Philanthropic Lodge of Masons. Doubtless the intellectual highlight of the first year was the arrival of the keelboat Philanthropist, bringing Thomas Say, the zoologist; William Maclure, geologist and educator; and a miscellany of artists and educators.
Above all, a heady feeling of toleration and liberty filled New Harmony. Visiting preachers of all persuasions vented their theologies in the village church, sometimes three on one Sunday. Maclure conducted exciting educational experiments in the classrooms. Owen welcomed the clash of ideas, and so did his followers. “I have experienced no disappointment,” William Pelham wrote. “I did not expect to find every thing regular, systematic, convenient—nor have I found them so. I did expect…to be able to mix with my fellow citizens without fear or imposition—without being subject to ill humor and unjust censures and suspicions—and this expectation has been realized—I am at length free—my body is at my own command, and I enjoy mental liberty, after having long been deprived of it.” A powerful sense of community and fraternity also pervaded New Harmony—and yet this noble venture was to last hardly more than a year.
In part, it was the inevitable falling off of novelty and esprit as the relative ease of summer gave way to winter discomfort and illnesses; in part, disillusionment with the workings of the complex system of credits and debits. So many individual exceptions were allowed that the entire system became suspect. New Harmony failed, however, primarily in its pretensions toward equality. Owen himself, while always hazy on the matter, was no extreme egalitarian. His concept of equality did not extend to “persons of color,” who might be received in the association “as helpers, if necessary,” but in his view might better go off to Africa or elsewhere.
Nor were all whites perceived as equal either. “No one is to be favored over the rest, as all are to be in a state of perfect equality,” wrote Mrs. Thomas Pears, reflecting the general sentiment of the community, but she went on to say in her very next sentence, “Oh, if you should see some of the rough uncouth creatures here, I think you would find it rather hard to look upon them exactly in the light of brothers and sisters.” This experiment in equality, Arthur Bestor concluded, had the paradoxical result of opening wide fissures in the community.
Young men began to grumble over favoritism to older members. Arguments broke out over land boundaries, extreme egalitarians contending that no one should have any property at all; one of them, Paul Brown, opposed the very existence of bookkeeping and decided that Owen was nothing but a “speculator in land, power, influence, riches, and the glories of this world.” Owen remained steadfastly committed to the great ideal, but he was away during a critical seven months, and when he returned the community was already splitting up. In its genteel way, New Harmony ended as a single community not in a grand upheaval but in a series of secessions as evangelical Methodists, then better-off “English farmers,” and later young intellectuals, split away. Owen benignly granted land to the secessionists, but soon he too slipped away from the experiment he had founded.
Thus New Harmony ended in disharmony. But it was not the end of Owen or his movement in America. Other Owenite communities were founded in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania in the 1820s and 1840s. The establishment of communities of all sorts—Owenite, foreign-language sectarian, and religious—seemed to abate in the 1830s, as though Jacksonian leadership in the nation and states was absorbing reform energies. But in the 1840s came a spate of community founding, mostly by followers of an exotic philosophy spun out of the feverish imagination of a Frenchman named Fourier and imported by an American named Brisbane.
Rarely has an intellectual leader seemed so unlikely to find followers as Charles Fourier. Born in Besançon in 1772 to a cloth merchant of small means and bourgeois aspirations, he grew up hating the commercial world of “chicanery and fraud” in which he was employed, despising later the revolutionaries who had ruined his financial prospects, and detesting the whole classical and rationalist heritage of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Living alone in poverty, a lifelong bachelor, he set himself, day after day and year after year, to expounding a philosophy of the passions. Into a series of enormous books lacking tables of contents, consecutive paging, or even any apparent order, he poured his views that men’s natural passions, arising out of deepest wants and needs, were fragmented, perverted, and crushed by bourgeois civilization. The more social institutions were made to respond to the true passions, he said, the more fulfilled and benign men would be.
Fourier was controversial enough with his view that sex was a fundamental passion to be expressed in all its infinite variations, from partners of two to orgies of ten, from heterosexuality to homosexuality, in complex networks of liaisons. He founded his philosophy on a cosmology that linked the history of the passions to tens of thousands of years of human history, to a future epoch of immensely expanded degrees of passionate gratification, to such phenomena as the transformation of the salty seas into a tangy sort of lemonade—ideas that invested Fourier’s writings with an air of happy madness.
Every day, precisely at noon, until his death, Fourier awaited the philanthropist who would agree to try out his system. No benefactor came. But one man who did come was Albert Brisbane, a young New Yorker who had studied Hegel in Berlin under the master himself, and dallied with the reformist ideas of Saint-Simon, until he discovered Fourier. After two years of indoctrination, Brisbane returned to America to propagate the faith. Fourierian wine lost some of its headiness in Brisbane’s importation. Purging the doctrine of such delightful fantasies as the fornication of the planets, Brisbane seized on his master’s detailed plan for Phalansteries, rural communes that would each allow their 1,600 members to live together in a harmonious, joyful, sensual life of love and passion.
Brisbane preached Fourierism from lecture rostrums, through the columns of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and in books on “association” and the reorganization of industry. Even so, it is not wholly clear how and why this young idealist cut so deeply into popular minds and aspirations. Evidently people were responding to Brisbane’s emphasis on association as an escape from capitalistic competition, industrial disorder, and social disarray. We do know that at least a score of Fourierian associations, phalanxes, unions, and colonies were founded in townships and villages throughout the Northeast and Midwest—none in the South—between 1840 and 1847. One of these was Brook Farm, where Sophia Ripley had communed so happily on an earlier August day. Some, communities like Oneida lasted for a few decades, but most succumbed within a year or two.
Why this record of failure? Critics pointed to mismanagement, poor planning, laziness, irresponsibility, thievery, fires and other catastrophes—and the inability of human nature to conform to the plans of Utopians. Others contended that communities stressing harmony, cooperation, sharing of profits and property, pastoral pursuits, agricultural produce, attention more to human needs than to human productivity, could not survive in a society tending more and more toward industrial productivity, urban growth, and competitive individualism.
Like poor persons’ names in village graveyards, the demise of these societies was often their only act recorded in history. Lost to history also were many of the happier days of communal people who at least for a summer or two, until the mortgage callers and rent or tax collectors swooped down, had a taste of true brotherhood, genuine sharing, social and religious tolerance, individual and collective fulfillment. We know only enough about these communities to generalize modestly: they were the final product of brilliantly creative intellectual leadership that knew how to envision but not how to plan. They were rural in nature, arcadian in heritage and nostalgia, mainly agricultural in sustenance. They were self-consciously experimental. And, despite all their concern with harmony, they usually broke up in conflict, secession, and mutual hostility.
It was a bitter denouement for the communitarians who had, in Horace Greeley’s admiring words, sought to achieve their goals not “through hatred, collision, and depressing competition; not through War, whether of Nation against Nation, Class against Class, or Capital against Labor; but through Union, Harmony, and the reconciling of all Interests, the giving scope of all noble Sentiments and Aspirations.…” It was precisely this aspiration of harmony, however, that was the target of criticism by a young German who had watched the communal experiments with interest. Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels lauded Owenites and Fourierians for their attacks on competitive capitalism, on the treatment of employees as mere commodities, on the alienation of the worker from his labor and its product. But, in a document that would become far more famous and influential than anything Fourier or Owen ever wrote, Marx and Engels excoriated the communitarians for their very belief in harmony and unity:
“They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. “Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class.…
“Hence, they reject all political and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.…These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.”
Class conflict, not communal harmony, was to Marx the driving social force in history, but neither Marx nor the harmonious anticipated the fundamental conflict that soon would rend American society.