Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform,

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1 CHAPTER10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, In 1824 the Marquis de Lafayette, former major general in the Continental Army and a Revolutionary War hero, accepted the invitation of President James Monroe and Congress to revisit the United States. For thirteen months as the Nation s Guest, Lafayette traveled to every state, from Maine to Louisiana, and received a welcome that fluctuated between warm and tumultuous. There seemed no limits to what Americans would do to show their admiration for this greatest man in the world. There were, one contemporary wrote, La Fayette boots La Fayette hats La Fayette wine and La Fayette everything. In New York City some fervid patriots tried to unhitch the horses from Lafayette s carriage and pull it up Broadway themselves. Lafayette had contributed mightily to the Revolution s success. Americans venerated him as a living embodiment of the entire Revolutionary generation that was fast passing from the scene. The majority of Americans alive in 1824 had been born since George Washington s death in John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were along in years, and both would die on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Seizing on Washington s remark that he loved Lafayette as my own son, Americans toasted the Frenchman as a cherished member of the family of Revolutionary heroes. In Charleston the toast ran: WASHINGTON, CHAPTER OUTLINE The Rise of Democratic Politics, The Bank Controversy and the Second Party System, The Rise of Popular Religion The Age of Reform 285

2 286 CHAPTER 10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, our Common Father you his favorite son ; in New Jersey, LA FAYETTE, a living monument of greatness, virtue, and faithfulness still exists a second Washington is now among us. The festive rituals surrounding Lafayette s visit symbolized Americans conviction that they had remained true to their heritage of republican liberty. The embers of conflict between Federalists and Republicans that once had seemed to threaten the Republic s stability had cooled; the Era of Good Feelings still reigned over American politics in Yet even as Americans were turning Lafayette s visit into an affirmation of their ties to the Founders, those ties were fraying in the face of new challenges. Westward migration, growing commercial activity, and increasing sectional conflict over slavery shaped politics between 1824 and The impact of economic and social change shattered old assumptions and contributed to a vigorous new brand of politics. This transformation led to the birth of a second American party system in which two new parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, replaced the Republicans and the Federalists. More was at work than a change of names. The new parties took advantage of the transportation revolution to spread their messages to the farthest corners of the nation and to arouse voters in all sections. New party leaders were more effective than their predecessors at organizing grass-roots support, more eager to make government responsive to the popular will, and more likely to enjoy politics and welcome conflict as a way to sustain interest in political issues. Not all Americans looked to politics as the pathway to their goals. Some, in fact, viewed politics as suited only to scoundrels. A Detroit workingman wrote in 1832 that he did not vote. I ll [have] none of sin. Troubled by the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics and worried by the increasingly unpredictable commercial economy, many Americans sought solace in religion. A wave of religious revivals swept across the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. Religion itself took on some of the features of democratic politics. The most successful leaders of revivals were clergymen who realized that to spread religious fervor they had to speak the language of the common people, not baffle them with the complexities of theology. Many deeply religious Americans stepped from revivals to reform movements. These movements pursued various goals, among them the abolition of slavery, the suppression of the liquor trade, improved public education, and equality for women. Since politicians usually tried to avoid these causes, most reformers began with a distrust of politics. Yet reformers gradually discovered that the success of their reforms depended on their ability to influence the political process. During the 1820s and 1830s, the political and reform agendas of Americans diverged increasingly from those of the Founders. The Founders had feared popular participation in politics, enjoyed their wine and rum, left an ambiguous legacy on slavery, and displayed only occasional interest in women s rights. Yet even as Americans shifted their political and social priorities, they continued to venerate the Founders, who were revered in death even more than in life. Histories of the United States, biographies of Revolutionary patriots, and torchlight parades that bore portraits of Washington and Jefferson alongside those of Andrew Jackson all helped reassure the men and women of the young nation that they were remaining loyal to their republican heritage. This chapter focuses on five major questions: In what ways had American politics become more democratic by 1840 than at the time of Jefferson s election in 1800? What factors explain Andrew Jackson s popularity? How did Jackson s policies contribute to the rise of the rival Whig party? How did the Panic of 1837 and its aftermath solidify the Democratic and Whig parties? What new assumptions about human nature lay behind the religious and reform movements of the period?

3 The Rise of Democratic Politics, To what extent did the reform movements aim at extending equality to all Americans? To what extent and how did they attempt to forge a more orderly society? THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS, In 1824 Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, who would guide the Democratic party in the 1830s, and Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, who would become that decade s leading Whigs, all belonged to the Republican party of Thomas Jefferson. Yet by 1824 the Republican party was coming apart under pressures generated by industrialization in New England, the spread of cotton cultivation in the South, and westward expansion. These forces sparked issues that would become the basis for the new political division between Democrats and Whigs. In general, those Republicans (augmented by a few former Federalists) who retained Jefferson s suspicion of a strong federal government and preference for states rights became Democrats; those Republicans (along with many former Federalists) who believed that the national government should actively encourage economic development became Whigs. Regardless of which path a politician chose, all leaders in the 1820s and 1830s had to adapt to the rising democratic idea of politics as a forum for the expression of the will of the common people rather than as an activity that gentlemen conducted for the people. Gentlemen could still be elected to office, but their success now depended less on their education and wealth than on their ability to identify and follow the will of the majority. Americans still looked up to their political leaders, but the leaders could no longer look down on the people. Democratic Ferment Political democratization took several forms. One of the most common was the substitution of poll taxes for the traditional requirement that voters own property. None of the new western states required property ownership for voting, and eastern states gradually liberalized their laws. Moreover, written ballots replaced the custom of voting aloud (called viva voce or stand-up voting), which had enabled superiors to influence, or intimidate, their inferiors at the polls. Too, appointive office increasingly became elective. The electoral college survived, but the choice of presidential electors by state legislatures gave way to their direct election by the voters. In 1800, rather than voting for Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, most Americans could do no more than vote for the men who would vote for the men who would vote for Jefferson or Adams. By 1824, however, legislatures chose electors in only six states, and by 1832 only in South Carolina. The fierce tug of war between the Republicans and the Federalists in the 1790s and early 1800s chipped away at the old barriers to the people s expression of their will. First the Republicans and then the Federalists learned to woo voters from Massachusetts to Maryland by staging grand barbecues at which men washed down free clams and oysters with free beer and whiskey. Wherever one party was in a minority, it sought to become the majority party by increasing the electorate. Jefferson s followers showed more interest in registering new voters in New England, where they were weak, than in their southern strongholds. Federalists played the same game; the initiator of suffrage reform in Maryland was an aristocratic Federalist. Political democratization developed at an uneven pace. In 1820 both the Federalists and Republicans were still organized from the top down. To nominate candidates, for example, both parties relied on the caucus (a conference of party members in the legislature) rather than on popularly elected nominating conventions. Nor was political democracy extended to all. Women continued to be excluded from voting. Free blacks in the North found that the same popular conventions that extended voting rights to nearly all whites effectively disfranchised African Americans. Yet no one could mistake the tendency of the times: to oppose the people or democracy had become a formula for political suicide. The people, a Federalist moaned, have become too saucy and are really beginning to fancy themselves equal to their betters. Whatever their convictions, politicians learned to adjust. The Election of 1824 Sectional tensions brought the Era of Good Feelings to an end in 1824 when five candidates, all Republicans, vied for the presidency. John Quincy Adams emerged as New England s favorite. South Carolina s brilliant John C. Calhoun contended with Georgia s William Crawford, an old-school Jeffersonian, for southern support. Out of the West marched Henry Clay of Kentucky, ambitious, crafty, and confident that his American System of protective tariffs and federally supported internal improvements would endear him to manufacturing interests in the East as well as to the West.

4 288 CHAPTER 10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, TABLE 10.1 The Election of 1824 Electoral Popular Percentage of Candidates Parties Vote Vote Popular Vote JOHN QUINCY ADAMS Democratic-Republican , Andrew Jackson Democratic-Republican , William H. Crawford Democratic-Republican 41 46, Henry Clay Democratic-Republican 37 47, Clay s belief that he was holding a solid block of western states was punctured by the rise of a fifth candidate, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. At first, none of the other candidates took Jackson seriously. But he was popular on the frontier and in the South and stunned his rivals by gaining the support of opponents of the American System from Pennsylvania and other northern states. Although the Republican congressional caucus chose Crawford as the party s official candidate early in 1824, the caucus could no longer unify the party. Threefourths of the Republicans in Congress had refused to attend the caucus. Crawford s already diminished prospects evaporated when he suffered a paralyzing stroke. Impressed by Jackson s support, Calhoun withdrew from the race and ran unopposed for the vice presidency. In the election, Jackson won more popular and electoral votes than any other candidate (Adams, Crawford, and Clay) but failed to gain the majority required by the Constitution (see Table 10.1). Thus the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, whose members had to choose from the three top candidates Jackson, Adams, and Crawford. Hoping to forge an alliance between the West and Northeast in a future bid for the presidency, Clay gave his support to Adams. Clay s action secured the presidency for Adams, but when Adams promptly appointed Clay his secretary of state, Jackson s supporters raged that a corrupt bargain had cheated Jackson of the presidency. Although there is no evidence that Adams had traded Clay s support for an explicit agreement to appoint Clay his secretary of state (an office from which Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams himself had risen to the presidency), the allegation of a corrupt bargain was widely believed. It formed a cloud that hung over Adams s presidency. John Quincy Adams as President Failing to understand the changing political climate, Adams made several other miscalculations that would cloak his presidency in controversy. For example, in 1825 he proposed a program of federal aid for internal improvements. Strict Jeffersonians had always opposed such aid as unconstitutional, but now they were joined by pragmatists like New York s senator Martin Van Buren. Aware that New York had just completed construction of the Erie Canal with its own funds, Van Buren opposed federal aid to improvements on the grounds that it would enable other states to build rival canals. Adams next proposed sending American delegates to a conference of newly independent Latin American nations, a proposal that infuriated southerners because it would imply U.S. recognition of Haiti, the black republic created by slave revolutionaries. Instead of seeking new bases of support, Adams clung to the increasingly obsolete notion of the president as custodian of the public good, aloof from partisan politics. He alienated his supporters by appointing his opponents to high office and wrote loftily, I have no wish to fortify myself by the support of any party whatever. Idealistic as his view was, it guaranteed him a single-term presidency. The Rise of Andrew Jackson As Adams s popularity declined, Andrew Jackson s rose. Although Jackson s victory over the British in the Battle of New Orleans had made him a hero, veteran politicians distrusted his notoriously hot temper and his penchant for duels. (Jackson had once challenged an opposing lawyer to a duel for ridiculing his legal arguments in a court case.) But as the only presidential candidate in the election of 1824 with no connection to the Monroe administration, Jackson benefited from what Calhoun recognized as a vague but widespread discontent in the wake of the Panic of 1819 that left people with a general mass of disaffection to the Government and looking out anywhere for a leader. To many Americans, Jackson, who as a boy had fought in the Revolution, seemed like a living link to a more virtuous past. Jackson s supporters swiftly established committees throughout the country. Two years before the election of 1828, towns and villages across the United States buzzed

5 The Rise of Democratic Politics, with furious but unfocused political activity. With the exception of the few remaining Federalists, almost everyone called himself a Republican. Some Republicans were Adams men, others were Jackson men, and still others styled themselves friends of Clay. Amid all the confusion, few realized that a new political system was being born. The man most alert to the signs of the times was Martin Van Buren, who was to become vice president during Jackson s second term and president upon Jackson s retirement. Van Buren exemplified a new breed of politician. A tavernkeeper s son, he had started his political career in county politics and worked his way up to New York s governorship. In Albany he built a powerful political machine, the Albany Regency, composed mainly of men like himself from the lower and middling ranks. His archrival in New York politics, DeWitt Clinton, was all that Van Buren was not tall, handsome, and aristocratic. But Van Buren had a geniality that made ordinary people feel comfortable and an uncanny ability to sense the direction in which the political winds were about to blow. Van Buren loved politics, which he viewed as a wonderful game. He was one of the first prominent American politicians to make personal friends from among his political enemies. The election of 1824 convinced Van Buren of the need for renewed two-party competition. Without the discipline imposed by a strong opposition party, the Republicans had splintered into sectional pieces. No candidate had secured an electoral majority, and the House of Representatives had decided the outcome amid charges of intrigue and corruption. It would be better, Van Buren concluded, to let all the shades of opinion in the nation be reduced to two. Then the parties would clash, and a clear popular winner would emerge. Jackson s strong showing in the election persuaded Van Buren that Old Hickory could lead a new political party. In the election of 1828, this party, which gradually became known as the Democratic party, put up Jackson for president and Calhoun for vice president. Its opponents, calling themselves the National Republicans, rallied behind Adams and his running mate, treasury secretary Richard Rush. Slowly but surely, the second American party system was taking shape. The Election of 1828 The 1828 campaign was a vicious, mudslinging affair. The National Republicans attacked Jackson as a drunken gambler, an adulterer, and a murderer. He was directly responsible for several men s deaths in duels and military executions; and in 1791 he had married Rachel Robards, erroneously believing that her divorce from her first husband had become final. Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband, the Adams men taunted, be placed in the highest office of this free and Christian land? Jackson s supporters replied in kind. They accused Adams of wearing silk underwear, being rich, being in debt, and having gained favor with the tsar of Russia by trying to provide him with a beautiful American prostitute. Although both sides engaged in tossing barbs, Jackson s men had better aim. Charges by Adams s supporters that Jackson was an illiterate backwoodsman added to Jackson s popular appeal by making him seem like an ordinary citizen. Jackson s supporters portrayed the clash as one between the democracy of the country, on the one hand, and a lordly purse-proud aristocracy

6 290 CHAPTER 10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, MAP 10.1 The Election of 1828 OREGON COUNTRY MEXICAN POSSESSIONS UNORGANIZED TERRITORY 3 ARK. TERR. 5 MICHIGAN TERR FLA. TERR. Democratic Andrew Jackson Electoral Vote 178 Popular Vote 642,553 Percentage of Popular Vote 56 National Republican John Q. Adams , Divided 6 5 on the other. Jackson, they said, was the common man incarnate, his mind unclouded by learning, his morals simple and true, his will fierce and resolute. In contrast, Jackson s men represented Adams as an aristocrat, a dry scholar whose learning obscured the truth, a man who could write but not fight. Much of this, of course, was wild exaggeration. Jackson was a wealthy planter, not a simple frontiersman. But it was what people wanted to hear. Jackson was presented as the common man s image of his better self as uncorrupt, natural, and plain. The election swept Jackson into office with more than twice the electoral vote of Adams (see Map 10.1). Yet the popular vote, much closer, made it clear that the people were not simply responding to the personalities or images of the candidates (though these factors dominated the campaign). The vote also reflected the strongly sectional bases of the new parties. The popular vote was close only in the middle states and the Northwest. Adams gained double Jackson s vote in New England; Jackson received double Adams s vote in the South and nearly triple Adams s vote in the Southwest. Jackson in Office Jackson rode to the presidency on a wave of opposition to corruption and privilege. As president, his first policy was to support rotation in office the removal of officeholders of the rival party, which critics called the spoils system. Jackson did not invent this policy, but his conviction that the federal civil service was riddled with corruption led him to apply it more harshly than his predecessors by firing nearly half of the higher civil servants. So many Washington homes were suddenly put up for sale by ousted officeholders that the real estate market slumped. Jackson defended rotation on new, democratically flavored grounds: the duties of most officeholders were so simple that as many plain people as possible should be given a chance to work for the government. Jackson never quite grasped the extent to which this elevated principle opened the gates to partisan appointments. Jackson himself was inclined to appoint his loyal friends to office, but the future belonged to Martin Van Buren s view that federal jobs should become rewards for loyalty to the victorious party. At least to its victims, Jackson s application of rotation seemed arbitrary because he refused to offer any reasons to justify individual removals. His stand on internal improvements and tariffs sparked even more intense controversy. Although not opposed to all federal aid for internal improvements, Jackson was sure that public officials used such aid to woo supporters by handing out favors to special interests. To end this lavish and corrupt giveaway, he flatly rejected federal support for roads within states. Accordingly, in 1830 he vetoed a

7 The Rise of Democratic Politics, bill providing federal money for a road in Kentucky between Maysville and Lexington for its purely local character. Jackson s strongest support lay in the South. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 (see Chapter 9) enhanced his popularity there. The tariff issue, however, would test the South s loyalty to Jackson. In 1828, while Adams was still president, some of Jackson s supporters in Congress had contributed to the passage of a high protective tariff that was as favorable to western agriculture and New England manufacturing as it was unfavorable to southerners, who had few industries to protect and who now would have to pay more for manufactured goods. Taking for granted the South s support for Jackson in the coming election, Jackson s supporters had calculated that southerners would blame the Adams administration for this Tariff of Abominations. In reality, Jackson, not Adams, bore the South s fury over the tariff. Nullification The tariff of 1828 laid the basis for a rift between Jackson and his vice president, John C. Calhoun, that was to shake the foundations of the Republic. Early in his career, Calhoun had been an ardent nationalist. He had entered Congress in 1811 as a war hawk, supported the protectionist tariff of 1816, and dismissed strict construction of the Constitution as refined philosophical nonsense. During the late 1820s, however, Calhoun the nationalist gradually became Calhoun the states rights sectionalist. The reasons for his shift were complex. He had supported the tariff of 1816 as a measure conducive to national defense in the wake of the War of By encouraging fledgling industries, he had reasoned, the tariff would free the United States from dependence on Britain and provide revenue for military preparedness. By 1826, however, few Americans perceived national defense as a priority. Furthermore, the infant industries of 1816 had grown into troublesome adolescents that demanded higher and higher tariffs. Calhoun also burned with ambition to be president. Jackson had stated that he would only serve one term, and Calhoun assumed that he would succeed Jackson. To do so, however, he had to maintain the support of the South, which was increasingly taking an antitariff stance. As the center of cotton production had shifted to Alabama and Mississippi in the Southwest, Calhoun s home state, South Carolina, had suffered an economic decline throughout the 1820s that its voters blamed on high tariffs. Tariffs not only drove up the price of manufactured goods but also threatened to reduce the sale of British textile products in the United States. Such a reduction might eventually lower the British demand for southern cotton and cut cotton prices. The more New England industrialized, the clearer it became that tariff laws were pieces of sectional legislation. New Englanders like Massachusetts s eloquent Daniel Webster swung toward protectionism; southerners responded with militant hostility. Calhoun followed the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of in viewing the Union as a compact by which the states had conferred limited and specified powers on the federal government. Although the Constitution did empower Congress to levy tariffs, Calhoun insisted that only tariffs that raised revenue for such common purposes as defense were constitutional. Set so high that it deterred foreign exporters from shipping their products to the United States, the tariff of 1828 could raise little revenue, and hence it failed to meet Calhoun s criterion of constitutionality: that federal laws benefit everyone equally. In 1828 Calhoun anonymously

8 292 CHAPTER 10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, wrote the widely circulated South Carolina Exposition and Protest, in which he spelled out his argument that the tariff of 1828 was unconstitutional and that aggrieved states therefore had the right to nullify, or override, the law within their borders. Vehement opposition to tariffs in the South, and especially in South Carolina, rested on more than economic considerations, however. Southerners feared that a federal government that passed tariff laws favoring one section over another might also pass laws meddling with slavery. Because Jackson himself was a slaveholder, the fear of federal interference with slavery was perhaps far-fetched. But South Carolinians, long apprehensive of assaults on their crucial institution of slavery, had many reasons for concern. South Carolina was one of only two states in which blacks comprised a majority of the population in Moreover, in 1831 a bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner boiled up in Virginia. That same year in Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison established The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper. These developments were enough to convince many troubled South Carolinians that a line had to be drawn against tariffs and possible future interference with slavery. Like Calhoun, Jackson was strong-willed and proud. Unlike Calhoun, he was already president and the leader of a national party that included supporters in protariff states like Pennsylvania (which had gone for Jackson in the election of 1828). Thus to retain key northern support while soothing the South, Jackson devised two policies. The first was to distribute surplus federal revenue to the states. Tariff schedules kept some goods out of the United States but let many others in for a price. The price, in the form of duties on imports, became federal revenue. In the years before federal income taxes, tariffs were a major source of federal revenue. Jackson hoped that this revenue, fairly distributed among the states, would remove the taint of sectional injustice from the tariff and force the federal government to restrict its own expenditures. All of this was good Jeffersonianism. Second, Jackson hoped to ease tariffs down from the skyhigh level of Calhoun disliked the idea of distributing federal revenue to the states because he believed that such a policy could become an excuse to maintain tariffs forever. But he was loath to break openly with Jackson. Between 1828 and 1831, Calhoun muffled his protest, hoping that Jackson would lower the tariff and that he, Calhoun, would retain both Jackson s favor and his chances for the presidency. Congress did pass new, slightly reduced tariff rates in 1832, but these did not come close to satisfying South Carolinians. Before passage of the tariff of 1832, however, two personal issues had ruptured relations between Calhoun and Jackson. In 1829 Jackson s secretary of war, John H. Eaton, married the widowed daughter of a Washington tavernkeeper. By her own account, Peggy O Neale Timberlake was frivolous, wayward, [and] passionate. While still married to a naval officer away on duty, Peggy had acquired the reputation of flirting with Eaton, who boarded at her father s tavern. After her husband s death and her marriage to Eaton, she and Eaton were snubbed socially by Calhoun s wife and by his friends in the cabinet. Jackson, who never forgot how his own wife had been wounded by slander during the campaign of 1828, not only befriended the Eatons but concluded that Calhoun had initiated the snubbing to discredit him and to advance Calhoun s own presidential aspirations. To make matters worse, in 1830 Jackson received convincing documentation of his suspicion that in 1818 Calhoun, as secretary of war under President Monroe, had urged that Jackson be punished for his unauthorized raid into Spanish Florida. The revelation that Calhoun had tried to stab him in the back in 1818, combined with the spurning of the Eatons, convinced Jackson that he had to destroy [Calhoun] regardless of what injury it might do me or my administration. A symbolic confrontation occurred between Jackson and Calhoun at a Jefferson Day dinner in April Jackson proposed the toast, Our Union: It must be preserved. Calhoun responded: The Union next to Liberty the most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by distributing equally the benefits and burdens of the Union. The stage was now set for a direct clash between the president and his vice president over nullification. In 1831 Calhoun acknowledged his authorship of the South Carolina Exposition and Protest. In November 1832 a South Carolina convention nullified the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 and forbade the collection of customs duties within the state. Jackson reacted quickly. He despised nullification, calling it an abominable doctrine that would reduce the government to anarchy, and he berated the South Carolina nullifiers as unprincipled men who would rather rule in hell, than be subordinate in heaven. Jackson even began to send arms to loyal Unionists in South Carolina. In December 1832 he issued a proclamation that, while promising South Carolinians further tariff reductions, lambasted nullification as itself unconstitutional. The Constitution, he

9 The Rise of Democratic Politics, emphasized, had established a single nation, not a league of states. The crisis eased in March 1833 when Jackson signed into law two measures the olive branch and the sword, in one historian s words. The olive branch was the tariff of 1833 (also called the Compromise Tariff), which provided for a gradual but significant lowering of duties between 1833 and The sword was the Force Bill, authorizing the president to use arms to collect customs duties in South Carolina. Although South Carolina did not abandon nullification in principle in fact, it nullified the Force Bill it construed the Compromise Tariff as a concession and rescinded its nullification of the tariffs of 1828 and Like most of the accommodations by which the Union lurched from one sectional crisis to the next before the Civil War, the Compromise of 1833 grew out of a mixture of partisanship and statesmanship. The moving spirit behind the Compromise Tariff was Kentucky s senator Henry Clay, who had long favored high tariffs. A combination of motives brought Clay and the nullifiers together in favor of tariff reduction. Clay feared that without concessions to South Carolina on tariffs, the Force Bill would produce civil war. Furthermore, he was apprehensive that without compromise, the principle of protective tariffs would disappear under the wave of Jackson s immense popularity. In short, Clay would rather take responsibility for lowering tariffs than allow the initiative on tariff questions to pass to the Jacksonians. For their part, the nullifiers hated Jackson and defiantly toasted Andrew Jackson: On the soil of South Carolina he received an humble birthplace. May he not find in it a traitor s grave! Although recognizing that South Carolina had failed to gain support for nullification from other southern states and that they would have to bow to pressure, the nullifiers preferred that Clay, not Jackson, be the hero of the hour. So they supported Clay s Compromise Tariff. Everywhere Americans now hailed Clay as the Great Compromiser. Even Martin Van Buren frankly stated that Clay had saved the country. The Bank Veto and the Election of 1832 Jackson recognized that the gap between the rich and the poor was widening during the 1820s and 1830s (see Chapter 9). He did not object to the rich gaining wealth by hard work. But he believed that the wealthy often grew even richer by securing favors, privileges, from corrupt legislatures. In addition, his disastrous financial speculations early in his career led him to suspect all banks, paper money, and monopolies. On each count, the Bank of the United States was guilty. The Bank of the United States had received a twentyyear charter from Congress in As a creditor of state banks, the Bank of the United States restrained their printing and lending of money by its ability to demand the redemption of state bank notes in specie (gold or silver coinage). The bank s power enabled it to check the excesses of state banks, but also provoked hostility. In fact, it was widely blamed for precipitating the Panic of Further, at a time of mounting attacks on privilege, the bank was undeniably privileged. As the official depository for federal revenue, its capacity to lend money vastly exceeded that of any state bank. Its capital of $35 million amounted to more than double the annual expenditures of the federal government. Yet this institution, more powerful than any bank today, was only remotely controlled by the government. Its stockholders were private citizens a few monied capitalists in Jackson s words. Although chartered by Congress, the bank was located in Philadelphia, not Washington, and its directors enjoyed considerable independence. Its president, the aristocratic Nicholas Biddle, viewed himself as a public servant duty-bound to keep the bank above politics. Urged on by Henry Clay, who hoped to ride a probank bandwagon into the White House in 1832, Biddle secured congressional passage of a bill to recharter the bank. In vetoing the recharter bill, Jackson denounced the bank as a private and privileged monopoly that drained the West of specie, was immune to taxation by the states, and made the rich richer and the potent more powerful. Failing to persuade Congress to override Jackson s veto, Clay now pinned his hopes on gaining the presidency himself. By 1832 Jackson had made his views on major issues clear. He was simultaneously a staunch defender of states rights and a staunch Unionist. Although he cherished the Union, he believed that the states were far too diverse to accept strong direction from Washington. The safest course was to allow the states considerable freedom so that they would remain contentedly within the Union and reject dangerous doctrines like nullification. Throwing aside earlier promises to retire, Jackson again ran for the presidency in 1832, with Martin Van Buren as his running mate. Henry Clay ran on the National Republican ticket, touting his American System of protective tariffs, national banking, and federal support for internal improvements. Jackson s overwhelming personal popularity swamped Clay. Secure in office for

10 294 CHAPTER 10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, another four years, Jackson was ready to finish dismantling the Bank of the United States. THE BANK CONTROVERSY AND THE SECOND PARTY SYSTEM, Jackson s veto of the recharter of the Bank of the United States ignited a searing controversy. Following the veto, Jackson took steps to destroy the Bank of the United States so that it could never be revived. His banking policies spurred the rise of the opposition Whig party, mightily stimulated popular interest in politics, and contributed to the severe economic downturn, known as the Panic of 1837, that greeted his successor, Martin Van Buren. By 1840, the Whig and Democratic parties divided crisply over a fundamental issue: banks or no banks. In part, tempers flared over banking because the U.S. government did not issue paper currency of its own; there were no official dollar bills as we know them today. Paper currency consisted of notes (promises to redeem in specie) dispensed by private banks. These IOUs fueled economic development by making it easier for businesses and farmers to acquire loans to build factories or buy land. But if a note depreciated after its issuance because of public doubts about a bank s solvency, wage earners who had been paid in paper rather than specie would suffer. Further, paper money encouraged a speculative economy, one that raised profits and risks. For example, paper money encouraged farmers to buy land on credit in the expectation that its price would rise, but a sudden drop in agricultural prices would leave them mired in debt. Would the United States embrace swift economic development at the price of allowing some to get rich quickly off investments while others languished? Or would it opt for more modest growth within traditional channels that were based on honest manual work and frugality? Between 1833 and 1840 these questions would dominate American politics. The War on the Bank Jackson could have allowed the bank to die a natural death when its charter ran out in But Jackson and several of his rabid followers viewed the bank as a kind of dragon that would grow new limbs as soon as old ones were cut off. When Biddle, anticipating further moves against the bank by Jackson, began to call in the bank s loans and contract credit during the winter of , Jacksonians saw their darkest fears confirmed. The bank, Jackson assured Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it. Accordingly, Jackson embarked on a controversial policy of removing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States and placing them in state banks.

11 The Bank Controversy and the Second Party System, The policy of removing deposits from the national bank raised a new and even thornier issue. State banks that became the depositories for federal revenue could use that revenue as the basis for issuing more paper money and for extending more loans. In short, the removal policy enabled state banks to increase their lending capacity. But Jackson hated both paper money and a speculative economy in which capitalists routinely took out large loans. The policy of removal seemed a formula for producing exactly the kind of economy that Jackson wanted to abolish. Jackson recognized the danger and hoped to sharply limit the number of state banks that would become depositories for federal revenue. But as state banks increasingly clamored for the revenue, the number of state-bank depositories soon multiplied beyond Jackson s expectations. There were twenty-three by the end of Critics dubbed them pet banks because they were usually selected for their loyalty to the Democratic party. During the next few years, fueled by paper money from the pet banks and by an influx of foreign specie to purchase cotton and for investment in canal projects, the economy experienced a heady expansion. Jackson could not stem the tide. In 1836, pressured by Congress, he reluctantly signed into law the Deposit Act, which both increased the number of deposit banks and loosened federal control of them. Jackson s policy of removing deposits deepened a split within his own Democratic party between advocates of soft money (paper) and those of hard money (specie). Both sides agreed that the Bank of the United States was evil, but for different reasons. Soft-money Democrats resented the bank s role in periodically contracting credit and restricting the lending activities of state banks; their hard-money counterparts disliked the bank because it sanctioned an economy based on paper money. Prior to the Panic of 1837, the soft-money position was more popular among Democrats outside Jackson s inner circle of advisers than within that circle. For example, western Democrats had long viewed the Cincinnati branch of the Bank of the United States as inadequate to supply their need for credit and favored an expansion of banking activity. Aside from Jackson and a few other figures within the administration, the most articulate support for hard money came from a faction of the Democratic party in New York called the Locofocos. The Locofocos grew out of various workingmen s parties that had sprouted during the late 1820s in northern cities and that called for free public education, the abolition of imprisonment for debt, and a ten-hour workday. Most of these parties had collapsed within a few years, but in New York the workies had gradually been absorbed by the Democratic party. Once in the party, they were hard to keep in line. A mixture of intellectuals and small artisans and journeymen threatened by economic change, they worried about inflation, preferred to be paid in specie, and distrusted banks and paper money. In 1835 a faction of workingmen had broken away from Tammany Hall, the main Democratic party organization in New York City, and held a dissident meeting in a hall whose candles were illuminated by a newfangled invention, the loco foco, or match. Thereafter, these radical workingmen were known as Locofocos. The Rise of Whig Opposition During Jackson s second term, the opposition National Republican party gave way to the new Whig party, which developed a broader base in both the South and the North than had the National Republicans. Jackson s magnetic personality had swept him to victory in 1828 and But as Jackson s vague Jeffersonianism was replaced by suspicion of federal aid for internal improvements and protective tariffs and by hard-and-fast positions against the Bank of the United States and nullification, more of those alienated by Jackson s policies joined the opposition. Jackson s crushing of nullification, for example, led some of its southern supporters into the Whig party, not because the Whigs favored nullification but because they opposed Jackson. Jackson s war on the Bank of the United States produced the same result. His policy of removing deposits from the bank pleased some southerners but dismayed others who had been satisfied with the bank and who did not share westerners mania for cheaper and easier credit. Jackson s suspicion of federal aid for internal improvements also alienated some southerners who feared that the South would languish behind the North unless it began to push ahead with improvements. Because so much southern capital was tied up in slavery, pro-improvement southerners looked to the federal government for aid, and when they were met with a cold shoulder, they drifted into the Whig party. None of this added up to an overturning of the Democratic party in the South; the South was still the Democrats firmest base. But the Whigs were making significant inroads, particularly in southern market towns and among planters who had close ties to southern bankers and merchants. Meanwhile, social reformers in the North were infusing new vitality into the opposition to Jackson.

12 296 CHAPTER 10 Democratic Politics, Religious Revival, and Reform, These reformers wanted to improve American society by ending slavery and the sale of liquor, bettering public education, and elevating public morality. Most opponents of liquor (temperance reformers) and most public-school reformers gravitated to the Whigs. Whig philosophy was more compatible with their goals than were Democratic ideals. Where Democrats maintained that the government should not impose a uniform standard of conduct on a diverse society, the Whigs commitment to Clay s American System implied an acceptance of active intervention by the government to change society. Reformers wanted the government to play a positive role by suppressing the liquor trade and by establishing centralized systems of public education. Thus a shared sympathy for active government programs tended to unite Whigs and reformers. Reformers also indirectly stimulated new support for the Whigs from native-born Protestant workers. The reformers, themselves almost all Protestants, widely distrusted immigrants, especially the Irish, who viewed drinking as a normal recreation and who, as Catholics, suspected (correctly) that the public schools favored by reformers would teach Protestant doctrines. The rise of reform agitation and its frequent association with the Whigs drove the Irish into the arms of the Democrats but, by the same token, gained support for the Whigs from many native-born Protestant workers who were contemptuous of the Irish. No source of Whig strength, however, was more remarkable than Anti-Masonry, a protest movement against the secrecy and exclusiveness of the Masonic lodges, which had long provided prominent men with fraternal fellowship and exotic rituals. The spark that set off the Anti-Masonic crusade was the abduction and disappearance in 1826 of William Morgan, a stonemason in Genesee County, New York, who had threatened to expose Masonic secrets. Every effort to solve the mystery of Morgan s disappearance ran into a stone wall because local officials were themselves Masons seemingly bent on obstructing the investigation. Throughout the Northeast the public became increasingly aroused against the Masonic order, and rumors spread that Masonry was a powerful conspiracy of the rich to suppress popular liberty, a secret order of men who loathed Christianity, and an exclusive retreat for drunkards. By 1836 the Whigs had become a national party with widespread appeal. In both the North and South they attracted those with close ties to the market economy commercial farmers, planters, merchants, and bankers. In the North they also gained support from reformers, evangelical clergymen (especially Presbyterians and Congregationalists), Anti-Masons, and manufacturers. In the South they appealed to some former nullificationists; Calhoun himself briefly became a Whig. Everywhere the Whigs assailed Jackson as an imperious dictator, King Andrew I ; indeed, they had taken the name Whigs to associate their cause with that of the American patriots who had opposed King George III in The Election of 1836 When it came to popularity, Jackson was a hard act to follow. In 1836 the Democrats ran Martin Van Buren, whose star had risen as Calhoun s had fallen, for the presidency. Party rhetoric reminded everyone that Van Buren was Jackson s favorite, and then contended that the Democratic party itself, with Van Buren as its mere agent, was the real heir to Jackson, the perfect embodiment of the popular will. Less cohesive than the Democrats, the Whigs could not unite on a single candidate. Rather, four anti-van Buren candidates emerged in different parts of the country. These included three Whigs William Henry Harrison of Ohio, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and W. P. Mangum of North Carolina and one Democrat, Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, who distrusted Van Buren and who would defect to the Whigs after the election. Democrats accused the Whigs of a plot to so divide the vote that no candidate would receive the required majority of votes in the electoral college. That would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where, as in 1824, deals and bargains would be struck. In reality, the Whigs had no overall strategy, and Van Buren won a clear majority of the electoral votes. But there were signs of trouble ahead for the Democrats. The popular vote was close, notably in the South, where the Democrats had won two-thirds of the votes in 1832 but barely half in The Panic of 1837 Jackson left office in a burst of glory and returned to his Nashville home in a triumphal procession. But the public s mood quickly became less festive, for no sooner was Van Buren in office than a severe depression struck. In the speculative boom of 1835 and 1836 that was born of Jackson s policy of removing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States and placing them in state banks, the total number of banks doubled, the value of bank notes in circulation nearly tripled, and both commodity and land prices soared. Encouraged by easy money and high commodity prices, states made new commitments to build canals. Then in May 1837,

13 The Bank Controversy and the Second Party System, prices began to tumble, and bank after bank suspended specie payments. After a short rally, the economy crashed again in The Bank of the United States, which had continued to operate as a state bank with a Pennsylvania charter, failed. Nicholas Biddle was charged with fraud and theft. Banks throughout the nation once again suspended specie payments. The ensuing depression was far more severe and prolonged than the economic downturn of Those lucky enough to find work saw their wage rates drop by roughly one-third between 1836 and In despair, many workers turned to the teachings of William Miller, a New England religious enthusiast whose reading of the Bible convinced him that the end of the world was imminent. Dressed in black coats and stovepipe hats, Miller s followers roamed urban sidewalks and rural villages in search of converts. Many Millerites sold their possessions and purchased white robes to ascend into heaven on October 22, 1843, the date on which Millerite leaders calculated the world would end. Ironically, by then the worst of the depression was over; but at its depths in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the economic slump fed the gloom that made poor people receptive to Miller s predictions. The origins of the depression were both national and international. In July 1836 Jackson had issued a proclamation called the Specie Circular, which provided that only specie was to be accepted in payment for public lands. The Specie Circular was one of Jackson s final affirmations of his belief that paper money encouraged people to embark on speculative, get-rich-quick schemes, sapped public virtue, and robbed honest labour of its earnings to make knaves rich, powerful and dangerous. He hoped that the Specie Circular would reverse the damaging effects of the Deposit Act of 1836, which he had signed reluctantly. The Specie Circular took the wind out of the speculative boom by making banks hesitant to issue more of the paper money that was fueling the boom, because western farmers eager to buy public lands would now demand that banks immediately redeem their paper in specie. Although the Specie Circular chilled bankers confidence, it was not the sole or even the major reason for the depression. There were international causes as well, most notably the fact that Britain, in an effort to restrain the outflow of British investment, checked the flow of specie from its shores to the United States in The Search for Solutions Called the sly fox and the little magician for his political craftiness, Van Buren would need these skills to confront the depression that was causing misery not only for ordinary citizens but also for the Democratic party. Railing against Martin Van Ruin, in 1838 the Whigs swept the governorship and most of the legislative seats in Van Buren s own New York. To seize the initiative, Van Buren called for the creation of an independent Treasury. The idea was simple: instead of depositing its money in banks, which would then use federal funds as the basis for speculative loans, the government would hold its revenues and keep them from the grasp of corporations. When Van Buren finally signed the Independent Treasury Bill into law on July 4, 1840, his supporters hailed it as America s second Declaration of Independence. The independent Treasury reflected the deep Jacksonian suspicion of an alliance between government and banking. But the Independent Treasury Act failed to address the banking issue on the state level, where newly chartered state banks of which there were more than nine hundred by 1840 lent money to farmers and businessmen. Blaming the depression on Jackson s Specie Circular rather than on the banks, Whigs continued to encourage the chartering of banks as a way to spur economic development. In contrast, a growing number of Democrats blamed the depression on banks and on paper money and swung toward the hard-money stance long favored by Jackson and his inner circle. In Louisiana and Arkansas, Democrats successfully prohibited banks altogether, and elsewhere they imposed severe restrictions on banks for example, by banning the issuing of paper money in small denominations. In sum, after 1837 the Democrats became an antibank, hard-money party. The Election of 1840 Despite the depression, Van Buren gained his party s renomination. Avoiding their mistake of 1836, the Whigs settled on a single candidate, Ohio s William Henry Harrison, and ran former Virginia Senator John Tyler as vice president. Harrison, who was sixty-seven years old and barely eking out a living on a farm, was picked because he had few enemies. Early in the campaign, the Democrats made a fatal mistake by ridiculing Harrison as Old Granny, a man who desired only to spend his declining years in a log cabin sipping cider. Without knowing it, the Democrats had handed the Whigs the most famous campaign symbol in American history. The Whigs immediately reminded the public that Harrison had been a rugged frontiersman, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, and a defender of all frontier people who lived in log cabins.

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