Download Introduction Chapter Eleven begins with an account of the rise of

Introduction Chapter Eleven begins with an account of the rise of Andrew Jackson, who symbolized for many the self‐
confident and expanding nation that was emerging. As president from 1828 to 1836, Andrew Jackson presided over a multitude of changes in the economy, society, and politics of the United States—changes that profoundly affected American men and women, both in the workplace and in their personal lives. The Market Revolution, pp. 357‐365 After 1815, powerful economic and social forces dramatically changed the domestic marketplace. Major innovations in transportation aided the movement of commodities, information, and people, while the growth of textile mills and other factories created many new jobs, especially for women. The nation also experienced widespread economic growth. Improvements in Transportation Between 1815 and 1840, growing networks of roads, canals, steamboats, and finally railroads lowered the costs and raised the speed of travel significantly. Improved transportation had clear economic benefits because products could now be sold more cheaply to a wider market; however, it also had profound social and political effects, as news, mail, and people traveled farther and farther. The development of the steamboat transformed water travel, as did the ongoing building of canals, but the use of steamboats had significant environmental impacts—deforestation and air pollution. By the 1830s, private railroad companies were competing with both for passengers and freight. Factories, Workingwomen, and Wage Labor As markets developed, entrepreneurs reorganized their operations to increase production. New England textile manufacturers began using new machines driven by water power, and the factory system they developed spread rapidly in the 1820s to shoemaking and other industries. Textile factories throughout New England employed young single women who worked for a few years in the mills and lived in supervised, company‐owned boardinghouses. Though labor conditions often were trying, many women workers welcomed the relative freedom of living away from home and the opportunity to earn real wages. In the increasingly competitive textile market, owners soon cut wages. Women mill workers responded with strikes in 1834 and 1836, but their easy replaceability undermined their bargaining power. By midcentury, mill owners had shifted to a cheaper and more pliant source of labor—immigrant families. Manufacturing enterprises like shoemaking also employed women. The work was transformed by separating shoemaking into different tasks, some done by men and others, especially shoebinding, by scantily paid women. Female shoebinders also tried to strike in protest over decreasing pay, but their isolation from each other made organization very difficult. Bankers and Lawyers Factory entrepreneurs relied increasingly on innovations in the banking system to finance their ventures. Thus the number of state‐chartered banks increased in the years after 1815 to several hundred by 1840. Banks aided economic expansion by making loans to various businesses and real estate enterprises and by increasing the money supply. The market revolution also was accompanied by a revolution in commercial law, as a growing sector of entrepreneurial lawyers increasingly shaped the legal system to promote and protect the interests of commercial activity and private investment. Booms and Busts In 1819, the United States endured its first economic downturn, the panic of 1819, which was caused by a number of factors, including the credit contraction by the second Bank of the United States and a European financial crisis. The resulting depression saw mounting unemployment, bank failures, plummeting crop prices, and the collapse of western land investments. Though the economy had recovered fully by the mid‐1820s, some Americans saw the panic as a warning that rapid economic growth and territorial expansion would destabilize the nation and threaten its survival. Strong resentment against banks and anxiety about rapid economic change persisted in the minds of many Americans, ready to be exploited by politicians in the decades to come. The Spread of Democracy, pp. 365‐369 Coinciding with the market revolution was an equally profound transformation of American politics. Between 1820 and 1840, a democratic revolution of sorts occurred, with increased voter participation and officeholding. Two important features of this democratization were the emergence of the second‐party system of Democrats and Whigs and the importance of candidatesʹ popularity with the ʺcommon manʺ in determining the outcome of elections. Popular Politics and Partisan Identity The 1828 election was the first presidential contest where popular votes determined the victor; in twenty‐
two out of twenty‐four states, voters now designated electors committed to a particular candidate. The election also inaugurated modern‐day electioneering, as many state‐level candidates gave speeches and held barbecues and banquets to woo voters. More informal and direct campaign rhetoric and blatantly partisan newspapers also were part of this new style. By 1828, party labels appeared, with Andrew Jacksonʹs followers assuming the name of Democratic Republicans, and those in the Adams‐Henry Clay coalition calling their party the National Republicans. By 1836, Jacksonians simply referred to their organization as the Democratic Party, and the National Republicans had evolved into the Whig Party. The Election of 1828 and the Character Issue The 1828 election was the first national election in which both candidates engaged in vicious character assassination. Jacksonians charged that John Quincy Adams was an elitist and extravagant aristocrat who had only won the election of 1824 by the ʺcorrupt bargainʺ with Henry Clay. Jackson is a sinful and impulsive man; they argued that he was guilty of murders during the War of 1812. They also accused him of being an adulterer and seducer even though it had been his wife who was not legally divorced from her first husband.. The stories became the real issues in the election, giving voters a choice between two different styles of masculinity. In the end, Jackson soundly defeated Adams, carrying most of the South and West as well as New York and Pennsylvania. The election showed a new approval of political parties and solidified a party loyalty that transcended individual candidates. Jacksonʹs Democratic Agenda Jacksonʹs inauguration epitomized his public image as a man of the people, with an open reception at the White House that turned into a near‐riot. Jackson favored a Jeffersonian limited federal government. He deviated from precedent by appointing party loyalists to his cabinet. Jackson also differed from his predecessors (especially Thomas Jefferson) in that he exercised full presidential powers over Congress and used the veto power more often than had all of the previous presidents combined. Cultural Shifts, pp. 369‐373 The market revolution was making the United States, and particularly its more industrialized regions, dramatically more wealthy by the year. It also transformed society and culture at almost every level, from the family to the world of leisure. The Family and Separate Spheres The growing separation between public and private life, between the workplace and the home, caused increasingly sharp distinctions between the social roles of men and women in Jacksonian America. In the middle‐class family of the new industrial society, the husband was assumed to be the principal income producer, and the wife was expected to remain in the home and to engage in largely domestic activities. Within this context, women were to be the custodians of morality and benevolence; they were to provide religious and moral instruction to their children and to counterbalance the acquisitive, materialistic impulses of their husbands. The image never described reality: While most women did not perform paid work, they had to do heavy household labor, and wealthy women who hired servants became employers. Some women, particularly free black wives, had to work as servants and laundresses to augment family income. They could not escape market relations. These idealized notions about the sentimental, noncommercial, feminine home and the masculine world of work gained acceptance in the 1830s (and well beyond) because of the cultural dominance of the middle and upper classes of the Northeast, expressed through books and periodical publications, but beyond white families of the middle and upper classes, these new gender ideals had limited applicability. The Education and Training of Youth The new market economy meant new opportunities for educating and training the youth of the 1820s and 1830s. Northern states adopted public schooling between 1790 and the 1820s, and the South soon followed. The job of educating the nationʹs youth began to fall more and more to young women in their late teens, who provided an inexpensive source of teachers. Remarkably, basic education was the same for girls as for boys. Higher education was a different story, with only Oberlin College accepting women in the 1830s, although a handful of top‐notch womenʹs seminaries offered college‐level education to those who could afford it. While some male youths went on to college, the vast majority left school at fourteen to train for an occupation, often moving to the city to take entry‐level business positions. Many youth were freed from family restrictions, a source of concern for moralists. Public Life, the Press, and Popular Amusements A widely shared but hardly monolithic national culture became possible in the Jacksonian era, as the movement of books, newspapers, and people spread ideas and values. Rising rates of literacy and new printing methods led to an explosion of newspapers. ʺPenny papersʺ covered a variety of issues ranging from entertainment to local news and exposés. By the end of the decade, penny papers could be found in every metropolitan area of the nation as well as in smaller towns and villages. Beginning in the 1830s, traveling lecturers crisscrossed the country, entertaining small‐town audiences with a variety of presentations, ranging from dramatic readings of poetry and plays to lectures on history, physiology, and anatomy. Theater also flourished in the 1830s, as audiences across the country applauded everything from Shakespeare to minstrel shows. Another popular diversion was public oratory. Huge audiences listened with rapt attention to sermons, speeches at trials, and to political orations that sometimes lasted for hours. Democracy and Religion, pp. 373‐377 After gathering momentum for three decades, an unprecedented revival of evangelical religion known as the Second Great Awakening peaked in the early 1830s. This evangelical movement contributed to a growing belief that individuals could improve not only themselves but the general human condition as well. The men and women of the new mercantile classes were the most enthusiastic converts to evangelical Protestantism. The Second Great Awakening The early nineteenth century witnessed the Second Great Awakening. The emotionally charged revivals, often outdoors, typically attracted more women than men. From 1800 to 1820, largely as a result of the Second Great Awakening, church membership doubled in the United States. A prominent leader of the Second Great Awakening, ex‐lawyer Charles Grandison Finney, reached national distribution with his evangelical message through the religious press. The Temperance Movement and the Campaign for Moral Reform One of the first specific reform impulses was temperance, the movement to limit or prohibit consumption of alcohol. Drinking had been rising and was common among all classes. Reformers identified liquor as the cause of a number of social and family problems, including spouse and child abuse, poverty, idleness, and crime. The first national organization, the American Temperance Society, was founded in 1826 by the evangelical minister Lyman Beecher, and by the mid‐1830s, over a million people had joined its affiliates throughout the nation. The campaign shifted from voluntary temperance to the legal banning of alcohol. More controversial than temperance was a social movement begun by women called ʺmoral reform,ʺ which initially applied to public morals in general but quickly became restricted to a campaign to eradicate sexual sin, especially prostitution, which they saw as an outgrowth of uncontrolled male sexuality. The female reformers published a national newspaper, the Advocate of Moral Reform, which was the first completely woman‐operated publication in the nation. Moral reform drew on evangelical themes of self‐control and suppression of sin, but its advocatesʹ belief that women had a responsibility to speak out about unspeakable things meant that male evangelicals often did not support the movement. Organizing against Slavery The cause of abolishing slavery—ʺabolitionismʺ‐gathered strength in the 1830s. Emigration to Africa proved to be so gradual (and expensive) as to have a negligible impact on American slavery. Black abolitionists such as David Walker demanded immediate emancipation and threatened racial violence otherwise. In 1831, Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison began publishing the Liberator, a newspaper devoted to putting an immediate end to slavery. In 1830, a ten‐day National Negro Convention met in Philadelphia to discuss the racism of American society. And in 1832, a twenty‐eight‐year‐old black woman, Maria Stewart, broke social taboos and began to deliver public lectures for black audiences in Boston on slavery and racial prejudice. Many northerners disliked both slavery and blacks and so were opposed to abolition. Their animosity often took the form of violence, with attacks ranging from destruction of property to murder. Women played a prominent role in abolition movements, which became a natural corollary to their involvement in other reform causes. The womenʹs rights movement came out of the sexism women experienced in antislavery campaigns. Jackson Defines the Democratic Party, pp. 377‐389 In his two terms as president, Andrew Jackson worked to enact his vision of a politics of opportunity for all white males. The primary issues of his tenure were westward expansion, Indian removal, nullification, and ʺwarʺ with the second Bank of the United States. He left a strong Democratic Party when he left office, but he also held partial responsibility for the Panic of 1837. Indian Policy and the Trail of Tears When Jackson became president, substantial tribal enclaves remained east of the Mississippi River, and he believed that removing Indians to territory west of the Mississippi River was the only way to save their cultures. Started in 1819, the assimilationist program granted $10,000 a year to missionary groups to teach Indians Christianity, English literacy, white culture, and European practices. Privately, Andrew Jackson, believing the Indians to be subjects of the United States, thought it was ʺabsurdʺ to treat the Indians as foreigners, and he did not approve of assimilation. The governmentʹs attempt in 1832 to relocate reluctant western Illinois tribes erupted into war and led to a major defeat for the Indians. More troubling to Jackson were the southern tribes of Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Cherokee, who the federal government hoped to remove to the West to open their lands for white settlement and cotton cultivation. Through appeals to the Supreme Court, the Cherokee—one of the most ʺassimilatedʺ tribes—
tried to stop encroachments onto their land by the state of Georgia. Jackson repudiated the Courtʹs decisions in their favor, and in 1835, the government was able to make a treaty with a minority faction of the tribe, ceding to Georgia the Cherokeeʹs land in return for $5 million and land in present‐day Oklahoma. When the majority of the Cherokee who did not recognize the treaty refused to move, Jackson sent in federal troops in May of 1838 to force them on a 1,200‐mile trek west. Nearly a quarter of the Cherokee perished on this journey that came to called the Trail of Tears. The Tariff of Abominations and Nullification The federal government passed tariffs to protect American manufactures and raise revenue in 1816 and 1824, over the protest of southern congressmen who feared the effects the tariffs would have on the southern export economy. The final and most controversial tariff of the period, passed in 1828, was an agglomeration of dozens of tariffs from every section of the country and from every type of industry demanding protection. Southerners opposed the measure, labeling it as the Tariff of Abominations. In 1832, a crisis arose when South Carolinians, led by John Calhoun, decided to nullify as of February 1, 1833, the despised federal tariffs they believed were responsible for their stateʹs economic stagnation. In response, Jackson sent warships to Charleston and pushed through Congress a Force Bill granting him the authority to use military force if necessary to uphold the tariff laws. As tensions escalated, John Calhoun, fashioned a compromise that got the South Carolinians the lower tariff they wanted. In the long run, though, the issue of federal power versus statesʹ rights was far from resolved and would surface again over the issue of slavery. The Bank War and the Panic of 1837 The major political issue of Jacksonʹs presidency was not the tariff but his war against the Bank of the United States. Though the bank had a stabilizing effect on the economy, Jackson considered it a bastion of elitism, concentrating great power in the hands of a privileged few. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster sought to recharter the bank four years early, hoping that Jackson would veto the bill and, consequently deemed unpopular, would lose the election. Jacksonʹs strongly worded veto, though, roused popular antibank sentiment, and Jackson was successfully reelected. Seeing his victory against Henry Clay in the 1832 election as a mandate for destroying the bank, Jackson ordered all federal deposits withdrawn and redeposited in selected state banks. Unbound and unregulated, the economy went into high gear, and a fury of speculation ensued, especially in land. In an attempt to control the economy, Jackson issued the Specie Circular, which, along with other factors, precipitated a financial panic of major proportions. Hundreds of banks and businesses failed in the wake of the panic of 1837, and another five years of economic hard times followed. Van Burenʹs One‐Term Presidency Martin Van Burenʹs political acuity earned him the nickname the ʺLittle Magician.ʺ However, for all his cleverness, Van Buren lacked the forcefulness of his predecessor Jackson. Elected in 1836, the new president spent the bulk of his four years attempting to deal with the panic of 1837. Van Buren devised a plan for an independent treasury that would hold all government deposits, deal only in hard money, and avoid loaning money, something that had destabilized the defunct Bank of the United States. A skeptical Congress withheld approval of the independent treasury until 1840. As the election of 1840 drew near, the Whigs smelled victory. They settled on candidate William Henry Harrison to oppose Van Buren. The 1840 campaign was one of the most dramatic, participatory, and exciting in American history. Harrison and the Whigs won a resounding victory in both the popular vote and electoral college. Democratic hegemony over American politics was temporarily over. Conclusion: The Age of Jackson or the Era of Reform? In the 1820s and 1830s, Americans transformed their politics and their attitude toward social problems. The economic boom of these years increased the connections between town and country and encouraged an unrestrained pursuit of individual gain, but the panics of 1819 and 1837 also reminded Americans of the risks inherent in the new system. Americans both welcomed the opportunities of the new age and searched for ways to solve problems that had been made more visible by economic change. Many considered Andrew Jackson a symbol of the times because he championed liberty, competition, and white supremacy. A smaller group disregarded Jacksonʹs example and sought to cure the ills of runaway individualism. Motivated by the Second Great Awakeningʹs message of human perfectibility and personal responsibility for salvation, reformers attacked vices ranging from alcohol abuse to slavery. Reform‐minded voters—a category that excluded thousands of women attracted to evangelicalism and reform‐‐joined the Whig Party because it advocated using government to direct social change. The Whigs, opponents of Jacksonʹs Democratic Party, thrived because they also drew support from businessmen who favored government activism on economic issues, like banking and tariffs. The contentious issues of economics and morals combined with new methods of communication to swell voter turnout at elections. Conflicts over slavery, womenʹs rights, and the status of white labor hinted at problems that the Whigs and Democrats could not easily resolve, although they did not seriously disrupt politics in the 1830s.