United States History

F

1

Changes in Slavery

During the cotton boom, slaveholders attempted to organize plantation slavery as a paternalistic system in which the planter exercised a fatherly authority in every area of slaves’ lives. Some evidence suggests that discipline of slaves became more strict and systematic in the second quarter of the 19th century, and that whippings and other forms of physical punishment persisted. The brisk interstate slave trade often destroyed family and community ties among slaves. At the same time, however, the food eaten by slaves improved, and more slave families lived in individual cabins than had in the past. After 1830, masters who had participated in Baptist and Methodist revivals (and who had been frightened by a bloody Virginia slave revolt led by Baptist preacher Nat Turner) provided religious instruction to their slaves. The goal of these changes, proudly stated by the planters, was to create not only economic dependence but also emotional dependence of the slaves upon their masters.

For their part, slaves learned to put the masters’ paternalistic efforts to their own uses. They accepted the food and housing, listened to the preachers, endured the labor discipline, and then made their own lives within slavery. Slave family forms, for instance, were a mix of the European nuclear model and African matriarchy and village kinship, shaped by the limits imposed by slavery. And while they became Christians, slaves transformed Christianity into a distinctly African American faith that served their own spiritual interests. In particular, Moses the liberator (not the slaveholders’ patriarchal Abraham) was the central figure in slave Christianity.

F

2

Growing Isolation of the South

The slave–based plantation economy of the South was economically successful: Planters were making a lot of money. But in the long term, Southern commitment to slavery isolated the region morally and politically and led to disaster because most other white societies were branding the institution as barbarism.

Northern states abolished slavery soon after the revolution. Slaves in Haiti revolted and formed an independent black republic in 1804 (see Haitian Slave Revolt). Four years later the British (whose navy controlled the oceans) outlawed the African slave trade. In ensuing years, the Republic of Colombia, or Gran Colombia (present-day Venezuela, Ecuador, Panama, and Colombia), Mexico, Peru, Chile, and other mainland colonies won wars of independence against Spain. Each of the new South and Central American republics outlawed slavery. Finally, the British Parliament emancipated slaves on British islands in the Caribbean in 1833. By then Brazil, Cuba, and the southern United States were the only remaining large-scale slave societies in the world. Southern slavery was producing profits for the masters, and political and moral isolation for the region.

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X

Jacksonian Democracy

A

Transforming Democracy

After 1815 Americans transformed the republic of the Founding Fathers into a democracy. State after state revoked property qualifications for voting and holding office—thus transforming Jefferson’s republic of property holders into Andrew Jackson’s mass democracy. Democracy, however, was not for everyone. While states extended political rights to all white men, they often withdrew or limited such rights for blacks. As part of the same trend, the state of New Jersey took the vote away from propertied women, who formerly had possessed that right. Thus the democratization of citizenship applied exclusively to white men. In the mid–19th century, these men went to the polls in record numbers. The election of 1828 attracted 1.2 million voters; that number jumped to 1.5 million in 1836 and to 2.4 million in 1840. Turnout of eligible voters by 1840 was well over 60 percent—higher than it had ever been, and much higher than it is now.

At the same time, however, popular political activity other than voting declined. Judging by available evidence, state and national governments received fewer petitions than in the past, and they paid less attention to the ones they received. In the 1830s, when Congress received hundreds of antislavery petitions, it simply refused to read them. Petitioning, parading, and mobbing (each of which included Americans who were not white males) had all been crucial to the American Revolutionary movement, and they had continued to play important roles in Jeffersonian America. By the 1830s and 1840s, spontaneous parades and mob actions played smaller roles in political life, and more-respectable citizens viewed such activities as disorderly and criminal. Popular participation in politics was more and more limited to voting.

Furthermore, voting was organized not by the voice of the citizenry, but by a national two–party system staffed by disciplined professionals. These professionals included candidates, appointed office holders, newspaper editors, and local leaders who organized voters, wrote party platforms, and developed party ideologies in ways that only partially and indirectly reflected popular wishes. Thus political participation was democratized by the 1830s. But democracy included only white men, and even they were transformed from citizens to spectators.

B

Origins of the Party System

Neither the Jeffersonians nor their Federalist opponents admitted to being a political party. To them the term party meant the same as faction. It also meant the victory of selfishness and contention over the selfless unanimity they felt a republic needed.

However, two events caused important politicians to reconsider the value of parties. First, the Panic of 1819, an economic downturn, introduced Americans to a cycle of booming economy followed by bust, a cycle that would come to characterize the new market economy during the 19th century. Some Jeffersonians blamed the panic on the Bank of the United States, which had been rechartered in 1816. They argued that if the disciplined coalition of Southern and Western farmers that had elected Jefferson had still been in place in 1816, Congress would not have rechartered the bank and the panic would not have happened.

The second event that caused politicians to reconsider the value of political parties was Missouri Territory’s application for admission to the Union in 1818. Missouri’s proposed constitution allowed slavery, and that provision caused heated argument in Congress, revealing angry differences between representatives of slave states and free states. Congress ultimately compromised, balancing the new slave state of Missouri by admitting Maine as a free state (see Missouri Compromise). Congress then declared that slavery would be allowed in the Louisiana Purchase territories south of a line drawn west from the southern border of Missouri. Slavery would be banned north of that line. The immediate crisis was solved, but the fault line between slave and free states remained open.

The same politicians (Martin Van Buren of New York was the most active of them) who opposed the Bank of the United States also argued that Jefferson’s coalition of slaveholding and nonslaveholding farmers would never have permitted the dangerous, divisive question of slavery to get into congressional debate. They organized a disciplined coalition for states’ rights and limited government that supported Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1828. That coalition became the Democratic Party.

In the 1820s, many politicians had come to believe that organized parties were essential to democracy. Parties gave ordinary men the power to compete with the wealth, education, and social connections of traditional leaders. Parties also created disciplined organizations that could control political debate.

C

Democrats and Whigs

Beginning with Jackson’s administration, the Democrats were opposed by the Whig Party. The Whigs were led by Henry Clay of Kentucky, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and others who called for an active national government and who had a nationalist answer to the growing problem of slavery.

The Whigs proposed what they called the American System. They wanted a high tariff that would protect Northeastern factories from European competition while it generated revenue for the national government. They proposed high prices for government land in the West—a policy that would slow westward movement and that also would increase federal revenue. They insisted that the Bank of the United States be maintained to stabilize currency and to discipline smaller banks. And they wanted to use the money that tariffs and the sale of lands would give the government to build and maintain roads and other internal improvements.

The result, they promised, would be a society with a national market under a government that fostered prosperity and order. At the same time, the national character of the Whig economy would discourage arguments among the three sections of the nation—the Northeast, the South, and the West. The Northeast would manufacture goods for the South and West. The South would supply cotton to Northeastern factories, and the West would provide food for both the South and the Northeast. The prosperity of each section would depend on friendly relations with the other two, and none of them would want to bring up the divisive question of slavery.

Andrew Jackson and his Democratic successors proposed to limit the role of government in the market revolution and in resolving the tensions among the sections. They wanted to abolish the Bank of the United States, set tariffs at low levels, sell government land at low rates, and leave the question of internal improvements to the states.

Democrats hoped to create a national government that never meddled in local affairs (one of the most important of those affairs being slavery), that played no favorites, and that kept taxes low. On the question of slavery and states’ rights, Jacksonians favored minimal central government within a permanent union. When South Carolina threatened the Union by attempting to nullify the protective tariff of 1828 (Southerners termed it the Tariff of Abominations because it penalized Southern states that exported cotton and imported Old World manufactured goods), Jackson threatened South Carolina with a federal invasion (see Nullification). At the same time, he let Southerners know that slavery was safe as long as a Democratic Party committed to states’ rights was in power. Even more than the Whigs, the Democrats were committed to avoiding any congressional debate that could possibly affect slavery.

In the 1830s and 1840s Democrats and Whigs built the most completely national two–party system that Americans have ever had—both parties relied on support from all sections of the country, and both were evenly matched in most states. Within that system, politicians knew that arguments between the North and South must be avoided. Such arguments would, first of all, split the Whig and Democratic parties in which politicians were making their careers. Second, and more dangerous, the breakdown of the national two–party system could realign the parties along North–South lines and focus national politics on the differences between the North and South. Political leaders feared that such a breakdown could lead ultimately to disunion and perhaps civil war. Most historians agree that the national party system’s eventual breakdown was a crucial cause of the American Civil War (1861-1865).