Essays in American History: Jefferson’s Election through the Mexican War
Expanding the Empire of Liberty: Territory
As was mentioned earlier, in 1803 Thomas Jefferson wisely set aside principle and grabbed at Napoleon's offer to double the size of the United States on the cheap, thus providing via the Louisiana Purchase the largest safety valve to internal political and economic pressures yet acquired. To be sure, that land wasn't really Napoleon's to give -- he'd acquired it via conquest -- and Jefferson didn't much care about whatever self-determinative wishes its occupants, of whatever "race," may have had. But a bargain is a bargain and the reality of statecraft usually falls far short of the nobility of political theory. Very soon, Jefferson set Lewis and Clark the task of exploring not only this new territory, but also regions beyond and long-desired. As almost always, whether by land or by sea, however dolled up in the garb of science (also a desideratum, especially for Jefferson), exploration was the spear-tip of empire. Surely, it was thought, there must be some way for the Manifest Destiny of the United States to undo the temporary misallocation of the continent to other, lesser breeds. And, lo and behold, such ways were found. Some were diplomatic and tending toward something like honest dealing. Others were martial and tending toward what even the future Civil War hero and president U.S. Grant labeled sinful in his memoirs. (Grant considered the Civil War divine retribution for what he considered the sin of the Mexican War.)
Long before the United States had the power to enforce it, John Quincy Adams's Monroe Doctrine (he wrote it in 1823 as Secretary of State under James Monroe) warned off all other imperial competitors, of which there were many, from what even then the United States considered its backyard, the Western Hemisphere. Interestingly and tellingly, enthusiasm for sister revolutionary states in "our" hemisphere stopped far short of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the first successful slave revolt in human history, itself deeply inspired by the American model but featuring the wrong kind of people in the terrifyingly victorious position. Later, of course, when the U.S. had caught up with Britain, it became possible to begin to enforce the Doctrine on the hemisphere.
But, as usual, consequences were not entirely controllable. Though the Purchase allowed increasingly land-poor farmers to expand west to unexhausted soil, thus easing internal conflicts in the established states, variation in agricultural-economic systems -- that is, slavery or the lack thereof -- almost instantly became a more pitched issue. If new lands westward were to be free, the South would be politically isolated in the Congress; if slave, the North would suffer the same fate. Some, especially after this period (as we shall see), would essentially leave it up to a referendum, which encouraged a competitive land-grabbing orgy. As for the Indian tribes that populated the new lands, successive displacement and ethnic cleansing, sanctified by a raft of almost instantly ignored treaties, were almost all they would reap no matter how noble or savage their varied resistance.
Essentially, what one could call the Hamilton-Jefferson divide persisted. Long embedded in both the culture and geography of North and South, rival economic systems divided the house of the nation, as Lincoln was soon to note with typical eloquence. Added to the longstanding mix was the relatively new and constantly expanding economic take-off -- the Market Revolution -- initiated in more than just symbolic terms by Hamilton and limited mostly to the North and those areas of the West linked to the North. "Linked" is the key: first canal-augmented river systems and then railroads began linking the urban centers of the Northeast to what we now call the upper Midwest. Produce of all kinds flowed down the Missouri-Mississippi river system, at first to New Orleans then to be distributed abroad or to the North for consumption or value-adding manufacture; later, via the new "built geography" of canals and rail, to new urban centers in the Midwest and thence to the Northeast, cutting out the South.
Recall that much of world history turns on who controls and thus profits from trading routes: the North grew ever more directly linked with the northern parts of the West. Were the North to dominate the agricultural system that would spread to the southern parts of the West, again, the South would be isolated and exposed, especially since centuries of heavy farming had increasingly over-cultivated the South. As with most economic systems, for better and worse, the clear priority was expand or die. To be sure, North and South enjoyed economic connections during this period -- Northern finance and trade codeveloping with Southern slave-based near-monoculture. Also linking regions -- and markets -- was the newly invented telegraph. But technologies are politically fickle: another, earlier invention, the cotton gin, spread widely during this period and encouraged sectional divergence, both political and economic, since it gave a new, turbo-charged lease on life for slavery, with cotton rapidly replacing tobacco as the monoculture of choice. But the South was no longer the North's only possible major "trading partner," and the more the country expanded west, the less the North needed the South.
These are the economic concerns that anchor the various political "compromises" that were floated during this period and up through to the Civil War. Key among these was the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which essentially drew a line across the Purchase (at the 36°30′ parallel, excepting compromised Missouri) with slavery banned above and allowed below. As with many compromises, it kicked the can down the road; neither section remained happy with it for long, if ever they were at its inception. One can never know whether in some counterfactual alternate reality Lincoln's divided house might nevertheless have stood: what matters is that despite the best efforts of some of its occupants the house fell apart.
Expanding the Empire of Liberty: Politics
In the first two decades of the new century, America became increasingly entangled in the European struggle between Napoleon's France and just about everybody else. Britain, having a massive naval advantage, was hell bent on containing France geographically and economically, and that included the United States. Commerce was mostly stopped and merchant sailors were even "impressed" into the British navy. Madison, thinking Britain pinned down in Europe, took the opportunity to try to annex Canada, asking for and receiving a declaration of war on Britain. This was a mistake. It offered up the country as yet another American theater of a European war, known in North America as the War of 1812. Britain took on France's traditional role by trying to contain American expansion through an opportunistic alliance with an Indian tribal confederacy happy to have another power to play off the ever-westering Americans. Ultimately, Napoleon met his Waterloo, and Britain was thus free to send many more troops to the United States where, among other things, they set fire to Washington, D.C. The war had already ended when Andrew Jackson took New Orleans in 1815, but he became a hero all the same. As usual with any society, under the threat and reality of foreign invasion, Americans temporarily set aside their differences in a patriotic "era of good feelings." It didn't last.
Jackson ascended to the presidency with the newly formed Democrats, which exist to this day (massive policy shifts through the years notwithstanding). Under Jackson, the domain of political liberty for those deemed American citizens expanded, not only in electoral-party politics but also via an ever-broadening civil society. A new party system was created that reflected the main sectional economic interests, while independent, often "single-issue" organizations (for the abolition of slavery; for the rights of women) arose. Of course, these political and social developments interacted dynamically with economic and territorial issues. (Frankly, these adjectives -- political, social, economic, cultural, and so on -- are mostly of heuristic value; indispensable but never to be considered more than unavoidably useful when constructing a story or explanation of what is, after all, a gigantic system of events that's indescribable in human language without simplification and somewhat artificial categorization.)
Whigs and Democrats
First, the new party system. Andrew Jackson was ushered in on a wave of democratic enthusiasm, with the "wave" consisting of mostly removing property qualifications for white males. The Democrats were mostly (somewhat modified) Jeffersonians; their new rivals, the Whigs, were mostly (somewhat modified) Hamiltonians.
The easiest way to define the parties is that Whigs (following original developments among the younger First Republicans like Henry Clay and John Calhoun) promulgated what was called the American System, and the Democrats fought it. This basket of economic policies consisted of a reinstated, or second, national bank, the legislation for the first having been allowed to lapse, with a dominant, if not exclusive, national currency; government investment in infrastructure ("internal improvements"); protection of infant industry via tariffs; and, in a bit of a deviation from "pure" Hamiltonianism, an economic balance between industry and agriculture. There was room for support of slavery among the Whigs, but note that the System didn't utterly depend upon it. Whigs, unlike most Democrats, also tended to favor what they considered the moral education and shaping of the populace; they were popular among many evangelicals.
Jacksonian Democrats deeply mistrusted the centralization of economic or political power: they were thus against a national bank (leading to a "war" over Biddle's Bank, as it was known); against federal investments in infrastructure; for states' rights and the rights of the non-rich (later to explode, and not for the last time, in the nullification crisis of 1832) and considered Africans to be permanent slaves in a permanent slave system and Indians to be essentially in the way and removable by any means necessary. In this latter belief they were hardly alone but rather more ruthless and proud of their ruthlessness.
Note, too, that Jackson had no problem with national power when it came to expanding the Empire of Liberty via violence. Nor, so it turned out, during the nullification crisis, if decentralization got in the way of the kind of national economic control (tariffs) usually associated with Whigs. (Of course, as with "political," "economic," et al, supposedly binary opposites that hold at the distance required by a brief review such as this and which aid in understanding the broad themes that the AP exam tests do somewhat dissolve upon closer inspection. This is hardly a dynamic limited to the past: the present, which is merely tomorrow's past, operates identically. In any event, keep in mind that large-scale distinctions often grow fuzzy at higher resolutions.)
Geographically, and roughly speaking, Whigs were northern (that is, northeastern) and Democrats southern, with the west divided between each mostly by degree of urbanization or linkage with the northern manufacturing centers. However, and despite the ever-tightening association of states' rights with slavery, many rich, southern plantation-owners were, at least at first, Whigs. Finally, and mostly unlike the Whigs, Democrats welcomed the wave of Irish and German immigrants, who duly became solid Democratic supporters, as of course did the relative losers of the ever-widening inequality caused by the market revolution.
One should note, in closing, that a Federalist, John Marshall, through mostly the sheer force of his legal will, as evidenced in Marbury v. Madison in 1803 and other foundational cases, established and enforced judicial review, the usually anti-democratic, though not necessarily always unjust, power of a Supreme Court somewhat hazily defined in the Constitution. It's probably no coincidence, and not solely due to rabid Indian-hatred, that Jackson later ignored Marshall's decision in favor of the Cherokee Nation in Worcester v Georgia in 1832 which led directly to the Trail of Tears, just one example of the long litany of American crimes against the continent's original inhabitants.
The Rise of Civil Society
The first third of the nineteenth century saw the rise of all kinds of voluntary citizen organizations, or what we'd now call "civil society." As much as, and perhaps more than, increasing democracy in the formal political system, civil society, often leavened by religious movements, began somewhat denaturing what had been consciously designed to be an aristocratic republic. Many of these associations were of a religious or pietistic bent, or were originated or inspired by religion in some fashion, such as the rise of temperance and other evidences of "the reforming impulse," as some historians have termed it. Many, if not most, were often led by or mostly composed of people in the upper parts of an increasingly unequal class system. Many were often paternalistic. Some even took the form of utopian socialist communes, such as Robert Owen's New Harmony, Indiana.
But also included were such grassroots, self-organizing groups as nascent labor unions, including associations of "factory girls," occasioned by increasing industrialization which created the working class, as it was soon called. Farmers, too, began to organize to protect themselves from the expanding market society forming the roots of the Populists of the post-Civil-War period. But the early labor movement arose and gained traction as increasing economic inequality, the handmaiden of any market revolution, increased. Crashes and panics, the worst of which was the depression of the late 1830s, reinforced older, revolutionary distrust in luxury and avarice, the universal acids eating away at revolutionary virtue. To many, the noble point of the American idea was being undermined by the Almighty Dollar. What was the point of the revolution if tyranny was to rear its head in other forms? What, in the final analysis, was the difference between chattel slavery, in which one was owned by another, and wage slavery, in which one had no choice but to rent oneself to another? Where was the vaunted liberty of autonomous men for which all that blood had been shed? Strikes, led by Workingmen's Parties, became commonplace. They were aimed not only at levels of remuneration but also at the replacement of skilled, end-to-end labor with increasingly rote routines themselves increasingly governed by the tyranny of the clock.
Also consequential were the movements for women's rights and the abolition of slavery. As the market revolution increasingly shifted economic production out of the home and into the factory, women's economic role contracted. To be sure, some women became "factory girls," but most who could afford to remained at home, far from the economic action. Still voteless, now shorn of what economic power they'd had, they were that much more relegated to the background. Republican motherhood, which at least in theory made women active participants in a new revolutionary society, withered away, leaving the far more passive role of harbor-masters shielding men from the burgeoning market-storm. This cult of domesticity, usually adopted wholeheartedly by women, relegated women's power to the limits of the home, leaving the rest to the men they were to nurture. Such roles were naturalized by the quasi-biology of the day, which is always useful: on what basis can one criticize the intention of the Creator, or, later in the century, of that equally determinative natural selection? The natural order, after all, brooks no appeal.
Yet all was not shrunk to domestic servitude. The poor, of course, had no choice but to work, whether in factories or as part of the putting-out system by which women could import work to be done while not leaving their domestic domain. The cult of domesticity became, therefore, a measure of class, of social status, and a kind of goal of full femininity, since to work, especially outside the home, was to be defeminized.
A different view emerged and is best symbolized by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Often barred by gender from participating in the abolitionist movement -- an irony if ever there was one -- women gathered to author a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on that ever-present inspiration for and template of human liberation, the Declaration of Independence. Suffrage was paramount but hardly the only goal: liberation in the social and economic spheres was expected to follow gaining the vote. It only took seventy years to get the vote; social and economic parity is still not entirely achieved. The cult of domesticity has proved quite resistant even well into the 21st century.
So, too, has full equality for the descendants of the centuries-long slave system. Rooted in religion, just like slavery apologetics, abolition arose in this period and became a crusade. Inclusive of women or not (mostly not), abolition did try to remove an obvious hypocrisy that many founders noted, some even uncomfortably: that slavery hardly jived with an Empire of Liberty. Not that we should project modern notions of equality onto this movement: most abolitionists would have found our somewhat widely held view of equality among the "races" ludicrous; what they wanted was to lead the benighted out of bondage, which was understood to be a White sin, civilize former slaves as much as possible, preparing them for their destined subordinate role, but as free people protected by the superior race.
That said, there were strains of what we'd consider more egalitarian views, and they perhaps even became dominant. In the 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison and others -- including, crucially, blacks themselves -- took not only slavery but racism itself head on, refusing any compromise with either. Most southerners, embedded in an economic system utterly dependent upon slavery, and thus marinated in the kind of rationalizing justifications -- moral, religious, even proto-biological -- one would expect, horrified by the prospect and occasional instances of slave revolts, were horrified by the rapidly growing abolitionist movement. Both abolitionism and feminism stood outside established electoral politics; each was an example of the rise of a civil society, warts and all, that has over time, slowly (if not glacially) penetrated the formal institutions of politics and the economy, whether party or board room.
Expanding the Empire of Liberty: Culture
As noted, a kind of religious pietism encouraged and colored reform movements in this period. As usual, more secular sources also helped to expand the Empire of Liberty. Our period saw the rise of the Second Great Awakening that mostly reinforced a more secular movement, transcendentalism, which may best be understood as the American form of Romanticism. Both movements underscored the sanctity of the individual as a moral agent, ever in a state of development, of becoming, ever-renewing both self and society.
The Second Great Awakening fully democratized American Christianity, bursting through the door opened by the previous, eighteenth-century Awakening. Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson preached, in their own fashion, another form of moral self-reliance -- hardly atheist, far from entirely secular, but distinct from evangelical Christianity in theory, practice, and cultural form. Both movements arose at least in part in response to the market revolution: both aimed to rehumanize, in their different ways, individual lives seen as increasingly instrumental in the hands of the market. Each was a reminder that human beings were ends, not means; living, free moral agents, potentially improvable as was the society they created, and decidedly not simply another in the increasing set of interchangeable parts that fueled the market and industrial revolutions then radically reshaping society.
However, as always, the Empire of Liberty, that surprisingly capacious term that must be taken both literally and ironically in American history, was soon to expand in a far less noble fashion -- into Mexico, which stood in the way of the nation's manifest destiny of continental dominance. The history of Grant's "sin" will be picked up in the next essay.