Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Van Buren began with a “general resuscitation of the old democratic party” (emphasis his) in 1822, by which he meant the Jeffersonian democratic party. To modern readers, this invites confusion because by that time the Jeffersonians were known as the Republicans (from “Democratic Republicans”) as opposed to the opposition party, the Federalists. He allied with Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, and other Virginians who were building the “Richmond junto” up to the same stature as the Albany Regency. Together, the “Richmond-Albany axis” could run the country, terrifying such leaders as South Carolinian John C. Calhoun: “between [them],” he exclaimed, “there is a vital connection. They give and receive hope from each other, and confidently expect to govern this nation.”8 Van Buren—like De Witt Clinton and other political organizers—built on the Jeffersonian foundation of the caucus. Caucuses were state bodies of largely self-appointed men who had money and influence and acted as regional kingmakers. But the caucus began to lose its power as the property requirement to vote was lifted in state after state, meaning that the vote of the “common man” suddenly counted for almost as much as the support of a few wealthy individuals. Van Buren did not create this, and he certainly did not initiate the end of voting restrictions; nor did he originate party newspapers as propaganda tools. But like Henry Ford with the auto and Bill Gates with operating systems, he immediately grasped the totality of the parts and began reshaping New York politics from the inside, convincing others to develop a party organization that reached down to local levels through a state, district, ward, and precinct arrangement. Under this framework, the party established levels of responsibility for getting out the vote on election day: the state coordinated and funded candidates and directed the districts or counties; district and county organizations made sure that every ward and precinct was staffed with “captains,” who, on election day, literally walked the streets and encouraged voters to go to the polls. County and district organizations also helped transmit funds downward to local candidates from the state level. Over time, Van Buren and his allies added newspapers as rallying devices to further ensure turnout.

  When Van Buren—by then known as the “Little Magician” for his dexterity at putting together political deals—became a U.S. senator and left for Washington in 1821, he sought to transplant his new party on a national level. Still technically a slave owner (his slave had run away eight years earlier), Van Buren again sought to have it both ways, arguing on the side of Northerners to limit the spread of slavery while comforting Southerners by defending the existence of slavery in the South. His thinking evolved slowly, but steadily, toward a position of strong states’ rights, constrained further by a national party that would avoid direct confrontation with slavery, all enforced by the discipline of spoils. This would, he thought, prevent disunion and war.

  Within forty years, however, it became shockingly obvious that Van Buren failed in this immediate objective and, ironically, the very system he founded would help bring on the pivotal and decisive conflict over slavery. Yet the carnage and heartbreak of the Civil War reached far beyond the 600,000 dead and the decades of sectional hatred and distrust. Van Buren’s legacy to the American people contained one final paradox: seeking to limit the power of the federal government to act on slavery within the states, Van Buren forged a system that ensured and accelerated the relentless, permanent, and inescapable growth of government. When critics of modern-day “special-interest politics” bemoan the fact that presidential campaigns (like all others) have descended into exercises in pandering to interest groups, it’s not unfair to lay this at the feet of Martin Van Buren. And when Barack Obama won the presidency in large part by appealing to formerly “oppressed minorities,” it’s fair to say Martin Van Buren elected him . . . in 1820.

  Creating a massive bureaucracy beholden to special interests was absolutely not Van Buren’s intention. Indeed, he never even imagined the possibility of such a state of affairs. State and national expenditures were not only small at the time, but tightly confined by both the U.S. and most state constitutions: what little money there was could not be spent willy-nilly or handed out to cronies. For example, in 1800 the entire U.S. government spent only $11 million for a nation of 5.3 million people.9 By 1820, the budget had nearly doubled, but so had the population, with over half of the spending dedicated to national defense and none to “welfare” or “education.” Interest on the debt claimed one-quarter of the government’s revenues (as opposed to, depending on the calculation, 8 to 10 percent today), and “other spending,” or transfers within government agencies and to the states, made up the final quarter.

  That’s not to say there was not an inherent bias for growth, however tiny, built into the system. U.S. government employees numbered 5,000 in 1816, but multiplied dramatically after 1830, to over 25,000 by 1850. Of course, the population of the United States also rose, but even adjusted per capita, the number of government employees per person nearly doubled over that same period. Although real per capita government expenditures fell slightly under Jefferson, Monroe, and John Adams, and rapidly under Van Buren, they spiked radically upward under Madison (partly as a result of the War of 1812), Jackson, and John Tyler. But even in Madison’s first two nonwar years in office, real expenditures rose; James Monroe promised in his inaugural address to build a network of canals and roads to “shorten distances . . . and bind the Union more closely together”; and under Jackson (supposedly a small-government president) government spending sky-rocketed, more than doubling with no foreign conflict and no major land acquisitions.10 Despite a general trend of increasing expenditures per person, federal government spending prior to 1850 still amounted to less than $3 per person per year.

  The remarkable hands-off approach of government to the economy, however, simultaneously resulted in per capita income growth of just about 1 percent per year prior to 1850, while government grew at only a rate of three-quarters of 1 percent per year. Put another way, even though government grew slowly but inexorably in the early 1800s, it shrank relative to the personal income growth of most Americans.11 This was not only because public expenditures remained light, but also because the young nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) was an astounding $700 million, or seven times the gross public debt of $91 million. In such a wealthy nation, where there was more money to be made outside of government than inside with even the most lavish political favors, elected officials had little to pledge to supporters, and thus even fewer favors to actually perform once in office.

  The astonishingly rapid growth of government, particularly (but not only) at the federal level, over the last half-century has led many Americans to think of it as a recent development. In fact, with the exception of a couple of panics and depressions—hardly examples of political restraint—- U. S. government spending has grown consistently, in actual and per capita terms, with every single administration. Indeed, the expansion of government started almost immediately with George Washington and John Adams. Washington proposed a national (government-funded) university, and both he and Adams appreciated the need for a larger navy as a means to protect the country’s shipping. James Monroe and John Quincy Adams supported the national road, and for more than national security reasons. In his inaugural address, the younger Adams noted:nearly twenty years have passed since the construction of the first national road was commenced. The authority for its construction was then unquestioned. To how many thousands of our countrymen has it proved a benefit? To what single individual has it ever proved an injury?12

  Virtually all of the Founders agreed that certain functions of government required the expansion of federal power, particularly defense (which often consumed at least half of the national budget), but also the mail system, the customs network, and the bureaucracy that supervised the surveying and distribution of land. By the time of Thomas Jefferson’s administration, “internal improvements” covered not only repairs to, but construction of, roads and the clearing of harbors and rivers and was suppor
ted by both Federalists and Republicans. Politicians of all stripes endorsed spending public money for transportation networks, often invoking national security as requiring the rapid movement of troops and supplies.13 Despite the fact that private contractors built and maintained most roads (turnpikes) through a system of tolls and fees, Jefferson tasked his secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, to design a large transportation network that would include federally funded roads and canals. When Gallatin presented the proposal, it had a whopping price tag of $10 million—an amount equal to the entire federal budget—and Congress predictably voted it down. But the fact that it came from Jefferson’s administration is telling: even small-government Founders like Jefferson expressed a willingness to spend public money, and a lot of it, on what they deemed appropriate, based on often flimsy justification.

  When it came to institutionalizing a national debt, few Founders have suffered as many slings and arrows as Gallatin’s predecessor and Washington’s treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, who viewed limited debt as a blessing because it enabled the government to borrow money it could use immediately, while tying men of capital to the nation’s financial future.14 He called debt the “price of liberty.” Hamilton, certainly a big-government advocate by any standard, nevertheless has earned something of a bum rap by conservatives in that he first and foremost called for limitations on government borrowing that would seem draconian by today’s standards. His recommendation in his 140,000-word Report on Public Credit (1790) that all national debt be processed through a “sinking fund,” in which state debts assumed by the federal government were subordinated to a new lower-yield debt, thus gradually reduced the overall debt burden of the nation. Hamilton also excelled when it came to appreciating the motivations of investors, offering lenders a menu of bond options so as to encourage the wealthy to ally with the young Republic, ranging from original debt at 6 percent to new funded debt options available at 4 percent.15 But the notion that Hamilton favored unending debt is ludicrous: he advocated extinguishing the debt “in the very first communication” which he ever made on the subject, called debt “perhaps the NATURAL DISEASE of all governments,” and as biographer Ron Chernow notes, Hamilton’s “warnings about oppressive debt vastly outnumber his paeans to public debt as a source of liquid capital.”16

  At the time, it wasn’t necessary for individual politicians to resist “big government” because the system the Founders had established fought against it in myriad ways on its own. One important restriction came in the requirement that most voters still had to own property, hence they were reluctant to suffer high taxes or accept burdensome regulations. Property requirements also ensured high voter turnout because voters had a stake in the system. However, the single most energizing and galvanizing characteristics of elections prior to 1824 that ensured voter participation were ideas as embodied in the presence of competitive parties. Richard McCormick, who produced seminal works on the early party systems, published a classic article in the American Historical Review (1960) in which he found that voter participation commonly reached 70 percent of the adult white males in states where there were competitive parties (but under 50 percent where one party dominated). Even he noted “curious exceptions” in the case of Alabama (one 1819 election reported 97 percent turnout) and Tennessee (an 1817 election netted 80 percent turnout).17 McCormick rejected notions that simply adding more turnout made the process any more “democratic,” noting, “I have the impression that the ‘new’ voters tended to divide between the two parties in much the same proportion as the ‘old’ voters.”18 His classic study of North Carolina and New York voters in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review revealed “whether or not a man owned fifty acres or more of land seemingly had little or no influence on his party affiliation,” leading him to conclude, “It does not appear that the liberalization of the franchise had any measurable effect on the relative strength of the contending parties. . . .”19

  A second feature of the early “first” (pre-Van Buren) party system was that it seemed to provide a means to express the will of the majority and to enable conflicting sides to settle their differences peaceably.20 No event better captured this spirit than Jefferson’s ascension to the White House in 1800—a first-of-its-kind election in which the loser, John Adams, not only relinquished power without a fight, but an entire governing philosophy was removed and another substituted for it without a single bayonet being brandished. 21 Nevertheless, the notion that the contentious issue of slavery could be resolved without a major struggle was an illusion, reinforced by the fact that until 1820 the nation had escaped any serious discussion of the issue. Moreover, until 1820, the mechanisms by which the tensions between individuals and groups were worked out within the American political process relied heavily on deferential politics, in which elites in the state legislatures (and, to a lesser degree, in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate) spoke for the “common man.” To some degree, rabble-rousers, rebels, and ambitious newcomers were routed into the state organizations with low-level appointments and thus somewhat neutralized and co-opted by the system. They could work their way up the ladder, and over a long period of time join the governing elites, or they could seek to overturn the system by appealing to the electorate directly. For the most part, that was a difficult row to hoe: the state electoral structures were extensively decentralized. In short, everything was built to resist rapid change.

  Politicians recognized that promoting their constituents’ interests automatically gained the support of some and the antagonism of others. Thus, choices had to be made on policy grounds, and since votes were needed to enact those policies, legislators took a keen interest in the outcome of congressional elections. The ability of a New Jersey congressman to deliver favorable policies for his constituents depended in part on the successful election of like-minded men in Delaware and Georgia who would vote with him on bills in Congress. Consequently, within twenty years of the Constitutional Convention, state races were already becoming nationalized, with implications for citizens in every state.

  Still another development involved the growing importance of the presidency as a politically symbolic lightning rod for all policy outcomes. After Washington’s two elections, however—in which he was the obvious choice—it became easier to associate legislation with an individual president than with dozens of legislators whom no one recognized. By identifying the cause of faction itself as liberty—the desire of people to express their opinions and join with like-minded people in that effort—Madison had to admit that “the latent causes of faction are . . . sown in the nature of man” because different abilities led to different outcomes. The only alternative, however, was an unconstitutional and undesirable restraint of freedom of association. As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in his dissent in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, “The Framers preferred a political system that harnessed such faction for good, preserving liberty while also ensuring good government. Rather than adopting the repressive ‘cure’ for faction that the majority today endorses, the Framers armed individual citizens with a remedy.”22 (The Court as a whole disagreed with Thomas, upholding the Buckley v. Valeo limitations on campaign contributions as “property . . . not speech.”) The remedy to which Thomas alluded was a regular vote and, as Madison put it, letting “ambition counteract ambition” through competing factions.23

  Over time, the American Left came to argue that factions were necessary to protect minorities. In 1982, Garry Wills, for example, claimed:Minorities can make use of dispersed and staggered governmental machinery to clog, delay, slow down, hamper, and obstruct the majority. But these weapons for delay are given to the minority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character; and they can be used against the majority irrespective of its factious or nonfactious character. What Madison prevents is not faction, but action. What he protects is not the common good but delay as such.24

  But as soon as liberal administrations became the dominant political culture in Ameri
ca, and when it was convenient for liberalism to benefit from the absence of competition, liberals abruptly made a U-turn. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent to the California Democratic Party v. Jones (2000) case, which set up a blanket primary (as opposed to a closed, “partisan,” primary), wrote that “Parties ranked high on the list of evils that the Constitution was designed to check.”25 To sum up, parties and factions were good for liberals when they worked on behalf of liberal interest groups, but as soon as partisanship began to work against liberals, suddenly factions made the evil hit list.

  Between 1800 and 1840, the variable most likely to bring out voters, particularly for presidential elections, was a highly contested race that elevated different ideas. Washington’s party, the Federalists, had lost their clout in the War of 1812, then completely disappeared by 1816, essentially leaving America a one-party state, and the result was predictable—voters didn’t care. McCormick found that in the 1824 election, for example, none of the eighteen states that had electors chosen by popular vote reached the percentage of voter participation that they had witnessed before 1824.26 The significance of Andrew Jackson’s unsuccessful presidential run in 1824, then his election in 1828, came in the fact that for the first time in years, a “sharp cleavage in almost every state” appeared, which is to say that partisan competition resurfaced.27 As flamboyant a character as Old Hickory was, “Jacksonian democracy” had more to do with a fundamental reordering of the American political structure than it did with any of Jackson’s ideas or policies. Nor did Jackson himself cause people to flock to the polls, contrary to the hyperbole of historian Charles Beard, who claimed democracy “foamed perilously near the crest.”28