These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  Andrew Jackson’s 1824 bid for the presidency introduced all manner of paraphernalia, including this campaign sewing box.

  Paper ballots were in general use by the 1820s, usually in the form of “party tickets” for an entire slate of candidates, like this Democratic Party ticket from Ohio in 1828. As the kind of people who could vote changed, so did the method of voting. Early paper voting had been unwieldy and inconvenient; voters were expected to bring to the polls a scrap of paper on which they could write the names of their chosen candidates. With the electorate expanding, this system became even more impractical. Party leaders began to print ballots, usually in partisan newspapers, usually in long strips, listing an entire slate as a “party ticket.” The ticket system consolidated the power of the parties and contributed to the expansion of the electorate: party tickets meant that voters didn’t need to know how to write or even how to read; each party ticket was printed on a different color paper, and each was stamped with a party symbol.

  In 1824, Jackson won both the popular vote and a plurality, though not a majority, of the electoral vote. The election was thrown to the House, which chose John Quincy Adams after Henry Clay threw his support behind him. Adams then appointed Clay his secretary of state. Jefferson wrote to John Adams to congratulate him on his son’s election. Having retired from politics, the two men had renewed the friendship of their youth. “Every line from you exhilarates my spirits,” Adams replied.75

  Jackson, furious at what he deemed a “corrupt bargain,” resigned from the Senate in 1825, returned to the Hermitage, and bided his time while the electorate swelled. Between 1824 and 1828, it more than doubled, growing from 400,000 to 1.1 million. Men who had attended the constitutional convention in 1787 shook their gray-haired heads and warned that Americans had crowned a new monarch, King Numbers.76

  ON JULY 4, 1826, the United States celebrated its jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In cities and towns, Americans paraded and sang and raised glasses and listened to speeches. Many of those speeches celebrated the new spirit of democracy, the defeat of the contempt for the people that had been part of the nation’s founding. “There may be those who scoff at the suggestion that the decision of the whole is to be preferred to the judgment of the enlightened few,” said the historian George Bancroft, speaking in Boston. “They say in their hearts that the masses are ignorant; that farmers know nothing of legislation; that mechanics should not quit their workshops to join in forming public opinion. But true political science does indeed venerate the masses.” The voice of the people, Bancroft insisted, “is the voice of God.”77

  Nothing more clearly marked the end of the founding era than the coincidence of the deaths of two men, on that very day: Thomas Jefferson, the pen of the Declaration, and John Adams, the voice of independence. Adams, ninety, died at his home in Massachusetts. “He breathed his last about 6 o’clock in the afternoon,” reported one newspaper, “while millions of his fellow-countrymen were engaged in festive rejoicings at the nation’s jubilee, and in chanting praises to the immortal patriots whose valour and virtue accomplished their country’s freedom and independence.”78 He had been declining for years. He’d lost his teeth and his eyesight. He slept in an overstuffed armchair in his library, in a dressing coat and a cotton cap, surrounded by his books; he left them, in his will, to his son John Quincy. Cannons fired on the Fourth were nearly drowned out by the sound of thunder, an afternoon storm. Having been carried to his bed, Adams stirred and whispered, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” At twenty past six, he died. But in Virginia, Jefferson, eighty-three, had died at ten minutes before one.

  In a will that Jefferson had made months before, he’d freed the last two of his children with Sally Hemings, Madison and Eston; he did not mention Sally. Invited to celebrate the Fourth of July in Washington, Jefferson had instead sent a letter of regret, and words upon the day, celebrating this self-evident truth: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” He was dying. Suffering and in pain, he’d been dosed with laudanum. He’d slept through most of July 2 and July 3 and then refused the medicine. He died on the Fourth, while the bells in nearby Charlottesville tolled the anniversary of American independence.

  Sally Hemings’s brother John built Jefferson’s coffin. Six months later, to pay his debts, Jefferson’s entire estate, including 130 slaves, was sold at an auction. The Fossett children, cousins of Sally Hemings’s, were among the “130 VALUABLE NEGROES” sold to the highest bidder.79 Hemings, fifty-three years old, was appraised at fifty dollars, but she was not sold at auction; she had, by then, quietly left Monticello for Charlottesville, where she lived until her death. From Monticello, she brought with her a pair of Jefferson’s eyeglasses to remember him by—a man of sight, and of blindness.80

  Their daughter Harriet Hemings was twenty-seven and still living in Washington in 1828 when Andrew Jackson finally defeated John Quincy Adams, in an election that marked the founding of the Democratic Party, Jackson’s party, the party of the common man, the farmer, the artisan: the people’s party.

  Jackson won a whopping 56 percent of the popular vote. Four times as many white men cast a ballot in 1828 as in 1824. They voted in throngs. They voted by casting ballots, not balls but slips of paper: Jackson tickets, with which they cast their votes for Jackson delegates to the Electoral College, and for an entire slate of Democratic Party candidates. The majority ruled. Watching the rise of American democracy, an aging political elite despaired, and feared that the Republic could not survive the rule of the people. Wrote John Randolph of Virginia, “The country is ruined past redemption.”81

  On a mild winter’s day, March 4, 1829, twenty thousand Americans turned up in Washington for Andrew Jackson’s unruly inauguration. Steamboats from Alexandria offered discounted passage across the Potomac.82 “Thousands and thousands of people, without distinction of rank, collected in an immense mass round the Capitol,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith. Jackson was the first president to deliver his inaugural address to the American people. Following the practice established by Jefferson, he walked to the Capitol instead of riding. Harriet Hemings might have watched, from a sidewalk.

  Jackson’s inauguration in 1829 brought an unprecedented crowd to the Capitol—a crowd that followed him to the White House. John Marshall administered the oath of office. Margaret Bayard Smith said that when Jackson began to speak, “an almost breathless silence, succeeded and the multitude was still, listening to catch the sound of his voice.”

  His voice rising, he celebrated the triumph of numbers. “The first principle of our system,” Jackson said, “is that the majority is to govern.” He bowed to the people. Then, all at once, the people nearly crushed him with their affection. “It was with difficulty he made his way through the Capitol and down the hill to the gateway that opens on the avenue,” Smith reported. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story attended the swearing-in and then left, bemoaning “the reign of KING MOB.”83

  Even after the president mounted a horse, the people followed him. “Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white,” Smith wrote. “Carriages, wagons and carts all pursuing him to the President’s house.” They followed Jackson from the steps of the Capitol all the way to the White House, where, for the first time, the doors were opened to the public. A “rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling fighting, romping,” wrote Smith. “Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses and such a scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe,—those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.” There was a real worry that the people might press the president to death before the day came to an end. “But it was the People’s day,” she wrote, “and the People’s President and the People would rule.”84 The rule of numbers had begun.

  Six

  THE SOUL AND THE MACHINE

  In
the 1830s, railroads emerged as a symbol of progress, pictured, as in this engraving, as if cutting through the wilderness and carrying civilization across the continent.

  MARIA W. STEWART, DARK AND BEAUTIFUL, CARRIED A manuscript tucked under her arm as she picked her way through the cobbled streets of Boston to the offices of the Liberator, at 11 Merchants’ Hall, down by the docks. “Our souls are fired with the same love of liberty and independence with which your souls are fired,” she’d written in an essay she hoped to publish. The descendant of slaves, she’d been born free, in Connecticut, in 1803. Orphaned at five, she’d been bound as a servant to a clergyman till she turned fifteen. In August of 1826, weeks after the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, she’d married a much older man: she was twenty-three; her husband, James W. Stewart, described as “a tolerably stout well-built man; a light, bright mulatto,” had served as a sailor during the War of 1812; captured, he’d been a prisoner of war. “It is the blood of our fathers, and the tears of our brethren that have enriched your soils,” Maria Stewart wrote in her first, revolutionary essay about American history. “AND WE CLAIM OUR RIGHTS.”1

  William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, was two years younger than Stewart. He’d apprenticed as a typesetter and worked as a printer and an editor and failed, again and again, before founding his most radical newspaper. A thin, balding white man, he slept on a bed on the floor of his cramped office, a printing press in the corner; he kept a cat to catch rats. Stewart told Garrison she wished to write for his newspaper, to say what she thought needed saying to the American people. Impressed with her “intelligence and excellence of character,” he later recalled, he published the first of her essays in 1831 in a column called the Ladies’ Department. “This is the land of freedom,” Stewart wrote. “Every man has a right to express his opinion.” And every woman, too. She asked, “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”2

  Stewart was a born-again Christian, caught up in a religious revival that swept the country and reached its height in the 1820s and 1830s in the factory towns that grew like kudzu along the path cut by the Erie Canal, from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, where the power of steam and the anxiety of industrialization were answered by the power of Christ and the assurance of the Gospel. Before the revival began, a scant one in ten Americans were church members; by the time it ended, that ratio had risen to eight in ten.3 The Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher called it “the greatest work of God, and the greatest revival of religion, that the world has ever seen.”4

  The revival, known as the Second Great Awakening, infused American politics with the zealotry of millennialism: its most ardent converts believed that they were on the verge of eliminating sin from the world, which would make possible the Second Coming of Christ, who was expected to arrive in as short a time as three months and to come, not to the holy lands, to Bethlehem or Jerusalem, but to the industrializing United States, to Cincinnati and Chicago, to Detroit and Utica. Its ministers preached the power of the people, offering a kind of spiritual Jacksonianism. “God has made man a moral free agent,” said the thundering, six-foot-three firebrand Charles Grandison Finney.5 And the revival was revolutionary: by emphasizing spiritual equality, it strengthened protests against slavery and against the political inequality of women.

  “It is not the color of the skin that makes the man or the woman,” wrote Stewart, “but the principle formed in the soul.”6 The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.

  I.

  THE UNITED STATES was born as a republic and grew into a democracy, and, as it did, it split in two, unable to reconcile its system of government with the institution of slavery. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, democracy came to be celebrated; the right of a majority to govern became dogmatic; and the right to vote was extended to all white men, developments much derided by conservatives who warned that the rule of numbers would destroy the Republic. By the 1830s, the American experiment had produced the first large-scale popular democracy in the history of the world, a politics expressed in campaigns and parades, rallies and conventions, with a two-party system run by partisan newspapers and an electorate educated in a new system of publicly funded schools.

  The great debates of the middle decades of the nineteenth century had to do with the soul and the machine. One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation’s original sin, the Constitution’s sanctioning of slavery? Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation’s new democratic traditions survive in the age of the factory, the railroad, and the telegraph? If all events in time can be explained by earlier events in time, if history is a line, and not a circle, then the course of events—change over time—is governed by a set of laws, like the laws of physics, and driven by a force, like gravity. What is that force? Is change driven by God, by people, or by machines? Is progress the progress of Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory—the journey of a Christian from sin to salvation? Is progress the extension of suffrage, the spread of democracy? Or is progress invention, the invention of new machines?

  A distinctively American idea of progress involved geography as destiny, picturing improvement as change not only over time but also over space. In 1824, Jefferson wrote that a traveler crossing the continent from west to east would be conducting a “survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day,” since “in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man.” His traveler—a surveyor, at once, of time and space—would begin with “the savages of the Rocky Mountains”: “These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts.” Moving eastward, Jefferson’s imaginary traveler would then stop “on our frontiers,” where he’d find savages “in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting.” Next, farther east, he’d meet “our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization.” Finally, he’d reach the seaport towns of the Atlantic, finding man in his “as yet, most improved state.”7

  Maria Stewart’s Christianity stipulated the spiritual equality of all souls, but Jefferson’s notion of progress was hierarchical. That hierarchy, in Jackson’s era, was the logic behind African colonization, and it was also the logic behind a federal government policy known as Indian removal: native peoples living east of the Mississippi were required to settle in lands to the west. A picture of progress as the stages from “barbarism” to “civilization”—stages that could be traced on a map of the American continent—competed with a picture of progress as an unending chain of machines.

  The age of the machine had begun in 1769, in Glasgow, when James Watt patented an improvement on the steam engine. People had tapped into natural sources of power for manufacturing before—with waterwheels and windmills—but Watt’s models produced five times the power of a waterwheel, and didn’t need to be sited on a river: a steam engine could work anywhere. Watt reckoned the power of a horse at ten times the power of a man; he defined one “horse power” as the energy required to lift 550 pounds by one foot in one second. Powered by steam, manufacturing became, in the nineteenth century, two hundred times more efficient than it had been in the eighteenth century. That this invention would eventually upend political arrangements is prefigured in a likely apocryphal story told at the time about Watt and the king of England. When King George III went to a factory to see Watt’s engine at work, he was told
that the factory was “manufacturing an article of which kings were fond.”8

  What article is that, he asked? The reply: Power.

  There followed machine upon machine, steam-driven looms, steam-driven boats, making for faster production, faster travel, and cheaper goods. Steam-powered industrial production altered the economy, and it also altered social relations, especially between men and women and between the rich and the poor. The anxiety and social dislocation produced by those changes fueled the revival of religion. Everywhere, the flame of revival burned brightest in factory towns.

  Before the rise of the factory, home and work weren’t separate places. Most people lived on farms, where both men and women worked in the fields. In the winter, women spent most of their time carding, spinning and weaving wool, sheared from sheep. In towns and cities, shopkeepers and the masters of artisanal trades—bakers, tailors, printers, shoemakers—lived in their shops, where they also usually made their goods. They shared this living space with journeymen and apprentices. Artisans made things whole, undertaking each step in the process of manufacturing: a baker baked a loaf, a tailor stitched a suit. With the rise of the factory came the division of labor into steps done by different workers.9 With steam power, not only were the steps in the manufacturing process divided, but much of the labor was done by machines, which came to be known as “mechanical slaves.”10