by Jill Lepore
Yet for all the abiding democratic idealism of the common school movement, it was animated, as well, by nativism. One New York state assemblyman warned: “We must decompose and cleanse the impurities which rush into our midst. There is but one rectifying agent—one infallible filter—the SCHOOL.” And critics suggested that common schools, vaunted as moral education, provided, instead, instruction in regimentation. Common schools emphasized industry—working by the clock. This curriculum led workingmen to voice doubts about the purpose of such an education, with Mechanics Magazine asking in 1834: “What is the education of a common school? Is there a syllable of science taught in one, beyond the rudiments of mathematics? No.”57
Black children were excluded from common schools, leading one Philadelphia woman to point out the hypocrisy of defenders of slavery who based their argument on the ignorance of Americans of African descent: “Conscious of the unequal advantages enjoyed by our children, we feel indignant against those who are continually vituperating us for the ignorance and degradation of our people.” Free black families supported their own schools, like the African Free School in New York, which, by the 1820s, had more than six hundred students. In other cities, black families fought for integration of the common schools and won. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature, urged on by Charles Sumner, made integration mandatory. This occasioned an outcry. The New York Herald warned: “The North is to be Africanized. Amalgamation has commenced. New England heads the column. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” No other state followed. Instead, many specifically passed laws making integration illegal.58
With free schools, literacy spread, and the number of newspapers rose, a change that was tied to the rise of a new party system. Parties come and go, but a party system—a stable pair of parties—has characterized American politics since the ratification debates. In American history the change from one party system to another has nearly always been associated with a revolution in communications that allows the people to shake loose of the control of parties. In the 1790s, during the rise of the first party system, which pitted Federalists against Republicans, the number of newspapers had swelled. During the shift to the second party system, which, beginning in 1833, pitted Democrats against the newly founded Whig Party, not only did the number of newspapers rise, but their prices plummeted. The newspapers of the first party system, which were also known as “commercial advertisers,” had consisted chiefly of partisan commentary and ads, and generally sold for six cents an issue. The new papers cost only one cent, and were far more widely read. The rise of the so-called penny press also marked the beginning of the triumph of “facts” over “opinion” in American journalism, mainly because the penny press aimed at a different, broader, and less exclusively partisan, audience. The New York Sun appeared in 1833. “It shines for all” was its common-man motto. “The object of this paper is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of everyone, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY,” it boasted. It dispensed with subscriptions and instead was circulated at newsstands, where it was sold for cash, to anyone who had a ready penny. Its front page was filled not with advertising but with news. The penny press was a “free press,” as James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald put it, because it wasn’t beholden to parties. (Bennett, born in Scotland, had immigrated to the United States after reading Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.) Since the paper was sold at newsstands, rather than mailed to subscribers, he explained, its editors and writers were “entirely ignorant who are its readers and who are not.” They couldn’t favor their readers’ politics because they didn’t know them. “We shall support no party,” Bennett insisted. “We shall endeavor to record facts.”59
During the days of the penny press, Tocqueville observed that Americans had a decided preference for weighing the facts of a matter themselves:
They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to facts and study facts with their own senses. As they do not easily defer to the mere name of any fellow man, they are never inclined to rest upon any man’s authority; but, on the contrary, they are unremitting in their efforts to find out the weaker points of their neighbor’s doctrine.60
The people wished to decide, not only on how to vote, but about what’s true, and what’s not.
I I I.
IF THOMAS JEFFERSON rode to the White House on the shoulders of slaves, Andrew Jackson rode to the White House in the arms of the people. By the people, Jackson meant the newly enfranchised workingman, the farmer and the factory worker, the reader of newspapers. In office, he pursued a policy of continental expansion, dismantled the national bank, and narrowly averted a constitutional crisis over the question of slavery. He also extended the powers of the presidency. “Though we live under the form of a republic,” Justice Joseph Story said, “we are in fact under the absolute rule of a single man.” Jackson vetoed laws passed by Congress (becoming the first president to assume this power). At one point, he dismissed his entire cabinet. “The man we have made our President has made himself our despot, and the Constitution now lies a heap of ruins at his feet,” declared a senator from Rhode Island, “When the way to his object lies through the Constitution, the Constitution has not the strength of a cobweb to restrain him from breaking through it.”61 His critics dubbed him “King Andrew.”
Jackson’s first campaign involved implementing the policy of Indian removal, forcibly moving native peoples east of the Mississippi River to lands to the west. This policy applied only to the South. There were Indian communities in the North—the Mashpees of Massachusetts, for instance—but their numbers were small. James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) was just one in a glut of romantic paeans to the “vanishing Indian,” the ghost of Indians past. “We hear the rustling of their footsteps, like that of the withered leaves of autumn, and they are gone forever,” wrote Justice Story in 1828. Jackson directed his policy of Indian removal at the much bigger communities of native peoples of the Southeast, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Chocktaws, Creeks, and Seminoles who lived on homelands in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, Jackson’s home state.62
The Cherokees devised their own writing system, adopted their own constitution, and began printing their own newspaper, the Phoenix, in 1828. To this campaign, Jackson brought considerable military experience. In 1814, he’d led a coalition of U.S. and Cherokee forces against the Creeks. After that war, the Creeks ceded more than twenty million acres of their land to the United States. In 1816 and 1817, Jackson then compelled his Cherokee allies to sign treaties selling to the United States more than three million acres for about twenty cents an acre. When the Cherokees protested, Jackson reputedly said, “Look around, and recollect what happened to our brothers the Creeks.”63 But the religious revival interfered with removal. In 1816, evangelicals from the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions began attempting to convert the Cherokee, declaring a mission “to make the whole tribe English in their language, civilized in their habits, and Christian in their religion,” a mission that, if accomplished, would seem to defeat the logic of removal in the name of “progress.” Meanwhile, the Cherokee decided to proclaim their political equality and declare their independence as a nation.64
For centuries, Europeans had based their claims to lands in the New World on arguments that native peoples had no right to the land they inhabited, no sovereignty over it, because they had no religion, or because they had no government, or because they had no system of writing. The Cherokees, with deliberation and purpose, challenged each of these arguments. In 1823, when the federal government tried to get the Cherokees to agree to move, the Cherokee National Council replied, “It is the fixed and unalterable determination of this nation never again to cede one foot of land.” A Cherokee man named Sequoyah, who’d fought under Jackson during the Creek War, invented a written form of the Cherokee language, not an alphabet but a syllabary, with one character for every syllable. In 1825, the Cherokee Nation began printing the Phoenix, in both
English and, using the syllabary, in Cherokee. In 1826, it established a national capital, at New Echota (just outside of what’s now Calhoun, Georgia), and in 1827 the National Council ratified a written constitution.65
South Carolina–born John C. Calhoun, Monroe’s secretary of war, pressed them: “You must be sensible that it will be impossible for you to remain, for any length of time, in your present situation, within the limits of Georgia, or any other State.” To whch the Cherokees replied: “We beg leave to observe, and to remind you, that the Cherokees are not foreigners, but original inhabitants of America; and that they now inhabit and stand on the soil of their own territory; . . . and that they cannot recognize the sovereignty of any State within the limits of their territory.”66
Jacksonians argued that, in the march of progress, the Cherokees had been left behind, “unimproved,” but the Cherokees were determined to call that bluff by demonstrating each of their “improvements.” In 1825, Cherokee property consisted of 22,000 cattle, 7,600 horses, 4,600 pigs, 2,500 sheep, 725 looms, 2,488 spinning wheels, 172 wagons, 10,000 plows, 31 grist mills, 10 sawmills, 62 blacksmith shops, 8 cotton gins, 18 schools, 18 ferries, and 1,500 slaves. The writer John Howard Payne, who lived with Cherokees in the 1820s, explained, “When the Georgian asks—shall savages infest our borders thus? The Cherokee answers him—‘Do we not read? Have we not schools? churches? Manufactures? Have we not laws? Letters? A constitution? And do you call us savages?’”67
They might have prevailed. They had the law of nations on their side. But then, in 1828, gold was discovered on Cherokee land, just fifty miles from New Echota, a discovery that doomed the Cherokee cause. When Jackson took office, in March 1829, he declared Indian removal one of his chief priorities and argued that the establishment of the Cherokee Nation violated Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution: “no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State” without that state’s approval.
Jackson’s Indian Removal Act aroused the ire of reformers and revivalists. David Walker had argued that Indian removal was just another version of the “colonizing trick.” Catharine Beecher, disavowing public speaking but advocating letter-writing, led an effort to submit a female petition opposing Indian removal to Congress. After considerable debate, the bill narrowly passed, the vote falling along sectional lines, New Englanders voting 28–9 against and southerners 60–15 in favor in the House while, in the Senate, New Englanders voted nearly uniformly against, and southerners unanimously in favor. The middle states were more divided. And yet the debate itself had raised, for everyone, broader questions about the nature of race, one senator from New Jersey inquiring, “Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the skin?”68
There remained the matter of the lawfulness of the act, and the question of its enforcement. The Cherokees argued that the state of Georgia had no jurisdiction over them, and the case went to the Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Chief Justice John Marshall said, “If courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined.” In his opinion, Marshall fatefully defined the Cherokee as “domestic dependent nations,” a new legal entity—not states and not quite nations, either. In another case the next year, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Marshall elaborated: “The Cherokee Nation, then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, . . . in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter. . . . The Acts of Georgia are repugnant to the Constitution, laws, and treaties of the United States.”69
In New England, Marshall’s decision led tribes like the Penobscots and the Mashpees to press for their own independence. In 1833, the Mashpee people published An Indian’s Appeal to the White Men of Massachusetts, arguing, “As our brethren, the white men of Massachusetts, have recently manifested much sympathy for the red men of the Cherokee nation . . . we, the red men of the Mashpee tribe, consider it a favorable time to speak. We are not free. We wish to be so.”70 Marshall’s rulings in the Cherokee cases—which touched on the nature of title—inevitably occasioned a pained discussion about the European settlement of North America and the founding of the United States. In 1835, Edward Everett, a Massachusetts legislator who’d led the fight against Indian removal in Congress, balked at the hypocrisy of northern writers and reformers: “Unless we deny altogether the rightfulness of settling the continent,—unless we maintain that it was from the origin unjust and wrong to introduce the civilized race into America, and that the whole of what is now our happy and prosperous country ought to have been left, as it was found, the abode of barbarity and heathenism,—I am not sure, that any different result could have taken place.”71 Jackson agreed, asking, “Would the people of Maine permit the Penobscot tribe to erect an independent government within their State?”72
In the end, Jackson decided to ignore the Supreme Court. “John Marshall has made his decision,” he is rumored to have said (the rumor appears to have been a wild one). “Now let him enforce it.”73 The leaders of a tiny minority of Cherokees signed a treaty, ceding the land to Georgia and setting a deadline for removal at May 23, 1838. By the time the deadline came, only 2,000 Cherokees had left for the West; 16,000 more refused to leave their homes. U.S. Army General Winfield Scott, a fastidious career military man from Virginia known as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” arrived to force the matter. He begged the Cherokees to move voluntarily. “I am an old warrior, and have been present at many a scene of slaughter,” he said, “but spare me, I beseech you, the horror of witnessing the destruction of the Cherokees.” On the forced march 800 miles westward and, by Jefferson’s imagining, backward in time, one in four Cherokees died, of starvation, exposure, or exhaustion, on what came to be called the Trail of Tears. By the time it was over, the U.S. government had resettled 47,000 southeastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi and acquired more than a hundred million acres of land to the east. In 1839, in Indian Territory, or what is now Oklahoma, the Cherokee men who’d signed the treaty were murdered by unknown assassins.74
By then, Jackson’s two terms in office had come to an end. But during the years he occupied the White House, between 1829 and 1837, ignoring a decision made by the Supreme Court had been neither the last nor the least of Andrew Jackson’s assertions of presidential power. Especially fraught was Jackson’s relationship with his first vice president, John C. Calhoun, Monroe’s former secretary of war, a fellow so stern and unyielding that one particularly shrewd observer dubbed him “cast-iron man.”75 Calhoun had served as John Quincy Adams’s vice president, too, and his relationship with Jackson had been strained from the start. Matters worsened when Calhoun led South Carolina’s attempt to “nullify” a tariff established by Congress. Like the struggle over Indian removal, the debate over the tariff stretched the limits of the powers of the Constitution to hold the states together.
One night in 1832, at a formal dinner, Jackson and Calhoun battled the matter out over drinks. The president offered a toast to “Our federal Union—it must be preserved.” After Jackson sat down, Calhoun rose from his seat to offer his own toast: “The Union—next to our liberty, the most dear; may we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states.” The much lesser political skills of former New York governor Martin Van Buren, also at the dinner that night, were in evidence when he rose to give a third toast, to “mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession.”76 Between Jackson and Calhoun, there would be no forbearance, and very little concession.
Although the tariff cut the duty on imports in half, it still worried southerners, who argued that it put the interest of northern manufacturers above southern agriculturalists. The South provided two-thirds of American exports (almost entirely in the form of cotton) and consumed only one-tenth of its imports, leading its politicians to oppose the tariff by endorsing a position that came to be called “free trade.”77
To protest the tariff, Calhoun wrote a
treatise on behalf of the South Carolina legislature in which he developed a theory of constitutional interpretation under which he argued that states had the right to declare federal laws null and void. Influenced by the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves, drafted by Jefferson and Madison in 1798, and also by the Hartford Convention, in 1812, in which northern states had threatened to secede from the Union over their opposition to the war with Britain, Calhoun argued that if a state were to decide that a law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, the Constitution would have to be amended, and if such an amendment were not ratified—if it didn’t earn the necessary approval of three-quarters of the states—the objecting state would have the right to secede from the Union. The states had been sovereign before the Constitution was ever written, or even thought of, Calhoun argued, and they remained sovereign. Calhoun also therefore argued against majority rule; nullification is fundamentally anti-majoritarian. If states can secede, the majority does not rule.78