These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The forgiveness of debts fostered a spirit of risk taking that fueled American enterprise. Tocqueville marveled at “the strange indulgence which is shown to bankrupts in the United States.” In this, he observed, “Americans differ, not only from the nations of Europe, but from all the commercial nations of our time.” A nation of debtors, Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle and not of fate or divine retribution or the wheel of fortune. The nation’s bankruptcy laws, even as they came and went again, made taking risks less risky for everyone, which meant that everyone took more risks.98

  Martin Van Ruin didn’t stand much of a chance at reelection in 1840. Voters blamed both him and his party for the misery caused by Jackson. The Whigs, unsurprisingly, but in a move that would become characteristic of American campaigning, argued that the Democrats, the so-called party of the people, had in fact failed the people. The Democratic Party, Whigs claimed, had become the party of tyranny and corruption, and the Whigs were the real people’s party. “The Whigs are THE Democrats, if there must be a party by that name,” one Whig insisted.99

  An 1848 cartoon pictured William Henry Harrison as the engine of a train fueled by hard cider and pulling a log cabin while President Martin Van Buren, driving “Uncle Sam’s Cab,” pulled by a blindered horse, stumbles on a pile of (Henry) Clay. For their presidential candidate, the Whigs nominated seventy-two-year-old William Henry Harrison, ran him as a war hero, and tried to pitch him as a Jacksonian man of the people, and even a frontiersman, which required considerable stretching of the truth. Harrison had served as governor of the Indiana Territory, and as a senator from Ohio, but he came from eminent forebears: his father, a Virginia plantation owner, had signed the Declaration of Independence. Writing in 1839, Harrison’s campaign biographer tried, in The People’s Presidential Candidate, to present the staggeringly wealthy Harrison as a humble farmer who had “never been rich.” Harrison exerted himself, delivering, at a hotel in Ohio, the first-ever presidential campaign speech, but his campaign urged him not to say too much. “Let him then rely entirely on the past,” they advised. “Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed—let him say nothing—promise nothing.” Critics dubbed him “General Mum.” Democrats mocked Harrison by suggesting that, so poor as he was, he lived in a log cabin and drank nothing but hard cider. Whigs took this as a political gift. Calling Harrison the “Log Cabin Candidate,” they campaigned in log cabins mounted on wheels and hitched to horses, handing out mugs of hard cider along the road. Harrison, of course, lived in a mansion, but after the log cabin campaign of 1840, few presidential candidates, whether they started out poor or whether they started out rich, failed to run as log cabin candidates.100

  Busy dueling for the mantle of “party of the people,” neither the Whigs nor the Democrats offered a plausible solution to the problem of slavery; they barely addressed it. This led to the founding of new parties, including the evangelical Liberty Party, formed in 1839. “We must abolish slavery,” the party pledged, “& as sure as the sun rises we shall in 5 or 6 years run over slavery at full gallop unless she pulls herself up & gets out of the way of Liberty’s cavalry.” Its bid to evangelical Whigs: “Vote as you pray.”101

  The religious revival that had brought women into moral reform also carried them into politics. In the 1820s and 1830s, Jacksonian democracy involved a lot of brawls. When the reformer Fanny Wright tried to attend a convention in 1836, she was called a “female man.” But while Democrats banned women from their rallies, Whigs welcomed them. In the 1840s, as one contemporary observed, “the ladies were Whigs.”102 Beginning with the Whig Party, long before women could vote, they brought into the parties a political style they’d perfected first as abolitionists and then as prohibitionists: the moral crusade, pious and uncompromising. No election has been the same since.

  During the years that Democrats ran against Whigs, both parties incorporated both Jacksonian populism—the endless appeals to “the people”—and the spirit of evangelical reform (campaign rallies borrowed their style and zeal from revival meetings). Walt Whitman complained about “the neverending audacity of elected persons,” damning men in politics as members of the establishment, no matter their appeals to the people. But those appeals were hardly meaningless: undeniably, the nature of American democracy had changed. Not only were more men able to vote, but more men did vote: voter turnout rose from 27 percent in 1824 to 58 percent in 1838 and to 80 percent in 1840.103

  Harrison won by a landslide. He then promptly died of pneumonia. His vice president and successor, John Tyler, came to be called “His Accidency,” but the log cabin, like the female reformer, proved long-lived. So did the battle for the soul of the nation in an age of machines.

  The United States is “the country of the Future,” Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed in February 1844, rhapsodizing about “a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.” That spring, Samuel F. B. Morse sat at a desk in the chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court and tapped out a message on his new telegraph machine, along wires stretched between Washington and Baltimore, paid for by Congress. His first message, in a code no longer secret: “What hath God wrought”? Meanwhile, a railroad line that began in Boston reached Emerson’s hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. “I hear the whistle of the locomotive in the woods,” Emerson wrote in his journal. “It is the voice of the civility of the Nineteenth Century saying, ‘Here I am.’”104

  The United States had been founded as a political experiment; it seemed natural that it should advance and grow through other kinds of experimentation. By December, telegraph wires would be installed along lines cut by train tracks through woods and meadows and even mountains, and Americans began imagining a future in which both the railroad and the telegraph would reach all the way across the continent. “The greatest revolution of modern times, and indeed of all time, for the amelioration of Society, has been effected by the Magnetic Telegraph,” the New York Sun announced, proclaiming “the annihilation of space.”105 Time was being annihilated, too: news spread in a flash. As penny press printer James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald pointed out, the telegraph appeared to make it possible for “the whole nation” to have “the same idea at the same time.” “The progress of the age has almost outstripped human belief,” Daniel Webster said. “The future is known only to Omniscience.”106

  The progress of the age—the rapid growth of the population, the unending chain of machines, and the astonishing array of goods—combined to produce an unceasing and often uneasy fascination with what lay ahead: What next? Political economists, in particular, busied themselves with working out a system for understanding the relationship between the present and the future. In Paris, a philosopher named Karl Marx began making predictions about the consequences of capitalism. He saw in the increase in the production of goods a decrease in the value of labor and a widening inequality between the rich and the poor. “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces,” Marx argued in 1844. “The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.”107 American thinkers pondered this problem, too. Emerson wrote,

  ’Tis the day of the chattel,

  Web to weave, and corn to grind;

  Things are in the saddle,

  and ride mankind.108

  In the United States, the political debate about the world of people and the world of things contributed to the agonized debate about slavery: Can people be things? Meanwhile, the geographical vastness of the United States meant that the anxiety about the machinery of industrial capitalism took the form not of Marxism, with its argument that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” but instead of a romance with nature, and with the land, and with all things rustic. Against the factory, Americans posed not a socialist utopia but the log cabin. “It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin,” Webster, a three-time presiden
tial aspirant, sighed, despairing of his biographical deficiency in the age of the log cabin presidency.109 But the most famous log cabin in nineteenth-century America was the one built in 1844 by Emerson’s twenty-seven-year-old friend Henry David Thoreau.

  The year the railroad reached Concord, Thoreau built a log cabin on a patch of land Emerson owned, on Walden Pond, a kettle pond a little more than a mile outside of town. He dug a cellar at the site of a woodchuck’s burrow. He borrowed an axe and hewed framing timbers out of white pine. “We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making the most rapid strides of any nation,” Thoreau wrote, from the ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin he built over that cellar, at a cost of $28.12. He used the boards from an old shanty for siding. He mixed his own plaster, from lime ($2.40—“that was high”) and horsehair ($0.31—“more than I needed”). He moved in, fittingly, on the Fourth of July. The chimney he built before winter, from secondhand bricks, marked real progress, but he didn’t think the same could be said for the nation’s “rapid strides” and “vast designs.” He had the gravest of doubts about what the machine was doing to the American soul, the American people, and the land itself. The telegraph? “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” The postal system? “I never received in my life more than one or two letters that were worth the postage.” The nation’s much-vaunted network of newspapers? “We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper.” Banks and railroads? “Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts ‘All aboard!’ when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over.”110

  Instead of Marx, America had Thoreau. Thoreau’s experiment wasn’t a business; it was an antibusiness; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything. Instead, he bartered, and lived on 27 cents a week. At his most entrepreneurial, he planted a field of beans and realized a profit of $8.71. “I was determined to know beans,” he wrote in a particularly beautiful and elegiac chapter called “The Bean-Field.” He worked, for cash, only six weeks out of the year, and spent the rest of his time reading and writing, planting beans and picking huckleberries. “Mr. Thoreau is thus at war with the political economy of the age,” one critic complained. Thoreau had chosen not to be ridden by the machine, “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.”111

  One pressing question woke him up every morning, as regularly as the screech of the whistle of the train that chugged by his cabin, on tracks built just up the hill from Walden Pond, where he’d hoped to still his soul. Were all these vast designs and rapid strides worth it? Thoreau thought not. He came to this truth: “They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”112 And still the trains chugged along, and the factories hummed, and the banks opened and closed, and the presses printed newspapers, and the telegraph wires reached across the nation, in one great and unending thrum.

  Seven

  OF SHIPS AND SHIPWRECKS

  In Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting, a crowd gathers on and around the porch of the “American Hotel”—a symbol of the Union—eagerly awaiting the “War News from Mexico.”

  THE DAY ABEL UPSHUR DIED, THE FATE OF THE UNION turned on the question of Texas. On the afternoon of February 28, 1844, Upshur, John Tyler’s secretary of state, boarded the USS Princeton, an iron-hulled, steam-powered warship, for a short trip along the icy waters of the Potomac. Tyler boarded, too, and so did all but one member of his cabinet, along with hundreds more dignitaries, soldiers, and sailors, and invited guests, in top hats and uniforms and snugly buttoned gowns, wrapped in woolen cloaks. James Madison’s aging widow, Dolley, was there, shivering against the wind, along with John C. Calhoun’s young son Patrick, a second lieutenant in the army, and General Juan Almonté, the straight-backed and stalwart Mexican ambassador, his cuffs embroidered with gold, his epaulets like wings.

  The U.S. Senate was about to vote on a treaty to annex Texas, a long-sought land of ranges and plains, of cattle towns and rushing rivers. Upshur, fifty-three and balding, with a broad forehead and a long, slender nose, had stayed up late the night before, counting votes and pondering war. Mexico considered Texas one of its provinces, if a rebelling one. If the Senate approved annexation, Upshur knew, Mexico might well declare war on the United States. Upshur, who, before he became secretary of state, had been secretary of the navy, expected that war to be waged at sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, and he had been building up the fleet, preparing for battle. The USS Princeton was the navy’s most formidable warship; the point of setting forth on the Potomac was to offer—to Almonté—a demonstration of the ship’s fearsome cannon, the largest gun ever mounted on a battleship. It was called the Peacemaker.

  As the ship steamed along the river, the gun was fired three times, each with a thundering, earth-shaking roar. Obeying the orders of the ship’s doctor, the guests kept their hands over their ears and their mouths wide open, to blunt the force of the shock wave. Almonté seemed suitably daunted. There was to be one more display: a salute to George Washington as the great ship steamed past Mount Vernon.1

  Tyler, a gaunt and ungainly man, had staked his presidency on annexation. But his presidency had been weak from the start, and by the time the treaty was drafted, he was a president without a party. A southern aristocrat who despised populism, Tyler had been nominated as Harrison’s running mate because he’d been a vocal critic of both Jackson and Van Buren, and because Whigs hoped he would carry his crucial home state, Virginia. He’d hardly been queried on his politics, nor had voters been informed of them. As one campaign song had it, “We will vote for Tyler therefore / without a why or wherefore.” But Tyler did have political positions, strenuously held: he had long advocated states’ rights. An opponent of the national bank, Tyler didn’t like anything national; he once complained about the signs he saw all over Washington, DC: “National Hotel, National boot-black, National black-smith, National Oyster-house.”2 In April 1841, after Harrison died weeks after his inauguration, Congress had twice passed legislation renewing the charter of the national bank. And twice Tyler had vetoed it. By September, every member of Tyler’s cabinet except his secretary of state, Daniel Webster, had resigned in protest. Two days later, fifty Whig members of Congress gathered on the steps of the Capitol and banished the president from the party. Protesters rallied outside the White House. Fearful for his safety, Tyler had established a presidential police force (it later became the Secret Service). His only respite from the incessant political assault had come during a time of tragedy: his wife, Letitia, suffered a stroke. Having borne eight children, she died in the White House in September 1842. When Charles Dickens met Tyler while on a headlong tour of the United States that year, the novelist wrote that the president “looked somewhat worn and anxious, and well he might; being at war with everybody.”3

  Abel Upshur came to be Tyler’s secretary of war after Webster, the last remaining member of Tyler’s original cabinet, resigned in May 1843 to protest the plan to annex Texas. Webster believed that the Republic was already large enough, and that any extension would diminish the spirit of the Union. How could people so different, spread across thousands of miles, even choose a ruler? He wondered “with how much of mutual intelligence, and how much of a spirit of conciliation and harmony, those who live on the St. Lawrence and the St. John might be expected ordinarily to unite in the choice of a President, with the inhabitants of the banks of the Rio Grande del Norte and the Colorado.”4

  When Webster’s replacement died of a burst appendix, Tyler appointed Upshur. He might have seen something of himself in him. Upshur, like Tyler, w
as a southern aristocrat, disdainful of the people (they “read but little,” he said, “and they do not think at all”). Upshur believed that slavery solved the problem of the tensions between capital and labor by giving even a white man of desperate circumstances a reason to accept the economic order: “However poor, or ignorant or miserable he may be, he has yet the consoling consciousness that there is a still lower condition to which he can never be reduced.”5

  Tyler and Upshur were convinced that the stability of the American republic rested on expansion. The Monroe Doctrine, crafted by John Quincy Adams in 1823, had warned Europeans not to found any new colonies in the Western Hemisphere, partly in order to keep the path clear for Americans. As one British newspaper observed at the time, “The plain Yankee of the matter is that the United States wish to monopolize to themselves the privilege of colonizing . . . every . . . part of the American continent.”6 Nevertheless, Great Britain’s North American territory, acquired long before the Monroe Doctrine, stretched all the way across the continent, while, in the Pacific Northwest, both Britain and the United States claimed the vast swath of land known as the Oregon Territory. Upshur feared Britain was making a bid to extend its borders to the south. Britain had been selling steam-powered warships to Mexico and offering to buy California. Upshur also believed rumors (which turned out to be false) that Britain had offered loans to Texas if it would abolish slavery, with an eye, presumably, to making Texas part of the British Empire, in which slavery had been abolished in 1833. Tyler’s plan was to annex Texas and have it enter the Union as a slave state, with the hope that he could arrange for the admission of Oregon as a free state, maintaining the balance of free states to slave.