These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  2.Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 29, 38. Garrison’s impressions of Stewart are recorded in a letter he later wrote in support of her widow’s pension application: William Lloyd Garrison to Maria W. Stewart, April 4, 1879, ibid., 89–90.

  3.On the Second Great Awakening, see especially Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Daniel Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  4.Quoted in Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, 1st rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 5.

  5.Ibid., 3.

  6.Maria W. Stewart, “Mrs. Stewart’s Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston,” in Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 70.

  7.Thomas Jefferson to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 20. vols. (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–7), 16:74–76.

  8.Jacob Bigelow, The Useful Arts, 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), 1:18–19.

  9.Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

  10.George B. Ellenberg, Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 146.

  11.Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), ch. 1.

  12.On the business history, see Robert Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).

  13.Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 216–17.

  14.Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 18, 42.

  15.Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 146–47, 155–58.

  16.See Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).

  17.Charles Grandison Finney, Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York: A. S. Barnes & Company, 1876), 20; Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 108, 122.

  18.Ruth Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 138, 210. And on technological determinism in American politics and culture, broadly, see David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Robert Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Robert L. Heilbroner, “Do Machines Make History?,” Technology and Culture 8 (1967): 335–45; Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

  19.Jacob Bigelow, Elements of Technology (Boston, 1829); Jacob Bigelow, An Address on the Limits of Education Read before the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1865), 4. See also Thomas Misa, Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 204; Marx, “The Idea of Technology”; Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 180–81.

  20.Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” Edinburgh Review 49 (June 1829): 457.

  21.Timothy Walker, “A Defense of Mechanical Philosophy,” North American Review 33 (July 1831): 122–27.

  22.Quoted in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: Norton, 2005), 425.

  23.Bancroft quoted in Russel Nye, George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel (New York: Knopf, 1944), 100; Sullivan quoted in New York Morning News, February 27, 1845.

  24.Stewart, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” October 1831, in Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 39.

  25.Quoted in Valerie C. Cooper, Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 4.

  26.Quoted in Richardson, introduction to Maria W. Stewart, 14.

  27.Benjamin Rush to John Adams, June 15, 1789, in The Letters of Benjamin Rush, ed. L. H. Butterfield, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 1:516.

  28.James Madison to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, “A Memorial and Remonstrance,” ca. June 20, 1785, in The Papers of James Madison, Congressional Series, ed. J. C. A. Stagg et al., 17 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 8:301.

  29.Article 11, Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli, November 4, 1796, in Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, ed. Hunter Miller, 8 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1931–48), 2:365.

  30.Stewart, “Cause for Encouragement” in Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, 43.

  31.Lyman Beecher, “Lecture VII: The Republican Elements of the Old Testament,” in Lectures on Political Atheism and Kindred Subjects (Boston, 1852), 189.

  32.Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 4.

  33.Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series, 10:226.

  34.William Lloyd Garrison, “Address to the Colonization Society,” July 4, 1829, in Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1852), 53.

  35.Richardson, Maria W. Stewart, introduction.

  36.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 221; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 41–42, 152–54; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), ch. 5.

  37.Douglas R. Egerton and Robert L. Paquette, eds., The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017). See also Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (2001): 915–76.

  38.Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal (New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848), vi.

  39.Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827.

  40.David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, September 28, 1829 (Boston, 1829), 73–74, 18, 66, 55, 47, 28, 21, and 27. See also David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), introduction. And, on the idea of the “colored citizen,” see Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 28–40.

  41.David Walker’s Appeal, ed. Hinks, xiv–xxv.

  42.Ibid., xxxix–xl; The Liberator [Boston, Massachusetts], January 1, 1831.

  43.The Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents, 2nd ed., ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (1831; Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2017), 44; James M’Dowell Jr., Speech of James M’Dowell Jr. (of Rockbridge) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on the Slave Question (Richmond: Thomas W. White, 1832), 29.

  44.Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1956), 2:256.

  45.Quoted in Stefan M. Wheelock, Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), ch. 4.

  46.William Lloyd Garrison, “Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Convention, December 6, 1833,” in Selections from the Writings of William Lloyd Garrison, 70.

  47.Catherine Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty of American Females (Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837), 121.

  4
8.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 356–57, 419–20; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 539–40.

  49.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 283; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 238.

  50.Quoted in Carl N. Degler, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, [1959] 1970), 275–76.

  51.Quoted in Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 80.

  52.Quoted in Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Random House, 1973), 257.

  53.Samuel F. B. Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration (New York, 1835), 28. And on Morse, see Jill Lepore, A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), ch. 6.

  54.Quoted in Daniel J. Czitrom, Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 11–12.

  55.Barnet Schecter, The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America (New York: Walker & Company, 2005), 78.

  56.On the common school movement, see Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic; Ira Katznelson and Margaret Weir, Schooling for All: Class, Race, and the Decline of the Democratic Ideal (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

  57.Quoted in Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 163, 139.

  58.Ibid., 176, 179.

  59.Christopher B. Daly, Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 59–63; Michael Schudson, Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity in the Professions: Studies in the History of American Journalism and American Law, 1830–1940 (PhD dissertation, 1976; New York: Garland, 1990), 36–40.

  60.Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:42.

  61.Joseph Story to Judge Fay, February, 18, 1834, in The Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 2:154. Asher Robbins quoted in Michael G. Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (1986; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 50.

  62.Joseph Story, A Discourse Pronounced at the Request of the Essex Historical Society on the 18th of September, 1828, in Commemoration of the First Settlement of Salem (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, Little, and Wilkins, 1828), 74–75. On Indian removal see Ronald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975); Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Theda Perdue, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York: Viking, 2007).

  63.“Instructions to a Deputation of Our Warriors . . . to Proceed On and Visit Our Father the President of the United States,” Fortville, Cherokee Nation, September 19, 1817, in Walter Lowrie and Walter S. Franklin, eds., American State Papers, Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States (Washington, DC: Gale and Seaton, 1834), 145.

  64.Quoted in Althea Bass, Cherokee Messenger (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 31.

  65.On the Cherokees in this era, see William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). On Sequoyah, see Lepore, A is for American, ch. 3.

  66.Response of the Cherokee Council to U.S. Commissioners Duncan G. Campbell and James Meriwether, October 20, 1823, in American State Papers, Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, Indian Affairs, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 2:469; U.S. Commissioners to the Cherokee Chiefs, December 9, 1824, in American State Papers, Indian Affairs, 2:570; and Cherokee Council to U.S. Commissioners, February 11, 1824, in American State Papers, Indian Affairs, 2:474.

  67.John Howard Payne, “The Cherokee Cause [1835],” reprinted in the Journal of Cherokee Studies 1 (1976): 19.

  68.Speech of Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, April 7–9, 1830, in Speeches of the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, Delivered in the Congress of the United States, April and May, 1830 (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), 8.

  69.Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831), and Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832).

  70.An Indian’s Appeal to the White Men of Massachusetts is reprinted in William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. by Barry O’Connell (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 205. And see my discussion of the broader cultural and political context for the Mashpee and Penobscot claims in The Name of War, ch. 7.

  71.Edward Everett, An address delivered at Bloody Brook, in South Deerfield, September 30, 1835 (Boston: Russell, Shattuck, & Williams, 1835), 8, 10–11. And see Edward Everett, “The Cherokee Case,” North American Review 33 (1831): 136–53.

  72.Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message, December 8, 1829.

  73.Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), 204.

  74.Perdue, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears, 139–40. General Winfield Scott, “Extracts from General Orders, or the Address to the Troops,” May 17, 1838, in Memoirs of Lieut.-General Winfield Scott, ed. Timothy D. Johnson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015), 166.

  75.Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 3 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 1:147.

  76.Quoted in Kerry S. Walters, Explosion on the Potomac: The 1844 Calamity Aboard the USS Princeton (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013), 85.

  77.Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, ch. 10.

  78.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 319–22.

  79.Memoirs of General Andrew Jackson Seventh President of the United States (Auburn, NY: James C. Derby & Co., 1845), 202, 208.

  80.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 387, 430.

  81.James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789–1832 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 27–34.

  82.Stan M. Haynes, The First American Political Conventions: Transforming Presidential Nominations, 1832–1872 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 29.

  83.On the Panic of 1837 and the Bank War, see Reginald Charles McGrane, The Panic of 1837: Some Financial Problems of the Jacksonian Era (New York: Russell and Russel, Inc., 1924, 1965); Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Alasdair Roberts, America’s First Great Depression: Economic Crisis and Political Disorder after the Panic of 1837 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).

  84.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 365.

  85.The Correspondence of Nicholas Biddle, ed. Reginald C. McGrane (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919), 93; Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 361.

  86.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 368, 372.

  87.U.S. Senate Journal, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., July 10, 1832.

  88.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 398.

  89.Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A Classic History of America’s Financial Disasters (Washington, DC: Beard Books, [1968, Macmillan], 1999), 38–40, 47.

  90.Andrew Jackson, “Fourth Annual Message,” December 4, 1832.

  91.Speech of Mr. Kennedy, of Indiana, on the Oregon Question Delivered in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1846 (Washington, 1846), 7. Also quoted in Donald William Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2: Continental America, 1800–1867, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 2:222.

  92.Meinig, The Shaping of America, 2:135; Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 12. On the War with Mexico, see, Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). And see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 2006), ch. 7.

  93.Quote
d in Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America (New York: Random House, 2008), 73.

  94.Donald J. Ratcliffe, “Thomas Morris,” American National Biography Online; Thomas Morris, Speech in Reply to the Speech of Henry Clay, February 9, 1839 (New York, 1839).

  95.Haynes, The First American Political Conventions, 1; Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 40.

  96.Frank E. Hagen and Elmo Scott Watson, “The Origin of Ruckerize,” Cambridge [MA] Sentinel, September 12, 1936.

  97.Sobel, Panic on Wall Street, 51, 67.

  98.Bauer, “The Movement Against Imprisonment for Debt.” See also Charles Warren, Bankruptcy in United States History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935); James Ciment, “In the Light of Failure: Bankruptcy, Insolvency and Financial Failure in New York City, 1790–1860”; Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

  99.Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 492–93.

  100.[Richard Hildreth], The People’s Presidential Candidate; or The Life of William Henry Harrison, of Ohio (Boston, 1839), 14–16, 194. Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log Cabin Campaign (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 73–79; 129–33.

  101.Quoted in Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 547. And see Milton C. Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 115.

  102.Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 134; and see Jo Freeman, A Room at a Time: How Women Entered Party Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

  103.Dinkin, Campaigning in America, 33.

  104.Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. A. W. Plumstead, Harrison Hayford, et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 7:482.