American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For a time, prospects in Congress for the Independent Treasury, as it was called, seemed auspicious. Van Buren made the proposed divorce of Treasury and bank a party issue, and the Democrats seemed firmly in control of both chambers. In the Senate, Silas Wright, the plain-spoken Regency leader and longtime cohort of Van Buren, presided over the Finance Committee. In the House, another young New Yorker and ally of the President’s, Churchill C. Cambreleng, chaired the Committee on Ways and Means, and loyalist James Polk was Speaker. On the face of it, moreover, the Independent Treasury bill seemed the answer to a Democrat’s prayers. It carried on the hard-money tradition of the party; it blunted the charge that the Democrats were unduly influenced by state banks; it refreshed the Democrats’ claim that they spoke for the great number of people. Thus Cambreleng argued that the bill would keep the government “in the hands of the planting, farming, and laboring classes and save it from becoming a mere gambling machine to fill the country as in England with ‘palaces, poorhouses, and prisons.’ ”

  Led by their forensic gladiators, Clay and Webster, the Whigs put up a furious resistance to Democratic dogma. Not only did they offer specific arguments that the Independent Treasury bill would draw specie out of circulation, unduly restrict loans and credits, and of course provide the Democrats with more patronage jobs. They maintained that government had positive obligations to help the people—to establish and maintain a sound currency, to secure and stabilize the nation’s financial system, and certainly not, in Webster’s words, to confine the constitutional obligation of government to the “mere regulation of the coins” and the care of its own revenues. He felt that “this could not be America when I see schemes of public policy proposed…leaving the people to shift for themselves. …”

  In the end, though, it was Democrats rather than Whigs who doomed the divorce of state and bank. All along Van Buren had been forced to fight a rearguard action against a group of Democratic Conservatives who were clinging stubbornly to old Jacksonian hard-money positions. Led by Senator William Cabell Rives, a patrician Jeffersonian from Virginia, and Nathaniel P. Talmadge of New York, the conservatives denounced the Independent Treasury as really a new national bank in disguise, a Biddle-type institution that would threaten the rights of the states. The divorce bill passed the Senate by a comfortable vote, but failed in the House as Democratic conservatives voted with the Whig opposition. In two years an Independent Treasury bill would pass both houses and receive Van Buren’s signature, but by then it would be too late for the President and his party.

  Somehow Van Buren had failed to find a transcending issue in the economic crisis, one that would raise Congress and the people above the lesser questions dividing them in order to grapple with the kind of central question—or visible enemy—that Jackson had so brilliantly dramatized. Van Buren had found himself harmonizing myriad factions that could not easily be brought together, mediating among ideologies that did not want conciliation. Democrats were split sectionally, doctrinally, ideologically; even the small band of conservatives were divided. Some of the financial issues, hideously complex, were easy prey to facile simplification and demagoguery. And looming ominously over all the debate was the old, unresolved, and bitter issue of states’ rights, and behind that, the question of slavery.

  A Calhoun Democrat from South Carolina, Francis Pickens, stoked the suppressed fire when he was allowed to give the first speech in the House on Van Buren’s Treasury scheme. Expected to reiterate Calhoun’s defense of the divorce bill in the Senate, the thirty-two-year-old congressman almost ignored the Treasury bill and, as “if drawn by some ineluctable force,” in James Curtis’ words, went on to a tirade against the North and a passionate defense of slavery. The whole banking system in the North, he declared, “is a political substitute for the standing armies of Europe.…We are not compelled to resort to those artificial institutions of society by which non-slave-holding regions seek to delude and deceive their victims. No, Sir, we avow to the world that we own our black population, and we will maintain that ownership, if needs be, to the last extremity!” Few in the House that day could have doubted the resolution of this young owner of several hundred slaves.

  He could see in Jackson an approaching tyranny, Henry Clay had cried out during his Senate call for the censure of the President. “The land is filled with spies and informers; and detraction and denunciation are the orders of the day.…The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress do not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on.…”

  Every senator knew what Clay was talking about. Jackson had indeed swept into Washington like a tropical tornado. By the end of his two terms not only did Clay’s censure resolution lie expunged but Jackson had forced on Congress the key policies he wanted and vetoed those he did not; his twelve vetoes, indeed, would serve as the presidential record until the regime of the beleaguered Andrew Johnson. Jackson was no less a tornado to his Cabinet, breaking and remaking it almost at will, or to the bureaucracy, forcing officials out of office and putting his own men in. He got rid of one Vice-President and chose a new one, and even in the most delicate area of all, “states’ rights,” he recognized the claims of Georgia and denied those of South Carolina.

  Andrew Jackson was one of the nation’s “strongest” Presidents, most historians agree, and probably one of the six or seven “greatest.” Some observers at the time viewed him as a dictator, some as the tool of Kendall or Van Buren or others, and historians have supported both arguments. But it took someone of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insight to write: “Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well as of intellect as of character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” Most of the public at the time saw him either as Tyrant or as Hero; there was little middle ground. The Jacksonian model of the presidency would become for at least a century and a half the model for the “strong” President.

  But for what purposes was the Jackson presidency used? With what results? In terms of what vision or values or fundamental goals? If historians agree about the Jacksonian model of the strong President, they sharply disagree over the central thrust of the Jacksonian leadership. Were the Jacksonians mainly a great coalition of poor farmers and eastern labor against entrenched capitalists? Or were they capitalists themselves, seeking only to share more of the booty of an expanding prosperity? Or were they mainly agrarians, dreaming the Jeffersonian dream of the small, independent, simple yeoman farmer who would constitute the base of a virtuous, limited, decentralized republic—a dream already being punctured by the cotton gin and the steam engine? Above all, was the climactic struggle between Jacksonians-Democrats and Federalists-National Republicans-Whigs a battle between equality and laissez-faire liberty, between People and Property?

  The answers to these questions have been elusive because Jacksonian leaders operated at three levels of political discourse and action, and the middle level—the vital “linking” level—is still hazy and vacuous. At the upper level of rhetoric and declamation, the Jacksonian message came across with power and clarity. To denounce Biddle and the “monster bank,” the southern nullifiers, the Whiggish “aristocrats,” came easily to the “outsiders” and nationalists from the West. Through their rallies and conventions and newspapers, moreover, the Jacksonian leaders knew how to carry their message back to the voters in their communities and homes. Van Buren, indeed, believed in a deliberate strategy of bypassing old party leaders and directly mobilizing the “mass of the parties” in order to substitute out leaders for in.

  At the bottom level, the level of day-to-day policy making and administration, the positions of the Jacksonian leaders were also clear. Absolute opposition to soft money, destruction of the national bank, guarded and opportunistic opposition to high tariffs, limited support of internal improvements, opposition to privileged corporate charters, fear of public debt, doubt about
public enterprise, antagonism to monopoly—these positions were solidified in congressional debate, executive action, party platform, and press. While the Jacksonians often compromised policy in the play of pressure-group and party faction, both their positive and negative policies left an indelible imprint on governance.

  But few Jacksonian leaders had a comprehensive, consistent philosophy that could support a coherent program. Like their Jeffersonian forebears, they believed in liberty and equality, but it was not clear how these supreme values would be achieved—by strengthening government or minimizing it, by curbing business or favoring it, by protecting property or regulating it or destroying it. These general questions became specific options in the everyday consideration of practical policies—questions, for example, of how to deal with what kind of business or property, owned by whom, serving whose interests, with what actual economic or social effects—but explicit, substantive principles to guide these options were deficient. Jacksonianism was full of ambiguities. Thus a powerful belief in laissez-faire gripped the Jacksonian leadership, as it had the Jeffersonian. But these agrarian individualists feared business power as much as they did governmental. “Instead of setting man free,” Amos Kendall said, business power had “only increased the number of his masters.”

  Jacksonian confusion over philosophy and program was reflected in his veto message returning the recharter bill to Congress. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” the President said. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions.” He inveighed against governmental award of exclusive privileges that would “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.…” He went on: “There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.” But how turn government, which the Jacksonians controlled, into at least a qualified blessing? Should the government give special protection to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” as Jackson called them, if Heaven and nature and the rich alike did not?

  So in the end, the Jacksonian “wind from the west” blew noisily but left the structure of American capitalism largely intact. Nor did it move that other citadel of power, the slavocracy. Jackson and Van Buren carried the old North-South axis of the Republican party into the Democratic—the alliance built largely by Virginians and New Yorkers and devoted to Jeffersonian agrarianism, individual liberty, states’ rights, and non-interference with liberty. Western leaders and voters did not upset this political balance; rather they fortified it. Thus the southern Democrats were left with a veto against any effort, gradual or radical, to curb slavery and possibly head off an explosion. Such was the price of Democratic party union, the price of national Union—a price that could not yet be calculated.

  The Whigs were hardly more coherent in their own political philosophy, in part because as a party of opportunistic anti-Jacksonians they took on much of the ideological eclecticism of their Jacksonian opponents, a movement originally of opportunistic outsiders, as the two parties tangled—and became entangled—with each other. Like the Democrats, Whigs could deliver grand rhetoric through the mouths of their Websters and Clays, and like the Democrats, they advanced a spate of concrete policies. But the middle, linking level was absent here too. If the Jacksonian leaders lacked a foundation of philosophical radicalism, the Whigs lacked that of philosophical conservatism. The materials of a class system—the aristocracies, peasantries, and proletariats—that had empowered European ideologies were absent in the United States; much of the combat on the American terrain lined up entrepreneurs against entrepreneurs. No wonder Louis Hartz was reminded of “two boxers, swinging wildly, knocking each other down with accidental punches.”

  Still, Jacksonianism embodied an explosive force that Whiggism lacked. The Democratic leaders posed democracy itself as the ultimate issue and pitched their appeal to the masses. Jackson as an outsider “went to the people,” and as a popular hero he easily mobilized support from the masses. Van Buren contended that those “who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the face of the universe.” By the people the Jacksonian leaders still meant “adult white men only,” of course, but within those limits they were willing to guide and to follow the popular will as they defined it.

  Sustained rhetoric, if honestly meant, has its own impact; orators may come to believe in what they say. As the leaders continued to apotheosize Mankind, the People, Popular Rule, the Majority of the People, and all the other targets of their windy appeals, they bound themselves politically and morally to respond to new popular majorities mobilizing behind rising new leaders.

  Thus the Jacksonians were forced to look ahead. The Whigs, more skeptical of popular rule, more cautious about extending the suffrage to poorer persons, were less captive to their own rhetoric about Mankind. Hostile to presidential power, they rejected the kind of majority rule that could be most directly implemented through a plebiscitary presidency. They had a powerful rhetorical appeal of their own in “Liberty and Union,” but their notions of liberty were as cloudy as their foes’, and the two parties matched each other in their nationalistic appeals. During the 1830s the Whigs could find no national coalition builder to match Jackson or even Van Buren; indeed, they lost their own intellectual hero when John Marshall, still Chief Justice, died in July 1835.

  It was said that the great bell in Philadelphia’s old State House—the bell that proclaimed “Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof”—was overtaxed as it tolled Marshall’s obsequies, leading to the fatal crack that appeared a decade later on Washington’s birthday. Symbolists could make of this what they wished. With his belief in national power, an independent judiciary, limited suffrage, rights of property, gradual abolition of slavery (while recognizing its constitutional validity), the old Federalist had become the Perfect Whig. Like the Whigs, he believed in “Liberty and Union,” in “ordered liberty,” but on the relation between these two—in a clear definition of these values in all their dimensions and amplitude, on the way in which these values could be realized so that they would broaden and strengthen rather than vitiate each other—on these matters of principle and purpose the Whig leadership was as divided and nebulous as were the Jacksonian leaders on the relationship of Liberty and Equality.

  Lacking the political and intellectual leadership in either party that could engage with these transcending questions, the “People” one day might have to decide them, but again the question was posed—with ballots or bullets?

  CHAPTER l0

  Parties: The Peoples Constitution

  CHARLES DICKENS WOULD NEVER forget his astonishment when, early, in January 1842, he opened the door of his stateroom on the steam packet Britannia and gazed inside at the tiny chamber hardly bigger than a cab, at the two horsehair seats fixed to the wall, the narrow slabs for sleeping, the pillows no thicker than crumpets. He could not believe that “this utterly impractical, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting house in the city of London.…” The world-famous author of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist suffered more disillusionments as the steam packet encountered terrible January storms that tore the planking out of the paddle wheels and left the usually exuberant Dickens prostrate with seasickness.

  Although the steam packet was a British ship carrying Her Majesty’s mails to Halifax
and Boston, she was also the start of Charles Dickens’ first tour of America, and the start of a long series of disenchantments he would undergo in the New World, of which he expected so much. Lionized on arriving in Boston, he liked much of what he first saw with his imaginative novelist’s eyes—the bright and gay houses with their “very red” bricks and “very white” stone and “very green” blinds and railings; the handsome State House and other public buildings; the quiet and benevolent and rational influence of the “University of Cambridge”; the healthy young factory girls of Lowell, with their serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls, and clogs and pattens; Hartford, where the legislature, Dickens reported gleefully, once had enacted “Blue Laws” that barred a citizen from kissing his wife on Sunday; New Haven, the City of Elms; and finally New York Harbor, “a forest of ships’ masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags.”

  Slowly the disenchantment took over. Dickens made a point of visiting prisons and insane asylums and, while often impressed by American innovations, he was shaken by the plight of the inmates he interviewed. Escorted by police officers, he prowled through the brothels and thieves’ dens of the Five Points section near the Bowery. In Philadelphia he was appalled by a “pioneering” and dreadful system of solitary confinement. His repulsion mounted in Washington, the region of “slavery, spittoons, and senators—all three are evils in all countries,” he wrote later. He was impressed by John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and some “noble specimens” from the West, but he hardly had time for the President of the United States, and he reserved his most impassioned criticism for members of Congress. Did he see an assembly of honest patriots trying to correct some of the vices of the Old World? Not at all.