American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Bitter quarrels broke out over such issues. The question of including non-workers was especially vexing. Some workers wished to exclude lawyers, bankers, brokers, and employers. Others argued that the crucial factor was a man’s views, not his job. The Philadelphia party decided that while employers might be present at meetings, they should be barred from holding office. But a member complained, “If an employer superintends his own business (still more if he works with his own hands) he is a working man.”

  Resolving such tough strategic questions—questions that have daunted all third parties before and since—required a rare degree of creative leadership, and this the workers’ parties did not possess. Although the various city organizations produced vigorous and committed local leaders, they were heavily localized movements incapable of elevating and supporting leaders who could plan a national strategy and mobilize workingmen behind it. The workers’ parties fell between stools—too inclusive in some places and too exclusive in others, too inexperienced in “practical” politics, too exposed to outside attack, too doctrinaire for some workers and yet too pragmatic for others. But their primary handicap was the readiness of the major parties—especially the Jacksonian Democrats—to appropriate their less controversial and less radical ideas as soon as it became politically expedient to do so. Within a few years the workers’ parties were declining and disappearing almost as quickly as they had arisen.

  If the workers’ parties suffered from too few adequate leaders, radical movements of the day seemed to suffer from too many. Jacksonian leadership hastened popular ferment and protest, especially in New York City, a magnet to rebels looking for ways to spread their heretical ideas. These radicals were united by little but their hatred for the “haves” and their concern for the “have-nots.” In a book, Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth, Langdon Byllesby, contending that the laboring man shared almost none of the goods he produced, denounced both the credit system and labor-saving machinery. Thomas Skidmore attacked property that was not shared equally by the whole community; he urged that all existing land and goods be surrendered to the state and then reallocated equally as part of a “General Division.” Robert Dale Owen, son of the organizer of the innovative but paternalistic factory at New Lanark in Scotland and later of the community of New Harmony in Indiana, edited The Free Inquirer and argued for liberalized divorce laws, education for workers, and a fairer distribution of wealth. Another British native, George H. Evans, founder of the Working Man’s Advocate in New York, preached atheism, land reform, and the rights of wage earners.

  The star of the New York radicals was a dedicated abolitionist, militant anti-cleric, popular lecturer, indefatigable social reformer—and a woman. Frances Wright had lived a remarkable life in Scotland even before she came to New York in 1830 to edit The Free Inquirer with Owen. Left without parents at the age of two, but with a large inheritance, she had traveled and written extensively while still in her teens, visited America in 1818 and again with General Lafayette in 1824, urged her plan of emancipation on Jefferson and Madison, and then carried out her own experiment in emancipation by purchasing slaves in the United States and colonizing them in Tennessee and, later, Haiti.

  She was a tall, slender woman, whom Walt Whitman years later would call one of the sweetest of his memories, “graceful, deer-like…beautiful in bodily shape and gifts of soul.” An eloquent foe of religion and of the influence of the Church in politics, she opposed the existing American educational system based on authority and the denial of equal rights for women. For insisting that the legal obligation of marriage should be replaced by a union based only on moral obligation she was called the “great Red Harlot of Infidelity.”

  Radical leaders in Massachusetts made up an even more variegated group. In the western hinterland of the state, where hard times and recalled mortgages reminded old men of the days of Shays’s Rebellion, Theodore Sedgwick had been a boy of hardly six in Stockbridge when some of Shays’s men ransacked the house of his father, Judge Sedgwick. Deserting his father’s conservative doctrines, except for a common belief in emancipation, the young man became increasingly sympathetic to the needs of wage earners, including improved working conditions, public education, and temperance. He became as committed and outspoken a radical Democrat as the judge had been a conservative Federalist.

  Fifty miles to the northeast, in Northfield, a disillusioned ex-pastor and ex-congressman, Samuel Clesson Allen, who had begun protesting the plight of the local farmers after he quit Congress in 1829, soon discovered—and asserted—that not only farmers but all producing workers were cheated by the diversion of wealth to the wealthy. Poverty, he contended, resulted from artificial limits on production. “The natural limit of production,” he said, “is the wants of the consumers. Till these are supplied there is no reason why production should stop.” Allen had hopes for Jackson’s administration.

  In Northampton, down the Connecticut River from Northfield, another kind of reformer was undergoing political transformation during the early thirties. The son-in-law of a wealthy Springfield capitalist, a Harvard-man, a member of the intellectual elite of Cambridge, George Bancroft had returned to Northampton to found a progressive school, and to write. For a time he played Whiggish politics while espousing radical and working-man doctrines, but then he took a position against Biddle’s bank, deserted the Whig party for good, and declared himself against the moneyed aristocracy, to the consternation of Springfield high society. In Boston a trio of radical Democrats—Frederick Robinson, William Foster, Theophilus Fisk—directed their reformist arguments both at fellow Democrats and at organized workingmen. Another Boston reformer, Robert Rantoul, had started life among Federalist Essexmen, attended Phillips Andover and Harvard, and settled among wealthy Whigs, only to veer sharply toward humanitarianism, Jacksonianism, workers’ rights, free markets, and a kind of genteel moralistic radicalism, including opposition to liquor and capital punishment.

  These men—and this woman—had little in common except a burning sense of injustice. They divided over many social and moral questions; most of them were sympathetic to the wage earner’s plight and took part in workingmen’s parties, but were repelled by the revulsion of many a worker against their radical views on marriage, divorce, religion, women’s rights. Many of them worked closely with the Jackson Democrats but were offended by the compromises and evasions of major-party coalition building and electioneering. Most were high-minded moralizers who had to recognize that they would lose their working-class audiences unless they were also willing to talk the hard language of wages, hours, working conditions, strikes, and boycotts. On one cardinal question the radicals and reformers were united—in economics they were egalitarians. They helped to make equality the burning issue of Jacksonian democracy.

  By the mid-1830s the outcome of the popular thrust toward equality still lay in the balance. Although in everyday social contacts the farmers and workers, having long since given up habits of deference, could mingle with upper-class men on the basis of almost easy familiarity, rich and poor were still separated by class distinctions, income, residing place, and style of life. Genuine equality of opportunity had been dramatically posed by radicals and Jacksonian Democrats as perhaps the transcending national issue, but equality of condition was still sharply limited and perhaps declining under the impact of industrial and agricultural changes. Equality before the law was guaranteed in the constitutions and formally protected in the courts, yet not always realized in concrete situations where poor men were pitted legally against rich. If economic and social and legal equality were, on balance, still largely unrealized in the Jacksonian “Age of Equality,” would the impetus of political equality be likely in the years ahead to broaden the other dimensions of equality?

  Political equality meant that all men and women would have the right to vote. It meant that they would have the right to vote for all elective offices, at every level of government, local, county, state, and federal, on a regular, prescribed basis, at
an appropriate time of year. It meant that the polls would be located reasonably near the voters; that voters would be subjected neither to corruption nor to intimidation; that they could vote in secret—which meant voting by paper ballots rather than orally, and with plain ballots that could be marked, folded, and deposited without anyone but the voter seeing them. It meant, more broadly, that voters could choose among candidates who took clear and forthright positions in competitive contests offering real alternatives, in elections the outcome of which would significantly affect the course of government, economic policy, social change.

  Such political equality barely existed in America before the Revolution. A half century later, it was only partially achieved. It might never be wholly realized. Certain political equalities were hardly conceivable even in Jacksonian days. Women and slaves and Indians could not vote, nor could most freed Negroes in the North. Certain offices—especially the presidency and United States senatorship—were rendered by constitutions only indirectly subject to popular balloting. Certain elections would remain noncompetitive, no matter what the procedures. Even so, political equality was immensely expanded during the half century following the Declaration of Independence.

  The central general issue was whether all adult white males should have the right to vote. The crucial specific issue was whether adult white males without property should have the right to vote. This issue aroused the most pressing philosophical, political, and practical questions. The powerful eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights dictated that the franchise must be considered a fundamental right of all men. If all men were naturally endowed with reason, on what grounds could some be excluded from the process of self-government? In America, where “all men were created equal” and endowed with certain inalienable rights, this question took on a special urgency. Other philosophers argued, however, that only those men with a real and continuing economic stake in a society should vote, that the property-holding middle class must serve as the great stabilizing force, that men without property would, if given the ballot, ultimately turn democracy into dictatorship.

  The practical question was how, if certain men were not allowed to vote, the criteria excluding them should be established. Should men be granted the right to vote on the basis of the money they had, the property they owned, or the taxes they paid? What if a man had property one year and lost it the next—did he lose the right to vote too? Critics of the property requirement liked to tell an old story of Tom Paine’s: “You require that a man shall have sixty dollars’ worth of property, or he shall not vote. Very well, take an illustration. Here is a man who today owns a jackass, and the jackass is worth sixty dollars. Today the man is a voter and he goes to the polls and deposits his vote. Tomorrow the jackass dies. The next day the man comes to vote without his jackass and he cannot vote at all. Now tell me, which was the voter, the man or the jackass?”

  The political question was simpler: if the vote is given to these new voters, are they likely to vote for “our” side or the opposition? Related to this calculation, however, was an ingenious political argument used over and over again and with telling effect by opponents of full male suffrage. The argument was that if the right to vote was extended to the poor, the rich would buy the votes of the poor, and hence extending the vote to the poor was in reality extending it to the rich. Blackstone was solemnly cited as the great authority on the question—Blackstone who said that the “true reason of requiring any qualification with regard to property in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation as to be esteemed to have no will of their own.” This argument was directed particularly against the enfranchising of industrial workers, who were seen as especially vulnerable to pressure from their employers.

  Historians like to tell stories with exciting beginnings and endings, and any chronicler of Jacksonian democracy would wish to picture a mounting grand finale to the Fight for the Ballot, with the villain named Property being undone at the height of the era. In fact, the fight was not one central struggle but thousands of tiny skirmishes in a score or more states over a long stretch of time. Dismantling property restrictions in particular was a lengthy effort, often with three steps forward, one back, and one sidewise. Half a dozen states had adopted suffrage reforms by the end of the Revolutionary era, when poor soldiers had shown that they could fight as bravely as the rich, but three states passed more conservative suffrage requirements. The framers of the Constitution forced suffrage reform into at least thirteen channels by ingeniously providing that members of the new House of Representatives would be elected by those voters eligible to elect the lower houses of the various state legislatures, thus leaving the struggle for the vote largely in the hands of the states.

  Some suffrage restrictions fell during the Jeffersonian era, with its emphasis on equal rights, and during the war with England, when soldiers argued that “if they were good enough to fight they were good enough to vote.” Property requirements were replaced by taxpaying requirements, which in turn gradually faded away. Further extensions of male suffrage were pushed through the states during the Jacksonian era, but in Pessen’s summary, “Well before Jackson’s election most states had lifted most restrictions on the suffrage of white male citizens or taxpayers. Jackson was the beneficiary rather than the initiator of these reforms.” Still Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi lagged; in the Old Dominion the 1831 suffrage extension still left a third of the white male population without the vote.

  Conservatives fought a desperate rearguard action against the “tyranny of numbers.” The state senate, declared the redoubtable conservative James Kent to the New York constitutional convention of 1821, “has hitherto been elected by the farmers of the state…by the free and independent lords of the soil.…We propose now to annihilate at one stroke all these property distinctions and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage.” He drew a dismal picture of the day when the “owners of the soil” would be impotent, the poor would plunder the rich, the debtor would ignore the obligation of contract, the majority would tyrannize over the minority, the “motley and undefinable population of the crowded ports may predominate in the assembly.” John Randolph, ravaged by drink, his eyes glowing with passion in a face of parchment white seamed by a mass of wrinkles, rose to heights of eloquence as he played perhaps his finest hour upon the stage. “I would not live under King Numbers,” he proclaimed to the delegates to the Virginia convention of 1829, evoking the Burkean ideas he exalted. “I would not be his steward, nor make him my task-master.…”

  Rhode Island lagged behind in suffrage reform, and it suddenly gave the nation a sharp warning as to the price of such delinquency in an industrializing state with large numbers of propertyless workers. It had held out against joining the new union after 1787; now it was resisting the currents of suffrage reform sweeping other states. In 1840, at the end of the “Jackson decade,” Rhode Islanders were still operating under an archaic charter granted by King Charles more than 175 years before. Under a heavy freehold requirement, almost half the adult male white population could not vote. A rotten-borough system favoring the rural population left urban voters seriously underrepresented in the lower house. The charter lacked even a bill of rights. All this was accompanied by extensive corrupt influence at the polls.

  The voteless men of Rhode Island needed their champion, and he came in the unlikely personage of Thomas Dorr, a wealthy young Exeter and Harvard graduate, of Whiggish disposition politically but philosophically a son of the Enlightenment. After trying vainly to work for reform within the charter system, Dorr led a move to draft a “People’s Constitution” that extended the vote to all adult white male citizens if resident in the state for one year; it boosted the representation of Providence and other urban areas in the lower house; it required the use of the secret ballot—but withheld the ballot from blacks and women, and left a property requirement for voting in city and town elections.

  Conservatives responded by drafting a less reformist charter. B
oth charters were submitted to the people, who voted Dorr’s up and the conservatives’ down.

  Soon bewildered Rhode Islanders had two governments, one under the establishment, the other under Dorr as the “People’s Governor.” Constitutional comic opera turned deadly serious when the old government began arresting leaders of the new. Dorr escaped to New York to enlist aid from reform and radical leaders, and returned with promises of military assistance, including the dispatch of a thousand men from New York to Rhode Island by steamboat. Soon the Dorrites, hardly two hundred in number, attacked the Providence Arsenal, but the desperate, vainglorious effort, reminiscent of Shays’s attack on the Springfield Arsenal, failed. Dorr’s men left for home, and the leader escaped over the border. When the old government put through a liberalized constitution, he returned despite the price on his head, only to be arrested, indicted for high treason, found guilty, and sentenced to solitary confinement at hard labor for life. But the old government had overreached itself, and by the act of a Democratic legislature, Dorr was released after a year’s confinement, and the oligarchy granted the people still another, and now heavily liberalized, charter. Decades late, Rhode Island had finally joined the parade toward full manhood suffrage.

  It was because constitutions like Rhode Island’s archaic one—and even more, the Constitution of the United States—embodied fundamental compromises with human liberty that abolitionist leaders like William Lloyd Garrison rejected constitutional processes, even voting. Garrison opposed any concerted political action; rather, he proposed that truth and right would prevail by waging the moral struggle through meetings and newspapers, especially his Liberator. His strategy was to be absolutely uncompromising. The first issue had proclaimed, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. ” By 1843 the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, under his influence, was resolving that the United States Constitution was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”