American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Another New England abolitionist leader, Theodore Dwight Weld, summarized the radical position. Slavery, he said, was pre-eminently a moral question, arresting the conscience of the nation. “As a question of politics and national economy, I have passed it with scarce a look or a word, believing that the business of the abolitionists is with the heart of the nation, rather than with its purse strings.” Such a stance cut this brand of radical off from others who believed philosophically that moral and economic and political forces must be seen in their interaction, and who calculated practically that persons suffering various forms of deprivations had to be brought together into some kind of alliance.

  Another “solution” to the slavery problem isolated not only the reformers but the problem. This was the colonization of freed slaves and free blacks. Founded in 1817, the American Colonization Society within a decade or so bought hundreds of slaves and transported them and hundreds of other freed blacks to Liberia, with money raised from churches, state legislatures, and individual donors. People of means tried private experiments in emancipation and colonization. Frances Wright, increasingly concerned about the plight of the blacks, took $10,000, a third of her inheritance, and bought 2,000 acres of dry, rolling land in the densely forested area of western Tennessee. She also purchased five male slaves and three female slaves who were to work cooperatively on the land. Her plan was to raise $41,000 from supporters and eventually settle a hundred slaves. With the hope of eventual freedom before them, the blacks would work off their purchase price and then emigrate to a colony of their own. The settlement would grow until all slaves in the South would be free.

  With several white friends, Wright moved into one of two cabins she had built, the blacks into the other. “We have raised buildings for immediate use, cleared and fenced round them, planted and fenced an apple orchard of five acres, planted in potatoes a vegetable garden—opened fifteen acres for corn and planted two of old ground in cotton.” The forest formed a thick, dark wall around the little settlement, and to one observer, it was “desolate.” But Frances Wright’s “mind was so exclusively occupied by the object she had then in view that all things else were worthless”; her enthusiasm for the project bordered on “religious fanaticism.” She had isolated the settlement deliberately, as many planters were hostile to her experiment.

  The experiment failed. The forbidding mosquito-infested environment took its toll; Wright became ill and had to leave the management to associates, who allowed it to end in disrepute and failure. She eventually colonized in Haiti the slaves she had purchased.

  STATE POLITICS: SEEDBED OF PARTY

  By the 1840s, Jefferson’s “People,” the Jacksonian Demos, Hamilton’s “Beast,” had been enthroned—the white male half of it, that is. Not only had the suffrage been immensely broadened, but the electoral college—now chosen directly by the voters—and other institutions had been made more directly and democratically responsive to the electorate. Nevertheless, the rising Demos still needed political organization strong enough to throw the People’s collective power into the political scales, yet stable and firm enough to curb the Beast when occasion might demand. Americans required a political vehicle to organize and mass the people, to fight election contests, to unify their fragmented governments, to translate popular needs and aspirations into public policy and social change. For fifty years such a vehicle had been in the process of being invented and developed, a process as slow and halting as the extension of the suffrage. That vehicle was the political party.

  In 1787 a few dozen men had met in Philadelphia and struck off a new constitution that soon was ratified in a dozen state conventions. During the half century after that year, many thousands of men (and lamentably few women), in tens of thousands of local, state, and national meetings, worked out a second charter that may be called a “party” or a “people’s” constitution. The contrasts between the formal Constitution of 1787and the party constitution of the 1780s to the 1830s are sharp and significant.

  The Constitution was deeply rooted in centuries of intense moral, political, and legal thought in Europe and America; the party charter had impoverished intellectual roots. The former represented a central, strategic idea—an idea with the intellectual credentials of a Locke, a Montesquieu, a Harrington, and other philosophical giants, carefully applied to the needs and aspirations of the people of a young republic; the national party constitution was shaped without central plan or purpose, in opposition to the accepted wisdom of the day, in meetings held for more limited and parochial purposes. The Constitution was conceived and dedicated by the most illustrious and respectable leaders—men like Washington and Madison inside the Philadelphia convention hall, men like Adams and Jefferson outside. The party charter was spawned outside the establishment, often outside the law, and hence, born a bastard and growing up as a political orphan, it never became quite respectable.

  The Constitution was accepted from the start, and indeed soon became a revered symbol of national unity and a mechanism of national unification. The party charter encountered sharp opposition from the established leadership of the new republic. Not only did leaders like Washington and Madison oppose parties as fractious, selfish, turbulent, divisive, but they also opposed or misconceived the essential theory of parties—the theory of majority rule, party rotation in office, party authority, party opposition, party distribution of power, the alternation of elites—that made the party charter in effect a constitution. The strategy of the Framers was to tame power by granting necessary authority to national officers responsible to conflicting constituencies, and to reserve authority to state and local officers who also had conflicting constituencies—all with an eye to curbing power by splitting it into pieces and balancing the pieces. The strategy of the party constitution was to control power by granting authority to electorally victorious parties that would have to compete against active opposition parties and be subjected to popular confirmation or repudiation in regular, open, and democratic elections. And that too was a difference—perhaps the fundamental difference—between the two constitutions.

  To refer to the party charter as a general strategy and set of procedures would imply that a single central document existed somewhere, as the formal Constitution does under glass in the National Archives. In fact the party charter was more like the British constitution—a collection of laws, institutions, regulations, usages, understandings, traditions, to be found in diverse places. The party founders had no strategy shaped out of political theory; they found one later in practice.

  The Constitution created a new national government and left the state governments in place, with their own constitutions and governments. But by fragmenting power, it made national parties necessary at the same time that it made them impossible—necessary because parties, with their coalition building and other unifying tendencies and machinery, could provide essential teamwork among the constitutionally separated branches of government, impossible because the existing parties (actually factions) were further fragmented and pulverized as they acted upon, and were acted upon by, those separated branches. By establishing two levels of constitutional and governmental authority—the national level and the state level—the Constitution also indirectly established two levels of party activity—in effect would create a party federalism as well as a constitutional and governmental federalism. Since state governments and political systems already existed (though somewhat altered after 1787), all this meant in effect that state political systems continued to exist for a time in roughly their pre-Constitution form while a new national political system slowly took shape.

  Considering that both Federalist and anti-Federalist leaders opposed the idea of strong national parties, it was remarkable that a Federalist and a Republican party developed so quickly, even before Washington quit the presidency—remarkable that rudimentary state and national party organizations would be formed, rising leaders would exploit intensifying and widening conflict to sharpen two-party competition, Jefferson
would assemble and lead a partisan administration, Congress would come to be organized roughly on party lines, the congressional caucus, established on a partisan basis, would become the central nominating mechanism for Presidents; and even the idea of a loyal party opposition would begin to be accepted, at least by some.

  The party constitution was by no means fully shaped during the first twenty years of the new republic. Party leadership did not fully mobilize party followership, in part because the party leaders did not have a strategy of party, or even a commitment to it. Party organization was rudimentary; parties were not fleshed out with leaders, officials, whips, activists. Party feeling was often intense but also unstable, unevenly distributed, lacking in depth. There were parties, but not a party system, not an institutionalized party ramifying through leadership cadres, levels and branches of government, into mobilized mass followings. Hence it was possible for a partisan President like Jefferson to be succeeded by a lackluster partisan like Madison and in turn by a partyless man like Monroe. And it was perhaps inevitable that the party structure beginning to be erected by the end of John Adams’ presidency would be in decay by the start of John Quincy Adams’.

  It was at the state level that the party charter continued to be shaped, parties persisted, party systems and structures began to develop. It was at this level that a fundamental transformation of American politics was precipitated.

  New York State served as the great testing ground for party. If downstate Virginians had been the main intellectual fathers of the formal Constitution, upstate New Yorkers were the leading experimenters and shapers of the second, “people’s” constitution. Perhaps it was natural that this state, embracing social diversity and robust political life, should be the vanguard in the shift from the politics of the 1790s to the politics of the 1830s. New York was already a polyglot land, with its inflows of English and French and Rhinelanders, its Dutch Reformed, Huguenot, and other major religious groupings, its busy ports along the Hudson, capped by Albany and Troy; its spreading settlements on Long Island and in Westchester County; its estates of Dutch patroons and English squires; its enormous hinterland peopled by Indians, trappers, and traders; its vigorous, factious, independent, and dynamic politics reflecting the social and economic life of its people.

  Even so, New York after the Revolution, continuing through the Federalist years and well into the Jeffersonian Republican epoch, epitomized not the politics of “modernity” but that of the mother country and its colonies. This was the politics of family and faction, patrician leaders and dutiful followers, hierarchy and deference. It was a politics of large patriarchal families controlling power and patronage in a narrow arena of governmental decision, and hence it was a politics of consensus within the upper socioeconomic stratum—in essence an upper-class politics, cloaked in a politics of compelling personality.

  De Witt Clinton personified this kind of politics. Son of a Revolutionary War major general and nephew of George Clinton, the first governor of New York State, De Witt Clinton after graduating from Columbia rose quickly with his uncle’s help. At the age of twenty, “he had arrived at a position of considerable political influence without having been obliged to serve an apprenticeship in the humble ranks of party workers, a circumstance,” according to a biographer, “which may account for certain defects as a tactician which he showed in later life.” In the personalistic wars of the New York Montagues and Capulets, he took on the Livingston, Jay, and other patrician families, and bolted the Republican ranks to become Federalist candidate for President in 1812. He ended up in low repute with both parties. Aristocratic in bearing, snobbish in attitude, resentful of criticism, he was, however, just the man to capitalize on his own vision, elite status, and network of personal supporters to drive through the planning and building of the Erie Canal. Having switched back to Republicanism, he was rewarded with the governorship in 1820 and in 1822.

  The man who was to take the measure of Clinton as a politician, and lead the way in dissolving for good Clinton’s kind of elitist, personalistic politics, hardly looked like a worthy challenger to the patrician six-foot “Magnus Apollo,” as Clinton was called. Small, smooth, sandy-haired, Martin Van Buren had become an astute judge of human nature listening to great talkers in his father’s tavern, but he had no advantage of social status or commanding presence. What Van Buren did possess was a new concept of democratic politics—the concept of party. And he had a group of followers who shaped with him a remarkable party organization that came to be known as the Albany Regency. These adherents—Silas Wright, William Marcy, Azariah Flagg, Franklin Butler, and perhaps a dozen others—were little known outside the Albany-Troy area where most of them lived and politicked. But they knew what they were against: Clinton and his whole system of politics.

  And these “Bucktails” knew what they wanted: a united party organization, collective leadership and responsibility, strong party loyalty and discipline, competition between a majority party and a worthy opposition party, and an extensive party apparatus and network. Regency members subordinated their individual interests and even careers to the demands of party as determined by a majority in the legislative caucus. Editors of party newspapers, such as the famed Albany Argus or the New York National Advocate, were expected to follow the party line, and they generally did so; when editor Mordecai Noah of the Advocate quit over alleged interference with the business aspect of his work, he relented under pressure, returned to his post, and stated, “I yield, as I have ever done, with deference to the wishes of the party, when expressed through its accredited organs.” Regency Republicans in the legislature were also expected to vote the party position (when the party had a position), even at risk to their careers. When seventeen legislators stood against a popular measure opposed by the Regency, in response to Van Buren’s request that they “magnanimously sacrifice individual preferences for the general good,” the lawmakers deliberately staked their posts. A few actually failed of re-election. The only reward for these potential martyrs was a banquet where, as Marcy wrote Flagg, “something approaching to divine honors were lavished on the Seventeen.”

  Party solidarity and loyalty came naturally to these men. They trusted one another, consulted with one another, respected one another’s opinions and advice. They played as well as worked together. “Their families interchange civilities,” it was noted, “their females kiss each other when they meet—their men shake each other heartily by the hand—they dine, or drink, or pray, or take snuff” with one another. As governor, Marcy read his proposed speeches to party colleagues in advance for their approval; Van Buren consulted closely with his associates. This kind of collective counsel was especially impressive in light of the quality of these men, no robots or pawns or party hacks but a group of unusually clear-headed, purposeful, thoughtful, honest men of considerable educational attainments and social standing.

  Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of these leaders was to shape, as much in practice as in advance theorizing, a formidable concept of party government and majority rule. That concept embraced the propositions that competition between two strong, unified, disciplined parties was not dangerous to a democracy but vital to its health and maintenance; that harmony and consensus were undesirable and undemocratic when fundamental issues divided the people; that the absence of parties, or the amalgamation of them, would sap the foundations of liberty, especially freedom of speech and press; that party competition, spirit, and discord stimulated popular interest and dispelled apathy; that the parties—a governing party monitored and checked by an opposition party—served as a vital, extra-constitutional set of checks and balances.

  Party advocates also emphasized the role of parties as watchdogs. The organized parties, Governor Enos Throop said, “watch and scan each other’s doings, the public mind is instructed by ample discussion of ample measures, and acts of violence are restrained by the convictions of the people, that the prevailing measures are the results of enlightened reason.” Above all, the t
heorists believed in majority rule, within and between parties.

  The ultimate question, however, was what parties stood for, as platform makers and policy shapers. It has long been supposed that Van Buren and other Regency leaders during these early years took radical, egalitarian positions on public issues. More recent analysis, however, shows that behind their rhetoric about “Democracy versus Aristocracy,” and “Republicans against Hartford Feds,” was a strongly conservative cast. The Regency’s loudest war cry, as late as 1830, was for states’ rights; Van Buren and associates took conservative positions on the leading reform issues of imprisonment for debt, free public education, and presidential electoral reform. Under the doctrine of party government and majority rule, the crucial test was not what parties were for or against at any particular time, but whether they could serve as vehicles for political leadership, popular mobilization, and governmental action in the face of new needs and changing public attitudes.

  That test came suddenly in July 1832, with Jackson’s dramatic veto of the United States Bank recharter. For years the Regency had been accused of protecting its own “monsters”—its own state banks and Freemasonry. Now Jackson had handed it a new, far more spectacular, and easily hateable Monster, Biddle’s national bank. After the veto message showed the way, Lee Benson wrote, the Regency’s strategy was obvious: “Jump on board the antimonopoly bandwagon, guide it down the state rights road, and crush the Monster in its Greek temple on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.” In effect the Democrats had “dished the Whigs”—had dished even more the Anti-Masons and Workingmen, who had sought to monopolize the egalitarian, anti-”Monster” thunder.