American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “Where am I to go, Mr. President?” Webster asked his chief.

  “You must decide that for yourself, Mr. Webster,” said the President, with his usual reserve.

  “If you leave it to me, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said, “I will stay where I am.”

  “Give me your hand on that,” said Tyler, rising from his chair, “and now I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man from this hour.”

  Total war had erupted between the two wings of the Whig party. Rid of the Harrison and Clay men in the Cabinet, Tyler created a new one composed of conservative Democrats and states’ rights Whigs. The congressional Whigs struck back by officially expelling Tyler from the party. There followed a presidential-congressional battle in which constitutional checks served as the live ammunition. In place of Clay’s kind of national bank, Tyler proposed a nonpartisan “Board of Control” designed to limit White House authority over the “public Treasury” and to protect the rights of the states against its branches, a plan quickly tabled in Congress and later defeated. The Clay party brought out two tariff bills in the summer of 1842; Tyler vetoed both. Some extremist Whigs—not Clay—threatened the President with impeachment; Tyler toyed with the idea of a third-party movement. By the fall of 1842 the President and Congress were almost deadlocked, amid the most savage polemics and mutual buck passing. Clay had the votes, it was said, and Tyler had the vetoes; but, in fact, each side had a veto over the other,

  Some bills did overcome the obstacle course. The Independent Treasury Act was repealed; a bankruptcy law was passed for the relief of hundreds of thousands of debtors spawned by the depression; and distribution and pre-emption acts gave settlers the right to “squat” on 160 acres of land and ultimately to buy it at low prices, with the proceeds from the sale of public lands to be distributed to the states. These enactments were due to “masterly logrolling,” in Glyndon Van Deusen’s words, among sectional blocs—logrolling that ultimately brought a new tariff compromise bill, the price of which was to decimate the distribution act.

  Whig unity was fading so quickly now that Tyler welcomed a Democratic party sweep of the 1842 congressional election as “the greatest political victory ever won within my recollection.” Clay, still master of the Senate Whigs, had already quit the upper house to prepare to seek the presidency in 1844. Webster left the Cabinet hardly a year and a half after Tyler had retained him. By this time Tyler’s administration had been reduced to a caretaker government.

  The Whigs never regained their verve and momentum after their failures in government. Clay won the party nomination in 1844 but once again he enjoyed a brief but empty victory when Democrat James K. Polk defeated him handily in the electoral college, though narrowly in the popular vote. Four years later, Clay lost the Whig nomination to General Zachary Taylor, who won the White House for the Whigs but died of cholera within two years. Having won the presidency twice by nominating military heroes who proceeded to die in office, the Whigs tried the same tactic again in 1852 with General Winfield Scott, who was beaten by Democrat Franklin Pierce. This time the general survived, it was said, but the Whig party did not.

  How could a political party develop so strongly, win two presidential elections and almost a third, and then decline so quickly? The Whigs had brilliant leadership in Clay and Webster and in broad cadres of secondary and grass-roots leaders. At a time when the Democrats were enfeebled by their states’ rights and localistic leanings, the Whigs had a potentially powerful nationalistic doctrine of direct utility to the rising industrial and mercantile elites of the nation. Their rapid monopolization of the opposition to the Democrats, and equally rapid capture of the presidency and Congress, attested to an electoral appeal that seemed likely to give the Whigs political dominance for a generation or two.

  But the heart of the Whig party often seemed to beat feebly behind the lively facade of senatorial gladiators and log-cabin appeals. Springing into existence after Jackson’s veto of the bank bill, the party attained true unity only in opposition to “presidential dictatorship”; no other doctrine could unite men so diverse in view and competitive in ambition as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Conceiving of party itself as more an occasion for oratory and camp meetings than a vehicle for policy leadership, most Whigs had little vision of the possibilities of partisan organization. Opposed to strong Presidents, the party allowed patronage and other political resources to slip into the hands of congressional leaders, and hence, in contrast to the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats, a national party was never firmly built around the chief executive.

  The party placed its future largely in the hands of Clay and his lieutenants, skillful in the give-and-take of group and sectional logrolling but far less adept in mobilizing the grand nationwide coalitions necessary for effective presidential politics. Ironically, the party that opposed executive power unwittingly demonstrated that strong Presidents are necessary to the existence of strong parties, just as strong parties comprise the political foundation for strong Presidents.

  Certainly the Whigs had bad luck, both in the demise of their generalissimo-Presidents and in their felt need to appeal at the same time to plantation elites in the South and business elites in the North. But transcending leaders can turn misfortune to their own uses and avoid, or at least cope with, sectional entrapment—they can, in short, turn the shank of history. The Whig failure of leadership lay far deeper than in the presidential-congressional imbalance; it lay in the inability of the Whigs to break away from a bourgeois, genteel, respectable, establishment politics appropriate in an earlier day of social elitism and popular deference. The genius of that system lay in the character—the honor, dignity, responsibility, honesty, courage—of wellborn leaders. The genius of Jacksonian leadership lay in its appeal to numbers through the techniques of organization, propaganda, conflict, party discipline, and voter mobilization. The Whigs commanded neither the quality of the earlier leadership nor the quantity of the Jacksonian followership. The day of the independent public gentleman was over.

  Challenged by the Jacksonians, the Whigs sought to unite all those who believed in the old kind of leadership, whether they were Calhoun nullifies or Clay nationalists. “In so doing,” according to Lynn L. Marshall, “they looked back longingly to a heroic era when leadership in politics was integral to leadership in society.…Thus was the party born dead in July 1832 and continued in that condition until 1836. Thereafter, however, a total transfusion of Jacksonian blood would bring it miraculously to life.” This miracle faded away as Democratic party leaders sought to build coalitions of voters even at the expense of older doctrines of liberty and equality, as new leaders of both parties calculated more in terms of a multiplicity of economic interests than of either republican or aristocratic leadership.

  THE ECONOMICS OF WHIGGERY

  Sometime during the 1830s and 1840s—we will never know more exactly—the American polity underwent an almost invisible but pervasive sea change. During the first three or four decades of the republic, political leaders in Washington and the state capitals had made the key decisions that closely molded the shape and direction of people’s lives. The brilliant constitutional planners of 1787, the state convention delegates voting thumbs up or down on the new Constitution, Washington and Adams and Jefferson and Madison and their hundreds of associates, the state leaders who made key political and economic decisions about the first canals and turnpikes and other enterprises, the early party builders—these men acted far more on doctrinal, and on political and practical grounds, than on narrowly economic. Jackson’s bank veto represented one of the last of the great political intrusions into economic life; later, politicians more reflective of specific economic interest increasingly dominated national and state politics. At least at the leadership level, Economic Man seemed to take over from Political Man.

  The change was not dramatic. Economic interests had affected public decision-making from earliest colonial days. And large political considerations w
ould continue to impinge on economic policy long after the 1840s. But the nation went through a significant shift from a condition where economics was a factor in politics to a condition where politics could be defined mainly as economic interest.

  In short, the enterprisers—the go-getters, the boosters—were taking over. In earlier years a relatively few men had shown the way—men like John Jacob Astor in the fur trade and Eli Whitney in cotton ginning—and they had won their places in the history books. An entrepreneur like the “Ice King” of Boston would be lucky to occupy a footnote. Son of a wealthy Boston lawyer, brother of three Harvard men, Frederic Tudor in his teens had rejected academic life for business. When one of his brothers idly wondered at a Boston party why ice was not harvested from local ponds and sold in the Caribbean, the twenty-one-year-old Tudor took up the idea, invested in a huge shipment of ice to Martinique, and lost $4,000 when the cargo melted. For two decades Tudor set himself to buying up New England ponds and Caribbean icehouses; he promoted a demand for ice cream, iced drinks, and ice-preserved food; he tested a variety of insulating materials such as wood shavings, straw, blankets, and finally—and successfully—sawdust. Another young businessman, Nathan Jarvis Wyeth, invented a horse-drawn ice cutter, pulled on runners notched with saw teeth, that could gouge out parallel grooves, enabling men with iron bars to break the ice off in even chunks. The two men teamed up to de-ice Fresh Pond in Cambridge.

  By the end of the 1840s, Tudor had achieved prodigious feats: trading in candles, cotton, claret, and a host of other commodities; digging for coal on Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod; devising a siphon for pumping out ships; designing a new hull for a ship; running a graphite mine; turning white pine into paper; setting up one of the first amusement parks in America; and bringing to New England the first steam locomotive, a toy affair of one-half horsepower. But above all, he remained the “Ice King” whose ships carried thousands of tons of packed chunks to the East Indies, China, Australia, India. He was a restless, flamboyant, imperious, aggressive promoter, no modest, prudent Horatio Alger hero, in Daniel Boorstin’s judgment, and he would pay for his recklessness by languishing in debtor’s jail. But he brought ice not only to equatorial lands but to millions of Americans; rid their homes of decaying meat and rancid butter; and permitted them fresh instead of dried food and salted meat, heavily spiced to disguise its age.

  Other Bostonians were as resourceful with granite as Tudor was with ice. In earlier years they had built their stone churches by digging up huge boulders, heating them with fires, and smashing them with iron balls. Later they split off chunks of granite with gunpowder, and still later by drilling holes along a straight line and then splitting the stone along the holes. Granite built the sixteen locks of the Middlesex Canal from Boston to Chelmsford, where the hard stone was mined. By the 1830s, Charles Bulfinch and other fine New England architects were designing churches and public buildings built of granite from Massachusetts quarries.

  Solomon Willard, a jack-of-all-trades, became the king of granite. Son of a country carpenter, he made his way to Boston, and soon to success as a builder of spiral stairs, wood carver, and self-taught architect. Summoned in 1825 to design the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown, he scoured the countryside for suitable stone until he came upon the granite of Quincy. To cut huge, monumental blocks of stone from this quarry he devised lift jacks, hoists, and other machinery, and to move the massive blocks to Charlestown, he used a crude wooden track covered with iron plates and resting on stone crossties. When Daniel Webster delivered a splendid address at the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in 1843, the event celebrated granite as well as the Revolutionary battle. For the flinty stone was now being used in the most famous public buildings and hotels in the country, as well as in drydocks; and when tough paving stone became necessary for heavy transport, Willard had the satisfaction of laying blocks of Quincy granite in front of Boston’s famous Tremont House.

  Some of the powder used in quarrying doubtless came from the Du Pont Company far to the south, near Wilmington, Delaware. The Du Pont mills, separated by buffer zones to keep one from blowing up another, were strung for miles along the swift-flowing Brandywine Creek. Stone dams formed shallow pools that diverted water from the creek into canals running to the power machinery. The Du Ponts made their black gunpowder and blasting powder out of charcoal from nearby willow trees, sulphur from Sicily, and saltpeter from India. Founded by the son of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, the celebrated physiocrat who had fled revolutionary France to start a new life in America, the firm was already becoming a company town that owned the houses and dominated the lives of its employees.

  Invention and innovation seemed to be accelerating during the thirties and forties. The electric dynamo in 1831, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1834, John Deere’s steel plow in 1839, the magnetic telegraph in 1843, the sewing machine in 1846—all these and a host of other devices set off little agricultural and industrial revolutions of their own. One of the most remarkable inventors was Samuel Finley Morse, educated at Andover and Yale, a noted portraitist, as celebrated at home and abroad as he was underpaid for his paintings. He might have lived out his life as a professor of art in New York City had it not been for a chance conversation with a fellow passenger on a voyage back from Europe in 1832, about work on electricity abroad.

  Morse had been curious about electrical phenomena ever since he had attended Benjamin Silliman’s lectures and demonstrations at Yale; now, his interest reawakened, he went to work on a contrivance to combine a sending device that would transmit signals by closing and opening an electric circuit; a receiving device, operated by an electromagnet, to record the signals as dots and spaces on a strip of paper moved by clockwork; and a code translating the dots and spaces into letters and numbers. At first the magnet would not operate at over forty feet, but with the help of a university colleague, Morse worked out a system of electromagnet renewers or relays. The artist-inventor went through several years of poverty, frustration, and even actual hunger before Congress voted for an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, and more months of waiting and preparation before he transmitted to Baltimore from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol his famous declaration, “What hath God wrought!”

  The most striking and significant of all the enterprises of this period came to depend heavily on Morse’s invention. This was railroading. Few ventures have been so much the product of trial-and-error gradualism and innovation, over so many years. Rails and roads were pioneered long before boilers and pistons. For hundreds of years beasts and men, women, and children had hauled coal cars on wooden rails in English and German mines. Flanges had to be devised to hold wheels on the tracks, and wooden rails plated with iron to keep them from splintering. The French and English developed fantastic steam engines for land transport—mechanical legs were even devised to push a car from behind—until it was discovered that the weighty iron locomotives needed smooth rails on a smooth track. By 1829 the English engineer George Stephenson had achieved success with his famous “Rocket.”

  Much earlier an American steamboat inventor, John Stevens, had been transfixed by the vision of American railway development. Squeezed out of Hudson River steamboating by Livingston’s and Fulton’s monopoly, Stevens appealed to state legislatures up and down the east coast to pave the way for railroading. He had the temerity to urge a railroad on the Erie Canal Commission as cheaper to build. Railroads, answered Chancellor Robert Livingston, would be too expensive, dangerous, and impractical. The canal went ahead. Finally, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures passed railroad bills, but things moved so slowly that Stevens in 1825, at the age of seventy-six, built an experimental locomotive on his own estate in Hoboken. This, the first American-built locomotive, was never put into service on a railroad.

  But all the while the tinkerers were innovating. When, in 1829, the Delaware & Hudson Canal and Railroad Company imported the “Stourbridge Lion,” a fine big English locomotive, to use at its weste
rn canal terminus, the machine ran forward and backward for a mile or two, amid the booming of cannon (one of which shattered a mechanic’s arm), but the six-ton “Lion” proved too heavy for American track and was hardly used again. Clearly, locomotives in America would have to be built lighter and more flexible, for frail wooden trestles and sharper curves. There were even experiments with locomotives decked out with sails and with a horse aboard working a treadmill to turn the wheels. Neither ran.

  Then, in the winter of 1830-31, Horatio Allen, who at the age of twenty-seven had single-handedly operated the “Lion,” put the American-built “Best Friend of Charleston” into service between the South Carolina capital and Hamburg. The next year John B. Jervis brought in his locomotive, the “Experiment,” with a swiveling, four-wheel “bogie” truck under the front end of the boiler, allowing the machine to follow more easily the curves of the railroad. The “Experiment” worked.

  American railroading was under way, with distinctly American problems. Unlike English locomotives, which ran on coal, the American engines feasted on the virgin timber cut down along the line. The wood-burners required a huge balloon stack, picturesque in etchings but menacing to dry forests, wooden bridges, and ladies’ parasols. The biggest challenge to American railroading was sheer distance. With a national mania for speed already evident, locomotives were invented that could cut through gardens, farms, and even towns—which meant in turn the devising of grade crossings, gates, bells, whistles, and cowcatchers. America’s technology of speed meant steeper grades, sharper curves, narrow gauges, fragile trestleworks—and hideous accidents.

  The nation’s twenty-three miles of railroad track in 1830 multiplied over a hundredfold in the next ten years. As the inventors settled down to devising better wheels, pistons, cylinders, valves, steam boxes, boilers, couplings, roadbeds, a host of local boosters and big-city promoters plunged into the scramble for railroad extensions and rights-of-way. Rich Boston merchants, eager to head off the threat of New York and the Erie Canal to their western trade, pushed a railroad westward to Worcester and Springfield and through the sloping Berkshire Mountains to the Hudson. George Bliss, Jr., a Yale graduate and Massachusetts legislator, had to devise ways of securing rights-of-way, attracting customers, avoiding accidents, and maintaining discipline. Robert Schuyler, grandson of the great manor lord Philip Schuyler, became president of the New York and New Haven line, and of the New York and Harlem. Despite competition from Hudson River steamboats, the New York City railroad magnates extended their lines up to Peekskill, Poughkeepsie, and Hudson. Other roads radiated from Manhattan up through Connecticut to Massachusetts. Railroad fever spread up and down the coast.