American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Extending out from the main cities, the railroads were not yet amalgamated into a system, or even fully connected. Local nabobs were still more interested in competing, or at least expanding, than in combining. When President Schuyler of the New York and New Haven advised President Charles F. Pond of the Hartford and New Haven that the New York railroad wanted to connect with Pond’s, in order “to form the most expeditious as well as the most comfortable lines which circumstances permit,” Pond evidently agreed only on condition of access by his company to the entire passenger business of Schuyler’s road between New Haven and New York. “We cannot accept such arrangement as you wish” was Schuyler’s curt answer to Pond.

  Railroad expansion in the 1840s symbolized a people on the make and on the move. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered during the forties, the total population rose from 17 million to over 23 million. People were continuing to move westward in huge numbers, for the West alone gained almost half that increase, the South only a fourth. Agriculture was still the dominant enterprise by far, but it was declining relatively to mining, manufacturing, and construction. By the 1840s the United States had a “domestic market truly national in its dimensions,” and economic growth sharply accelerated. If the country had not yet reached the point of an explosive takeoff, it was nearing the edge. The rise of an “American common market,” in Stuart Bruchey’s words, resulted, not merely from economic change but also from deliberate political action.

  “Of all the parties that have existed in the United States,” Henry Adams said, “the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas.” Here again, the Whigs were cornered by history. Whiggery had respectable intellectual roots in men like Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, with their belief in national power and private property, and their awareness of the links between the two. It had national spokesmen of the caliber of Horace Greeley and William Henry Seward, and state leaders creative in economic policy and development; Georgia Whigs, for example, promoted the building of railroads to link cotton planters to seaports.

  During the 1840s, however, the Whigs had become as opportunistic in their national economic credo as in their log-cabin-and-cider campaign tactics. Their arguments varied, depending on circumstance. Some Whigs held that the interests of rich and poor had become identical. Said Robert Hare, the noted Philadelphia chemist: “Never was an error more pernicious than that of supposing that any separation could be practicable between the interests of the rich and the working classes.” The wealthy must serve the poor—and if “the labouring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored, they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished.”

  Others proclaimed not the interdependence of classes but the absence of them. All Americans were workers, all were capitalists—or if not, could become so. The “wheel of fortune,” said Edward Everett, “is in constant motion, and the poor in one generation furnish the rich of the next.” Even so, the lot of the rich was not all that happy. The Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wondered if the hardships of the poor were exaggerated. “That some of the indigent among us die of scanty food is undoubtedly true,” he said, “but vastly more in this community die from eating too much than from eating too little.” After all, he added, lawyers, doctors, and merchants had their struggles and disappointments, and as for women—“how many of our daughters are victims of ennui, a misery unknown to the poor, and more intolerable than the weariness of excessive toil!”

  Whig writers even found a happy pastoralism in the lot of the sturdy working people. The Boston Courier ran an ode to the Factory Girl, who would leave her hearth and vineyard for a bucolic stint in the mills and then return home with her dowry:

  … She tends the loom, she watches the spindle,

  And cheerfully talketh away;

  Mid the din of wheels, how her bright eyes kindle!

  And her bosom is ever gay.

  *****

  O sing me a song of the Factory Girl!

  Link not her name with the SLAVES.—She is brave and free as the old elm tree,

  That over her homestead waves.

  As a final strategy Whigs advanced a doctrine of personal, internal reform. Workers’ elevation, Channing said, “is not release from labour. It is not struggling for another rank. It is not political power. I understand something deeper. I know but one elevation of a human being, and that is Elevation of Soul.” Collective, organized action by the poor was unnecessary and undesirable. For conservative Whiggery, if religion was not the opiate of the masses, individual moral uplift was the sedative for the fractious.

  The Whig doctrine of classlessness, or of class consensus or identity, was in part a political stratagem to gain worker support and divide the opposition. It was also a valid expression of a crucial reality in American society: the absence of deep-seated class conflict. As Louis Hartz argued in his astute study of American liberalism, there was no fixed aristocracy to revolt against, no persisting peasant class, no genuine proletariat that might form a revolutionary movement, but rather farmers who were incipient capitalists and workers who were incipient entrepreneurs. An instinct of friendship, Hartz said, “was planted beneath the heroic surface of America’s conflict, so that the contenders in it, just as they were about to deliver their most smashing blows, fell into each other’s arms. American politics was a romance in which the quarrel preceded the kiss.”

  In the absence of large and genuine social conflict, American political combat dissolved into numberless skirmishes and scuffles, mainly over the elevating issue of who got what, when, and how in slicing up the expanding American pie. Tariff schedules, internal improvements, state subsidies, and even banking legislation provided ideal arenas for the politics of brokerage. Many Americans were in fact landless and jobless, or living in penury, but their voices were muted, or lost in the social euphoria and political complacency of a people that seemed to be realizing, most of them, the Lockean ideal of free individuals in a state of nature, the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of small property holders. Still, the spectacle of Americans scrambling for jobs, tariff protection, subsidies, and other financial goodies was not wholly edifying to moralists of the old school.

  Inevitably, it seemed, the rich and the better-off gravitated toward the Whig party. New England industrialists, middle state commercialists, skilled native labor, farmers closer to markets, many big cotton, tobacco, and sugar planters tended to embrace Whiggery. In the Ohio Valley, Van Deusen found, “the pushing, ambitious, go-ahead bankers and businessmen, canal promoters, landowning interests, lawyers with an eye to the main chance, and farmers anxious for internal improvements” were more likely than not to be found in the Whig ranks. While individual enterprise was far too dynamic to be contained within party lines—plenty of Democrats were go-getters too—Whig elites were more closely linked with big money and property.

  The wealth of Boston Whiggery was revealing. An 1846 study of 714 Bostonians reputed to be worth $100,000 or more—in some cases far, far more—indicated that the overwhelming majority of those identified by party were Whigs. They were not only partisans but active ones, contributing to the party’s war chest, serving as delegates to party conventions, running for office, and altogether exerting a pervasive influence on state and national policy. Wealthy New Yorkers also were heavily Whig. Democrats too, in these and other cities, numbered rich men—a fact that helped mute the conflict between parties—but to a far less degree than did the Whigs.

  The economics of Whiggery pervaded a profession that was becoming more and more allied to business—the profession of law. On the Supreme Court, Justice Story had seconded Marshall in carving out the scope of national power; in Jackson’s day he returned to Massachusetts, mourning that “I am the last of the old race of judges.” Yet he continued to teach at Harvard, developing and adapting American common law in the areas of partnership, bills of exchange, promissory notes, and other areas
vital to a growing commercial and industrial society. The ablest of Massachusetts judges was doubtless Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who further adapted common law to business requirements, such as the need of railroads for land lying along direct routes, involving the right of eminent domain. Other lawyers, with the views if seldom the talents of a Story or Shaw, made the common law a powerful ally of business interests. Workers fared less well. Shaw developed a “fellow-servant rule” that relieved the employer of liability for damage to an employee harmed by another employee on the job—a rule that delayed the development of workmen’s compensation.

  Whiggery did not lack other illustrious leadership. Edward Everett’s was an extraordinary success story: minister of the Brattle Street (Unitarian) Church—the largest and most prestigious in the Boston area—at twenty; occupant of the recently established chair of Greek literature at Harvard a year or so later; editor of the North American Review while still in his twenties; a commanding orator; member of Congress for five terms; governor of Massachusetts for four terms; minister to the Court of St. James’s from 1841 to 1845; president of Harvard; briefly Secretary of State and United States senator. Yet there was often a negative cast to Everett’s thinking, whether he was criticizing abolitionism, lecturing workers, or warning of a “war of Numbers against Property.” The intellectual leader William Ellery Channing served as a moral and religious influence on Whiggery, but Channing too, though liberal in theology, did not fully grasp the evils of slavery and advocated the kind of inward personal reform that was often both ephemeral and hostile to collective efforts toward social reform.

  Men like Abbott Lawrence and Nathan Appleton were more typical of Whig economic leadership. Already a leading Boston merchant by the time he reached his early forties, Lawrence had the vigor and imagination to move into the thriving cotton and wool industry—he founded the textile city that would bear his name—and then took the lead in extending the Boston-Worcester railroad to Albany. An ardent Whig, he served in Congress as a Boston representative and provided a nexus between the party and the men of money. At a crucial moment he lent Harrison $5,000. Appleton too had made a fortune out of textiles, beginning with his involvement in Lowell’s power mill in Waltham, and he too went on to Congress, where he became a vigorous defender of protective tariffs and the American System. Of a very different cast was Thurlow Weed, the little-schooled son of a poor farmer, who began as a printer’s apprentice and became a newspaperman, Anti-Mason, Whig party leader and patronage dispenser in New York. Like many other Whig leaders, Weed was antislavery—and anti-abolition.

  The pre-eminently typical Whig was always Daniel Webster—and much of the success and failure of Whiggery reflected his own. Once upon a time, as a Federalist leader of the old school, he had stood foursquare for a lofty, nationalist conception of the young republic, but as the years passed he had chosen to serve the growing commercial and industrial interests of his region rather than respond to the needs and aspirations of the poor throughout the nation. His loans and retainers from banks and businesses hardly affected the public decisions of a man who was, in a more philosophical sense, already bought. In calling for a consensus that could only be flabby, in condemning those Jacksonians who exploited recession in order to array class against class, the “Godlike Daniel” became a kind of caricature of the Whig politico who traded with any and every interest that might give him a small victory on the morrow, regardless of political doctrine.

  Whiggery never seemed to have a real chance. Born in negativism, led by men who often divided it, politically unlucky as well as inept, faced ultimately with the power of a resurgent Democracy, the Whig party faded away as quickly as it began. History finally vanquished it. This was a pity, because Whiggery developed a positive, creative impetus, in its nationalism, in its frank engagement with expanding commercial interests, and above all, in its fecund concept that individual liberty could be protected not only against government, but through government, especially at the state and local level. Yet in the late 1840s and early 1850s the Whigs would have one more opportunity to take leadership in confronting the supreme moral issue of the time.

  EXPERIMENTS IN ESCAPE

  “Our farm is a sweet spot,” Sophia Willard Dana Ripley wrote a friend on an August day in 1840. Even “my lonely hours have been bright ones, and in this tranquil retreat I have found that entire separation from worldly care and rest to the spirit which I knew was in waiting for me somewhere. We are nearly two miles from any creature, but one or two quiet farmers’ families, and do not see so many persons here in a month as we do in one morning at home. Birds and trees, sloping green hills and hay fields as far as the eye can reach—and a brook clear running, at the foot of a green bank covered with shrubbery opposite our window, sings us to our rest with its quiet tune, and chants its morning song to the rising sun. Many dreamy days have been my portion here—roaming about the meads, or lying half asleep under the nut trees on the green knoll near by—or jogging along on my white pony for miles and miles through the green lanes and small roads which abound in our neighborhood.…”

  Sophia Ripley was giving voice to a powerful longing of thousands of Americans during the second quarter of the nineteenth century—to escape from the increasingly busy, noisy, bustling, competitive, industrial, urban world into some pastoral retreat. This escapism was in part a reaction against Whiggery in both parties, but the rebels against prosperity and profit were influenced by Whig views more than they liked to admit, for they usually had to fight on their opponents’ intellectual battlefield.

  The 1830s and 1840s were a time of ferment in much of the Western world, as workers and peasants, caught in the gears of the industrial revolution, attempted diverse experiments in social and political change. In France, working men and women fought alongside soldiers and students to force the abdication of the nation’s last divine-right monarch; the new king of the French was invited to reign. In England, businessmen, workers, liberal and radical intellectuals joined in demonstrations and mass meetings to force through a reform bill designed to abolish rotten boroughs and extend the vote. Belgians fought in the streets of Brussels to break away from the Dutch kingdom, but Italian protest was stamped out by the Hapsburgs and the Vatican, and Polish revolt by the Russians.

  Americans did not revolt—they had no crown or aristocracy to revolt against. There was still no proletariat or peasantry to furnish the materials of revolution, only a slave population too disorganized to act as a militant class or caste. The high tide of Jacksonian radicalism had ebbed by the forties; the reform impetus now took several directions. Some Americans still carried the torch for revolutionary change, but they were small in number if large of voice. Many reform-minded Americans made gradual changes through their state and local governments. Some went west to new opportunities; some climbed up through the class system, still largely an open one. But some yearned to go back to the Arcadia of their childhood, when they lived and worked in their own pastures and vineyards, when Jefferson could say that those “who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.” Most of all, they longed for a family, a home, a community.

  Pastoral communitarianism was hardly new in America. Labadists, authoritarian in organization and fanatically anti-sexual in doctrine, had settled in Maryland in the late seventeenth century but dissolved in conflict within two or three decades. Early in the next century German Seventh-Day Baptists founded Ephrata, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the monastic orders of Sisters and Brethren practiced their Pietist beliefs, and on the side ran grist and other mills, a tannery, a book bindery, and even a printing press. About the same time Moravians settled a permanent community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and fanned out to the west and south.

  Rappites, eager to submerge their individual interests in the social good in order to plant God’s kingdom on earth as a prelude to Christ’s return, moved across the Appalachians to establish their Harmony community at the head of the Ohio Valley; finding the soil there poor for vine
and other cultivation, they founded a new “Harmonie” on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana. All of these communitarian sects, however, were dwarfed in size and duration by the Quakers and by the Shakers. Then, in the early nineteenth century, Americans witnessed a new phenomenon: the nonsectarian communitarian experiment. And they witnessed a phenomenal leader, Robert Owen of New Lanark, who arrived in America in 1824.

  The son of an ironmonger and saddler, Owen soon had made his way to Manchester, the center of a burgeoning cotton-spinning industry in the 1780s, and with borrowed capital set up a factory for making cotton-spinning machinery. By the age of twenty he had become manager of one of the largest mills in Manchester, and within a few years the possessor of a sizable fortune. He was the boy wonder of English capitalism. But he was also an industrialist who cared deeply about the education and social welfare of his employees, especially the hundreds of pauper children who worked in his mills. As he steeped himself in the intellectual and reformist ferment of Manchester, he became more and more critical not only of the poverty and dismal working conditions of English mill hands, but of the whole system of government, religion, and family that sustained social misery. The target of biting attacks from Tory ecclesiastics and industrialists, he wanted a fresh start in America, where he could experiment with the reconstruction of society.