American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [Van Buren’s view of party]: Martin Van Buren to Thomas Ritchie, Jan. 13, 1827, Martin Van Buren Papers, Library of Congress; see also Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 223-26.

  [Chase on intellectual failure in party organization]: James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789-1832 (University of Illinois Press, 1973). p. 17.

  [Inter-party balance in the states]: McCormick, p. 341.

  [Party and constitution]: Theodore J. Lowi, “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” in Chambers and Burnham, pp. 238-76.

  11. THE MAJORITY THAT NEVER WAS

  [Revolutionary, radical, and reformist movements, their emergence, non-emergence, and suppression]: Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton University Press, 1970); Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (M. E. Sharpe, l978); James Chowning Davies, ed., When Men Revolt and Why (Free Press, 1971); Bob Jessop, Social Order, Reform and Revolution (Herder and Herder, 1978); the works of Marx, Weber, Dahrendorf, and other theorists from which much of the recent analysis is drawn.

  [Tocqueville on revolution in America]: quoted in Irving M. Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Little, Brown, 1971), p. 41.

  [The slave trade]: John R: Spears, The American Slave-Trade (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900); W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (Longmans, Green, 1904); Julius Lester, To Be a Slave (Dial Press, 1968).

  [Voyage of La Fortuna]: Brantz Meyer, ed., Captain Canot, an African Slaver (Arno Press, 1968), pp. 99-106. [Canot’s accounting]: ibid, p. 101.

  Blacks in Bondage

  [Description of Montevideo]: Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride (Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 17-19; for another large plantation (Georgia), see Pierce Butler Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

  [Letter of Cato to Charles Colcock Jones, Sept. 3, 1852]: Robert S. Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage (New Viewpoints, 1974), pp. 47-50.

  [Statistics on number of slaves living on large plantations and small farms]: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 31.

  [Cato to Charles Colcock Jones]: Starobin, pp. 47-50.

  [Reverend Jones on religion for slaves]: Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 208. [Importance of religion and black preachers to slaves]: John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 64-76.

  [Genovese on proportion of house servants]: Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 328.

  [Charles Colcock Jones Jr.’s letter about his body servant, George]: Myers, pp. 306-7.

  [Behavior of house servants]: Blassingame, pp. 200-1.

  [Letter of Cato to Charles Colcock Jones, March 3, 1852, on behavior of Phoebe and Cassius ]: Starobin, p. 54.

  [Rose Williams and Rufus]: quoted in Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery & Freedom, 1750-1925; (Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 84-85.

  [Statistics on infant mortality and increase of slave population ]: Stampp, pp. 318-21.

  [Charles Colcock Jones to Charles C Jones, Jr.; Oct. 2, 1856, on pricing of blacks for eventual sale]: Myers, p. 244.

  [Charles Colcock Jones to Charles C. Jones, Jr., Nov. 17, 1856, on purchase of new cloth for better appearance of family for sale]: ibid., pp. 263-64.

  [Phoebe to children, March 17, 1857]: Starobin, p. 57.

  [Early life of Nat Turner]: Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee (Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 28-41.

  [Capture and hanging of Nat Turner]: ibid., pp. 125-26.

  [Restrictions on free blacks in the South]: Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), Vol. 1, pp. 518-32.

  [Restrictions of northern states on civil rights of blacks]: Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 63-91. See, in general, Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (Pantheon Books, 1974).

  [Restrictions on blacks in Boston]: The Liberator, March 16, 1860,.and quoted in Litwack, p. 110.

  [Escape to liberty]: Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (University Press of Kentucky, 1967); Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (John Snow, 1855).

  [Frederick Douglass’ early career]: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, “Written by Himself” (Collier Books, 1962); Nathan Irwin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Little, Brown, 1980); Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass (Johns . Hopkins University Press, 1980); Benjamin Quarles, ed., Frederick Douglass (Prentice-Hall, 1968).

  Women in Need

  [Household tasks of women]: R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest (Indiana Historical Society, 1950), p. 223.

  [Statistics on the size of families]: Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women (Hill & Wang, 1979), p. 57.

  [Millicent Hunt’s discontent]: quoted in Horace Adams, “A Puritan Wife on the Frontier,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (June 1940), pp. 67-84; see also, on “custom,” Anne Firor Scott, “Women’s Perspective on the Patriarchy in the 1850’s,” Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1974), p. 55.

  [Infant mortality]: Scott, p. 55.

  [The Lowell Offering]: Philip S.. Foner, The Factory Girls (University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 26-29.

  [“Fictional” account of first day at work]: quoted in Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: ‘The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us,’ ” in Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, eds., Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 45.

  [Mill worker’s letter]: quoted in Lise Vogel, “Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak: New England Mill Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Cantor and Laurie, pp. 65-66.

  [H. E. Back’s letter]: ibid., pp. 66-68.

  [Sarah Bagley on Lowell Offering]: quoted in Foner, p. 57.

  [Mehitable Eastman on denial of liberty]: address to Manchester Industrial Reform Association, Sept. 1846, quoted in Vogel, p. 70.

  [“The Factory Bell”]: author unknown, quoted in Lise Vogel, “Their Own Work: Two Documents from the Nineteenth-Century Labor Movement,” in Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1976), pp. 793-94.

  [Lucy Larcom’s initial liking for factory]: ibid., p. 778.

  [Sarah Bagley on mutual dependence]: Foner, p. 172.

  [Lowell strike of 1834]: Dublin, pp. 51-55.

  [Lowell Female Labor Reform Association]: ibid., pp. 57-61.

  [Schouler concludes that “the remedy is not with us”]: W. Elliot Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee, Women in the American Economy (Yale University Press, 1976), p. 169.

  [“Female fragment societies”]: Richard D. Brown, “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760-1820,” Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1974), p. 39.

  [Emma Willard and the Troy Female Seminary]: Anne Firor. Scott, “What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?”Journal of American History, Vol. 65, No. 3 (December 1978), pp. 679-703.

  [Women at Oberlin]: Jill K. Conway, “Perspectives on the History of Women’s Education in the United States,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1974). pp. 1-11.

  [Emergence of women’s rights movement within abolitionism]: Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 11-39.

  [Lucretia Mott and National Anti-Slavery Convention]: Otelia Cromwell, Lucretia Mott (Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 58.

  [Exclusion of women from World’s Anti-Slavery Convention]: Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, The Concise History of Woman Suffrage (University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 78-87.

  [Seneca Falls convention]: Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (Harvard University Press, 1975), Ch. 5. [Seneca Falls declaration]: text in Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 77-82.

  [Lucretia Mott]: Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant Friend (Walker, 1980); Anna Davis Hal
lowell, ed., James and Lucretia Mott, Life and Letters (Houghton Mifflin, 1884).

  [Legal status of wives]: Richard B. Morris, Studies in the History of Early American Law (Columbia University Press, 1930), Ch. 4; Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force in History (Macmillan, 1946), pp. 113-21; Peggy Rabkin, “The Origins of Law Reform: The Social Significance of the Nineteenth-Century Codification Movement and Its Contribution to the Passage of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts,” Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Spring 1975), pp.683-760; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), Ch. 5.

  [Difficulty of divorce]: Kerber, Ch. 6.

  [Millicent Hunt]: diary quoted in Adams, pp. 67-84.

  [Lydia Maria Child]: Patricia G. Holland and Milton Meltzer, eds., The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880, Guide and Index to the Microfiche Edition (Kraus Microform, 1980); “Biography of Lydia Maria Child,” ibid., pp. 23-38; Collections of Lydia Maria Child papers and correspondence in the Schlesinger Library, Harvard College, and in the New York Public Library.

  [Women’s rights and blacks’ rights]: see, in general, Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past (Oxford University Press, 1979); Kerber.

  [Mehitable Eastman on “hearts to feel”]: quoted in Vogel, “Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak,” p. 64.

  Migrants in Poverty

  [Frances Wright’s voyage to America]: Alice J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, Francis Wright: Free Enquirer (Harper & Brothers, 1939), quoted at pp. 26-29.

  [Voyage of the Oxford]: Edwin C. Guillet, The Great Migration (Thomas Nelson, 1937), p. 78; Thomas W. Pate, “The Transportation of Immigrants and Reception Arrangements in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 9 (November 1911), pp. 732-49.

  [Reception of immigrants at docks]: Guillet, pp. 185-86; Nevins, Vol. 2, p. 285.

  [Irish emigration after 1835]: Oscar Handlin, Boston’s immigrants (Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 51. [Statistics on immigration]: David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 63.

  [Concentration of immigrants in tenement neighborhoods]: Ward, p. 107.

  [Incident of doctor and canal worker]: Rudolph J. Vecoli, The People of New Jersey (Van Nostrand, 1965), p. 81.

  [Swindling of immigrants]: Nevins, Vol. 2, pp. 282-85.

  [Irish in New Jersey]: Vecoli, passim.

  [Competition between Irish and blacks]: Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City (King’s Crown Press, 1949), pp. 66-68.

  [Bellevue]: Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783-1825, (Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 84-85.

  [Work as deterrent to welfare]: ibid., p. 225.

  [Mike Walsh and Tammany]: William V. Shannon, The American Irish (Macmillan, 1963), pp. 51-54. [Walsh on “negro slaves and white wage slaves”]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown, 1945), p. 490.

  [Poor whites of the rural South]: Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790-1860 (Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 168-76; J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People (Indiana University Press, 1979).

  [Franklin Plummer]: Reinhard H. Luthin, “Some Demagogues in American History,” American Historical Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 (October 1951), pp. 22-46, esp. pp. 25-26; Edwin A. Miles, “Franklin E. Plummer: Piney Woods Spokesman of the Jackson Era,” Journal of Mississippi History, Vol. 14 (January 1952), pp. 2-34.

  Leaders Without Followers

  [Protest of “Unlettered Mechanic”]: quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980), p. 216; [handbill against the “rich”]: ibid., p. 218.

  [Protest of Sojourner Truth]: quoted in Schneir, pp. 94-95.

  [Lydia Maria Child on drawing up her will]: Lydia Maria Child to Ellis Gray Loring, Feb. 24, 1856, reprinted in Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1882).

  [Staughton Lynd on the Declaration of Independence]: Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Pantheon Books, 1968), p. 4.

  [Barrington Moore on the recurring sense of injustice]: Moore, p. 77.

  [Angelina Emily Grimké and Sarah Moore Grimké]: Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844, 2 vols. (Peter Smith, 1965).

  [Theodore Weld]: Benjamin P. Thomas, Theodore Weld (Rutgers University Press, 1950).

  [Frederick Douglass in the North Star on the Seneca Falls convention]: quoted in Schneir, p. 85.

  [Lydia Maria Child on Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler]: Lydia Maria Child to Ellis Gray Loring, Dec. 5, 1838, Lydia Maria Child Papers, New York Public Library.

  [Exchanges at the Akron meeting]: Schneir, pp. 93-95.

  [Seneca Falls declaration and economic issues]: ibid., p. 82.

  [FLRA “Factory Tract”]: reprinted in Vogel, “Their Own Work,” p. 795.

  [Frances Wright]: Perkins and Wolfson; William Randall Waterman, “Frances Wright,” Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Vol. 115, No. 1 (Columbia University Press, 1924), pp. 92-133: Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, “The Nashoba Plan for Removing the Evil of Slavery: Letters of Frances and Camilla Wright, 1820-1829,” Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 1975), and No. 4 (October 1975).

  12. WHIGS: THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS

  [The Whig rally in Dayton]: Ohio State Journal, Sept. 16, 1840, p. 2; Dayton Log Cabin, No. 12, Sept. 18, 1840, p. 1.

  [William Henry Harrison’s speech, Dayton, Ohio, Sept. 10, 184o]: Cincinnati Gazette, Sept. 12, 1840; Dayton Log Cabin, No. 12, Sept. l8, 1840; text published by the Whig Republican Association, reprinted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), Vol. t, pp. 737-44. The version quoted is paraphrased from Schlesinger, pp. 678-79.

  [Harrison’s “first presidential campaign speech”]: Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (University Press of Kentucky, 1957), pp. 164-65.

  [John Quincy Adams on “itinerant speech-making”]: John Quincy Adams, Memoirs (Lippincott, 1876), Vol. 10, p. 352, entry for Sept. 24, 1840.

  [Invective]: Schlesinger, pp. 671-74; Gunderson, passim.

  [Voter turnout, 1840]: William Nisbet Chambers, “Election of 1840,” Schlesinger, p. 680; see also William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation (Oxford University Press, 1963), Ch. 1.

  The Whig Way of Government

  [Harrison’s inaugural]: Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too (McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 144.

  [Harrison’s illness]: Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era: 1828-1848 (Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 153.

  [Tyler on Whig factions]: Seager, p. 149.

  [Clay’s anger]: ibid., p. 134.

  [Dilemma of the Whigs in Congress]: John E. Fisher, “The Dilemma of a States’ Rights Whig,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 81, No. 4 (October 1973), pp.

  387-404.

  [Ewing’s bank bill]:Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Little, Brown, 1957), p. 146. [Clay’s reaction]: ibid., p. 147.

  [Tyler’s retort to Clay]: Seager, p. 154.

  [“Corporal’s Guard” of Virginians]: ibid, p. 159.

  [Tyler on Clay’s compromise]: ibid, p. 155.

  [Veto celebration and protest]: ibid., p. 156.

  [Crittenden’s warning]: ibid., p. 159.

  [Webster and Tyler]: Van Deusen, p. 159.

  [Van Deusen on “logrolling”]: ibid., p.

  [Tyler welcomes Democratic victory of 1842]: Seager, p. 171.

  [Whigs nominating generals]: James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 60-61.

  [Politics of Whiggery]: William R. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience: American Dilemmas, 1840-1850, (KTO Press, 1979); Daniel Walker Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979); Lynn L. Marshall, “T
he Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (January 1967), pp. 445-68; Sydney Nathans, Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)·

  [Marshall on Whig nostalgia for a “heroic era” of leadership]: “Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” p. 463.

  The Economics of Whiggery

  [Frederic Tudor, the “Ice King”]: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (Random House, 1965), pp. 11-16; Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American

  Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), Vol. 19, pp. 47-48.

  [Nathan Jarvis Wyeth]: Boorstin, pp. l3-14.

  [Solomon Willard]: ibid, pp. 18-19; Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 20, pp. 241-42.

  [Du Pont Company]: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (Harper & Row, 1971).

  [Samuel Finley Morse]: Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 13, pp. 247-51.

  [Railroad development and leadership]: Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action (Harvard University Press, 1953); Roger Burlingame, March of the Iron Men (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Railroads (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

  [Railroad expansion]: Chandler, p. 13.

  [Boston and New York City railroad promoters and magnates]: Cochran, pp. 263-64.

  [Schuyler-Pond exchange]: Robert Schuyler to Charles F. Pond, Dec. 1, 1848, reprinted in Cochran, p. 457.

  [Population growth and economic growth]: Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861(Harper & Row, 1965), p. 91.

  [Adams on Whigs]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown, 1945), p. 279.

  [Whigs and economic development]: Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern of American Politics (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 154-55.

  [Hare on unity of interests]: Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 270.