What if William Pitt the Elder’s colonial program had prevailed and not that of Charles Townshend? We might very well be a member of the British Commonwealth today. There are instances when an individual and/or a series of events prompt a significant change in the course of history. Elections, such as that of Rutherford B. Hays in 1877, have altered the trajectory of our political and social history. We will examine these and eight other turning points in American’s story which have brought us to where we are today.
Teacher: David Moore taught in the History Department at Newton North High School. He received his master’s degree from Boston College. He received the Charles Dana Meserve outstanding teacher award in 1993. His particular historical interests include classical Greece, American Studies and the Holocaust.
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Session One: Origins ~ The Great Migration 1630-1635
Session Two: "Minds and Hearts," ~ 1772-1775
Session Three: Watering the Tree of Liberty ~ Shays's Rebellion 1786
Session Four: A Republic if You Can Keep It ~ Philadelphia 1787
Session Five: The Empire of Liberty ~ The Election of 1800
Session Six: Populism Triumphant ~ The Election of 1828
Session Seven: "The Crossroads of Our Being" ~ The Civil War
Session One: Origins ~ The Great Migration of 1630 - 1635
The election of Donald Trump in November of 2016 prompted a tsunami of political commentary and analysis on the nature of liberal democracy and its ability to withstand the anti democratic forces his election represented. Similar populist trends in England, Eastern Europe, Italy, India and the Philippines coupled with the expansionist policies of Russia and China have brought into question the durability of the post war liberal democratic settlement. My hope is that this course will help to locate this current crisis in a broader historical context. Today's political developments are an extension of a much longer narrative that has characterized our political history. At the risk of overgeneralizing, we can conceive of this narrative as a conversation, often an argument, over just what is meant by our foundational words, liberty, freedom, and equality.
Regarding the origins of our political culture, Americans are prone to ascribe it a sui generis nature, as if it emerged, like Aphrodite, whole and mature upon the sea foam of the New World experience. In his third Letter from an American Farmer, 1782, Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur captured this sentiment when he asked “What, then, is the American, this new man?” Since our inception we have indulged the conceit of American Exceptionalism, wrapping it in the flag of white nationalism and Manifest Destiny as we exploded across the landscape of North America. It is a pleasant, but dangerous, indulgence, this celebration of our supposedly unique political identity forged on the shores of a New World, unspoiled and untainted by the Old. But then, as always, there is history, and it is history that documents and informs us about our actual origins. For democratic liberalism, that story begins in the towns and parishes of East Anglia.
John Winthrop, 1587 - 1649
First Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colonly
The 1620 arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth will always have pride of place in the American origins narrative, but the story actually begins 10 years later and 40 miles to the north-west with The Great Migration of 1630-1640. The arrival of seventeen ships and the flagship Arabella under the leadership of John Winthrop initiated the beginning of a mass exodus of over 80,000 English emigres to the shores of Massachusetts. While this migration emanated from all parts of England, a substantial number were drawn from the parishes of East Anglia, often leaving as a group, often with their pastor. As they arrived they quickly took up residence in small towns whose naming reflected their home parishes: Cambridge, Sudbury, Braintree, Ipswich, Framlingham, Attleborough, Chelsmford, Maldon, and Dunstable to name a few. And that is the point. In addition to their hymnals, tools, livestock and furnishings they also brought what David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed calls their "folkways." They promptly re-established the political, religious, agricultural and settlement patterns which they were familiar with in East Anglia. It is there that we look for the roots of the political sensibilities which would inspire their New England descendants in the revolution that would come.
Session Three: "Minds and Hearts" ~ 1772-1775
The Burning of the Gaspee
First Reading
Richard R. Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Introduction, pp. 12-18, Google eBooks edition.
"Richard Roy Beeman was an American historian and biographer specializing in the American Revolution. Born in Seattle, he published multiple books, and was the John Walsh Centennial Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. Beeman was the 2003-4 Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History. He also served as the director of the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies, on the Board of Trustees of the National Constitution Center, and as the editor of American Quarterly. He died in his home outside of Philadelphia from complications due to ALS." Wikipedia
Beeman's major concern in Varieties is to survey the often diffuse and divergent political norms that co-existed in British North America in the mid to late eighteenth century, and to do this with an eye to understanding to what extent they did or did not contribute to the eventual establishment of a "...political identity founded upon democratic principles." I have chosen his Introduction to Varieties because it presents an excellent synopsis of the book as a whole providing an overview of these differences as they existed in Massachusetts, Virginia, New York, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.
Download Here
Third Reading
Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014.
"Nick Bunker is the author of Making Haste from Babylon: The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World and An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, the latter of which won the 2015 George Washington Prize. In the same year, An Empire on the Edge was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, he worked as a reporter for the Liverpool Echo and the Financial Times, where he was one of the writers of the Lex Column. After leaving journalism, he was a stockbroker and investment banker, principally for the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. For many years he served on the board of the Freud Museum, based in the house in Hampstead, London, where Sigmund Freud died in 1939. Nick Bunker now lives with his wife Susan and their otterhound, Champion Teckelgarth Mercury, in Lincolnshire, England." 1
The picture that emerges from Bunker's exploration of Britain's relations with the American colonies is one of chaos, confusion, and ignorance combined with an attitude of indifference that could only have but one result. Once it became apparent that years of "salutary neglect" had produced a colonial political ethos quite different from the expectations of the mother country, it was far too late to impose what British authorities felt to be "regular order" on their colonial subjects. "If British statesmen had visited the colonies, they might gradually have come to accept that these Americans' aspirations were valid. But they might also have come away even more appalled by what they found: a political culture that, by the 1770's had evolved until it was radically different from their own."
Session Four: Watering the Tree of Liberty ~ Shays's Rebellion 1786
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?
From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the
unjust oppression of naughty men.
For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond,
and who free.
And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may if
ye will cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty
John Ball
The sentiments above are an echo from the 14th century. An itinerant priest, John Ball, delivered them in an exhortation to an assembled peasant army in early 1381. Burdened by an onerous new poll tax, they marched towards London seeking redress from their king. Despite the passage of 400 years, their sentiments would have been understood and could easily have been adopted by the farmers of Northampton, Massachusetts as they congregated outside the county court house on August 29, 1786 and forced the Court of Common Pleas to end its session. These are but two examples of a long conversation, most often an argument, that has punctuated the history of civilization between the many and the few, the rural and the urban, the "people" and the elites. It lies at the core of the of the continuing dispute about the meaning of liberty, freedom, and equality in our Republic today.
Like their forebears in East Anglia during the Peasants Revolt of 1381, the farmers at Northhampton were intent upon redressing their oppression by an urban elite who were tone deaf to the increasing inability of rural farmers to pay their debts and taxes in hard currency. As in East Anglia, petitions of redress had been ignored and a tipping point was soon reached. In the case of the Kentish rebels of East Anglia, it culminated in the capture of London and the beheading of several high officials including the Lord High Chancellor and the Treasurer. Wat Tyler, the leader of the revolt, was killed the following day while meeting with King Richard II. By the following November the revolt was over and 1500 insurgents had been executed. In Massachusetts "Regulators," as they called themselves, began to close down the county court system including Springfield, Concord, Taunton, Great Barrington as well as Northampton. The solution was a simple one; without courts there can be no forced sale of farms and homes to satisfy delinquent tax payments and debts. Under the leadership of Daniel Shays, a retired captain of the Continental Army, 1500 armed militia men, many former Continental Army soldiers, attempted to storm the Federal Armory at Springfield on January 25, 1787. Confronted by General Shepard and a force of 1400 militiamen financed by Boston merchants, Shays's militia were forced to retreat. Pursued westward, the remnants of Shays Rebellion were confronted at Petersham on February 4th, the majority scattered to Vermont and New Hampshire. Eventually a majority of the insurrectionists were pardoned or given amnesty. Only two, John Bly and Charles Rose, were hanged on December 6, 1787. For his part, John Ball was hung, drawn, and quartered in front of fourteen year old King Richard II at St. Albans on15 July 1381.
HOME OF CAPTAIN DANIEL SHAYS, PELHAM, MA
The significance of the events which unfolded in Massachusetts that fall and winter of 1786 are twofold. The insurrection and its near success served as a catalyst for the calling of a constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787 to address the insufficient governmental framework provided by the Articles of Confederation. But in a larger sense, it revealed a deep and pervasive fault line in the body politic which had been papered over by the events of the Revolution, but came to the fore under the stress of the near economic collapse that followed. Farmers such as Job Shattuck and Daniel Shays had risked their lives for the restoration of their liberty from an oppressive foreign monarch only to return home to find county sheriffs confiscating and auctioning off their property for the satisfaction of debts which had accrued during their absence. With the loss of their property they also in most cases lost their right to vote as well. Their petitions and letters were rejected by the state government and the "better sort" in Boston with disdainful comments about their lack of "frugality," their "wasteful ways," and "frivolous" lifestyles.
A you read and watch the materials below keep in mind the following points:
It had only been five short years since victory at Yorktown. The Declaration of Independence had asserted that ''whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty and pursuit of happiness] it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." How do we square the circle? The very term "Shays's Rebellion" indicates from whose point of view its history was written. Samuel Adams who famously planned the Boston Tea Party, as President of the Massachusetts Senate in 1786, suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus for all of the Shaysites and advocated their execution.
Eighteenth century acceptance of class differences resulted in a determination to created a "balanced government" in which diverse social orders would check each other and yet preserve popular sovereignty. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, chiefly authored by John Adams, enshrined this principle. In practice it was dominated by urban elites and commercial interests. Do 18th century solutions and perceptions still obtain in the 21st century?
The echos of this conflict can be found throughout our history. The elections of 1800 and 1830 were fought along class lines in which the virtues of the "common man" were arrayed against the vested interests of wealth and property. In the later part of the 19th century agrarian discontent would crystallize in the creation of the Farmer's Alliance, the Granger movement, and culminate in the populist movement and the nomination of William Jennings Bryan for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908. The Progressive Movement of the first two decades of the 20th century continued the populist protests in a more urban and middle class setting. Lastly we can find the same tension in our current politics as the alienated of "fly-over" country rail against the smug dominance of coastal elites and the middle class watches more of its wealth accumulate in the hands of the 1%.
MATERIALS
The Revolution Against the Revolution, Looking back on Shays’ Rebellion, David Black,City Journal, A quarterly magazine of urban affairs, published by the Manhattan Institute, edited by Brian C. Anderson. ,Summer 2018.
www.city-journal.org/html/shays-rebellion-16041.html
An excellent overview from beginning to end. Pay particular attention to the reactions of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers to the events in Massachusetts.
The People vs. Job Shattuck, National Geographic Society (U.S.) Publisher: Washington : The Society, 1975. Series: Decades of decision, the American Revolution series. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gj7bmX8PpY
A dramatization of Job Shattuck's participation in the Shaysite Rebellion. While much of the dialogue is obviously invented, the main speeches of principle characters are accurate.
Shays' Rebellion: Epilogue to the American Revolution. https://youtu.be/r5xUro2z2tI
Produced Historical Spotlight. This video presents an accurate account of the events and the issues which led up to them with an emphasis on how the Rebellion was instumental in bringing about the call for a constitutional convention.
Shay's Rebellion and the Making of a Nation, Springfield Technical Community College, Springfield MA. 2008
shaysrebellion.stcc.edu/
A multi-page site including Historic Scenes, People, Artifacts, Documents, Essays, Music, Timeline and Maps. Browse and enjoy!
For Further Reading
Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America, Sean Condon, John "Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2015. 176 pages Available in iBook and Kindle editions. In this concise and compelling account of the uprising that came to be known as Shays’s Rebellion, Sean Condon describes the economic difficulties facing both private citizens and public officials in newly independent Massachusetts. He explains the state government policy that precipitated the farmers’ revolt, details the machinery of tax and debt collection in the 1780s, and provides readers with a vivid example of how the establishment of a republican form of government shifted the boundaries of dissent and organized protest.
Underscoring both the fragility and the resilience of government authority in the nascent republic, the uprising and its aftermath had repercussions far beyond western Massachusetts; ultimately, it shaped the framing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which in turn ushered in a new, stronger, and property-friendly federal government. A masterful telling of a complicated story, Shays’s Rebellion is aimed at scholars and students of American history."1
Session Five: A Republic if You Can Keep It ~ Philadelphia 1787
The "Pillar" cartoon was quite popular during the ratification period.
Here we see "Mass." being raised up by the guiding hands of Providence.
We have arrived at that point of time in which we are forced to see our national humiliation, and that a progression in this line, cannot be productive of happiness either private or public—something is wanting and something must be done or we shall be involved in all the horror of faction and civil war without a prospect of its termination—Every tried friend to the liberties of his country is bound to reflect, and step forward to prevent the dreadful consequences which will result from a government of events—Unless this is done we shall be liable to be ruled by an Arbitrary and Capricious armed tyranny, whose word and will must be Law.
Letter from Henry Knox to George Washington, October 23, 1786,
following the closing of County Courts in Massachusetts by the Shaysites.
Letter
from Henry Knox to George Washington, October 23, 1786,
following the closing of County Courts in Massachusetts by the Shaysites
What stronger evidence can be given of the want of energy in our governments than these disorders? If there exists not a power to check them, what security has a man for life, liberty, or property? To you, I am sure I need not add aught on this subject, the consequences of a lax, or inefficient government, are too obvious to be dwelt on. Thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head will soon bring ruin on the whole; whereas a liberal, and energetic Constitution, well-guarded and closely watched, to prevent encroachments, might restore us to that degree of respectability and consequence, to which we had a fair claim, and the brightest prospect of attaining. With sentiments of the sincerest esteem ect.
Letter from George Washington to James Madison, November 5, 1786,
in which he comments upon his recent communications with Henry Knox.
Our situation is becoming every day more and more critical. No money comes into the Federal Treasury; no respect is paid to the Federal authority; and people of reflection unanimously agree that the existing confederacy is tottering to its foundation…Many individuals of weight, particularly in the Eastern districts, are suspected of leaning towards monarchy. Other individuals predict a partition of the states into two or more confederacies. It is pretty certain that, if some radical amendment of the single one cannot be devised and introduced, one or other of these revolutions, the latter no doubt, will take place.
From James Madison to Edmund Pendleton, 24 February 1787.
Historians assessing this period have emphasized one or the other of two points of view: consensus or conflict. For "consensus" historians, the Constitutional Convention represented a final step in the Revolution begun in 1776. The Revolution had confirmed the supremacy of traditional republican liberal values which were endangered by the forces of anarchy and insolvency rampant in the post-war period. Thus the Convention rescued those very ideals which formed the underlying consensus which became the bedrock of the nation throughout its history, the sovereignty of the "people" within a balanced republican form of government. For "conflict" historians, the Convention was a reactionary counter-revolution, a conservative coup d'etat rescuing the interests of the "better sort" from the excesses of democracy unleashed by the Revolution. For them the Revolution had been a victory of agrarian democracy, citizen soldiers who had fought not only against British tyranny, but also against the tyranny of the commercial elites.
Thus, the Constitutional Convention was one more chapter in an ongoing story of class conflict in America.
Materials
Scott Spillman, Conflict and Consensus, The Point Magazine, Issue 13, Politics, February 21, 2017.
thepointmag.com/politics/conflict-and-consensus/
A thoughtful review of the contemporary historiography of this period. Note how Spillman locates the point of view of each school within the political/cultural matrix of its times.
Sophia Tutorial, Think About It: How Do Historians View the Constitutional Convention?
www.sophia.org/tutorials/think-about-it-how-do-historians-view-the-constitutional-convention
Sophia develops on line courses for college credit. In this particular tutorial they succinctly outline the two basic schools of thought which I mentioned in the introduction.
Woody Holton, Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution?
Journal of American History, Volume 92, Issue 2, September 2005, Pages 442–469, September 2005
woody_holton.pdf
Jason Frank, The People, The Founders, and the American Political System. Cornell University, Cornellcast, April 15, 2009.
"Jason Frank, the government department's Gary S. Davis Assistant Professor of the History of Political Thought, explores intriguing questions about the way we--as individuals, voters, and citizens--talk about, think about, and theorize about, the nature, origins, and operation of our government and political system. What does the phrase "the people" actually mean? Why do we (and our politicians) talk so often about Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, and the other "Founders," and what is the relationship between the system they created and 'the people'?"
www.cornell.edu/video/the-people-the-founders-and-the-american-political-system
Session Six: The Revolution of 1800
In the summer of 1819, long after his tenure as president had ended, Thomas Jefferson, reflecting upon the election of 1800, remarked that it was "...as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of [17]76. was in it's form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people."1 Thus began one of the more interesting and as yet unsettled debates in the annals of American historiography. To what extent was Jefferson's "Revolution" revolutionary?
There is so much about this particular election that can be considered noteworthy. For the first time in modern history, a newly established Republic had transferred power peacefully from one political faction to another without recourse to arms or violence. The same could not be said of France where Napoleon's Consulate replaced the French Republic in December of 1799.
The "principles" Jefferson referenced were the democratic principles already established by the Revolution of 1776 which, in the Republican view, were threatened by the establishment of elitist policies and programs under the Federalist administrations of Washington and Adams. In this sense, the "Revolution" is more of an "restoration" than it is a revolution.
Other claims as to the revolutionary nature of this election have to do with the development of what will become our modern two party system, To an extent not seen before there was a determined effort to appeal to core constituencies that Republicans identified as "the People." Newspapers, broadsides, democratic "societies" and clubs, all were enlisted in a determined effort to get out the vote.
And lastly, there is Jefferson's claim that this revolution was effected by the "suffrage of the people." Just what role did popular sovereignty play in this and the election of 1804? Who and how many voted? What were the criteria for suffrage as one moved from state to state? Given the state of record keeping in the early 19th century this is difficult to determine.
Anti-Jefferson cartoon from the Election of 1800 showing Jefferson in league with Satan
www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2016/10/10/the-revolution-of-1800/chronicles/who-we-were/
Second Reading
Party Time for a Young America
Smear tactics, skulduggery, and the début of American democracy
.
Jill Lepore, newyorker.com, September 10, 2007
Download Here
Jill Lepore Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She has been a recipient of the 1999 Bancroft Prize for The Name of Warand the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in History for New York Burning. 1
Her most recent work, These Truths, is the first one volume narrative history of the United States to be published in quite some time and has been received with critical acclaim. This is not a comprehensive history that attempts to survey the entire history of the Republic, but is rather a more selective analysis of the extent to which we have and have not failed to give expression to what Jefferson called "these truths," ..."political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people."
If you have not read Jill Lepore, you are in for a treat. In this short essay Lepore takes the reader by the hand as if they were going to vote in the election of 1800 and walks you through the campaign and all the slander it contained to the final vote in the House of Representatives. As she does so you will gain an insight into what was and what was not democratic in our early elections.
Third Reading
Thomas Jeffferson and the Psychology of Democracy
Joyce Appleby, Chapter 6 of The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic. Edited by James J. Horn, Jan Ellen Taylor, Peter S. Onuf. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville & London, 2002.
Download Here
Joyce Appleby, 1929-2016, taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, she served as president of the American Historical Association as well as president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She was internationally known for her research on the place of liberalism and capitalism in 17th century England and its impact upon the thinking of the the American founding generation. Whereas the republican synthesis of Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn emphasized the the primacy of disinterested republican civic virtue as a motivating force, Appleby sought to expand this characterization by making room for the the influence of John Locke and Adam Smith as well: "For me, liberalism had entered American consciousness as a potent brew blended from 17th-century entrepreneurial attitudes and the Enlightenment’s endorsement of liberty and reason.... Because nature had endowed human beings with the capacity to think for themselves and act on their own behalf, representative government seemed the perfect fit for them.... Rather than classical republicanism’s fixation on social traumas, liberalism was optimistic, moving forward with the rational, self-improving individual who was endowed with natural rights to be exercised in a widened ambit of freedom.” An excellent overview of her work can be found here.
In this essay Appleby proposes that Jefferson's presidency helped to establish a new democratic ethos for the new nation, overturning the older veneration of social status and class and replacing it with a "psychology of democracy," a preference for egalitarianism and individualism.
Session Seven: Populism Triumphant ~ The Election of 1828
The 1945 publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Age of Jackson signaled the start of one of the most enduring historiographical debates. Generally, historians have fallen into one of two distinct camps. One either agrees with Schlesinger that the Jacksonian period was another chapter in the continuing story of liberal versus conservative forces in an American history marked by class conflict, or one questions the very foundations of Schlesinger's analysis of the social forces that came together politically during this period. To the latter camp there was little evidence of an upwelling of working class discontent that coalesced in the election of Jackson. Some saw just the opposite, that he represented a more aspirational middle class on the make. Other historians saw little evidence of ideological differences in the intense political activity of the Jacksonian period, but rather the dominance of local issues and partisan politics. Thus the question becomes, just how democratic was Jacksonian Democracy? Was this really the Era of the Common Man?
Answers to the above are dependent, not just on the history of his administration, but also on our understanding of the character and nature of the man himself. There are no easy answers either. I am reminded of Emily Wilson's opening in her new translation of the Odyssey: "tell me about a complicated man." His upbringing on the developing frontier of the late 18th century would foster character traits that come to symbolize an age and endear him to the rising, aspirational middle class. He belonged to what historian Richard Hofstadter called that "...peculiar blend of pioneer and aristocrat," a form of self-made man that sprung from the Tennessee frontier. His tenure as president and his presidential legacy bring together a set of contradictions that led his first biographer, James Parton, to call him a "democratic autocrat."
Perhaps the way to begin our journey is to watch one of the best available documentaries on Jackson's life and administration. Produced by KCET for PBS in 2008 and narrated by Martin Sheen, Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil and the Presidency [120 minutes] can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGfxyeuy8u8
F
irst Reading
Andrew Jackson: Campaigns and Elections, Daniel Feller, UVA Miller Center
https://millercenter.org/president/jackson/campaigns-and-elections
Our first reading provides an overview of the elections of 1824 and 1828 establishing the basic background you will need to understand the development of political parties and the issues that dominated this period.
Daniel Feller is an American historian, currently a Distinguished Professor at University of Tennessee. Feller earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1981. His chief interests include early and mid 19th century American history. He is the author of The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics and The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815-1840. Since 2004, Feller and a team of historians have been collaborating on a project to compile the writings of Andrew Jackson in a multi-volume series, The Papers of Andrew Jackson.1
Our second reading provides an overview of the concept "Jacksonian Democracy"
Second Reading
Jacksonian Democracy ~ Wikiwand
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Jacksonian_democracy
This Wikiwand [a derrivative of Wikipedia] article presents a short, readable overview of the basic historical aspects of Jacksonian Democracy.
Third Reading
The Ages of Jackson, Daniel Walker Howe, Claremont Review of Books,
Vol. IX, Number 2 - Spring 2009
www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-ages-of-jackson/
This very readable review of the historical treatment of Jacksonian Democracy provides an overview of how resistant this period of history is to simplistic descriptive narratives. It would seem that the more we know of this period, they more difficult synthesis becomes.
"Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln and The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861, among other books."1 His What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, Oxford University Press, was the 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner in history.
Additional Reading
On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America
, Sean Wilentz, Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4, The Promise of American History: Progress and Prospects (Dec., 1982), pp. 45-63, The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Down Load Here
Not for the faint of heart, this 13 page article was written with professional historians in mind who would bring to it a familiarity with the sources and the historiography of the period. Given that, it presents a rich analysis of the period and particularly what needs to be done in terms of a future synthesis of divergent interpretations.
"Sean Wilentz is a Professor of History at Princeton University. His primary research interests include U.S. social and political history. He is the author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008, and Chants Democratic (1984), which won several national prizes, including the Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association, among others. Wilentz is also the coauthor and coeditor of The Key of Liberty (1993) and the editor of several other books, including Major Problems in the Early Republic (1992) and The Rose and the Briar (2004). One of his major works, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wilentz also serves as a contributing editor to The New Republic, and is a member of the editorial boards of Dissent and Democracy. His writings on music have earned him a Grammy nomination and a Deems Taylor-ASCAP award."1
Session Eight: "The Crossroads of Our Being" ~ The Civil War
Antietam, Alexander Gardner, 1862
"Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads."
Shelby Foote, Interview from PBS Series The Civil War, 1990.
The battle of Antietam, Sharpsburg MD, September 17, 1862, witnessed the single bloodiest day in the military history of the United States. 3,650 Americans died that day. Total casualties were over 22,000. Taken as a whole the Civil War resulted in over 620,000 deaths. To what purpose? For what cause?
The naming of events is important. It conveys the underlying sensibilities of those using them. Over time, with repetitive usage, shades of meaning fade from our consciousness. Our use of the term "Civil War" is such a one. But it was not always the case. An examination of Civil War monuments erected in the three decades after the war is quite revealing. It is rare to find a reference to the "Civil War." In the South you will most often find a reference to the "War Between the States," whereas in the North it is quite common to read "The War for the Union." These are names that come closer to answering the questions above. It is conceivable that one might risk one's life in defense of national "union," or the sovereignty of one's state.
[I] "...could not help thinking we had indeed a country worth fighting for. To think that we were in danger of losing the great and good government whose paternal care is extended so widely, and whose benign influence is felt in the remotest corner of these wild regions; which offers freedom and equal rights to all, whose very greatness is sown in this her struggle for existence,-made me almost frantic."
Ezra Ripley, 1st Lt. 29th Massachusetts Volunteers. February 1863. Died July, 1863 near Vicksburg.
"Yet the country needs my services and has your blessing rather than be compelled to let me go... our own "Sunny South” with all her flourishing institutions of a short time back is now in a perilous condition — about to be overrun by merciless and implacable foe, and “tis the duty” of every “freedom loving” son of hers to rally to the rescue, and drive the hireling invador back, or nobly perish in the attempt, as did many a gallant brave on the bloody field of Shiloh."
Robert W. Banks, 43rd Regiment, Mississippi Infantry.
The seeds for these differences were planted in Philadelphia in 1787. Whereas the Articles of Confederation had stipulated that "...the Union shall be perpetual," the Constitution did not expressly address this issue. Within a matter of years the assertion that states could declare laws of Congress unconstitutional and nullify their effect within their state boundaries had been made by Jefferson and Madison in their Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. While Jefferson and Madison were reacting to the Federalist Alien and Sedition Acts, they had, unwittingly, or not, created a "...clear recipe for calamitous dissension and ultimate disunion,"1 that would culminate in the Civil War. Seen in this light the Civil War was a "crossroads of our being." Did "we the people...form a more perfect Union," which had been ratified by the "people" in special state conventions, or was this union more of a compact between sovereign states who reserved the right to nullify and secede. The issue was decided by force of arms, by the deaths of 620,000 Americans.
Eric Foner, Dewitt Clinton Professor of History, at Columbia University, chose the phrase The Second Founding for his new study of this period precisely because the Civil War and Reconstruction continued the work only partially completed in 1787 and would provide the legal grounding for continued extension of rights, democracy and equality today. Whereas before the war the locus of political authority were the individual states, it was now the national government that defined itself as the guarantor of equal protection under the law.
The Civil War crystallized in the minds of northerners the idea of a powerful national state protecting the rights of citizens. The second founding not only put abolition, equal rights, and black male suffrage into the Constitution, but in its provisions for national enforcement made the federal government for the first time what Sumner called “the custodian of freedom.”
It goes without saying that the ever increasing role of the Federal government continues to dominate the national conversation today.
First Reading
How the Founders Sowed the Seeds of Civil War, W. Barksdale Maynard
"Author of six books on history since 2002, several of them award-winning, as well as two co-authored business books. Regular lecturer in art history at universities including Johns Hopkins and Princeton since 1997; currently a lecturer in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. Highly experienced freelance journalist who has written for more than 30 magazines and newspapers since 1999, including the Washington Post and New York Times."1
A brief, accurate and very readable summary of the history behind the Constitution's failure to deal with the issue of slavery and how it played out over time. While on the one hand finding that the "founders were fallible men incapable of envisioning a united, multiracial society," we should perhaps remember that the Convention had "problems enough" in undertaking the task of "uniting half a continent under a single government...."
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Second Reading
How the Civil War Changed the Constitution, Paul Finkelman, New York Times, June 2, 2015
"Paul Finkelman is an American legal historian, who in 2017 became President of Gratz College, Melrose Park, Pennsylvania. He has written or edited numerous articles, monographs, and reference books in American legal history, particularly concerning slavery, as well as analyzed various topics on broadcast media."1
Finkelman presents an analysis of the areas in which specific constitutional powers were altered by the war and made "fundamentally different — and better."
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Third Reading
The Civil War and State-Building: A Reconsideration
, Gary Gerstle, Journal of the Civil War Era, UNC Press
"Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University. He works on the twentieth-century United States, with a particular focus on how the United States periodically reconfigures its boundaries and national identity to open or close itself to immigrants and other minorities in its midst. He is the author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (2015), which won the OAH Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2001), which won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Theodore Saloutos Book Award. He has been awarded many fellowships and has also been elected to the Society of American Historians."1
Gerstle offers an alternative interpretation as to the growth of the federal state as the result of the War. "The Civil War and Reconstruction era...may not have constituted a sharp pivot in the history of the American state. He reminds us that the historical reality is far more complex and nuanced when we actually examine the extent of federal power during the postbellum era. "The slowness and unevenness of the postbellum effort to consolidate authority in the federal government suggests the need to rethink our conception of nineteenth-century state-building and perhaps to scrutinize assumptions about the transformative effects of the Civil War."
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