More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
December 25, 2019 - January 20, 2020
Economic prosperity had actually declined for most Americans in the wake of the Revolution.
As civilization approached, the backwoodsman was expected to lay down roots, purchase land, and adjust his savage ways to polite society—or move on.
In place of Jefferson’s sturdy yeoman on his cultivated fields, they found the ragged squatter in his log cabin.3
Early republican America had become a “cracker” country.
Interlopers and trespassers, unpoliced squatters and crackers grew crops, cut timber, hunted and fished on land they did not own. They lived in temporary huts beyond the reach of the civilizing forces of law and society
The motley caravan of settlers that gathered around encampments such as Fort Pitt (the future Pittsburgh), at the forks of the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers, served as a buffer zone between the established colonial settlements along the Atlantic and Native tribes of the interior.
In 1759, Bouquet argued that the only hope for improving the colonial frontier was through regular pruning. For him, war was a positive good when it killed off the vermin and weeded out the rubbish.
Their lineage, as it were, could be traced back to North Carolina, and before that to Virginia’s rejects and renegades.
American crackers were aggressive.
In 1798, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote that Pennsylvania squatters had adopted the “strong tincture of the manners” of Indians, particularly in their “violent” fits of labor, “succeeded by long intervals of rest.”
Pennsylvania retained the heartier poor, those willing to plough the stubborn soil, whereas the truly indolent ended up in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia.
1786. In the wake of the panic, the federal government devised a program of regulated land sales that kept prices high enough to weed out the lowest classes.19
1819
least 35 percent of the population owned no real estate.
Federal laws for purchasing land were weighted in favor of wealthier speculators.
with five traits: (1) crude habitations; (2) boastful vocabulary; (3) distrust of civilization and city folk; (4) an instinctive love of liberty (read: licentiousness); and (5) degenerate patterns of breeding.
Describing squatters
favorable qualities: the simple backwoodsman welcomed strangers into his cabin, the outrageous storyteller entertained them through the night.
Ferocious in his resentments, driven to wreak revenge against his enemies, he often acted without deliberation and justified his behavior as a law unto himself.
Could be describing Trump!
His political rise came through violence,
Jackson did not look or act like a conventional politician, which was a fundamental part of his appeal.
Another Trumpian quality.
Jackson was blunt in his opinions and quick to resent any who disagreed with him.
soil. He violated his orders and ignored international law.
In Jackson’s crude lexicon, territorial disputes were to be settled by violent means, not by words alone.
But unlike Crockett, Jackson was never a champion of squatters’ rights.
Coffin Handbill.
Jackson was seen as thoroughly ruthless—the antithesis of that studied republican gentility meant to define a sober statesman.52
cleaning up the corruption in Washington.
he recast Jackson’s foes as beaus and dandies, the classic enemies of crackers and squatters.55
The beau was an effete snob, and his ridicule an uncalled-for taunt. The real men of America were Jacksonian, the hearty native sons of Tennessee and Kentucky.
When John Quincy Adams supporters circulated a note written by Jackson filled with misspellings and bad grammar, Jacksonians praised him as “self-taught.”
Defending Jackson seemed to require threats that celebrated physical prowess over mental agility.
the couple’s known adultery.
the backwoods aggressor who refused to believe the law applied to him.
Whiteness was a badge of class privilege denied to poor cracker gals who worked under the sun.
Rachel Jackson succumbed to heart disease shortly before she was meant to accompany her husband to Washington and take up her duties as First Lady.
Jacksonians routinely exaggerated their man’s credentials, saying he was not just the “Knight of New Orleans,” the country’s “deliverer,” but also the greatest general in all human history.
Bragging had a distinctive class dimension in the 1820s and 1830s.
In the Crockett manner, lying and boasting made up for the absence of class pedigree.
Democrats supported preemption rights, which made it easier and cheaper for those lacking capital to purchase land.
Benton’s thinking was double-edged: yes, he wished to give squatters a chance to purchase a freehold, but he was not above treating them as an expendable population.
The presidential campaign of 1840 appears to be the moment when the squatter morphed into the colloquial common man of democratic lore.
The new class politics played out in trumped-up depictions of log cabins, popular nicknames, hard-cider drinking, and coonskin caps.
The squatter all at once became a romantic figure in popular culture.
1840
the new common man, a simple fellow who couldn’t be misled by fancy rhetoric.71
The squatter may have been tamed, at least in the minds of some, but political equality did not come to America in the so-called Age of Jackson.
Jackson’s appeal as a presidential candidate was not about real democracy, then, but instead the attraction to a certain class of land-grabbing whites and the embrace of the “rude instinct of masculine liberty.”
while some journalists defended the “country crackers” as the “bone and sinew of the country,” others continued to see the cracker as a drunken fool
1821, the designation gained widespread popularity in the 1850s.
Scottish physiologist Alexander Walker revived the debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over whether human beings should breed to “improve the race.”
The roots of the eugenics movement?
Native American tribes, a biologically degraded race, could no longer coexist with their Saxon superiors.
Mid 19th c shift in attitude about Native Americans from paternalistic assimilation to abject pity and scorn, and expecting their ultimate extinction.
filibuster,
Meaning an insurrection. Never heard this meaning before.
