thousand in 1837. Regular transatlantic steamship travel began in 1838. The Jackson years were also roiled by conversations and controversies about race, religion, immigrants, and the role of women. In 1829, the year Jackson took office, David Walker, the son of a slave, published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a popular pamphlet that worried Southern slaveowners and inspired abolitionists. The blacks of the United States, wrote Walker, were “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and I pray God that none like us ever may
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