These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Consistent with his argument in his Letters concerning Toleration, Locke’s Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina established freedom of religious expression. People who did “not acknowledge a God and that God is publickly and solemnly to be worshiped” were to be barred from settling and owning land, but, aside from that, any belief was acceptable, the constitution decreeing that “heathens, Jews and other dissenters from the purity of Christian Religion may not be scared and kept at a distance.”

In Utopia in 1516, Thomas More had written that taking land from a people that “does not use its soil but keeps it idle and waste” was a “most just cause for war.”58 But Locke, spurred both by a growing commitment to religious toleration and by a desire to distinguish English settlement from Spanish conquest, stressed the lack of cultivation as a better justification for taking the natives’ land than religious difference, an emphasis with lasting consequences.

In both the Carolina constitution and in his Two Treatises on Government, Locke treated both property and slavery. “Slavery” is, in fact, the very first word in the Two Treatises, which begins: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation, that it is hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it.” This was an attack on Sir Robert Filmer, who had argued, in a book called Patriarcha, that the king’s authority derives, divinely, from Adam’s rule and cannot be protested. For Locke, to believe that was to believe that the subjects of the king were nothing but his slaves. Locke argued that the king’s subjects were, instead, free men, because “the natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.”

All men, Locke argued, are born equal, with a natural right to life, liberty, and property; to protect those rights, they erect governments by consent. Slavery, for Locke, was no part either of a state of nature or of civil society. Slavery was a matter of the law of nations, “nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.” To introduce slavery in the Carolinas, then, was to establish, as fundamental to the political order, an institution at variance with everything about how Locke understood civil society. “Every Freeman of Carolina, shall have absolute power and Authority over his Negro slaves,” Locke’s constitution read. That is to say, notwithstanding the vehement assertion of a natural right to liberty and the claim that absolute power is a form of tyranny, the right of...

The only way to justify this contradiction, the only way to explain how one kind of people are born free while another kind of people are not, would be to sow a new seed, an ideology of race. It ...

Property requirements for voting meant that not all free white men could vote. Meanwhile, the fact that slaves could be manumitted by their masters meant that it was possible to be both black and free and white and unfree. But after Bacon’s Rebellion, free white men were granted the right to vote, and it became nearly impossible for black men and women to secure their freedom. By 1680, one observer could remark that “these two words, Negro and Slave” had “grown Homogeneous and convertible”: to be black was to be a slave.

In 1740, in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion, the South Carolina legislature passed An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes, a new set of rules for relations between the rulers and the ruled. It restricted the movement of slaves, set standards for their treatment, established punishments for their crimes, explained the procedures for their prosecution and codified the rules of evidence for their trials; in capital cases, the charges were to be heard by two justices and a jury comprising at least three men. The law also made it a crime for anyone to teach a slave to write, in hopes of averting the next Jemmy, reading and preaching liberty.68 The English, as Samuel Purchas had remarked, enjoyed a “literall advantage” over the people they ruled, and they meant to keep it.

Benjamin Franklin was the youngest of his father’s ten sons; his sister Jane, born in 1712, was the youngest of their father’s seven daughters. Benjamin Franklin taught himself to read and write, and then he taught his sister, at a time when girls, like slaves, were hardly ever taught to write (they were, however, taught to read, so that they could read the Bible). He wanted to become a writer. His father could only afford to send him to school for two years (and sent Jane not at all). Another of their brothers, James, became a printer, and at sixteen, Benjamin became his apprentice, just when James Franklin began printing an irreverent newspaper called the New-England Courant

While his little sister remained at home dipping candles and boiling soap, young Benjamin Franklin decided to thumb his nose at the government by printing excerpts from a work known as Cato’s Letters, written by two radicals, an Englishman, John Trenchard and a Scot, Thomas Gordon. Cato’s Letters comprises 144 essays about the nature of liberty, including freedom of speech and of the press. “Without freedom of thought,” Trenchard and Gordon wrote, “there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man.”

The culture of the fact—the idea of empiricism that had spread from law to government—hadn’t yet quite spread to newspapers, which were full of shipping news and runaway slave ads, and word of slave rebellions and Indian wars, and of the latest meeting of Parliament. Newspapers were interested in truth, but they established truth, as Franklin explained, by printing all sides, and letting them do battle. Printers did not consider it their duty to print only facts; they considered it their duty to print the “Opinions of Men,” as Franklin put it, and let the best man win: truth will out.

At a time when political parties were frowned upon by nearly everyone as destructive of the political order—“Party is the madness of many, for the gain of a few,” remarked the poet Alexander Pope in 1727—two political factions nevertheless emerged in the hurly-burly city of New York: the Court Party, which supported Cosby, and the Country Party, which opposed him.

There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.

Taxation became tied to representation at the very time that England was founding colonies in North America and the Caribbean, which was also the moment at which the English had begun to dominate the slave trade. In the 1760s, the two became muddled rhetorically. Massachusetts assemblyman Samuel Adams asked, “If Taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our having a legal Representation where they are laid, are we not reduced from the Character of free Subjects to the miserable State of tributary Slaves?”25

“The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black,” James Otis Jr. insisted, in a searing tract called Rights of the British Colonists, Asserted, published in 1764, only months after he had rejoiced about the growth of Britain’s empire. Brilliant and unstable, Otis would later lose his mind (before his death in 1783, when he was struck by lightning, he had taken to running naked through the streets). But in the 1760s, he, better than any of his contemporaries, saw the logical extension of arguments about natural rights. He found it absurd to suggest that it could be “right to enslave a man because he is black” or because he has “short curl’d hair like wool.” Slavery, Otis insisted, “is the most shocking violation of the law of nature,” and a source of political contamination, too. “Those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own,” he warned.

In Virginia, George Mason began to have doubts about slavery, sending to George Washington, in December of 1765, an essay in which he argued that slavery was “the primary Cause of the Destruction of the most flourishing Government that ever existed”—the Roman republic—and warning that it might be the destruction of the British Empire, too.

The London-based East India Company was at risk of bankruptcy, partly due to the colonial boycott, but more due to a famine in Bengal, the military costs it incurred there, and collapsing stock value consequent to the empire-wide credit crash of 1772. In May of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, which reduced the tax on tea—as a way of saving the East India Company—but again asserted Parliament’s right to tax the colonies. Townspeople in Philadelphia called anyone who imported the tea “an enemy of the country.” Tea agents resigned their posts in fear. That fall, three ships loaded with tea arrived in Boston. On the night of December 16, dozens of colonists disguised as Mohawks—warring Indians—boarded the boats and dumped chests of the tea into the harbor.

In January 1776, Paine published an anonymous pamphlet called Common Sense, forty-seven pages of brisk political argument. “As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand,” Paine explained, “I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet.” Members of Congress might have been philosophers, reading Locke and Montesquieu. But ordinary Americans read the Bible, Poor Richard’s Almanack, and Thomas Paine.

Inevitably, slavery cast its long and terrible shadow over these statements of principle: slavery, in fact, had made those statements of principle possible. Mason’s original draft hadn’t included the clause about rights being acquired by men “when they enter into a state of society”; these words were added after members of the convention worried that the original would “have the effect of abolishing” slavery.76 If all men belonging to civil society are free and equal, how can slavery be possible? It must be, Virginia’s convention answered, that Africans do not belong to civil society, having never left a state of nature.

DURING THE WAR, nearly one in five slaves in the United States left their homes, fleeing American slavery in search of British liberty. One American refugee renamed himself “British Freedom.” New lyrics to “Yankee Doodle,” rewritten as “The Negroes Farewell to America,” were composed in London. In the new version, fugitive slaves leave the United States “for old Englan’ where Liberty reigns / Where Negroe no beaten or loaded with chains.”

To Americans, the Revolutionary War was not a world war but a civil war, between those who favored independence and the many who did not. John Adams, offhand, guessed that one in three colonists remained loyal to the Crown and another third hadn’t quite decided, but Adams’s guess did not begin to include the still greater numbers of Loyalists whom the British counted among their allies: the entire population of American slaves and nearly all Native American peoples.

A sizable number of the freed slaves who left the United States for other parts of the British Empire ended up in the Caribbean. In Jamaica, they began demanding the right to vote: they argued that taxation without representation was tyranny. In the end, the American challenge to empire contributed to a political and moral critique of slavery that was felt far more deeply in the British Empire than in the United States.

Englishmen boasted that “England is now the only monarchy in the world that can properly be said to have a constitution.”6 But England’s constitution is unwritten; instead of a single, written document, England’s constitution is the sum of its laws, customs, and precedents. In a debate with the conservative Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine suggested that England’s constitution did not, in fact, exist. “Can, then, Mr. Burke produce the English Constitution?” Paine asked. “If he cannot, we may fairly conclude that though it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist.”7 In America’s book of genesis, the constitution would be written, printed, and preserved.

For all the veneration of the “people,” the word “democracy” retained an unequivocally negative connotation. Eighteenth-century Americans borrowed from Aristotle the idea that there are three forms of government: a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a polity; governments by the one, the few, and the many. Each becomes corrupt when the government seeks to advance its own interests rather than the common good. A corrupt monarchy is a tyranny, a corrupt aristocracy an oligarchy, and a corrupt polity a democracy. The way to avoid corruption is to properly mix the three forms so that corruption in any one would be restrained, or checked, by the others.

Most states arranged a government of three branches, with a governor as executive, a superior court as judicial, and a Senate and House of Representatives as legislative. But some states, attempting to correct for colonial arrangements, in which a royally appointed governor and his appointed council wielded the preponderance of power over a weak elected assembly, granted the greatest weight to lower houses of the legislature rather than to upper houses or to an executive. Pennsylvania’s constitution, like its Quakers, was the most radical, and, in the eyes of many observers, alarmingly democratic. It called for annual elections, no governor, and a unicameral legislature whose members served limited terms. Any proposed law had to be printed and distributed to the people, who would have a year to consider it before the legislature voted.

The states’ constitutions were political experiments in more ways, too. The Declaration of Rights in Vermont’s 1777 constitution specifically banned slavery: men might be indented as servants till the age of twenty-one, or women till the age of eighteen, but no one past that age could be held in bondage. (This provision would have made Vermont the first state to abolish slavery, except that in 1777 Vermont was not a state but an independent republic; it would not join the United States until 1791.)

Two years later, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court formally ruled that slavery was inconsistent with the state’s constitution, adding, “Is not a law of nature that all men are equal and free? Is not the laws of nature the laws of God? Is not the law of God then against slavery?” The next year, Pennsylvania’s 1775 Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage renamed itself the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and a judge in Vermont ruled in favor of a runaway slave whose master had produced a bill of sale proving his ownership: the judge said in order to retain his property in the form of another man he’d have to provide a bill of sale from “God Almighty.”

The convention began its work eleven days late, on May 25, when at last a quorum of twenty-nine delegates had arrived. Washington, almost as striking at fifty-five as he’d been as a young man, was unanimously elected president. (His beauty was marred only by his terrible teeth, which had rotted and been replaced by dentures made from ivory and from nine teeth pulled from the mouths of his slaves.)32

In this same revolutionary spirit, the Constitution required congressmen to be paid, so that the office would not be limited to wealthy men. It required only a short residency for immigrants before they, too, became eligible to run for office. Delegates who argued for greater restriction faced immigrants like Hamilton, born in the West Indies, and James Wilson, born in Scotland, who wondered at the prospect of “his being incapacitated from holding a place under the very Constitution which he had shared in the trust of making.”

The problem of property in the form of people had become an even bigger problem than it had been before the Revolution. The years following the end of the war had witnessed the largest importation of African slaves to the Americas in history—a million people over a single decade. The slave population of the United States, 500,000 in 1776, had soared to 700,000 by 1787. After the Treaty of Paris, when Britain recognized the independence of the United States, it also regarded its former colonies as a foreign nation, which meant that American merchants were banned from British ports, including ports in the West Indies. As a result, a trade in slaves grew within the United States, as slave owners in the South sold their property to back country settlers in Kentucky, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Yet even as the number of slaves in the southern states was rising, it was falling in the North; by 1787, slavery had been effectively abolished in New England and much challenged in Pennsylvania and New York. Economically, it was significant in only five of the thirteen states, and in only two, South Carolina and Georgia, was it the crux of the economy.

Slavery became the crucial divide in Philadelphia because slaves factored in two calculations: in the wealth they represented as property and in the population they represented as people. The two could not be separated.

New York ratified by the smallest of margins: 30 to 27.60 By three votes, the Constitution became law. And yet the political battle raged on. The day after the vote, Thomas Greenleaf, the only Anti-Federalist printer in Federalist-dominated New York City, arrived home in the evening to find that a band of Federalists had fired musket balls into his house. He loaded two pistols, put them in a chest near his bed, and went to sleep, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by men shouting outside his house. When a mob began breaking down his door, smashing windows, and throwing stones, Greenleaf shot into the crowd from a second-story window, tried to reload, then decided to run. After he and his wife and children made a narrow escape out the back door, the mob swarmed his house and office and destroyed his type and printing press, a bad omen for a nation founded on the freedom of speech.61

Nearly everything Washington did set a precedent. What would have happened if he had decided, before taking that oath of office, to emancipate his slaves? He’d grown disillusioned with slavery; his own slaves, and the greater number of slaves owned by his wife, were, to him, a moral burden, and he understood very well that for all the wealth generated by forced, unpaid labor, the institution of slavery was a moral burden to the nation. There is some evidence—slight though it is—that Washington drafted a statement announcing that he intended to emancipate his slaves before assuming the presidency. (Or maybe that statement, like Washington’s inaugural address, had been written by Hamilton, a member of New York’s Manumission Society.) This, too, Washington understood, would have established a precedent: every president after him would have had to emancipate his slaves. And yet he would not, could not, do it.65 Few of Washington’s decisions would have such lasting and terrible consequences as this one failure to act.

Franklin, from his deathbed, attempted to protest. Earlier, he’d tried to reassure his sister, “As to the Pain I suffer, about which you make yourself so unhappy, it is, when compar’d with the long life I have enjoy’d of Health and Ease, but a Trifle.”73 But this was the merest dissembling. He was in agony. Writing in the Pennsylvania Gazette, he offered an attack on slavery, signing his essay “Historicus”—the voice of history.74 He died two weeks later. He was the only man to have signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. His last public act was to urge abolition. Congress would not hear of it.

With the ratification of the Bill of Rights, new disputes emerged. Much of American political history is a disagreement between those who favor a strong federal government and those who favor the states. During Washington’s first term, this dispute took the form of a debate over the economic plan put forward by Hamilton. Much of this debate concerned debt. First stood private debt. The depression that followed the war had left many Americans insolvent. There were so many men confined to debtors’ prison in Philadelphia that they printed their own newspaper: Forlorn Hope.77 Second stood the debts incurred by the states during the war. And third stood the debts incurred by the Continental Congress. Until these government debts were paid, the United States would have no lenders and no foreign investors and would be effectively unable to participate in world trade.

As with so many financial crises, the story began with ambition and ended with corruption. Hamilton had been befriended by John Pintard, an importer with offices at 12 Wall Street. Pintard had been elected to the state legislature in 1790; the next year, he’d become a partner of Leonard Bleecker, who happened to be the secretary of New York’s Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors: together, they auctioned stock. After Bleecker dissolved their partnership, Pintard began dealing with Hamilton’s assistant secretary of the Treasury, William Duer, a rogue who had the idea of cornering stock in the Bank of the United States. With Pintard acting as his agent, Duer borrowed the life savings of “shopkeepers, widows, orphans, Butchers, Carmen, Gardners, market women.” In 1792, when it became clear that over a million dollars’ worth of bank notes, signed by Pintard, weren’t worth the paper on which they were printed, Duer and Pintard’s insolvency triggered the nation’s first stock market crash. A mob attempted to stone Duer to death and then chased him to debtors’ prison. Pintard hid in his Manhattan town house. “Would it not be prudent for him to remove to a State where there is a Bankrupt Act?” one friend wondered.80 Pintard fled across the river to New Jersey, where he was eventually found, and sent to debtors’ prison.

Washington’s Farewell Address consists of a series of warnings about the danger of disunion. The North and the South, the East and the West, ought not to consider their interests separate or competing, Washington urged: “your union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty.” Parties, he warned, were the “worst enemy” of every government, agitating “the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” kindling “the animosity of one part against another,” and even fomenting “riot and insurrection.” As to the size of the Republic, “Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it.” The American experiment must go on. But it could only thrive if the citizens were supported by religion and morality, and if they were well educated. “Promote, then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge,” he urged. “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”

Republicans attacked Adams for abuses of office. Federalists attacked Jefferson for his slaveholding—Americans will not “learn the principles of liberty from the slave-holders of Virginia,” cried one—and especially for his views on religion. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had stated his commitment to religious toleration. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god,” he’d written. “It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” From their pulpits, Federalist clergymen preached that such an opinion could lead to nothing but unchecked vice, crime, and depravity. One New York minister answered Jefferson: “Let my neighbor once perceive himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket and break not only my leg but my neck.” And a Federalist newspaper, Gazette of the United States, insisted that the election offered Americans a choice between “GOD—AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT” and “JEFFERSON—AND NO GOD!!!!”

The campaigning went on for rather a long time, partly because there was no single national election day in 1800. Instead, voting stretched from March to November. Voting was done in public, not in secret. It also hardly ever involved paper and pen, and counting the votes—another affair of calculation—usually meant counting heads or, rather, counting polls. A “poll” meant the top of a person’s head. (In Hamlet, Ophelia says, of Polonius, “His beard as white as snow: All flaxen was his poll.” Not until well into the nineteenth century did a “poll” come to mean the counting of votes.)

Jefferson’s inauguration marked the first peaceful transfer of power between political opponents in the new nation, a remarkable turning point. The two-party system turned out to be essential to the strength of the Republic. A stable party system organizes dissent. It turns discontent into a public good. And it insures the peaceful transfer of power, in which the losing party willingly, and without hesitation, surrenders its power to the winning party.

“The very idea of cooking up opinions in conclave begets suspicions,” Jefferson complained.40 But Marshall went ahead anyway. And, in 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, a suit against Jefferson’s secretary of state, James Madison, Marshall granted to the Supreme Court a power it had not been granted in the Constitution: the right to decide whether laws passed by Congress are constitutional.

John Quincy Adams was hardly a shirker. He’d begun keeping a diary in 1779, when he was twelve and on a diplomatic mission to Europe with his father. After finishing his studies and passing the bar, he’d served as Washington’s minister to the Netherlands and Portugal, as his father’s minister to Prussia, and as Madison’s minister to Russia. He spoke fourteen languages. As secretary of state, he’d drafted the Monroe Doctrine, establishing the principle that the United States would keep out of wars in Europe but would consider any European colonial ventures in the Americas as acts of aggression. By the time he decided to seek the presidency, he’d also served as a U.S. senator and as a professor of logic at Brown and professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard.

Andrew Jackson, man of the people, was the first presidential candidate to campaign for the office, the first to appear on campaign buttons, and nearly the first to publish a campaign biography. In 1824, when Jackson announced his bid for the presidency, Eaton, who ran Jackson’s campaign, shrewdly revised his Life of Andrew Jackson, deleting or dismissing everything in Jackson’s past that looked bad and lavishing attention on anything that looked good and turning into strengths what earlier had been considered weaknesses: Eaton’s Jackson wasn’t uneducated; he was self-taught. He wasn’t ill-bred; he was “self-made.”

Their daughter Harriet Hemings was twenty-seven and still living in Washington in 1828 when Andrew Jackson finally defeated John Quincy Adams, in an election that marked the founding of the Democratic Party, Jackson’s party, the party of the common man, the farmer, the artisan: the people’s party. Jackson won a whopping 56 percent of the popular vote. Four times as many white men cast a ballot in 1828 as in 1824. They voted in throngs. They voted by casting ballots, not balls but slips of paper: Jackson tickets, with which they cast their votes for Jackson delegates to the Electoral College, and for an entire slate of Democratic Party candidates. The majority ruled. Watching the rise of American democracy, an aging political elite despaired, and feared that the Republic could not survive the rule of the people. Wrote John Randolph of Virginia, “The country is ruined past redemption.”

Women led the temperance movement, spurred to this particular crusade not least because drunken husbands tended to beat their wives. Few laws protected women from such assaults. Husbands addicted to drinking also spent their wages on liquor, leaving their children hungry. Since married women had no right to own property, they had no recourse under the law. Convincing men to give up alcohol seemed the best solution. But the movement was also a consequence of deeper and broader changes. With the separation of home from work there emerged an ideology of separate spheres: the public world of work and politics was the world of men; the private world of home and family was the world of women. Women, within this understanding, were the gentler sex, more nurturing, more loving, more moral. One advice manual, A Voice to the Married, told wives that they should make the home a haven for their husbands, “an Elysium to which he can flee and find rest from the story strife of a selfish world.” These changes in the family had begun before industrialization, but industrialization sped them up. Middle-class and wealthier women began having fewer children—an average of 3.6 children per woman in the 1830s, compared to 5.8 a generation earlier. No new method of contraception made this possible: declining fertility was the consequence of abstinence.

The United States was not founded as a Christian nation. The Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders. The Bill of Rights forbids the federal government from establishing a religion, James Madison having argued that to establish a religion would be “to foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”28 These were neither casual omissions nor accidents; they represented an intentional disavowal of a constitutional relationship between church and state, a disavowal that was not infrequently specifically stated. In 1797, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, securing the release of American captives in North Africa, and promising that the United States would not engage in a holy war with Islam because “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

MARIA STEWART WAS the first woman in the United States to deliver an address before a “mixed” audience—an audience of both women and men, which happened to have been, as well, an audience of both blacks and whites. She spoke, suitably, in a hall named after Benjamin Franklin. She said she’d heard a voice asking the question: “‘Who shall go forward, and take of the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman?’ And my heart made this reply—‘If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!’”45 Stewart delivered five public addresses about slavery between 1831 and 1833, the year Garrison founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, in language that echoed hers. At the society’s first convention, Garrison declared, “We plant ourselves upon the Declaration of our Independence and the truths of Divine Revelation, as upon the Everlasting Rock.”

Mexico wouldn’t sell its own land, but the Mexican territories of Coahuila and Texas, along the Gulf of Mexico, and west of the state of Louisiana, proved particularly attractive to American settlers in search of new lands for planting cotton. “If we do not take the present opportunity to people Texas,” one Mexican official warned, “day by day the strength of the United States will grow until it will annex Texas, Coahuila, Saltillo, and Nuevo León.” (At the time, Texas included much of what later became Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.) In 1835, Americans in Texas rebelled against Mexican rule, waging a war under the command of a political daredevil named Sam Houston. In 1836, Texas declared its independence, founding the Republic of Texas, with Houston its president. Mexico’s president, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, warned that, if he were to discover that the U.S. government had been behind the Texas rebellion, he would march “his army to Washington and place upon its Capitol the Mexican flag.”

For their presidential candidate, the Whigs nominated sixty-eight-year-old William Henry Harrison, ran him as a war hero, and tried to pitch him as a Jacksonian man of the people, and even a frontiersman, which required considerable stretching of the truth. Harrison had served as governor of the Indiana Territory, and as a senator from Ohio, but he came from eminent forebears: his father, a Virginia plantation owner, had signed the Declaration of Independence. Writing in 1839, Harrison’s campaign biographer tried, in The People’s Presidential Candidate, to present the staggeringly wealthy Harrison as a humble farmer who had “never been rich.” Harrison exerted himself, delivering, at a hotel in Ohio, the first-ever presidential campaign speech, but his campaign urged him not to say too much. “Let him then rely entirely on the past,” they advised. “Let him say not one single word about his principles, or his creed—let him say nothing—promise nothing.” Critics dubbed him “General Mum.” Democrats mocked Harrison by suggesting that, so poor as he was, he lived in a log cabin and drank nothing but hard cider. Whigs took this as a political gift. Calling Harrison the “Log Cabin Candidate,” they campaigned in log cabins mounted on wheels and hitched to horses, handing out mugs of hard cider along the road. Harrison, of course, lived in a mansion, but after the log cabin campaign of 1840, few presidential candidates, whether they started out poor or whether they started out rich, f...

During the years that Democrats ran against Whigs, both parties incorporated both Jacksonian populism—the endless appeals to “the people”—and the spirit of evangelical reform (campaign rallies borrowed their style and zeal from revival meetings). Walt Whitman complained about “the neverending audacity of elected persons,” damning men in politics as members of the establishment, no matter their appeals to the people. But those appeals were hardly meaningless: undeniably, the nature of American democracy had changed. Not only were more men able to vote, but more men did vote: voter turnout rose from 27 percent in 1824 to 58 percent in 1838 and to 80 percent in 1840.103

In the United States, the political debate about the world of people and the world of things contributed to the agonized debate about slavery: Can people be things? Meanwhile, the geographical vastness of the United States meant that the anxiety about the machinery of industrial capitalism took the form not of Marxism, with its argument that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” but instead of a romance with nature, and with the land, and with all things rustic. Against the factory, Americans posed not a socialist utopia but the log cabin. “It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin,” Webster, a three-time presidential aspirant, sighed, despairing of his biographical deficiency in the age of the log cabin presidency.109 But the most famous log cabin in nineteenth-century America was the one built in 1844 by Emerson’s twenty-seven-year-old friend Henry David Thoreau.