The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

The Age of Jackson, or what some scholars have called the Jacksonian consensus, entailed a radical empowerment of white men. At the same time, though, it witnessed an equally radical subjugation of African Americans. “The adoption of universal white male suffrage,” wrote the historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., in 1970, “led directly to the disenfranchisement of black males who had voted since the colonial period.” As chattel cotton slavery spread into the Deep South, into Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas, free people of color (that is, former slaves or descendants of slaves who had gained their emancipation through manumission, escape, or, in northern states, abolition) saw their rights greatly curtailed, with new second-class-citizenship laws passed in many states. “As Jacksonian democracy reached new heights,” Bennett continued, “racism in America reached levels never before known to man.” “Poor whites rose” and “poor blacks were pushed down.” But poor whites could only rise so far in cramped cities and squalid quarters, earning low wages and paying high rent. Many, looking around at their miserable conditions, began to organize workingmen’s and mechanics’ associations and to ask the same question Jackson asked of his encounter on the Trace: “Are we freemen or are we slaves?” The Indian Removal Act let Jackson answer: freemen. The act, which Jackson signed into law in early 1830, about a year