What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

by Daniel Walker Howe

The most common name for the years this book treats is “Jacksonian America.” I avoid the term because it suggests that Jacksonianism describes Americans as a whole, whereas in fact Andrew Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people. Even worse difficulties arise from the familiar expression “Jacksonian Democracy.” Our own age finds the limitations on the democracy of that period glaring: the enslavement of African Americans, the abuse of Native Americans, the exclusion of women and most nonwhites from the suffrage and equality before the law. The Jacksonian movement in politics, although it took the name of the Democratic Party, fought so hard in favor of slavery and white supremacy, and opposed the inclusion of non-whites and women within the American civil polity so resolutely, that it makes the term “Jacksonian Democracy” all the more inappropriate as a characterization of the years between 1815 and 1848. Nor did Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaigns constitute a nationwide struggle on behalf of universal white manhood enfranchisement. In most states, white male suffrage evolved naturally and with comparatively little controversy. The consequences of white male democracy, rather than its achievement, shaped the political life of this period.

Jackson addressed the blacks as “brave fellow citizens” and had promised them pay and respect the equal of whites’

With the battle over, Jackson ignored his promise to secure equal rewards for the black men who had stood with him at the barricade. Besides twenty-four dollars cash, each soldier was supposed to receive 160 acres of public land, but forty years later, the black veterans were still trying to get their land claims honored. The slaves among them had been returned to their owners, who were not bound by any promises made.15 On the other hand, Jackson showed solicitude for those masters whose slaves had escaped and taken refuge with the enemy. He repeatedly demanded that the departing British army return them. General Lambert, to his credit, refused and took some two hundred self-emancipated people off to lives of poverty but freedom in Bermuda.

In an effort to endow the Battle of New Orleans with strategic significance, Jackson’s admirers later claimed that if the British had won the engagement, they might have revoked the Treaty of Ghent by declining to exchange ratifications and seeking a more advantageous settlement.19 In fact, no such meaning can be derived from the bloodshed of January 8. The prince regent ratified the treaty as soon as he received it and dispatched the ratification to Washington without waiting to hear the outcome of the campaign in the Gulf of Mexico.

In fact, primary responsibility for the American victory lay with the artillery, not with the frontier marksmen of legend.

A popular song of the 1820s, “The Hunters of Kentucky,” extolled the performance of the Kentucky militia at New Orleans despite the fact that Jackson himself had criticized the Kentuckians harshly and never retracted his condemnation.

At five feet eight inches, the average American man was four inches taller than his English counterpart and as tall as his successor who was drafted in World War II. His health reflected the benefits of the land-to-population ratio: abundant food and rural isolation from contagious disease.

It was a young society: The census listed the median age as sixteen, and only one person in eight as over forty-three years old.

One-third of white children and over half of black children died before reaching adulthood.

A typical ocean crossing from New York to Liverpool took three or four weeks, but the westward voyage, against prevailing winds and currents, took anywhere from five to eight or even more. (The news that might have prevented the War of 1812 and that which would have prevented the Battle of New Orleans were both carried in westward crossings.) These times had not improved since the middle of the eighteenth century.

Despite the mythology of “noble savages” in harmony with nature, in fact Native Americans collaborated with whites in altering their environment and depleting its resources.

As of 1815, more people had traveled to the New World from Africa via the slave trade than had come from Europe.

Many whites who did not own slaves expected to acquire them later in life, and in the meantime might rent their services on a short-term or long-term basis. Thus even nonslaveowners could feel a direct interest in slavery as a system.

While the average slaveowner was forty-three, the average age of slaves was under eighteen.

Most southern whites, whether they owned slaves or not, feared emancipation would invite black rebellion.

Their strong sense of common interest enabled the slaveowning planters to become the most politically powerful social group in the United States. They dominated southern state governments. The Constitution’s three-fifths rule (counting five of their slaves as three free persons) enhanced their representation in Congress and the electoral college. In 1815, they had held the presidency for twenty-two of the past twenty-six years, and they would control it for all but eight of the next thirty-four.

On February 21, six militiamen who had tried to leave before their term of service expired were executed in Mobile by his orders, a draconian action at a time when everybody but Jackson considered the war over. When the federal district judge in New Orleans challenged Jackson’s dictatorship, the general put him in jail! After the eventual restoration of civil law, Judge Dominick Hall hailed Jackson into federal court and fined him a thousand dollars for contempt. Jackson’s admirers chipped in to pay the fine, but the general declined their money and paid it himself. Both the peremptory behavior of the strong-willed Jackson and the way he polarized people by it were premonitory of things to come. (Twenty-nine years later, a Democratic Congress would refund Jackson, by then an ex-president, the fine plus interest.)

The President’s Mansion received a hasty coat of white paint over its stone exterior to hide the black smoke marks, though the interior took years to restore; from this cover dates the new name “White House.”22 The paint job symbolized the country’s attitude perfectly. Americans reinterpreted the War of 1812 as a second war for independence, a vindication of their national identity rather than a revelation of its precariousness. “Seldom has a nation so successfully practiced self-induced amnesia!” the historian Bradford Perkins has commented.

On August 9, 1814, he imposed the Treaty of Fort Jackson upon the Creeks, forcing the tribe to cede over 22 million acres in Alabama and Georgia, more than half their territory. Among the lands thus seized, much belonged to Creeks who had been friendly to Jackson, for the conflict had begun as a civil war among Creeks. Some of it was not Creek land at all but belonged to Jackson’s allies the Cherokees. The eminent nineteenth-century historian John Bach McMaster called the Treaty of Fort Jackson a “gross and shameless” wrong, and the twenty-first century has no reason to alter that judgment.

In June 1815, the Madison administration ordered Andrew Jackson to begin to return to the Creeks the lands taken from them by his treaty. But Jackson raged and refused to obey, and the government felt loath to enforce its edict upon a popular hero supported by white public opinion in the Southwest. Would the British make an issue of it? Lord Bathurst, the secretary of state for war, argued that they should, but he could not persuade his cabinet colleagues.

In the Southwest, Andrew Jackson, returning to his primary interest in gaining lands for white occupancy, extorted a fraudulent treaty with unauthorized Cherokees in September 1816, purporting to confirm the loss of the area he had taken from their tribe by the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Not willing to defy his popularity with southwestern voters, the Senate ratified it.41 By a series of such treaties in the years immediately after 1814, Jackson obtained vast lands for white settlement. A historian has estimated his acquisitions at three-quarters of Alabama and Florida, one-third of Tennessee, one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi, and smaller portions of Kentucky and North Carolina.

In July 1816, amphibious expeditions of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and their Indian allies converged against the most powerful of North American maroon communities, the Negro Fort on the Apalachicola River in Spanish East Florida. During their naval bombardment, a redhot shot hit the fort’s powder magazine, destroying the fort and taking more than 270 lives in a gigantic explosion. The leaders of the maroons were captured, tortured, and killed; about sixty surviving followers were rounded up and taken to Alabama and Georgia for sale into slavery (in violation of the federal law of 1807 prohibiting the importation of slaves across international boundaries).

But in his enthusiasm for American institutions, the incoming president got carried away. “And if we look to the condition of individuals what a proud spectacle does it exhibit! On whom has oppression fallen in any quarter of our Union? Who has been deprived of any right of person or property?”5Monroe took it for granted that the answer to these rhetorical questions was negative. If someone had responded by pointing to 1.5 million persons held in chattel slavery, or to white women firmly deprived of rights of person and property, or to expropriated Native Americans, the president would have been startled, then irritated by the irrelevancy.

A Boston Federalist newspaper welcomed the president’s visit as evidence of a new “era of good feelings.”7 The administration was happy with the expression, and the name stuck.

Both defendants were found guilty. The court sentenced Ambrister to flogging and a year at hard labor, Arbuthnot to death. Jackson changed Ambrister’s sentence to death also and carried out the executions the next day so there would be no chance of an appeal. A former justice of the Tennessee state supreme court, he must have known the convictions would not stand up to appellate scrutiny. Jackson reported to Calhoun that he hoped “the execution of these Two unprincipled villains will prove an awfull example” to the British government and public.

As a result the Monroe Doctrine proved more important in the long run than in the short run. The United States seriously invoked the Monroe Doctrine for the first time only after the Civil War, when it persuaded Napoleon III to withdraw French military support from Maximilian von Hapsburg in Mexico. Thereafter the doctrine loomed increasingly large in the American public imagination.

The Erie Canal represented the first step in the transportation revolution that would turn an aggregate of local economies into a nationwide market economy. Within a few years the canal was carrying $15 million worth of goods annually, twice as much as floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans.

Instead of treating the federal Constitution as a compact among the states, Story characterized it as the act of a sovereign national people.

Contemporaries typically observed the transit of a slave coffle with disgust and shame: “a wretched cavalcade... marching half naked women, and men loaded with chains, without being charged with any crime but that of being black, from one section of the United States to another, hundreds of miles.”12 Such a procession could number anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred souls, who were expected to walk up to twenty-five miles a day and sleep on the ground. The long trek overland from Virginia to Mississippi or Louisiana would consume six to eight weeks and was usually undertaken in winter, when agricultural labor could best be spared.

The Panic of 1819 has been called “a traumatic awakening to the capitalist reality of boom-and-bust.”54 This was the first time that the American public had experienced collectively what would become a recurrent phenomenon, a sharp downward swing of the business cycle. Because it was the first time, people had no perspective from which to judge the events. Previous economic troubles had not been universal and had had more obvious causes in war, natural disaster, or the political paralysis of the Articles of Confederation. By 1819, economic relationships had become strongly interconnected; more people were producing for national or international markets rather than home or local consumption. With the advantages of such commercial ties went a corresponding exposure to risk. It was profoundly disturbing that a change in personal fortunes could be unrelated to personal merit, yet the hardworking and honest suffered along with the undeserving. The United States had been hit harder than Europe by the downturn. Today economists recognize that less developed, staple-producing economies are especially vulnerable to the international business cycle. No such frame of reference existed then. Who was to blame?

John Marshall used the opportunity presented by McCulloch v. Maryland to render what may have been the most important of his many important judicial decisions. The first question he had to decide was whether Congress had been within its rights to incorporate the Bank. Endorsing the line of argument used by Alexander Hamilton to justify the first national bank, Marshall held that the power of Congress to charter corporations, while not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, was implied. The Constitution enumerates a list of powers of Congress and then authorizes it “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.” Marshall adopted a broad construction of the phrase “necessary and proper,” defining it so as to approve not merely “indispensable” measures but whatever means seemed “appropriate,” “plainly adapted” to a constitutional objective, and “not prohibited” explicitly. Having confirmed the constitutionality of the Bank, Marshall then went on to ask whether the state had the right to tax it. The power to tax was the power to destroy, as the Bank’s lawyer Daniel Webster had argued. States must not be allowed to frustrate the legitimate authority of Congress. “The states have no power, by taxation or otherwise,” Marshall concluded, “to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the Federal Government, or its agencies.”

The Panic of 1819 remains the only nationwide depression in American history when the voters did not turn against the administration in Washington.

The Missouri debate revealed—to the surprise of some observers—that the South had quietly become much more committed to slavery than it had been during the Revolutionary generation. The opening of the Southwest to cotton cultivation, providing a vast new demand for slave labor, had caused the value of slave property to soar. A prime field hand worth four to five hundred dollars in 1814 commanded a price of eight to eleven hundred dollars by early 1819.

“Diffusion” of slaves “over a greater surface,” as Jefferson explained it, would “facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation” by making local white populations more willing to contemplate the possibility of freeing them and by spreading the burden of paying compensation to masters. So the extension of slavery actually would help long-term prospects for bringing an end to slavery! What makes the argument so unconvincing is that it was being used to prevent gradual emancipation in a place where blacks constituted no more than 16 percent of the population. In the last analysis, even those white southerners who regretted slavery and hoped to eliminate it would not tolerate northern participation in planning how to end it.68

When Felix Walker of North Carolina was urged to sit down, he replied that he had to give his speech for the folks back home, “for Buncombe County.” Ever since, Americans have called a certain kind of inflated political oratory “buncombe”—or “bunk” for short.75

Jefferson and the other southern “conditional terminators” (those who favored terminating slavery under the right conditions) had sided not with the restriction of slavery but with those who wanted to extend it. Their essential condition was the consent of the local white population, not obtained in Missouri. Their theoretically antislavery position had become proslavery in practice. Hope for a moderate, peaceful resolution of America’s number one social problem dimmed.

This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence....I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it.88 These sad words have often been quoted out of context. Jefferson wrote them in a letter to John Holmes, a Maine Republican who had recruited northern supporters for the compromise. Now Holmes found himself in political trouble for not having fought for the Tallmadge amendment. Holmes showed the letter around, as Jefferson expected he would, to vindicate his conduct as saving the Union. Holmes’s invocation of the patriarch’s authority worked; he saved his career. Assessing Jefferson’s state of mind at this time is not easy. He certainly feared that emancipation, if imposed from outside, would be a disaster for the South. He also worried about the political party he had founded and its continued hegemony. Yet he found other contemporaneous events cheering. He felt extremely pleased with the acquisition of Florida and was encouraging Monroe to acquire Texas as well.

Fearing subversives from outside, the state authorities decided to keep any arriving free black sailor locked up until his ship prepared to weigh anchor.

This campaign to alter age-old habits and attitudes proved amazingly successful: consumption of alcohol, especially of hard liquor, declined steadily and dramatically after 1830, falling to 1.8 gallons per person over fifteen by the late 1840s.11

The extent to which evangelical religion dominated communication in the early republic is most vividly exemplified by the fact that, per capita, twice as many Methodist sermons were heard in 1840 as there were letters received.80 The historian Richard Carwardine, after carefully estimating that about 40 percent of the U.S. population was “in close sympathy with evangelical Christianity” (not the same thing as belonging to a church), concludes, “This was the largest, and most formidable, subculture in American society.”81

Jefferson delivered a straightforward opinion of Jackson’s presidential aspirations: “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.”

Generous franchise laws, including the popular election of presidential electors, constituted one of the ways that new states bid for settlers. Old states, worried about losing population, felt pressure to adopt similar rules. By 1824, the number of states following the popular practice had grown to eighteen out of twenty-four. (Later in the century, a similar mechanism would spread women’s suffrage from west to east.)

Jackson owed his electoral college lead to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which inflated the voting power of slaveholding states. Without it, he would have received 77 electoral votes and Adams 83.

Rather than blame overproduction on the rich soils of the Gulf states, Carolinians complained about the unfairness of the tariff (raised in 1824 against their wishes), which condemned cotton producers to buy in a protected market and sell in an unprotected one. Calhoun decided he could no longer support a nationalist agenda of internal improvements and a protective tariff in the face of such dissatisfaction in his home state.

The cotton planters were morally wrong about slavery, but they were economically right to complain that the tariff did not serve their interest.

He himself described the contest as a “struggle between the virtue of the people and executive patronage”—an ironic expression indeed, in view of his party’s exploitation of the spoils of office once in power, but there is no reason to suppose it not sincerely felt.

To celebrate his victory at New Orleans, Jackson’s campaign marketed the song “The Hunters of Kentucky”—in defiance of the historical record, which showed that Jackson had reproached the Kentucky militia for their conduct in the battle.

Instead, the presidential campaign of 1828 was probably the dirtiest in American history. It seems only fair to observe that while the hostile stories circulated about Adams were largely false, those about Jackson were largely true.

In the South, Jackson’s popularity was enhanced by the feeling that only he could be relied upon to maintain white supremacy and expand the white empire, to evict the Indian tribes, to support and extend slavery.

If Jackson was the candidate of the “common man,” as he was so often described, it was specifically the common white man, and one not bothered by slavery or the abuses of Freemasonry.