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

by Daniel Walker Howe

“The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds,” he noted, “that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”

Her three-volume work Society in America (1837), supplemented with the anecdotal Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), contains more empirical data than Tocqueville provided, along with no less interest in generalizations.

Lafayette broached the subject to Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson. Madison and Jackson warned that it all depended on southern “collaboration”; Jefferson declined to participate.

Another symptom, even more emphatically deplored, was the habit, widespread among males, of chewing tobacco and spitting on the floor. Women found their long dresses caught the spittle, which encouraged them to avoid male company at social events. Chewing tobacco thus reinforced the tendency toward social segregation of the sexes, with each gender talking among themselves about their occupations: the men, business and politics; the women, homemaking and children.

In February 1833, the prophet received his famous revelation, “the Word of Wisdom,” which came to him after his wife had complained about men smoking and spitting tobacco juice in their house. It enjoined abstinence from “wine or strong drink,” from tobacco, and from “hot drinks” (interpreted to mean tea and coffee).

Slaves Jackson bought and sold in substantial numbers; in 1817, he disposed of forty at one time for $24,000 (an economy of scale for the purchaser, his friend Edward Livingston). Jackson is said to have wagered his slaves on horse races. However, he indignantly denied ever having been a professional slave trader.4 Old Hickory was capable of patriarchal generosity to dependents; he even adopted a Creek Indian boy whose parents Jackson’s soldiers had massacred. “He is a savage, but one that fortune has thrown in my hands,” Jackson explained to his wife. (Adoption of captives was common in frontier warfare. The boy, who never renounced his tribal heritage, died of tuberculosis at sixteen.)5 But if someone challenged Jackson’s authority or he felt his honor questioned, he became implacable. After one of his slaves dared run away, Jackson offered a fifty-dollar reward for his recapture, “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes a person will give to the amount of three hundred.”6 Three hundred lashes risked beating the man to death, but perhaps revenge outweighed financial interest.

He defined himself as defender of the people against special interests and advocated—unsuccessfully—a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college and choose the president by direct popular vote.

More rapid turnover in the bureaucracy led to officeholders who were less experienced and less motivated. Over the long term the spoils system diminished both the competence and the prestige of public service.

The Eaton Affair continued to preoccupy Washington and took up more of the president’s time in his first year than any other issue.

Witch hunt!

Jackson demanded loyalty, and to him this meant acceptance of his assertions, whether he was insisting on Peggy Eaton’s chastity or (as he did in the course of another tirade) that Alexander Hamilton “was not in favor of the Bank of the United States.”31 In the same spirit of privileging his will over truth, Jackson claimed in 1831 that he had received a message from President Monroe through John Rhea (pronounced “Ray”) authorizing his conduct in the invasion of Florida. Historians working over a period of half a century have carefully proved the story a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, Old Hickory persuaded John Rhea to vouch for its truth!32 After all, Jackson had prevailed upon his friends to endorse the story of his 1791 marriage to Rachel in Natchez. And in 1829–30, with no issue save Indian Removal yet defining the administration’s position, personal loyalty to the president meant everything.

These peoples practiced agriculture and animal husbandry much as their white neighbors did and still possessed substantial domains in the Deep South states plus Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida Territory. The eminent geographer Jedidiah Morse had been commissioned by the federal government to prepare a comprehensive report on the nation’s Indian tribes. His report, issued in 1822, waxed eloquent about the economic and educational progress of the five tribes and advised that they be left in peace to continue it.

In the past, whites had justified taking aboriginal lands on the grounds that the Indians were not fully utilizing them. Now, Cherokee economic development was rapidly eliminating that excuse.

Jackson was personally well experienced in the techniques of bribery, intimidation, and fraud through which treaties were imposed on reluctant peoples, having been active in securing a series of land cessions by the Civilized Tribes since 1816. To make it clear what he really meant, the president stated that the federal government would not protect the Indians in their present locations whenever states extended jurisdiction over them. This announcement was a clear departure from policy under Adams. Jackson told the Native Americans “to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States.” Submission to the laws of Georgia for a Creek or Cherokee meant not being able to vote, sue, own property, testify against a white person, or obtain credit. For Sharp Knife (as the Indians called Jackson) to pretend that such submission represented a viable option offering the Natives the chance to “become merged in the mass of our population,” was disingenuous, to say the least. (“I was satisfied that the Indians could not possibly live under the laws of the state,” Jackson admitted privately.) In fact, when an earlier federal treaty (1819) for a Cherokee land cession had guaranteed citizenship and property rights to those Natives who chose to remain, Georgia had refused to accept the stipulations.

The Indian Removal Bill only barely passed the House, 102 to 97, with 24 Jacksonians voting no and 12 others not voting. On some of the preliminary tests of strength the votes had been even closer, Speaker Andrew Stevenson having to break ties three times.

The vote had a pronounced sectional aspect: the slave states voted 61 to 15 for Removal; the free states opposed it, 41 to 82. Without the three-fifths clause jacking up the power of the slaveholding interest, Indian Removal would not have passed.

Seeking the fundamental impulse behind Jacksonian Democracy, historians have variously pointed to free enterprise, manhood suffrage, the labor movement, and resistance to the market economy. But in its origins, Jacksonian Democracy (which contemporaries understood as a synonym for Jackson’s Democratic Party) was not primarily about any of these, though it came to intersect with all of them in due course. In the first place it was about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent. By his policy of Indian Removal, Jackson confirmed his support in the cotton states outside South Carolina and fixed the character of his political party. Indian policy, not banking or the tariff, was the number one issue in the national press during the early years of Jackson’s presidency.

Jackson was fortunate that his time in office coincided with a wave of prosperity. Government revenues from tariffs and land sales soared, which made money available for both internal improvements and Indian Removal, even while retiring the national debt. The president and his party managed to reap the political benefits of a reputation for thrift and constitutional probity while at the same time passing “pork-barrel” legislation on a scale unprecedented. Both contemporaries and historians have noted the inconsistency (or, more charitably, the ambiguity) in Jackson’s policy on internal improvements. Adams had signed all bills for internal improvements in order to affirm their constitutionality and build support for economic development. Jackson, however, contrived to leave himself free to approve whatever projects he decided were “national” and veto those he decided were “local,” without any clear guidelines for distinguishing between them.91 The one unambiguous consequence of the Maysville Road Veto was the doom of any comprehensive national transportation program. In the absence of such an overall plan, the Jackson administration felt free to distribute its favors where they would do the most political good. What Van Buren had learned fighting Clinton in New York, about how to posture as a friend of democracy while maintaining a tightly knit party machine and remaining completely flexible on economic issues, he put to use in Washington.

This graph shows how much the federal government spent each year on transportation infrastructure, such as canals, roads, dredging of rivers and harbors, and lighthouses. It indicates a flurry of activity right after the War of 1812, then a marked increase during John Quincy Adams’s administration, which soared even higher during the administrations of Jackson and Van Buren until the Panic of 1837 curtailed government revenues and consequently expenses.

The New Englander’s eloquence helped forge the broad consensus of northern opinion that by 1861 was ready to wage war for the integrity of the Union. Abraham Lincoln called Webster on Liberty and Union “the very best speech that was ever delivered” and drew upon it in composing his own First Inaugural.

Robert Hayne gave the longest speech of all, celebrating Jefferson’s state-rights principles and concluding with a toast to “the Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States.” After the formal toasts came the “volunteer” toasts, and it was the president’s prerogative to offer one of these. In consultation with Van Buren beforehand, Jackson had resolved to rebuke the nullifiers by proposing a toast to “our federal Union.” In the heat of the moment, however, he rose and called out an even more forceful toast: “Our Union: It must be preserved.” He glared directly at the vice president. Calhoun, his voice strong but the hand holding his glass shaking with emotion, responded, “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear. May we always remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the states and by distributing equally the benefits and the burdens of the Union.”

As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has pointed out, the “resounding and demagogic language” of this passage “diverted attention” from the inability of the Bank’s critics to agree on a substitute for it.31

The unpopularity of banks among working people derived not only from their age-old suspicion of the wealthy but more immediately from the uncertainty of paper money. When antebellum banks made loans, they lent out their own paper notes, which then circulated as currency. If the bank of issue was far away, its currency might circulate at a discount. With transportation difficult and communication slow, it could be quite inconvenient to redeem the currency and not even easy to learn whether it was creditworthy at all. Unscrupulous businessmen paid workers or other unsophisticated creditors with discounted notes and pocketed the difference. With so many different kinds of notes in circulation, in denominations varying from ten thousand dollars to five cents, counterfeiting was easy. No wonder that many citizens, especially wage-earners, distrusted paper currency in general and preferred hard money—gold and silver. A ten-dollar gold piece, called an eagle, was certainly safer than the note of an overextended, remote, or nonexistent bank. Hard money seemed to provide the many with protection from the unscrupulous few.

The elimination of the national bank removed restraints from regional and local banks, enabling them to behave more irresponsibly than ever. Getting rid of the BUS, whose notes had constituted the most reliable form of paper money, only exacerbated the difficulties that continued to plague the currency until the Civil War. On the other hand, improvements in communication and transportation helped stabilize the currency as well as minimize price differentials around the country.

Posterity would vindicate the right of a president to dismiss cabinet members who refuse to follow his orders, but his right to order an officer to break the law (in this case, to remove the deposits without finding them unsafe) is another matter.

Madison repudiated it, insisting that the Virginia Resolutions had meant nothing of the kind. Madison asserted that the Constitution had in fact created a system of divided sovereignty, whatever philosophers might say about sovereignty being indivisible, and that no individual state could nullify a federal law.

Why did South Carolina’s political community insist on pursuing nullification when the rest of the South felt comfortable with Jackson and thought it could live with the Tariff of 1832? Fears for slavery, while widespread in the South, alarmed whites the most in the state with the highest proportion of the population enslaved (54 percent in 1830). Ever since the Missouri Compromise, those in South Carolina called the Radicals had felt apprehensive regarding the future of slavery. In 1827, a powerfully argued pamphlet called The Crisis appeared in South Carolina under the pseudonym “Brutus,” linking the protective tariff and internal improvements with the slavery issue. The American Colonization Society, the author warned, constituted a stalking-horse for the general abolition of slavery. Brutus (whose real name was Robert J. Turnbull) declared that in the face of growing northern strength and ever-broadening constitutional interpretation, only consistent insistence on state sovereignty could forestall eventual emancipation by Congress.84 With such anxieties in the back of their minds, Calhoun and the Radicals with whom he now cooperated wanted to try out nullification as a means of pressuring the majority into making concessions. If they could make the procedure work in the case of the tariff, they would have the tactic to use whenever needed, and the protection of slavery would be that much more secure.

The mood of Georgia’s white populace was captured in a popular song of the day: All I want in this creation Is a pretty little wife and a big plantation Away up yonder in the Cherokee nation.

Before the end of his two terms, about forty-six thousand Native Americans had been dispossessed and a like number slated for dispossession under his chosen successor. In return Jackson had obtained 100 million acres, much of it prime farmland, at a cost of 30 million acres in Oklahoma and Kansas plus $70 million ($1.21 billion in 2005, insofar as such equivalents can be calculated).

During the Removal process the president personally intervened frequently, always on behalf of haste, sometimes on behalf of economy, but never on behalf of humanity, honesty, or careful planning.

By 1835, the AASS boasted 200 auxiliaries (local chapters), and by 1838, a remarkable 1,350, representing some 250,000 members. This number, the historian Kathleen McCarthy points out, is 2 percent of the U.S. population at the time—making the American Anti-Slavery Society larger, in relation to its American public, than the Boy Scouts of America or the National Wildlife Federation or the National Rifle Association in the year 2000.34

The abolitionists printed up 175,000 tracts and would have a million ready by the end of the calendar year, but no more than a handful ever reached their addressees. Southern local authorities had vainly urged the mayor of Boston to crack down on Walker’s Appeal and Garrison’s Liberator; when the first abolitionist tracts showed up in their local post offices, they took the law into their own hands. Regardless of the fact that the literature was addressed to prominent white citizens, most southerners seemed convinced that it could fall into the hands of literate blacks and incite rebellion. On June 29, 1835, a group of burglars broke into the Charleston, South Carolina, post office and made off with a bag of abolitionist publications that the postmaster had (not coincidentally) sorted out and labeled for their convenience. The next night the contents of the mailbag were burned before a crowd of two thousand.

Old Hickory concurred, calling the abolitionists “monsters” guilty of stirring up “the horrors of a servile war,” who deserved “to atone for this wicked attempt with their lives.”

Rioting, rather than crime by individuals, primarily precipitated the creation of police forces as we know them.

The most common targets of mob violence in the 1830s were the abolitionists and the free black communities that supported them.

All five of his last round of appointees came from the slave states, although if representation on the Court had been proportional to free population or litigation there would have been but three southern justices.

The African race in the United States even when free, are every where a degraded class, and exercise no political influence. The privileges they are allowed to enjoy, are accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than of right.... And where they are nominally admitted by law to the privileges of citizenship, they have no effectual power to defend them, and are permitted to be citizens by the sufferance of the white population and hold whatever rights they enjoy at their mercy. They were never regarded as a constituent portion of the sovereignty of any state.... They were not looked upon as citizens by the contracting parties who formed the Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution declares emphatically that “no state may issue bills of credit,” but the Court ruled that states could charter banks to do so, even if the bank in question was wholly owned by the state!

Even when the African American population was included, U.S. illiteracy at 22 percent compared favorably with the 41 percent illiteracy in England and Wales recorded by their census of 1841.

To this, the redoubtable Southern Baptist Thornton Stringfellow pointed out that many other passages in the Pentateuch indicate God’s Chosen People practiced chattel slavery and that God, far from issuing a blanket condemnation of the institution, prescribed legal rules for it (as in Exodus 21).

When opponents of slavery appealed to the Golden Rule in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, proslavery writers pointed out that Paul’s Epistle to Philemon proved that the church of New Testament times, like the Israel of Old Testament times, had included slaveholders and recognized their rights.

First, he pointed with pride to his accomplishments, notably Indian Removal.

He identified two specific dangers to the Union: nullification and abolitionism. The latter, interestingly, received his harsher condemnation; “nothing but mischief can come from these improper assaults upon the feelings and rights of others.”

The crisis had causes both foreign and domestic. It reflected the chronic shortage of capital in the United States and the country’s dependence on inflows of foreign money. By paying off the national debt, Jackson had returned capital to Europe, and by destroying the BUS, he had made it harder to control the domestic money supply.

Contemporaries reacted to the Panic of 1837 in terms of their political allegiances. Democrats blamed the banks. Whigs blamed Jackson, and especially his Specie Circular. For a long time historians agreed with the Democrats and said that the pet banks had irresponsibly overextended their loans during the boom of 1836.49 But now we know that, monitored by the Treasury, the state bankers showed appropriate caution and that, except for Taney’s friends in Baltimore, the pet banks were generally responsibly managed.50 There is more truth in the Whig argument.

The Jacksonian destruction of the national bank had left the country without a lender of last resort.

When a newspaper in Oneida, New York, backed both Van Buren and abolitionism, his campaign dealt with this embarrassment by instigating a mob (led by a Democratic congressman) to destroy the paper’s office.62

As General Thomas Jesup accurately declared, “This, you may be assured is a negro and not an Indian war.”

Overall, in the years between 1820 and 1850 the sector of the population considered “urban” (residing in places with more than 2,500 people) multiplied fivefold and increased its share of the total population from 7 percent to 18 percent—commencing the period of the most rapid urbanization in American history.

During the 1820s and ’30s, more than 667,000 overseas immigrants entered the United States—three-quarters of them through the port of New York.

The 1840s and ’50s saw 4,242,000 immigrants arrive from overseas, and three-quarters of them still came through New York.