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

by Daniel Walker Howe

Doctors were in short supply, hospitals almost unknown. This proved a blessing in disguise, for physicians then did as much harm as good, and hospitals incubated infection. The upside of rural isolation was that epidemics did not spread easily.

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.69

Although the Great Migration was a success story from the point of view of American national aggrandizement, it did not constitute a success story for all its individual participants.

Reflective southerners had long regretted the introduction of black slavery but feared that emancipation would invite race war, at least in areas with substantial black populations.

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.

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.”

Even today, some historians continue to accept the claims of Van Buren’s Buck-tails to have scored a dramatic victory for democracy at the New York constitutional convention of 1821. On the whole, however, partisan advantage rather than philosophical disagreement over democracy explains the differences between Bucktails and Clintonians at the convention.

Jackson demanded loyalty, and to him this meant acceptance of his assertions,

Opposition to his will could only derive from a conspiracy against him.

The Second Bank of the United States was the largest corporation in the country; indeed, it was the only really nationwide business. Modeled on its precursor, the Bank Hamilton had founded, the Second BUS held the Treasury’s tax receipts on deposit and handled the federal government’s financial transactions. Like most other banks of the time, it issued its own paper currency; unlike most of theirs, its notes were legal tender and could always be exchanged for gold and silver. The government itself issued no paper money, only coins. By presenting the paper money of state banks for redemption, the national bank could limit their extensions of credit. The BUS made loans to other banks as well as to other businesses and individuals; unlike the Federal Reserve Bank of today, which is the debtor of its member banks, the Second Bank of the United States was the creditor of state banks. Like the Federal Reserve Bank of today, it marketed the Treasury’s securities to buyers from all over the world. The BUS handled virtually all foreign exchange transactions, a vital function for a debtor country with a chronically unfavorable trade balance.

(Even if Calhoun’s grammatical interpretation be granted, the difficulty of deciding when a tariff is “for revenue” and when “protective” seems insuperable, since all tariffs have both elements, and the congressmen who voted for it probably did not all have the same motive. The Supreme Court has never drawn the distinction.)

Calhoun believed that the same parties who had adopted the Constitution in the first place should possess the final power to interpret it.

Where Whigs voiced reverence for the supremacy of the law, Democrats more typically celebrated the autonomy of the sovereign people.

Indian Removal reveals much more about Jacksonian politics than just its racism. In the first place it illustrates imperialism, that is, a determination to expand geographically and economically, imposing an alien will upon subject peoples and commandeering their resources. Imperialism need not be confined to cases of overseas expansion, such as the western European powers carried on in the nineteenth century; it can just as appropriately apply to expansion into geographically contiguous areas, as in the case of the United States and tsarist Russia. Imperialism is a more accurate and fruitful category for understanding the relations between the United States and the Native Americans than the metaphor of paternalism so often invoked by both historians and contemporaries (as in treaty references to the “Great White Father” and his “Indian children”).

Besides eagerness for territorial expansion, Jackson’s Indian policy also demonstrates impatience with legal restraints.

The southern practice of ignoring inconvenient federal laws in order to preserve white supremacy was established long before the Civil War. Jackson, who had stood up to South Carolina so firmly over the tariff, cooperated with the state’s defiance of federal law when the issue was race.43 The refusal of the Post Office to deliver abolitionist mail to the South may well represent the largest peacetime violation of civil liberty in U.S. history. Deprived of access to communication with the South, the abolitionists would henceforth concentrate on winning over the North.

Sadly, Jackson himself was part of the problem of violence. He realized that the “spirit of mob-law is becoming much too common and must be checked, or ere long it will become as great an evil as servile war.” Yet having said that to his postmaster general, he went on in the same letter to urge Amos Kendall to break the law and cooperate with the mob to prevent delivery of abolitionist tracts.

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!

Why did farm parents, tired at the end of a day’s work, make time to teach their children? The primary motive seems not to have been commercial or political, still less to facilitate the children’s upward social mobility. It was religious.

Sadly but understandably, poor Catholic immigrants, especially the Irish, treasured the whiteness of their skin as their one badge of privilege over the free Negroes who competed with them for jobs as laborers. Abolitionists, especially black abolitionists, deeply resented the attitude of Irish Americans and their church, contrasting it with the sympathy American antislavery received in Ireland itself from nationalists like Daniel O’Connell. As a result, abolitionists sometimes allied with the cause of nativism.83

Where John Quincy Adams, like the framers, had believed in balanced government, Jackson believed in popular virtue—and in himself as its embodiment.

The introduction during the late nineteenth century of the “Australian ballot” (printed at government expense and listing all candidates) was accounted a great reform.22

“The World Is Governed Too Much”

(Boardinghouses met a real need: With hours of labor long, employed people had to come home to a prepared meal.)

The most extensive industrial use of slave labor occurred in the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond, Virginia. In 1842, Joseph Reid Anderson, the “commercial agent” (chief operating officer) of the company, began a program to train slaves for the most highly skilled work in the mill: “puddling.” Five years later, when he was about to turn over a new rolling mill to the now fully trained slave puddlers, the white workers went out on strike in protest, but to no avail. Anderson fired the strikers and replaced them with slaves, and within three years two-thirds of his labor force was owned by the company.72 In years to come, the Tredegar Iron Works would play an important role in the Confederate armaments industry.

Despite the anarchic state of the money supply, the nineteenth-century United States did not represent the age of pure laissez-faire that many people imagine. This widespread misconception does not square with the economic role actually played by state and local governments. The decline of mixed corporations provoked by the depression of the Van Buren years proved permanent, but the decline in state promotion of internal improvements turned out to be very temporary. The coming of the railroads encouraged a new wave of economic interventions by most of the states, many localities, and eventually the federal government as well. Rather than waiting for prosperity to return in the 1840s, American governments actively promoted it through their investments in the newly invented steam railroads.

The sheer size of the railway companies altered the American economy.

Railroads became the largest corporations since the demise of the BUS, and the first nationwide secular enterprises under entirely private control.

Perhaps most importantly, being too large and technical to operate through the conventional arrangement of an owner and a foreman, the railroads developed a whole new profession: business management.

Significantly, the constitution of the Confederate States adopted in 1861 forbade the central government to sponsor internal improvements.

Under Jackson, the Democratic Party celebrated popular sovereignty and expressed relative indifference to the rule of law when this conflicted with the will of “the people” as defined by the party. Even violence had been shrugged off when directed against unpopular minorities. Whigs, on the other hand, emphasized that the people had imposed legal limitations on their own sovereignty; in controversies like deposit removal they cast themselves as upholders of the law.

(It is not widely grasped that Joseph’s plural marriages involved polyandry as well as polygyny.)

Regulars suffered less than volunteers, for they understood the importance of clean camps and well-cooked food, and they had all been inoculated against smallpox.

In all these ways, 1848 marked a pivotal year for the development of American history.

One reason why the president promoted the Gold Rush was to stimulate gold coinage. His Message to Congress urged establishment of what became the U.S. Mint in San Francisco, so as to save transporting the bullion a long distance before monetizing it. By the end of 1848, $10 million in gold had been produced in California; by the end of 1851, $220 million. The value of U.S. gold coins in circulation increased by a factor of twenty.56 This went far to alleviate the shortage of currency that had always plagued the United States and that had done so much to stimulate conflict between “hard” and “soft” money advocates. With plenty of gold in circulation, there could be no objection to the hard-money policy of the Jacksonian Democrats, and less need for a multitude of bank notes with all their problems of confusion, fraud, and counterfeiting.

Congress specified a Tuesday so rural voters could journey to the county seat on Monday, thus not forcing sabbatarians to travel on Sunday; November first was ruled out because Catholics went to mass on All Saints’ Day.

Yet the Free Soil Party had served notice on national politicians that a critical fraction of the northern electorate found additional slave states unacceptable. Thereafter, Congress admitted no more slave states.

The most bloody conflicts, however, derived from the domination and exploitation of the North American continent by the white people of the United States and their government.

Americans’ aggressive imperialism manifested their preoccupation with the future rather than the present. New homes, either in the growing cities or on the frontier, constituted part of the innovative quest in which so many participated. No significant group of Americans wished to shun what all agreed was the nation’s destiny to greatness. Even the critics of territorial expansion endorsed the growth of American population, productivity, and power; but they preferred to improve the quality of national life through education, economic development, and moral reform both individual and collective, rather than just expand geographically the kind of America that already existed, encumbered with the institution of slavery. The National Republicans and afterwards the Whigs, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, proposed an alternative vision to that of the Jacksonian Democrats. Their vision of government-sponsored modernization offered America a different future. Eventually, the Whig vision prevailed, but only after Abraham Lincoln had vindicated it in the bloodiest of American wars.