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THE American YAWP- Chapter 9 Notes., Exams of History

Harvard UniversityHistory

THE American YAWP- Chapter 9 Notes.pdf

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THE American YAWP- Chapter 9 Notes
THE AMERICAN YAWP- CHAPTER 9 NOTES
CHAPTER 9 DEMOCRACY IN
AMERICA
• In 1819, only 32 years after ratifying her Constitution, the issue of slavery threatened to
bring an end to the American experiment. Missouri applied for admission into the Union
and became the first state forced to align itself with the free-state North or slave-state
South. Slavery was well-established in Missouri, but congressman James Tallmadge
from New York tried to make it a condition of admittance that Missouri stop the further
introduction of slaves and provide for the gradual emancipation of those slaves already
living there. Since the founding of the republic, new states typically came into the union
in pairs. At eleven free and eleven slave states, this Missouri crisis now threatened to tip
the balance of power toward the southern states. The admission of Maine as a free state
alongside Missouri, a slave state, created the Missouri Compromise, which ended the
crisis, but only for a time.
• In the late 1820s, partisan divisions were emerging across the nation once again.
Threeway election between Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay sent
the son of the first President Adams to the White House in 1824 in what Jackson called
the “corrupt bargain.” By 1828, a new two-party system had begun to coalesce.
Adam’s supporters called themselves the National Republicans, supporting the
economic nationalism of the preceding years. Jackson’s faction called themselves the
DemocraticRepublicans and stood opposed to the “economic aristocracy” and
stratification of wealth and opportunity.
• The politics were of little matter, as the election became personal quickly; Adams called
Jackson a murderer and distributed a coffin handbill which listed the names of American
deserters Jackson had executed (legally) in his Florida military campaigns against the
Creek Indians. His critics called his wife a bigamist and when she learned of the
accusation, she collapsed and died. (She assumed her first husband had divorced her by
the time she married Jackson, but he had not.)
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THE AMERICAN YAWP- CHAPTER 9 NOTES

CHAPTER 9 DEMOCRACY IN

AMERICA

  • In 1819, only 32 years after ratifying her Constitution, the issue of slavery threatened to bring an end to the American experiment. Missouri applied for admission into the Union and became the first state forced to align itself with the free-state North or slave-state South. Slavery was well-established in Missouri, but congressman James Tallmadge from New York tried to make it a condition of admittance that Missouri stop the further introduction of slaves and provide for the gradual emancipation of those slaves already living there. Since the founding of the republic, new states typically came into the union in pairs. At eleven free and eleven slave states, this Missouri crisis now threatened to tip the balance of power toward the southern states. The admission of Maine as a free state alongside Missouri, a slave state, created the Missouri Compromise , which ended the crisis, but only for a time.
  • In the late 1820s, partisan divisions were emerging across the nation once again. Threeway election between Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay sent the son of the first President Adams to the White House in 1824 in what Jackson called the “ corrupt bargain .” By 1828, a new two-party system had begun to coalesce. Adam’s supporters called themselves the National Republicans , supporting the economic nationalism of the preceding years. Jackson’s faction called themselves the DemocraticRepublicans and stood opposed to the “economic aristocracy” and stratification of wealth and opportunity.
  • The politics were of little matter, as the election became personal quickly; Adams called Jackson a murderer and distributed a coffin handbill which listed the names of American deserters Jackson had executed (legally) in his Florida military campaigns against the Creek Indians. His critics called his wife a bigamist and when she learned of the accusation, she collapsed and died. (She assumed her first husband had divorced her by the time she married Jackson, but he had not.)

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  • Jackson’s electoral victory in 1828 was less ideological than sectional; regardless, his supporters championed a new era of democracy and joyously swarmed the White House upon his swearing-in. America was a nation at a crossroads with the election of Andrew Jackson. The National Republicans, represented by John Quincy Adams, feared that rapid growth of the nation would produce social chaos, and they argued that American authority needed to be centralized by political elites. Jackson’s faction, the DemocraticRepublicans, argued that the greatest danger facing the nation was the growth of inequality of privilege, and they came to power in 1839. Jackson is the founder of the Democratic Party that exists to this day.
  • Thousands of Americans greeted Andrew Jackson at his inauguration, trashing the White House, leading one Supreme Court Justice to lament the rise of “ King Mob ” in America. Politics now became open to virtually all the nation’s white male citizens, and Jacksonians hailed the era of the common man.
  • The franchise (the right to vote) began to expand, and as new states entered the union, the requirement that men be property owners or taxpayers was gradually lifted, even in the old states, and relatively peacefully. Only with Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island did the fight to open elections incite conflict, and that ended with a new state constitution that expanded suffrage (the right to vote).
  • Simultaneously, however, states across the North gradually disenfranchised their free black populations (even wealthy free black war veterans like James Forten , who had been voting his entire life). Ironically, these citizens were deemed “white enough” to be taxed, but no longer deemed “white enough” to vote. The democratization of the nation, of course, was far from complete. In much of the south, no slaves could vote. Even free blacks in the North had trouble casting votes, and no women could vote in any state. Nowhere was the ballot secret, as it was often spoken aloud, which meant people could be more easily bribed or intimidated.
  • Though factional competition had been a very real part of the American political system since its inception, it was not until the 1820s and 1830s that most Americans began to accept permanent, institutionalized political parties as a desirable part of the political process. In New York, political parties became institutionalized on the theory that

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nullified two federal tariff laws - namely, the tariff of abominations which critics argued, punished southern agricultural interests for the benefit of northern manufacturers. Jackson insisted that nullification was treason, and he ordered a federal warship to Charleston. Violence seemed a real possibility. When no state offered political alliance with South Carolina, Henry Clay, the newly elected South Carolina senator, was able to navigate a peaceable solution. Though proponents of nullification were able to claim a small victory, Jackson had made it clear that no state could defy the federal government alone.

  • Though Jackson was famously willing to use federal force against Indian tribes who resisted relocation west, he was reluctant to use it in other contexts, including in matters of business and economics. The Bank of the United States held a monopoly on federal deposits, provided credit to growing enterprises, issued dependable banknotes, and served as a dependable medium of exchange and moderation in an era of wild and irregular banking practices. And as a representative of “ hard-money ” interests (and as a man opposed to state-sponsored, bank-issued notes entirely), Jackson wanted to destroy it. The continuation of the bank emerged as the paramount issue of the 1832 election, and Henry Clay took up the cause of the 2nd Bank of the United States on behalf of the Whig Party, seeking to renew its charter four years ahead of schedule. The bank war , though, failed to provide Clay with a winning issue. Jackson won 55% of the popular vote on his way to a second term as President. Though Jackson could not legally abolish the Bank during its charter, he removed the government’s deposits, firing two secretaries of the Treasury to do so. Cabinet “shake-ups” were common during Jackson’s tenure (see the chapter’s description of the so-called Petticoat Affair).
  • After the bank war, Jackson moved against the most powerful remaining institution of economic nationalism: the Supreme Court.
  • In 1835, after the Federalist Chief Justice John Marshall died, the president appointed his former secretary of the treasury (a man named Roger B. Taney) to the Supreme Court - the same man who had consented to defund the national bank. Taney’s opinions and decisions echoed Jackson’s own ideology - that government existed to expand the

THE AMERICAN YAWP- CHAPTER 9 NOTES

economic opportunity of the people, which would not be possible if older economic interests, government agencies, and corporations were allowed to dominate the economy.

  • Jacksons’ hardline tactics galvanized a growing coalition opposed to the president’s use of power. Denouncing the president as “ King Andrew I,” they began to refer to themselves as Whigs , taking the name of the party in England that traditionally worked to limit the power of the king. With the emergence of the Whig Party , America had formalized its “second party system” that we recognize today.
  • The Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson believed that the power of government should be limited, except to the degree that it worked to eliminate social and economic arrangements that entrenched privilege and stifled opportunity. Democrats celebrated simple farmers and honest workers and contrasted them to corrupt, monopolistic, aristocratic forces of established wealth. They supported territorial expansion by the people, and their most radical members called for strong, even violent assaults on monopoly and privilege. The Whigs, in contrast, favored the expansion of federal power and industrial and commercial development. Whigs were cautious about westward expansion and fearful that rapid growth would produce instability and favored entrepreneurs and institutions that most effectively promoted economic growth. Though they tended to attract different sorts of people, both parties were more interested in winning elections than maintaining philosophical purity and adjusted their ideology from region to region in order to attract the most votes. While Democrats were firmly unified behind Jackson, the Whigs tended to divide their allegiance among the “Great Triumvirate” of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster , and John C. Calhoun. As such, while Whigs competed well in congressional, state, and local races, they ran different presidential candidates in different parts of the country, hoping to throw the election to the House of Representatives, and managed to win only two presidential elections in their more than twenty years of political prominence.
  • The Whig coalition drew strength from sever\al earlier parties, including two that harnessed American political paranoia. The Anti-Masonic Party formed in the 1820s for the purpose of destroying the Freemasons. Later, anti-immigrant sentiment formed the American Party, also called the Know-nothings. The American Party sought and won

THE AMERICAN YAWP- CHAPTER 9 NOTES

  • Just before Martin Van Buren -- himself a Democrat in the vein of Jackson -- was elected president in 1836, an economic boom swept the nation. Land prices picked up, credit was plentiful, and the government sold enough of its land holdings to have a surplus in its Treasury (the first and only time this ever occurred). The federal government, in response, gave the surplus back to the states, who invested it in highways, railroads, and canals. Jackson, however, adopted a policy of accepting only gold or silver currency for government land in an executive order called the “ specie circular .” The new policy sparked a drop in confidence in banknotes, and Van Buren began his term just as the nation headed into an unprecedented, five-year economic depression ( the Panic of 1897)
  • Though Van Buren presided over few legislative achievements, his proposal for a new, independent financial system established our current federally backed banking system. As he sought reelection, the Whigs settled on a single candidate for the nomination. William Henry Harrison, soldier of renown and a popular national figure, faced off against Van Buren in 1840. It was the first campaign in which the new and popular penny press carried sensationalistic news of the candidates to large audiences - which, in turn, made the candidates focus more on the “everyman” voter in American politics.
  • Both parties used the same techniques of mass voter appeal. The Whigs were able to paint Harrison, a wealthy member of the frontier elite with a considerable estate, as a simple man of the people who loved log cabins and hard cider. They used music to great effect by performing the song “ Tippecanoe and Tyler, too ” at campaign rallies.
  • The Democrats took the fall for the economic depression and Harrison won the election handily, though he died of pneumonia only one month into his term and was succeeded by Vice President John Tyler. Tyler, who had been a Democrat previously, frustrated Whigs and ended up aligning himself with a small fraction of southern, conservative Whigs who favored re-joining the Democratic Party In the midst of these domestic controversies, international politics took center stage. When anti-British factions in Canada launched an unsuccessful rebellion against the colonial government in 1837, an

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American steamship, the Caroline, got caught in the conflict and was set aflame. Resentment in the United States grew rapidly. A simmering conflict over a border between Maine and British Canada flared up consequently, pitting Canadian and American lumberjacks against British soldiers in a brawl that became known as the Aroostook War.

  • Later, when an American slave ship, the Creole, was seized by its captive slaves on its way to New Orleans, the British responded by declaring the slaves’ free men once they reached the Bahamas. Only a conciliatory British government in Great Britain salved Anglo-American relations. Under Whig leadership, the United States established its first diplomatic relations with China with the Treaty of Wan Hya. But international successes and peace were not enough for the Whigs to hold onto power, as James K Polk, a Democrat with an explicit agenda of westward expansion, won the White House in 1844.