Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Unwilling to consider the dangers of a politicized press, or unable to contemplate the political results, political parties propelled newspaper circulation upward, with circulation growing more than five times as fast as population by 1840, having been roughly equal to population in 1790. This tsunami of newspapers had little to do with market forces and everything to do with political patronage. Publishers carried delinquent customers for months, their deficits offset through political contributions, “loans,” and subsidies from Congress.60 Historian Gerald Baldasty found that in 1830, the state of Georgia had eleven newspapers, “all of them embroiled in political fights,” and the party had at least three patronage papers in each state, with the Globe serving as their pilot for editorial policy.61 By 1850, political bias so dominated the newspaper industry that the U.S. Census estimated nearly 80 percent of American papers were partisan, while other estimates put the number of partisan papers at close to 100 percent!62

  Thus, at the time “newspapers” emerged as a driving force in American political life, they had almost nothing to do with objective news. To the contrary, they deliberately slanted every report and openly advertised their partisan purposes through their names. Partisanship was their primary raison d’être.63 Editors viewed readers as voters who needed to be guided to appropriate views, then mobilized to vote.64 Green’s Telegraph flatly condemned neutrality as an absence of principles, and overall, editors increasingly discarded news in favor of propaganda.65 A Louisville paper criticized the neutrality of an Indiana paper, noting, “in this State, people have more respect for an open, independent adversary than for dumb partisans . . . who are too imbecile to form an opinion.”66 One Jacksonian editor stated that “we most of all abhor and detest . . . a neutral paper. It pretends to be all things to all men.”67 This attitude has been confirmed in studies of content, in which the percentage of editorial comment in “news” stories increased, then nearly doubled between 1847 and 1860.

  Many editors owed their jobs directly and specifically to the Jacksonians, frequently slipping back and forth between editor positions and postmaster jobs. Jackson himself appointed numerous editors to salaried political positions, including many postmasters, while nationally it is estimated that fifty to sixty editors had been given plum political jobs.68 Rewarding political friends was nothing new—the Federalists had appointed nearly one thousand editors to postmaster positions over a twelve-year period—but the Jacksonians transformed an ad hoc approach to appointments into a strategic political plan.69 Under such circumstances, few readers of “news” doubted where a paper stood on particular positions, nor did people think they were receiving objective facts upon which to make reasoned decisions.

  Ironically—keeping in mind that the entire purpose behind founding the Democratic Party was to exclude slavery from the political debate—newspapers had for more than a century provided a cheap and reliable way of catching runaway slaves and overcoming cost barriers of distance.70 One historian of slavery noted that eighteenth-century slave owners used “print to counter the mobility of the unfree, to establish or reestablish confidence in slavery and servitude.”71 This aspect of the public discussion of slavery apparently went unnoticed in Van Buren’s schemes, but it reflected a truth about slavery and the press, namely, that to not take a stand against slavery was to endorse it.72 Put another way, at the local level, “printers and postmasters . . . served as agents for masters. They were go-betweens” who supported the slave structure through the dissemination of information needed to reacquire runaways.73 This fact clashed on the most profound level with the Jacksonian imperative that required that slavery be pushed out of the public sphere, subtly and consistently pushing maintenance of “the peculiar institution” into the public sphere. Over time, as northern states ended slavery, even pro-Jacksonian papers that ran ads about runaways began to vanish, further distinguishing northern and southern papers, and “free” and “slave” papers, all in stark contrast to what Van Buren had hoped would occur.

  With the end of “King Caucus,” the elimination of restrictions on voter qualifications, and the erection of a massive network of newspapers supported by the federally funded postal system, Van Buren had constructed a political party that conceivably could restrain the trend toward disunion over slavery. It bears repeating: at every turn, Van Buren’s system was designed to suppress all political discussion of slavery. Of course, this proved impossible to enforce since virtually every debate involved sectional tensions, and sooner or later slavery became the unspoken topic. The stultification of free speech through the very newspapers established to spread the Democratic message was an inevitable by-product. Southern Democrats attempted to manipulate and control the press even more over time, seeking to stem the influx of hostile, abolitionist literature between 1820 and 1860. This affected the nature of news-gathering itself as editors depended less on “clipped news” (which fell from 54 percent of the stories in 1820 to just 30 percent by 1860) because of the potential for pro- or anti-slave views to surface in the text.74 Instead, reporter-generated stories doubled between 1820 and 1860, a trend that shifted the location of stories to a geographical area within the editor’s reach, allowing him to tell the slavery story as he saw fit.75

  It was a futile effort. Even as news emanating from Washington, D.C., fell by 3 percent from 1820 to 1860 as a share of total news at a time when the federal government played an increasingly important role in the lives of ordinary people, over that same period discussion of sectional problems “increased steadily . . . from 5% of the coverage in the early years to 12%” by the election of Lincoln.76 Even that sharp increase in sectional issues did not adequately reflect the profound impact slavery had on the party system and the press, due to the understanding of a “gag” on all discussion of slavery on the part of southern editors. In essence, the increasingly sectional tone of newspaper discussions occurred even while a gag on debate over slavery was imposed in the South. It seems reasonable to conclude, therefore, that despite Van Buren’s grand design to push it onto the back burner, slavery had become the single most important topic in America.

  At the same time that free speech was being stifled under the guise of preserving the Union, Van Buren’s scheme frayed at other edges. The requirement, for example, that to maintain a national party presence, the presidential candidate had to be a “northern man of southern principles” or a westerner meant that if a northern man of northern principles ever acceded to the highest office, it would constitute a threat of the most profound kind. So long as the Whigs remained the loyal opposition—winning only two presidential elections between 1836 and 1860, and both presidents died in office—little danger existed that they would raise the issue of slavery. Indeed, one reason Lynn Marshall labeled the party “stillborn” is that from its inception, the Whig Party’s chief components were irreconcilable. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, an ardent opponent of slavery, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (the first major politician to term slavery a “positive good” as opposed to a “necessary evil”) had virtually nothing in common, save their hatred of Jackson.

  If, however, the Whigs faltered and another party took their place—a party whose chief issue was the restriction or elimination of slavery—then Van Buren’s presidential safeguard would likewise collapse. Such was the case in 1860 when a northern man of northern principles, Abraham Lincoln, explicitly campaigned on the principle that slavery should not be allowed into the western territories. While he promised repeatedly not to touch slavery where it then existed, as we will see keeping such a vow was an impossibility, as Lincoln himself had acknowledged with his “House Divided” speech.

  Quickly, all supporting elements of Van Buren’s scheme fell apart. In 1836 Congress officially adopted the “gag rule” to prohibit all debate or discussion of slavery, which itself became the source of endless conflict and debate. Anti-slavery forces had begun inundating Congress with thousands of petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in 1831. The pro-sla
very forces found support from, of all people, newly elected president Martin Van Buren, who urged them to find a compromise. The result came in the Twenty-fourth Congress, using the Pinckney Resolutions of 1836, which packaged all anti-slavery petitions together and referred them to a select committee.77 South Carolina representative Henry Laurens Pinckney’s committee concluded that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states, and therefore proposed to table all petitions so that none were brought up for discussion or debate. Attempts by Whigs to derail it were themselves gagged. Because this was a “resolution,” and not a House “rule,” every new session had to renew the gag rule. In both 1837 and 1838, new gag resolutions passed, but not without a backlash, which in part contributed to the first Whig majority in the Twenty-seventh Congress. Nevertheless, in 1840, the Twenty-first Rule was passed, which converted the resolution to permanent status and prohibited the Speaker from even receiving an anti-slavery petition. Far from ending debate, the gag rules by their very wording required that new and expanded language be added as new territories joined the Union as states.

  Throughout, the star in Congress was former president John Quincy Adams—the only U.S. president to return to the House of Representatives after a term in the White House. Adams’s speaking skills enabled him to follow the gag rule while still raising anti-slavery issues.78 For example, Adams forced the Speaker to rule on whether each individual petition he received fell under the jurisdiction of the latest gag rule, altogether violating the intent of the rule itself. His actions finally resulted in a motion to have Adams censured. Then, when the Whigs had the majority, he got himself appointed to head the Rules Committee, which reported out rules that removed the gag provision. When finally, in 1844, the House rescinded the gag rule by a 28-vote margin, the victory belonged to Adams more than any other man.

  Repeal of the gag rule constituted only the first thread to unravel from Van Buren’s garment to exclude slavery from national debate, and even there, the Democrats could not maintain party discipline. During the debate over the settlement of the Mexican War, Democratic congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced a provision that slavery be prohibited in all territories acquired by the United States in the conflict. Hence, Van Buren’s own party abandoned the principle that slave politics should be excluded from the halls of Congress.

  Two other key elements of Van Buren’s scheme to suppress the slave issue also spun out of his control. Government at the federal level had grown consistently bigger and more powerful. Ironically, the man who gave it the most muscle was Van Buren’s champion, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory’s reputation as a small-government president is ill deserved, a myth based largely on his famous “war” on the Bank of the United States in 1832. In fact, the Bank War was a highly partisan power struggle with the influential president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, who had great support among Jackson’s congressional foes. It had nothing to do with either economics or federalism, and certainly was not an example of limited-government libertarianism as so many of Jackson’s admirers have attempted to paint it. Jackson had ordered the drafting of his own plan for a national bank in 1829, and when he killed the BUS, he put the government deposits in state banks run by his political pals. Considerable evidence exists that he hoped to completely eliminate state paper money.79 Jackson issued more vetoes than all previous presidents combined, reversing the long tradition of “Whig” governance (the term in this instance does not refer to the party, but rather the view that the main source of popular will lay in the Congress, not the presidency).

  The oft-overlooked aspect of Jackson’s many vetoes is that as negative demonstrations of presidential authority, they nevertheless increased the scope and power of the office itself, regardless of the intention that lay behind them. In other areas, though, Jackson made no mystery of his intention to dominate other branches. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him in the Cherokee removal, he uttered the famous phrase, “Justice Marshall has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.” Jackson (with legitimate cause) threatened to invade South Carolina and enforce the collection of tariff duties there. Nothing Andrew Jackson did actually weakened the federal government, and most of what he did greatly expanded the size and reach of the presidency. It was only a matter of time until someone who did not share Martin Van Buren’s goal of suppressing all discussion of slavery reached the White House.

  A final failure of Van Buren’s plan involved the issue of patronage, for as the Whigs learned to play the game, with every election came more government jobs to be given away. Ensuring electoral success meant that a candidate had to promise more jobs than his opponent. Jefferson may have answered the White House door himself in his bathrobe and slippers, but the trends were such that by 1860 Abraham Lincoln spent every moment not fighting the war dealing with a seemingly endless line of political office holders, whose letters of appointment he had to sign. Even though he still ran the U.S. government essentially with only three personal aides, the burdens of dealing with the spoils at the end of every election had started to become apparent.

  Thus, Van Buren’s nightmare only increased national debate about slavery (when he had sought to exclude it), increased the presence and intrusion of the federal government (when he had counted on limiting it), and increased the likelihood that if the government ever fell into the hands of a contrary ideology, its power would be such that slavery itself would not be safe. And that was precisely the case when Abraham Lincoln was elected. The Democrats had by then ceased to be a national party at all, fracturing into northern and southern wings that could not even agree on a presidential candidate. An entirely new party—using spoils as its instrument to win elections, but this time fueled and directed by a specific anti-slavery ideology—the Republicans, ditched Van Buren’s concept of a party devoid of principle and elevated the principle of anti-slavery to the top of its agenda.

  Not only had he failed to keep slavery out of the national debate, Van Buren had devised a system that ensured it would be addressed at the national level, with the machinery of a vastly larger federal government. During the Civil War which followed, both the Union and Confederate governments accelerated the growth of government power. Both imposed income taxes, confiscated private property, enacted draft laws, printed unsecured money, silenced free speech, engaged in arrests that violated habeas corpus, and committed dozens of other violations of the principles of limited government. The excesses of Lincoln’s government were substantial, but research has shown that the Confederacy in fact was far more oppressive to the rights of free white citizens than the North.80 As historian Richard Bensel found, during the war, “two central states . . . were locked in mortal combat,” and the Confederacy pursued a “relatively statist war mobilization. In contrast, the northern war effort mobilized materiel and men by relying on voluntary contracts within a comparatively robust capitalist market.”81

  Another unintended consequence of the war was that a giant lobbying organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, was formed to acquire benefits for veterans. Between 1865 and 1888, the GAR emerged as the largest nonbusiness special interest group in America, padding its rolls with thousands of “veterans,” many of whom never served in combat; it pleaded for those who had received war wounds to obtain restitution. Yet many never served, more still never fought, and still more were never wounded. Its ranks swelled beyond all imagination—when, given the age and physical health of the war survivors, the numbers should have declined steadily—until after the Compromise of 1877, the GAR floated the notion of paying veterans’ benefits to Confederate soldiers.

  Eventually, the courageous president Grover Cleveland would personally rein in the GAR, by which time other unintended consequences of Van Buren’s party structure would be out of control. As long as government remained relatively small, the excesses of the spoils system likewise remained minimal. On a micro level, one could see the inevitable results, however: the Tweed Ring in New York City in the 1850s
turned spoilsmanship into a high art, as the political agents of “Boss” William Marcy Tweed doled out largesse to anyone and everyone who helped keep the ring in power. Alexander Callow has detailed the staggering graft that went on under the Tweed Ring, which honed Van Buren’s political machine to perfection, stealing millions from the taxpayers of New York City.82 At one point, Tammany Hall (as Tweed’s operation was called, for the building out of which it operated) counted almost twelve thousand people whose livelihood directly depended on the Tweed Ring staying in power. The modus operandi for getting out the vote was accurately captured in Martin Scorsese’s film Gangs of New York, and was epitomized in the saying, “It’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.” Tweed’s boys used intimidation to prevent opponents from getting to the polls, while at the same time they elevated to a fine art the practice of getting out the vote among their own supporters. Their practices included outright cash bribes, multiple voting by the same person, and scouring every alley and saloon for any breathing citizen who could cast a ballot for Tammany Hall.

  It was a far cry from the voters in the age of Jefferson, who turned out at up to 80 percent rates because of a sense of duty, patriotism, and pride. Tweed’s voters were herded like livestock, told whom to vote for, and warned to not think for themselves.