A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Scottish and French socialists Robert Dale Owen and Charles Fourier attracted American converts, but their experiments also failed miserably. Owen sought to eradicate individualism through education in New Harmony, Indiana, which he bought from the Rappites in 1825.26 Yet despite Owen’s doctrinal desires, individualism went untamed among the eight hundred unruly Owenites, whose children ran amok and who eagerly performed “head work” (thinking) but disdained “hand work” (physical labor of any sort). Predictably, New Harmony soon ran out of food. Promising to destroy the “Three Headed Hydra: God, marriage, property,” Owen himself was nearly destroyed. He poured good money after bad into the colony, losing a fortune calculated in modern terms to have been in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Likewise, twenty-eight separate attempts to establish Fourierist “phalanxes” (Fouriers’ utopian organizational scheme) from Massachusetts to Iowa from 1841 to 1858 also failed.27 Members were expected to live on eighty cents a week, a sum below even what contemporary Benedictine and Franciscan monks survived on.

  Most of these utopians advocated greatly expanded rights (some would say, roles) for women. White women had gained property rights within marriage in several Ohio and Mississippi Valley states. Divorce became slightly more prevalent as legal grounds increased, and a woman was awarded custody of children for the first time ever in the precedent-setting New York State court case Mercein v. People (1842). At the same time, the emerging industrial revolution brought young women work in New England’s numerous new textile and manufacturing industries. Jacksonian education reforms and the growth of public schools opened up a new white-collar profession for females—teaching. Steadily, the woman’s sphere overlapped the men’s sphere in economic endeavor. As demand for teachers grew, women began to attend institutions of higher education; Oberlin, the radical abolitionist college presided over by Charles Grandison Finney, produced America’s first female college graduate. And during the Civil War, nursing joined teaching as a profession open to educated women.

  Women also became involved in social activism through the temperance movement. As wives and mothers, females sometimes bore the brunt of the alcoholism of husbands and male family members. The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was one of many women’s organizations educating the public on the evil of “strong drink” and seeking its eradication. The Washington Society, an antebellum equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous, was formed to assist problem drinkers. A single overarching theme emerged, however—solving personal problems through political means. Women helped pass the Maine Law (1851), which forbade alcohol throughout the entire state. Enforcement proved difficult, yet as society saw the implications of widespread drunkenness, thousands of Americans (including a young Whig named Abraham Lincoln) joined the campaign against “Demon Rum.” By 1850 the movement had slashed alcohol consumption by three fourths.

  All of these causes combined to lead women, inevitably, toward feminism, a religio-socio-political philosophy born at the end of the Age of Jackson. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Frances Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and others led a small, fiery band of Jacksonian feminists. These women gathered together in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, where they issued a proclamation—a Declaration of Sentiments—touching on nearly all of the issues (abortion is the notable exception) of today’s feminists. They decried the lack of education, economic opportunities (especially in medicine, law, and the pulpit), legal rights, marital power, and, most important, the “elective franchise” (the right to vote). “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman,” they declared, “having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”28

  Abolitionism—the radical belief in the immediate prohibition of slavery—reached fever pitch during the Age of Jackson. It is important to distinguish at the outset the difference between abolitionists and those who merely opposed slavery: abolitionists wanted to abolish all American slavery immediately without compensation. Antislavery politicians (like some Whigs and Free-Soilers, and after 1854, Republicans) wanted only to keep slavery out of the western territories, while permitting it to continue in the South.

  Quakers initially brought English abolitionist views to America, where they enjoyed limited popularity in the northern colonies. Revolutionary ideals naturally sparked antislavery sentiment, especially in Philadelphia and Boston. After the Revolution, the American Colonization Society was formed to advocate freeing and colonizing slaves (sending them back to Liberia in Africa). But the rise of the cotton kingdom fueled even more radical views. On January 1, 1831, a Massachusetts evangelical named William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, calling the slave “a Man and a brother” and calling for his “immediate emancipation.” The New England Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society formed soon thereafter. Garrison, joined by Lewis Tappan, Elijah P. Lovejoy, and Sarah and Angelina Grimké, gained a growing audience for the abolitionist cause. The Grimké sisters were themselves former slaveholders, but when they inherited their father’s South Carolina plantation, they freed its black workers, moved north, and joined the Quaker church. They created a minor sensation as two of the nation’s first female lecturers touring the northern states, vehemently speaking out against the evils of slavery.29

  Former slaves also proved to be powerful abolitionist activists. Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Solomon Northrup, Harriet Tubman, and others brought their own shocking life experiences to the lecture stages and the printed pages of the abolitionist movement. Douglass, the son of a white slave master whom he had never even met, escaped Maryland slavery and headed north as a young man. In his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass spoke eloquently of the hardships he had endured, how his slave mother had taught him to read, and how he rose from obscurity to become North America’s leading Negro spokesman. His story served as a lightning rod for antislavery forces. At the same time, Harriet Tubman devoted much of her effort to helping the Underground Railroad carry escaped slaves to freedom in the North. Tubman put her own life on the line during a score of secret trips south, risking recapture and even death.30

  The abolitionists succeeded in putting great pressure on the major political parties and beginning the long process by which their radical ideas became mainstream ideas in a democracy. Abolitionists succeeded at provoking an immediate and violent reaction among southern slaveholders. Georgians offered a five-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him south. Abolitionist Arthur Tappan boasted a fifty-thousand-dollar price on his head. In North and South alike, proslavery mobs attacked abolitionists’ homes and offices, burning their printing presses, and threatening (and delivering) bodily harm. Anti-abolitionist violence culminated in the 1837 mob murder of Illinois abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy.

  American Renaissance

  Education and the arts also experienced great change, to the point that some have described Jacksonian high culture as an American “renaissance” and a “flowering” of the arts.31 Although such language is exaggerated, it is true that America saw its second generation of native intellectuals, writers, and artists achieve bona fide success and recognition during the antebellum years. Jacksonian writers and artists came into their own, but they did so in a uniquely American way.

  American educators continued to pursue aims of accessibility and practicality. New England public schools provided near-universal co-ed elementary education, thanks to the efforts of Massachusetts state school superintendent Horace Mann and a troop of spirited educational reformers. Public school teachers, many of them women, taught a pragmatic curriculum stressing the three R’s (reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic). Noah Webster’s “blue-backed speller” textbook saw extensive, and nearly universal, use as teachers adopted Webster’s methodology of civics, patriotism, and secular but moralistic teachings.

  New “booster colleges” appeared to supplement the elite school
s and were derided because their founders often were not educators—they were promoters and entrepreneurs aiming to “boost” the image of new frontier towns to prospective investors. Illinois College and Transylvania College appeared west of the Appalachians and eventually became respected institutions. Ohio alone boasted nearly three dozen degree-granting institutions during the Age of Jackson. And although Ohio’s Oberlin College produced excellent scholars (and scores of abolitionist radicals), many booster colleges failed to meet the high standards of, for example, Great Britain’s degree-granting colleges—Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

  The arts flourished along with academics in this renaissance. Beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, northern painters Thomas Cole, George Innes, and others painted evocative scenes of New York’s Hudson River Valley. Nature painting drew wide praise, and a market developed for their landscape art that spread to all regions. Missouri’s George Caleb Bingham, for example, earned acclaim for painting scenes of the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys, fur trappers, local elections, and his famed Jolly Flatboatmen. Landscape and genre painters adopted America’s unique frontier folkways as the basis for a democratic national art that all Americans—not just the educated and refined—could enjoy.

  James Fenimore Cooper did for literature what the Hudson River school did for painting. A native of an elite upstate New York family, Cooper wandered from his socioeconomic roots to create his literary art. After a childhood spent on the edge of the vanishing New York frontier, Cooper dropped out of Yale College to become a merchant seaman and, ultimately, a novelist. In The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826), he masterfully created what we now recognize as the first Western-genre novel. During two decades, Cooper wrote a five-book series featuring his hero Hawkeye (whose name changed in each book as his age advanced), who fought Indians and wily Frenchmen and battled the wild elements of nature. Hawkeye, a wild and woolly frontiersman, helped to advance the cause of American civilization by assisting army officers, settlers, townspeople, and, of course, damsels in distress. In classic American style, however, Hawkeye also constantly sought to escape the very civilization he had assisted. At the end of every tale he had moved farther into the wilderness until at last, in The Prairie (1827), he died—an old man, on the Great Plains, with the civilization he had both nurtured and feared close at his heels.

  It is no accident that during this time of industrial revolution and social and political upheaval, America produced a literature that looked back longingly at a vanished (and, often, imagined) agrarian utopia. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) is perhaps the most famous example of American writers’ penchant for nature writing. Thoreau spent nearly two years in the woods at Walden Pond (near Concord, Massachusetts) and organized his evocative Walden narrative around the four seasons of the year. His message was for his readers to shun civilization and urban progress, but unlike Hawkeye, Henry David Thoreau traveled to town periodically for fresh supplies! After his two-year stint in the “wilderness” of Walden Pond, Thoreau returned to his home in Concord and civilization only to land in the town jail for tax evasion. He wrote of this experience (and his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War) in his famed essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849).

  Although Thoreau’s fellow Massachusetts author Nathaniel Hawthorne was not a nature writer, he addressed crucial Jacksonian issues of democracy, individual freedom, religion, feminism, and economic power in his elegantly written novels The Scarlet Letter (1850) and House of the Seven Gables (1852). Later, Herman Melville provided a dark and powerful view of nature in the form of the great white whale of Moby Dick (1851). Indeed, some experts point to Melville’s and Hawthorne’s artful prose to refute Alexis de Tocqueville’s criticism of the quality of American literature. They note their literary skill and that of their fellow northeasterners—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and the transcendentalist authors as evidence of an accomplished Jacksonian literati. Yet another school of writers, active at the same time as the New Englanders, actually proves Tocqueville partially correct. The southwestern school of newspaper humorists was not as well known as the northeastern, yet it ultimately produced one of the most famous (and most American) of all American writers, Mark Twain. The southwestern writers were newspapermen residing in the Old Southwest—the emergent frontier towns along the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In Louisville, St. Louis, Natchez, Baton Rouge, Cincinnati, and New Orleans newspapermen like James Hall, Morgan Neville, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe wrote short prose pieces for newspapers, magazines, and almanacs throughout the Jacksonian era.32

  A new, entirely American frontier folk hero emerged through the exploits of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, although contemporaries thought Boone “lacked the stuff of a human talisman.”33 Instead, Crockett captured the imagination of the public with his stories of shooting, fighting, and gambling—all of which he repeated endlessly while running for public office. Crockett liked a frequent pull on the whiskey bottle—phlegm cutter and antifogmatic, he called it—and he bought rounds for the crowd when campaigning for Congress. Crockett named his rifle Old Betsy, and he was indeed a master hunter. But he embellished everything: in one story he claimed to have killed 105 bears in one season and told of how he could kill a racoon without a bullet by simply “grinning it” out of a tree!34 Not one to miss an opportunity to enhance his legend (or his wallet), Crockett wrote, with some editorial help, an autobiography, Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee. It became an instant best seller, and far from leaving the author looking like a hick, Crockett’s book revealed the country congressman for what he really was, a genuine American character, not a clown.35

  Nearly all of the southwestern tales, like the Western genre they helped to spawn, featured heroes in conflicts that placed them in between nature and civilization. Like Hawkeye, the southwestern folk hero always found himself assisting American civilization by fighting Indians and foreign enemies and, above all, constantly moving west. Crockett’s life generated still more romantic revisions after his fabled immigration to Texas, where he died a martyr for American expansion at the Alamo in 1836.36

  Had Crockett lived long enough to make the acquaintance of a young author named Samuel Clemens from Missouri, the two surely would have hit it off, although the Tennessean’s life may have surpassed even Mark Twain’s ability to exaggerate. In his job as a typesetter and cub reporter for Missouri and Iowa newspapers, Sam Clemens learned well his lessons from the southwestern writers. One day Clemens—under the nom de plume Mark Twain—would create his own wonderful version of the Western. Speaking the language of the real American heartland, Twain’s unlikely hero Huckleberry Finn and his friend the escaped slave Jim would try to flee civilization and slavery on a raft headed down the mighty Mississippi. Like Twain, Cooper, Thoreau, the Hudson River school, and scores of Jacksonian artists, Huck and Jim sought solace in nature—they aimed to “light out for the Territories” and avoid being “sivilized”!

  Such antipathy for “sivilization” marked the last years of Andrew Jackson’s tenure. When he stepped down, America was already headed west on a new path toward expansion, growth, and conflict. Perhaps symbolically, westerner Jackson handed over the reins to a New Yorker, Martin Van Buren, at a time when the nation’s cities had emerged as centers for industry, religion, reform, and “politicking.”

  The Little Magician Takes the Stage

  Martin Van Buren ran, in 1836, against a hodgepodge of Whig candidates, including William Henry Harrison (Old Tippecanoe), Daniel Webster, and North Carolinian W. P. Mangum. None proved a serious opponent, although it appeared that there might be a repeat of 1824, with so many candidates that the election would be thrown into the House. The Little Magician avoided that alternative by polling more of the popular vote than all the other four candidates put together and smashing them all combined in the electoral college, 170 to 124. (Harr
ison received the most of the opposing votes—73.) Notably, the combined positions of those who preferred to eliminate slavery, constitutionally or otherwise, accounted for more than half the electoral vote in the presidential election.37

  Andrew Jackson exited the presidency just as a number of his policies came home to roost. His frenzied attacks on the BUS had not done any specific damage, but had contributed to the general erosion of confidence in the national economy. His lowbrow approach to the White House and diatribes against speculators who damaged “public virtue” in fact diminished the dignity and tarnished the class of the presidency. The vetoes and arbitrary backhanding of states’ rights ate away at important principles of federalism.

  Thus, no sooner did Van Buren step on the stage than it collapsed. The Panic of 1837 set in just as Van Buren took the oath of office. Wheat and cotton prices had already fallen, knocking the props out from under the agricultural sector and sending lenders scurrying to foreclose on farmers. Once banks repossessed the farms, however, they could do little with them in a stalled market, forcing land prices down even further. In the industrial sector, where rising interest rates had their most severe effects, some 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed and still others suffered from falling wages. A New York City journalist claimed there were two hundred thousand people “in utter and hopeless distress,” depending entirely on charity for relief.38 Even the shell of the old BUS, still operating in Philadelphia, failed.

  Van Buren railed against the ever-convenient speculators and jobbers. Some sagacious individuals promised the president that the economy would rebound, and that land prices, especially, would return. But Van Buren, contrary to the claims that he embraced the concept of a small federal government, hastily convened a special session of Congress to stop the distribution of the surplus. It was static economic thinking: the federal government needed more money, so the additional funds were kept in Washington rather than sent back to the states, where they might in fact have spurred a more rapid recovery. He also advocated a new Independent Treasury, in which the government of the United States would hold its deposits—little more than a national vault.