What Hath God Wrought (72 page)

Where Jackson had created the party, Martin Van Buren served it and owed his presidency to it. Van Buren made himself the party’s strategist, tactician, and official apologist. Ever since his rivalry with DeWitt Clinton, Van Buren had defined his public life in terms of party loyalty and limited government. John Quincy Adams having outraged him on both accounts, Van Buren had climbed aboard the Jackson wagon. As he explained in his letter to Thomas Ritchie of 1827, Van Buren envisioned the Democratic Party resting upon an alliance between “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.” Van Buren realized that an Old Republicanism of strict construction appealed both to common folk suspicious that government economic intervention advantaged special interests and to slaveowners fearing an activist government might some day move against the South’s “peculiar institution.”
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The American politics Van Buren understood so well reflected the broadening of the franchise in the generation following the War of 1812 and the communications revolution that made political information widely available. During the years after 1815, state after state abolished property requirements for voting; the actions of Massachusetts in 1820 and New York in 1821 attracted particular attention. Historically, such qualifications had been defended as ensuring that voters possessed enough economic independence to exercise independent political judgment. Now, voting increasingly came to be seen as the right of all adult males, at least if they were white. Reflecting the new attitude toward the suffrage, none of the states admitted after 1815 set property requirements. The change in opinion largely antedated industrialization and typically occurred before a significant population of white male wage-earners had appeared. Proponents of the change saw it as enfranchising tenant farmers and squatters on the public domain, small shopkeepers, and craftsmen. They usually excluded free black men from the broadened suffrage. They did not realize that their new rules would enfranchise an industrial proletariat and the large influx of immigrants who would begin to arrive in the 1840s, for they did not foresee the appearance of either. As a result, suffrage liberalization occurred in many places with relatively little controversy. Rhode Island constituted an exception to the pattern of peaceful enfranchisement. There the issue was not confronted until 1842, after a significant degree of industrialization and immigration had occurred, and suffrage reform would come only after the state constitutional crisis known as the Dorr Rebellion. Virginia, reflecting the power of her tidewater aristocracy, withstood pressure to eliminate the property qualification until 1850. South Carolina, whose planter aristocracy remained the strongest of all, hung on to property qualifications until the Civil War.
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The widespread change in the conception of the suffrage, from a privilege bestowed on an independent-minded elite to a right that should be possessed by all male citizens, reflected in part the success of the American Revolution and general acceptance of its natural-rights ideology. The process may be compared with the decline of religious qualifications for voting or the progress of state-by-state emancipation of northern slaves, both of which had likewise reflected the triumph of natural-rights ideology where self-interested opposition was not very powerful. Broadening the suffrage also represented one aspect of a long-continuing process of gradual modernization in American society that antedated the Declaration of Independence. The franchise had been relatively widespread even in colonial times, because the property that qualified a man to exercise it was also relatively widely distributed. Compared with Europe, America had seemed democratic for a long time.
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Practical as well as principled considerations operated to broaden the suffrage in the young republic. Eager to attract settlers (who boosted land values), the newer states saw no reason to put suffrage obstacles in their path. Some of them even allowed immigrants to vote before becoming citizens. This in turn put pressure on the older states, which worried about losing population through emigration westward. For the most part, property restrictions on voting declined before the rise of the Democratic Party, which benefited from, rather than fought for, the liberalization of the suffrage. Taxpaying qualifications sometimes remained after the elimination of property ones, and the Democratic Party did generally oppose these, while their Whig opponents often agreed in removing these restrictions too by the end of the antebellum period.
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Paralleling the extension of the suffrage, another nationwide development also responded to white male democracy: the decline of the militia. Jeffersonians of the founding generation had reposed great confidence in the militia as an alternative to a standing army that could be used against the liberties of the people it supposedly protected. This militia, organized in each locality, consisted of all physically fit white males of military age, who would supply their own arms and donate as much of their time as necessary to keep in training and readiness when called upon to deal with insurrection or invasion. This was the “well regulated militia” postulated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and prescribed by the federal Militia Act of 1792. The militia had proved ineffective on many occasions in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (George Washington never put much trust in it), but its gradual disappearance in the generation after 1815 had nothing to do with its military shortcomings. The militia gradually ceased to function because most male citizens resented it as an imposition, and hated serving in it so much that they either refused to show up for the periodic musters and drills, or if they came made a mockery of the occasion. Since the men who defied the militia laws also constituted the electorate, politicians dared not attempt to coerce service. White male democracy could successfully defy the law, as squatters defied landlords or Indian treaties. Militia units continued to function only in those few places where the men took pride in participating in them. When the war with Mexico came in 1846, the administration made little use of the militia and relied instead on its small professional army plus volunteers trained and equipped at government expense.
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The development of political parties represented a response not only to legal definitions of the suffrage but also to the conditions of its exercise. The typical antebellum American polling place displayed many of the worst features of all-male society: rowdy behavior, heavy drinking, coarse language, and occasional violence. (This rude ambience, in fact, was one of the reasons offered for excluding women from voting.) Commonly, two or three weekdays would be set aside for each election and declared holidays so men could come to the polling place and vote. With terms of office short and separate elections held for local, state, and federal offices, most communities underwent two elections a year, each preceded by publicity and demonstrations. Since election days varied from state to state, electioneering somewhere in the Union was more or less constant. Although public opinion polls did not exist, politicians had no difficulty keeping a finger on the public pulse at all times. Voting was sometimes oral and seldom secret. Even where written ballots were used, they were printed by the rival parties, each on paper of a distinctive color to make it easy for poll-watchers to tell which one a voter placed in the ballot box. A ballot would only list the names of the candidates of the party that printed it. To cast anything other than a straight party vote, a man had to “scratch his ticket”—line out a name and write in a different one. Challenging a voter could lead to physical conflict. When some states proposed requiring voters to register in advance, the Democratic Party generally opposed it. The prevailing electoral practices encouraged a large turnout, party-line voting, and various forms of partisan cheating, including vote buying and intimidation. Absence of secrecy encouraged most men in each community to vote the same way. This tendency toward local political homogeneity appeared strongest in rural areas, where everyone knew everyone else and where he lived, and threats of political retaliation carried strong conviction. The introduction during the late nineteenth century of the “Australian ballot” (printed at government expense and listing all candidates) was accounted a great reform.
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In light of the nature of the voting experience, it is not surprising that men voted from a mixture of motives. The issues themselves certainly did arouse many a voter for substantive reasons. Jackson’s Indian Removal and cheap land policies enjoyed wide approval in the West, helping account for his popularity there. The transportation revolution created new economic opportunities, leading some to welcome and others to fear economic intervention by local, state, or national governments. Beginning in 1819, fluctuations in the business cycle created constituencies for hard and soft money, the National Bank, free banking, or no banks of issue at all. The events of Van Buren’s administration would heighten the importance of economic issues in party politics that had arisen from Jackson’s Bank War.

In general, Van Buren’s Democratic Party appealed to people who for whatever reasons preferred limited government and free trade. Often these people saw themselves as “outsiders” suspicious that an active government would bestow favoritism upon “insiders.” Such outsiders included recent immigrants (generally the most strongly Democratic constituency of all), dwellers in provincial geographical areas bypassed by the arteries of commerce, and critics of the influential, activist Evangelical United Front. These outsiders felt more comfortable leaving matters to local communities where their views counted, rather than trusting remote (to them) cosmopolitan power centers. But in some parts of the country, those supporting the Democrats could be definite “insiders.” Many large cotton and tobacco planters and New York export merchants, for example, supported the Democratic Party because they had a vested interest in free trade. Representative James K. Polk of Tennessee encapsulated the desires of those who produced agricultural staples in a toast that became a Democratic slogan: “Sell what we have to spare in the market where we can sell for the best price; buy what we need in the market where we can buy cheapest.”
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Finally, those who felt most zealously committed to preserving white supremacy and expanding slavery, whether insiders or outsiders, found the Democratic Party safe and worried that the Whig Party’s program of expanding the federal government might make trouble at some point.

The centrality of the banking issue in party politics was no accident. A banking system that provided an effective source of credit constituted a necessary condition for the economic development of the United States. Banks also performed other essential financial services, mobilizing capital, providing information to prospective investors about risks and rewards, and facilitating financial transactions.
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Those most committed to promoting economic development supported the Whigs. Those who felt threatened by the prospect of economic change supported the Democrats.

Underscoring the issues themselves in arousing political interest was the communications revolution, with its mass of cheap, intensely partisan publications. Political pamphlets had been around for a long time, and there were also political books, for campaign biographies appeared of every presidential hopeful; but the most influential segment of the political media was the newspaper press. By 1836, both administration and opposition newspapers flourished in all parts of the country. So long as they exempted slavery from criticism, they enjoyed freedom of political expression everywhere. Despite the harshness of the partisan press, no one attempted to revive the Sedition Act of 1798.

On occasion the communications revolution could itself become the subject of partisan debate. In 1832 the Senate spent a week debating a measure to grant all newspapers free postage. Supporters argued that it would promote political awareness among the electorate and help unify the nation. Opponents complained that it would enable people in the countryside to subscribe to big-city newspapers and undercut the local markets of the small-town press. The proposal went down to a narrow defeat, 22 to 23, with all Jacksonian senators voting no. Then as now, those who defined themselves as outsiders distrusted the influence of metropolitan opinion-makers.
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This attitude did not prevent the Jacksonians from creating big-city newspapers of their own and developing a sophisticated understanding of the role of the media of communication.

The newspaper editors of the time offer fascinating examples not only of colorful personalities but also of the interaction between politics and the press. Francis Blair came out of Kentucky, where he won his spurs as a spokesman for debt relief after the Panic of 1819. Chosen to run the
Washington Globe
as organ of the Jackson administration, Blair displayed across its masthead the slogan “The World Is Governed Too Much” and put out a paper that appealed not only to small farmers but also to recent immigrants and aspiring businessmen impatient with the national bank. The
Globe
, it has been said, served “the army of minor officeholders” as “a kind of continuing communique from national headquarters.”
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Blair was rewarded with the contract to print the record of Congressional debates, which he renamed the
Congressional Globe
. On occasion, he exploited this vantage point to suppress speeches by critics of the administration.

The new media opened new opportunities to talent and imagination. James Gordon Bennett, a self-made immigrant from Scotland, created the
New York Herald
and turned it into America’s best-selling newspaper. A Catholic who sometimes criticized his church’s clerical hierarchy, Bennett did much to define the Democratic Party’s urban constituency. Mordecai Noah, playwright, diplomat, and would-be founder of the Jewish community called Ararat, was rewarded for his Jacksonian journalism with an appointment as surveyor of the Port of New York. Alienated from the Democrats by the Bank War, Noah lost his patronage job, switched to the Whig Party, and founded the innovative, high-quality
New York Evening Star
in 1833.
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