The Whigs' America

Middle-Class Political Thought in the Age of Jackson and Clay

Joseph W. Pearson, Dick Gilbreath

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780813179728
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813179759
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

1

The Individual

True national freedom, in the American view, rests upon moral groundwork, upon the virtue of self-possession and self-control in individual citizens.

Philip Schaff

In democratic nations such as the antebellum United States, political parties brought together groups of individuals with shared ideas, anxieties, and aspirations, ostensibly to win elections. But that is a thin reading of their importance because the ideology woven into the fabric of campaign rhetoric, polemic, and song echoed the beating heart of what mattered most to antebellum people. Whiggery was the political culture of America’s rising middle class, the partisan expression of a bourgeois worldview. Jacksonians lionized yeoman agriculture and its attendant agrarian worldview above all. Whigs saw room for virtue in other places, perspectives, and occupations, describing the middle class as plain, honest, hardworking, virtuous, and successful. The key idea is not that Whigs met certain material criteria that Jacksonians did not but that they thought about themselves and their world in far more middle-class terms and celebrated that point of view.¹

Then, as now, political culture was built first on individuals. Daniel Webster explained this idea in 1833, noting: “The actual character of the government can never be better than the general moral and intellectual character of the community.”² And, since communities are made up of individuals, a deep reading of Whig political culture must begin with Whig thinking on the promise and possibilities of individual Americans. Whigs’ attitudes toward human nature, the proper understanding of liberty and equality, and the role of families in shaping individuals were crucial to their view of the world.

Human Nature

“But men are men, the best sometimes forget,” Shakespeare wryly observed in Othello (2.3.256), culling nearly a millennia and a half of popular wisdom and intellectual inspection on the darker aspects of human character. And, for their part, most Whigs agreed, maintaining a healthy skepticism about human nature. The world that Whigs sought to build was a partisan middle-class response to their particular understanding of individual character. Their reading of biblical Christianity taught them that human nature was at best flawed and that the depths of its darkness did not vary noticeably across classes, races, or genders. But they also believed that the possibilities for improvement—for the kinds of people individual Americans might become—were as vast as the continent stretching out before them. Though they shared with Jacksonians an appreciation for Christian notions of human weaknesses, they thought more was possible from more kinds of people. Indeed, in many ways they demanded it. But what were they reacting to? What sort of upheaval was occurring that demanded a middle-class response?³

In the years between 1820 and 1850, Americans endured a staggering succession of changes that, taken together, freed individuals from centuries of similar living conditions, roughly thrusting everyone into a modern world, whether they wanted to go there or not. In these three decades, the population and the sovereignty of the United States were extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Atlantic world that for two centuries Americans had traveled in, traded in, and died on, clutching the coast in colonial farms, villages, and towns, was now linked by trains, roads, canals, and railroads to the vast North American continent stretching westward beyond the Mississippi River. An agrarian lifestyle with roots in the medieval past was rocked by a passion for building cities on windswept prairies seemingly overnight. Old bonds of patriarchy, paternalism, and hierarchy gave way to the draw of cheap land in the West, cheap labor in the cities, merchant opportunities almost everywhere, and a thriving, risky general spirit of go-ahead that coursed through the heart of the antebellum years. Not everyone was happy about these shifts in society. Many Americans felt satisfied with their country the way that it was. They craved space, certainly, but they did not want to surrender their autonomy, independence, or station to the modernist ethos of their neighbors. Andrew Jackson spoke for them, and, if theirs was a political outlook that protected slavery, ignored social violence, and dismissed the future’s possibilities for the present’s comforts, they also rightly saw the abusive potential in the new social and economic arrangements gaining traction among the rising mercantile interests. Individuals were cast adrift in cities, left to trust as best they were able the bosses and managers that replaced the old apprentice-journeyman-master artisan system, based so firmly on family and reciprocity, with one of cash exchange, alienation, and expediency. Crafts were now jobs, craftsmen hired laborers, and nothing but supply and demand linked labor and capital. These changes could be soulless, soul-crushing, and cruel to individuals most of all, at least as Democrats saw things, and they vowed to fight against them.

Others saw that the old ways were dying no matter what anyone did. They argued that sulking about a fading world did little to create meaning, prosperity, or happiness in the new one in which all must live. Henry Clay spoke for them, and, if theirs was a political outlook that took too rosy a view of commercial exchange, had too little of an appreciation for the human cost of their policy failures, and was perhaps too ready to throw present comforts into the hazard to win future glories, they also correctly understood that America was destined to be an urban world and that success would follow those who were comfortable with change. All of life’s meaning was not wrought by hand, they argued, and a life earning money, managing people, or developing technical systems of communication, transportation, and industry had merit too. A world of comfort for all who would earn it was at last possible, and they would defend those possibilities forever. Individuals were indeed adrift, Whigs conceded, and, absent guiding principles and strong institutions, their descent into savage barbarism would be swift. Humanity’s fallen nature was fertile soil for vice. And everywhere they looked coarseness, ignorance, and brutality were rising.

Whigs believed that Americans’ disturbing penchant for violence, drunkenness, and ignorance justified their skepticism about human nature. In 1839, for instance, perhaps the most famous Whig, Henry Clay, argued that American society was rife “with all the violent prejudices, embittered passions, and implacable animosities which ever degraded or deformed human nature.” Clay’s language is telling, and the words he chose in describing human nature were common to most Whiggish Americans. Across the country Whigs shared a common reading of social ills that often described humanity as violent, embittered, degraded, and deformed. From the Illinois prairies, to the rolling river country of West Tennessee, to the piedmont of Kentucky, to the rocky farms of New England, American society and Americans themselves, Whigs believed, suffered from a lack of order.⁴

For their part, Jacksonians often rejected Clay’s reading of American individual character. In 1837, the staunchly Jacksonian periodical the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review declared: “We have an abiding confidence in the virtue, intelligence, and full capacity for self-government of the great mass of our people—our industrious, honest, manly, intelligent millions of freemen.” For Jackson’s supporters, white men were stolid, dependable, virtuous, and hardworking, if only left alone. For them, common was no insult and striving no boast. Whigs shared their optimism, at least in terms of what was possible, but believed that Americans, unimproved or unrestrained, were dangerous to themselves and to one another.⁵

Whigs did not have to look far to see evidence of human depravity. In the decade after Jackson’s election alone, the news was littered with tales of American brutality. In 1834, just outside Charlestown, Massachusetts, for example, an angry drunken mob assaulted a boarding school for girls run by Catholic nuns, putting the chapel, the bishop’s lodge, the stables, and the nuns’ living quarters to the torch. Truly barbarous, at least in the eyes of many stunned eyewitnesses, was the razing of the cemetery and the disinterment of Catholic dead. And similar scenes occurred throughout the era with disturbing regularity. A year after the Ursuline convent burned another mob in Vicksburg, Mississippi, strung up five gamblers without benefit of trial or jury. “The wife of one of the sufferers, half distracted at the cruel treatment and murder of her husband,” one shocked account of the gamblers’ deaths held, “trembling for her own safety, in tears begged permission to inter her husband’s body—it was refused!” In 1835, Protestants and Catholics brawled on the streets of Cincinnati, gouging eyes, ripping out hair, and stabbing one another.⁶

As figure 1.1 demonstrates, this scene was repeated again in Philadelphia in 1844. Even more gruesome, in 1836 a free black man in St. Louis, Frank McIntosh, was burned alive after killing a white sheriff during a brawl. Finally, in the fall of 1839, New York governor William H. Seward was forced to send in the state militia to quell violent protests in and around Albany stemming from unjust lease and rent practices.⁷

It follows, then, that the possible future descent of the amoral and unlettered into barbarism that haunted the Whig imagination was based on more than middle-class worry. In 1837, for example, another mob formed in Vicksburg, Mississippi, publicly mutilating and murdering a fifty-year-old white man for offering free passes to slaves. “In the broad light of day,” the Vicksburg Sentinel’s editor grimly noted in 1837, “this aged wretch was stripped and flogged, we believe within hearing of the lamentations and the shrieks of his afflicted wife and children.” The mob cut off his nose and ears, flayed his skin until the ribs were exposed, and continued beating him until their bloodlust ebbed. Before retiring to drink and song, they left him swinging in a magnolia tree, a creaking corpse rotting in the fall breeze. “In the name of heaven to what is this country coming?” the outraged local editor implored. “When is the spirit of turbulence, outrage, and barbarism to have an end? Upon what principle do these enemies to the peace and happiness of society arrogate themselves to the right of dispensing with the laws of the land at pleasure?” At bottom, he tapped into the greater Whig concern that there was no principle beneath this violence save a fevered thirst for one man’s blood.⁸

Fig. 1.1.H. Bucholzer, Riot in Philadelphia, June [i.e., July] 7th (New York: James Baillie, July 23, [1844?]). Lithograph. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. “Tensions built up in 1844 when the Roman Catholic bishop persuaded school officials to use both the King James and Latin Vulgate bibles. Protestant mobs burned two Catholic churches on May 7, 1844. On July 7, 1844 rioting broke out again, necessitating intervention on the part of the state militia.” https://www.loc.gov/item/2003654121.

Mob violence offers a rather obvious example of Whiggish fears of barbarism. Indeed, most discerning Jacksonians objected to the excesses of lynch mobs too. The difference between these two lines of thought, however, lay in their reading of social disorder’s depth and breadth and its underlying causes. For Jacksonians, a bit of bedlam was an unfortunate but necessary price to pay for healthy republican liberty. After all, as New York Democrats stressed in 1847: “It was here upon this Continent that the sentiment was first promulgated, ‘that all men are born free and equal,’ . . . [and that] the blood of those who uttered that God-like truth, was freely poured out on many battle fields.” The people could be rowdy, true, even occasionally violent and cruel, as the preceding examples demonstrate, but those instances were exceptions that must be endured to secure the larger freedom and independence of all.⁹

For Whigs, on the other hand, mob law was but an outward symptom of a more serious social ill. “It is easy to see how idle must be all pretense of principle,” Louisville’s Whig Daily Journal brooded in 1845, “when a body of politicians proclaim the tactics of slaughter and of rapine; give notice that whoever can kill an opponent shall strip his body, carry away his watch, and tear off his epaulets; and call to their ranks everything that is sanguinary in point of feeling and rapacious in purpose.” What was barbarism, they wondered, but the inevitable result of a lack of middle-class civilization and, more important, cultivation? In their view, Andrew Jackson’s America sorely needed both. In 1847, for instance, Horace Bushnell compared antebellum America to Israel in the era of the Judges. “It is a time of decline towards barbarism,” he noted. “Public security is gone. The people have run wild. Forms are more sacred than duties.” Worse, the people often mistook vices for virtues: “The villain and the saint coalesce, without difficulty, in one and the same character; and superstition, which delights in absurdities, hides the imposture from him who suffers it.”¹⁰

The problem was bigger than violence and ran deeper than disorder. Intemperance, irreligion, ignorance, stupidity, and sheer laziness were spreading as fast as the country’s borders. “This world was never made for people to dwell on in idleness,” wrote one Whiggish woman who put her faith in individual hard work, “and yet more than three-fourths of the human family fail in contributing to the support and welfare of the race.”¹¹ Whiggery was built on the middle-class premise that men and women must continually seek improvement and avoid indolence at all costs. “Upon this subject, the habits of our whole species fall into three great classes,” the Illinois Whig Abraham Lincoln argued in 1847, “useful labour, useless labour and idleness. Of these the first only is meritorious; and to it all the products of labour rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of it’s [sic] just rights. The only remedy for this is to, as far as possible, drive useless labour and idleness out of existence.”¹²

But how? How could Americans correct inherent tendencies toward violence, sloth, and drink while improving their character to secure a better future? Whigs believed that the process began with a realistic understanding of human nature. Their understanding of human nature flowed first from Christian Holy Writ and the idea of original sin. But what does that mean? “Original sin is a condition,” one useful reference explains, “not something that people do: It is the normal spiritual and psychological condition of human beings.” Adam and Eve chose to disobey God in the Garden of Eden, and their transgression forever stained their descendants. During the decades before the Civil War, this concept was powerful and grew out of deep intellectual, social, and religious roots.¹³

Popular culture opens useful windows into prevalent ideas of a given era. Thus, the New York printers Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives offered prints, pictures, and lithographs that mined popular sporting and literary motifs, everyday life, and religious themes. In their 1835 print The Tree of Death—The Sinner, they stressed that the fruits of humanity’s wickedness led all men and women through a cascading life full of folly, misery, and despair (see fig. 1.2).

Absent the saving power of God’s grace, most believed that a cold grave and a hot afterlife awaited all. Antebellum American...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Individual
• 2. Society
• 3. The State
• 4. The Past
• 5. The Future
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index