Monmouth Regional High School
APUSHWinter Break PacketDistributed: December 5, 2016Due: January 3, 2016The entire packet will count as a test grade. Each individual assignment within the packet will count as a homework grade. Packet Assignments:Chapter 12 WorksheetREADINGS/QUESTIONS- Jackson READINGS/QUESTIONS- Reform Movements REMINDER- The extra credit and the Unit 4 Guide will also be due shortly after Winter Break. TIME 4 (1800-1848)NAME: ___________________________________________________ DATE: _____________________________WORKSHEET: Chapter #12- Reform and Politics in the Age of Jackson 1824-1845Most of those who organized utopian communities did so with the objective of:Completely withdrawing from civilized societyReturning to a state of natureEstablishing a cooperative, as opposed to a competitive, environmentCreating a new political order based on the BibleWhich of the following is true of the Shakers?They abolished individual familiesThey practiced polygamyThey rejected the divinity of JesusThey believed that Jesus has already returned to EarthHorace Mann believed that:Moral education had no place in the public schoolThe public school should stand as a bastion against the secularism of the industrial agePublic education should concentrate on the abolition of ignorance, not on religionEducation was a private, family concern and not the concern of the stateThe Second Great Awakening bred reform because it taught that:All perfection of earthly society could speed the Second ComingAll people were evil and would burn in the fires of everlasting HellGod was no longer active in human affairsJesus had returned to Earth and had begun the Last JudgmentWhich of the following is true of the temperance movement?The movement had little impact on the consumption of alcoholic beveragesLeaders of the movement simply wanted to regulate the sale of alcoholic spiritsFew women were involved in the movementThe movement was often supported by employersAlthough short-lived, Anti-masonry is important because it:Led to the abolition of the electoral collegeWas the vehicle used by Andrew Jackson to gain grassroots supportDemonstrated to future political candidates that moral crusades had no place in American politicsWas a bridge between reform and politics by establishing political conventionsWhich of the following positions on slavery would William Lloyd Garrison most likely have endorsed?ColonizationImmediate emancipation Compensated emancipationFree-soilThe Lovejoy murder served to:Cause dissension within the anti-slavery movementIncrease northern support for the anti-slavery movementMobilize national support for the temperance movementIncrease national support for government regulation of industryThe 1828 presidential election was important because it:Demonstrated that issues were more important than personalities in presidential electionsLed political reformers to charge that the electoral college was obsolete Demonstrated that party organization would be very important in presidential electionsLed to literacy tests for votersWhich of the following statements BEST expresses Jacksonian beliefs?Strong central government is the enemy of individual libertyPublic education is essential in a democratic societyGovernment should be active in the economic life of the stateA strong, powerful president is to be fearedIn the Webster-Hayne debate, Webster argued that:The doctrine of nullification would result in a society made up of warring statesThe Union was a collection of sovereign, independent statesThe Union was created by God and given as a gift to His special people, the AmericansAbolitionists sought to destroy the SouthAs a result of the nullification crisis:Federal authority was weakened because of the disagreement between Jackson and CongressThe South accepted the idea of successionNeither the federal government nor South Carolina won a clear victoryJackson demonstrated his unwillingness to compromise In his veto message concerning the rechartering of the Second Bank of the United States, Jackson:Admitted that the bank was unconstitutionalDenounced the bank as a symbol of special privilege and economic powerDelivered a personal attack against the bank’s presidentAttacked the bank for its tight money policiesA person’s political affiliation in the 1830s and 1840s was most closely associated with the person’s:Social classReligious beliefsOccupationGenderAfter ascending to the presidency upon the death of President Harrison, President Tyler:Turned the reins of government over to Secretary of State Daniel WebsterProclaimed his opposition to Senator Calhoun’s nullification theoryCommitted himself to the creation of an active federal governmentOpposed the economic program that the Harrison had wanted enactedTIME 4 (1800-1848)Name: _______________________________________________________ Date: ___________________________QUESTIONS: Jackson ReadingsJacksonian Democrats favored all of the following EXCEPT:Rotation in officeUniversal male suffrage for white malesThe caucus system of nominating candidatesPresidential electors being chosen by popular voteAfter the election of 1824, the president’s choice of Henry Clay as secretary of state resulted in:The revival of the Federalist PartyWidespread criticism of the spoils systemCharges of a corrupt bargain with John Quincy AdamsA political alliance between Clay and Andrew JacksonAn important effect of the tariff of abominations of 1828 was:Increased prices for cotton overseasSouth Carolina’s adoption of the theory of nullificationAn alliance of northeastern workers and western farmersThe election of a Democratic president, Andrew JacksonThe Revolution of 1828 revealed that political power was:Shifting to the southern statesShifting to the western statesGravitating toward conservative elementsEvenly divided between Whigs and DemocratsIn the 1830s, the factor that most directly promoted the development of a two-party system was:The growth of the immigrant populationChanges in methods of nominating and electing the presidentIncreasing sectional conflict between northern and southern states over the tariff issueThe dropping of constitutional limitations on the party systemThe main issue in the presidential campaign of 1832 was:The removal of Native Americans from eastern statesThe recharter of the Bank of the United StatesThe use of federal funds for internal improvementsThe nullification of the “tariff of abominations”Supporters of the Whig Party included all of the following groups EXCEPT:Supporters of Clay’s American SystemWesterners who wanted federal funds for internal improvementsAdvocates of a national bankNew immigrants, such as the Germans and IrishJackson has been interpreted in very different, even conflicting, ways by different historians at different times. What are some of the most influential interpretations and their authors? What is it in Jackson that has elicited such varying responses? What can these varying interpretations tell you about the historians and the periods that shaped those historians? On December 29, 1835, a Cherokee treaty council signed away the Cherokees’ tribal lands and agreed to the tribe’s being moved west of the Mississippi. What methods did the US government use to obtain this treaty? Discuss the paradox of how a nation such as the USA, founded on democratic principles of government, could justify signing such a fraudulent treaty.The framers of the Constitution were men of property who also held republican ideals. How did the experience of Indian removal illustrate America’s conflict between benevolence and greed, idealism and pragmatism? TIME 4 (1800-1848)Name: ________________________________________________________ Date: __________________READINGS- Reform Movements Answer the following questions on early 19th century reformers.List several evils that the reformers of the period 1820-1860 tried to eliminate.What factors created a climate favorable to reform in the early 19th century?What common vision of a better world did these individuals have?Were these individuals as idealists or practical reformers? Explain the reasoning behind the answer.To what extent did these reformers achieve success in the period 1820-1860?To what extent did these individuals build a foundation for the realization of reforms in a later period? TIME 4 (1800-1848)READINGS- Age of JacksonAge of Jackson 1824-1844“The political activity that pervades the United States must be seen in order to be understood. No sooner do you set foot upon American ground than you are stunned by a kind of tumult.” – Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy of America, 1835The era marked by the emergence of popular politics in the 1820s and the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837) is often called the Age of the Common Man, or the Era of Jacksonian Democracy. Historians debate whether Jackson was a major molder of events, a political opportunist exploiting the democratic ferment of the times, or merely a symbol of the era. Nevertheless, the era and Jackson’s name seem permanently linked.JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACYThe changing politics of the Jacksonian years paralleled complex social and economic changes.The Rise of a Democratic SocietyVisitors to the United States in the 1830s, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, was amazed by the informal manners and democratic attitudes of Americans. In hotels, under the American plan, men and women from all classes ate together at common tables. On stagecoaches, steamboats, and later in railroad cars, there was only one class for passengers, so that the rich and poor alike sat together in the same compartments. European visitors could not distinguish between classes in the United States. Men of all backgrounds wore simple dark trousers and jackets, while less well-to-do women emulated the fanciful and confining styles illustrated in wide-circulation women’s magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book. Equality was becoming the governing principle of American society. Among the white majority in American society, people shared a belief in the principle of equality- more precisely, equality of opportunity for white males. These beliefs ignored the oppression of enslaved African Americans and discrimination against free blacks. Equality of opportunity would, at least in theory, allow a young man of humble origins to rise as far as his natural talent and industry would take him. The hero of the age was the “self-made man.” There was no equivalent belief in the “self-made woman,” but by the end of the 1840s, feminists would take up the theme of equal rights and insist that it should be applied to both women and men.Politics of the common ManBetween 1824 and 1840, politics moved out of the fine homes of rich southern planters and northern merchants who had dominated government in past eras and into middle and lower class homes. Several factors contributed to the spread of democracy, including new suffrage (voting) laws, changes in political parties and campaigns, improved education, and increases in newspaper circulation.UNIVERSAL MALE SUFFRAGE: Western states newly admitted to the Union- Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), and Missouri (1821)- adopted state constitutions that allowed all white males to vote and hold office. These newer constitutions omitted any religious or property qualifications for voting. Most eastern states soon followed suit, eliminating such restrictions. As a result, throughout the country, all white males could vote regardless of their social class or religion. Voting for president rose from about 350,000 in 1824 to more than 2.4 million in 1840, a nearly sevenfold increase in just 16 years, mostly as a result of changes in voting laws. In addition, political offices could be held by people in the lower and middle ranks of society.PARTY NOMINATING CONVENTION: In the past, candidates for office had commonly been nominated either by state legislatures or by “King Caucus,” a closed-door meeting of a political party’s leaders in Congress. Common citizens had no opportunity to participate. In the 1830s, however, caucuses were replaced by nominating conventions. Party politicians and voters would gather in a large meeting hall to nominate the party’s candidates. The Anti-Masonic Party was the first to hold such a nominating convention. This method was more open to popular participation, hence more democratic.POPULAR ELECTION OF THE PRESIDENT: In the presidential election of 1832, only South Carolina used the old system in which the state legislature chose the electors for president. All other states had adopted the more democratic method of allowing the voters to choose a state’s slate of presidential electors.TWO-PARTY SYSTEM: The popular election of presidential electors- and, in effect, the president- had important consequences for the two-party system. Campaigns for president now had to be conducted on a national scale. To organize these campaigns, candidates needed large political parties.RISE OF THIRD PARTIES: While only the large national parties (the Democrats and the Whigs in Jackson’s day) could hope to win the presidency, other political parties also emerged. The Anti-Masonic Party and the Workingmen’s Party, for example, reached out to groups of people who previously had shown little interest in politics. The Anti-Masons attacked the secret societies of Masons and accused them of belonging to a privileged, antidemocratic elite. MORE ELECTED OFFICES: During the Jacksonian era, a much larger number of state and local officials were elected to office, instead of being appointed, as in the past. This change gave the voters more voice in their government and also tended to increase their interest in participating in elections.POPULAR CAMPAIGNING: Candidates for office directed their campaigns to the interests and prejudices of the common people. Politics also became a form of local entertainment. Campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s featured parades of floats and marching bands and large rallies in which voters were treated to free food and drink. The negative side to the new campaign techniques was that in appealing to the masses, candidates would often resort to personal attacks and ignore the issues. A politician, for example might attack an opponent’s “aristocratic airs” and make him seem unfriendly to “the common man.”SPOILS SYSTEM AND ROTATION OF OFFICEHOLDERS: Winning government jobs became the lifeblood of party organizations. At the national level, President Jackson believed in appointing people to federal jobs (as postmasters, for example) strictly according to whether they had actively campaigned for the Democratic Party. Any previous holder of the office who was not a Democrat was fired and replaced with a loyal Democrat. This practice of dispensing government jobs in return for party loyalty was called the spoils system because of a comment that, in a war, victors seize the spoils, or wealth, of the defeated. In addition, Jackson believed in a system of rotation in office. By limiting a person to one term in office he could then appoint some other deserving Democrat in his place. Jackson defended the replacement and rotation of office-holders as a democratic reform. “No man,” he said, “has any more intrinsic claim to office than another.” Both the spoils system and the rotation of office-holders affirmed the democratic ideal that one man was as good as another and that ordinary Americans were capable of holding any government office. These beliefs also helped build a strong two-party system.JACKSON VS. ADAMSPolitical change in the Jacksonian era began several years before Jackson moved into the White House as president. In the controversial election of 1824, Jackson won more popular and electoral votes than any other candidate, but he ended up losing the election.The Election of 1824Recall the brief Era of Good Feelings that characterized US politics during the two-term presidency of James Monroe. The era ended in political bad feelings in 1824, the year of a bitterly contested and divisive presidential election. By then, the old congressional caucus system for choosing presidential candidates had broken down. As a result, four candidates of the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson campaigned for the presidency: John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson. Among voters in states that counted popular votes (six did not) Jackson won. But because the vote was split four ways, he lacked a majority in the Electoral College as required by the Constitution. Therefore, the House of Representatives had to choose a president from among the top three candidates. Henry Clay used his influence in the House to provide John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts with enough votes to win the election. When President Adams appointed Clay his secretary of state, Jackson and his followers charged that the decision of the voters had been foiled by secret political maneuvers. Angry Jackson supporters accused Adams and Clay of making a “corrupt bargain.” President John Quincy AdamsAdams further alienated the followers of Jackson when he asked Congress for money for internal improvements, aid to manufacturing, and even a national university and an astronomical observatory. Jacksonians viewed all these measures as a waste of money and a violation of the Constitution. Most significantly, in 1828, Congress patched together a new tariff law, which generally satisfied northern manufacturers but alienated southern planters. Southerners denounced it as a “tariff of abominations.”The Revolution of 1848Adams sought reelection in 1828. But the Jacksonians were now ready to use the discontent of southerners and westerners and the new campaign tactics of party organizations to sweep “Old Hickory” (Jackson) into office. Going beyond parades and barbecues, Jackson’s party resorted to smearing the president and accusing Adams’ wife of being born out of wedlock. Supporters of Adams retaliated in kind, accusing Jackson’s wife of adultery. The mudslinging campaign attracted a lot of interest and voter turnout soared. Jackson won handily, carrying every state west of the Appalachians. His reputation as a war hero and man of the western frontier accounted for his victory more than the positions he took on issues of the day.THE PRESIDENCY OF ANDREW JACKSONJackson was a different kind of president form any of his predecessors. A strong leader, he not only dominated politics for eight years but also became a symbol of the emerging working class and middle class (the so-called common man). Born in a frontier cabin, Jackson gained fame as a Native American fighter and as hero of the Battle of New Orleans, and came to live in a fine mansion in Tennessee as a wealthy planter and slaveowner. But he never lost the rough manners of the frontier. He chewed tobacco, fought several duels, and displayed a violent temper. Jackson was the first president since Washington to be without a college education. In a phrase, he could be described as an extraordinary ordinary man. This self-made man and living legend drew support from every social group and every section of the country. Presidential PowerJackson presented himself as the representative of all the people and the protector of the common man against abuses of power by the rich and the privileged. He was a frugal Jeffersonian, who opposed increasing federal spending and the national debt. Jackson interpreted the powers of Congress narrowly and therefore vetoed more bills- 12- than all six presidents before him combined. For example, he vetoed the use of federal money to construct the Maysville Road, because it was wholly within one state, Kentucky, the home state of Jackson’s rival, Henry Clay. Jackson’s closest advisers were a group known as his “kitchen cabinet,” who did not belong to his official cabinet. Because of them, the appointed cabinet had less influence on policy than under earlier presidents.Peggy Eaton AffairThe champion of the common man also went to the aid of the common woman, at least in the case of Peggy O’Neale Eaton. The wife of Jackson’s secretary of war, she was the target of malicious gossip by other cabinet wives, much as Jackson’s recently deceased wife had been in the 1828 campaign. When Jackson tried to force the cabinet wives to accept Peggy Eaton socially, most of the cabinet resigned. This controversy contributed to the resignation of Jackson’s vice-president, John C. Calhoun, a year later. For remaining loyal during this crisis, Martin Van Buren of New York was chosen as vice-president for Jackson’s second term. Indian Removal Act (1830)Jackson’s concept of democracy did not extend to Native Americans. Jackson sympathized with land-hungry citizens who were impatient to take over lands held by American Indians. Jackson thought the most humane solution was to compel the American Indians to leave their traditional homelands and resettle west of the Mississippi. In 1830, he signed into law the Indian Removal Act, which forced the resettlement of many thousands of American Indians. By 1835 most eastern tribes had reluctantly complied and moved west. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was created in 1836 to assist the resettled tribes. Most politicians supported a policy of Indian removal. Georgia and other states passed laws requiring the Cherokees to migrate to the West. When the Cherokees challenged Georgia in the courts, the Supreme Court (under Marshall) ruled in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) that Cherokees were not a foreign nation with the right to sue in a federal court. But in a second case, Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the high court ruled that the laws of Georgia had not force within Cherokee territory. In this clash between a state’s laws and the federal courts, Jackson sided with the states. The Court was powerless to enforce its decision without the President’s support.Trail of TearsMost Cherokees repudiated the settlement of 1835, which provided land in the Indian Territory. In 1838, after Jackson had left office, the US Army forced 15,000 Cherokees to leave Georgia. The hardships on the “Trail of Tears” westward caused the deaths of 4,000 Cherokees.Indian Removal in the 1830sNullificationJackson favored states’ rights- but not disunion. In 1828, the South Carolina legislature declared the increased tariff of 1828, the so-called Tariff of Abominations, to be unconstitutional. In doing so, it affirmed a theory advanced by Jackson’s vice-president, John C. Calhoun. According to this nullification theory, each state had the right to decide whether to obey a federal law or to declare it null and void (of no effect). In 1830, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts debated Robert Hayne of South Carolina on the nature of the federal Union under the Constitution. Webster attacked the idea that any state could defy or leave the Union. Following this famous Webster-Hayne debate, President Jackson declared his own position in a toast he presented at a political dinner. “Our federal Union,” he declared, “it must be preserved.” Calhoun responded immediately with another toast: “The Union, next to our liberties, most dear!”In 1832, Calhoun’s South Carolina increased tension by holding a special convention to nullify both the hated 1828 tariff and a new tariff of 1832. The convention passed a resolution forbidding the collection of tariffs within the state. Jackson reacted decisively. He told the secretary of war to prepare for military action. He persuaded Congress to pass a Force bill giving him authority to act against South Carolina. Jackson also issued a Proclamation to the People of South Carolina, stating that nullification and disunion were treason.But federal troops did not march in this crisis. Jackson opened the door for compromise by suggesting that Congress lower the tariff. South Carolina postponed nullification and later formally rescinded it after Congress enacted a new tariff along the lines suggested by the president. Jackson’s strong defense of federal authority forced the militant advocates of states’ rights to retreat. On another issue, however, militant southerners had Jackson’s support. The president shared southerners’ alarm about the growing antislavery movement in the North. He used his executive power to stop antislavery literature from being sent through the US mail. Southern Jacksonians trusted that Jackson would not extend democracy to African Americans.Bank VetoAnother major issue of Jackson’s presidency concerned the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. This bank and its branches, although privately owned, received federal deposits and attempted to serve a public purpose by cushioning the ups and downs of the national economy. The bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, managed it effectively. Biddle’s arrogance, however, contributed to the suspicion that the bank abused its powers and served the interests of only the wealthy. Jackson shared this suspicion. He believed that the Bank of the United States was unconstitutional. Henry Clay, Jackson’s chief political opponent, favored the Bank. In 1832, an election year, Clay decided to challenge Jackson on the bank issue by persuading a majority in Congress to pass a bank-recharter bill. Jackson promptly vetoed this bill, denouncing it as a private monopoly that enriched the wealthy and foreigners at the expense of the common people and the “hydra of corruption.” The voters agreed with Jackson. Jackson won reelection with more than three-fourths of the electoral vote.TWO-PARTY SYSTEMThe one-party system that had characterized Monroe’s presidency (the Era of Good Feelings) had given way to a two-party system under Jackson. Supporters of Jackson were now known as Democrats, while supporters of his leading rival, Henry Clay, were called Whigs. The Democratic Party harked back to the old Republican Party of Jefferson, and the Whig Party resembled the defunct Federalist Party of Hamilton. At the same time, the new parties reflected the changed conditions of the Jacksonian era. Democrats and Whigs alike were challenged to respond to the relentless westward expansion of the nation and the emergence of an industrial economy.Democrats and Whigs in the Age of JacksonDEMOCRATSWHIGSIssues SupportedLocal ruleLimited governmentFree tradeOpportunity for white malesAmerican System:A national bankFederal funds for internal improvementsA protective tariffMajor ConcernsMonopoliesNational bankHigh tariffsHigh land pricesCrime associated with immigrantsBase of Voter SupportThe South and WestUrban workersNew England and the Mid Atlantic statesProtestants of English heritageUrban professionalsJackson’s Second TermAfter winning reelection in 1832, Jackson moved to destroy the Bank of the United States.PET BANKS: Jackson attached the bank by withdrawing all federal funds. Aided by Secretary of the Treasury Roger Taney, he transferred the funds to various states banks, which Jackson’s critics called “pet banks.”SPECIES CIRCULAR: as a result of both Jackson’s financial policies and feverish speculation in western lands, prices for land and various goods became badly inflated. Jackson hoped to check the inflationary trend by issuing a presidential order known as the Specie Circular. It required that all future purchase of federal lands be made in specie (gold or silver) rather than in paper banknotes. Soon afterward, banknotes lost their value and land sales plummeted. Right after Jackson left office, a financial crisis- the Panic of 1837- plunged the nation’s economy into a depression.The Election of 1836Following the two-term tradition set by his predecessors, Jackson did not seek a third term. To make sure his policies were carried out even in his retirement, Jackson persuaded the Democratic Party to nominate his loyal vice president, Martin Van Buren, who was a master of practical politics. Fearing defeat, the Whig Party adopted the unusual strategy of nominating three candidates from three different regions. In doing so, the Whigs hoped to throw the election into the House of Representatives, where each state had one vote in the selection of the president. The Whig strategy failed, however, as Van Buren took 58% of the electoral vote.President Van Buren and the Panic of 1837Just as Van Buren took office, the country suffered a financial panic as one bank after another closed its doors. Jackson’s opposition to the rechartering of the BUS was only one of many causes of the panic and resulting economic depression. But the Whigs were quick to blame the Democrats for their laissez-faire economics, which advocated for little federal involvement in the economy.The “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” Campaign of 1840In the election of 1840, the Whigs were in a strong position to defeat Van Buren and the Jacksonian Democrats. Voters were unhappy with the bad state of the economy. In addition, the Whigs were better organized than the Democrats, and had a popular war hero, William Henry “Tippecanoe” Harrison, as their presidential candidate. The Whigs took campaign hoopla to new heights. To symbolize Harrison’s humble origins, they put log cabins on wheels and paraded them down the streets of cities and towns. They also passed out hard cider for voters to drink and buttons and hats to wear. Name-calling as a propaganda device also marked the 1840 campaign. The Whigs attacked “Martin Van Ruin” as an aristocrat with a taste for foreign wines. A remarkable 78% of eligible voters (white males) cast their ballots. Old “Tippecanoe” and John Tyler of Virginia, a former states’ rights Democrat who joined the Whigs, took 53% of the popular vote and most of the electoral votes in all three sections: North, South, and West. This election established the Whigs as a national party. However, Harrison died of pneumonia less than a month after taking office, and “His Accidency,” John Tyler, became the first vice-president to succeed to the presidency. President Tyler was not much of a Whig. He vetoed the Whigs’ national bank bills and other legislation, and favored southern and expansionist Democrats during the balance of his term (1841-1845). The Jacksonian era was in its last state, and came to an end with the Mexican War and the increased focus on the issue of slavery.HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: were the Jacksonians Democratic??Historians debate whether the election of Jackson in 1828 marked a revolutionary and democratic turn in American politics. The traditions view is that Jackson’s election began the era of the common man, when the masses of newly enfranchised voters drove out the entrenched ruling class and elected one of their own. The Revolution of 1828 was a victory of the democratic West against the aristocratic East. On the other hand, 19th century Whig historians viewed Jackson as a despot whose appeal to the uneducated masses and “corrupt” spoils system threatened the republic. In the 1940s, the historians Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. argued that Jacksonian democracy relied as much on the support of eastern urban workers as on western farmers. Jackson’s coalition of farmers and workers foreshadowed a similar coalition that elected another Democratic president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s. Contemporary historians have used quantitative analysis of voting returns to show that increased voter participation was evident in local elections years before 1828 and did not reach a peak until the election of 1840, an election that the Whig Party won. Some historians argue that religion and ethnicity were more important than economic class in shaping votes. For example, Catholic immigrants objected to the imposition of the Puritan moral code (e.g., temperance) by the native Protestants. Recent historians see Jackson’s popularity in the 1830s as a reaction of subsistence farmers and urban workers against threatening forces of economic change. A capitalist, or market, economy was taking shape in the early years of the 19th century. This market revolution divided the electorate. Some, including Whigs, supported the changes giving a greater role for enterprising businessmen. Jackson’s veto of the bank captured popular fears about the rise of capitalism.PORTRAIT I- “The Jacksonian Revolution” (by Robert V. Remini)The age of Jackson was a turbulent era- a period of boom and bust, of great population shifts into the cities and out to the frontier, of institutionalized violence and racial antagonisms, of utopian communities, reform movements, the abolitionist crusade, and the “great southern reaction” in defense of slavery. It was also a time of graft and corruption, of machine politics and ruthless political bosses. But above all, it was an age of the self-made man, a time when privilege and elitist rule gave way to the vestiges of popular democracy- at least for white males. Between the 1820s and the 1840s, America witnessed the rise of universal manhood suffrage for whites, long ballots, national nominating conventions, and grassroot political parties. The man who gave the age its name was a self-made planter and slaveholder of considerable wealth. Like most aristocrats from the Tennessee country of his day, Andrew Jackson could not spell, he lacked education and culture, but he did aspire to wealth and military glory, both of which he won. Despite his harsh, gaunt features, he looked like a gentleman and a soldier, and in calm moods he could be gentle, even grave.In politics, however, Jackson was an “aggressive, dynamic, charismatic, and intimidating individual,” as Robert V. Remini describes him. He became a symbol of “the common man,” Remini says, because he was devoted to liberty and democracy and had a powerful faith in “the people,” In Remini’s view, Jackson’s ascension to the presidency in 1828 launched a genuine revolution against the “gentry republic” founded by the signers in which the rich and powerful ruled. The Jacksonian revolution, Remini argues, moved America toward a more democratic system in which the government was responsive to the popular will. In Remini’s view, Jackson himself played a major role in the shift toward democracy- that is, toward a system of true majority rule, not just rule by a propertied elite. He set out to make the president and every other federal official answerable to the people. Thus, he favored abolishing the Electoral College and rotating every elected office. He even challenged the role of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter in interpreting the Constitution… In Remini’s view, Jackson also inaugurated the history of powerful executive leadership in this country. He used his veto power more than all his predecessors combined and asserted the right of the chief executive to initiate legislation, which altered the president’s relationship with congress and made the president the head of state. Surprisingly enough, Remini does not mention Jackson’s crucial role in solving the nullification crisis of 1832, which Remini heralds elsewhere as the single most important achievement of Jackson’s presidency. That event is discussed in the portrait of Henry Clay. As Remini explains in an afterward, his view of Jackson is a revival of a once popular interpretation that had fallen into disfavor. The author of a recent three-volume biography of Jackson and perhaps the county’s leading Jackson scholar, Remini disputes those who have dismissed Jackson as an opportunist and a fraud masquerading as a man of the people. Remini even defends Jackson’s Indian removal policy, which so offends many modern Americans. Remini’s interpretation is provocative. Do you agree that a slave owner could really be a man of the people? As you ponder that question, remember Professor Wilson’s warning about presentism. Jackson himself would have answered the question with a resounding yes on two counts. First, the Jacksonian revolution ushered in universal white manhood suffrage in most states and created a true mass electorate. Second, “the people” meant white men almost exclusively. Women, slaves, and free blacks outside New England were all denied the electoral franchise and were excluded from the idea of “the people.” They had no will to which Jackson or any other government official could be responsive. Because Remini makes much of the transition from Washington’s generation to Jackson’s, you may want to compare the records and outlooks of the two presidents. But Remini’s essay is best studied and discussed in conjunction with… Jackson’s great adversary, Whig leader Henry Clay. A New Generation of Political Leaders:“What?” cried the outraged North Carolina lady when she heard the dreadful news. “Jackson up for president? Jackson? Andrew Jackson? The Jackson that used to live in Salisbury? Why, when he was here, he was such a rake that my husband would not bring him into the house? It is true, he might have taken him out to the stable to weigh horses for a race, and might drink a glass of whiskey with him there. Well, if Andrew Jackson can be president, anybody can!”Indeed. After forty years of constitutional government headed by presidents George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, the thought of General Andrew Jackson on Tennessee- “Old Hickory” to his devoted soldiers- succeeding such distinguished statesmen came as a shock to some Americans in 1828. And little did they know at the time that Old Hickory would be followed in succession by the little Magician, Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, Young Hickory, and then Old Rough and Ready.What happened to the American political process? How could it come about that the Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Madisons of the world could be replaced by the Van Burens, Harrisons, Tylers, and Taylors? What a mockery of the political system bequeathed by the Founding Fathers? The years from roughly 1828 to 1848 are known today as the Age of Jackson or the Jacksonian era. To many contemporaries, they initiated a “revolution,” a shocking overthrow of the noble republican standards of the founders by the “common people,” who in 1828 preferred as president a crude frontiersman like Andrew Jackson to a statesman of proven ability with a record of outstanding public service like John Quincy Adams.Over the forty years following the establishment of the American nation under the Constitution, the US had experienced many profound changes in virtually all phase of life. Following the War of 1812, the industrial revolution took hold and within thirty years all the essential elements for the creation of an industrial society in America were solidly in place. At the same time, a transportation revolution got underway with the building of canals, bridges, and turnpikes, reaching a climax of sorts in the 1820s with the coming of the railroads. The standard of living was also improved by numerous new inventions. Finally, many of the older eastern states began to imitate newer western states by democratizing their institutions, for example amending their constitutions to eliminate property qualifications for voting and holding office, thereby establishing universal white manhood suffrage.The arrival of many thousands of new voters at the polls in the early 19th century radically changed American politics. In the past, only the wealthy and better educated were actively involved in government. Moreover, political parties were frowned upon by many of the Founding Fathers. Parties stood for factions or cliques by which greedy and ambitious men, who had no interest in serving the public good, could advance their private and selfish purposes. John Adams spoke for many when he declared that the “division of the republic into two great parties… is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.” But times had changed. An entirely new generation of politicians appeared at the outbreak of the War of 1812, men like Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Daniel Webster, who regarded political parties more favorably. Indeed, the party structure that had emerged before the end of President Washington’s administration had been their corridor to power, since none of them could offer to their constituents a public record to match what the founders had achieved.None had fought in the revolution. None had signed the Declaration or participated in the debates leading to the writing and adoption of the Constitution. Some of them- Martin Van Buren is probably the best example- actually considered parties to be beneficial to the body politic, indeed essential to the proper working of a democratic society. Through the party system, Van Buren argued, the American people could more effectively express their will and take measures to ensure that that will was implemented by their representatives. “We must always have party distinctions,” he wrote, “and the old ones are the best… Political combinations between the inhabitants of the different states are unavoidable and the most natural and beneficial to the country is that between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”In supporting Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1828 and trying to win support from both planters and plain Republicans, Van Buren affirmed his belief in the American need for a two-party system. Jackson’s election, he told Thomas Ritchie, editor of the Richmond Enquirer, “as the results of his military service without reference to a party, and, as far as he alone is concerned, scarcely to principle, would be one thing. His election as the result of combined and concerted effort of a political party, holding in the main, to certain tenets and opposed to certain prevailing principles, might be another and far different thing.”Van Buren eventually formed an alliance with John C. Calhoun and a number of other southern politicians, and led the way in structuring a political organization around the presidential candidacy of Andrew Jackson. That organization ultimately came to be called the Democratic Party. Its leaders, including Jackson, Van Buren, Calhoun, and Thomas Hart Benton, claimed to follow the republican doctrines of Thomas Jefferson. Thus they opposed both a strong central government and a broad interpretation of the Constitution, and they regarded the states, whose rights must be defended by all who cared about preserving individual liberty, as a wholesome counterweight to the national government. Many of them opposed the idea of the federal government sponsoring public works, arguing that internal improvements dangerously inflated the powers of the central government and jeopardized liberty. As president, Andrew Jackson vetoed the Maysville road bill and contended that the national government should avoid internal improvements as a general practice, except for those essential to the national defense.The political philosophy these Democrats espoused was fundamentally conservative. In advocated economy in operating the government because a tight budget limited government activity, and Jackson swore that if ever elected president he would liquidate the national debt. True to his word, he labored throughout his administration to cut expenditures by vetoing several appropriations bills he tagged as exorbitant, and he finally succeeded in obliterating the national debt altogether in January 1835- a short-lived accomplishment.The organization of the Democratic Party in its initial stages included a central committee, state committees, and a national newspaper located in Washington, D.C., the United States Telegraph, which could speak authoritatively to the party faithful. In time it was said that the Democratic organization included “a chain of newspaper posts, from the New England States to Louisiana, and branching off through Lexington to the Western States.” The supporters of Jackson’s election were accused by their opponents of attempting to regulate “the popular election by means of organized clubs in the States, and organized presses everywhere.” Democrats took particular delight in celebrating the candidacy of Andrew Jackson. They found that Old Hickory’s personality and military accomplishments made him an attractive and viable candidate for the ordinary voter. Indeed his career and personality stirred the imagination of Democratic leaders around the country and they devised new methods, or improved old ones, to get across the message that Andrew Jackson was a “man of the people,” “The Constitution and liberty of the country were in imminent peril, and he has preserved them both!” his supporters boasted. “We can sustain our republican principles… by calling to the presidential chair… ANDREW JACKSON.”Jackson became a symbol of the best in American life- a self-made man, among other things- and party leaders adopted the hickory leaf as their symbol. Hickory brooms, hickory canes, hickory sticks shot up everywhere- on steeples, poles, steamboats, and stage coaches, and in the hands of all who could wave them to salute the Old Hero of New Orleans. “In every village, as well as upon the corners of many city streets,” hickory poles were erected. “Many of these poles were standing as late as 1845,” recorded one contemporary, “rotten mementoes of the delirium of 1828.” The opponents of the Democratic Party were outraged by this crude lowering of the political process. “Planting hickory trees!” snorted the Washington National Journal on May 24, 1828. “Odd nuts and drumsticks! What have hickory trees to do with republicanism and the great contest?”The Democrats devised other gimmicks to generate excitement for their ticket. “Jackson meetings were held in every county where a Democratic organization existed. Such meetings were not new, of course. What was new was their audience. “If we go into one of these meetings,” declared one newspaper, “of whom do we find them composed? Do we see there the solid, substantial, moral and reflecting yeomanry of the country? No… They comprise a large portion of the dissolute, the noisy, the discontented, and designing of society.” The Democratic press retorted with the claim that these so-called dissolute were actually the “bone and muscle of American society. They are the People. The real People who understand that Gen. Jackson is one of them and will defend their interests and rights.”The Jacksonians were also very fond of parades and barbeques. In Baltimore a grand barbeque was scheduled to commemorate the successful defense of the city when the British attacked during the War of 1812. But the Democrats expropriated the occasion and converted it into a Jackson rally. One parade started with dozens of Democrats marching to the beat of a fife and drum corps and wearing no other insignia save “a twig of the sacred [hickory] tree in their hats.” Trailing these faithful Jacksonians came “gigantic hickory poles,” still live and crowned with green foliage, being carted in “on eight wheels for the purpose of being planted by the democracy on the eve of the election.” These poles were drawn by eight horses, all decorated with “ribbons and mottoes.” Perched in the branches of each tree were a dozen Democrats, waving flags and shouting, “Hurrah for Jackson!” “Van Buren has learned you know that the Hurra Boys were for Jackson,” commented one critic, “and to my regret they constitute a powerful host.” Indeed they did. The number of voters in the election of 1828 rose to 1,155,340, a jump of more than 800,000 over the previous presidential election of 1824. The Hurra Boys brought out the voters in 1828, but at considerable cost. The election set a low mark for vulgarity, gimmickry, and nonsensical hijinks. Jackson’s mother was accused of being a prostitute brought to America to service British soldiers, and his wife was denounced as an “adulteress” and bigamist. “Ought a convicted adulteress and her paramour husband to be placed in the highest offices of this free and Christian land?” asked one editor. But the Democrats were no better, accusing John Quincy Adams of pimping for the czar of Russia.The tone and style of this election outraged many voters who feared for the future of American politics. With so many fresh faces crowding to the polls, the old republican system was yielding to a new democratic style and that evolution seemed fraught with all the dangers warned against by the Founding Fathers. Jackson’s subsequent victory at the polls gave some Americans nightmares of worse things to come. At his inauguration people came from five hundred miles away to see General Jackson, wrote Daniel Webster, “and they really seem to think that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger!” They nearly wrecked the white House in their exuberance. Their behavior shocked Joseph Story, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and sent him scurrying home. “The reign of KING MOB seemed triumphant,” he wailed. But a western newspaper disagreed. “It was a proud day for the people,” reported the Argus of Western America. “General Jackson is their own President.”Jackson himself was fiercely committed to democracy. And by democracy he meant majoritarian rule. “The people are the government,” he wrote, “administering it by their agents; they are the Government, the sovereign power.” In his first message to Congress as president, written in December 1829, Jackson announced: “The majority is to govern.” To the people belonged the right of “electing their Chief Executive.” He therefore asked Congress to adopt an amendment that would abolish the College of Electors. He wanted all “intermediary” agencies standing between the people and their government swept away, whether erected by the Founding Fathers of not. “The people are sovereign,” he reiterated. “Their will is absolute.” So committed was Jackson to the principle of popular self-rule that he told historian-politician George Bancroft that “every officer should in his turn pass before the people, for their approval or rejection.” And he included federal judges in this sweeping generalization, even justices of the Supreme Court. Accordingly, he introduced the principle of rotation, which limited government appointments to four years. Officeholders should be regularly rotated back home and replaced by new men, he said. “The duties of all public officers are… so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.” Otherwise abuse may occur. Anyone who has held office “a few years, believes he has a life estate in it, a vested right, & if it has been 20 years or upwards, not only a vested right, but that it ought to descend to his children, & if no children then the next of kin- This is not the principles of our government. It is rotation in office that will perpetuate our liberty.” Unfortunately, hack politicians equated rotation with patronage and Jackson’s enemies quickly dubbed his principle “the spoils system.”But it was never meant to be a spoils system. Jackson wanted every office of government, from the highest to the lowest, within the reach of the electorate, arguing that “where the people are everything… there and there only is liberty.” Perhaps his position was best articulated by Alexis de Tocqueville, the French visitor in the 1830s whose Democracy in America remains one of the most profound observations about American life in print. “The people reign in the American political world,” declared Tocqueville, “as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.” The “constant celebration” of the people, therefore, is what Jackson and the Democratic Party provided the nation during his eight years in office. It is what Jacksonian Democracy was all about.As President, Jackson inaugurated a number of important changes in the operation of government. For example, he vetoed congressional legislation more times than all his predecessors combined, and for reasons other than a bill’s presumed lack of constitutionality. More importantly, by the creative use of his veto power he successfully claimed for the chief executive the right to participate in the legislative process. He put Congress on notice that they must consider his views on all issues before enacting them into law or run the risk of a veto. In effect he assumed the right to initiate legislation, and this essentially altered the relationship between the executive and the Congress. Instead of a separate and equal branch of the government, the president, according to Jackson, was the head of state, the first among equals. Jackson also took a dim view of the claim that the Supreme Court exercised the final and absolute right to determine the meaning of the Constitution. When the court decided in McCulloch v. Maryland that the law establishing a national bank was constitutional, Jackson disagreed. In his veto of a bill to recharter the Second National Bank in 1832, he claimed among other things that the bill lacked authority under the Constitution, despite what the high court had decided. Both the House and Senate, as well as the president, he continued, must decide for themselves what is and what is not constitutional before taking action on any bill. The representative of Congress ought not to vote for a bill, and the president ought not to sign it, if they, in their own good judgment, believe it unconstitutional. “it is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionally of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision.” Jackson did not deny the right of the Supreme Court to judge the constitutionality of a bill. What he denied was the presumption that the Court was the final or exclusive interpreter of the Constitution. All three branches should rule on the question of constitutionality, Jackson argued. In this way the equality and independence of each branch of government is maintained. “The authority of the Supreme Court, he declared, “must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress, or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.” What bothered Jackson was the presumption that four men could dictate what 15 million people may or may not do under their constitutional form. To Jackson’s mind that was not democratic but oligarchic. But that was precisely the intention of the Founding Fathers: to provide a balanced mix of democratic, oligarchic, and monarchial forms in the Constitution. Of course Jackson was merely expressing his own opinion about the right of all three branches to pass on the constitutionality of all legislation, as opinion the American people ultimately rejected. The great fear in a democratic system- one the Founding Fathers knew perfectly well- was the danger of the majority tyrannizing the minority. Jackson would take his changes. He believed the American people were virtuous and would always act appropriately. “I for one do not despair of the republic,” he wrote. “I have great confidence in the virtue of a great majority of the peoples and I cannot fear the result. The republic is safe, the main pillars [of] virtue, religion, and morality will be fostered by a majority of the people.” But not everyone shared Jackson’s optimism about the goodness of the electorate. And in time- particularly with the passage of the 14th Amendment- it fell to the courts to guard and maintain the rights of the minority.Jackson summed up his assertion of presidential rights by declaring that he alone- not Congress, as was usually assumed- was the sole representative of the American people and responsible to them. After defeating Henry Clay in the 1832 election, he decided to kill the Second National Bank by removing federal deposits because, as he said, he had received a “mandate” from the people to do so. The Senate objected and formally censured him, but Jackson, in response, merely issued another statement on presidential rights and the democratic system that had evolved over the last few years.By law, only the secretary of the treasury was authorized to remove the deposits, so Jackson informed his secretary, William Duane, to carry out his order. Duane refused pointblank. And he also refused to resign as he had promised if he and the president could not agree upon a common course of action with respect to the deposits. Thereupon, Jackson sacked him. This was the first time a cabinet officer had been fired, and there was some question whether the president had this authority. After all, the cabinet positions were created by Congress and appointment required the consent of the Senate. Did that not imply that removal also require senatorial consent- particularly the treasury secretary, since he handled public funds that were controlled by Congress? The law creating the Treasury Department never called it an “executive” department, and it required its secretary to report to the Congress, not the president. None of this made a particle of difference to Andrew Jackson. All department heads were his appointees and they would obey him or pack their bags. The summary dismissal of Duane was seen by Jackson’s opponents as a presidential grab for the purse strings of the nation. And in fact presidential control over all executive functions gave the chief executive increased authority over the collection and distribution of public funds.The Jacksonian Revolution:By the close of 1833 many feared that Andrew Jackson was leading the country to disaster. Henry Clay regularly pilloried the president on the Senate floor. On one occasion he accused Jackson of “open, palpable and daring usurpation” of all the powers of government. “We are in the midst of a revolution,” Clay thundered, “hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending towards a total change of the pure republican character of the Government.”A “revolution”- that was how the opposition Whig Party characterized Jackson’s presidency. The nation was moving steadily away from its “pure republican character” into something approaching despotism. What the nation was witnessing, cried Clay, was “the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.” Thereafter Whig newspapers reprinted a cartoon showing Jackson as “King Andrew the First.” Clad in robes befitting an emperor, he was shown wearing a crown and holding a scepter in one hand and a scroll in the other on which was written the world “veto.” Democrats, naturally, read the “revolution” differently. They saw it as the steady progress of the country from the gentry republic originally established by the Founding Fathers to a more democratic system that mandated broader representation in government and a greater responsiveness to popular will. Andrew Jackson did not take kindly to Clay’s verbal mauling. “Oh, if I live to get these robes of office off me,” he snorted at one point, “I will bring the rascal to a dear account.” He later likened the senator to “a drunken man in a brothel,” reckless, destructive, and “full of furry.”Other senators expressed their opposition to this “imperial” president and seconded Clay’s complaints. John C. Calhoun, who by this time had deserted to the enemy camp, adopted the Kentuckian’s “leading ideas of revolution” and charged that “a great effort is now making to choke and stifle the voice of American liberty.” And he condemned Jackson’s insistence on taking refuse in democratic claims. The president, “tells us again and again with the greatest emphasis,” he continued, “that he is the immediate representative of the American people! What effrontery! What boldness of assertion! Why, he never received a vote from the American people. He was elected by electors… who are elected by Legislatures chosen by the people.”Sen. Daniel Webster and other Whigs chimed in. “Again and again we hear it said,” rumbled Webster, “that the President is responsible to the American people!... And this is thought enough for a limited, restrained, republican government!... I hold this, Sir, to be a mere assumption, and dangerous assumption.” And connected with this “airy and unreal responsibility to the people,” he continued, “is another sentiment… and that is, that the President is the direct representative of the American people.” The sweep of his language electrified the Senate. And “if he may be allowed to consider himself as the sole representative of all the American people,” Webster concluded, “then I say, Sir, that the government… had already a master. I deny the sentiment, and therefore protest against the language; neither the sentiment nor the language is to be found in the Constitution of this Country.”Jackson’s novel concept that the president served as the people’s tribune found immediate acceptance by the electorate, despite the warnings of the Whigs. In effect, he altered the essential character of the presidency. He had become the head of government, the one person who would formulate national policy and direct public affairs. Signed Senator Benjamin W. Leigh of Virginia: “Until the President developed the faculties of the Executive power, all men thought it inferior to the legislature- he manifestly thinks it superior: and in his hands [it]… has proved far stronger than the representatives of the States.” Jackson Interpreted:From Jackson’s own time to the present, disagreement and controversy over the significance of his presidency has prevailed. In the 20th century the disagreements intensified among historians. Confusion over the meaning of Jacksonian Democracy, varying regional support for democratic change, and the social and economic status of the Democrats and Whigs have clouded the efforts of scholars to reach reliable conclusions about the Old Hero and the era that bears his name. Andrew Jackson himself will always remain a controversial figure among historians. That he can still generate such intense partisan feeling is evidence of his remarkable personality. He was an aggressive, dynamic, charismatic, and intimidating individual. And although modern scholars and students of history either admire of dislike him intensely, his rating as president in pools conducts among historians over the past thirty years varies from great to near great. He carries an enormous burden in winning any popularity contest because of his insistence on removing the eastern Indians west of the Mississippi River and on waging a long and vicious war against the Second National Bank of the United States.His first biographer, James Parton, wrote a three-volume Life of Andrew Jackson (1859, 1860) and came away with mixed feelings about the man and his democracy. At times Parton railed against the mindless mob “who could be wheedled, and flattered, and drilled,” but at other times he extolled democracy as the mark of an enlightened society. What troubled Parton particularly was the spoils system. Rotation, he wrote, is “an evil so great and so difficult to remedy, that if all his other public acts had been perfectly wise and right, this single feature of his administration would suffice to render it deplorable rather than admirable.” William Graham Sumner’s Andrew Jackson (1882) was relentlessly critical of his subject, deploring in particular Jackson’s flawed moral character and emotional excesses. Sumner and other early historians, such as Herman von Holst and James Schouler, constituted what one student of the Jacksonian age called a “liberal patrician” or “Whig” school of history. These individuals came from European middle or upper class families with excellent backgrounds of education and public service. Because their class had been ousted from political power, these historians were biased against Jacksonian Democracy, and their books reflect their prejudice.The interpretation of Old Hickory and his adherents took a sharp about-face with the appearance in 1893 of the vastly influential article by Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner argued that American democracy emerged from the wilderness, noting that universal white manhood suffrage guaranteed by the new western states became something of a model for the older, eastern states. Naturally Jackson and his followers were seen as the personification of this frontier democracy. The thesis was advanced and sometimes amplified by Charles A. Beard, Vernon L. Parrington, and other western and southern historians of the early 20th century who were caught up in the reform movement of the Progressive Era. They dubbed the Jacksonian revolution an age of egalitarianism that produced the rise of the common man. Jackson himself was applauded as a man of the people. Thus the liberal patrician school of historiography gave way to the Progressive school.This interpretation dovetailed rather well with the views of Tocqueville. During his visit, Tocqueville encountered a widespread belief in egalitarianism but worried that majoritarian rule could endanger minority rights. These are so many sharp and accurate insights into American society and institutions in Democracy in America that it ought to be the first book anyone reads in attempting to understand the antebellum period of American history. Among other things, he catches the American just as he is emerging from his European and colonial past and acquiring many of the characteristics of what are generally regarded as typically American today.Tocqueville’s democratic liberalism, augmented by the works of the Progressive historians- especially Turner, Beard and Parrington- dominated historical thought about the American past for the next 50 years or more. Almost all the Progressive historians stressed the role of geographic sections in the nation, and Turner at one point even denied any class influence in the formation of frontier democracy. The only important negative voice concerning Jackson during this period came from Thomas P. Abernethy, whose From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee: A Study in Frontier Democracy (1932) insisted that Jackson himself was a frontier aristocrat, an opportunist, and a land speculator who strongly opposed the democratic forces in his own state of Tennessee.The virtual shattering of the Progressive school’s interpretation of Jacksonian Democracy came with the publication of one of the most important historical monographs ever written concerning American history: The Age of Jackson (1945), by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. The classic work virtually rivals in importance the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner. It is a landmark study and represents the beginning of modern scholarship on Jackson and his era. Schlesinger argued that class distinctions rather than sectional differences best explain the phenomenon of Jacksonian Democracy. He interpreted Jackson’s actions and those of tis followers as an effort of the less fortunate in American society to combat the power and influence of the business community. The working classes in urban centers as well as the yeoman farmers, he argued, were the true wellsprings of the Jacksonian movement. Jacksonian Democracy evolved from the conflict between classes and best expressed its goals and purposes in the problems and needs facing urban laborers. Schlesinger singled out the bank war as the most telling example of the conflict and as the fundamental key to a full understanding of the meaning of Jacksonian Democracy. What attracted many historians to this path-breaking study, besides its graceful and majestic style, was Schlesinger’s perceptive definition of Jacksonian Democracy and a precise explanation of its origin.The reaction to Schlesinger’s work was immediate and dramatic. It swept the historical profession like a tornado, eliciting both prodigious praise and, within a relatively short time, fierce denunciations. Bray Hammond, in a series of articles as well as his Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (1957), and Richard Hofstadter, in his The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948)m contended that the Jacksonians were not the champions of urban workers or small farmers but rather ambitious and ruthless entrepreneurs principally concerned with advancing their own economic and political advantage. They were “men on the make” and frequently captains of great wealth. According to Hofstadter, the Jacksonians were not so much hostile to business as they were hostile to being excluded from entering the confined arena of capitalists. Where Schlesinger had emphasized conflict in explain the Jacksonian era, Hofstadter insisted that consensus best characterized the period. The entrepreneurial thesis, as it was called, found strong support among many young scholars who constituted the Columbia University school of historians. In a series of articles and books produced by these critics, Jackson himself was described as an inconsistent opportunist, a strikebreaker, a shady land speculator, and a political fraud. Marvin Meyers, in his The Jackson Persuasion (1957), provides a slight variation on the entrepreneurial thesis by arguing that Jacksonians did indeed keep their eyes on the main chance but yearned for the virtues of a past agrarian republic. They hungered after the rewards of capitalism but looked back reverentially on the blessings of a simple agrarian society.A major redirection of Jacksonian scholarship came with the publication of Lee Benson’s The Concept of Jacksonian democracy: New York as a Test Case (1961). This work suggested a whole new approach to the investigation of the Jacksonian age by employing the techniques of quantification to uncover solid, factual data upon which to base an analysis. Moreover, Benson emphasized social questions and found that such things as ethnicity and religion were far more important than economies in determining how a person voted or which party won his allegiance. He dismissed Jacksonian rhetoric about democracy and the rights of the people as “claptrap” and contended that local issues in elections meant more to the voters than national issues. Andrew Jackson himself was dismissed as unimportant in understanding the structure and meaning of politics in this period. In time, some college textbooks virtually eliminated Jackson from any discussion of this period except to mention that he opposed social reforms and that his removal of the Indians was one of the most heinous acts in American history…[In more recent years] Jackson has been somewhat restored to his former importance, if not his former heroic stature. My own three-volume life of Old Hickory, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821; Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832; Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845 (1977, 1981, 1984) highlights Schlesinger’s findings and Jackson’s faith and commitment to liberty and democracy. I contend that Jackson was in fact a man of the people, just as the Progressive historians had argued, and that he actively attempted to advance democracy by insisting that all branches of government, including the courts, reflect the popular will. I also tried to show that, for a number of reasons, the president’s policy of Indian removal was initiated to spare the Indian from certain extinction. And Francis Paul Pruchs has argued persuasively that Indian removal was probably the only policy possible under the circumstances.The study of the Jacksonian era is essential for any serious examination of the evolution of the American presidency. This has been widely recognized since the avalanche of articles and books triggered by the appearance of Schlesinger’s monumental work. Jackson himself was never lost his ability to excite the most intense passions and interests among students of American history. No doubt scholars and popular writers will continue to debate his role as a national hero and as an architect of American political institutions.Andrew Jackson and the Constitution (Gilder Lerhman Document)In 1860, biographer James Parton concluded that Andrew Jackson was “a most law-defying, law obeying citizen.” Such a statement is obviously contradictory. Yet it accurately captures the essence of the famous, or infamous, Jackson. Without question, the seventh president was a man of contradictions. To this day, historians have been unable to arrive at accepted conclusions about his character or impact on the nation. Was he, as Robert Remini has argued across the pages of more than a dozen books, the great leader and symbol of a burgeoning mass democracy? Or was Jackson merely a vainglorious bully with no vision for the nation, reacting in response to his own sensitive pride, as Andrew Burstein and others have insisted?There is much that one can look at in Jackson’s life when attempting to arrive at conclusions. In particular, his relationship with the law and Constitution offer a significant window into his worldview. Whether it was illegally declaring martial law in New Orleans, invading Spanish Florida and executing British citizens, removing federal deposits from the Bank of the United States, or questioning the Supreme Court’s authority in Worcester v. Georgia, Jackson acted in a manner that was at times distinctly illegal yet widely hailed by supporters as being in the nation’s best interest. And before we conclude that this support was partisan banter bestowed by his own Democratic Party, we must remember that historians and legal scholars to this day have wrestled with the larger ideological and constitutional meaning of Jackson’s beliefs and actions. One thing is certain: Jackson had no qualms about overstepping the law, even the Constitution, when he believed that the very survival of the nation required it. Moreover, this perspective remains at the heart of debate in a post-9/11 America. The essential question stands—can a leader violate the law in order to ultimately save it and the nation?Andrew Jackson’s fame came with the Battle of New Orleans in 1814 and 1815, where he demolished a seasoned British army with virtually no loss to his troops. The victory launched the general to national stardom and ultimately the presidency. Yet there were looming, constitutionally delicate issues that roiled beneath the surface of this victory, namely Jackson’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and declaration of martial law. The first was authorized by the Constitution, but the Supreme Court had determined that only Congress could suspend the privilege of the writ, which allowed a judge to “bring a body” before the court thus making it impossible for an arresting authority (the police or military) to hold a person indefinitely without filing charges. Jackson suspended the writ anyway, and went even further by imposing martial law, which canceled all civilian authority and placed the military in control. The act was wholly illegal. There existed no provision in the Constitution authorizing such an edict. The rub was that martial law saved New Orleans and the victory itself saved the nation’s pride. After several years of dismal military encounters during the War of 1812 and the burning of the nation’s capitol to the ground in the summer of 1814, no one, especially President Madison, was in the mood to investigate, let alone chastise, the victorious General Jackson’s illegal conduct. Thus Jackson walked away from the event with two abiding convictions: one, that victory and the nationalism generated by it protected his actions, even if illegal; and two, that he could do what he wanted if he deemed it in the nation’s best interest.Jackson’s convictions came into play only three years later in 1818, when the indomitable general exceeded his orders to protect the Georgia frontier by crossing into Spanish Florida, where he invaded two towns and executed two British citizens for making war on the United States. Once again, Jackson’s actions were questionable, if not outright illegal. He essentially made war on Spain without congressional approval, overstepped his own boundaries as a commander, and summarily executed two men, which could very well have incited legal and military difficulties with Great Britain and Spain. However, Jackson’s conduct was once again seen by many, including himself, as a necessary defense of the nation. The Spanish had done nothing to stop the marauding Seminole Indians from crossing the border and attacking American farms. The general’s actions were therefore justified as national self-defense by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the sole member of President Monroe’s cabinet to support Jackson. Adams used the turmoil over the incident to convince Spain that they should sell Florida for a measly $5 million.Unlike Jackson’s use of martial law in New Orleans, Congress debated Jackson’s rogue behavior in Florida, with Henry Clay announcing that the general was a “military chieftain” and dangerous to a young republic. Although legislators wrangled over the matter, nothing significant resulted except that Jackson became a more and more polarizing figure, particularly because of his political aspirations. When he ran for president in 1824, critics unleashed a torrent of abuse, much of it focused on his lawless ways. Jackson was forced to respond, and commented specifically on his violations of the Constitution. He noted that some in the nation believed him to be “a most dangerous and terrible man. .?.?. and that I can break, & trample under foot the constitution of the country, with as much unconcern & careless indifference, as would one of our backwoods hunters, if suddenly placed in Great Britain, break game laws.” He continued, “it has been my lot often to be placed in situations of a critical kind” that “imposed on me the necessity of Violating, or rather departing from, the constitution of the country; yet at no subsequent period has it produced to me a single pang, believing as I do now, & then did, that without it, security neither to myself or the great cause confided to me, could have been obtained.”Jackson’s ideological conviction about the flexible nature of the law and Constitution in the face of dangers confronting the still-fledgling nation can be seen in many subsequent Jacksonian battles. When President Jackson confronted the Bank of the United States in 1832, he did so with the belief that it was a corrupt fiscal monster threatening the nation’s economic security. He not only vetoed the Bank’s recharter, which was within his right as chief executive, but went a step further by removing federal deposits even after Congress had deemed them safe. Jackson transferred one secretary of the treasury and fired another in order to secure the deposit removals. His actions were questionable, if not completely illegal, and the Senate censured him by making a notation in their journal. They didn’t attempt impeachment for lack of support.Other legal conflicts surfaced. Jackson allegedly defied the Supreme Court over Worcester v. Georgia (1832), announcing, “John Marshall has made his decision now let him enforce it.” The case revolved around Georgia’s attempt to apply state laws to Cherokee lands. The Court had ruled against Georgia’s authority to do so and Jackson, dedicated to Indian removal, allegedly challenged Marshall. Although there is little evidence to support the above quotation, it certainly sounds like Jackson. Nonetheless, the case required nothing of Jackson and was ultimately settled out of court. The fact remained, however, that in this case and in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), when it was ruled that the Bank of the United States was in fact constitutional, Jackson challenged the Court’s authority as the final arbiter. As president, Jackson believed that his authority to deem what was constitutional equaled the Supreme Court’s.Jackson’s views regarding American Indians also challenged the law. Treaties were and continue to be legal agreements among sovereign nations. However, Jackson refused to believe that Native American tribes were sovereign and thus viewed Indian treaties as an absurdity. Ultimately, he forcibly removed a number of tribes, most notoriously the Cherokee, from their homes. The Trail of Tears is one of Jackson’s most infamous legacies. Yet even removal and issues of tribal sovereignty fit within a larger context of Jackson’s convictions regarding national security and state sovereignty. The general’s rise was due to his success as an Indian fighter on the frontier. He always, and to some extent legitimately, viewed American Indians as a serious threat to settlers. As president, Jackson understood the sentiment of southern states and their conception that states could not be erected within sovereign states such as Georgia. All of this, of course, revolved around the larger issue of Native American dispossession and who rightfully owned of the land. This ideological—and to some extent legal—issue remains unresolved.A variety of other incidents in Jackson’s life and career expose the nature of his relationship with the law and Constitution: the fact that he was a lawyer who engaged in dueling; his actions during the Nullification Crisis; and his failure as president to follow federal guidelines concerning mail delivery of abolitionist propaganda. Most fit within his larger conception of duty, honor, and what was necessary for the sanctity of the Union. Jackson’s ideology remains as controversial now as it was in his own time. There are few easy answers. Yet this is what makes Jackson’s views and conduct so relevant today. When presented with Jackson’s history, students invariably split down the middle over whether he was justified in his conduct, regardless of legality. In this sense, Jackson continues to serve as an important source of reflection when considering how America should and should not act when it comes to matters of national security.Matthew Warshauer is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University and author of Andrew Jackson in Context?(2009)?and Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law: Nationalism, Civil Liberties, and Partisanship (2006).Andrew Jackson’s Shifting Legacy: A Vindication of the Character and Public Services of Andrew Jackson by Henry Lee (Gilder Lehrman)Of all presidential reputations, Andrew Jackson’s is perhaps the most difficult to summarize or explain. Most Americans recognize his name, though most probably know him (in the words of a famous song) as the general who “fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” in 1815 rather than as a two-term president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Thirteen polls of historians and political scientists taken between 1948 and 2009 have ranked Jackson always in or near the top ten presidents, among the “great” or “near great.” His face adorns our currency, keeping select company with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Jackson is the only president, and for that matter the only American, whose name graces a whole period in our history. While other presidents belong to eras, Jackson’s era belongs to him. In textbooks and in common parlance, we call Washington’s time the Revolutionary and founding eras, not the Age of Washington. Lincoln belongs in the Civil War era, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the Progressive era, Franklin Roosevelt in the era of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. But the interval roughly from the 1820s through 1840s, between the aftermath of the War of 1812 and the coming of the Civil War, has often been known as the Jacksonian Era, or the Age of Jackson.Yet the reason for Jackson’s claim on an era is not readily apparent. Washington was the Father of his country. Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt were war leaders who also (not wholly coincidentally) presided over dramatic changes in government. But besides winning a famous battle in the War of 1812 years before his presidency—and at that, a battle that had no effect on the war’s outcome, since a treaty ending it had just been signed—just exactly what did Andrew Jackson do to deserve his eminence? He led the country through no wars. No foreign policy milestones like Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase or the “Doctrines” of James Monroe or Harry Truman highlighted Jackson’s presidency. He crafted no path-breaking legislative program like Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Indeed Jackson’s sole major legislative victory in eight years was an 1830 law to “remove” the eastern Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi, something more often seen today as travesty rather than triumph. That measure aside, the salient features of Jackson’s relations with Congress were his famous vetoes, killing a string of road and canal subsidies and the Bank of the United States, and Jackson’s official censure by the US States Senate in 1834, the only time that has yet happened. On its face, this does not look like the record of a “top ten” president.An exception might be claimed for Jackson’s handling of the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833. Most southern states in Jackson’s day vehemently opposed the “protective tariff,” an import tax that provided most of the government’s revenue and also aided American manufacturers by raising the price of competing foreign (mainly British) goods. In 1832 the state of South Carolina declared the tariff law unconstitutional and therefore null and void. In assuming this right, independent of the Supreme Court or anybody else, to judge what the US Constitution meant and what federal laws had to be obeyed, South Carolina threatened the very viability of the federal union. Although he was himself a southerner, no great friend of the tariff, and a South Carolina native, Jackson boldly faced down the nullifiers. He first confronted nullification’s mastermind (and his own vice president), John C. Calhoun, with a ringing public declaration: “Our Federal Union—It must be preserved.” He then responded officially to South Carolina’s action with a blistering presidential proclamation, in which he warned that nullification would inexorably lead to secession (formal withdrawal of a state from the United States), and secession meant civil war. “Be not deceived by names. Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?” Bloodshed was averted when Congress passed a compromise tariff that South Carolina accepted and Jackson approved. Although he played no direct role in its passage, Jackson took much credit for the compromise, and even many political opponents conceded it to him.For his own generation and several to come, Jackson’s defiance of nullification earned him a place in the patriotic pantheon above the contentions of party politics, at least in the eyes of those who approved the result. In the secession crisis thirty years later, Republicans—including Abraham Lincoln, an anti-Jackson partisan from his first entry into politics—hastened to invoke his example and quote his words. In 1860 James Parton, Jackson’s first scholarly biographer, managed to praise Jackson’s unionism while providing a negative overall assessment of his character.Still, though not wholly forgotten, Jackson’s reputation as defender of the Union has faded distinctly in the twentieth century and hardly explains historians’ interest in him today. Secession is a dead issue, and commitment to an indivisible and permanent American nationhood is now so commonplace as to seem hardly worth remarking.Rather, Jackson’s continuing prominence, and the source of continuing controversy, lies in something much less concrete: his place as an emblem of American democracy. He is remembered less for specific accomplishments as president than for his persona or image, his role as America’s first presidential Representative Man. That image has deep roots. In 1831–1832, midway through Jackson’s presidency, a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the country. Returning home, he published Democracy in America, still the most penetrating analysis of American society ever penned. De Tocqueville organized his exposition (which in many respects was not at all flattering) around two themes. One was “the general equality of condition among the people.” The other was democracy, which gave tone to everything in American life: “the people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe.” De Tocqueville saw democracy, for good or ill, as the future of Europe and the world. “I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or to hope from its progress.”America, then, was democracy embodied—and Andrew Jackson was its exemplar. Born poor, half-educated, self-risen, he was the first president from outside the colonial gentry, the first westerner, the first with a nickname (“Old Hickory”), the first to be elected in a grand popular plebiscite—all in all, the first living proof that in America, anyone with enough gumption could grow up to be president. He furnished the plebeian template of humble origins, untutored wisdom, and instinctive leadership from which would spring “Old Tippecanoe” William Henry Harrison, “Honest Abe” Lincoln, and a thousand would-be imitators down to the present day.The image of Jackson as a quintessential product of American democracy has stuck. Yet always complicating it has been the interplay between the personal and the political. If Jackson is a potent democratic symbol, he is also a conflicted and polarizing one. In his own lifetime he was adulated and despised far beyond any other American. To an amazing degree, historians today still feel visceral personal reactions to him, and praise or damn accordingly.Jackson’s outsized, larger-than-life character and career have always offered plenty to wonder at and to argue about. His lifelong political antagonist Henry Clay once likened him, not implausibly, to a tropical tornado. Jackson’s rough-and-tumble frontier youth and pre-presidential (mainly military) career showed instances of heroic achievement and nearly superhuman fortitude. Mixed in with these were episodes of insubordination, usurpation, uncontrolled temper, wanton violence, and scandal. Jackson vanquished enemies in battle everywhere and won a truly astonishing victory at New Orleans. He also fought duels and street brawls, defied superiors, shot captives and subordinates, launched a foreign invasion against orders, and (disputably) stole another man’s wife. As president he was, depending on whom one asked, either our greatest popular tribune or the closest we have come to an American Caesar.An adept manipulator of his own image, Jackson played a willing hand in fusing the political and the personal. First as a candidate and then as president, he reordered the political landscape around his own popularity. Swept into office on a wave of genuine grassroots enthusiasm, Jackson labored successfully through eight years as president to reshape his personal following into an effective political apparatus—the Democratic Party, our first mass political party, which organized under his guidance. Significantly, the party’s original name was the American Democracy, implying that it was not a party at all but the political embodiment of the people themselves. Democrats labeled their opponents, first National Republicans and then Whigs, as the “aristocracy.” But the initial test of membership in the Democracy was less an adherence to a political philosophy than fealty to Andrew Jackson himself.A generation after Jackson’s presidency, biographer James Parton found his reputation a mass of contradictions: he was dictator or democrat, ignoramus or genius, Satan or saint. Those conundrums endure, and the facts, or arguments, behind them would fill a book.There are a few focal points upon which Jackson’s modern reputation has turned for better or for worse. One is his attack on corporate privilege and on the concentrated political influence of wealth. In his famous Bank Veto of 1832, Jackson juxtaposed “the rich and powerful” against “the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” and lamented that the former “too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” No president before and few since have spoken so bluntly of economic antagonisms between Americans. Jackson went on, in his Farewell Address in 1837, to warn of an insidious “money power,” made up of banks and corporations, that would steal ordinary citizens’ liberties away from them. (It said something of Jackson’s sense of his own importance that he presumed to deliver a Farewell Address, an example set by Washington that no previous successor had dared to follow.)Jackson’s Bank Veto was so riveting, and so provocative, that in the ensuing presidential election both sides distributed it as a campaign document. Foes of bankers, corporations, Wall Street, and “the rich” have turned to it ever since. Populists and other agrarian insurgents in the nineteenth century, and New Deal Democrats in the twentieth, claimed it as their birthright. Writing in the wake of the Great Depression and the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. made the Bank Veto the centerpiece of The Age of Jackson (1945), the foundational work of modern Jacksonian scholarship.In the late twentieth century, Jackson’s strictures attracted some historians who were articulating a class-based analysis of American history, and who used them to interpret Jackson as a foe not only of capitalist abuses and excesses, but of capitalism itself. To other recent scholars, though, the Bank Veto has seemed merely demagogic, while to most people outside the academy the whole Jacksonian struggle over banking grew to appear baffling and arcane, divorced from our present concerns. All of that has suddenly changed. Since the financial collapse of 2008, Jackson’s warnings seem not only urgently relevant but eerily prescient. They are again often quoted, and his reputation has enjoyed, at least for the moment, a sharp uptick.The other framing issue for Jackson’s recent reputation—one that Schlesinger did not even mention, but which has come since to pervade and even dominate his image—is Indian removal. The symbolic freighting of this subject can hardly be overstated. Just as Jackson—child of the frontier, self-made man, homespun military genius, and plain-spoken tribune of the people—has sometimes served to stand for everything worth celebrating in American democracy, Indian removal has come to signify democracy’s savage and even genocidal underside. It opens a door behind which one finds Jackson the archetypal Indian-hater, the slave owner, the overbearing male patriarch, and the frontiersman not as heroic pioneer but as imperialist, expropriator, and killer.To Schlesinger (who was no racist) and to others who have seen Jackson’s essential importance in his championship of the common man, the “little guy,” against corporate domination, Indian removal appeared to be an aside, at worst a regrettable failing, but to many today it shows Jackson and his white man’s democracy at their core. There is no doubt that removing the American Indians, particularly those in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, was centrally important to Jackson. Together with purging the federal bureaucracy of his political opponents and instituting what he called “rotation in office” (and what his enemies dubbed the “spoils system”), it stood at the head of his initial presidential agenda. Jackson’s motives and methods in pursuing Indian removal were deeply controversial at the time and remain so today. He claimed to be acting only on impulses of duty and philanthropy. American Indians could not, without violating the essential rights of sovereign states, remain where they were; their own self-preservation required quarantine from pernicious white influences; and the terms offered for their evacuation were reasonable and even generous. Critics, then and since, have branded these as artful rationalizations to cover real motives of greed, racism, and land-lust.Connecting directly to our widely shared misgivings about the human cost of Euro-American expansion and the pejorative racial and cultural attitudes that sustained it, the recent debate over Jackson’s Indian policy has gone mainly one way. A handful of defenders or apologists—most notably Jackson biographer Robert V. Remini—have dared to buck the tide, but for most scholars the question is not whether Jackson acted badly, but whether he acted so badly as to exclude considering anything else he might have done as palliation or excuse. Both inside and outside the academy, at least until the sudden resuscitation of Jackson as anti-corporate champion, the arch-oppressor of Indians had become Jackson’s prevalent image. Far more American schoolchildren can name the Cherokee Trail of Tears (which actually happened in Martin Van Buren’s presidency, though in consequence of Jackson’s policy) than the Bank Veto, the Nullification Proclamation, or perhaps even the Battle of New Orleans.No simple conclusion offers itself. Jackson’s reputation, like the man himself, defies easy summary. The one thing that seems certain is that Americans will continue to argue about him.Daniel Feller is Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of History and editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840 (1995).PORTRAIT I- “Trail of Tears” (by Dee Brown)One of the most unhappy chapters in American history is the way whites treated Indians. American Indian policy, however, must be seen in the context of the entire European conquest of the New World. That conquest began with Columbus, who gave the people the name Indios and kidnapped ten San Salvador Indians, taking them back to Spain to learn the white man’s ways. In the ensuring four centuries, as Dee Brown writes in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, “several million Europeans and their descendants undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World,” and when these people would not accept European ways, they were fought, enslaved, or exterminated.Whites in North America joined the conquest in the colonial period, when they drove most of the eastern tribes into the interior. This pattern of “Indian removal” continued through the 18th and 19th centuries. When Jefferson came into power, his administration began an official US policy of Indian removal either by treaty of by outright warfare. During the next three decades, most tribes of the Old Northwest were “removed” in that manner to west of the Mississippi. When a thousand hungry Sac and Fox Indians recrossed the river into Illinois in 1832, militia and federal troops repelled the “invasion” in what became known as the Black Hawk War, in which young Abraham Lincoln commanded a militia company. The Sac and Fox retreated across the Mississippi into Wisconsin, but white soldiers pursued and needlessly slaughtered most of them. The most forceful champion of removal was Andrew Jackson, whom the Indians called Sharp Knife. In their view, Jackson was an incorrigible Indian hater. In his frontier years he had waged war against the tribes in the South- the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, known as the “Five Civilized Tribes,” because most had well-developed agricultural societies. These tribes were still clinging to their tribal lands when Jackson took office. At once, he announced that the tribes must be sent away to “an ample district west of the Mississippi,” and Congress responded with the Indian Removal act, which embodied his recommendations. Under Jackson’s orders, federal officials set about “negotiating” treaties with the southern tribes, with the implication that military force would be used if they did not consent to expulsion. In a subsequent act, passed in 1830, Congress guaranteed that all of the USA west of the Mississippi “and not within the states of Missouri and Louisiana or the Territory of Arkansas” would constitute a “permanent Indian frontier.” But settlers moved into Indian country before Washington could put the law into effect. So US policymakers were obliged to shift the “permanent Indian frontier” from the Mississippi to the 95th meridian, again promising that everything west of this imaginary line would belong to the Indians “for as long as trees grow and water flows.” In the late 1830s, US soldiers rounded up the Cherokees in Georgia and herded them west into Indian country in what ranks among the saddest episodes in the sordid story of white-Indian relations in this country. Nor were the Cherokees the only Indians who were expelled. The other “civilized tribes” also suffered on the Trail of Tears to the new Indian Territory. What happened to the Cherokees is the subject of the next selection, written with sensitivity and insight by Dee Brown, a prolific historian of the West and of Native America.In selection 17, Robert Remini defends Jackson’s policy, contending that the Five Civilized Tribes would have been exterminated had he not removed them. Remini is probably right. By this time, as Brown has said elsewhere, the Wampanoag of Massasoit “had vanished, along with the Chesapeakes, the Chicahominys, and the Potomacs of the Great Powhatan confederacy (only Pocahontas was remembered). Scattered or reduced to remnants were the Pequots, Montauks, Nanticokes, Madchapungas, Catawbas, Cheraws, Miamis, Hurons, Eries, Mohwaks, Senecas, and Mohegans… Their musical names have remained forever fixed on the American land, but their bones are forgotten in a thousand burned villages or lost in forests fast disappearing before the axes of twenty million invaders.” In the spring of 1838, Brigadier General Winfield Scott with a regiment of artillery, a regiment of infantry, and six companies of dragoons marched unopposed into the Cherokee country of northern Georgia. On May 10 at New Echota, the capital of what had been one of the greatest Indian nations in eastern America, Scott issued a proclamation:The President of the United States sent me with a powerful army to cause you, in obedience to the treaty of 1835, to join that part of your people who are already established in prosperity on the other side of the Mississippi…. The emigration must be commenced in haste… The full moon of May is already on the wane, and before another shall have passed away every Cherokee man, woman and child… must be in motion to join their brethren in the west… My troops already occupy many positions… and thousands and thousands are approaching from every quarter to render resistance and escape alike hopeless… Will you then by resistance compel us to resort to arms? Or will you by flight seek to hide yourselves in mountains and forests and thus oblige us to hunt you down? Remember that in pursuit it may be impossible to avoid conflicts. The blood of the white man or the blood of the red man may be spilt, and if spilt, however accidently, it may be impossible for the discreet and humane among you, or among us, to prevent a general war and carnage.For more than a century the Cherokees had been ceding their land, thousands of acres by thousands of acres. They had lost all of Kentucky and much of Tennessee, but after the last treaty of 1819 they still had remaining about 35,000 square-miles of forested mountains, clean, swift-moving rivers, and fine meadows. In this country which lay across parts of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee they cultivated fields, planted orchards, fenced pastures, and built roads, houses, and towns. Sequoya had invented a syllabary for the Cherokee language so that thousands of his tribesmen quickly learned to read and write. The Cherokees had adopted the white man’s way- his clothing, his constitutional form of gove3rnment, even his religion. But it had all been for nothing. Now these men who had come across the great ocean many years ago wanted all of the Cherokees’ land. In exchange for their 35,000 square miles the tribe was to received five million dollars and another tract of land somewhere in the wilderness beyond the Mississippi River.This was a crushing blow to a proud people. “They are extremely proud, despising the lower class of Europeans,” said Henry Timberlake, who visited them before the Revolutionary War. William Barstram, the botanist, said the Cherokees were not only a handsome people, tall, graceful, and olive-skinned, but “their countenance and actions exhibit an air of magnanimity, superiority, and independence.” Ever since the signing of the treaties of 1819, Major General Andrew Jackson, a man they once believed to be their friend, had been urging Cherokees to move beyond the Mississippi. Indians and white settlers, Jackson told them, could never get along together. Even if the government wanted to protect the Cherokees from harassment, he added, it would be unable to do so. “If you cannot protect us in Georgia,” a chief retorted, “how can you protect us from similar evils in the West?”During the period of polite urging, a few hundred Cherokee families did move west, but the tribe remained united and refused to give up any more territory. In fact, the council leaders passed a law forbidding any chief to sell or trade a single acre of Cherokee land on penalty of death. In 1828, when Andrew Jackson was running for President, he knew that in order to win he must sweep the frontier states. Free land for the land-hungry settlers became Jackson’s major policy. He hammered away at this theme especially had in Georgia, where waves of settlers from the coastal low-lands were pushing into the highly desirable Cherokee country. He promised the Georgians that if they would help elect him President, he would lend his support to opening up the Cherokee lands for settlement. The Cherokees, of course, were not citizens and could not vote in opposition. To the Cherokees and their friends who protested this promise, Jackson justified his position by saying that the Cherokees had fought on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War. He conveniently forgot that the Cherokees had been his allies during the desperate War of 1812, and had save the day for him in his decisive victory over the British-backed Creeks at Horseshoe Bend (one of the Cherokee chides who aided Jackson was Junaluska. He said afterward: “If I had known that Jackson would drive us from our homes I would have killed him that day at the Horseshoe).Three weeks after Jackson was elected President, the Georgia legislature passed a law annexing all the Cherokee country within that state’s borders. As most of the Cherokee land was in Georgia and ? of the tribe lived there, this mean an end to their independence as a nation. The Georgia legislature also abolished all Cherokee laws and customs and sent surveyors to map out land lots of 160 acres each. The 160-acre lots were to be distributed to white citizens of Georgia through public lotteries.To add to the pressures on the Cherokees, gold was discovered near Dahlonega in the heart of their country. For many years the Cherokees had concealed the gold deposits, but now the secret was out and a rabble of gold-hungry prospectors descended upon them.John Ross, the Cherokees’ leader, hurried to Washington to protest the Georgia legislature’s actions and to plead for justice. In that year Ross was 38 years old; he was well-educated and had been active in Cherokee government matters since he was 19. He was adjutant of the Cherokee regiment that served with Jackson at Horseshoe Bend. His father had been one of a group of Scottish emigrants who settled near the Cherokees and married into the tribe.In Washington, Ross found sympathizers in Congress, but most of them were anti-Jackson men and the Cherokee case was thus drawn into the whirlpool of politics. When Ross called upon Andrew Jackson to request his aid, the President bluntly told him that “no protection could be afforded the Cherokees” unless they were willing to move west of the Mississippi. While Ross was vainly seeking help in Washington, alarming messages reached him from Georgia. White citizens of that state were claiming the homes of Cherokees through the land lottery, seizing some of them by force. Joseph Vann, a hard-working half-breed, had carved out an 800-acre plantation at Spring Place and built a fine brick house for his residence. Two men arrived to claim it, dueled for it, and the winner drove Vann and his family into the hills. When John Ross rushed home he found that the same thing had happened in his family. A lottery claimant was living in his beautiful home on the Coosa River, and Ross had to turn north toward Tennessee to find his fleeing wife and children.During all this turmoil, President Jackson and the governor of Georgia pressed the Cherokee leaders hard in attempts to persuade him to cede all their territory and move to the West. But the chiefs stood firm. Somehow they managed to hold the tribe together, and helped disposed families find new homes back in the wilderness areas. John Ross and his family lived in a one-room log cabin across the Tennessee line.In 1834, the chiefs appealed to Congress with a memorial in which they stated that they would never voluntarily abandon their homeland, but proposed a compromise in which they agreed to cede the state of Georgia a part of their territory provided that they would be protected from invasion in the remainder. Furthermore, at the end of a definite period of years to be fixed by the US they would be willing to become citizens of the various states in which they resided.“Cupidity has fastened its eye upon our lands and our homes,” they said, “and is seeking by force and by every variety of oppression and wrong to expel us from our lands and our homes and to tear from us all that has become endeared to us. In our distress we have appealed to the judiciary of the US, where our rights have been solemnly established. We have appealed to the Executive of the United States to protect those rights according to the obligations of treaties and the injunctions of the laws. But this appeal to the Executive has been made in vain.”This new petition to Congress was no more effectual than their appeals to President Jackson. Again they were told that their difficulties could be remedied only by their removal to the west of the Mississippi.For the first time now, a serious split occurred among the Cherokees. A small group of subchiefs decided that further resistance to the demands of the Georgia and US governments was futile. It would be better, they believed, to exchange their land and go west rather than risk bloodshed and the possible loss of everything. Leaders of this group were Major Ridge and Elias Boudinot. Ridge had adopted his first name after Andrew Jackson gave him that rank during the War of 1812. Boudinot was Ridge’s nephew. Originally known as Buck Watie, he had taken the name of a New England philanthropist who sent him through a mission school in Connecticut. Stand Watie, who later became a Confederate general, was his brother. Upon Boudinot’s return from school to Georgia he founded the first tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1827, but during the turbulence following the Georgia land lotteries he was forced to suspend publication.And so in February 1835 when John Ross journeyed to Washington to resume his campaign to save the Cherokee nation, a rival delegation headed by Ridge and Boudinot arrived there to seek terms for removal to the West. The pro-removal forces in the government leaped at this opportunity to bypass Ross’s authority, and within a few days drafted a preliminary treaty for the Ridge delegation. It was then announced that a council would be held later in the year at New Echota, Georgia, for the purpose of negotiating and agreeing upon final terms. During the months that followed, bitterness increased between the two Cherokee factions. Ridge’s group was a very small minority, but they had the full weight of the US government behind them, and threats and inducements were used to force a full attendance at the councils which was set for December 22, 1835. Handbills were printed in Cherokee and distributed throughout the nation, informing the Indians that those who did not attend would be counted as assenting to any treaty that might be made.During the seven days which followed the opening of the treaty council, fewer than 500 Cherokees, or about 2% of the tribe, came to New Echota to participate in the discussions. Most of the other Cherokees were busy endorsing a petition to be sent to Congress stating their opposition to the treaty. But on December 29, Ridge, Boudinot and their followers signed away all the lands of the great Cherokee nation. Ironically, thirty years earlier Major Ridge had personally executed a Cherokee chief named Doublehead for committing one of the few capital crimes of the tribe. That crime was the signing of a treaty which gave away Cherokee lands.Charges of bribery by the Ross forces were denied by government officials, but some years afterward it was discovered that the Secretary of war had sent secret agents into the Cherokee country with authority to expend money to bribe chiefs to support the treaty of cession and removal. And certainly the treaty signers were handsomely rewarded. In an era when a dollar would buy many times its worth today, Major Ridge was paid $30,000 and his followers received several thousand dollars each. Ostensibly they were being paid for their improved farmlands, but the amounts were far in excess of contemporary land values.John Ross meanwhile completed gathering signatures of Cherokees who were opposed to the treaty. Early in the following spring, 1836, he took the petition to Washington. More than ? of the tribe, 15,964, had signed in protests against the treaty.When the governor of Georgia was informed of the overwhelming vote against the treaty, he replied: “Nineteen-twentieths of the Cherokees are too ignorant and depraved to entitle their opinions to any weight or consideration in such matters.”The Cherokees, however, did have friends in Congress. Representative Davy Crockett of Tennessee denounced the treatment of the Cherokees as unjust, dishonest, and cruel. He admitted that he represented a body of frontier constituents who would like to have the Cherokee lands opened for settlement, and he doubted if a single one of them would second what he was saying. Even though his support of the Cherokees might remove him from public life, he added, he could not do otherwise except at the expense of his honor and conscience. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, and other great orators of the Congress also spoke for the Cherokees. When the treaty came to a final decision in the Senate, it passed by only one vote. On May 23, 1836, President Jackson signed the document. According to its terms, the Cherokees were allowed two years from that day in which to leave their homeland forever.The few Cherokees who had favored the treaty now began making their final preparations for departure. About three hundred left during that year and then early in 1837 Major Ridge and 465 followers departed by boats for the new land in the West. About 17,000 others, ignoring the treaty, remained steadfast in their homeland with John Ross.For a while it seemed that Ross might win his long fight, that perhaps the treaty might be declared void. After the Secretary of War, acting under instructions from President Jackson, sent Major William M. Davis to the Cherokee country to expedite removal to the West, Davis submitted a frank report: “That paper called a treaty is no treaty at all,” he wrote, “because it is not sanctioned by the great body of the Cherokees and was made without their participation or assent… The Cherokees are a peaceable, harmless people, but you may drive them to desperation, and this treaty cannot be carried into effect except by the strong arm of force.” In September 1836m Brigadier General Dunlap, who had been sent with a brigade of Tennessee volunteers to force the removal, indignantly disbanded his troops after making a strong speech in favor of the Indians. “I would never dishonor the Tennessee arms in a servile service by aiding to carry into execution at the point of the bayonet a treaty made by a lean minority against the will and authority of the Cherokee people.” Even Inspector General John E. Wool, commanding US troops in the area, was impressed by the united Cherokee resistance, and warned the Secretary of War not to send any civilians who had any part in the making of the treaty back into the Cherokee country. During the summer of 1837, the Secretary of War sent a confidential agent, John Mason Jr., to observe and report. “Opposition to the treaty is unanimous and irreconcilable,” Mason wrote. “They say it cannot bind them because they did not make it; that it was made by a few unauthorized individuals; that the nation is not party to it.”The inexorable machinery of government was already in motion, however, and when the expiration date of the waiting period, May 23, 1838, came near, Winfield Scott was ordered in with his army to force compliance. As already stated, Scott issued his proclamation on May 10. His soldiers were already building thirteen stockade forts- six in North Carolina, five in Georgia, one in Tennessee, and one in Alabama. At these points the Cherokees would be concentrated to await transportation to the West. Scott then ordered the roundup started, instructing his officers not to fire on the Cherokees except in case of resistance. “If we get possession of the women and children first,” he said, “or first capture the men, the other members of the same family will readily come in.”James Mooney, an ethnologist who afterwards talked with Cherokees who endured this ordeal, said that squads of troops moved into the forested mountains to search out every small cabin and make prisoners of all the occupants however or whenever they might be found. “Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockades. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their spinning wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed a ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scent that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction.” Long afterward one of the Georgia militiamen who participated in the roundup said: “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”Knowing that resistance was futile, most of the Cherokees surrendered quietly. Within a month, thousands were enclosed in the stockades. One June 6 at Ross’s Landing near the site of present-day Chattanooga, the first of many departures began. 800 Cherokees were forcibly crowded onto a flotilla of 6 flatboats lashed to the side of a steamboat. After surviving a passage over rough rapids which smashed the sides of the flatboats, they landed at Decatur, Alabama, boarded a railroad train (which was a new and terrifying experience for most of them), and after reaching Tuscumbia were crowded upon a Tennessee River steamboat again.Throughout June and July similar shipments of several hundred Cherokees were transported by this long water route- north on the Tennessee River to the Ohio and then down the Mississippi and up the Arkansas to their new homeland. A few managed to escape and make their way back to the Cherokee country, but most of them were eventually recaptured. Along the route of travel of this forced migration, the summer was hot and dry. Drinking water and food were often contaminated. First the young children would die, and then the older people, and sometimes as many as half the adults were stricken with dysentery and other ailments. On each boat deaths ran as high as five per day. On one of the first boats to reach Little Rock, Arkansas, at least a hundred had died. A compassionate lieutenant who was with the military escort recorded in his diary for August 1: “My blood chills as I write at the remembrance of the scenes I have gone through.” When John Ross and other Cherokee leaders back in the concentration camps learned of the high mortality among those who had gone ahead, they petitioned General Scott to postpone further departures until autumn. Although only 3,000 Cherokees had been removed, Scott agreed to wait until the summer drought was broken, or no later than October. The Cherokees in turn agreed to organize and manage the migration themselves. After a lengthy council, they asked and received permission to travel overland in wagons, hoping that by camping along the way they would not suffer as many deaths as occurred among those who had gone on the river boats.During this waiting period, Scott’s soldiers continued their searches for more than a thousand Cherokees known to be still hiding out in the deep wilderness of the Great Smokey Mountains. These Cherokees had organized themselves under the leadership of a chief named Utsala, and had developed warning systems to prevent captures by the bands of soldiers. Occasionally, however, some of the fugitives were caught and herded back to the nearest stockade.One of the fugitive families was that of Tsali, an aging Cherokee. With his wife, his brother, three sons and their families, Tsali had built a hideout somewhere on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. Soldiers surrounded their shelters one day, and the Cherokees surrendered without resistance. As they were being taken back toward Fort Cass (Calhoun, Tennessee) a soldier prodded Tsali’s wife sharply with a bayonet, ordering her to walk faster. Angered by the brutality, Tsali grappled with the soldier, tore away his rifle, and bayoneted him to the ground. At the same time, Tsali’s brother leaped upon another soldier and bayoneted him. Before the remainder of the military detachment could act, the Cherokees fled, vanishing back into the Smokies where they sought refuse with Chief Utsala. Both bayoneted soldiers died.Upon learning of the incident, Scott immediately ordered that Tsali must be brought in and punished. Because some of his regiments were being transferred elsewhere for other duties, however, the general realized that his reduced force might be occupied for months in hunting down and capturing the escaped Cherokee. He would have to use guile to accomplish the capture of Tsali. Scott therefore dispatched a messenger- a white man who had been adopted as a child by the Cherokees- to find Chief Utsala. The messenger was instructed to inform Utsala that if he would surrender Tsali to General Scott, the Army would withdraw from the Smokies and leave the remaining fugitives alone.When Chief Utsala received the message, he was suspicious of Scott’s sincerity, but he considered the general’s offer as an opportunity to gain time. Perhaps with the passage of time, the few Cherokees remaining in the Smokies might be forgotten and left alone forever. Utsala put the proposition to Tsali: If he went in and surrendered, he would probably be put to death, but his death might insure the freedom of a thousand fugitive Cherokees. Tsali did not hesitate. He announced that he would go and surrender to General Scott. To make certain that he was treated well, several members of Tsali’s band went with him. When the Cherokees reached Scott’s headquarters, the general ordered Tsali, his brother, and three sons arrested, and then condemned them all to be shot to death. To impress upon the tribe their utter helplessness before the might of the government, Scott selected the firing squad from Cherokee prisoners in one of the stockades. At the last moment, the general spared Tsali’s youngest son because he was only a child. (By this sacrifice, however, Tsali and his family gave the Smoky Mountain Cherokees a chance at survival in their homeland. Time was on their side, as Chief Utsala had hoped, and that is why today there is a small Cherokee reservation on the North Carolina slope of the Great Smoky Mountains).With the ending of the drought in 1838, John Ross and the 13,000 stockaded Cherokees began preparing for their long overland journey to the West. They assembled several hundred wagons, filled them with blankets, cooking pots, their old people and small children, and moved out in separate contingents along a trail that followed the Hiwassee River. The first party of 1,103 started on October 1.“At noon all was in readiness for moving,” said an observer of the departure. “The teams were stretched out in a line along the road through a heavy forest, groups of persons formed about each wagon. The day was bright and beautiful, but a gloomy thoughtfulness was depicted in the lineaments of every face. In all the bustle of preparation there was a silence and stillness of the voice that betrayed the sadness of the heart. At length the word was given to move on. Going Snake, an aged and respected chief whose head 80 summers had whitened, mounted on his favorite pony and led the way in silence, followed by a number of younger men on horseback. At this very moment a low sound of distant thunder fell upon my ear… a voice of divine indignation for the wrong of my poor and unhappy countrymen, driven by brutal powers from all they loved and cherished in the land of their fathers to gratify the cravings of avarice. The sun was unclouded- no rain fell- the thunder rolled away and seemed hushed in the distance.”Throughout October, 11 wagon trains departed and then on November 4, the last Cherokee exiles moved out for the West. The overland route for these endless lines of wagons, horsemen, and people on foot ran from the mouth of the Hiwassee in Tennessee across the Cumberland Plateau to McMinnville and then north to Nashville where they crossed the Cumberland River. From there they followed an old trail to Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and continued northwestward to the Ohio River, crossing into southern Illinois near the mouth of the Cumberland. Moving straight westward they passed through Jonesboro and crossed the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Some of the first parties turned southward through Arkansas; the later ones continued westward through Springfield, Missouri and on to Indian Territory.A New Englander traveling eastward across Kentucky in November and December met several contingents, each a day apart from the others. “Many of the aged Indians were suffering extremely from the fatigue of the journey,” he said, “and several were quite ill. Even aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to their backs- on the sometimes frozen ground and sometimes muddy streets, with no covering for the feet except what nature had given them… We learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed, that they buried 14 or 15 at every stopping place, and they make a journey of 10 miles per day only on an average. They will not travel on the Sabbath… they must stop, and not merely stop- they must worship the Great Spirit, too; for they had divine service on the Sabbath- a camp meeting in truth.”Autumn rains softened the roads, and the hundreds of wagons and horses cut them into molasses, slowing movement to a crawl. To add to their difficulties, tollgate operators overcharged them for passage. Their horses were stolen or seized on pretext of unpaid debts, and they had no recourse to the law. With the coming of cold damp weather, measles and whooping cough became epidemic. Supplies had to be dumped to make room for the sick in the jolting wagons. By the time the last detachments reached the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau it was January, with the river running full of ice so that several thousand had to wait on the east bank almost a month before the channel cleared. James Mooney, who later heard the story from survivors, said that “the lapse of over half a century had not sufficed to wipe out the memory of the miseries of that half beside the frozen river, with hundreds of sick and dying penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground, with only a blanket overhead to keep out the January blast.” Meanwhile the parties that had left early in October were beginning to reach Indian Territory (the first arrived on January 4m 1839). Each group had lost from 30-40 members by death. The later detachments suffered much heavier losses, especially toward the end of their journey. Among the victims was the wife of John Ross.Not until March 1839 did the last of the Cherokees reach their new home in the West. Counts were made of the survivors and balanced against the counts made at the beginning of the removal. As well as could be estimated, the Cherokees had lost about 4,000 by deaths- or one out of every four members of the tribe- most of the deaths brought about as the direct result of the enforced removal. From that day to this the Cherokees remember it as “the trail where they cried,” or the Trail of Tears. Indian Removal (Gilder Lehrman Collection)In 1828 pressure was building among white Americans for the relocation of American Indians from the eastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi River. A student at a mission school in the Cherokee Nation, which lay within the chartered borders of Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee, demanded to know, “they have got more land than they can use, what do they want to get ours for?” HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn1" \o "" [1] American Indians have grappled with that question ever since Europeans arrived, and historians have tried to understand exactly what motivated hostility to Indians, especially peaceable groups such as the Cherokees and others, who were ejected from their homelands in the early nineteenth century. In this period, the dispossession of Indians fell under a federal policy called “removal,” taken from the title of the 1830 Indian Removal Act that authorized the negotiation of treaties to rid the east of American Indians. The use of that neutral sanitized term obscures both the motivations and effects of the policy.European legal principles, which the United States inherited, recognized a “right of discovery,” which gave title to newfound land to the Christian, “civilized” European nation that discovered it and limited the rights of indigenous “savage” peoples to occupancy. When Native people died out, moved away, or forfeited their rights, the European title became absolute. In order to cement their title, colonial governments recognized the legitimacy of tribal governments by entering into treaties with them, something only sovereign nations do. Treaties that regulated trade, cemented alliances, and provided for the cession of land became a cornerstone of US Indian policy. In the 1820s, however, some politicians, most notably Andrew Jackson, began to question the practice of making treaties with, and thereby recognizing the sovereignty of, Indian nations. This change of heart accompanied an intellectual shift in the US and Europe. The Enlightenment idea that “all men are created equal” had shaped US Indian policy in the three decades following the writing of the Constitution. Cultural disparities, policy makers had thought, stemmed from education and opportunity, not inherent differences. Therefore, American Indians could be “civilized” and assimilated into white American culture as individuals. The US appointed agents to live among the tribes, hired farmers and artisans to teach the Indians skills, and provided funds for missionaries to establish schools and churches. These efforts had barely gotten underway when objections arose.By the 1820s, new ideas about human differences as immutable had begun to emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, for example, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 had tried to redraw the national boundaries of post-Napoleonic Europe to reflect the supposed innate differences among people. The assumption that distinct cultures reflected racial differences began to take hold in the United States, and policy makers increasingly believed that American Indians could not be assimilated. Once an Indian, they believed, always an Indian. Furthermore, their differences meant that Indians and whites could not live together. Sometimes called “Romantic Nationalism,” these views contributed to the decision to force Native peoples from the East, as well as to subsequent atrocities on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a century.The decisions that some Indian nations made seemed to support the tenets of Romantic Nationalism. Some tribes, such as the Shawnees in southern Ohio, experienced a revitalization that dramatically conveyed their preference for their own culture. Many tribes, on the other hand, welcomed the education and practical skills that missionaries and agents brought, but expressed little interest in Christianity or assimilation. Among peoples in the Southeast, in particular, the “civilization” program simply better equipped leaders to defend their nations’ sovereignty. The Cherokees, for example, developed commercial agriculture, operated toll roads and ferries, adopted a writing system, published a bilingual newspaper, and instituted a constitutional government that took Georgia to court when the state infringed on its tribal sovereignty. The Cherokees and other tribes adopted aspects of European culture while preserving many of their own practices and beliefs, and they defended their right to make decisions for themselves. The dissolution of their nations and assimilation into the United States were not on their agendas.Native peoples east of the Mississippi confronted demographic changes that made their positions increasingly untenable. The original thirteen states had transferred their western lands, granted in colonial charters, to the United States. Indians lived on much of this land, and the intrusion of white settlers led to unrest and violence, especially north of the Ohio River where an alliance led by the Shawnee brothers Tenskwatawa and Tecumseh resisted encroachment before meeting military defeat in 1811. They failed to stop US expansion, and by 1820, the number of states had risen to 22. Older states feared loss of revenue and political power as new states emerged, and those with American Indian populations eyed Native lands. Georgia, home of the Creeks and Cherokees, led the charge to dispossess Indians. The sentiment was widespread that people as fundamentally different as Indians and Europeans could not live next to each other and that the Indians had to go. Eliminating property requirements for voting, increasing the number of offices directly elected, and other democratic reforms in this period made removal a potent political issue that demagogues used to inflame voters who either lacked land or wanted more.In 1828 Americans elected Andrew Jackson president. Jackson did not succeed in convincing legislators to abandon treaty-making; instead he cynically used treaties to expel five large southern tribes. In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the President to negotiate treaties for the removal of eastern Indian nations and appropriated $500,000 to accomplish that goal. Given the disdain with which Jackson regarded Indian treaties, it is not surprising that some of this money went to bribe chiefs to sign removal treaties. Treaty commissioners appointed by the United States also negotiated with unauthorized parties, circumvented established protocol, and lied, cajoled, and threatened in order to achieve land cessions.The President used the Indian Removal Act to target southern tribes, many of whom lived on prime cotton-growing land. In 1830, a rump council of the Choctaw Nation agreed to removal after the full council refused. Two years later the Chickasaws surrendered their land east of the Mississippi River only to discover that there was no land west of the river for them, and they were forced to merge with the Choctaws. Having signed a removal treaty, the Creeks became victims of such violence from white Americans that whites feared retaliation, and the United States removed the Indians as a military measure. While Seminole leaders were touring land in the West, their escorts pressured them into signing a treaty that they repudiated upon their return home. And when the Cherokee Nation refused to sell, commissioners convinced a small, unauthorized faction to sign a removal treaty.Indians did not submit to these high-handed and duplicitous dealings without a struggle. Under a provision in their treaty, thousands of Choctaws chose to remain in Mississippi, and when their agent refused them the land to which they were legally entitled, they squatted on public land or became tenant farmers until finally getting a reservation in the twentieth century. Creeks who had avoided the military roundup tried to become invisible, but many ended up illegally enslaved by white planters in Alabama. Others settled on a small tract of land that the United States held in trust and survived as a Creek community. The Cherokees petitioned the US Senate to deny ratification of their removal treaty, which the Senate refused to do. Legal maneuvers enabled some Cherokees to remain, particularly in western North Carolina, where they obtained land. When soldiers arrived to begin deportations in Florida, the Seminoles went to war in a struggle that ended formally in 1842. The US Army withdrew, leaving behind several hundred Seminoles. Despite these acts of resistance, however, most citizens of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole Nations went west, resettled in what is today eastern Oklahoma, and rebuilt their nations. Their removal, which cost them their homelands and at least one-fourth of their citizens, has come to be known as the “Trail of Tears.” Southern Indians have received the most attention from historians, but they were not the only victims of removal. The Oneidas from New York and the Stockbridge people from Massachusetts sought refuge in Wisconsin to escape white harassment and encroachment on their lands. The state militia forced the Sauks from their Illinois lands to Iowa in 1831, and a year later in the Black Hawk War, the Illinois militia attacked a starving group of Sauks whom Black Hawk had led back to their homeland. Ultimately, the Sauks lost their lands in Iowa and most moved to Kansas. From the Old Northwest, the Ho-Chunk, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Miami, Wyandot, and Delaware peoples also lost their lands and moved to what would become Kansas and Nebraska. Each of these removals occurred under different circumstances, but all were fraught with anguish and loss.Although it was no longer the focus of federal Indian policy, removal did not end in the 1840s. Efforts to transport remnants of removed tribes continued into the twentieth century. In 1903, the US tried to get Choctaws in Mississippi to move to Oklahoma and receive allotments of land, but the effort met with little success. At the end of the twentieth century, some Choctaws believed that the United States would make yet another attempt to remove them. The continuing fear of removal magnified the sense of loss that Native people felt, and some scholars suggest that their grief became trans-generational. Parents passed the despair they felt on to their children, affecting their physical as well as mental health.Although we use the term “removal,” the US actually engaged in ethnic cleansing when it forced Native Americans west of the Mississippi. By 1830 most white Americans did not believe that Indians and whites could live together, and they thought that Indians held resources, especially land, to which whites were entitled. Democratic institutions meant that Native peoples, who had no vote, could be dispossessed by those who did. As a result, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, the US expelled Indians from the East “with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, philanthropically.” HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn2" \o "" [2] The insistence of the US that its policy was just should lead modern Americans to contemplate not only why their ancestors so desperately wanted Indian land, but also how they justified taking it.Andrew Jackson: “To the Cherokee Tribe of Indians East of the Mississippi” March 16, 1835 (Gilder Lehrman)Elected president in 1828, Andrew Jackson supported the removal of American Indians from their homelands, arguing that the American Indians’ survival depended on separation from whites. In this 1835 circular to the Cherokee people, Jackson lays out his case for removal. Using paternalistic and threatening language, Jackson urges the Cherokee to accept removal from Georgia and relocate westward peacefully. “I have no motive, my friends, to deceive you,” Jackson writes. He continues, “Circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are beyond the reach of human laws, render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community .?.?. You have but one remedy within your reach. And that is, to remove to the west.” Jackson closes with an ominous tone and these threatening sentences: “The fate of your women and children, the fate of your people, to the remotest generation, depend on the issue.” Later that same year, a small group of 100 Cherokee delegates signed the Treaty of New Echota, paving the way for the Cherokee Nation’s removal to Oklahoma in 1838.ExcerptI have no motive, my friends, to deceive you. I am sincerely desirous to promote your welfare. Listen to me, therefore, while I tell you that you cannot remain where you now are. Circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are beyond the reach of human laws, render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community. You have but one remedy within your reach. And that is, to remove to the West and join your countrymen, who are already established there. And the sooner you do this, the sooner you will commence your career of improvement and prosperity.?.?.?.As certain as the sun shines to guide you in your path, so certain is it that you cannot drive back the laws of Georgia from among you. Every year will increase your difficulties. Look at the condition of the Creeks. See the collisions which are taking place with them. See how their young men are committing depredations upon the property of our citizens, and are shedding their blood. This cannot and will not be allowed. Punishment will follow, and all who are engaged in these offences must suffer.Davy Crockett on the Removal of the Cherokees, 1834 (Gilda Lehrman)In this letter, written in December 1834, Davy Crockett complains about President Andrew Jackson’s forced removal of the Cherokees from their homes to Oklahoma. Crockett opposed that policy and feared Vice President Martin Van Buren would continue it, if elected president. He even goes so far as to say that if Van Buren is elected, Crockett would leave the United States for the “wildes of Texas.” Crockett writes, “I will consider that government a Paridice to what this will be. In fact at this time our Republican Government has dwindled almost into insignificancy our [boasted] land of liberty have almost Bowed to the yoke of of [sic] Bondage.” Crockett actually went to Texas before Martin Van Buren was elected president, and he died in the Battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836, months before the election.ExcerptI have almost given up the Ship as lost. I have gone So far as to declare that if he martin vanburen is elected that I will leave the united States for I never will live under his kingdom. before I will Submit to his Government I will go to the wildes of Texas. I will consider that government a Paridice to what this will be. In fact at this time our Republican Government has dwindled almost into insignificancy our [boasted] land of liberty have almost Bowed to the yoke of Bondage. Our happy days of Republican principles are near at an end when a few is to transfer the many.TIME 4 (1800-1848)READINGS- Reform Movements of the Jacksonian Era“We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man… As the friend of the Negro assumes that one man cannot by right hold another in bondage, so should the friend of Woman assume that Man cannot by right lay even well-meant restrictions on Woman.” – Margaret Fuller, 1845SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND REFORM 1820-1860Several historic reform movements began during the Jacksonian Era and in the following decades. This period before the Civil War started in 1861 is known as the antebellum period. During this time, a diverse mix of reformers dedicated themselves to such causes as establishing free (tax-supported) public schools, improving the treatment of the mentally ill, controlling or abolishing the sale of alcohol, winning equal rights for women, and abolishing slavery. The enthusiasm for reform had many historic sources: the Puritan sense of mission, the Enlightenment belief in human goodness, the politics of Jacksonian democracy, and changing relationships among men and women, among social classes, and among ethnic groups. The most important source may have been religious beliefs.RELIGION: THE SECOND GREAT AWAKENINGReligious revivals swept through the United States during the early decades of the 19th century. They were party a reaction against the rationalism (belief in human reason) that had been the fashion during the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. Calvinist (Puritan) teachings of original sin and predestination had been rejected by believers in more liberal and forgiving doctrines, such as those of the Unitarian Church. Calvinism began a counterattack among these liberal views in the 1790s. The Second Great Awakening began among educated people such as Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College in Connecticut. Dwight’s campus revivals motivated a generation of young men to become evangelical preachers. In the revivals of the early 1800s, successful preachers were audience-centered and easily understood by the uneducated; they spoke about the opportunity for salvation for all. These populist movements seemed attuned to the democratization of American society. The Second Great Awakening, like the first, caused new divisions in society between the newer, evangelical sects and the older Protestant churches. If affected all sections of the country. But in the northern states of Massachusetts to Ohio the Great Awakening also touched off social reform. Activist religious groups provided the leadership and the well-organized voluntary societies that drove the reform movements of the antebellum era.Revivalism in New YorkIn 1823, Presbyterian minister Charles G. Finney started a series of revivals in upstate New York, where many New Englanders had settled. Instead of delivering sermons based on rational argument, Finney appealed to people’s emotions and fear of damnation. He prompted thousands to publicly declare their revived faith. He preached that every individual could be saved through faith and hard work- ideas that strongly appealed to the rising middle class. Because of Finney’s influence, western New York became known as the “burned-over district” for its frequent “hell-and-brimstone” revivals.Baptists and MethodistsIn the South and on the advancing western frontier, Baptist and Methodist circuit preachers, such as Peter Cartwright, would travel from one location to another and attract thousands to hear their dramatic preaching at outdoor revivals, or camp meetings. These preachers activated the faith of many people who had never belonged to a church. By 1850, the Baptists and Methodists were the largest Protestant denominations in the country.MillennialismMuch of the religious enthusiasm of the time was based on the widespread belief that the world was about to end with the second coming of Jesus. One preacher, William Miller, gained tens of thousands of followers by predicting a specific date (October 21, 1844) for the second coming. Nothing happened on the appointed ay, but the Millerites continued as a new Christian denomination, the Seventh-Day Adventists.MormonsAnother religious group, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints, or Mormons, was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830. Smith based his religious thinking on a book of Scripture- the Book of Mormon- which traced a connection between the Native Americans and the lost tribes of Israel. Smith gathered a following in New York and moved to Ohio, then Missouri, and finally, Illinois. There, the Mormon founder was murdered by a local mob. To escape persecution, the Mormons under the leadership of Brigham Young, migrated to the far western frontier, where they established the New Zion (as they called their religious community) on the banks of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Their cooperative social organization helped the Mormons to prosper in the wilderness. Their practice of polygamy (allowing a man to have more than one wife), however, aroused the hostility of the US government.CULTURE: IDEAS, THE ARTS, AND LITERATUREIn Europe, during the early years of the 19th century, artists and writers shifted away from the Enlightenment emphasis on balance, order, and reason and toward intuition, feelings, individual acts of heroism, and the study of nature. This new movement, known as romanticism, was expressed in the United States by the transcendentalists, a small group of New England thinkers.The TranscendentalistsWriters such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau questioned the doctrines of established churches and the business practices of the merchant class. They argued for a mystical and intuitive way of thinking as a means for discovering one’s inner self and looking for the essence of God in nature. Their views challenged the materialism of American society by suggesting that artistic expression was more important than the pursuit of wealth. Although the transcendentalists valued individualism highly and viewed organized institutions as unimportant, they supported a variety of reforms, especially the antislavery movement.RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882): The best-known transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was a very popular American speaker. His essays and lectures expressed the individualistic and nationalistic spirit of Americans by urging them not to imitate European culture but to create a distinctive American culture. He argued for self-reliance, independent thinking, and the primacy of spiritual matters over material ones. A northerner who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, Emerson became a leading critic of slavery in the 1850s and then an ardent supporter of the Union during the Civil War. HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862): Also living in Concord and a close friend of Emerson was Henry David Thoreau. To test his transcendentalist philosophy, Thoreau conducted a two-year experiment of living simply in a cabin in the woods outside town. He used observations of nature to discover essential truths about life and the universe. Thoreau’s writings from the years were published in the book for which he is best known, Walden (1854). Because of this book, Thoreau is remembered today as a pioneer ecologist and conservationist. Through his essay “On Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau established himself as an early advocate of nonviolent protest. The essay presented Thoreau’s argument for disobeying unjust laws and accepting the penalty. The philosopher’s own act of civil disobedience was to refuse to pay a tax that would support an action he considered immoral- the US war with Mexico (1846-1848). For breaking the tax law, Thoreau spent one night in the Concord jail. In the next century, Thoreau’ essay and actions would inspire the nonviolent movements of both Mohandas Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States. BROOK FARM: Could a community of people live out the transcendentalist ideal? In 1841, George Ripley, a Protestant minister, launched a communal experiment at Brook Farm in Massachusetts. His goal was to achieve “a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor.” Living at Brook Farm at times were some of the leading intellectuals of the period. Emerson went, as did Margaret Fuller, a feminist (advocate of women’s rights) writer and editor; Theodore Parker, a theologian and radical reformer; and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novelist. A bad fire and heavy debts forced the end of the experiment in 1849. But Brook Farm was remembered for its atmosphere of artistic creativity, its innovative school, and its appeal to New England’s intellectual elite and their children. Communal ExperimentsThe idea of withdrawing from conventional society to create an ideal community, or utopia, in a fresh setting was not a new idea. But never before were social experiments so numerous as during the antebellum years. The open lands of the United States proved fertile ground for more than a hundred experimental communities. The early Mormons were an example of a religious communal effort and Brook Farm was an example of a humanistic or secular experiment. Although many of the communities were short-lived, these “backwoods utopias” reflect the diversity of the reform ideas of the time.SHAKERS: One of the earliest religious communal movements, the Shakers had about 6,000 members in various communities by the 1840s. Shakers held property in common and kept women and men strictly separate (forbidding marriage and sexual relations). For lack of new recruits, the Shaker communities virtually died out by the mid-1900s.THE AMANA COLONIES: The settlers of the Amana colonies in Iowa were Germans who belonged to the religious reform movement known as Pietism. Like the Shakers, they emphasized simple, communal living. However, they allowed for marriage, and their communities continue to prosper, although they no longer practice their communal ways of living.NEW HARMONY: The secular (nonreligious) experiment n New Harmony, Indiana, was the work of the Welsh industrialist and reformer Robert Owen. Owen hoped his utopian socialist community would provide an answer to the problems of inequality and alienation caused by the Industrial Revolution. The experiment failed, however, as a result of both financial problems and disagreements among members of the community.ONEIDA COMMUNITY: After undergoing a religious conversion, John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 started a cooperative community in Oneida, New York. Dedicated to an ideal of perfect social and economic equality, community members shared property and, later, marriage partners. Critics attacked the Oneida system of planned reproduction and communal child-reading as a sinful experiment in “free love.” Despite the controversy, the community managed to prosper economically by producing and selling silverware of excellent equality.FOURIER PHALANXES: In the 1840s, the theories of the French socialist Charles Fourier attracted the interest of many Americans. In response to the problems of a fiercely competitive society, Fourier advocated that people share work and housing in communities known as Fourier Phalanxes. This movement quickly died out as Americans proved too individualistic to live communally. Arts and Literature:The democratic and reforming impulses of the Age of Jackson expressed themselves in painting, architecture, and literature.PAINTING: Genre painting- portraying the everyday life of ordinary people such as riding riverboats and voting on election day- became the vogue of artists in the 1830s. For example, Charles Caleb Bingham depicted common people in various settings and carrying out domestic chores. William S. Mount won popularity for his lively rural compositions. Thomas Cole and Frederick Church emphasized the heroic beauty of American landscapes, especially the dramatic scenes along the Hudson River in New York State and the western frontier wilderness. The Hudson River school, as it was called, expressed the romantic age’s fascination with the natural world.ARCHITECTURE: Inspired by the democracy of classical Athens, American architects adapted Greek styles to glorify the democratic spirit of the republic. Columned facades like those of ancient Greek temples graced the entryways to public buildings, banks, hotels, and even some private homes.LITERATURE: In addition to the transcendentalist authors (notably Emerson and Thoreau), other writers helped to create a literature that was distinctively American. Partly as a result of the War of 1812, the American people became more nationalistic and eager to read the works of American writers about American themes. Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, for example , wrote fiction using American settings. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales were a series of novels written from 1824 to 1841 that gloried the frontiersman as nature’s nobleman. The Scarlet Letter (1850) and other novels by Nathaniel Hawthorne questioned the intolerance and conformity in American life. Herman Melville’s innovative novel Moby-Dick (1855) reflected the theological and cultural conflicts of the era as it told the story of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of a white whale. REFORMING SOCIETYReform movements evolved during the antebellum age. At first, the leaders of reform hoped to improve people’s behavior through moral persuasion. However, after they tried sermons and pamphlets, reformers often moved on to political action and creating new institutions to replace the old. TemperanceThe high rate of alcohol consumption, five gallons of hard liquor per person in 1820, (2 ounces per serving with 128 ounces in a gallon equals approximately 320 servings of alcohol per person in a year), prompted reformers to target alcohol as the cause of social ills, and explains why temperance became the most popular of the reform movements. The temperance movement began by using moral exhortation. In 1826, Protestant ministers and others concerned with drinking and its effects founded the American Temperance Society. The society tried to persuade drinkers to take a pledge of total abstinence. In 1840, a group of recovering alcoholics formed the Washingtonians and argued that alcoholism was a disease that needed practical, helpful treatment. By the 1840s, various temperance societies together had more than a million members.German and Irish immigrants were largely opposed to the temperance campaign. But they lacked the political power to prevent state and city governments from passing reforms. Factory owners and politicians joined with the reformers when it became clear that temperance measures could reduce crime and poverty and increase workers’ output on the job. In 1851, the state of Maine went beyond simply placing taxes on the sale of liquor and became the first state to prohibit the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. Twelve states followed before the Civil War. In the 1850s, the issue of slavery came to overshadow the temperance movement. However, the movement would gain strength again in the late 1870s (with strong support from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union) and achieve national success with the passage of the 18th Amendment in 1919. Movement for Public AsylumsHumanitarian reformers of the 1820s and 1830s called attention to the increasing numbers of criminals, emotionally disturbed persons, and paupers. Often these people were forced to live in wretched conditions and were regularly either abused or neglected by their caretakers. To alleviate the suffering of these individuals, reformers proposed setting up new public institutions- state-supported prisons, mental hospitals, and poorhouses. Reformers hoped that inmates would be cured as a result of being withdrawn from squalid surroundings and treated to a disciplined pattern of life in some rural setting.MENTAL HOSPITALS: Dorothea Dix, a former schoolteacher from Massachusetts, was horrified to find mentally ill persons locked up with convicted criminals in unsanitary cells. She launched a cross-country crusade, publicizing the awful treatment she had witnessed. In the 1840s one state legislature after another build new mental hospitals or improved existing institutions and mental patients began receiving professional treatment. SCHOOLS FOR BLIND AND DEAF PERSONS: Two other reformers founded special institutions to help people with physical disabilities. Thomas Gallaudet opened a school for the deaf, and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe started a school for the blind. By the 1850s, special schools modeled after the work of these reformers had been established in many states of the Union. PRISONS: Pennsylvania took the lead in prison reform, building new prisons called penitentiaries to take the place of crude jails. Reformers placed prisoners in solitary confinement to force them to reflect on their sins and repent. The experiment was dropped because of the high rate of prisoner suicides. These prison reforms reflected a major doctrine of the asylum movement: structure and discipline would bring about moral reform. A similar penal experiment, the Auburn system in New York, enforced rigid rules of discipline while also providing moral instruction and work programs.Public EducationAnother reform movement started in the Jacksonian era focused on the need for establishing free public schools for children of all classes. Middle-class reformers were motivated in part by their fears for the future of the republic posed by growing numbers of the uneducated poor- both immigrant and native-born. Workers’ groups in the cities generally supported the reformers’ campaign for free (tax-supported) schools.FREE COMMON SCHOOLS: Horace Mann was the leading advocate of the common (public) school movement. As secretary of the newly founded Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann worked for compulsory attendance for all children, a longer school year, and increased teacher preparation. In the 1840s, the movement for public schools spread rapidly to other states.MORAL EDUCATION: Mann and other educational reformers wanted children to learn not only basic literacy, but also moral principles. Towards this end, William Holmes McGuffey, a Pennsylvania teacher, created a series of elementary textbooks that became widely used to teach reading and morality. The McGuffey readers extolled the virtues of hard work, punctuality, and sobriety- the kind of behaviors needed in an emerging industrial society. Objecting to the Protestant tone of the public schools, Roman Catholics founded private schools for the instruction of Catholic students. HIGHER EDUCATION: The religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening helped fuel the growth of private colleges. Beginning in the 1830s, various Protestant denominations founded small denominational colleges, especially in the newer western states (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa). At the same time, several new colleges, including Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts (founded by Mary Lyon in 1837) and Oberlin College in Ohio, began to admit women. Adult education was furthered by lyceum lecture societies, which brought speakers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson to small-town audiences. Changes in Families and Roles for WomenAmerican society was still overwhelmingly rural in the mid-19th century. But in the growing cities, the impact of the Industrial Revolution was redefining the family. Industrialization reduced the economic value of children. In middle-class families, birth control was used to reduce average family size, which declined from 7.04 family members in 1800 to 5.42 members in 1830. More affluent women now had the leisure time to devote to religious and moral uplift organizations. The New York Female Moral Reform Society, for example, worked to prevent impoverished young women from being forced into lives of prostitution.CULT OF DOMESTICITY: Industrialization also changed roles within families. In traditional farm families, men were the moral leaders. However, when men took jobs outside the home to work for salaries or wages in an office or a factory, they were absent most of the time. As a result, the women in these households who remained at home took charge of the household and children. The idealized view of women as moral leaders in the home is called the cult of domesticity. WOMEN’S RIGHTS: Women reformers, especially those involved in the antislavery movement, resented the way men relegated them to secondary roles in the movement and prevented them from taking part fully in policy discussions. Two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, objected to male opposition to their antislavery activities. In protest, Sarah Grimké wrote her Letter on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes (1837). Another pair of reformers, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, began campaigning for women’s rights after they had been barred from speaking at an antislavery convention.SENECA FALLS CONVENTION (1848): The leading feminists met at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. At the conclusion of their convention- the first women’s rights convention in American history- they issued a document closely modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Their “Declaration of Sentiments” declared that “all men and women are created equal” and listed women’s grievances against laws and customs that discriminated against them. Following the Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony led the campaign for equal voting, legal, and property rights for women. In the 1850s, however, the issue of women’s rights was overshadowed by the crisis over slavery. Anti-Slavery MovementOpponents of slavery ranged from moderates who proposed gradual abolition to radicals who demanded immediate abolition without compensating their owners. The Second Great Awakening led many Christians to view slavery as a sin. This moral view made compromise with defenders of slavery difficult. AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY: The idea of transporting freed slaves to an African colony was first tried in 1817 with the founding of the American Colonization Society. This appealed to moderate antislavery reformers and politicians, in part because whites with racist attitudes hoped to remove free blacks from US society. In 1822, the American Colonization society established an African-American settlement in Monrovia, Liberia. Colonization never proved a practical course. Between 1820 and 1860, only about 12,000 African Americans were settled in Africa, while the slave population grew by 2.5 million.AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY: In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison began publication of an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, an event that marks the beginning of the radical abolitionist movement. The uncompromising Garrison advocated immediate abolition of slavery in every state and territory without compensating the slaveowners. In 1833, Garrison and other abolitionists founded the American Antislavery Society. Garrison stepped up his attacks by condemning and burning the Constitution as a proslavery document. He argued for “no Union with slaveholders” until they repented for their sins by freeing their slaves. LIBERTY PARTY: Garrison’s radicalism soon led to a split in the abolitionist movement. Believing that political action was a more practice route to reform than Garrison’s moral crusade, a group of northerners formed the Liberty Party in 1840. They ran James Birney as their candidate for president in 1840 and 1844. The party’s one campaign pledge was to bring about the end of slavery by political and legal means.BLACK ABOLITIONISTS: Escaped slaves and free African Americans were among the most outspoken and convincing critics of slavery. A former slaves such as Frederick Douglass could speak about the brutality and degradation of slavery from firsthand experience. An early follower of Garrison, Douglass later advocated both political and direct action to end slavery and racial prejudice. In 1847, he started the antislavery journal The North Star. Other African American leaders, such as Harriet Tubman, David Ruggles, Sojourner Truth and William Still, helped to organize the effort to assist fugitive slaves escape to free territory in the North or to Canada, where slavery was prohibited. VIOLENT ABOLITIONISM: David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet were two northern African Americans who advocated the most radical solution to the slavery question. They argued that slaves should take action themselves by rising up in revolt against their owners. In 1831, a Virginia slaves named Nat Turner led a revolt in which 55 whites were killed. In retaliation, white killed hundreds of African Americans in brutal fashion and put down the revolt. Before this event, there had been some antislavery sentiment and discussion in the South. After the revolt, fear of future uprisings as well as Garrison’s inflamed rhetoric put an end to antislavery talk in the South. Other Reforms:Efforts to reform individuals and society during the antebellum era also included smaller movements such as:The American Peace Society- founded in 1828 with the objective of abolishing war; actively protested the war with Mexico in 1846.Laws to protect sailors from being flogged.Dietary reforms, such as eating whole wheat bread or Sylvester Graham’s crackers, to promote good digestion.Dress reform for women, particularly Amelia Bloomer’s efforts to get women to wear pantalettes instead of long skirts.Phrenology, a pseudoscience that studied the bumps on an individual’s skull to access the person’s character or ability.Southern Reaction to Reform:The antebellum reform movement was largely found in the northern and western states, with little impact in the South. While “modernizers” worked to perfect society in the North, southerners were more committed to tradition and slow to support public education and humanitarian reforms. They were alarmed to see northern reformers join forces to support the antislavery movement. Increasingly, they viewed social reform as a northern threat against the southern way of life. HISTORIAL PERSPECTIVES: What Motivated Reformers?In her history of antebellum reform, Freedom Ferment (1944), Alice Tyler portrayed the reformers as idealistic humanitarians whose chief goal was to create a just and equitable society for all. Other historians generally accepted Tyler’s interpretation. However, in recent years, historians have questioned whether reformers were motived by humanitarian concerns or by a desire of upper- and- middle-class citizens to control the masses. According to their argument, the temperance movement was designed to control the drinking of the poor and recent immigrants. The chief purpose of penitentiaries was to control crime, of poorhouses to motive the lower classes to pursue work, and of public schools to “Americanize” the immigrant population. Schools were supported by the wealthy, because they would teach the working class hard work, punctuality, and obedience. Revisionist historians also have noted that most of the reformers were Whigs, not Jacksonian Democrats. Some historians have argued that the reformers had multiple motivations for their work. They point out that, although some reasons for reform may have been self-serving and bigoted, most reformers sincerely thought that their ideas for improving society would truly help people. For example, Dorothea Dix won support for increased spending for treatment of the mentally ill by appealing to both self-interest and morality. She argued that reforms would save the public money in the long run and were humane. Historians point out further that the most successful reforms were ones that had broad support across society- often for a mix of reasons. National Expansion and Reform, 1815–1860 (Gilder Lehrman Collection)A good way to understand the men and women who created America’s reform tradition and carried it across the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War is to look at the political heritage their parents and grandparents left to them. The very idea of generations resonated with new meaning after independence. The conveyance of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel, but the American Revolution was a social and political rupture that clouded the future for young Americans. Together they faced a new way of life in a new nation.While this attachment within the generation that inherited the Revolution weakened traditional loyalties, it also held out the promise of creating a new political will that would extend across the continent. The Revolutionary leader Gouverneur Morris expressed this hope when he wrote that a “national spirit is the natural result of national existence; and although some of the present generation may feel colonial oppositions of opinion, that generation will die away, and give place to a race of Americans.”Fighting a war for independence had not unified Americans. Rather it created the problem of unity—an imperative to hang together once the actual fighting ended and peace had been secured. The states were held together by a loose confederation. Much of the land Americans claimed still remained part of the ancestral domain of American Indians. The commonalities that did exist among the states—those of language, law, and institutional history—pointed in the wrong direction, back to the past when they were still part of the British Empire.The Declaration of Independence with its charged statements about equality and “certain unalienable rights” proved far more divisive than unifying. The flagrant contradiction between slavery and the principle of equality led to the first emancipation movement as one after another of the northern states abolished slavery in the waning years of the eighteenth century. With these remarkable acts, the Mason-Dixon boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania became the symbolic division between freedom and slavery, an ominous development at a time when Americans were working to strengthen their union.The Constitution created a national government along with the new responsibility of being an American citizen for white men. Most of those who George Washington invited to serve in his administration were social conservatives who believed that the world was divided between the talented few and the ordinary many. They endorsed individual freedom and equality before the law, but believed that members of the upper class should govern, restricting the common man to voting. Thomas Jefferson, chafing at this elitist doctrine, organized an opposition to the Federalists based on the contentious issues of popular participation, free speech, and equal opportunity. Two raucous presidential campaigns permanently disrupted the electoral decorum that the Federalists had hoped to impose with the new constitutional order. Jefferson’s presidential victory in 1800 opened the way for the next generation to fashion the world’s first liberal society.The embrace of personal liberty as a defining feature of American politics gave concrete grounds for the hope that slavery would end. The number of free blacks, swollen by northern emancipation, southern manumissions, and greater scope for self-liberation, led to the formation of African American communities. Their success gave the lie to slaveholders’ dismissive claims about the abilities of African Americans. After the Revolution, whites and blacks mingled in churches and shops, on the frontier and in the cities of the Upper South and the North, along with persistent racial prejudice. Despite the campaigns to abolish slavery in the northern states, African Americans figured on the margins of political life, and the existence of slavery in the “land of the free” continued to exacerbate sectional tensions.During this time a French countess planted the seeds of a powerful idea—American exceptionalism—in a letter to Jefferson on the eve of the French Revolution: “The characteristic difference between your revolution and ours,” she wrote, “is that having nothing to destroy, you had nothing to injure, and labouring for a people, few in number, incorrupted, and extended over a large tract of country, you have avoided all the inconvenience of a situation, contrary in every respect.” Then she added, “Every step in your revolution was perhaps the effect of virtue, while ours are often faults, and sometimes crimes.”This view of the United States as exceptional was echoed among reform-minded Europeans. “They are the hope of the human race, they may well become its model,” Anne Robert Turgot told the pro-American English minister Richard Price. The famed editor of the Encyclopedie, Denis Diderot, proclaimed the new United States an asylum from fanaticism and tyranny “for all the peoples of Europe.”The new nation appeared exceptional to such Europeans because, in their view, its healthy, young, hard-working population had won a revolutionary prize—what was seen as an empty continent upon which to settle its free-born progeny. America was exceptional because the familiar predators of ordinary folk—the extorting tax collector, the overbearing nobleman, the persecuting priest, the extravagant ruler—had failed to make the voyage across the Atlantic. Natural abundance, tolerance, exemption from Old World social evils—these were among the materials from which the European reform imagination created the exceptional United States. This view ignored the new nation’s reliance on slavery and its displacement of Native peoples, who did not figure in the romanticized view of a New World, where the evils of the Old World could be eradicated.America’s ordinary citizens took up this view, celebrating what was distinctively American: its institutional innovations, its leveling spirit, above all, its expanded opportunities for common people. To them the idea of American exceptionalism had enormous appeal, for it played to their strengths. Taking up western land could become a movement for spreading democratic institutions across the continent. Being exceptional established a reciprocity between American abundance and high moral purposes. It infused the independence and hardiness of America’s farming families with civic value, generating patriotic images that could resonate widely without addressing the question of slavery. The Fourth of July rhetoric of the hoi polloi made clear that American exceptionalism freed them from the elite’s embrace of European gentility. To be genteel, one had to accept the cultural domination of Europe. For ordinary Americans the country’s greatness emerged in a lustier set of ideals—open opportunity, an unfettered spirit of inquiry, destruction of privilege, personal independence.During the nineteenth century, ordinary white Americans ignored the insignificance of their country on the world stage and propelled their republic discursively into the march of progress, a resonant new idea in Western culture. What might be construed elsewhere as uninterestingly plebian was elevated to a new goal for mankind. America was the only nation, Richard Hofstadter wryly commented, that began with perfection and aspired to progress. And American history was written to explain how this could be. Three themes of American exceptionalism came into play: the clean slate with its implicit rejection of the past, the autonomy of the individual with its accompanying disparagement of dependency, and the commitment to natural rights with the corollary that democratic governance could best protect them. The metaphor of a clean slate helped create the illusion of a frontier emptied of human inhabitants—a virginal continent—an image that drew a veil over the violent encounters with the indigenous peoples that actually paced the westward trek of Americans. The autonomous man enjoyed the freedom to be the designer of his and his family’s life unaided or impeded by others, and the republic drew its worth from protecting individual rights. Democratic rhetoric likewise drew a veil over the severe limits that existed for those whose race or sex had already been assigned a value at birth.This idea of being exceptional didn’t really become the core of national identity until those who fought for independence and wrote the Constitution had retired from public life—as the Virginia dynasty of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, gave way to men such as John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Then a new generation of Americans took possession of their legacy and wrapped their imagination around the idea of a special role in world history for their nation. The tensions between the ideal and reality generated the reform movements that flourished in antebellum America. Activists became agents of change in an era of change, brought about by the convergence of political revolutions, intellectual ferment, and social turbulence.During these same years, America entered into a period of commercial expansion that promoted the construction of roads, the extension of postal services, and the founding of newspapers in country towns. A dense new communication network amplified the resonance of partisan disputes. The control over information and opinions once exercised exclusively by an elite had been wrested away by the articulate critics of that elite. A strong consensus quickly formed that American democracy required a broad base of educated people and literacy became widespread for both men and women, promoted by religious and commercial demands. Reading became a necessity, met by a thriving print culture. European visitors expressed astonishment that those who lived in the rural areas were as well informed as city dwellers.Land lured men and women westward. By 1810 a third of the American population lived in a new settlement. The conclusion of the War of 1812 added another push towards the frontier as soldiers got paid in land bounties. The fertile lands of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys beckoned, giving ordinary men a chance to capitalize their family’s labor. All this movement thrust the nation into sustained warfare against the native inhabitants.Urbanization grew apace; population in the older cities more than doubled, though three-quarters of Americans still lived on farms or rural towns on the eve of the Civil War. Within a decade, merchants, freed from British restrictions, sent ships across the Pacific and into the Indian Ocean. Baltimore became the fastest growing city in the United States, benefitting from its access to both the Atlantic and the hinterland for the raw materials and customers for its flourishing flour-milling industry. Yankee ingenuity displayed itself in manufacturing and retailing. In the rural Northeast where there were plenty of rivers, entrepreneurs tapped into waterpower. Both men and women sought liberation from the drudgery of farm work in the hundreds of factories that sprang up along the waterways of Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Enterprise moved out to the countryside and down the social ladder as a market emerged that matched the nation’s geographic and public reach.Antebellum economic growth undulated through boom and bust cycles, the busts being remembered as the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857. The European demand for cotton created most of the booms—though the discovery of gold in the newly acquired California in 1848 was the most spectacular. Cotton, however, tied the American economy to slavery at the very time that the first emancipation movement created the portentous division between free and slave states. Profits from cotton coursed through the whole American economy. Southern specialization meant that plantation owners looked north for wood products, tools, and some foodstuffs, while they imported their luxury items from Europe.As northern states used their impressive communications network to spread their values, southerners—that is, the planter elite—began to perceive themselves standing against the nation, straining at the bonds of union as they drew closer to one another through shared political goals and intense sociability. Enslaved men and women, whose numbers ranged from 30 percent to 60 percent of each slave state’s population, formed ties with slaves on neighboring plantations, though they all lived in fear of being sent to the southern frontier of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Poorer whites clustered in the small communities of the hill country.The Bill of Rights and the steady, if slow, expansion of the suffrage for white men and a few free black men kept the democratic torch burning. Equally significant was the disestablishment of colonial churches. Between 1786 and 1833, Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts replaced their established churches with religious freedom, like those of the other states. Their leaders could have approved multiple established churches, but they opted to disentangle religious and political institutions, mirroring at the state level that “wall of separation between church and state” which Jefferson wrote about in 1802. This move particularly benefitted Baptists and Methodists, which were the fastest-growing denominations in the nation. Neither had enjoyed state support and both had suffered discrimination from the established churches.Although the majority of Americans were nominally Christians, many of them lived without places of worship, especially those who had moved to the frontier. Paying for clergy, church buildings, and seminaries now depended upon voluntary contributions, and without state support, many churches struggled to survive. Yet the separation of church and state paradoxically strengthened religion in America, for it permitted a hundred spiritual flowers to bloom, and bloom they did. Ministers began experimenting with new methods designed explicitly to revive Christianity in America.In the early 1800s revivals passed in waves over the country’s villages, towns, and cities. They could be scheduled or impromptu, held in church buildings or out in the open at great camp meetings lasting many days. Charismatic preachers exhorted men and women to confess their sins and accept the grace extended to them through Christ. Many achieved fame for their persuasive ability. The astute French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville commented wryly that every time he was told he was going to meet a priest, he met a politician. To be born again became the core religious experience. While some churches continued to accept the doctrine of predestination associated with Calvin, an increasing number believed that good works contributed to a Christian’s claim on heaven. These revivals transformed American culture and the nature of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Ministers, responding to the “call to do the Lord’s work,” would pack their Bibles in their saddle bags and set off to find a field of souls to harvest. The Methodist Church organized circuits for their ministers to ride to extend their reach. The revivalists’ stress on personal salvation led to the neglect of other elements of Christian dogma and of the learned clergy to explicate them. They also encouraged personal commitments that went far beyond conventional service attendance. Critics within America’s older churches—Lutheran, Dutch Reformed, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Episcopal—found much to find fault with in this new movement. They considered its theology shallow and disliked what they saw as manipulative appeals to the emotions, but the evangelicals were astoundingly popular. Reliance upon the Bible led to differing interpretations and new denominations. Every contested meaning had the potential of inspiring a new group of worshippers. Upstate New York was called “the burned over district” in reference to the intense passions aroused by the revivals as well as their frequency. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sprang from this soil, while the Disciples of Christ began as an effort to bring all the denominations together and ended by adding to the proliferating array. Without a formal hierarchy, the Baptists were particularly prone to splintering over doctrinal differences.After a long period during which many Christians had drifted toward a more rationalist understanding of divinity and others had been set adrift by the turmoil of two wars, the disestablishment campaigns, and westward movement, the revivals successfully re-pietized America. While Evangelicals may have constituted a minority, they successfully imposed their mores upon the public. The new denominations educated members in democratic practices as well. Forming new churches required volunteers to raise funds, build organizations, and participate in decision-making. Women, blacks, and the poor, often excluded from voting, learned about democratic governance in their churches. With a strong wind at their back, Evangelical Protestants sought to fill in the empty canvas of the American continent, assured by their success and their confidence in the fresh footings of the US Constitution. HYPERLINK "" \l "_ftn6" The zeal generated by the revivals fueled an extensive missionary movement, at home among the American Indian tribes and abroad. In the early nineteenth century, the American Board of Commissions for Foreign Missionaries sent young missionary couples to Asia, a field opened up by American commerce to Ceylon and India. Evangelical associations like the Bible Society, the Peace Society, and the Sunday School Union followed in quick succession.The General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Sabbath was organized to ensure the sanctity of Sundays. They exerted pressure on storekeepers to show respect for the day of rest and worship, but lost the battle to close post offices or stop the flow of water into the Erie Canal where rowdy boatman shattered Sabbath tranquility. The network of Evangelical organizations became known as the Benevolent Empire, a term that captures their proponent’s aspiration to rise above denominational differences to join forces for proselytizing and educating, wherever needed. Scarcely a social ill escaped the attention of these men and women.In 1827 a perceptive observer was struck by the constant churning of people in the United States. He concluded that if “movement and the quick succession of sensations and ideas constitute life, here one lives a hundred fold more than elsewhere; here, all is circulation, motion, and boiling agitation.” He continued, “Experiment follows experiment; enterprise follows enterprise.” A British naval officer more laconically commented that “the Americans are a restless, locomotive people: whether for business or pleasure, they are ever on the move in their own country, and they move in masses. .?.?. Wandering about seems engrafted in their Nature,” he added; they “forever imagine that the Lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.” These observers saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the ambitious dreams that had been unleashed by their exceptional situation.In all this mobility lay the seeds of the many social problems Evangelicals addressed. The decline of traditional ordering mechanisms had led to deteriorating standards of personal behavior. Anyone who wasn’t a reformer usually needed reforming. In 1820, Americans fifteen years and older drank more liquor than ever before or since. Artisans in most shops took a whiskey break every morning and afternoon. Children could easily encounter alcoholic teachers; heavy drinking punctuated most public celebrations. Gambling and ritualized violence figured prominently in public life as well, and mobs formed easily. The lightly governed, newly settled communities in the West had their urban equivalent in the older cities where the decadal doubling of population created entirely new neighborhoods.Efforts to stop alcohol consumption were largely a top-down affair until Lyman Beecher, one of the stars of the revival movement, launched the American Temperance Society in 1826. He shifted the focus from the hopeless drunkard to the social drinker and made abstinence, not moderation, the goal. Fanning out to the West and the South, Beecher’s group swept up Methodists and Baptists who had long deplored the pervasive drinking. His temperance tracts reached 100,000 readers at a time when the biggest paper in the country had a circulation of 4,500. In the 1840s, a new group, the Washington Temperance Society, garnered a membership of half a million in three years. Formed by working-class men in Baltimore, the Washingtonians campaigned to secure local-option prohibition laws. Harking back to the Revolutionary heritage, temperance workers claimed that they had liberated themselves from a tyranny worse than Britain’s. Changes in American drinking habits came swiftly; consumption was cut in half in the ten years between 1835 and 1845, but the campaign to make the sale of alcoholic beverages illegal persisted through the century. Many Catholics immigrated to the United States during the Irish potato famines of the 1840s and 1850s. Less censorious about drinking—they picnicked with beer in public parks—Catholics drew the ire of temperance leaders. They also suffered persecution from nativist groups who feared and defamed their religion. Joined by emigrating Germans, the Catholics soon built their own churches, parochial schools, and seminaries. When John Hughes became Archbishop of New York in 1842, Catholics acquired a forceful champion who publicly exposed every insult and injury that Catholics sustained. Americans slowly came to realize that their respect for religious freedom meant more than tolerating diversity within the Protestant fold.The two most significant reform causes of the antebellum period called for the end of slavery and full citizenship for women. In the afterglow of the Revolution, anti-slavery societies agitated for cures for this poisonous thorn in the body politic. State legislatures, including Virginia’s, debated schemes for emancipation. Free African Americans were particularly active in keeping the issue alive with petitions to legislatures, legal suits, pamphlets, newspapers, and acts of self-liberation. They were particularly eager to undermine colonization societies, which attempted to solve the problem of racial prejudice by sending freed slaves to Africa. The Quakers, first in the anti-slavery field, helped establish the so-called Underground Railroad to ease southern slaves’ flight from captivity. The fear of slave revolts, after the successful one in Haiti, haunted white southerners. The 1820 census showed that the slave population had almost doubled in twenty years. The increasing profitability of cotton gradually stilled anti-slavery voices in the South, and it took some dramatic developments to stir much concern about southern slavery in the North. Missouri applied for admission to the Union as a slave state—the first state carved from the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. New York Congressman James Talmadge, railing against the extension of such “a monstrous scourge,” tried to tack on a gradual emancipation provision to the enabling act. Finally, under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Missouri came in as a slave state with the promise of no further extension of slavery, in essence pushing the problem off to an uncertain future and energizing some new opponents to slavery.William Lloyd Garrison brought the full force of evangelical fervor to the abolition movement. A newspaperman by trade, he started the Liberator in 1831 and founded, with others, the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. His statement in the Liberator’s first issue gives a sense of his fierce determination: “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Abolitionists followed his lead by abandoning gradual and ameliorative measures and demanding “immediate and complete emancipation.” This position provoked the wrath of southerners and the scorn of many in Garrison’s native New England. Congress was intent on containing, not enflaming, the conflict over slavery. Despite the clear right of Americans to petition Congress, they adopted a gag rule to prevent anti-slavery petitions from being read. This issue rankled as no other, until abolitionists were able to persuade Congress to change it. Senator and former Vice-President John Calhoun said this repeal put the states on an irreversible path towards conflict over slavery. Not until the new Republican Party in 1854 articulated its opposition to any extension of slavery into the western territories did anti-slavery northerners find a unifying, rallying position.Mobilizing people against slavery triggered a movement to secure greater political participation for women. Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who championed both abolition and women’s rights, were forceful advocates from the South. With Garrison, they proved to be the fulcrum for the entwined efforts. Propertied women had voted in New Jersey for thirty-three years after the Revolution, but they lost that right as citizenship became less defined by property and more by independence, which the law denied women. At the same time American popular culture defined woman’s role as the presiding domestic presence and nurturer of male citizens. When the American Anti-Slavery Society encouraged women to take an active part in its outreach, some men broke away to form an anti-slavery society that did not admit women. This kind of response intensified the determination of a handful of pioneers—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott—to pursue the struggle for equal rights for women. It would be hard to exaggerate how radical this movement was in the 1840s and 1850s, yet the work these women had done in anti-slavery work and the temperance movement made it seem quite natural to them that women should be active in the public sphere.Stanton came from a prominent New York family. She not only received an excellent academy education, she also learned about the law from her father’s law clerks. Strong willed and talented, she studied and then rejected the legal system that so thoroughly subordinated women, especially wives, to men. She and her abolitionist husband honeymooned in London, where they attended the Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. Mott, a charismatic Quaker feminist, also attended. When the men voted to deny women participation in the conference, Stanton and Mott forged a bond. Mott, like two other women’s rights leaders, Lucy Stone and Susan Anthony, had awakened to the discrimination against women when she discovered that male colleagues where she was teaching earned four times more than she did. Stone was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree; she was also unique in refusing to take her husband’s name. Stanton said that Stone “was the first person by whom the heat of the American public was deeply stirred on the woman question.” Through temperance and abolitionist work, many women learned the organizational skills that were to stand them in good stead when they turned their heads and hearts toward eradicating the laws and mores subjugating women because of their sex. In 1848, Stanton and Mott threw themselves into organizing the Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Drawing 300 activists, among them forty men, the convention endorsed Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments, which was based on the Declaration of Independence. Delegates at the convention passed a number of resolutions, including an audacious claim for the right to vote. Leading newspapers, in an attempt to ridicule the proceedings, published in full the Declaration of Sentiments with its description of an aristocracy of sex “exalting brute force above moral power, vice above virtue, ignorance above education, and the son above the mother who bore him.” The publicity was an attempt to scandalize the public, but Stanton shrewdly observed the widening of their of readership as a result.Learning about the Seneca Falls convention drew Susan Anthony to active participation in the women’s rights movement. Her Quaker father was both a cotton manufacturer and an abolitionist who undertook her education after he discovered that her primary school limited the subjects it would teach girls. In 1851, Anthony met Stanton, and the two of them founded the first women’s temperance society. After that they traveled together on speaking tours, which became forays into hostile territory punctuated by insults and battery. Stone, who was also an indefatigable speaker, reported occasions when she was hit by ice, rotten fruit, eggs, and a hymnal. Many women were turned into agitators for women’s rights because of negative reactions to their participation in the reform movements that were sweeping the North in the antebellum period. They felt compelled to seek the liberty, equality, and independence that Americans extolled as a national legacy and overcame any personal timidity to do so. After the Civil War, they continued to campaign for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. But the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 giving newly freed African American men the voting privileges that the women had so long sought became a bitter pill to swallow. Defending slavery through the decades placed the southern states in opposition to the experimental thrust of northern life. Increasingly northerners and southerners construed their differences as implicit challenges to one another. Emancipation had given those in the North a deceptive sense of their political convictions. The opening up of opportunities to move, to innovate, to express personal opinions defined for many what it meant to be an American. In making the ideal American a restless, ingenious, and accomplishment-centered person, northerners characterized the nation in a way that made southern differences ever more apparent. Over time southern states coalesced as the South, a separate society from that of the rest of the nation. Its leaders no longer apologized for slavery as they had in the Revolutionary area; instead they defended it as the basis of a truly genteel, American, civilization.Conflict became inevitable when northern voters rallied around Abraham Lincoln and supported the Republican Party’s adamant opposition to the extension of slavery in the presidential election of 1860. Lincoln’s victory drove southern leaders to secede rather than accept the containment of slavery. With the firing of cannon on Fort Sumter, the federal redoubt in Charleston harbor, on April 12, 1861, they took up arms to defend their way of a life.The ardent reform campaigns had given ordinary northerners a sense that their country was what Turgot had called the “hope of the human race.” As European countries retreated from democracy, the United States seemed more and more exceptional as a self-governing people dedicated to securing inalienable rights for all. Northern soldiers fought to save the union as described in the Declaration of Independence. Halting the extension of slavery had unified them; abolishing slavery came about through fighting the war. Evangelical Christians with their intense reforming zeal supplied the energy for the reform movements of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Fusing the social ideals of liberty and equality with the personal ones of seeking redemption, they had narrowed the scope for compromise. They had also fortified Northerners to fight for their values as keenly as those in the South fought for theirs.?Joyce Appleby is professor of history emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Inheriting the Revolution: the First Generation of Americans (2000). Her most recent book is The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism (2010).Abolition and Antebellum Reform (Gilder Lehrman Collection)When the Boston abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson looked back on the years before the Civil War, he wrote, “there prevailed then a phrase, ‘the Sisterhood of Reforms.’” He had in mind “a variety of social and psychological theories of which one was expected to accept all, if any.” Of that sisterhood, anti-slavery stands out as the best-remembered and most hotly debated, even though it was not the largest in terms of membership or the most enduring. (That honor goes to the temperance movement.) Abolitionism continues to fascinate because of its place in the sectional conflict leading to the Civil War, its assault on gender and racial inequality, and its foreshadowing of the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement.Sometimes, however, it is useful to consider abolitionism in relation to Higginson’s Sisterhood of Reforms. The years between 1815—the year that marked the end of the War of 1812—and 1861 did indeed produce a remarkable flowering of movements dedicated to improving society, morals, and individuals. Some appear silly from a present-day perspective (would cheap postage really foster international unity and understanding?), but many contemporaries nonetheless took them seriously. And although Higginson exaggerated connections between movements, it was relatively common for people who believed in anti-slavery reform also to believe in religious reforms, women’s rights, temperance, and health reform. (The latter was based on the idea that proper diet—a severely vegetarian one—could eliminate illness and produce moral human beings.)Placing anti-slavery within the sisterhood helps us to see both what was and what was not distinctive about it, as well as begin to address the larger question of why certain periods in American history provide especially fertile ground for reform movements. The answer to the latter question is not always straightforward. Drunkenness did not begin around 1819, when a temperance movement began to take shape; slavery had not suddenly changed in 1831, the year a new, more radical anti-slavery movement emerged; and the oppression of women did not start around 1848, the year of the pioneering women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. For that matter, segregation and racial discrimination began well before the twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement. Making it all the more difficult to answer the question of timing is the fact that periods of intense reform activity sometimes coincide with economic crises, as was notably the case during the Great Depression of the 1930s, while at other times such as the Progressive Era (1890–1919) and the 1960s, periods of reform are also periods of general prosperity. But regardless of whether reform movements take place in good or bad economic times, the point is that reform movements usually are more than just simple, direct responses to a perceived problem.Multiple changes converged after the War of 1812 to produce the Sisterhood of Reforms. Improvements in transportation—especially steamboats, canals, and railroads—made it easier to send lecturers and publications—including abolitionists, other reformers, and their writings—far and wide. And new printing technologies in the 1830s lowered the cost of publications, including publications from abolitionists.At the same time, a dynamic American economy created a new class of men and women with the leisure time and financial resources to devote to reform movements. A comparison with eighteenth-century reformers is revealing. They were fewer in number and, with some notable exceptions (mostly Quakers), tended to be part-timers like Benjamin Franklin who were either retired or had other jobs. By contrast, antebellum reformers were both more numerous and, in cases like that of the abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, had no other career.Social and economic change also provided a psychological context for reform. After 1820, the rapid growth of cities and expanding commerce and manufacturing seemed both to herald a glorious future and to open the door to temptations and vice. How to ensure that God, and not Satan and Mammon, would win? Behind that question lay two powerful traditions that compelled reformers to contrast what America and Americans were with what they ought to be. One was the legacy of the American Revolution. Even when most critical of their government, reformers evoked it. The first women’s rights convention modeled its declaration after the Declaration of Independence. Similarly, after publicly and notoriously burning a copy of the Constitution on July 4, 1854, William Lloyd Garrison asked, “What is an abolitionist but a sincere believer in the Declaration of ’76?” He was repudiating a government that supported slavery, not the principles of the Revolution.The other tradition was evangelical Protestantism. An outpouring of religious fervor in the early nineteenth century—sometimes called the Second Great Awakening—swept from west to east and fired the hearts of millions of Americans. It encouraged many to believe they had a moral imperative to do what they could to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. Although not all evangelicals were reformers, and not all reformers were evangelicals, the Awakening put the power of religion behind a belief that individual men and women could change the world, rather than passively accept as inevitable whatever fate held in store, as their ancestors often had done.Why should they conclude that that job fell to them rather than to their leaders? The most famous foreign observer of the young republic, Alexis de Tocqueville, was struck by the peculiar propensity of Americans to form local “voluntary associations” to accomplish a wide range of goals, including reforms. In large measure, this was a reasonable approach in a nation with few effective institutional sources of moral authority, and one with relatively weak political institutions, no national church, and a culture mistrustful of governmental power. Use of voluntary associations also reflected a feeling among some—especially the most radical abolitionists—that elected officials were part of the problem, not the solution. Antebellum reformers believed in moral absolutes; politicians believe in the art of the deal, even when the result is compromise with an evil like slavery. Under the circumstances, it seemed better to go around the political system than through it (a position temperance reformers and some abolitionists began to reconsider in the 1840s).If multiple changes came together after the War of 1812 to produce the Sisterhood of Reforms, they did not determine how antebellum reformers tried to change the world or what they regarded as the main thing wrong with it. Even within a movement like abolitionism, there was widespread disagreement over tactics and goals. Running through many reforms, however, were common themes and assumptions, one of the most important of which was a passionately held belief that individuals must be able to act as free moral agents, capable of choosing right from wrong, and not restrained by the “arbitrary power” of someone else (like a slaveholder or immoral husband) or something else (like alcohol, bad diet, or mental illness). In that respect, abolitionism was the ultimate expression of the antebellum reform impulse: Slaves, for abolitionists, were the mirror image of freedom, symbols of what it was not—the most extreme example of unfreedom. This logic helps explain the close connection between abolitionists and reforms such as the women’s rights movement, as well as why abolitionists felt an affinity with European revolutionaries and efforts to end serfdom in Russia. All such cases, in their view, were part of a larger international drama of the progress of freedom. With this powerful rhetorical tradition entrenched by the 1840s, it is no accident that the term “slave” persisted in reform rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century, long after the institution itself died in 1865—drunkards as “slaves” to the bottle, women as “slaves” to men, and factory workers as “wage slaves.”Abolitionists themselves were vague about what freedom might mean in practice after the death of slavery, and unconcerned that others might disagree with their definitions. Even so, their emphasis on individual moral agency and their use of the antithesis between slavery and freedom to define freedom’s absence and presence locates them within Higginson’s sisterhood. But in three important respects—in their views on their government, gender, and race—abolitionists parted company with other sisterhood reforms. Few reform movements prior to 1861 produced the fundamental attacks on the American political system that abolitionists mounted in denouncing its devil’s bargain with slavery. And although all major antebellum reforms depended heavily upon women, only a handful of utopian communities gave as prominent a voice to them as abolitionism in its most radical forms.Most distinctive, however, was how abolitionists framed the relationship between anti-slavery and race, using ideas and concepts that went well beyond the movement’s assault on slavery and that eventually came home in the form of attacks on discriminatory laws and practices in the North. In addition, the abolitionist movement was unusually interracial. The fame of a few black abolitionists—notably Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman—somewhat obscures the high degree to which lesser-known African American abolitionists also supported the cause in every way possible, including with their own organizations, pens, speeches, and dollars. If racism never entirely disappeared among white abolitionists, and if relations between them and black colleagues were sometimes strained, it is nonetheless true that no other movement of the day was remotely close to abolitionism in interracial cooperation, in mobilizing black communities, and in challenging racism in both theory and practice. On those issues, abolitionism was both part of a band of sister reforms and a movement that went well beyond them.Ronald Walters, Professor of History at The John Hopkins University, is the author of The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (1984)?and editor of Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America?(1973)?and A Black Woman’s Odyssey through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of Nancy Prince?(1989).A Mirror for the Intemperate, Boston, ca. 1830 (Gilder Lehrman)The temperance crusade against liquor consumption was a central element of reform movements of the antebellum period. It drew support from middle-class Protestants, skilled artisans, clerks, shopkeepers, free blacks, and Mormons, as well as many conservative clergy and some Southerners who were otherwise hostile to reform. This broadside, “A Mirror for the Intemperate,” reflects the movement’s concerns that alcohol consumption led to economic waste, polluted youth, crime, poverty, and domestic violence.“A Mirror for the Intemperate,” printed in Boston, ca. 1830, features illustrations, poems, and extracts exemplifying the dangers of alcohol. One illustration features a barroom scene where a brawl has broken out. Another shows a “moderate drinker” being overtaken by a many-headed “hydra monster” representing alcohol. Each of the monster’s heads represents a type of liquor—brandy, rum, whiskey, and gin—and a lady temperance takes on the monster, killing it one head at a time.The broadside also features an “Extract from the dying Declaration of Nicholas Fernandez, who, with nine others, were executed in front of Cadiz Harbor in December, 1829, for Piracy and Murder.” Fernandez blames his fate on “the habitual use of ardent spirits” and warns parents to teach their children “the fatal consequences of Intemperance.”ExcerptParents into whose hands this my dying declaration may fall will perceive that I date the commencement of my departure from the paths of rectitude and virtue, from the moment when I become addicted to the habitual use of ardent spirits—and it is my sincere prayer that if they value the happiness of their children—if they desire their welfare here, and their eternal well being hereafter, that they early teach them the fatal consequences of Intemperance!American Colonization Society membership certificate, 1833When James Madison signed this membership certificate as president of the American Colonization Society in 1833, the organization’s effort to repatriate America’s free black population to Africa had been underway for over a decade. On December 21, 1816, Robert Finley, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey, initiated the founding of the society. He laid out his goal of establishing an African colony at a meeting of powerful white supporters, including Henry Clay and Francis Scott Key. The membership rolls expanded rapidly and in the following years the society’s base in Washington, DC, extended to auxiliary organizations throughout the country.Concern over the growing population of free African Americans attracted individuals from seemingly disparate groups to the American Colonization Society. They included both abolitionists and slaveholders. Abolitionist members sought the gradual elimination of slavery and wanted to provide free blacks with the opportunity to escape racism and the systematic denial of citizenship rights in the United States. Slaveholders saw a threat to their livelihood in the growing free black population and believed African colonization would help reinforce the institution of slavery at home. Linking both groups was an entrenched belief that whites and blacks could not coexist equally in the United States.Congress granted the society $100,000 in 1819 and provided its first ship the following year. By 1822, the society succeeded in establishing the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa. By 1867, more than 13,000 African Americans had emigrated. The American Colonization Society continued doing missionary and educational work in Liberia until its dissolution in 1913.A Northerner’s View of Southern Slavery, 1821 (Gilder Lehrman) Aurelia Hale to her sister Sarah, June 11, 1821.Aurelia Hale of Hartford, Connecticut, offered her impressions of southern life in this letter of June 11, 1821. Hale, then about twenty-two years old, had recently traveled to Washington County, Georgia, to serve as a schoolteacher. Writing to her sister, she declared that the “manner of living” in the South was “better than at the North.” Georgians, she wrote, “differ in every respect from the Northerners, are much more agreeable, polite, attentive, and friendly.” Hale seemed to revel in southern gentility and aspired to a similarly privileged life, writing that since moving to the South, “I now can move in the sphere I have always wished to.”Another aspect of southern life that Hale seemed to find agreeable was slavery. At first, she wrote, “we were astonished by the number of blacks; but now they have become quite familiar to us.” Initially taken aback by slavery, she soon found it “no inconvenience at all to be waited upon. I have one and sometimes two to attend me.” Hale was pleased with the lifestyle slavery allowed her, telling her sister, “We ride in state I assure you, with blacks on all sides. One little Negro stands behind the Carriage; With a face shining like a glass bottle.” She was evidently oblivious to the human costs and horrors of the institution that enabled the “manner of living” she preferred, writing that the slaves she encountered were “To appearance as happy as if worth thousands.”ExcerptWhen we entered Savannah we were astonished at the number of blacks; but now they have become quite familiar to us, We find it no inconvenience at all to be waited upon. I have one and sometimes two to attend me. And can find them sufficient employment. I like?their manner of living here, better than at the North they have a greater variety of dishes, and the most of them entirely different from ours.?.?.?.I designed to write you a long letter, but Mrs [S]ansom’s Coach is wa[i]ting for us to ride. I will leave the remainder till I return; perhaps I shall get some new ideas. We ride in state I assure you, with blacks on all sides. One little Negro stands behind the Carriage; With a face shining like a glass bottle. To appearance as happy as if worth thousands.John Quincy Adams and the Amistad case, 1841John Quincy Adams to Roger S. Baldwin, November 11, 1840. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)On July 1, 1839, fifty-three Africans, recently kidnapped into slavery in Sierra Leone and sold at a Havana slave market, revolted on board the schooner Amistad. They killed the captain and other crew and ordered the two Spaniards who had purchased them to sail them back to Africa. Instead, the ship was seized off Long Island by a US revenue cutter on August 24, 1839. The Amistad was then landed in New London, Connecticut, where the American cutter’s captain filed for salvage rights to the Amistad’s cargo of Africans. The two Spaniards claimed ownership themselves, while Spanish authorities demanded the Africans be extradited to Cuba and tried for murder. Connecticut jailed the Africans and charged them with murder. The slave trade had been outlawed in the United States since 1808, but the institution of slavery itself thrived in the South. The Amistad case entered the federal courts and caught the nation’s attention. The murder charges against the Amistad captives were quickly dropped, but they remained in custody as the legal focus turned to the property rights claimed by various parties. President Martin Van Buren issued an order of extradition, per Spain’s wishes, but the New Haven federal court’s decision preempted the return of the captives to Cuba. The court ruled that no one owned the Africans because they had been illegally enslaved and transported to the New World. The Van Buren administration appealed the decision, and the case came before the US Supreme Court in January 1841.Abolitionists enlisted former US President John Quincy Adams to represent the Amistad captives’ petition for freedom before the Supreme Court. Adams, then a 73-year-old US Congressman from Massachusetts, had in recent years fought tirelessly against Congress’s “gag rule” banning anti-slavery petitions. Here, Adams accepted the job of representing the Amistad captives, hoping he would “do justice to their cause.” Adams spoke before the Court for nine hours and succeeded in moving the majority to decide in favor of freeing the captives once and for all. The Court ordered the thirty surviving captives (the others had died at sea or in jail) returned to their home in Sierra Leone.ExcerptI have received your obliging Letters of the 2d. and 4th: inst[an]t together with the narrative of the case to be tried before the Supreme Court of the United States, at their next January session, of the Captives of the Amistad.I consented with extreme reluctance at the urgent request of Mr. Lewis Tappan and Mr. Ellis Gray Loring, to appear before the Court as one of the Counsel for these unfortunate men. My reluctance was founded entirely and exclusively upon the consciousness of my own incompetency to do justice to their cause. In every other point of view there is in my estimation no higher object upon earth of ambition than to occupy that position.Lydia Maria Child on women’s rights, 1843Title page, Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York, Second Series (New York: C. S. Francis & Co. and Boston: J. H. Francis, 1845). (Gilder Lehrman Collection)The best-known work of the poet and novelist Lydia Maria Child may be her poem “Over the River and through the Woods,” but she is also remembered for her compelling objections to slavery and her support for underrepresented groups. She was a tireless activist and her prolific and candid writing on non-violence and equality was well ahead of its time.Originally from Massachusetts, Child moved to New York in 1841 to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard. After leaving that post in 1843, she published many of her popular editorials and commentaries in the two-volume Letters from New-York. Among the wide-ranging topics covered, Child included a discussion of women’s rights:That the present position of women in society is the result of physical force, is obvious enough .?.?. taking away rights, and condescending to grant privileges, is an old trick of the physical force principle; and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises an ugliness, which would otherwise be abhorred.??ExcerptsLydia Maria Child, “Woman’s Rights,” in Letters from New-York, Vol. 1 (New York: Charles S. Francis, and Boston: James Munroe, 1843), 232–240.January, 1843. . . Books addressed to young married people abound with advice to the wife, to control her temper, and never to utter wearisome complaints, or vexatious words, when the husband comes home fretful or unreasonable, from his out-of-door conflicts with the world. Would not the advice be as excellent and appropriate, if the husband were advised to conquer his fretfulness, and forbear his complaints, in consideration of his wife’s ill-health, fatiguing cares, and the thousand disheartening influences of domestic routine? In short, whatsoever can be named as loveliest, best, and most graceful in woman, would likewise be good and graceful in man. You will perhaps remind me of courage. If you use the word in its highest signification, I answer that woman, above others, has abundant need of it, in her pilgrimage; and the true woman wears it with a quiet grace. If you mean mere animal courage, that is not mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount, among those qualities which enable us to inherit the earth, or become the children of God.?.?.?.That the present position of women in society is the result of physical force, is obvious enough; whosoever doubts it, let her reflect why she is afraid to go out in the evening without the protection of a man. What constitutes the danger of aggression? Superior physical strength, uncontrolled by the moral sentiments. If physical strength were in complete subjection to moral influence, there would be no need of outward protection. That animal instinct and brute force now govern the world, is painfully apparent in the condition of women everywhere.?.?.?.This sort of politeness to women is what men call gallantry; an odious word to every sensible woman, because she sees that it is merely the flimsy veil which foppery throws over sensuality, to conceal its grossness. So far is it from indicating sincere esteem and affection for women, that the profligacy of a nation may, in general, be fairly measured by its gallantry. This taking away rights, and condescending to grant privileges, is an old trick of the physical force principle; and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises an ugliness, which would otherwise be abhorred. The most inveterate slaveholders are probably those who take most pride in dressing their household servants handsomely, and who would be most ashamed to have the name of being unnecessarily cruel. And profligates, who form the lowest and most sensual estimate of women, are the very ones to treat them with an excess of outward deference.?.?.?.The nearer society approaches to divine order, the less separation will there be in the characters, duties, and pursuits of men and women. Women will not become less gentle and graceful, but men will become more so. Women will not neglect the care and education of their children, but men will find themselves ennobled and refined by sharing those duties with them; and will receive, in return, co-operation and sympathy in the discharge of various other duties, now deemed inappropriate to women. The more women become rational companions, partners in business and in thought, as well as in affection and amusement, the more highly will men appreciate home—that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel’s wings.?.?.?.A copy of Letters from New-York, Vol. 1, by Lydia Maria Child (New York and Boston, 1843), can be viewed on Google Books. ................
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