Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-dwq4g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-05T05:43:00.605Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Moral Perspective and the Cycles of Jacksonian History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Iver Bernstein
Iver Bernstein
Affiliation:
Washington University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

It is not surprising that an era that saw the creation of much of the America that we know—its mass political parties, sustained capitalist growth, individualistic creed, modern labor, feminist and moral reform movements, and formalized racism—witnessed intense moral controversy. The Jacksonian period posed in its starkest form what Edmund S. Morgan has called the central “paradox” of American history—the “marriage” of slavery and freedom, each of them expanding by leaps and bounds, each doing so increasingly within its own sphere. This was a time when many Americans were seized, as never before, with an intensely self-seeking and accumulating spirit. It was also a period when Americans' collective national mission, suffused with benevolent dreams of “righteous liberty and opportunity that would surpass all worldly limits,” was frequently invoked, sometimes in support of the claims of interest and law, and other times in ways that challenged authority justified purely in terms of selfish interest, positivistic application of the law, or coercive force. All this is to say that in the epoch from the end of the War of 1812 to the eve of the Civil War, moral dispute among different groups of Americans—parties and factions, classes, races and the national minorities, vested and emerging interests, masters and slaves, men and women—was often ferocious.

Type
Commentary
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1994 , pp. 260 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Morgan, Edmund S., American Slavery—American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), esp. 5–6, 363–87Google Scholar.

2. Davis, David Brion, “Expanding the Republic, 1820–1860,” in Bernard Bailyn et al., The Great Republic, 4th ed. (Lexington, Mass., 1992), 1:483Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), esp. 231–78Google Scholar; Cover, Robert M., Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, 1975)Google Scholar.

3. C. Vann Woodward, “Unfinished Business,” New York Review of Books, 12 May 1988, 22.

4. Tucker, George, The History of the United States from their Colonization to the End of the Twenty-Sixth Congress in 1841 (Philadelphia, 1856–57), 4:22, 56, 139, 288–93Google Scholar; Cave, Alfred A., Jacksonian Democracy and the Historians, University of Florida Monographs, Social Sciences, vol. 22, (Gainesville, 1964), 1–2Google Scholar.

5. See especially Parton, James, Life of Andrew Jackson, 3 vols. (New York, 1860–61)Google Scholar; William Graham Sumner' two works, Andrew Jackson as a Public Man (New York, 1882)Google Scholar and History of Banking in the United States (New York, 1896)Google Scholar; Schouler, James, History of the United States Under the Constitution (New York, 1885, 1889), vols. 3 and 4Google Scholar; von Hoist, Hermann Eduard, Constitutional and Political History of the United States (Chicago, 1879–88)Google Scholar.

6. Wilentz, Sean, “On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Sellers, Charles G. Jr., “Who Were the Southern Whigs?” American Historical Review 59 (January 1954): 334–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and esp. 340; Alexander, Thomas B., “The Basis of Alabama's Ante–Bellum Two–Party System,” The Alabama Review 19 (1966): 243–76Google Scholar; Sharp, James Roger, The Jacksonians Versus the Banks: Politics in the States After the Panic of 1837 (New York, 1970), 325–27Google Scholar; Watson, Harry L., Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981), 314–24Google Scholar; idem, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), 170–71, 236–38, for a summary of such studies and an effort to shape them into a synthesis of national political cultures in Jacksonian America.

8. See Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

9. Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York, 1991), 138Google Scholar.

10. Messerli, Jonathan, Horace Mann: A Biography (New York, 1972), xiiGoogle Scholar.

11. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review (June 1889): 653–64.

12. See “Our Working Classes,” New York Times, 24 February 1869, and Montgomery, David, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967), 40Google Scholar.

13. See McCoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 191–95Google Scholar; Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilisation, 1606–1865 (New York, 1946), 2:593–96Google Scholar, 792–96; Carey, Henry C., The Harmony of Nature, as Exhibited in the Laws Which Regulate the Increase of Population and the Means of Subsistence; arui in the Identity of the Interest of the Sovereign and of the Subject; the Landlord and the Tenant; the Capitalist and the Workman; the Planter and the Slave (Philadelphia, 1836)Google Scholar; Joseph J. Spengler, “Population Theory in the Antebellum South,” Journal of SouthernHistory 12 (August 1936): 362–88. Most northern and southern writers on Malthus in the 1820s and 1830s were critical of his perspective; in the late antebellum period there did emerge a school of pro–Malthusian Southerners who sought to challenge the notion of American exceptionalism as applied to northern free labor.

14. Faragher, John Mack, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven, 1986), 131, 204, 255Google Scholar; for a discussion of small farmers' productive strategies in the southern context, see Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983), 142Google Scholar.

15. See esp. Neufeld, Maurice F., “Realms of Thought and Organized Labor in the Age of Jackson,” Labor History 10 (Winter 1969): 5–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Sellers, “Who Were the Southern Whigs?”; Sellers, Charles Grier Jr., “Jackson Men with Feet of Clay,” American Historical Review 62 (April 1957): 537–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.