Expediency vs. Morality: Jacksonian Politics and Slavery

Abstract

W HEN the current events of today become history, future generations of historians will surely emphasize the influence of racial consciousness upon their predecessors. The once lily-white American past has already taken on a darker hue-a more authentic perspective, since America has always been a multiracial society. Most Americans neither deny the racist attitudes of their society nor their historical roots. Attention to past racial prejudice is undermining much of the foundation for the American liberal tradition. Winthrop D. Jordan has documented Thomas Jefferson's unsuccessful attempts to repress his deep anxieties over the presence of blacks in America. Robert McColley depicts the Virginian, on a conscious level, apprehensively concealing his mild antislavery opinions from fellow southern planters for fear of losing political power. In evaluating the racial attitudes of Federalism and Jeffersonianism, McColley credits the Federalists with more humanity and liberality than the Republicans.' Jacksonian Democracy offers yet another target for a reassessment. Until now, the debunkers of Jacksonianism have concentrated on economics. For example, the consensus school of American historians argues that Jacksonians were not disinterested servants of the common man, but merely opportunists who wanted money and power-goals hardly unknown or unacceptable to most Americans today. More significant than a reassessment of its economic motives would be the historical judgment that the Jacksonian party operated as a conscious and active agent of the slave power. Is it possible that Jacksonian Democrats, the self-proclaimed champions of the Jeffersonian tradition, also inherited and practiced its pro-southern, proslavery bias? Assuming that