The Educational Level of the Jacksonians

Abstract

AMONG THE IDEAS firmly associated with the Jacksonian era is that which asserts a general decline in the intellectual qualities of the national political leadership. Most recently, this concept of the low intellectual and educational level of the Jacksonians has been promoted by Richard Hofstadter in his Anti-lntellectualism in American Life. (i) first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone amounted to a repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life. (2) This article proposes to question the assumption that the formal educational achievement of political leaders of the Jacksonian era was generally inferior to that of earlier political office holders. The data to be presented, compiled for a recently completed dissertation, were derived from a biographical study of nine hundred sixty-eight men who held specified political offices from the First Continental Congress of 1774 through the Thirty-Sixth Congress terminating in March of 1861. (3) These men constitute the total population of those holding the specified offices of Continental Congressman,