Jacksonian Democracy Research Articles

“Anti Societies Are Now All the Rage”: Jokes, Criticism, and Violence in Response to the Transformation of American Reform, 1825–1835

Taking a series of popular jokes about fictitious “anti-societies” as its point of departure, this article explores the responses to the transformation of reform in the decade between 1825 and 1835 and places them in the context of social and political change brought about by Evangelicalism and Jacksonian democracy. Rooted in the tradition of the moral reform society, through specialization of its aims, the anti-society seemed to become a democratic pendant of older reform societies and was thought to play a divisive role in local communities. Critics denounced the new societies for their prescriptive character, the prominent role women played, and the “spirit of opposition” they triggered. Contemporaries increasingly understood the evolution of reform culture from the relatively harmonious religious and moral reform societies of the Benevolent Empire of the first quarter of the 19th century to the oppositional and highly contested organizations of radical antislavery and temperance of the 1830s as a serious threat to the social order and the future of the United States. Using the Benign Violation Theory of Humor, this article argues that the American reaction to anti-societies suggests that while they were broadly perceived as a threat to the social order from the late 1820s on, this threat was at first understood to be benign, and thus could be laughed off, while from 1833 on, anti-societies were increasingly regarded as a destructive force, and provoked substantial fears that could justify violent responses as an alternative way to reinforce the “normal” order of things.

Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee

Satire, Minstrelsy, and Embodiment in Sheppard Lee Benjamin J. Doty (bio) Let those shine now that never shined before,And those that always shone now shine the more. —Advertisement to Hunt’s Blacking. The above epigraph to Robert Montgomery Bird’s 1836 novel Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself suggests that it will be a tale of transformation, and indeed its protagonist undergoes profound changes. After Sheppard Lee strikes his foot with a mattock while digging for buried treasure in a New Jersey forest, his spirit exits his body (47). The disembodied Lee wanders the woods until he comes across the corpse of Squire Higginson, a local brewer, and to his surprise, he finds that he can house his spirit in the dead man’s body and reanimate it (52). Upon doing so, he discovers that Higginson’s corpse carries within it an innate character that changes his natural affections and instincts. Drawing on the language of contemporary medicine, he says that the new body’s power over his thought and behavior is such that he becomes a completely different person. Over the course of the novel, he bounces from corpse to corpse—rich and poor, free and slave—reporting throughout that his original identity is overwhelmed by the makeup of others’ physiques. That the bodies Lee inhabits are dead emphasizes the degree to which he views their materiality itself as determinative: “much of the evil and good of man’s nature,” he says, “arise from causes and influences purely physical” (140). Scholars who have written about Sheppard Lee tend to understand Bird as in agreement with Lee’s materialist account of selfhood because this account dovetails with early nineteenth-century medical discourses on character and consciousness. Bird was, after all, a physician. Samuel Otter offers an insightful reading of the ways Lee’s account of embodiment calls attention to the soul’s ties to “the material it inhabits”; this account, Otter asserts, “stem[s] from [Bird’s] medical training” (100, 95). Christopher Looby, similarly, writes in his trenchant introduction to the novel that its [End Page 131] “physiognomic determinism … must owe a good deal to Bird’s experience as a medical doctor” (xvii). Recently, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine Murison have read the novel as having a less straightforward relationship to Lee’s portrayal of embodiment. In particular, both attend to how Bird uses Lee’s materialist metaphysics of consciousness as a source of comedy. Stein notes that Lee’s philosophical materialism “erases the distinction between the willed or chosen, on the one hand, and the inevitable, on the other,” and that the novel plays Lee’s materialism “largely for comedy”; he does not, though, pursue in depth what comedic materialism might mean for how we read the novel (34). Instead, he argues that Lee’s materialism, because it downplays the power of individuals to control their bodies, is part of a wider critique of Jacksonian democracy, a political movement predicated on the idea that the common man is fit to govern himself (36). Justine Murison reads the novel as a satire of “the politics of physiological sympathy” that indicates the absurdity of sympathetically conflating one person with another (27). In this essay I read the novel’s depiction of embodiment as a source of comedy, but my argument differs from prevailing scholarship in that I claim that embodiment itself is the butt of Bird’s joke. I view two comedic forms at play, one of which is satire: like his contemporary and admirer Edgar Allan Poe, who is the likely author of a favorable review of Sheppard Lee in the Southern Literary Messenger, Bird delights in lampooning all elements of Jacksonian life.1 As Murison, especially, emphasizes, Sheppard Lee explores the use of embodiment as a vantage point from which to satirize contemporary politics and culture. Though she and other critics are correct to view Lee as endorsing the view that the body determines the mind, it does not follow to say the same of Bird, as many do; doing so conflates author and narrator. I argue, rather, that Bird finds such views to be laughable. The first part of this essay explores the ways that Lee’s views...

Dr. Johnson's Dictionary in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Owing largely to the deep cultural affinity between colonial Virginia and Britain, Dr. Samuel Johnson's of the English Language (1755) became a fixture in the private libraries of Virginia's elite, alongside other British works such as Blackstone's Commentaries (1765-69) or Hogarth's prints. Despite the political separation from Britain wrought by the American Revolution, Johnson's Dictionary remained popular in Virginia until the Jacksonian era and the arrival of Noah Webster''s Dictionary in 1828.

“A TAX ON THE MANY, TO ENRICH A FEW”: JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY VS. THE PROTECTIVE TARIFF

The core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy—equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual—have long been defined almost exclusively by the Bank War, which commenced in earnest with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Yet, this same rhetoric proved far more pervasive and consistent when one considers the ardent opposition to the protective system. Opponents of the protective tariff, commencing with the Tariff of 1816 and continuing unabated to the Walker Tariff of 1846, thus contributed directly to the development of Jacksonian Democracy, and, by introducing and continually employing this language, gave to the tariff debates in the United States a unique angle that differed from the debates in Europe.

Mike O'Connor. A Commercial Republic: America's Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism.

Mike O'Connor's A Commercial Republic: America's Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism is an ambitious work of intellectual history. O'Connor begins with a straightforward question that has been in the forefront of popular debate in the years since the 2008 economic collapse: What has been—and what should be—the federal government's role in shaping and reshaping the national economy? It should be none, say many, insisting that recent government economic intervention is an aberration, harmful to economic growth. It should be more, answer others, arguing that only through federal regulation and involvement can the democratic promise of both liberty and equality be maintained. These contradictory answers, O'Connor tells us, share space in the ongoing fierce debate, reaching back to the early republic, over the possibility of ensuring both democratic government and boisterous capitalism. Tracing that debate is the project of this book. To do so, O'Connor begins in the early republic and charges chronologically through the Jacksonian era, the postbellum period, the Progressive Era and New Deal, the postwar years, and ends in the Reagan/Bush years. O'Connor takes what he calls a case-study approach, picking one particular issue or idea from each period to help him dissect contemporary worries over the relationship between capitalism and democracy. The ideological pendulum swings from chapter to chapter (and within chapters as well), from favoring government intervention to staunchly opposing it. Only the swing itself remains constant. Individual chapters look at (in order) debates over the ideal of economic stewardship in the 1790s, the question of separating government and economy in the 1830s, expanded property rights in the age of incorporation in the 1870s, the plausibility of full employment in the 1930s, the amelioration of inequality in the postwar period, and the hazards of taxation in the 1970s and 1980s.

Reassessing Jacksonian Political Culture: William Leggett’s Egalitarianism

AbstractScholars have long debated the character of Jacksonian political culture. Many have argued that the Democrats were individualist in political culture, and those who recognize an egalitarian aspect still describe the Jacksonian view of society as “atomistic.” The article focuses on the political thought of William Leggett, “Spokesman” of Jacksonian Democracy. It distinguishes between universalist and particularist varieties of egalitarianism and argues that Leggett’s universalist egalitarianism has been frequently misunderstood as individualist. In fact Leggett, like all egalitarians, started from a negative reference group bias against elites. His positive reference group identifications were broad and deracinated; they included as civically worthy both African Americans and women. This broadly inclusive view has often been conflated with the individualist view of equality, which is horizontal or reciprocity based. Leggett’s literary writings provide a context for reconstructing his vertical equal...

Vicente Pagasartundua's Último de los mohicanos: A Racialized Dialogue

This article uses the translation history of North American James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 Last of the Mohicans to explore the place of race in nineteenth-century republican discourse as it circulated in the Atlantic World. Based not on Cooper's original, but on Auguste Defauconpret's 1826 French translation, le Dernier des mohicans, Vicente Pagasartundua's 1832 Ultimo de los mohicanos, like many republican-oriented works in the early nineteenth century, was translated in Spain for a Spanish American audience. Traveling from pre-Jacksonian New York to Orleanist Paris to absolutist Madrid, Cooper's novel and its translations participate in a transnational conversation on the role of racial hierarchies in republican government –particularly, as I will show, in regards to the question of the place of Afro-descendants in the republic, a contentious issue in the U.S., France, Spain, and Latin America as the Atlantic World faced events such as the rise of Jacksonian Democracy, the Haitian Revolution, the Cadiz Constitution, and the independence of the Spanish Main.

Tragic Deal

Tragic Deal Robert Westbrook (bio) Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Liveright, 2013. 706pp. Photographs, notes, acknowledgements, and index. $29.95. My granddaddy told me when he was just seven or so, His daddy lost work and they didn’t have a row left to hoe, Not near enough to eat for nine boys and three girls. They all lived in a tent, a bunch of sharecroppers against the world. So his mama sat down and wrote a letter to FDR. And a couple days later, two county men pulled up in a car. They went out in the field and told his daddy to put down the plough. He helped build the dam that gave power to most of the South. So I thank God for the TVA. I thank God for the TVA. Well, Roosevelt let us all work for an honest day’s pay. I thank God for the TVA. —Jason Isbell, “TVA”* The New Deal was a pivotal moment in the making of modern American liberalism. Hence its history has proved a long-standing source of controversy, and not only among historians. After the 2008 presidential election, hopeful liberal Democrats envisioned that Barack Obama would lead a “New New Deal” in the face of a fresh crisis of global capitalism; Time magazine even featured a post-election cover with Obama’s face superimposed on the body of Franklin Roosevelt in an iconic FDR photograph. At the same time, Republican conservatives warned of this prospect, attacking not only Obama but Roosevelt, venturing the view that the New Deal had made the Great Depression worse than it would have otherwise been under more laissez-faire Republican leadership. A new New Deal, they contended, was the last thing Americans needed. What one makes of the New Deal then continues to matter in our politics.1 If New Deal historiography has been mobilized for political purposes, political purposes have been very much in evidence in New Deal historiography. As Morton Keller has said, its most prominent historians have sought [End Page 1] “to explain not only how and why the New Deal happened, but why it was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.”2 During World War II, the “New Deal order” (1933–73) crystallized around a mixed political economy regulated by a modest, Keynesian welfare state. In the two decades that followed, its history lay largely in the hands of its proponents, chief among them Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.3 Having rendered Jacksonian democracy as the New Deal in embryo in The Age of Jackson (1945), Schlesinger turned, in the 1950s, to the “Age of Roosevelt” in three celebrated volumes: The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (1957), The Coming of the New Deal, 1933–1935 (1958), and The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (1960). For Schlesinger and other liberals at the time, the New Deal was a decisive moment in the history of American democratic reform: a fruitful victory for the disadvantaged and a decisive defeat for the powerful interests of privilege, especially big business. It marked a new era of significantly greater state intervention in the political economy to protect the public interest from depredations of private power and the instabilities of a capitalist market economy. By redistributing wealth and power and putting the state at the disposal of heretofore marginalized groups, the New Deal dramatically advanced the cause of a more egalitarian United States. It is perhaps telling that Schlesinger’s story ended before FDR’s disappointing second term, for his history focused far less on the limitations of modern American liberalism than its promise. Not only a Harvard professor but also a vigorous and at times embattled activist in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, Schlesinger provided Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and the rest of FDR’s heirs with a rousing creation narrative to guide their efforts to consolidate and extend the achievements of the mid-1930s. Like American liberalism generally, the liberal interpretation of the New Deal came under attack from the left in the 1960s. The signal assault was Barton Bernstein’s essay, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of...

Rendering violence: riots, strikes, and upheaval in nineteenth-century American art

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. How Could a Mob Be Painted? Picturing Political Violence in the Jacksonian Era 2. Painting That Might Prove Injurious: Cinque and the Representation of African American Political Violence 3. Riot, Rowdyism, and Reform: George Henry Hall and the Picturing of Midcentury Urban Upheaval 4. Trouble on the Home Front: Art, Democracy, and Disorder during the Civil War 5. Painting and Political Violence at Century's End Conclusion Notes List of Illustrations Index

A Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism. By Mike O’Connor (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2014) 287 pp. $34.95

O’Connor’s engaging survey of leading debates about political economy throughout American history helps to explain why many of us are oblivious to the role that the federal government necessarily plays in our market economy. Despite the enduring popular appeal of laissez-faire from the Jacksonian era to the present, the “American government cannot help but alter market outcomes, often significantly” (243). Echoing Alexis de Tocqueville’s influential analysis in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), O’Connor posits an ongoing tension between “liberty and equality,” the central concepts around which controversies over capitalism and democracy have pivoted in the history of American liberalism (244). As they “struggled to reconcile their commitment to the political sovereignty of the people with their equally fervent desire to ensure the integrity of markets and to protect private property,” Americans have perpetuated a tension that defies resolution and defines democratic capitalism.O’Connor’s study begins with a Hamiltonian tradition of “stewardship” that linked the federal state with elite investors and the promotion of manufactures. Despite resistance from reactionary Republicans, Alexander Hamilton established a central role for the state in fostering a “diverse and healthy economy” (47). Jacksonians resisted federal intervention—most notably in banking—but embraced markets. Their “laissez-faire populism” proved ill-equipped to deal with the business cycle and paved the way for a return to power by neo-Hamiltonian Whigs and their successors (61). But suspicions of state power remained the democratic default in future decades, disabling efforts to curb concentrations of private wealth and power. However significant the federal government’s role has always been in the economy, American voters have been reluctant to use their power to promote egalitarian outcomes. The collapse of the New Deal consensus and the triumph of the populist right’s anti-tax orthodoxy confirm the democratic legitimacy of supposedly free markets.O’Connor’s best chapters help to explain why Americans are reluctant to interfere in markets. Led by Justice Stephen F. Field’s influential dissent in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the Supreme Court transformed the corporation from a grant of power to achieve a public purpose to a “sort of placeholder for individual interests,” thus providing “a Liberal, individualist justification for what was effectively an illiberal, collectivist enterprise” (110). Field’s jurisprudence showed the importance of ideas in determining the character of democratic capitalism. In contrast, modern liberals fell short on the intellectual battleground, failing to elaborate a rationale for social democracy and the welfare state before it was too late. In O’Connor’s sympathetic analysis, John Rawls’ enormously popular Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971) ironically served as an epilogue to liberalism’s brief and limited ascendancy. Conservative, pro-market theorists and pundits would instead carry the day, as their “antitax message” developed into an “overarching theory of government” (203).A Commercial Republic does not pretend to be a comprehensive synthesis. O’Connor could have drawn on a rich new literature in American political development that has “brought the state back in[to]” our understanding of political economy. Moreover, any one of the themes that he addresses—from trade to currency policy to taxation—could have been much more systematically developed. But O’Connor has succeeded admirably in showing how previous generations have engaged with the policy controversies that continue to define the character of political economy in America.

James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War ed. by John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner (review)

Reviewed by: James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War ed. by John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner Brie Swenson Arnold (bio) Keywords James Buchanan, Civil War James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War. Edited by John W. Quist and Michael J. Birkner. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013. Pp. 300. Cloth, $69.95.) The sesquicentennials of Bleeding Kansas, secession, and the Civil War have prompted scholars to revisit the life and policy decisions of the [End Page 525] nation’s fifteenth president, James Buchanan. Though historians often readily accept Buchanan’s ranking as one of the worst U.S. presidents, his life and administration have received relatively little sustained scholarly attention. Quist and Birkner’s collection of essays—which emerged from a 2008 symposium held at Buchanan’s Pennsylvania estate, Wheatland—aims to bring this presidency out of “the shadows” and illuminate “the complexity of the Buchanan years” (14). To be sure, Old Buck had a lot on his plate in the late 1850s: bitter discord over the expansion of slavery (particularly in Kansas), Dred Scott, a showdown between the federal government and Mormons in Utah Territory, the Panic of 1857, filibusters in Latin America, tensions with Great Britain in Central America and the Pacific Northwest, the implosion of the Democratic Party and the rise of the Republican Party, secession, and a standoff at Fort Sumter. The essays in this volume address these topics and more. While for the most part the assessment of Buchanan’s less-than-stellar leadership stands, the essays in this thought-provoking and enjoyable volume allow historians to “revisit familiar narratives” (5) and better understand the context of Buchanan’s decisions. The editors open the volume with a helpful review of Buchanan scholarship produced since the Civil War. This introduction is indicative of the good editorial hand at work throughout: The chapters are nicely ordered, often reference each other, and (generally) avoid rehashing information covered in prior chapters. The eight essays composing the bulk of the book are from leading scholars of antebellum politics, the 1850s, and the fifteenth president. In the first essay, historian Paul Finkelman demonstrates how “in a breach of political and judicial ethics” Buchanan conspired with Supreme Court justices to influence the Dred Scott decision (39). Such unsavory actions began the Buchanan administration “with a series of lies” and “ended [it] with a nation careening toward Civil War” (42). Independent scholar William MacKinnon argues that unlike Buchanan’s handling of other crises, the president acted boldly during a confrontation with Brigham Young and other Mormons in “the Utah War”—even as he struggled to take advice from his cabinet, refused to learn from mistakes, and did nothing to curb corruption and mismanagement of federal finances. MacKinnon’s essay connects events often discussed in isolation: Mormons and the Utah War, federal authority over western territories, the Panic of 1857, Kansas, and the secession crisis. Historian Nicole Etcheson examines how Buchanan went so wrong [End Page 526] with his Kansas policy, wherein his failure to take decisive action and his dogged dedication to the sham Lecompton Constitution became perhaps the greatest failure of his presidency. Etcheson untangles the complicated events surrounding Lecompton and deftly explains how Buchanan’s southern sympathies, “moral tone-deafness on the issue of slavery” (88), determination to ruin Stephen Douglas, and inability to recognize that the Democracy of the 1850s was not that of the Jacksonian era all “highlighted how out of touch the president was with the concerns of a new political generation” (90). Historian John Belohlavek finds more to admire, arguing historians should “grant ‘justice’ to Buchanan’s foreign policy” (129). The president’s efforts to defend the Monroe Doctrine; acquire Cuba; “hold the line” against the British in Honduras, Nicaragua, and the “Pig War” in the American Northwest; diffuse tensions with the French in Mexico and the Russians in Alaska; and expand trade with China and Japan “often benefited the nation” (112) and were in keeping with “established principles and goals of his party and his government” (128). Historian Michael Morrison compellingly shows how Buchanan exacerbated “sectional fractures long extant in the national [Democratic] party” (136). Between incurring southern Democrats’ disfavor...

A crisis of community: the trials and transformation of a New England town, 1815-1848

In the first decades of the American republic, Mary White, a shopkeeper's wife from rural Boylston, Massachusetts, kept a diary. Woven into its record of everyday events is a remarkable tale of conflict and transformation in small-town life. Sustained by its Puritan heritage, gentry leadership, and sense of common good, Boylston had survived the upheaval of revolution and the creation of the new nation. Then, in a single generation of wrenching change, families, neighbors, church, and town descended into contentious struggle. Examining the tumultuous Jacksonian era at the intimate level of family and community, Mary Babson Fuhrer brings to life the troublesome creation of a new social, political, and economic order centered on individual striving and voluntary associations in an expansive nation.Blending family records and a rich trove of community archives, Fuhrer examines the age of revolutions through the lens of a rural community that was swept into the networks of an expanding and urbanizing New England region. This finely detailed history lends new depth to our understanding of a key transformative moment in American history.

Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier by Bob Thompson (review)

Reviewed by: Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier by Bob Thompson Paul Andrew Hutton Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier. By Bob Thompson. (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2012. Pp 384. Illustrations, map, notes on sources, bibliography, index.) Bob Thompson, former editor of the Washington Post Sunday magazine, came late to his fascination with Davy Crockett. He escaped the great craze of the baby boomer generation only to be ensnared by his young daughter Lizzie’s fascination with the Crockett story. Lizzie’s introduction was the hypnotic—or irritating, depending on your musical tastes—“Ballad of Davy Crockett” written by Disney screenwriter Tom Blackburn as narrative transition and filler for the three-part 1955 television show. That program revived the somnolent Crockett legend and catapulted Davy back into the front rank of American heroes. Lizzie, like so many other American children, outgrew Davy and moved on, but it was not so easy for her father. He was haunted by the many ghosts of Davy Crockett, both historic and modern, and so he went in search of them and their cultural meaning. We are all the better for his quest. Students of the literature of American memory will recognize Thompson’s book as kin to Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic (1998), although not nearly as acerbic, and Michael Elliott’s Custerology (2007), although not nearly as academic, and even a bit of a distant cousin to John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962). This is road-trip history at its best, a journey across both time and space that entertains as well as educates—much like the song that started it all. Thompson writes with grace in a breezy style that makes for a good read. Thompson explores the life of the real Crockett from his Limestone, Tennessee, birthplace (in a valley of course, not on a mountaintop) through his various incarnations as bear hunter, Indian fighter, politician, freedom fighter, and martyr. In his own lifetime Davy was many things, and after his death he became even more. A living symbol of the Jacksonian “Age of the Common Man,” he became in death a martyr to national expansion and the embodiment of America’s “Manifest Destiny” to conquer a continent. His 1955 rebirth, with Walt Disney as able midwife, spoke to the symbolic Crockett as a buckskin-clad Cold Warrior who was also racially tolerant, a fighter for social justice, and disdainful of political corruption. He was the perfect hero for a generation that [End Page 100] would soon embrace John F. Kennedy and usher in an era of vast social change. Thompson’s journey ends, of course, at the Alamo, where he cannot resist that great issue of the manner of Crockett’s death. His interviews with the two leading protagonists in that grand debate, William Groneman and James Crisp, are more informative on the reasons for the continuing fascination with Crockett than on the actual details of the hero’s death, but that is the nature of this delightful book. A bevy of Crocketteers from all walks of life also appear along the way, from Tennessee school teacher Jim Claborn and businessman Joe Swann to Hollywood film-maker David Zucker, Professors Michael Lofaro and Stephen Hardin, National Park Service historian Danny Martinez, Alamo hostess Joan Headley, and bestselling Texas novelist Stephen Harrigan. All share a mutual fascination with the author on both the real and imagined Crockett. All, in one way or another, are still haunted by the ghost of Davy Crockett. Buckle up and go on the road with Bob Thompson and Davy Crockett. It is not about the destination, of course, but rather all about the journey. You will come away amused, enlightened, and perhaps a bit haunted by the vivid personalities, complex histories, and many ghosts you meet along the way. Paul Andrew Hutton University of New Mexico Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

O'Reilly v. Morse

O’Reilly v. Morse (1854) is a famous patent case. It is relied on by Justices and judges, discussed by scholars, and taught to students. Everyone agrees it was correctly decided: Chief Justice Roger Taney’s majority opinion stopped Samuel Morse’s attempt to control all telecommunication technologies with a patent that went far beyond his invented telegraph and encompassed modern email, fax machines and text messages. This conventional wisdom, however, is profoundly mistaken. It fails to account for the historical context in which Morse invented, patented, commercialized and ultimately was swept up in massive litigation over his innovative telegraph. This paper corrects this anachronism by reinserting this full historical context back into our understanding of Morse. It details the invention and innovative commercial development of the telegraph, and it reveals that Chief Justice Taney’s opinion was not a sterling exemplar of patent law. Similar to his decisions in constitutional law and in other patent cases, Chief Justice Taney ignored established patent doctrines and instead decided the case on the basis of his own political biases. As a fervent Jacksonian Democrat, Chief Justice Taney viewed patents as state-granted monopolies, and not as property rights in technological innovation. It is only a happy accident for him that his judicial activism in O'Reilly v. Morse comported with much-later changes in patent law that made his opinion appear correct to our modern eyes — unlike Chief Justice Taney’s similar twisting of established law in Dred Scott to reach a result similarly dictated by his personal political preferences.

Mississippi Dreamin’ and the American Nightmare

Mississippi Dreamin’ and the American Nightmare Gary J. Kornblith (bio) Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. x + 526 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth and e-book). Joshua D. Rothman. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xx + 391 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95 (cloth and e-book); $24.95 (paper, to be released in May). Over the course of a gory fortnight in the summer of 1835, white citizens of Madison County, Mississippi—fearing that their way of life if not their very lives were at stake—executed roughly two dozen persons for the crime of plotting a massive slave insurrection. A majority of those killed were enslaved black men, but the victims also included seven white men. Most were hanged on orders of a self-styled Committee of Safety established by popular vote in Livingston, the county seat. In lieu of regular court proceedings, Committee members identified and interrogated suspects, tortured them to obtain confessions, and then pronounced them guilty of a capital felony. The magnitude and immediacy of the threat justified such extralegal measures—or so the respectable citizens of Madison County believed. But was there actually a slave rebellion, supported—even instigated—by white allies, in the offing? What caused this deadly social panic and what was its larger historical significance? In the books under review, Joshua D. Rothman and Walter Johnson chronicle these grim events and explicate what they reveal about the social (dis)order of the Mississippi Valley during the Jacksonian era. Although both authors recognize that slaves had excellent reasons to revolt against the status quo in Madison County, each concludes that the insurrection scare of 1835 represented not evidence of the agency of the oppressed but, more likely, the collective delusion of insecure white strivers searching desperately for social esteem and economic success on the cotton frontier. “That a genuine plot existed in 1835 for a gang of white robbers to collaborate with the enslaved in a massive region-wide rebellion . . . is highly improbable,” writes Rothman (p. 265). [End Page 248] Johnson observes vividly that “what happened in the end was less a revolt than a pogrom, a preemptive strike against a conspiracy that may never have existed and left at least sixteen slaves and seven whites dead, their backs scored by torture before their necks were snapped and their legs left quivering at the end of the gallows’ arc” (p. 47). Yet the question of why Madison County exploded in a frenzy of paranoia in the summer of 1835 remains. Rothman devotes most of Flush Times and Fever Dreams to this question and to analyzing another social panic that erupted the same summer in the same region of west-central Mississippi. A major factor was the area’s shifting racial balance, as plantation-based cotton agriculture rapidly took root in the region. In 1830 slaves comprised less than half of Madison County’s total population; in 1840 they accounted for three-quarters. By Rothman’s estimate, at mid-decade, the ratio of blacks to whites in the communities where the frenzy first hit exceeded fifty-to-one. “Making matters even more volatile,” he explains, “as of 1835 settlers in Madison County had failed to establish reliable mechanisms of law and order or even an organized militia system” (p. 99). He faults the rising slaveholding class for this lack of social infrastructure: “It was whites’ own greed that crowded out institutional development and created racial demographics that endangered their own families and threatened the very abundance they believed slave labor made possible” (pp. 99–100). Even taken together, however, greed and demographics fail to explain the decision of the Livingston Committee of Safety to hang whites as well as blacks in the summer of 1835. Expanding upon the research of earlier scholars, Rothman highlights the indirect yet pivotal role played by Virgil Stewart, a maladjusted vagabond and the author (under a pseudonym) of an inflammatory pamphlet titled A History of the Detection, Conviction, Life and...

John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest by Steven P. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest by Steven P. Brown Tony A. Freyer John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest. By Steven P. Brown. Tuscaloosa: University of South Alabama Press, 2012. 328 pp. $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-8173-1771-3. Professor Steven P. Brown makes a notable contribution in this judicial biography of Supreme Court Justice John McKinley. Brown employs wide-ranging research in numerous newspapers and private papers of McKinley’s political and judicial contemporaries. Brown’s constructive use of these sources ameliorates the research problem that McKinley left few known private papers and authored only a limited number of Supreme Court opinions. Generally, historians neglected the extensive evidence Brown has now developed, establishing a dominant but inaccurate interpretation of McKinley as an unimportant politician and Supreme Court Justice. Brown refutes the view that McKinley was insignificant in Jacksonian politics or on the Taney Court. Given Brown’s strong mobilization of previously unused sources, his inattention to certain secondary sources and some noteworthy McKinley opinions is surprising. Born in 1780, the young McKinley migrated with his parents from Virginia to Lincoln County, Kentucky, a frontier borderland disputed by the Americans, Spain, Britain, and Indian tribes. By 1800 McKinley had abandoned the carpentry trade for admission to the Kentucky bar. While most accounts note these early beginnings, none do as well as Brown explaining that McKinley’s carpenter trade connected him with the agricultural and artisan producer economy which prevailed on the borderland. McKinley’s state and federal electoral successes reflected the practical experience he shared with those competing in the frontier producer economy. He shifted political loyalties among not only Democratic-Republicans, but also, initially, between these coalescing factions and the diminishing Federalists. By 1826 he combined politics with the recognition voiced by future-abolitionist James G. Birney that McKinley “stands” at the “head” of the state’s best legal “Bar” (45) in Madison County, North Alabama. Brown’s extensive explorations of news accounts and various private papers like Birney’s demonstrate that McKinley was an effective elected official and lawyer. A major contribution is Brown’s account of McKinley’s role in the Cypress Land Company, along with Andrew Jackson and others, during [End Page 188] the internationally-known “Alabama fever,” which shaped migration to and settlement of the “old southwest” between the Treaty of Ghent and the aftermath of the Missouri Compromise. Located in the fluid politics and lawmaking of the “old southwest,” Brown explains McKinley’s rise within Jacksonian Democracy and appointment to the Supreme Court. McKinley knew, and at different times supported, both Henry Clay and Jackson. Brown skillfully tracks McKinley’s involvement in the complex Bank of the United State’s regional branch control of credit upon which small-producers and speculators depended during the Alabama land rush. Ultimately, McKinley sided with the state’s Jackson supporters who felt the losses incurred under the BUS credit obligations in Alabama’s troubled land deals. Elected to the Alabama assembly and the U.S. House and Senate, McKinley strengthened the bond with the state’s Jackson constituencies grappling with land and banking issues. Congress increased the size of the Supreme Court from seven to nine amidst the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression. Economic hardship further entangled old southwest land disputes in contentious bank credit. As a result, Jackson appointed Tennessee state judge John Catron to the Supreme Court; Martin Van Buren did the same for Alabama’s McKinley. McKinley’s appeals for more reasonably-apportioned federal circuits truly reflected the impediment 10,000 miles presented to providing legal services in the nation’s most extensive circuit. The relief McKinley’s agitation achieved was modest amidst the slave and free-labor states’ growing clash over the contested enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Brown is especially good at reconstituting the comparative operational arduousness of Supreme Court circuit riding. Nearly every member of the Court protested the system from 1789 when Congress created it to final abolition in 1891. McKinley traveled about three times farther than other member of the Taney Court. The rigors of circuit riding often prevented McKinley...

Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 by Samuel J. Watson (review)

Reviewed by: Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 by Samuel J. Watson William S. Belko (bio) Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846. By Samuel J. Watson. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Pp. 688. $49.95 cloth) This is the second volume of a monumental two-volume study of the U.S. Army officer corps along the American frontier, from the Canadian border to the Florida swamps, and from the northern Great Plains to the Texan-Mexican frontier. Watson provides a vivid and detailed accounting of the experiences of the army policing the [End Page 124] borderlands, acting as dutiful and disciplined agents of the national government, controlling both unruly white frontiersmen and pressured Indians, and preserving law and order in spite of aggressive white westward expansion. Despite their frequent frustration, disillusionment, and discontent with state and federal policymakers and potentially erratic and unclear government policies, the army officer corps operated as effective, albeit hesitant, peacekeepers, diplomats, and, ultimately, as the crucial component of a peaceful, efficient, and controlled westward expansion. Conflict with local white citizens and their elected officials, however, proved as taxing as preventing Indian-white warfare, intertribal struggles, and potential filibusters and border violations. Whether dealing with Indians, aggressive white Americans, or British and Mexican troops, army officers exercised remarkable restraint and caution; patience and composure defined army activities at every juncture. Watson portrays the army officer corps as considerably less bellicose than other white citizens, who were often deemed as unscrupulous, partisan, and rapacious by officers. The officers displayed a distinct disdain for white settlers and contempt for populist disregard of law and order, while often demonstrating a deep respect and even empathy for their adversaries, whether Indians or Mexicans. The author depicts army officers as more objective and “morally upright” than frontiersmen and the state and local elected officials with whom they frequently clashed. After 1821, a decline of aggressive expansionistic sentiment dominated the officer corps, as they became increasingly ambivalent toward, even suspicious of, white territorial expansion. Uncertainty and skepticism over federal Indian policy and the pace and process of Indian removal only complicated matters further for the army. Thus, tension, frustration, and dissension defined civil-military relations during Jackson’s presidency, but this uneasy relationship declined substantially during the successive Jackson–era administrations, as the army succeeded in securing its insulation and autonomy from constant civilian intervention. Military subordination and accountability to civilian national [End Page 125] authority, representative government, and the constitution was, according to Watson, the most important dimension of the professional development of the army in the Jacksonian era. As the army officer corps labored to maintain national sovereignty, secure American borders, police the frontier, and prepare for white settlement, they acted as disinterested servants to the national government, always maintaining political neutrality and nonpartisanship, avoiding political entanglements and party battles, and keeping a conservative realism regarding American foreign policy. Army officers were, Watson declares, classical republicans advancing liberal democracy; they were exemplars of classical virtue in an era of increasing acquisitive individualism, rising majoritarian democracy, and adamant state sovereignty. Words such as integrity, reputation, honor, duty, gentility, discipline, service, and responsibility characterize army officers in the Age of Jackson, and the army officer corps usually appears as the unapproachable paragon of virtue which can do little wrong, always an icon of honorable behavior, morality, and humanity. There is an underlying political bias throughout the work, however, as the author clearly supports Hamiltonian centralism, Madisonian nationalism, and Clay Whiggery over Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy. Watson often displays some derision for a liberal, majoritarian, populist, democratic government, one responsive to and operating solely on the demands of its citizens. The efficacy of a strong federal government and an aversion for the compact theory of the Union, prevails throughout. The harsh criticism, often unwarranted, of Jackson and his contribution to American democracy detracts somewhat from the story; Robert Remini’s masterful three-volume biography of Jackson should accompany a reading of Watson’s book. Still, this is a magisterial study of the American frontier in the Age of Jackson, and it should be required reading for courses in...

American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act

NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act 65 JOHN P. BOWES American Indian Removal beyond the Removal Act THE INDIAN REMOVAL ACT was not just enabling legislation passed by Congress in May 1830. It did more than grant authority to the President of the United States to arrange for the relocation of eastern Indians to lands west of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal Act, as well as the debates and events connected to it, established a discourse that has continued to frame discussions of the historical era in which it occurred. That discourse is one layered in the language of constitutional authority, civilization versus savagery, property rights, states’ rights, tribal sovereignty, and government jurisdiction. It­ provides the foundation for a broad conversation encompassing American imperialism during the Jacksonian Age, “a determination to expand geographically and economically, imposing an alien will upon subject peoples and commandeering their resources.”1 In addition, the process has created a powerful and tragic narrative concerned primarily with the experiences of the southeastern Indian tribes and their forced removal from the eastern half of the continent.2 The portrayal of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 as a watershed historical event has thus been influenced by the construction of the American national narrative as a whole. Whether it is seen as ending “the drift and indecision of previous administrations” or forcing “the recognition that attitudes that had been vaguely and randomly expressed before had now to be consolidated into a unified, practical, and defensible national policy,” the legislation has left its mark as a significant moment for federal policy.3 Teachers and scholars have long emphasized the well-known battle among the assembled forces of Andrew Jackson, Christian missionaries, Georgia politicians, and Cherokee Indians to illustrate the bill’s place within a transformative era of American history. John A. Andrew III presents Indian removal as “Jacksonian Democracy’s first great crusade,” which “became a key to understanding a concomitant change in American culture.” Similarly, Mary Hershberger has deftly illustrated the connections between women’s involvement in the antiremoval petition campaign of 1830 and the early abolitionist movement. In an impressive study of political behavior, Fred Rolater has asserted that the debates over Indian removal contributed significantly to the emergence of John P. Bowes NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 66 the second American party system. Rolater’s argument was foreshadowed by Ronald Satz’s foundational work on Jacksonian Indian policy that also highlighted the broader political implications of the congressional debates over the legislation. For Andrew, Hershberger, Rolater, Satz, and others, the battle over American Indian removal influenced vital elements of American society during a period of tremendous change.4 But removal was also an act of all-encompassing violence. This violence played out on a local level and did not simply happen in an abstract world of political debates and historical narratives. Literary scholar Scott Richard Lyons states in harsh terms that, “removal is to migration what rape is to sex.” It was not antiseptic. It was not clean. In all cases it involved some manner of coercion. Removal forcefully renamed the physical and cultural landscape as it marginalized Native ways of living and being.5 Lyons expands upon this idea, stating that, “while the original political policy was concerned with actual physical removals like the Trail of Tears, the underlying ideology of removal in its own way justified and encouraged the systematic losses of Indian life: the removal of livelihood and language, the removal of security and self-esteem, the removal of religion and respect.”6 In this light, federal removal policy should be viewed as a continuation of, rather than a transition from, the civilization policy begun in the late eighteenth century that attacked Indigenous religions, subsistence patterns, and landholding practices. And this wholesale dispossession continued in the histories written in the decades that followed. It is a trajectory shown quite clearly by James Buss, who describes the literary genocide committed by nineteenth-century historians of the lower Great Lakes who crafted stories that hinged on the “moment of Native dispossession and victimless settlement.”7 The scholarship examining Cherokee removal is not devoid of this violence . Nor does...

The Anxiety of Influence: The Evolving Regulation of Lobbying

Our legal system has long been of two minds about lobbying. As far back as the Jacksonian Era, courts anxiously viewed the use of paid agents to influence government decision-making as a source of corruption. Yet courts have also long recognized a legitimate interest in having professional assistance when trying to affect government. Moreover, since the mid-twentieth century the Supreme Court has emphasized that lobbying is protected by the First Amendment. The law of lobbying grows out of these conflicting views of lobbying as both corrupting and legitimate, constitutionally protected yet requiring regulation. Lobbying regulation today reflects four goals: protecting the right to lobby; preventing improper influence; restricting some unfair opportunities for influence; and promoting transparency of lobbyists' activities. Although the constitutional core of lobbying, that is, the presentation of facts and arguments to officials is protected from limitation, rules may restrict the material benefits (gifts, honoraria, free travel) lobbyists can give officials; limit lobbying by former government officials; and require lobbyists to disclose their income and expenditures. Recently, attention has focused on the campaign finance role of lobbyists, with some jurisdictions restricting their ability to give or raise campaign funds or requiring greater disclosure of these activities. The law in this area is still developing, but some special regulation of the interplay of lobbying and campaign finance is likely to be sustained in light of the longstanding concern that lobbying poses special corruption dangers.

Hunting and American Identity: The Rise, Fall, Rise and Fall of an American Pastime

This article examines how hunting came to define the American identity in the nineteenth century and how that identity became increasingly restricted to rural, white males in the twentieth century. The tie between hunting and identity began at colonisation, when promoters portrayed North America as a hunter's paradise. Colonial charters, meanwhile, guaranteed colonists the right to hunt. Because colonists associated hunting with both aristocratic indolence and Indian ‘savagery’, however, they seldom deemed it important. Not until the American Revolution did writers and artists transform seemingly Hobbesian hunters into powerful defenders of natural rights. In the Jacksonian era, Americans identified hunters as culture heroes, men whose ‘self-possession’ made them exemplary. The near-universal right to hunt – a right carried over from colonial times – seemed to complement and buttress widening political rights. Both sorts of rights provided a bulwark against aristocracy. For a time – roughly from 1850 to 1950 – Americans viewed hunting as a font of their greatness. Since then, however, Americans, shaped by the Civil Rights Movement – African-Americans, women, urbanites – have rejected the hunter heroes of old, who seem more like oppressors than liberators. Hunting has become a badge of identity not for all Americans, but for rural whites.