Jacksonian Democracy Research Articles

Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia by Brent Tarter

Reviewed by: Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia by Brent Tarter Seth C. McKee Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia. By Brent Tarter. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. x, 130. $19.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4320-6.) Brent Tarter's Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia packs a wealth of information into 130 pages. The book is a detailed and chronological history of state legislative and congressional redistricting in Virginia. The principal contribution is a thorough accounting of the motivations and consequences of redistricting in the Old Dominion. Foremost is an emphasis on the question of whose interests, from the 1600s to now, have been favored by district line drawing. Historically, because of their power as landowners and slave owners, the aristocracy, located mainly in the eastern part of the state (especially the Tidewater, where slavery was most prevalent), stacked the deck in crafting district boundaries. The vestiges of malapportionment benefiting wealthy power brokers have persisted for most of Virginia's existence. Importantly, Tarter focuses on the concept of representation and how it has changed very slowly in Virginia compared with the rest of the United States. Indeed, the era of Jacksonian Democracy was no longer in its infancy when Virginians finally considered universal white male suffrage with no property qualifications. Tarter is adept at discussing the significance of changes to redistricting in Virginia's various state constitutions. The use of gerrymandering first reared [End Page 514] its head in the state's 1776 constitution, and Tarter provides an insightful passage in which Thomas Jefferson excoriated the baneful representational bias of districting that disproportionately advantaged Virginia's eastern inhabitants. Tarter also advances our understanding of Virginia redistricting by offering an in-depth look at the 1830 plan, which he aptly dubs the Great Gerrymander. In this legislation, malapportionment advantaged inhabitants in the eastern half of the state by splitting senate districts geographically in half between east and west, while also partitioning the state for the lower chamber (House of Delegates) into four parts, so that the two eastern sections provided more representation to these residents. For one, the eastern portion of Virginia was the beneficiary because population growth was more rapid in the western half of the state. Additionally, representation factored in property ownership (and there were more of these citizens residing in the east), and districts (state legislative and congressional) did not split city and county boundaries for the furtherance of greater population equality. In fact, as Tarter points out, from 1871 to 1971 "no [state legislative] district boundary line ever divided a city or a county" (p. 11). The reluctance to make population equality the primary basis for representation explains why this principle loomed large in the redistricting criteria written into West Virginia's original constitution and also why the Mountaineer State came into existence in the first place, since its inhabitants were poorly represented under the districting precepts benefiting Virginia's slaveocracy. The more recent changes in Virginia redistricting are illuminating because, like the rest of the secessionist South, the Old Dominion experienced the remarkable disruptions of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and finally the reapportionment revolution that ushered in the principle of one person, one vote in district-based elections. Throughout these notable eras, Virginia elites were exceedingly slow to embrace, advance, and implement districting plans that would further democracy and therefore undermine their own political clout. As the major parties have become increasingly polarized, Virginia is no exception to contentious redistricting battles. Tarter proves up to the task of documenting the numerous consequential court rulings that shape the parameters of redistricting jurisprudence and laws applicable to Virginia. Given the state's history of unequal representation, it is notable that in 2020 Virginians approved a bipartisan redistricting commission for redrawing state legislative and congressional boundaries. Ironically, this development transpired in a once-again Democratic-run state, but now with a ruling party that found a way to hold power by advancing equal representation rather than by denying it. Seth C. McKee Oklahoma State University Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association...

Joshua A. Lynn. Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism.

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Beyond Whigs and Democrats: historians, historiography, and the paths toward a new synthesis for the Jacksonian era

ABSTRACT This article reviews 30 years of synthetic works on Jacksonian America and argues that while most are still political narratives, the elements of a new synthesis are emerging. Recent scholarship suggests three broad areas from which a newer, more relevant synthesis might come: slavery, race, and gender; political culture; and the new history of capitalism. Furthermore, some key building blocks of a new synthesis have been emerging in the scholarly dialogue prompted by recent research trends and publications.

The Silence of the Soulless Corporation: Corporate Agency in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo

Early nineteenth-century Americans, particularly during the Jacksonian Era, viewed corporations with caution since they were often associated with a dangerous centralization of power, feudal privilege, and even the threat of conspiracy. In The Bravo (1831), James Fenimore Cooper makes the protagonist of his tale such a “soulless corporation”. Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of the government of Venice, which has turned from a model republic into a corrupted oligarchy. This article maintains that Cooper’s novel thereby draws attention to the cultural anxieties surrounding the emergence of the private corporation aggregate in the United States and, by analyzing Cooper’s narrative strategy, points out the special challenges of narrating corporations: how their collective nature requires Cooper to find ways of representing corporate agency beyond embodiment in individual characters.

Cooley v. Board of Wardens and its Nineteenth‐Century Legacy

<i>Cooley v. Board of Wardens</i> and its Nineteenth‐Century Legacy

Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America

Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America

The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, and: Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. by Joshua A. Lynn

Reviewed by: The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, and: Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. by Joshua A. Lynn Christopher Childers (bio) The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics. By David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. (New York: Basic Books, 2018. Pp. 433. Cloth, $32.00.) Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. By Joshua A. Lynn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 271. Cloth, $39.50.) Read together, David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler's The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics and Joshua A. Lynn's Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism offer fascinating bookends to the Age of Jackson. The Heidlers write about the origins of Jacksonian politics, while Lynn focuses on the meaning of Jacksonian Democracy as the Second American Party System unraveled. Both books expertly place Jacksonian politics in fascinating and often troubling context. That no historian has done what the Heidlers undertake in The Rise of Andrew Jackson is amazing given Andrew Jackson's looming presence over the history of the early republic. Yet the authors have accomplished something truly original by uncovering the political coalition that propelled Jackson to power and the means by which it succeeded. The Heidlers carefully distinguish between the Jacksonians and those who they call the "Jacksonites." "Jacksonians supported universal white manhood suffrage, territorial expansion, and the elimination of the Second Bank of the United States," the authors argue, while "Jacksonites were [End Page 591] those willing to use Jackson's popularity to achieve political power" (5). The authors are not merely splitting hairs; in distinguishing between the ideological purists and the political operatives, they have explained how the Democrats evolved into a big-tent party of disparate coalitions by the late 1820s. The Jacksonites, as the Heidlers call the political operatives who built Jackson's political career, sought to exploit the military hero's story to secure their political aspirations in the 1820s. With the end of the Era of Good Feelings, amid intense jockeying for office among a variety of political factions, certain politicians such as Martin Van Buren, John Eaton, Thomas Ritchie, and a host of other Jacksonites realized that a new form of politics that accepted political parties and partisan competition could win elections. Accordingly, they embraced the idea of active campaigning and built a public persona around Andrew Jackson to win the presidency. The Jacksonites had one problem, however. Their chief asset—Jackson himself—had a way of also becoming their chief liability. The Rise of Andrew Jackson does a marvelous job of showing how Jackson's handlers struggled to rein in their candidate and suppress the potentially damaging elements of his past as well as his volatile personality. In the 1824 and the 1828 elections, the Jacksonites worked to moderate, or even suppress, the stories about Jackson's past, including his dueling, his questionable military exploits, and the details of his marriage to his wife, Rachel. Jackson's temper, his questionable ethics, and his penchant for writing and speaking before measuring his words caused trouble for his campaign managers, who had to recast the candidate's words in more moderate language. Historians will be familiar with many of the details, but the Heidlers have placed the stories in a thoughtful narrative that shows how the politicians behind the Jackson campaigns crafted his image and created a sanitized public persona that would propel him to office. How did the Jacksonites pull off their plan to catapult their man into the presidency? With fascinating detail, the Heidlers explain how the Jacksonites created the media networks that broadcast their message to the public and how they developed the patronage network that secured loyalty to Jackson and then, by extension, the Democratic Party. Without a network of friendly newspapers and correspondents across the nation, the Jacksonites could not have disseminated the carefully crafted image of Andrew Jackson to the public, and...

Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

Reviewed by: Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn Rachel A. Shelden (bio) Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. By Joshua A. Lynn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 288. $39.50 cloth) At a time in which our contemporary politics have become increasingly partisan and ideological, it seems fitting that one of the most exciting trends in the political history of the Civil War era is a reappraisal of mid-nineteenth century political parties and their cultural and ideological foundations. Joining this important conversation [End Page 506] is Joshua Lynn’s Preserving the White Man’s Republic, a cultural and intellectual history of the Democratic Party during what he calls the “interbellum” years between the U.S.-Mexico War and the Civil War. Lynn uses racial, gender, and rhetorical analysis to get to the heart of the Democratic Party’s political philosophy. This philosophy, he argues, revolved around individualism, local democracy, and a cross-sectional culture of “manhood, whiteness, and domesticity” (p. 7). During the Jacksonian era, Lynn explains, Democrats crafted a radical ideology of white male diversity, a “liberal” and “broad-minded” approach that “tolerated much that other Americans considered social, political, or moral evils” (p. 44). But by the interbellum period, the radical Jacksonian ideology had become inherently conservative as the Democrats fought off the various fanatical “isms” that weakened white supremacy. Thus, Lynn’s main historiographical target is the tradition that views Democratic principles as antithetical to white supremacy. Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book is Lynn’s reappraisal of democracy itself. Much like Gregory Downs’s reexamination of Reconstruction politics in After Appomattox, Lynn shows how the foundations of American equality and freedom were (and remain) tied up with regressive and illiberal politics. While Downs focuses on the coercive means by which Republicans secured essential rights during the post-war period, Lynn similarly contends that Democratic ideology “synthesized democracy, equality, and white supremacy,” demonstrating that “democracy is not inherently progressive” (p. 5). Although the Democratic party thrived on this gendered and racial vision of individualism and local democracy in the 1850s, fissures in the coalition began to appear in debates over popular sovereignty in Kansas by the end of the decade. Party leaders who had long assumed that majoritarian democracy was fully compatible with individual rights came to learn that “local majorities . . . were neither necessarily silent nor conservative” (p. 148). As Stephen Douglas debated the meaning of “the people” and their power with African Americans and white Southerners, all began to feel the rising tension between the party’s ideology and practical (sectional) politics. Yet, [End Page 507] Democrats remained committed to both white supremacy and local rule in the post-war years, creating what Lynn calls the basis for contemporary conservativism. Here the interbellum Democrats have key lessons for our current moment: “In the United States,” Lynn concludes, “individualism and democracy can work together to consecrate an inegalitarian present” (p. 180). Like Adam I. P. Smith’s The Stormy Present (2017), Lynn shows that the relationship between ideology and practical politics in the Civil War era was often fluid and complex. Yet, in many places the book feels muddled. The reader never really sees the transition from radical Jacksonian Democracy to conservative interbellum partisan-ship; a chapter on the radical origins and one on the party in transition would have been welcome. Moreover, by the end of the book, Lynn claims that the Democratic party “rejuvenate[d]” conservatism in the 1850s (p. 178) but it is not clear what it was rejuvenated from. Definitions are also elusive and oddly timeless; even a capacious or contingent explanation of progressivism and conservatism would have been helpful. Lynn is undoubtedly right that Democrats were “simultaneously progressive and conservative because the individual at the heart of Democratic ideology was the agent of both liberty and order” (pp. 66–67) but what that tells us about the long trajectory of American conservatism remains unclear. Rachel A. Shelden RACHEL A. SHELDEN is an associate professor of history and the director of the George and...

Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

Reviewed by: Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatismby Joshua A. Lynn Daniel Feller (bio) Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism. By Joshua A. Lynn. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 288. Cloth, .) How did the American Democracy—a party once defined by Andrew Jackson’s championing of “the agricultural, the mechanical, and the laboring classes” against the “money power”—within a generation become a party [End Page 273]of southern slavemongers and their northern coadjutors? One conventional historiography sees the Democracy metamorphosing in the 1850s, renouncing its egalitarian and majoritarian roots for the defense of racial (and gender) hierarchy. Echoing northern voters and politicians who forsook the party in the 1850s, historians of this bent see the true Democratic ethos by 1860 residing mainly among Republicans, not Democrats. Joshua A. Lynn has a different answer. Some men may have quit the party, but the party itself did not really change. The exaltation of white male mastery that typified Democracy by 1860 had really undergirded it all along—indeed, lay at its core. Democrats did not merely fail to challenge racial and sexual boundaries; they had deliberately erected them. Their democracy was not imperfectly inclusive but definitionally exclusive. From the beginning, they upheld the unfettered power of free white men to do as they please, including holding sway over everybody else. The universal values they proclaimed were universal for some only: values of “Enlightenment egalitarianism, natural rights, and racial essentialism” (2), of “democracy, equality, andwhite male supremacy” (5). And while party credos and allegiances have shifted over time, the conjoining of racial and sexual privilege with white male egalitarian individualism that was effected by Jacksonian Democrats remains central to American conservatism—and American democracy—today. Rather than an abandonment of party ethos in the years leading up the Civil War, Lynn thus sees an evolution in circumstances and adversaries. Jackson’s founding generation had battled aristocracy and privilege, but by the 1850s the white republic was an established reality, and the threats to its safety now came from elsewhere—from reforming “fanatics,” proponents of novel social arrangements, temperance, women’s rights, and antislavery. To combat these foes, the party’s rhetoric and emphasis shifted; its core premises and values did not. The aim now was preservative, not revolutionary. Yet first, last, and always, “the white male individual lay at the heart of Democrats’ political ideology. Democrats built their notions of progress, social order, and, ultimately, the Good Society around this raced and gendered individual” (35). Lynn explicates this thesis by examining Democratic rhetoric in the 1850s, the decade of party realignment, the Kansas debacle, Buchanan’s election, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. During these years, he says, the Democracy was threatened less by sectional disharmony—for on white male dominance all Democrats agreed—than by internal ideological conundrums. Lynn sees the “popular sovereignty” doctrine not as an expedient dodge around the issue of slavery in the territories, but as a declaration of [End Page 274]universal Democratic precept: white men should decide slavery, as they should everything else, for themselves. The doctrine imploded in Kansas not because it exposed an underlying sectional cleavage over slavery, but because it triggered a crisis in the application of democratic principle, as the individual right of white men to hold slaves or not collided with the majoritarian right of a self-governing community of white men to set its own rules. The question of what constituted Jacksonian Democracy’s true identity and legacy, and of who maintained and who betrayed it, is ultimately unanswerable. Secessionists, Douglasites, and Republicans all claimed the mantle of True Democrats in 1860, and esteemed historians have been found to uphold them all. It may be that preserving white male mastery had indeed been a constitutive element—a feature, not a bug—in the Democratic ethos all along. Yet, as Lynn himself stresses, it matters greatly how a party portrays itself, the words of self-definition and purpose with which it chooses to go before the electorate. The drumbeat word for 1850s Democrats was “conservative.” In his chapter on James...

Introduction

Introduction Liette Gidlow, Section Guest Editor (bio) As the debate over ratification of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment to enfranchise American women intensified after the Great War, both suffragists and antisuffragists believed that a great deal was at stake. Suffrage proponents promised that, armed with the ballot, women would tackle the great social issues of the day and usher in a new era of progress and peace. Antisuffragists, by contrast, worried that suffrage would damage women's elevated moral stature and threaten the very stability of life in the home. Now, in 2020, historians have the opportunity to reconsider those predictions using a century's worth of evidence. A hundred years out, what difference did the Nineteenth Amendment make? The Nineteenth Amendment is popularly celebrated for enfranchising half the population overnight and fulfilling the American promise of democracy. Two narratives, distinct but entwined, promote this perspective. In one version, aptly termed "the master narrative" by the historian Nancy Hewitt, the woman suffrage struggle started with Elizabeth Cady Stanton at Seneca Falls in 1848 and, after much struggle and sacrifice, succeeded with the ratification of the Anthony Amendment in 1920.1 In an alternative interpretation, the Nineteenth Amendment completed the American democratic project of suffrage expansion, a project that began in the early national period when states repealed freeholder restrictions and when a growing economy expanded property ownership and rendered them moot. The march toward full inclusion continued during the period of "Jacksonian democracy" when states granted "universal" suffrage to white men; traversed the color line with the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870; and concluded in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment brought women into the ranks of the voting public. Many historians, however, question both the framing and the tenor of these interpretations. They argue instead, for example, that woman suffrage was but one of many demands made by mid-nineteenth-century women's rights reformers, and often not their top priority; or that many aspects of women's lives and politics persisted across "the great divide" of 1920, emphasizing continuity, not change; or that electoral politics was but one tool women used to bring change to their communities. Some scholars [End Page 11] stress that alternative strategies, like labor mobilization and community organizing, sometimes yielded tangible results when voting did not or that some women, in particular African American women in the Jim Crow South, found that after ratification they still could not vote. Others further argue frankly that, on policy grounds, the Nineteenth Amendment was a bust: the voter turnout for women in the 1920s was low, the suffrage coalition splintered, and the newly enfranchised women failed to push through a fresh wave of progressive reform. In these interpretations, not much changed after women got the vote. The suffrage amendment—highly anticipated and hotly debated—landed with a thud.2 In this forum, women's history scholars with diverse areas of expertise navigate between a triumphalist narrative of progress and a dispirited narrative of failure. These essays, although varied in approach, share three common threads. First, they recognize the intersectional identities of the women whose stories they tell and offer interpretations that reflect these complexities. Second, they extend the field of vision both backward and forward in time—backward to recall a sense of contingency for historical actors who could not know that a federal woman suffrage amendment would be adopted, and forward to identify consequences of the amendment that may have taken decades to develop. Third, they interrogate the boundaries of the nation by considering internal "borders" created by processes of racial formation and settler colonialism, spaces that were incorporated into the nation but governed by what the political scientist Partha Chatterjee called "the rule of colonial difference."3 The authors in this forum also make the case that the significance of woman suffrage was not limited to women themselves. They illustrate how the question of women's right to vote was deeply implicated in the politics of white supremacy both before and after ratification. They highlight tensions that the amendment raised for women who, drawing on multiple sources of identity and affiliation, identified as members of communities instead of, or as well as, rights-bearing individuals. Individually and...

Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism

Preserving the White Man’s Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

Preserving the White Man's Republic: Jacksonian Democracy, Race, and the Transformation of American Conservatism by Joshua A. Lynn

The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson by Mark R. Cheathem

Reviewed by: The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson by Mark R. Cheathem Jacob T. Wood (bio) The Coming of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning in the Age of Jackson. By Mark R. Cheathem. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. x, 248. $64.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $14.72 ebook) In a historical moment where presidencies and politics are defined as much by Saturday Night Live and Twitter as they are from bills in Congress, one could be forgiven in assuming that the intersection of politics, entertainment, and popular culture is a new phenomenon. However, Mark Cheathem, current editor of the Martin Van Buren Papers and biographer of Andrew Jackson and family, presents the [End Page 504] early republic as a period where “entertainment, things such as music, public events, and cartoons, held important political meaning” for Americans (pp. 2–3). Cheathem focuses The Coming of Democracy on the five presidential elections that occurred between the controversial election of 1824 to the apotheosis of cultural politics in the election of 1840. Through each election, Cheathem covers how the confluence of informal entertainment and politics facilitated the rise of Jacksonian democracy through the creation of partisan clubs, political media such as cartoons and music, and appeals to women. He admits these factors all existed prior to the election of 1824 but argues that it was the period between 1824 and 1840 where they became far more widespread and accessible to Americans at large (p. 9). The Coming of Democracy synthesizes previous historical works to contribute to the field a succinct précis of Jacksonian politics. He draws upon the most recent scholarship of the past twenty years, including expanding upon his previous books on Jackson, Van Buren, and the rise of the Democratic Party. A credit to Cheathem’s research is the numerous political cartoons and excerpts from contemporary songs poking fun at the leading men and issues of the antebellum period. His coverage of the use and spread of print culture notably during the 1836 election portrays a United States where the average American could see their presidential candidates before them in cartoons, read about those candidates and their stances in new biographies and newspapers, and celebrate their impending victory with clubs and songs and Liberty Balls rolling through the streets. Cheathem also demonstrates the prominent role previously excluded women played in influencing the political process, especially for Whig candidates. The democratic impulse extended beyond discussions of policy; it entered the realms of popular culture, pushing 80 percent of eligible voters to participate in 1840 (p. 175). The key year for both the coming of democracy in the abstract and The Coming of Democracy in the literal sense was 1840. Perhaps the greatest strengths of this work, its extensive chronology and readable page length, also act as its major drawback. Friends [End Page 505] of Tippecanoe rejoice with the Whig triumph in 1840 as Harrison and allies outmaneuver Van Buren and the Democrats through their use of cultural politics; yet The Coming of Democracy could elaborate further as to why the Democrats in 1836 and 1840 utterly failed to take advantage of an arena that seemed perfectly suited to them following Jackson’s successes. After successfully electing Jackson twice along with Van Buren, the work can explain more of the rationale or circumstances that prevented Democrats from fully embracing music, lithographs, or women’s participation in Van Buren’s campaigns (pp. 108, 162, 168). Despite cutting off his study at the election of 1840, Cheathem’s work demonstrates a breadth of subject matter that would benefit upper level history majors and early graduate students in understanding the changes that occurred in how Americans participated in their presidential politics. By consolidating the latest scholarly works on the intersection of three cultures—political, print, and material—Cheathem offers readers an introduction into the world of Jacksonian politics that future scholars can expand upon. Jacob T. Wood JACOB T. WOOD is a doctoral student at the University of Kentucky. He is currently researching the role of fluid political boundaries in the partisan debates of the election of 1844. Copyright © 2020 Kentucky Historical Society

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman

Reviewed by: The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman Gunja SenGupta The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. By Joanne B. Freeman. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018. Pp. xviii, 450. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-374-15477-6.) Joanne B. Freeman’s richly contextualized portrait of violence in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War is a book for the times in which we live. Polarized politics; clashing cultural values; a Congress defined as much by human failings as by lofty idealism; the workings of emotion; the complicated relationships among politicians, the press, and popular opinion; new technologies for spreading information; and the debates over free speech that helped launch a crisis of union in the nineteenth century—all resonate powerfully in the public sphere that present-day Americans inhabit. Weaving together these threads of public discourse and technological development into a deadly brew in the antebellum United States was violence: slights and slurs, brawls and riots, mobbing, caning, dueling, and killing. Violent encounters extended from the murderous landscapes of Indian removal and the lynch mobs that targeted abolitionists, black people, and immigrants, through bowie-knife-happy state-houses, all the way to Congress. As the author notes at the outset, her subject poses a methodological quandary. The Washington, D.C., press, beholden to the government for printing contracts, was inclined to suppress news that cast lawmakers in a negative light. At the same time, newspapers outside the nation’s capital tended sometimes to sensationalize and bend the truth. How then to unveil the hidden true histories of violence in Congress? Freeman skillfully deploys the art of historical detection to expose the full scale of the unsavory underbelly of [End Page 156] governance during an age of mounting sectionalism. Scattered references to conflicts with colleagues in congressmen’s letters and diaries offer personal, intimate, and emotional glimpses of incidents that Freeman fleshes out and corroborates by cross-referencing the Congressional Globe and a range of newspapers representing different times, places, interests, and politics. Most of all, she relies on the testimony of a reliable eyewitness to the episodes that she describes: Benjamin Brown French, who was elected House Clerk in 1845 and kept a prolific diary, totaling eleven volumes and over 3,700 pages, from 1828 to 1870. Freeman’s choice of French as informant is astute. The political evolution of this “congressional insider” who was nevertheless “not too far inside,” from a New Hampshire Jacksonian Democrat to a Republican indignant about southern violation of the North’s constitutional freedoms, made him a bellwether for the growing alienation of the sections in the 1850s (p. 7). Significantly, this House Clerk’s Jacksonian perspectives did not translate into the sort of radical politics of producers’ rights and free soil of which the historian Jonathan H. Earle has written. In the beginning, far from proceeding from the traditional Democratic suspicion of a grasping “Money Power” to avowed opposition to an imperial “Slave Power” bent on colonizing the West, French denounced abolitionism as a threat to the stability of the Union. Freeman carefully tracks the trajectory of French’s observations and emotions set forth in his diaries through successive confrontations—from the Gag Rule debate through the Compromise of 1850 to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act—to illustrate how concern for southern abuses of northern rights turned him gradually into a moderate Republican. Early chapters establish the physical setting—from the inchoate city of Washington to the tobacco-stained floors of the Capitol—where the action unfolded. Freeman offers a graphic portrayal on a granular level of the sights, the sounds, the smells, the emotions, and the length and cadences of the speeches that filled the halls of Congress. Readers meet a cavalcade of men who passed through its revolving doors, the first generation to be memorialized in photographs. And readers learn that congressmen resorted to violence not only because it vindicated their manhood, but also because it paid political dividends with the constituents in their districts. In this context, one of Freeman’s most original insights consists in her argument that...

Une autre démocratie en Amérique (1824–1844): Orestes Brownson, un regard politique (Another democracy in America [1824–1844]: Orestes Brownson, a political look)

In 1939 the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called Orestes Brownson “an American Marxist before Marx” (“Orestes Brownson: An American Marxist before Marx,” Sewanee Review, July–Sept. 1939, pp. 317–23). This posthumous qualifier derived from Brownson's most famous article “The Laboring Classes,” which stood in favor of a radical reform of the right to property (Boston Quarterly Review, July 1840, pp. 758–95). Almost eighty years after Schlesinger wrote his catchy phrase, the French historian Naomi Wulf revisits Brownson's specific view of democracy by showing how his works offered a critical and theoretical reflection on Jacksonian democracy. Her book goes beyond Brownson's polemical article to encompass the rich body of writings published by this leading intellectual of the Jacksonian era. Wulf elegantly describes Brownson's complex intellectual and social world. Rendering the task more difficult are his changing opinions during his fascinating life. Brownson's evolving views have enabled different and sometimes-conflicting interpretations to be formed—from Schlesinger's “first Marxist” theory to Russel Kirk's belief that the Jacksonian reformer was a consistent conservative. According to Wulf, Brownson's view of a flawed democracy cemented his intellectual journey and led him to promote major economic and educational reforms. Such a reformist creed was accompanied by a desire for a more active federal government, particularly interesting at a time when the national government was mainly “out of sight,” to use the historian Brian Balogh's words (A Government out of Sight, 2009). At the heart of Brownson's arguments was a denunciation of the failure of Andrew Jackson's democratic ideal. Far from Alexis de Tocqueville's contemporaneous celebration in his classic Democracy in America (1835), Brownson's work characterized Jacksonian America as incomplete and far from perfect.

Le mariage dans les romances historiques du premier XIX e siècle

Closing a novel on a wedding is the formulaic ending of most popular 19th&#160;century fictions. Yet, when it comes to Cooper&#8217;s and Sedgwick&#8217;s historical romances the final union is loaded with a symbolical meaning. As the story opens onto the future, the concluding epithalamium pictures a white, patriotic, common-man America, as heralded in the Jacksonian era. However, the unifying discourse of national concord superimposed on the heroes&#8217; happy end covers up diverging paths: the eulogy of both spinsters and bachelors and the possibility of miscegenation eventually tends to blur the harmony showcased in the epilogue.

The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics by William J. Cooper

Reviewed by: The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics by William J. Cooper Ben Wynne The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics. By William J. Cooper. (New York and London: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018. Pp. xvi, 526. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-1-63149-495-6.) In a departure from his consistently fine work on southern history, William J. Cooper has produced in The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics an outstanding biography of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States. The well-written tome is aptly named, giving readers a portrait of one of American history’s best-credentialed statesmen, whose story is sometimes diminished by the shadow of both the older founding leaders he followed and the wave of social and political change that ushered in the Jacksonian era. Cooper offers a balanced treatment of Adams’s life in the context of the turbulent times in which he lived. Cooper portrays Adams’s conduct against a backdrop of national growing pains, including the increasing “democratization of American politics for white men” and the relentless progress of slavery as the nation’s most divisive issue (p. xii). The strengths of this book are many. Adams was involved in all the important debates of his era, as James Monroe’s secretary of state, as president, and as a United States congressman after his term in the White House. Cooper does a wonderful job weaving Adams’s views into the historical fabric of the times and describing his relationships with powerful political contemporaries such as Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun. Of particular [End Page 896] interest are treatments of Adams’s work on the Adams-Onis Treaty with Spain and the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, along with Adams’s views of the Missouri Compromise as an ominous harbinger of things to come rather than an agreement that would help bring calm to the slavery debate. Adams was unique among American presidents in that, rather than retire from politics after his term as president, he continued to contribute significantly to public discourse through lengthy service in the U.S. House of Representatives. There he cast the South’s increasingly angry rhetoric promoting slavery and states’ rights as a “simmering brew of political evil” and became increasingly pessimistic regarding the immediate future of the country (p. 268). Guided by a firm belief in American exceptionalism before his presidency, he lived long enough to see the national fabric begin to unravel, dimming, in his view, the original vision of the Founders. In addition to chronicling major national events during turbulent times, this work also reminds readers of a towering political figure in America who has never quite achieved the historical status that he surely deserves. In many ways John Quincy Adams was indeed the last Founding Father—or “Founding Father by extension,” as Cooper puts it (p. 3). As John Adams’s son, he grew up in the household of a president and surrounded by leading members of the Revolutionary generation, men he looked up to and whose enlightened vision for the country he admired. Harvard-educated and well-traveled as a young man, there was probably no person better prepared to carry the Founders’ ideals into the next generation than John Quincy Adams. Yet he was unable to sustain his presidency for two terms against the swell of Jacksonian democracy that took the country in a new direction. Overall, Cooper’s work helps define Adams’s legacy and, one hopes, will give readers a chance to finally recognize this “lost Founding Father” and appreciate his contributions to his era. Anyone interested in antebellum American history, political history, or presidential biography would do well to add this book to their collection. Ben Wynne University of North Georgia Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Vagabond Voters and Racial Suffrage in Jacksonian-Era Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania eliminated black suffrage during its constitutional convention of 1837-1838. Although racism was a motivating force, white supremacists also reacted against the flood of so-called vagabond voters: migrants and transients unleashed by the economic changes of the Jacksonian era. Transient voters who had to move to find work became more typical in this period of expanding white suffrage. Bias against immigrants—including native-born men from other states—thus merged with hatred of African Americans as concerns for Democrats, as racial exclusion became one of the means by which to handle a constellation of elements that were viewed as having the potential to create disorder in power arrangements.

Американская политическая карикатура как исторический источник по изучению «джексоновской эпохи»

Американская политическая карикатура как исторический источник по изучению «джексоновской эпохи»

Afterword: The History and Legacy of Jacksonian Democracy

Afterword: The History and Legacy of Jacksonian Democracy