Jacksonian Politics Research Articles

Justice Samuel Nelson and the Seneca Indians

Justice Samuel Nelson and the Seneca Indians Laurence M. Hauptman (bio) Scholars examining the career of Justice Samuel Nelson, who served on the Supreme Court from 1845 to 1872, have considered the jurist's record on the bench to be mediocre.1 According to historian Frank Otto Gatell, Justice Nelson "did not leave a deep impression on the history of the court."2 Political scientist Carl B. Swisher concluded that Nelson was a "stable, sound, and unspectactular judge"; that he "was not a man of deeply philosophical bent or soaring imagination"; and that he exhibited an "unwillingness to stretch the law to make it conform to local moral sentiment."3 Indeed, Nelson has largely been viewed through the lens of his concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).4 Consequently, scholars have labeled him a "doughface justice," castigating him, along with Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania, for being the only two Northern jurists on the bench who voted with the majority in the case.5 In assessing Nelson's overall importance, scholars examining the justice's service on the Taney-led and Chase-led Courts have failed to analyze or even mention two of his most important opinions: Fellows v. Blacksmith (1857) and The New York Indians (1866). In the first of these cases, Nelson favored the Tonawanda Senecas; a decade later, the justice favored the treaty rights of the Seneca Nation of Indians.6 The cases permanently affected the Tonawanda Senecas and the Seneca Nation of Indians, two separate, federally recognized governments that today occupy four reservations in western New York State: Allegany, Cattaraugus, Oil Spring, and Tonawanda. After the Revolution, the Senecas, original members of the Iroquois Confederacy, occupied approximately six million acres of lands. Their vast territory was attractive to land speculators, promoters of canals and turnpikes, New York politicians pushing for Empire State development, and Americans seeking access to the Great Lakes and Ohio Country. As a result, from the time of the federal Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 onward, [End Page 7] the Senecas faced unrelenting pressures to cede all or select parcels of their land. Despite specific assurances made by the Washington administration in the federal Treaty of Canandaigua in1794 to guarantee the Seneca land base, dispossession continued. In the federal Treaty of Big Tree in 1797, federal officials recognized ten, later eleven, Seneca reservations totaling 202,000 acres. However, because of the nefarious actions of state and federal politicians in collusion with the Holland and later Ogden Land Companies, the Senecas continued to be dispossessed and threatened with removal to the Indian Territory well into the 1850s.7 The question arises about why Nelson favored the Senecas' position in his opinions in 1857 and 1866. After all, Nelson had been a loyal member of Martin Van Buren's Albany Regency, the fledgling Democratic political machine that dominated New York politics in the 1820s, and which in the 1830s had pushed for Indian removal from New York State. Even Nelson's appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1845 was tied to Jacksonian politics after three Whigs had been rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.8 However, Nelson was to write the Court's opinion in Fellows v. Blacksmith. and convince all of his fellow jurists, including five appointed by Presidents Jackson and Van Buren, to vote with him. He even persuaded Justice James Moore Wayne, a Georgian who had actively been a proponent Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Seneca Land Losses in Treaties During Justice Nelson's Lifetime* [End Page 8] Click for larger view View full resolution Scholars mostly remember Samuel Nelson as a "dough-face" for his concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sand-ford (1857) and have failed to consider two of his seminal opinions favoring the Tonawanda Senecas and the Seneca Nation of Indians. of removal of Creeks and Cherokees, to support his opinion.9 Justice Nelson's favorable response to the crises facing the Senecas was conditioned by a myriad of factors. He selectively drew inspiration and ideas from four separate sources. First, Nelson's residence in Cooperstown, New York, and his connections there to the family of James Fenimore Cooper...

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...

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

Emerging Contours of Transatlantic Relationship under Trump Administration

With the election of US President Donald Trump, the very essence of transatlantic relations, embedded in the shared ideologies of liberalism, democracy, human rights and globalization has begun to erode. The already strained United States-Europe relationship is now at the lowest ebb under the Trump administration. This rift is visible since long and is continuously widening due to divergence of economic, security, political and environmental interests of the United States (US) and its European allies. This paper discusses the reasons for divergence between the two old partners who have traditionally identified themselves collectively as the ‘West’ and the impact it has had on their partnership. This paper examines the evolution of the US-Europe relations, crisis under Trump's Jacksonian politics leading to divergences on core issues, namely Russia as a threat and energy supplier, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), climate change and Iran. In addition, it deliberates on the future trajectory of transatlantic partnership under Trump administration and offers policy options.

The Steam Mill and Jacksonian Politics: The Career of William N. Jeffers

Political and economic transitions reshaped New Jersey as they did throughout the United States during the 1820s. By the end of that decade an emergent second party system, centered on support of or opposition to Andrew Jackson, defined both national and state elections. The “Market Revolution” had begun to transform the nation’s economy. Industrialization and improvements in the transportation network led to the eclipse of purely local markets by national ones. Politicians and entrepreneurs at the local level sought to adapt to such transitions. William N. Jeffers of Salem County, New Jersey, so adapted his approach to both political and economic relationships. Jeffers furthered his political ambitions by identification with the Jacksonian movement in New Jersey. He sought to advance his economic ambitions by obtaining a charter for a bank and for a steam mill to take advantage of Salem County’s agricultural economy.

The Origins of American Religious Nationalism. By Sam Haselby.

The early United States claimed extensive territorial domains that created vexing problems for the nation’s Protestants. Sam Haselby’s recent book about this subject might be summarized as an argument for the significance of the frontier in American religious history. Indeed, Haselby identifies “the primary conflict in American religion during the early republic as one between frontier revivalism and a nationalist missions movement—in other words, not as denominational but as social and geographic” (p. 3). Furthermore, according to Haselby, this conflict “was essentially a contest for governance of the frontier” (p. 2). Haselby’s two broad categories include several religious movements. He identifies Methodists, Baptists, and Shakers, religious groups with large popular followings west of the Appalachian Mountains, as frontier revivalists. Northeastern Presbyterians and Congregationalists, along with their financial backers, created the nationalist missions movement, or “national evangelism,” as Haselby often labels his second broad category. Haselby argues that, in the absence of a strong early national state, frontier revivalists and national evangelists alike worked to build a moral society in the West. Frontier revivalists pursued this task by subjecting their daily lives to local religious controls. National evangelists looked to the West as they created well-funded reform associations and print networks to bring forth their country’s providential destiny. Over the course of seven chronologically-arranged chapters, Haselby explores the origins of frontier revivalism and national evangelism; conflicts between these two positions over beliefs, practices, and issues such as slavery and Indian removal; and finally how both positions contributed to the emergence of religious nationalism in American life that was both populist and providential. Haselby concludes that Andrew Jackson embodied this type of religious nationalism, which found its expression in Jacksonian politics.

Origins of Patent Exhaustion: Jacksonian Politics, Patent Farming,, and the Basis of the Bargain

Current conventional wisdom holds that patent exhaustion and copyright first sale—which allow you to buy a patented smartphone or a copyrighted book and use or resell it for any purpose—have longstanding common law bases first referenced in U.S. courts by Chief Justice Taney in the mid-nineteenth century: “when the machine passes to the hands of the purchaser, it is no longer within the limits of the [patent]. It passes outside of it.” doctrines are at the heart of the modern technology-based economy and have been repeatedly in front of the Supreme Court: first sale in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; and exhaustion now on appeal in Lexmark International, Inc. v. Impression Products, Inc. Without them, consumers would need to ensure they have all intellectual property permissions needed to use or resell purchased goods, much like the confusion around rights to digital content obtained through the internet. This Article, however, shows the conventional account to be mistaken. Taney’s statement was likely politically driven dicta in a case involving only patent licensees holding franchises to build and operate proprietary retail businesses. There were no sales of goods. But its compelling spatial metaphor was repeated in other opinions until taking on the veneer of longstanding law. Nonetheless it took twenty years for the Court to hold an implied use-only right upon sale of patented goods, and forty years to find a resale right. This Article unpacks the context of Taney’s bootstrapped quote and traces its incremental transformation to show that even when fully formed by 1900 it was simply a default presumption for unconditional sales in which full title in the good passed to the buyer with no right of reversion. Sales subject to express, mutually assented conditions allowed the patentee to pursue patent property-type remedies in appropriate situations, and not just contract remedies. unifying principle was to enforce the basis of the bargain, especially to protect licensees and purchasers from patentee “gotcha” tactics. Accordingly, the Article advocates a flexible approach to exhaustion rather than a mandatory rule, while giving enhanced scrutiny to consumer transactions, to allow fair, innovative transactions at different price points in the new sharing, goods-as-services, and digital economies. [A substantially revised version of this working paper, The Damaging Myth of Patent Exhaustion, is posted to SSRN and forthcoming in Volume 28 of the Texas IP Law Journal.]

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 296. $49.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-3770-0.) The ten (all male) authors in this volume met at conference at University College London in 2011 to reexamine well-worn questions of political engagement, development, and democratization in the first seventy-two years of U.S. history. Taken together, the essays they produced show early American political history to be vibrant field, capable of providing fresh insights. Editors Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith set an ambitious agenda for the volume, to chart the among citizens, parties, and governance in the period by building on insights from political science, from the political history of the 1960s and 1970s, and from the new, new political history of the 1990s and early 2000s (p. 11). The essays revise ideas about foundational issues: the relationship between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics; the push-pull relationship between political parties and voter turnout; and the interaction between parties, those in government power, and broader public. The essays in Part 1 focus on political development, even while sometimes resisting stable model of developing systems. Douglas Bradburn uses the concept of path dependence to examine the origins of two-party conflict in the early republic. Reeve Huston reexamines Ronald P. Formisano's The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983) in light of more recent work that shows high activity in the 1790s to argue that the true origin of parties should be located in that decade, rather than in the Jacksonian period, even as state and local politics reveal an uneven pattern of democratization. Huston contends that Martin Van Buren may have invented discipline, but he did not innovate in most other functions. John L. Brooke's excellent essay follows up on his widely influential work on the public sphere by examining the early 1850s as a liminal, revolutionary rupture that hurried the onset of the Civil War as transformative event-clusters ... [reshaped] foundational myths and challenged social, political, and cultural structures (pp. 74, 75). He argues, in part, that the Civil War was hastened when party managers lost their power to control events because of cultural factors such as the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) (p. 77). The essays in Part 2 add nuance to the wearing-thin battle over whether voter turnout was high or low in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. …

Andrew Jackson, Southerner by Mark Cheathem (review)

Reviewed by: Andrew Jackson, Southerner by Mark Cheathem Robert Bonner (bio) Keywords Andrew Jackson, American South, Jacksonian politics, Southern honor Andrew Jackson, Southerner. By Mark Cheathem. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. Pp. 312. Cloth, $39.95.) Back in 1996, the late Bertram Wyatt-Brown marked SHEAR’s Nashville-based conference with a Presidential Address on “Andrew Jackson’s Honor.” That paper, subsequently published in the Journal of the Early Republic, forged a link between Old Hickory’s dueling, Indian-fighting, and general orneriness and the traits of “southern” honor that so fascinated Wyatt-Brown. Mark Cheathem’s new book takes a cue from Wyatt-Brown’s classic piece even as he moves beyond the most clearly sensational parts of “Old Hickory’s” career (there were many) so as to apply the “southern honor theme” to the entire life of this seminal political figure. If Jackson has often been treated as a “representative of the trans-Appalachian frontier,” Cheathem insists that a Waxhaw upbringing and a subsequent Tennessee political apprenticeship made him “truly a southerner” (4). His political appeal across the slaveholding states thereby can be seen as a function of Jackson’s “southern identity,” as evidenced in his well-known “propensity toward violence, defense of honor, enslavement of African-Americans, embrace of kinship, and pursuit of Manifest Destiny.” With such powerful associations came a cross-class appeal, with the willful old General earning the plaudits of “many contemporary white southerners, elite and non-elite” (4). The merits of Cheathem’s approach are most evident in areas where he has the greatest expertise. His earlier work on Jackson nephew and namesake A. J. Donelson lends considerable authority to this new book’s treatment of the patriarchal Jackson. The Hermitage, we learn in vivid detail, was situated as the central node of a far-flung network of kin ties, local political alliances, and plantation initiatives. This dense social and cultural web of interconnections linked Jackson’s impulsive and often arbitrary political style not simply to his command of the frontier militia but to the world of the Middle Tennessee gentry. Like Wyatt-Brown, Cheathem sees this world of “gentlemanly” honor and hyper-masculine [End Page 510] assertiveness as a regional ideal. More specifically still, this integrated complex of cultural values, perspectives, and imperatives yielded a certain political style that set the slave states apart from the rest of the country. Jackson’s standing with his peers (which at first meant fellow slaveholding gentry but would eventually would encompass all white republican patriarchs entrusted with the franchise) rested on the ways he exercised authority over household white dependents, political subordinates, and the enslaved workers whose labor formed the basis of Jackson’s own considerable (though remarkably precarious) wealth. The greatest challenge of Cheathem’s approach is to show how the “private” Jackson informed the actions of that domineering “political” figure associated since with an entire era of democratic assertiveness. His emphasis on regional traits as a vital link between local and national power is buttressed by citations to Wyatt-Brown, David Hackett Fisher, Kenneth Greenberg, T. H. Breen, and others. Harkening back to this late-twentieth-century scholarly corpus appears fresher than it otherwise might, in that the theme can be revivified by our current tendency to divide political maps (especially those involving presidential politics) between dyed-in-the wool neo-Jacksonian “Red States” and the “Blue State” northern, coastal, and urban enclaves where selective elements of a Whiggish ethos have prevailed as a distinctive cultural style. Jackson’s presidential ambitions and his two-term “Red State” presidency span fully eight of the book’s twenty chapters. This coverage is where Cheathem’s main theme seems strained. What happens in these years was crucial, given the extraordinary influence that Jackson had over the office of the American presidency. His martyrdom as the frustrated “People’s choice” of 1824 de-legitimized John Quincy Adams’s single term; Jackson’s victories in 1828 and 1832 consolidated his appeal so as to put a Van Buren succession in place for 1836; as a political finale, Jackson threw his vital support to Polk in 1844. In his sway over national executive politics, Jackson, and his...

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...

Poe Writing/Writing Poe

Poe Writing/Writing Poe

A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson by Sean Patrick Adams (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson by Sean Patrick Adams Mark R. Cheathem (bio) Keywords Andrew Jackson, Bank War, Politics, Elections A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson. Edited by Sean Patrick Adams. (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Pp. 597. Cloth, $199.95.) [End Page 800] The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Andrew Jackson, from Jon Meacham’s popular biography to Daniel Walker Howe’s and Sean Wilentz’s tomes covering what has commonly been referred to as the Age of Jackson. Editor Sean Patrick Adams and the contributors to this new volume demonstrate conclusively that scholars have much more to say about the seventh president and his times. A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson comprises an introduction and twenty-seven chapters, which are divided into four sections. The first section, “Young Andrew Jackson’s America,” focuses on the frontier/borderlands and U.S.–Indian relations during the late 1700s and early 1800s, as well as Jackson’s participation in the Battle of New Orleans and the consequences of his actions in that city after the battle. The second section, “The Era of the ‘Common Man,’ ” examines economic development, class identity, and racial attitudes during the period. The third section, “Politics in the Age of Jackson,” examines significant events and movements, starting with the origins of the Jacksonian Democrats and ending with a look at the more radical political expressions of the period. The final section, “Jacksonian Legacies,” addresses some of the broader themes of the Jacksonian era, such as immigration, gender, political participation, and Manifest Destiny. Limited space prohibits an assessment of each chapter, so I will address only a few as examples of the volume’s high-quality scholarship. One area that receives significant attention is the Bank War, which Daniel Feller once called in the pages of this journal, “the pivotal issue of the second party system.” Stephen Mihm and Jose R. Torre provide overviews of the national panics of the period and the Bank War itself, highlighting the important recent work undertaken by scholars such as Jane Knodell and Jessica Lepler. Because, as Mihm points out, “the scholarship on the Bank War is inseparable from the larger historiographical debates about the Jacksonian era,” and because of the importance of this period for realizing the benefits and drawbacks of the market revolution, these chapters are essential reading (364).1 The chapters on Jacksonian politics reveal that even in that area, which has been written about extensively, there are still topics that have been understudied. Tom Coens outlines the early Jacksonian movement, [End Page 801] while Sharon Ann Murphy and John M. Sacher ably explore the significance of the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections. While recent books by Donald B. Cole and Lynn Hudson Parsons have added to our understanding of the 1828 election, the mechanics of the political transformation of Jeffersonian Republicans into Jacksonian Democrats (and specifically the role of the 1824 election) is a subject that deserves more attention. One deficiency, Sacher observes, is historians’ failure to connect the actions of John Quincy Adams’s administration to the campaign (295). Jackson’s election was not inevitable, and the “corrupt bargain,” while important, was not the only issue that prompted voters to choose the Tennessean over the incumbent. In his essay, Robert J. Cook notes that no recent treatments of the 1832, 1836, and 1840 elections exist, the study of which would help uncover the actual process of political participation that took place during the 1830s and 1840s, much as Alan Taylor’s work helped explain New York politics in the 1790s (546).2 In a multi-author book this large, factual errors are bound to creep in. Lynn Hudson Parsons is a male historian, not female (263), James K. Polk was commonly known as “Young Hickory,” not “Little Hickory” (321), and the Bank War heated up in 1832, not 1828 (361). Readers might also disagree with some authors’ interpretations. For example, one would be hard pressed to prove that Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., did much of anything to elucidate “the long-term significance” of Jackson’s presidential decisions on the lives of Native...

Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World

Essay collections are notoriously difficult to review. Their strength for readers—diversity of voices and multiple points of analysis—is simultaneously a source of weakness for reviewers. Many essay collections are uneven in quality, unfocused, and maddeningly vague in purpose and scope. Our Lincoln avoids these pitfalls. The essays run the gamut of Abraham Lincoln–related subjects, from Andrew Delbanco and Richard Carwardine's essays examining his religious life to Catherine Clinton's discussion of Lincoln's family and its influence. But taken together all of the essays approach Lincoln from a perspective that might be called critical sympathy. To a greater or lesser extent the authors express a degree of admiration for Lincoln. Sean Wilentz is enamored of Lincoln's commitment to democracy in his essay on the relationship between Lincoln and Jacksonian politics, and James McPherson offers high praise for Lincoln's skills as commander in chief, pointing out that Lincoln “took a more active, hands-on part in shaping military strategy than presidents have done in most other wars” (p. 28). Essays by Harold Holzer and David Blight examining aspects of Lincoln, public art, and the national memory also generally paint Lincoln in a positive light, even while takingissue with what Blight identifies as the “myriad of appropriations, uses, inventions, and reinventions—thefts—of the sixteenth president's meaning and memory” over the decades following his death (p. 269).

Freedom and Progress: The Dilemma of Southern Republican Thought during Radical Reconstruction

The failure of the Republican Party in the South to appeal to the white yeomanry has been a recurring puzzle in the historiography of Reconstruction. Acknowledging the important role of white resistance, racism, and economic depression, this essay instead locates the roots of its failure in its ideology. It argues that the southern Republican appeal to the yeomanry was inherently weakened by yoking together Whiggish appeals of economic development with the class appeals of Jacksonian Democracy. The coupling of these clashing tendencies brought to the surface the latent conflicts of Jacksonian politics in the South, driving still another wedge into the southern Republican coalition.

The Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois

Invention of Party Politics: Federalism, Popular Sovereignty, and Constitutional Development in Jacksonian Illinois. By Gerald Leonard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. x, 328. Cloth, $45.00.)In Invention of Party Politics, Gerald Leonard reinterprets origins of mass party competition by studying Jacksonian Illinois. Taking up a question posed initially by Richard Hofstadter in Idea of a Party System (1969), Leonard asks how mass parties emerged from antipartisan milieu of early national America. question is an important one. After all, mass parties came to dominate nineteenth-century politics, profoundly shaping history of country; and, as Hofstadter observed, they also facilitated operation of government under and established idea of a legitimate opposition.Leonard's explanation for emergence of parties, however, breaks categorically with Hofstadter. Hofstadter contended that a new class of professional politicians spurred rise of modern partisan politics in 182Os and 183Os. Not tethered to strong convictions or to unbending ideologies, these men organized assiduously and accepted idea of permanently competing with an opposition party. By contrast, Leonard argues that emergence of competing mass parties was an unintended consequence of a constitutional reform movement inaugurated by democratic at local and state level. Believing in existence of what they called the democracy, comprising those Americans who advocated political equality, majority rule, and states' rights, and believing that democracy should be sovereign, partyists responded to threat of neo-Hamiltonian loose constructionists, such as John Quincy Adams, by creating a party of democracy to protect federalism and popular sovereignty (5). According to Leonard, partyists paradoxically clung to sentiment because they did not recognize constitutional legitimacy of an aristocratic party, such as defunct Federalists, and they rejected idea that any party could represent a portion of sovereign democracy. Thus party of democracy-soon to be called Democratic Party-was antiparty party of Constitution (46).Antipartyists, unsurprisingly, objected to this justification for party, which seemed to be a hypocritical and unconstitutional assault on framers' attempt to establish a against parties. But antipartyists soon confronted necessity of organizing a party in order to fend off partyists; hence, they haltingly created Whig Party, and so began organized two-party competition. The origins of mass party competition, Leonard explains, thus lay in a battle not so much about social and economic positions for which Democratic and Whig parties are well known, but in a battle over question of party itself and its relationship to Constitution, neither party ever fully accepting constitutional legitimacy of other (14). With this argument, Leonard challenges not only Hofstadter, but also legion of scholars who have located origins of second Party System in social, cultural, or economic issues.Leonard makes his case by tracing how politicians justified expansion of partisan behavior in Illinois from 1817 to 1840. Although this focus may seem narrow, social and economic history of state is largely irrelevant to his argument because he maintains that Jacksonian politics in Illinois was essentially constitutional. While politicians necessarily addressed substantive policy issues, their central focus was the constitutional implications inherent in handling of each issue (117). Thus, to take one example, Leonard does not interpret campaign of 1840 as a debate over partisan economic policy, but rather as a partisan struggle to control historical interpretation of founding and development of American Constitution (176). …

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (review)

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (review)

The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War.

Journal Article The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. By Michael F. Holt. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xx, 1,248 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-19-505544-6.) Get access Michael A. Morrison Michael A. Morrison Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 86, Issue 4, March 2000, Pages 1738–1740, https://doi.org/10.2307/2567592 Published: 01 March 2000