The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861

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The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861

The phrase “Young America” connoted territorial and commercial expansion in the antebellum United States. During the years leading up to the Civil War, it permeated various parts of the Democratic Party, producing new perspectives in the realms of economics, foreign policy, and constitutionalism. Led by figures such as Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and editor John L. O’Sullivan of New York, Young America Democrats gained power during the late 1840s and early 1850s. They challenged a variety of orthodox Jacksonian assumptions, influencing both the nation’s foreign policy and its domestic politics. This is the first book to offer an exclusively political history of Young America’s impact on the Democratic Party, complementing existing studies of the literary and cultural dimensions of this group. This close look at the Young America Democracy sheds light on the political realignments of the 1850s and the coming of the Civil War, in addition to showcasing the origins of America’s longest existing political party. Yonatan Eyal received his A.B. in history from Stanford University and his A.M. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Eyal has been the recipient of the Dissertation Writing Fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History Fellowship, the Richard A. Berenson Graduate Fellowship at Harvard University, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. His articles have been published in Civil War History, American Nineteenth Century History, and the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. This is Eyal’s first book.

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The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861

YONATAN EYAL

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Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521875646 © Yonatan Eyal 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-511-33432-0 ISBN-10 0-511-33432-X eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 ISBN-10

hardback 978-0-521-87564-6 hardback 0-521-87564-1

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For my parents, Hanna and Chaim Eyal

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Spirit of Young America Orthodox Jacksonianism, 1828–1844 Strict Construction and States’ Rights A Proslavery Democracy An Agrarian Democracy An Insular Democracy Reform in Other Hands Trade and Improvements: The Economic Orientation of Young America Democrats Free Trade Internal Improvements Rivers and Harbors Rails, Canals, and a New Commercial Spirit Causes and Explanations Rails and Canals The Independent Treasury New Feelings for the Market: Individual Cases A Broad Spirit of Enterprise Young America Democrats and the Revolutions of 1848 Young America and Young Europe Among the Barricades, in Person and in Spirit The Magnificent Magyar Innocents Abroad

1 17 20 25 28 30 33 36 37 44 55 65 66 69 79 82 89 93 94 98 107 110

A New International Consciousness Reviving Monroe’s Doctrine “Fifty-Four Forty”

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viii Texas and Mexico Pearl of the Antilles Land of the Samurai The Grand Tour

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The Fires of Perfection Revisited Free Land Knowledge and New Institutions A Social Conscience Race and Immigration Investigation and Technology Monopolies and Regulation The Spoils System The Antislavery Democracy Barnburners and Others Colonization, Popular Sovereignty, and Free Soil New Democrats and the Coming of the Civil War A Partisan Glue A Bipartisan Drawstring Conclusion: Lincoln on Young America

Index

127 135 139 141 145 147 150 153 161 165 171 174 183 184 190 202 203 222 229 237

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Acknowledgments

Although New Democrats may have been reluctant to thank those who helped them and came before them, it gives me great pleasure to do so myself. At the top of the list is Professor and Dean (and now President) Drew Gilpin Faust. Drew directed the doctoral dissertation that became this book, providing expert guidance with a human touch. At a critical moment in my graduate career, she took time from her busy schedule to encourage me, offer incisive feedback, and suggest more effective ways of presenting my research. Her uncanny ability to remain rigorous and critical while providing support and building confidence is the hallmark of an ideal mentor. I will always be grateful for her shrewd insight, warm encouragement, and careful engagement with my work. I am also indebted to the two other historians who served on my dissertation committee. James T. Kloppenberg was the first Harvard professor with whom I spoke, and during my graduate school years and after he has remained a constant and indispensable presence in my intellectual life. Harry L. Watson painstakingly read my manuscript, expressing interest in my conclusions and refining my conceptualization of the antebellum Democracy. Since I first met him, Harry has offered valuable feedback on several projects, and I appreciate his rigor and attention to the details. Since my undergraduate days at Stanford, George M. Fredrickson and Jack N. Rakove have served as mentors, friends, and role models. George was the one who first suggested that I explore the Young America phase of Democratic Party development. For the original idea behind this undertaking, and for much else, I remain grateful. David B. Abernethy and Brad S. Gregory both encountered me as a college freshman, and since then have contributed to my growth and self-confidence as a scholar. Michael F. Holt carefully read the entire manuscript and saved me from numerous errors of fact and interpretation. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as “Trade and Improvements: Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party,” Civil War History 51 (September 2005): 245–68. I thank the Kent State University Press for granting ix

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permission for its use, and editors William Blair and Anthony Kaye for their constructive feedback. Various faculty members at Harvard guided me through graduate school, offering help throughout the process of research and writing. They include Professors Sven Beckert, Joyce Chaplin, Lizabeth Cohen, Donald Fleming, Christopher Jones, Michael McCormick, Lisa McGirr, Susan O’Donovan, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Lilian Handlin took time away from her own research schedule to discuss the fascinating life of George Bancroft with me. Staff members Pat Denault, Janet Hatch, Mary McConnell, Arthur Patton-Hock, Cory Paulsen, and Gail Rock made all the logistics run smoothly. At the University of Cincinnati, James Murray ensured that my first academic appointment provided a hospitable work environment, while Mark Lause, Tom Lorman, and John K. Alexander engaged in numerous helpful conversations. For assistance in locating archival sources, I thank Alison Scott and Barbara Burg of the Widener Library at Harvard University. I also appreciate the efforts of the reference staff at the Houghton Library of Harvard University (my favorite place to work), the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. At Cambridge University Press, my editor, Lewis Bateman, expressed early interest in this project and guided it to publication with enthusiasm and skill. Lew’s reputation preceded him, and now I can see why. His assistants Ciara McLaughlin and Monica Finley diligently aided in the process, while Shelby Peak and Regina Paleski saw the manuscript through its final stages. Thanks to Sara Black’s copyediting, the finished product is more readable and polished. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers for the Press, both of whom improved my work significantly. I of course take sole responsibility for any deficiencies remaining. I came to Harvard as a student of Professor William E. Gienapp. Although he passed away during my time there, I like to think that the book I have written bears his mark and would garner his approval. Whether physically present or not, Bill’s attention to detail, passion for excellence, vast knowledge of nineteenth-century American politics, and marvelous wit and humor have infused my work throughout this project. I vividly remember the morning that I proposed this topic to him. He sat, in characteristic fashion, behind his large desk, reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose and arms folded across his chest. After I outlined the idea to which George Fredrickson had first alerted me, he paused for a moment and asked, “Well, did George tell you how long this would take to do?” His approach to scholarship has made a lasting impact on my own, which means that his memory will continue to live as long as I am writing and thinking about history. In coping with the death of Bill Gienapp, I was comforted by the loyalty and generosity of his wife, Erica, and his son, Jonathan. Jonathan has cultivated a precocious historical mind during college, while Erica continues to involve

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herself with her late husband’s students and activities. I thank them both for allowing me to remain connected to the Gienapp family in the face of such trying circumstances. For funding to support my research and writing, I gratefully acknowledge the U.S. Department of Education for a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, the Harvard Center for American Political Studies, and the Harvard University Department of History. These agencies allowed me the luxury of several unfettered years to pursue my interests. When I first visited Cambridge, Bill Gienapp said that I should come to Harvard not just for the faculty, but also to enjoy the company of talented peers. His comment was correct, and I have made some of my best friends while working on this project. The “first tetrarchy” of Daniel Wewers, Justin Florence, and Kevin Blake deserves pride of place. Over the past several years, we have gotten to know each other’s families, traveled together, studied for general examinations, held countless discussions, and otherwise done what close friends do. They have become an integral and greatly appreciated part of my life. Fellow graduate students in nineteenth-century American history have made our field a community. They include Dara Baker, Mike Bernath, Tom Coens, Christine Dee, Jennifer Goloboy, Dan Hamilton, Alison LaCroix, Lisa Laskin, and Chandra Miller Manning. Silvana Siddali and Eva Sheppard Wolf offered their advice about the job market and the dissertation during the past several years, and Silvana alerted me to a number of research leads regarding Young America. Other graduate student friends who have left indelible (and that means positive) impressions on me are George Blaustein, Linzy Brekke, Lauren Brown, Luis Campos, Jennifer Davis, James Fichter, Rebecca Goetz, Kate Grandjean, Kyle Harper, Hal Jones, Judy Kertesz, Andrew Kinney, Philip Mead, Elizabeth Mellyn, Marion Gross Menzin, Margot Minardi, Daniel Sargent, Sara Schwebel, David Smith, Trygve Throntveit, Ken Weisbrode, and Lauren Willig. Alan Gluck spent many a lunchtime discussing my interpretation of the Democratic Party, among other topics, while Christopher Carlsmith provided a faultless model of the academic at work and play. My parents, Hanna and Chaim Eyal, have marched alongside me throughout this academic journey. They have supported me emotionally and financially at every point in my education. When I expressed doubts, my father said, “Trust me – when have I ever been wrong?” I am happy to say that his track record remains unblemished. Without them I would not be writing these words today. To them I dedicate this book with thanks for all they have done throughout my life. My sister, Shiri, kept her own scholarly identity at a healthy distance from the history world. But she has also read some of my work and shared the happiness of my successes. My parents-in-law, Debbie and Irwin Thomashow, welcomed me into their lives like a son. Because of them, my memories of

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writing this book include the sounds of waves crashing on the Maine seashore among the laughter and warmth of family gatherings. Last, though so amazingly far from least, I am eager to acknowledge the love, empathy, and companionship of my wife, Karen. Not only has she shared her linguistic cleverness, analytical insight, and editorial skill, she has been my cheering section and ally. Although I use words to describe the world of nineteenth-century Democrats, the English language fails me when I try to express my love for her.

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Introduction The Spirit of Young America

In 1853, New York writer and lecturer George William Curtis tried to put into words the elusive mindset known as Young America. Curtis attempted to define a concept that had many meanings in the antebellum United States, and in his speech he focused on its spirit of freshness and boldness. “Youth, or Young America, smiles at greatness,” he observed. It confidently expects to exceed and rival in greatness, “the noblest Roman of them all.” It says “well done” to Alexander, and pats Hannibal on the back; it smiles patronizingly on Julius Caesar, and will acknowledge Homer to be a good poet, if you insist upon it; and even admits that, at present, two and two make four. But it is secretly convinced that all these works of antiquity are only partial and incomplete affairs, not to be compared with what can be done in our day, and resolves that the time shall come when two and two shall make five.1

The Young American “prowls about Cuba,” he continued, “seeking how he may devour it, and sends Commodore Perry to Japan, with the very pleasant message that he is the sun, that the moon is his wife, and the earth their heritage.” This assessment only barely exaggerated the quest for novelty that lay at the heart of the Young America ethos.2 Curtis’s contemporaries came to similar conclusions about Young America. The Democratic Review, a partisan journal of polite letters, best encapsulated its ethos through poetry: Wherever Action leaves the past, and brings the future near – Where’er electric progress leaps from customs cloudy sphere – Wherever Thought, like nature, yearly fruits progressive bloom, And where Free-Will, like Christ, escapes all living from earth’s tomb – Oh! there is Young America.3 1 2 3

Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 December 1853, 2. Ibid., 15 December 1853, 2. Democratic Review 31 (July 1852), 87.

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Daring and audacious conduct, a willingness to depart from well-worn customs, a forward-looking desire to embrace the new – these were all attributes of the ideology named Young America. New York Democratic operative Samuel J. Tilden spoke in a Young America vein when he wrote: I believe that the gradual amelioration and culture of our race is in the inevitable order of Providence. I see elements which have been and are preparing our country to act a grander part than any has hitherto done in this great plan. That part is to be wrought out, not by an indolent repose on what our ancestors have ordained for us, but by trials and sacrifices and earnest efforts to solve the great social and civil questions which necessarily arise in the experiences of a nation.4

For Tilden, fulfilling America’s national destiny involved hard work and application. It remained a hard-headed labor of love, not an idle inheritance. The younger generation needed to shoulder its burden. Territorial expansion, an increase in the volume of trade and manufacturing, government involvement in social matters, and assertiveness in foreign policymaking were all new approaches to public affairs that Young Americans wished to introduce. The following pages chronicle the life of a Democratic political faction representing this way of thinking. They document the efforts of a group of politicians, editors, and activists to reshape the nature of the antebellum Democratic Party, making it more progressive and adaptive than was the case during its founding days of the 1820s and 1830s. Moving away from the agrarian roots of Andrew Jackson’s original coalition, Young America Democrats accepted the market revolution, loosened their interpretations of the Constitution, and adopted various reform causes. This book examines the novel doctrines introduced into the Democratic Party by Young America. It highlights the differences between the old Jacksonian Democracy of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, on the one hand, and the New Democracy of leaders such as Stephen Douglas and August Belmont, on the other. Young America’s imprint moved the Democratic organization closer toward the Whig line of thinking, accepting economic growth and American nationalism to a degree that would have seemed alien to many of the party’s founders. During the 1840s and 1850s, the Democracy began to leave behind much of its outmoded ideology of agrarian solidity and republican virtue, coming to terms with market growth, technological invention, entrepreneurial opportunity, and other aspects of what contemporaries considered the modern world. As a friend of Senator Stephen Douglas once characterized this forward-looking faction of the party, the “progressive Democracy” was a group “opposed to cherishing one set of doctrines & one set of office holders generation after generation.” Injection of new blood and new ideas into the party was their goal.5 4

5

Samuel J. Tilden to Mrs. Franklin Chase, 29 November 1850, in John Bigelow, ed., Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, 2 vols. (1908; New York: Books for Libraries, 1971), I, 70. James O’Donnell to Stephen A. Douglas, 29 November 1852, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

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Historians have used the catchphrase “Young America” in several murky contexts, generating confusion about whether the name refers to a faction or a movement, a fad or a rhetorical device, or a general label for the times. The term “Young America” in fact stood for all of these things. It is perhaps most commonly known as the moniker of a group of self-conscious literary nationalists who clustered in New York during the 1830s and 1840s and pledged to create a distinctly American literature. Nationalistic New York intellectuals formed this branch of Young America in the late 1830s. It became an informal literary salon devoted to fostering uniquely American writing and combating rising vulgarity with high culture. Among its leadership stood the publisher Evert Duyckinck and the haughty author Cornelius Mathews, as well as writers William Alfred Jones, Jedediah Auld, and Russell Trevett. Novelists such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne flittered around the circle too, ensuring Young America’s entrance into the literary canon. Together they probed American themes for a native literature, particularly urban life and the frontier. For several years, they published The Arcturus, a literary journal, and ultimately entered the circle surrounding publisher John L. O’Sullivan and his Democratic Review. By 1847, they were again producing their own magazine, the New York Literary World, with Duyckinck as editor.6 Young America thus emerged first and foremost as a slogan denoting a group of writers and editors who wished to distance their country from the pretensions of European fiction and poetry. Circling around its margins were Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Gilmore Simms, lending a national air to what frequently appeared a provincial reading club. This is the Young America best known to literary scholars and many historians. However, as this group’s connections with the Democratic Review suggest, the expression “Young America” was also adopted by a set of politicians, party operatives, and editors within the Democratic Party. And considerable overlap existed between literary and political Young Americans. For example, John O’Sullivan, longtime proprietor of the Democratic Review, published fiction in his magazine and kept in contact with members of both groups. Cultural Young American Evert Duyckinck served as literary editor for the Review, while authors such as Hawthorne occupied Democratic political posts. Still, Young America the Democratic political faction featured leaders and programs of its own, eventually overtaking the literary society in activism and prominence. This is a study of political Young America, the group of progressive Democrats who introduced new policies into the party during the late 1840s and early 1850s. Most scholarship on Young America has examined its literary and intellectual side, providing cultural histories that address politics tangentially or inadequately. For example, the most recent study of Young America erroneously 6

Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1956), 71–117; Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999); Robert E. Riegel, Young America, 1830–1840 (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1949).

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interprets the political wing as a weak dilution of the original literary society. Its primary focus and affinity is for the writers and artists who attempted to establish an indigenous intellectual culture.7 Although historians have written about the Young America Democracy, only one unpublished study of the movement addresses politics head-on, and it remains clouded by dated scholarship and narrow vision. Instead of conceptualizing and explaining this party transformation, it narrates events year by year without providing a satisfying analysis. Scholars have also written articles on political Young America, as well as accounts of people and events that touch on the movement marginally.8 But no one has pursued a systematic analysis of Young America’s impact on the Democratic Party. This book seeks to correct the imbalance, providing the first exclusively political examination of changes within the Democracy.9 In order to understand how 7

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Widmer, Young America. Other scholarship on the literary and cultural history of Young America includes Miller, The Raven and the Whale; John Stafford, The Literary Criticism of Young America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1952); Brady Harrison, “The Young Americans: Emerson, Walker, and the Early Literature of American Empire,” American Studies 40 (Fall 1999): 75–97; Robert E. Spiller, “Emerson’s ‘The Young American,’” Clio 1 (Oct. 1971): 37–41; and William T. Kerrigan, “‘Young America!’ Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843–1861” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Michigan at Ann Arbor, 1997). Kerrigan’s dissertation is an admirable account of Young America’s contributions to literature, politics, and reform. By contrast, I pay exclusive attention to party politics and come to conclusions different from his. Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939). Other sources on political Young America include David B. Danbom, “The Young America Movement,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (June 1974): 294–306; Merle Curti, “Young America,” American Historical Review 32 (Oct. 1926): 34–55; Kerrigan, “Young America”; Robert W. Johannsen, “Young America and the War with Mexico,” in Richard Francaviglia and Douglas Richmond, eds., Dueling Eagles: Reinterpreting the U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–48 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 2000), 155–75; Dale R. Prentiss, “Economic Progress and Social Dissent in Michigan and Mississippi, 1837–1860” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford Univ., 1990); Bradley Jay Cartwright, “Young America: Manifest Destiny and the Rhetoric of Race and Gender, 1837–1855” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of Texas at El Paso, 1999); Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study in Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1977); Jere W. Roberson, “The Memphis Commercial Convention of 1853: Southern Dreams and ‘Young America,’” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 33 (Fall 1974): 279–96; George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 2003); and Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2005), which examines a workingmen’s reform movement that also adopted this label. On the antebellum Democratic Party, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1945); Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001); Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1983; New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1998); Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1948) and The Democratic Machine, 1850–1854 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1923); Michael F. Holt, “The Democratic Party, 1828–1860,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties, I (New York: Chelsea House, 1973); Joel Silbey, A Respectable

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the spirit of Young America challenged Jackson’s coalition, a political narrative centered on issues and campaigns is necessary. Literary Young America remains an important field of investigation, one inevitably entwined with political Young America. Indeed, it would seem impossible to comprehend the latter without giving heed to the former. However, the interpretation presented here is based on the assumption that much other scholarship has explored the literary and cultural dimension of this idea, and that a political history of the antebellum Democracy is needed to redress an historiographical omission. Ultimately, of course, both the cultural and political aspects of Young America are required in order to understand the movement fully. Ralph Waldo Emerson provided the first mention of Young America. In comments delivered to a “Boston Mercantile Association” in February 1844, Emerson hailed the “Young American” as a pioneering figure in national life. He prodded the “Young American” to anticipate the future with openness and ingenuity. He spoke, somewhat uncharacteristically, of the benefits of railroads and steam engines, of foreign immigration and the promise of American technology. The most nationalistic piece of writing in Emerson’s repertoire thus inaugurated the career of a political group that moved far from the sage’s intentions. Later that year Democratic radical George Henry Evans started a newspaper called Young America in order to advance his campaign for the federal distribution of western lands to settlers. In June 1845, New York writer Cornelius Mathews spoke of “Young America” at a New York University address. And, in December 1845, essayist Edwin De Leon employed the words for a commencement address at South Carolina College.10 These orators had no doubt heard of Emerson’s speech, although they were also attracted to the concept of Young America because of developments overseas. During the 1830s, European radicals launched a series of revolts, usually unsuccessful, that culminated in the great revolutions of 1848. Expressing the yearnings of a new generation, the dissidents called themselves “Young Europe.” In 1831, Italian revolutionaries led by Giuseppe Mazzini founded the “Young Italy” movement. Their goals included the unification of the peninsula and the substitution of American-style democracy for monarchy. “Young England,” “Young Ireland,” “Young Germany,” and other variants sprouted up throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Americans such as Emerson, and later Senator Stephen Douglas and editor George Sanders, appropriated this revolutionary language in order to express sympathy for European rebels who hungered for

10

Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–68 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977); James C. N. Paul, Rift in the Democracy (1951; New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1961); William N. Chambers, The Democrats, 1789–1864: A Short History of a Popular Party (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1964); and Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004). Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” The Dial (April 1844): 484–507; Edwin De Leon, The Position and Duties of Young America (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston, 1845); Widmer, Young America, 51, 60–1; Kerrigan, “Young America,” 1–28.

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republics of their own. The coinage of Young America thus began with transatlantic contact, and the movement subsequently strengthened this connection by attempting to aid European republicans during and after the revolts of 1848.11 The Young America label permeated disparate branches of the Democracy at different times and with varying effects. Young America Democrats were those party members who adopted a progressive course on a range of issues during the 1840s and 1850s, who felt comfortable moving away from the orthodoxies of Andrew Jackson’s Democracy and toward the construction of a newer, more flexible organization. In this study, I refer to these forward-looking Democrats as New Democrats, and I use the term “New Democrats” or “New Democracy” interchangeably and synonymously with the phrase “Young America” or “Young America Democrats.” Both concepts refer to the rising generation of party leaders and constituents who stood for change within the organization. New Democrats used the ideology of Young America to reorient the image their party had heretofore represented. They relied on the Young America values of foreign expansion, prodemocracy intervention in other countries, research and innovation, and economic growth to guide their party toward a new synthesis. How cohesive or self-conscious a group were the politicians who comprised Young America? Generational consciousness and unity played a key role in their mobilization, as most of them occupied the same age range and had experienced similar career trajectories during the early national and Jacksonian periods. Senator Stephen Douglas, editor John O’Sullivan, and banker August Belmont were all born in 1813. Chicago notable John Wentworth was born in 1815. Editor and publicist George Sanders and Senator Jesse Bright, in 1812. Florida legislator David Yulee, in 1810. Young party operative Samuel J. Tilden, in 1814. This common age range reinforced the way they thought of themselves as a distinct generation, a cohort unique in having matured after the War of 1812, when a heady spirit of American nationalism displaced the precarious anxiety of the early republic. Thus, it seemed no accident that the Young Americans placed more confidence in assertive policymaking than their elders. Their childhood was one of relative peace and prosperity, when the nation could focus on consolidating its gains rather than hanging on to its existence.12 New Democrats also tended to follow similar life trajectories. They often grew up in established eastern areas or in Europe. Their youth was dominated by trailblazing moves to the American West and subsequent efforts to establish themselves as lawyers, local notables, and then politicians. They reached their peak of political influence during the 1840s and 1850s but more often than not suffered defeat when politics turned overtly sectional in the mid 1850s. They felt displaced and irrelevant during the Civil War and saw their hour of glory as the Young America heyday before the coming of secession. This generation 11 12

For more on Young Europe’s connections with Young America, see Chapter 4. On the common age range of New Democrats, also see Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 54.

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of mid-nineteenth-century Democrats was born around the time of the War of 1812, cut their political teeth on Jacksonian politics, rose to what they called the “full flush of manhood” in the 1840s and 1850s, sometimes enjoyed brief political revivals in the 1860s and 1870s (e.g., Governors William Allen in Ohio and Samuel J. Tilden in New York), and then flickered and died in the 1880s and 1890s. Their actions as New Democrats must be understood in the context of their generational consciousness, particularly the common experiences through which they lived. The War of 1812 and the rise of Jacksonian Democracy served as constant reference points guiding their political lives, as did the Civil War and Reconstruction toward the twilights of their careers. Of course not all members of this generation became New Democrats. Many gravitated toward the Whigs, feeling less anxiety than the Democrats about the exercise of state power and the expansion of the economy. Others maintained the orthodox Jacksonian position on key issues. Those figures who did embrace the spirit of Young America were often captivated by the political ferment in Europe during the 1840s, by the rise of novel technologies and the acquisition of conquered territory, and by the explosion in scale and volume that characterized the Jacksonian economy. Both economics and foreign policy lit up their imaginations, in other words, and prompted them to act more boldly than their fellow Democrats and their Whig opponents. This book will examine these motivations, among them concern for revolution in Europe and the importance of bottom-up demands on politicians from their constituents. To put it plainly, the two most important factors causing certain members of this generation to become New Democrats were, first, the perceived necessity of enhancing federal power for the purpose of foreign prodemocracy intervention, and, second, the calls of constituents upon their leaders to increase the government’s role in promoting economic activity for their own self-interest. Democratic revisionism in the 1840s and 1850s was thus grounded in larger ideological and cultural changes taking place during the late Jacksonian period. The market revolution spread westward quickly, European republicans took up arms to realize their vision of free society, Americans’ penchant for invention and ingenuity generated technological growth, and optimistic schemes for introducing free trade and international communication appeared foolproof. The particular way in which certain Jacksonian Democrats reacted to these broader changes forms the story narrated here. Had there been no Young Americans, the Union and the Democracy would no doubt have developed economically and politically without them. Yet the special form that this maturation took, the unique ways in which New Democrats presented their priorities, makes their history significant. Though not all young statesmen became Young Americans, allusions to youth, purity, and freshness nevertheless filled the correspondence and public discourse of many Democrats. Taken together, this generational rhetoric underscores the age-sensitive awareness that cemented a network of politicians into a young Democracy, a New Democracy, a Young America Democracy. Democrats (and others) writing to New York attorney and assemblyman Samuel

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J. Tilden spoke of a “Young Democracy” in the 1840s, for instance.13 When Ohioans convened to frame a new constitution in 1851, they explicitly called for a “Young Men’s Convention,” reasoning that the new generation would have to live with their handiwork. The “Young Democracy” was a rallying cry first sounded during James K. Polk’s presidential campaign of 1844, and during the next ten years a variety of sometimes-conflicting Democratic groups used it to draw attention to their causes.14 When William Allen became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1845, his constituents observed that he occupied “an enviable position Regarded universally as the Leader of the young Democracy of the Nation. The older portion of the Party are compelled to acknowledge your fitness for that post, and even for any so high as the people can hereafter confer.” Allen remained the youngest senator in both sessions of Congress in which he served and was applauded for obtaining the “greatest [honor] conferred on one so young.” Supporters calling themselves “young Democrats” continued to write to him throughout his time in Washington.15 Allen’s constituents were not the only ones highlighting youth. Complaining of old Democratic Party regulars, publisher John O’Sullivan editorialized: Such a class are very liable to become not less hostile to all progressive improvement, to all further development, and practical application of democratic reform, than the most conservative bigots of the opposite school of politics [the Whigs]. . . . They become the most bitter in the persecution of those from whose unseasonable agitation of such topics they apprehend a disturbance of that calm and consolidated party ascendancy of which they are reaping, or hoping to reap, all the fruits of personal aggrandizement. They gradually crust themselves over the party, with an influence upon it paralyzing to all the generous simplicity, fervor, and truth, natural to democratic principles, until at last they ruin by corrupting it, and eventually, after the lapse of a greater or less term of years, the healthy vitality of the main body itself is roused from its long lethargy – its gallant and unsophisticated youth come forward on the stage, and take up and carry on the great mission of the party, which is that of unresting democratic reform – the old skin sloughs gradually off, and it comes forth in all the young vigor of its rejuvenescence – and lo, if you presently look abroad, you will find the greater portion of these old “party leaders,” once so loud, so zealous, and so radical in their day, arrayed on the side of the old permanent aristocratic opposition to all democratic movement.16 13

14 15

16

William Allen Butler to Samuel J. Tilden, 7 January 1845, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library; J. Boorman to Samuel J. Tilden, et al., 28 March 1846, ibid.; James J. Roosevelt to Samuel J. Tilden, 1 April 1846, ibid. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 6 January 1851, 2, 3. Henry A. Whitman to William Allen, 28 April 1845, 14 December 1845, William Allen Papers; J. R. Meredith to William Allen, 24 February 1846, ibid. Ironically enough, during Allen’s later political career as governor of Ohio and Democratic presidential contender in the 1870s, questions emerged about his age and competence for office. The ineluctable fate of a Young American was one day to become its antithesis, an Old Fogy. See the clipping attached to a letter from C. H. Sargent to William Allen, 21 May 1875, ibid., and Reginald C. McGrane, William Allen: A Study in Western Democracy (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1925), 198–9. Democratic Review 6 (Nov. 1839), 439–40.

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Written in 1839, O’Sullivan’s article threw down the gauntlet on behalf of his generation of Democratic upstarts. So sharp did Democrats’ generational cleavage become by the election of 1852 that Whigs publicly sympathized with the older group of politicians. “If we can thus confer a favor on the veterans of the opposition,” waxed a Whig journal, “and manifest the tender and respectful sympathy which we feel for them, we shall consider ourselves truly fortunate in finding so easy a method of benevolence.” Even though they despised the principles of Democracy, they still respected the “prominent members of that party.” As Richard Hofstadter noted, the idea of legitimate opposition in American politics reached maturity by the 1840s. Whigs saw their perennial contests with Democrats as part of an established pattern with accepted customs and procedures. And they expressed dismay when these routines collapsed at the hands of an erratic youth movement that could eventually derail American politics beyond the Democracy alone.17 Generational self-consciousness thus remained the crucial unifier of Young America Democrats. A keen sense of their generation’s responsibility to reform the Democracy and the Union prompted their heterodoxy on standard Democratic policy. Few other ties bound New Democrats together as closely as age, since coalitional affiliation was transitory and many New Democrats endorsed one part of Young America’s program but not another. New Democrats’ group consciousness, to be sure, was not as strong as some competing affiliations. At critical moments, one’s home state, factional loyalty, and commitment to a particular pet policy could trump concerted Young American action. This is one of the reasons why historians have shied away from full-scale analysis of political Young America: its self-consciousness and cohesion were not so tight as to define a formal movement or even a faction, though they became strong enough to suggest a presence, a temper, a subtle inkling of change in sensibility. More than a faction but less than a movement, as George Fredrickson has described it, Young America functioned as an idea with diverse adherents at any given time. It operated fluidly, not rigidly, and this illusoriness accounts for the dearth of historical writing on New Democracy.18 A lax generational consciousness that swept up certain members of the antebellum Democracy, 17

18

American Whig Review 15 (April 1852), 311, 316; Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1760–1840 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969). George M. Fredrickson, personal communication with the author. George Forgie argues that the cohort that came of age between the 1820s and 1860s revolted against their Revolutionary-era fathers in attempting to establish their own place in national history. Oppressively filiopietistic, midcentury American culture seemed ill-suited to the forward-going spirit of Young America, and a new generation felt the need to light their own path. New Democrats, however, revolted from the Jacksonian generation, not the Revolutionary Founding Fathers. Forgie, in effect, misses a generation. He argues that Young America dissented from Washington, Madison, and Hamilton. In fact, they revered this generation, and took exception to Jackson, Cass, Marcy, and Taney. It was this middle group that constituted the fathers needing displacement. See Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided, 89–158. Also see Widmer, Young America, 21, 57, on this question.

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Young America offered a new departure for party members who outgrew their fears of a maturing republic.19 Loosely united by a generational affiliation, New Democrats referred to themselves as “young Democrats,” “progressive Democrats,” or simply as “Young America.” Periodicals and personal correspondence fostered their connectedness, bringing together Democrats from various parts of the party and the country to support the forward-looking ideology of Young America. The Democratic Review served as a clearinghouse for New Democratic writers and ideas, as editors John O’Sullivan and George Sanders attracted most of the younger party leaders who believed the organization needed to change. In addition, party newspapers cited throughout this study featured Young American proposals, not to mention the speeches and political rallies where most nineteenth-century Americans received their public information. The central facilitator of New Democratic mobilization, however, remained private correspondence. The importance of letter writing was twofold: it knit together a national Democratic leadership based on the values of Young America, and it also connected constituents with their representatives. This bottom-up pressure, as noted elsewhere, proved instrumental in the rise of a New Democracy. Despite a recurring generational consciousness, the “fuzzy boundaries” of Young America present a tricky and elusive issue. Certainly not all members of the War of 1812 cohort became Democrats, and even fewer presented a fresh political outlook during the 1840s. On crucial issues discussed later, some older members of the party, such as Lewis Cass and Thomas Hart Benton, joined the New Democratic call for change. And on several questions, the younger members of the party did not fall into lockstep. For this reason, readers should not interpret the idea of a New Democracy as a formal movement, a congressional voting bloc, or even as one intellectual circle. The understandable tendency is to try to pigeonhole the Young Americans into a label such as “movement” or “faction.” To the contrary, the mobilization discussed in this book was far more ephemeral, inconsistent, and fleeting. The New Democracy represented not so much a coherent group as a chorus of voices from various quarters collectively calling for policy change and partisan reorientation. The phrase “Young America” penetrated a factionally and regionally diverse coterie of Democrats who often acted in contradictory ways. The fact that contemporaries referred to themselves in this generational language, however, confirms the presence of a Young American identity in the antebellum United States. Although this identity remains more unclear or inchoate than we as scholars would like, this group of loosely knit individuals together produced an important effect on the Democratic and Republican parties of the Civil War era. Most New Democrats joined the party during the Jacksonian ascendancy of the 1830s. Attracted to its strict construction constitutionalism and its agrarian 19

Sean Wilentz writes that “Young America won support from a diverse collection of northern Radicals, Hunkers, and Calhounites.” See Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 564.

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economic approach, they fought the explicit hierarchicalism of the Whigs. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, as their communities developed and as the United States entered a new era of international involvement, they began to jettison some of the ideological baggage they had acquired upon joining the coalition years earlier. They loosened their constricted views of the federal government’s constitutional authority and embraced a more welcoming attitude toward commerce, reform, and internationalism. Though they moved closer to the Whig line of thinking in this respect, they nevertheless remained within the Democracy (at least until the mid 1850s) because they agreed with its policies on related issues. Banker August Belmont, for example, would never join the Whigs no matter how economically progressive he became. He remained devoted to helping European revolutionaries and immigrants, and these priorities stayed close to the collective Democratic heart. In short, most New Democrats were longtime members of their party, their introduction of new Young America issues represented an internal evolution of ideas within the organization, and they stayed within the party because they agreed strongly with one policy or another that Democrats retained. A group of New Democrats highly conscious of their youth determined to change the party from within, making it more modern and adaptable while maintaining its basic constituency and electoral achievement. The spirit of Young America infused Democrats north and south, producing a bisectional alliance that knit the party together during times of sectional turmoil. Although most New Democrats hailed from the North, southerners who spoke for the movement became an immensely significant lot. Indeed, editor George Sanders, President James K. Polk, diplomat Pierre Soul´e, soldierstatesman John Quitman, and Senator Robert J. Walker stood at the heart of the young Democracy, deeply committed to its programs and visions. Young America’s priorities could often turn sectional, as in the case of the bid to acquire Cuba as slave territory. Yet during most of the period of New Democratic dominance, their proposals assumed a broad nationalistic air that brought the party together rather than tearing it apart. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, New Democrats did not succeed at a complete takeover of the party, and they remained a minority within the organization. The best that might be said is that they introduced a fresh agenda into a plodding organization, confusing two-party politics and diversifying the range of options within the Democracy. They did enjoy notable triumphs between 1844 and 1854, the decade of their greatest power and reputation. Responsible for the mindset of Manifest Destiny, they completed an unprecedented expansion of American territorial boundaries. Eager to realize the benefits of the market revolution, they pushed state and federal governments to appropriate funds for local improvement projects. At the same time, they failed in their trademark crusade to “liberate” Cuba and much of Europe, and in their dreamy hope that American nationalism could eviscerate sectional tensions. Proposals that aimed to unify the country too often divided it by region. Their major success, however, lay in making the antebellum Democracy a more progressive

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organization, and in paving the way for the early Republican Party. They provided a new set of alternatives for those who desired growth, prosperity, and a place in the sun for the United States. Rising Democrats first deployed the slogan “young Democracy” during the presidential canvass of 1844. James K. Polk was in many ways one of them, though he stymied their plans for internal improvements. By 1854, when Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act marked the transition from nationalistic to sectional politics, the Young America moment had passed. During those ten years, however, New Democrats made their case for a more active government, assertive overseas involvement, investment in local infrastructure, and reform of basic American practices (including slavery). If the period 1828 to 1844 represented the dominance of the Jacksonian founders and elders, the decade 1844 to 1854 witnessed the rise of a New Democracy, and the years 1854 to 1861 saw the decline of Young America and the eruption of sectional crisis. This study portrays antebellum Democrats as progressive and forward-looking. Contrary to the recurrent stereotype of the Democrats as racists and imperialists – as Mexican conquerors, Indian removers, and slaveholders – alternative traditions did exist within the Democratic Party of the 1840s and 1850s. Young America highlights this neglected side of the Democracy. On the whole Democrats remained imperialistic and militaristic, although a study of Young America complicates the meaning of these labels and suggests intraparty dialogue over these policies. I argue that New Democrats came to accept the market revolution and its need for internal improvements. This led them to loosen the strict constitutional interpretation that previously occluded federal involvement in such initiatives. They also lusted for international prominence, again projecting a vision of a more active federal state. They undertook a variety of social reform campaigns, nurtured an antislavery tradition within their own organization, and fostered technological investigation and the spirit of free enterprise. All of these ventures required increased federal oversight and activity. One of the greatest contributions of New Democrats, and a key theme of this study, therefore, is the expansion of what Democrats considered legitimate federal authority during the era of young Democracy between 1844 and 1854. In addition, this book will show that New Democrats anticipated some of the policies of the Civil War period, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive era. Rather than merely harking back to Jeffersonian republicanism and the Western classical tradition, antebellum Democrats also looked ahead to the postbellum years, when a stronger federal government unwittingly implemented many of the visions they had promoted several decades earlier. These ideas included direct taxation, federal distribution of western lands, governmentfunded scientific investigation and exploration, and – more controversially – naval imperialism. When liberal reformers of the Gilded Age and Progressive bureaucrats of the early twentieth century proposed various reform measures, they unknowingly and unconsciously borrowed much from the spirit of Young

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American Democracy. However, such ideas were contemporary to the 1840s and 1850s regardless of what came after, so this argument should not be seen as teleological. In addition to embracing proposals that played prominent roles later on in American history, New Democrats also smoothed the way for the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Their support for a more activist federal state both domestically and internationally, along with their vision of economic growth and their social reform agenda, operated as stepping-stones between the antebellum Democracy and the Republican Party. The Young America Democracy served as a “half-way” house between older agrarian Democratic ideas and the new nationalist spirit of the Republicans. New Democrats thus affected the agenda of the early Republican Party as well as the orientation of their own organization. The fact that several prominent Young Americans became Republicans during the 1850s makes this link tangible. Throughout the following chapters readers will encounter a set of mostly recurring characters: politicians, editors, and party organizers, as well as the constituents and ordinary voters they represented. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois served as the figurehead of New Democracy, embodying in his twitchy personality the restive boldness of Young America. His lieutenants George Sanders, a Democratic editor and organizer from Kentucky, and August Belmont, a German-born banker and party chairman, joined his call for an updated Democracy. Yet even before Douglas rose to fame in the early 1850s, New Democrats in Washington were beginning to reorient their party. President James K. Polk pursued the Young America projects of expansion and free trade with monomaniacal zeal, while his Navy secretary-turned-diplomat George Bancroft advanced Young America’s mission abroad. Several years later, President Franklin Pierce exhibited a similar attraction to Young America, selecting a large portion of his diplomatic corps from the ranks of New Democracy. Samuel J. Tilden, a young Democratic operative from New York, labored tirelessly to convince his colleagues of the need for new policies in a new era. Robert F. Stockton, a Navy commodore elected to Congress, spoke for New Democratic values in the Senate, where a panoply of allies including Pierre Soul´e of Louisiana, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi, William Allen of Ohio, David Yulee of Florida, James Shields and Sidney Breese of Illinois, and Edward Hannegan and Jesse Bright of Indiana all united with him. In the House served Young Americans William A. Richardson of Illinois, a close advisor to Douglas; John Wentworth, future Republican organizer and mayor of Chicago; and William Corry of Ohio, a socialist writer. Among the editors stood James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, John O’Sullivan of the Democratic Review, and the changing group of publicists who worked for such journals as the Illinois State Register, the Ohio Statesman, and the Washington Union. In addition to this central cast of characters, other important Democrats or sympathizers make passing appearances, depending on the issue and the timeline. Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, western explorer and columnist Jane

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Cazneau, the president’s son John Van Buren, Congressman David Wilmot, and Mississippi Governor John A. Quitman all played a part in the New Democracy at one time or another. So did New York steamship executive George Law, Ohio editor Samuel Medary, Wisconsin senator Isaac P. Walker, and Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Marcus Morton. The following chapters introduce the major characters gradually, providing biographical information that locates them within the context of antebellum America, the Democratic Party, and the Young America movement. An important qualifier bears mention at the outset. Some of the historical figures mentioned here, and others whom readers will encounter in the text, make only passing appearances. This is because there were a number of Democrats who only endorsed one or another aspect of the Young America program, at times even opposing a different part of the progressive Democratic agenda. Only a few of the figures discussed in these pages supported the entire New Democratic program without reservation. Indeed, the transition from old to New Democracy, from orthodox Jacksonianism to Young America, was fraught with controversy. Young America was a label that permeated various parts of the organization, and often in an inconsistent or self-contradictory manner. Very few individuals represented all of the traits and refashioned policy stances characteristic of the New Democracy. Some New Democrats lurched forward on slavery, while remaining traditional on economic issues (e.g., New York’s Barnburner faction and Free Soilers nationwide, including David Wilmot). Others toed a progressive line on commerce but seemed willing to remain southern sympathizers and accede to proslavery demands (e.g., the Hunker Democratic factions of many states and the more conservative, oftenmercantile constituency they represented). There were some New Democrats who moved the party forward with respect to foreign intervention (e.g., filibuster John Quitman), but who in the final analysis proved weak in their commitment to the Union. Others, conversely, opposed secession and were less insistent on an assertive foreign policy, but chose as their concern commercial development and the opening of new markets. Some focused their international energies on the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, while others tried to annex all of Mexico and promoted southern plans for a Caribbean slave empire. In short, there were many New Democrats, all representing a variety of different positions, and all moving the party and the country toward a more modern, forward-looking orientation in their own way. The New Democracy must be understood as the sum of its parts, not as a fully organized and coherent movement per se. The relevant question is: how did this fertile mix of new, but sometimes contradictory, positions and ideologies alter the basic character of the party and the country from 1844 to 1854? How did this transformation shape the political realignments of the 1850s, the rise of the Republican Party, and the coming of the Civil War? Young America was a loose form of generational consciousness that affected Democrats of many different stripes: northerners, southerners, westerners, Barnburners, “soft” and “hard” Hunkers, “fire-eaters,” and filibusters. I argue

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that this affiliation, which trumped so many established sectional and factional categories, kept the Democracy united longer than it otherwise would have been. The understudied party consensus of Young America united a broad mix of Democrats for much of the late antebellum period. The book is organized topically and thematically, with each chapter focusing on a particular policy or ideology championed by Young America Democrats. Chapter 1 identifies the fundamentals of traditional Jacksonian Democracy, highlighting positions about which Young Americans felt special concern. It covers the years between 1828 and 1844, when the founders of the Democracy held sway in party councils and when Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren loomed as symbols of the organization. Chapters 2 and 3 address the revamped economic outlook sponsored by Young America Democrats. They show how bottom-up pressure from Democratic constituents on their national representatives created a push for federally funded internal improvements, for a stronger central government, and for free trade and market growth. Chapter 2 concentrates on internal improvements, free trade, and rivers and harbors appropriations, whereas Chapter 3 examines railroads, foreign economic policy, the Independent Treasury, and other expressions of a new economic worldview. Chapter 4 moves the scene to Europe, where the revolutionaries of 1848 enlisted Young American support in their efforts to resist monarchy and absolutism. Chapter 5 branches out from the Continent to discuss more broadly the assertive internationalism practiced by New Democratic leaders, from the North American West to imperial Japan. Chapter 6 explores the social conscience and professionalizing ethic of New Democrats: the way they embraced an array of reform causes spanning civil service, taxation, governmental reorganization, and immigration and race relations. It illustrates the fact that reform could operate within the Democratic tradition, not just in Whig, evangelical, or third-party settings. Antislavery became the most well known and controversial of reforms, and varieties of Democratic antislavery form the subject of Chapter 7. Free Soilers, colonizationists, and other types of antislavery activists all found a home within the New Democracy, belying the party stereotype of southern appeasement and virulent defense of slavery. Finally, Chapter 8 explains the relationship of the New Democracy to the sectional politics of the 1850s and the outbreak of the Civil War. It shows how Young Americans unified the Democratic Party for many years before secession and then explains how New Democrats contributed to the partisan reshufflings of the last antebellum decade. A Conclusion analyzes Abraham Lincoln’s retrospective of Young America from 1859, isolates the causes of its decline and fall, and connects its tenets and agents to the oncoming tide of civil war and beyond. Together, these chapters demonstrate the subtle movement from old to New Democracy, from orthodox Jacksonian ideology to the refurbished orientation of Young America. By shining a spotlight on the political side of Young America, the progressive members of the Democratic Party who tried to reshape what it meant

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to be a Democrat in the 1840s and 1850s, we can better discern the transition from an infant American republic to a bustling industrial democracy. For Young America, or New Democracy, constitutes the neglected middle link of the antebellum era – the critical moment when Jackson’s Democracy gave way to that of Stephen Douglas and August Belmont, George Bancroft and James K. Polk. This “young Democracy” came to power with a different set of experiences and expectations than their forebears; they knew a nation at peace for decades, and believed it ripe for new responsibilities and adventures. Never did they anticipate that ending slavery and reuniting the Union, not grabbing more land and accruing wealth, would turn out to be the central tasks of their generation.

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1 Orthodox Jacksonianism, 1828–1844

“Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none.” “The best government is that which governs least.” – Democratic slogans

Americans like to think they never experienced a true revolution, in the socially transformative, European sense of the word. As a substitute for this void, they apply the term to numerous events in their history. One of the first instances came when Thomas Jefferson won election to the presidency in the “revolution of 1800.” Jefferson had long valued upheaval, most recently of the French variety, although in this case the transition in question remained peaceful. Unseating the Federalist ascendancy of John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson brought to the executive department of the central government a wholly different worldview. Hamilton and the Federalist Party cherished a “loose” construction of the U.S. Constitution, one that inflated the powers of the federal government in order to meet the needs of a growing republic. Jefferson and his followers played watchdogs, insisting that a restrictive interpretation of the charter would maintain economical government and prevent the growth of despotism, or what they called “consolidation.” Federalists envisioned national growth within limited territorial bounds, as infrastructure such as roads created a vibrant national economy. Jefferson instead conjured a sprawling “empire of liberty” that would accrue land for the virtuous farmers whom he considered the salt of the earth. Federalists saw the benefits of governmental alliance with a monied aristocracy, since wealth invested in national coffers stood to benefit the entire polity. Jeffersonians distrusted unhealthy cabals between the twin aristocracies of wealth and power. Federalists remained Anglophiles, lionizing the prudent constitutional monarchy of the motherland, while Jefferson’s Republican Party revered France and its forthright watering of liberty’s tree. In these and other ways, the diverging parties and personalities of the 1790s clashed. By winning the presidency in 1800, Jefferson brought to power the Republicans’ distinctive 17

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set of ideologies and assumptions, premises that would lead to the maintenance of state sovereignty, a limited and unthreatening federal government, expansive land acquisitions to keep the republic a community of farmers, and an egalitarian vision that tolerated no “unnatural” elites. Given the polarized perspectives of Federalists and Republicans, Jefferson’s election indeed seemed a revolution.1 But even Jefferson and James Madison, stalwarts of this “country” or “republican” political heritage, could not see how far their revolution would stretch. For the election of 1800 signaled not just the elevation of an opposition party to power, but the beginning of a long period of Jeffersonian dominance. Adherents of Federalist-style politics would not enter the White House again until 1825, when John Quincy Adams became president. Even then, control quickly returned to followers of the Jeffersonian persuasion, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren after 1828. And Democrats – the party representing the Jeffersonian ethos after the 1820s – dominated Congress and the White House consistently until 1861. Jefferson’s revolution of 1800, in short, marked the beginning of more than a half-century of political control by disciples of his and Madison’s vision of limited government. Most revolutions, certainly those in Jefferson’s treasured Paris, never lasted so long. Between 1800 and 1828, the tenets of Jefferson’s worldview found expression in national policy. The territorial size of the country mushroomed, the Federalists’ English friends fought another war against the United States, and supporters of Hamilton’s policies of centralization and institutional power remained on the defensive. Exceptions evolved, to be sure: Congressman Henry Clay of Kentucky launched his “American System” of government-funded transportation improvements and proindustrial policies in 1816; Chief Justice John Marshall pioneered a legal code to protect free enterprise and economic growth; and the new Whig Party, formed as an antidote to Jackson in 1833, posed an increasingly formidable challenge to the overall hegemony of Jeffersonian ideals.2 Yet, on the whole, the trajectory of development laid down by Jefferson and furthered by Andrew Jackson carried the day. This Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition aimed to keep the United States a loose confederation of state governments that jealously guarded rights they reserved to themselves. Punctuating this period of broad Democratic control was a subtle change in party belief.3 Historians of Jacksonian and Civil War America have overlooked 1

2

3

See Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), and Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000). John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001); Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977); Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). In this chapter, I use the terms “Jacksonian,” “Democratic,” “Democracy,” “Jeffersonian,” and “Jeffersonian-Jacksonian” interchangeably to refer to the set of political ideals favored by

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this organizational transformation, despite its ability to explain much about the foundering of the Democracy and the coming of civil war. Beginning in the mid 1840s, a group of young Democratic politicians, reformers, and editors gradually reoriented some of the fundamental principles of the Democratic Party, and hence of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition that held sway since the revolution of 1800. They made a defensive, agrarian, small-government party into a forward-looking, market-oriented, internationally conscious organization ready to fight the economic battles of the new age of steam and railroads. This New Democracy dissented from the classic viewpoints attributed to Jefferson, Jackson, and the officeholders surrounding them. It ushered in a more progressive, open-minded, and reformist ideology by the late 1840s and early 1850s. But before exploring this transition from old to New Democracy, one must have a clear sense of the baseline ideology from which the new generation departed. What exactly was the orthodox Jacksonian position that Young America Democrats did so much to qualify, if not overturn? Nailing down precisely what I mean by “orthodox Jacksonianism” is important because of the historiographic controversy surrounding the concept. Historians have sparred over the question of what core idea formed the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian mindset. While some have heeded the traditional perspective that sees Jacksonianism as an agrarian, states’ rights ideology, others have suggested that Old Hickory’s legacy was in fact more complicated, with progressive strains that did not eschew economic development to the extent once assumed.4 Overall, the Jacksonian ideology around which Democrats rallied after 1828 was built on limited-government beliefs stretching back to Jefferson and the Revolution. One can find numerous exceptions to this simple statement, including Jackson’s defense of the protective tariff during the nullification crisis of 1832–3, or the existence of probanking Democrats during the 1830s. Nevertheless, the Jacksonian worldview was influenced by a basic “country” tradition that prized farming and artisanal production as the virtuous backbones of republican society. However qualified, Jacksonianism featured several articles of faith that fed this way of thinking. It was this older worldview, chronicled in this chapter, that New Democrats challenged beginning in the mid 1840s. Perhaps the best formulation is to say that the Democratic Party always featured

4

Jefferson and furthered by Jackson during the first half of the nineteenth century. Although important differences between Jefferson and Jackson developed (to say nothing of Jefferson and Madison), the party ideologies they propounded appear similar enough to lump together for the purposes of the argument presented here. Richard Hofstadter, “Andrew Jackson and the Rise of Liberal Capitalism,” in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1948); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984); Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978); McCoy, Elusive Republic; Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1960); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1945); Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991).

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competing strands of thought, and that the more progressive wing won out at midcentury.5 Indeed, as Sean Wilentz notes of the Jacksonian coalition of the 1830s, “Radical Democrats were pitted against Bank Democrats. The future of both democracy and Jackson’s Democracy would depend on which of these two wings of the party would gain ascendancy in the North.” It is the thesis of this work that more progressive Democrats overtook the traditionalists on a variety of issues after the 1840s.6

Strict Construction and States’ Rights In order to understand the suspicious and decentralizing proclivities of old Democrats, one must turn back to the republican ideology of the American Revolution, which in turn owed much to the neoclassicism of the Italian Renaissance and the civic spirit of the ancient Mediterranean.7 British colonists who sought to dismember the empire fought for a set of quintessentially English beliefs about individual liberties and the encroachments of government. These values were truly English because their most famous deployments until 1776 came during the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of the seventeenth century.8 English writers on these subjects held that the aggrandizement of power by government inherently threatened popular freedoms, and that the necessarily endless task of republics was to remain vigilant against institutional conspiracies that duped the people. Citizens of a republic, especially if they worked as producers, bore an inner sense of civic obligation, a commitment to the common good over private interest that came to be known as “virtue.” Only a virtuous people could govern themselves; otherwise petty selfishness and factional interest would pull society apart, as had occurred with the Roman republic in the first century b.c.e. So republican ideology taught its adherents 5

6 7

8

Lawrence Kohl defines this tension by observing that “the fruits of individualistic striving were too attractive [for Democrats] to resist entirely, but they longed for the spontaneity and personal warmth they were leaving behind.” See Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 15. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 423. Also see Wilentz’s penetrating overview of Jacksonian ideology on pages 507–18. Standard sources on classical American republicanism include Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1969), especially Chapter II; and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). On historiographical applications of the concept, see Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 11–38, and James T. Kloppenberg, “Premature Requiem: Republicanism in American History,” in The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 59–70. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988).

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to remain skeptical of central institutions that accrued power conspiratorially and against the citizenry, as well as to cherish the personal goodness that made a people worthy of holding political rights in the first place. Republican ideology also cautioned against luxury and decadence, which could lead to the decay of virtue and an upsurge in corruption. Smothered by power or material things, a citizen risked losing the public-spiritedness that ensured he would act for the country as a whole. Enlightenment, purity, and virtue would then give way to rot and decay. The corrupted citizen would turn into a demagogue, appealing to mass passions in an effort to become a dictator. Hence a republic could easily pass into tyranny or oligarchy given the corruption of its people. The examples of ancient Rome and modern France confirmed the veracity of this dire prophecy for Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For this reason, constant vigilance, steady suspicion of the machinations of government – what, at the extreme, Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in American politics – infected the young United States.9 The price, degeneration into monarchy or anarchy, seemed too great to pay. Thus, even before the foundation of an independent United States, coloniststurned-revolutionaries inherited a defensive mindset that saw government as a necessary evil. Yet, in the period 1776–87, not all Americans prepared for these dangers with equal intensity. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton led the drive for a more centralized, nationalist form of government that addressed deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation (the plan of government in place since 1781). Through the “critical period” of the 1780s, the need for a stronger federal state became sorely apparent, leading to the Philadelphia convention of 1787 and the framing of the U.S. Constitution.10 Federalists, the group that endorsed the new instrument and desired a tighter unification of the 13 states, battled with anti-Federalists, who often if not always objected to the proposed Constitution on the republican grounds that it reposed too much power in the new central government. Following ratification, the Federalist and Jeffersonian Republican Parties of the 1790s inherited these two opinions, transforming the ratification struggle into competing views of how to implement the new Constitution. The first major test of constitutional interpretation came in 1798, when John Adams’s Federalist administration passed laws punishing open criticism of the government. These Alien and Sedition Acts were intended to quash the carping of Republican editors who objected, among other things, to Adams’s war against France that year. Devotees of Jefferson and Madison, sensing a conspiracy against their liberties, took matters into their own hands. The two sages wrote resolutions, passed by the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia, protesting the sedition laws and claiming that the states retained the right of 9 10

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 391–467.

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interposing against, or nullifying, federal law for their own protection. The year 1798 thus saw the firmest deployment of republican, strict construction principles since the Revolution itself, for the Jeffersonian manifestoes effectively threatened secession. Although Federalists usually spoke for loose and Republicans for strict construction of the Constitution, events sometimes inverted the pattern. For example, President Jefferson faced criticism for purchasing Louisiana from France in 1803. Hecklers charged that he failed to establish the constitutionality of annexation by the chief executive, and that his usurpation threatened dangerously to increase the powers of the federal government. Now Jefferson, the hero of 1798, stood on the antirepublican ground of “consolidation.” Similarly, during the War of 1812, Federalists became secessionists when they met in convention in 1814. New Englanders for several years had been chafing against Jefferson’s embargo – and Madison’s war – on Britain. These policies ruined their lifeblood shipping industry, and toward the end of the war a group of Federalists threatened the secession of New England. In this case, Federalists and not Jeffersonians occupied the ground of strict construction. These reversed positions, atypical as they are, show that parties and politicians did not act consistently. As mentioned previously, exceptions to usual patterns abound. Overall, however, exponents of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition cried foul at the expansion of federal authority, while Federalists and their eventual Whig successors took the opposite tack. After the conclusion of the war in 1815, Americans of the Jacksonian generation faced the same questions of federal versus state authority. A series of Supreme Court cases decided by Chief Justice John Marshall fired the opening shots of the era’s battles. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), Marshall invalidated an attempted state takeover of a private institution. He thereby upheld federal authority to enforce contracts against the actions of a state regime. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Marshall pronounced the Second Bank of the United States, a federal creation, constitutional. Jeffersonians and Jacksonians objected to the Bank as a dangerous expansion of federal authority, as an institution that benefited its wealthy stockholders, and as a threat to the independence of America’s virtuous laborers. The Bank extended credit and created opportunity, but it also called in loans and contracted the currency to the ruin of many hard-working Americans. The Panic of 1819, when a postwar speculation and land boom came crashing down, set the nefarious pattern. Marshall ruled that Congress did not exceed its authority by chartering the Bank. Jacksonian agrarians disagreed, as their successful war against the “Monster Bank” of the 1830s demonstrated. If Marshall and the Hamiltonians (now called the National Republicans) threw down the gauntlet, so did the Jacksonians (called the Democratic Republicans, and soon just the Democrats). After the War of 1812, a new generation of Jeffersonian Republicans adopted policies at odds with the earlier stances of their party. Led by House Speaker Henry Clay, they wished to link the nation together and tap its productive capacity. They chartered a new national bank, imposed tariff duties to protect domestic manufactures, and appropriated

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congressional funds for improvements such as roads and canals. This transition from traditional to New Jeffersonianism bears some resemblance to the later growth of New as opposed to old Democracy. In both cases, a rising generation saw the need for amending the orthodoxy of their political fathers. Party veterans who grew up with the principles of 1798 felt disappointed by the course of this new cohort. Known as Old Republicans, they demanded a return to the stark decentralizing convictions espoused by Jeffersonians in the 1790s, when they remained a party of opposition. Old Republicans failed to realize that when a party comes into power it needs to govern, and so necessarily expands the reach of governmental authority. Loose, or looser, construction is in some sense an inevitable byproduct of governance. For leaders such as William H. Crawford of Georgia and William Smith of South Carolina, however, the recent course of Jefferson’s party proved alarming, particularly Clay and John C. Calhoun’s American System of economic ferment. Old Republicans continued to see the Bank of the United States as unconstitutional because its charter exceeded congressional authority; they doubted the legitimacy of federal appropriations for local improvements that stood to benefit only one part of the country; and they scorned the protective tariff as a northern gambit to benefit manufacturers and damage planters and farmers. With these triedand-true slogans, Old Republicans parried the thrusts of John Marshall, Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, and other National Republicans. The Democratic coalition that formed around Andrew Jackson’s campaign in 1828 promised to rescue the vulnerable young nation from National Republican tyranny. It wished to elevate “the will of the people,” which supposedly had been thwarted in the “corrupt bargain” election of 1824. Jackson also represented states’ rights, limited government, low tariffs, and other positions reminiscent of the Jeffersonian persuasion. Although at first Old Hickory’s views on public policy remained hazy because of his short record of civil rather than military service, and although voters usually flocked to Jackson because they were attracted to his magnetic aura and personality, as his administration wore on Jackson allied himself with Jeffersonian ideology.11 The Old Hero spoke out against protective tariffs, for example. By placing a tax on imported foreign goods, proponents of the tariff hoped to raise the domestic price of imports and thereby prevent them from undercutting products made at home. America’s fledgling industrial sector deserved such protection, argued National Republicans led by Clay and Adams. But Jackson insisted that the tariff was unfair legislation, designed to benefit the manufacturing-centered North while hurting the agrarian South. He looked forward to the retirement of the public debt in the early 1830s as an opportunity for tariff reduction. And in 1832, Congress indeed lowered duties from the “abominable” levels of 1828. Next, Jackson decided to veto legislation he considered unconstitutional. Jackson transformed the veto from an infrequent check on congressional excess 11

For background on all of these developments, see Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1990); Kohl, Politics of Individualism; and Louis P. Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (New York: Hill & Wang, 2001).

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into an active policy-shaping tool. He refused to pass bills that appropriated federal money for improvement projects that did not serve a clear national purpose. In 1830, he vetoed funding for the Maysville Road using this argument. The federal government should remain a compact, simple institution without elastic powers, he thought. By endorsing parochial projects such as tariffs and local roads, the general government also undermined its purpose as an advocate for all regions of the Union. Jackson thus spoke in the Revolutionary-era republican language of the commonweal, against self-interest and sectional prejudice. He fell clearly within the Jeffersonian tradition. Jackson best displayed his commitment to states’ rights in the case of Georgia’s Cherokee Indians. In the second of two cases on that front, Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the Cherokees residing on Georgia’s western frontier deserved protection from state authorities who were trying to oust them in order to clear land for settlement. Jackson refused to take action to enforce Marshall’s decision, instead furthering the Democrats’ program of Indian removal to the trans-Mississippi West as a way to give more land to American citizens. Jackson saw the issue in personal terms: he genuinely believed that Americans should occupy frontier land in order to maintain their independence from debilitating wage work and other eastern infirmities. But he also viewed this question in more impersonal legal terms: he thought that the state governments held authority to deal with their own populations, and that Marshall’s course gave undue power to Washington. As a states’ rights Democrat, Jackson wanted to reserve as much control over domestic affairs as possible to local governments themselves. As quickly became clear, however, states’ rights did not mean state sovereignty. When a South Carolina convention declared federal tariff laws “utterly null and void” in 1832, Jackson sprang to action. He decried Carolina’s “nullification” of federal law as anarchic and argued that no such power could be deduced from the Constitution. Indeed, Jackson went so far to confirm a unified nationalist interpretation of the Union that even die-hard National Republicans such as Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts thought about joining forces with him in a new political coalition. Plans fell apart when compromise resolved the crisis in 1833, however. Jackson returned to the states’ rights orthodoxy he inherited from Jefferson and Madison. As already mentioned, nullification was one exception in the Jacksonian legacy, showing that the old Democracy could turn nationalist and centralizing at certain moments. Also, for Jackson there was no contradiction between support for both tariff reduction, which Carolina favored, and federal supremacy, which he upheld. He wished to lower protective duties as agrarian interests demanded, but tolerated no revolution from below. He thought the tariff constitutionally enacted and hence lawful, even though he also wished to reduce it by acceptable means. Orthodox Jacksonianism thus meant states’ rights and limited government, but also respect for order and legitimate procedure.12 12

William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966); Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk:

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These contradictory interpretations of the Constitution came to a head on the floor of Congress in 1830, when Senators Robert Hayne of South Carolina and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts debated the origins and meaning of the American Union. Hayne, articulating his colleague John C. Calhoun’s theory, argued that the Constitution remained a compact among sovereign states that agreed to pool resources for specific and limited ends. The federal government, under this view, served as a trustee for various equal partners in the enterprise. Webster, by contrast, gave voice to his romantic, expansive dreams of the Union as a people and of the Constitution as a binding instrument that created a nation rather than a confederation. He famously saluted “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”13 Hayne fit into the old Jacksonian tradition, if at the extreme end of its spectrum, while Webster expressed the ideals of what became a Whig-Republican lineage. Through interpretation, action, and legislation, therefore, a strict construction of the Constitution and a respect for states’ rights became bedrock principles in the Jacksonian world of thought. Jackson and his supporters desired a small, efficiently administered federal regime that would leave room for the states to exercise their reserved powers. As we will see, New Democrats of the 1840s had different ideas. A Proslavery Democracy Old Democrats defended states’ rights and strict construction in a specific context, not in a vacuum. True, their political faith stretched back to the decentralizing traditions of the Revolutionary era and the partisan battles of the 1790s. But in the years after 1815, devotees of states’ rights ideology more and more rushed to defend the southern practice of black enslavement. Followers of Jacksonian Democracy, as the general’s new movement was called, increasingly bolstered state prerogatives because they grew fearful of federal intervention against slavery.14 These antislavery beliefs saw glory days during the closing decades of the eighteenth century, when northern states emancipated black servants and in some cases even allowed them to vote. But antislavery died down during the first part of the nineteenth century, and only after the War of 1812 did the first

13 14

Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Merrill D. Peterson, Olive Branch and Sword: The Compromise of 1833 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1982). Sellers, Market Revolution, 315. See William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); Freehling, Prelude to Civil War; and William J. Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978). Other studies (e.g., Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984], and Sellers, Market Revolution) stress the importance of economics and class-based politics, rather than slavery, in the emergence of the Jacksonian persuasion, though that interpretation is not incompatible with the notion that the leaders of the party tended to favor the South during this early period in the organization’s history.

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stirrings of a new crusade emerge. The first phase of this awakening came with the creation of the American Colonization Society in 1817. Its members wished to remove blacks to Africa as a way of solving the nation’s race problem. Colonizationists thought that only by returning to their mother continent could African Americans realize their destiny of freedom and self-employment. They succeeded in founding the colony of Liberia, although the monumental challenges of transporting huge numbers of slaves to Africa stymied their broadest efforts. In the early 1830s, a new brand of antislavery evolved, eventually led by such well-known abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and New York’s Tappan brothers. Immediatism, as it was called, stood for nothing less than the instant abolition of black enslavement, regardless of its potentially shattering effect on the Union and on social stability. Garrison even burned the Constitution as a “covenant with death” and insisted that sinful America expiate its transgressions at once, though the heavens fall. It was immediatist abolitionism, launched with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, that most troubled states’ rights Jacksonians. The most direct use of states’ rights ideology on behalf of slavery came in the autumn of 1832, when South Carolina vowed to ignore federal tariffs within its borders. As William Freehling has argued, Palmetto nullifiers sought not only to roll back the tax laws, but also to prevent an aggrandizement of power to the federal government, power it could subsequently use to tamper with slavery. By reinforcing the sovereign rights of state governments as they understood them, Carolina’s fire-eaters also kept the forces of antislavery in check.15 Anxiety then ran high in Dixie, for two previous crises set the stage for nullification. In the years leading up to 1820, the United States suffered its first major dispute on the slavery issue. When a bill for the admission of Missouri came before Congress, one legislator proposed a provision for gradual emancipation in the new state. He ignited a firestorm of protest and protracted deliberations over the future status of slavery in Missouri. In 1820, Congress settled the conflict with a compromise that admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, and drew a geographical line across the Louisiana Purchase above which free soil was forever to prevail. Barely two years later, an abortive slave revolt near Charleston (or, at least, fears of one) rattled southern nerves once again, making Carolinians perk up and better appreciate the perils of antislavery (the perennial southern fear remained slave revolt instigated by northern abolitionists). So when an opportunity to resist federal authority emerged in the early 1830s, South Carolina hot-spurs saw a chance to hold back both the tariff and centralized power. All southerners felt apprehensive about antislavery, for even the majority who held no slaves stood to suffer from a vast antiwhite rebellion on the model of Haiti in 1791. Thus, southerners of all parties opposed northern abolitionism. Indeed, southern Whigs such as Henry Clay, John Tyler, and Zachary Taylor remained committed to black bondage as much as Democrats. It seems 15

Freehling, Prelude to Civil War.

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important to remember that both parties, Whigs and Democrats, accommodated southern slavery in the Jacksonian period. Still, the Democratic coalition formed by Old Hickory seemed especially susceptible to domination by the Slave Power. First, the early Democratic Party was indeed constituted in large part by southerners. Jackson himself hailed from Tennessee and was born in South Carolina; members of his informal “Kitchen Cabinet,” as well as his official appointees, came from a variety of southern states; and Jackson symbolized the individual liberty of the southern planter and the western yeoman. His and other Democrats’ goal remained the forging of an alliance between South and West, as well as the solidly agrarian North, on behalf of these classic Jeffersonian principles. The early Democratic Party included such defenders of slavery as the “Richmond Junto” of Virginia editor Thomas Ritchie and the radical states’ rights clique swirling around Vice President John C. Calhoun in South Carolina. The old Democracy continued to impart a distinct southern flavor.16 But it also included a loyal northern wing, led by Martin Van Buren of New York. Van Buren the “Little Magician” hoped to ally the “plain republicans” of the North with the planters of the South, creating an intersectional party alliance that would prevent the emergence of regional tensions a` la the Missouri crisis of 1818–20. Only by uniting northerners and southerners in the same political movement could Van Buren guarantee the unity of his fragile republic. This became the genius of America’s Second Party System of WhigDemocratic competition: by binding North to South within each party, the Jacksonian party structure prevented sectional tensions from spiraling out of control. Van Buren’s New York farmer felt connected to his southern and western colleagues on the basis of a shared commitment to individual liberties and freedom from oppressive, impersonal institutions such as banks. Similarly, the Whig merchants and professionals of New York City identified shared interests with southern planters who supplied them with cotton for export and a market for finished manufactures. Thus, both major parties tied together various sections of the country on the basis of common economic and political goals. Within the Democracy, this partnership was never equal, however; southern domination almost always prevailed. A new political type, called “doughface,” filled the northern imagination. The doughface was a Yankee with southern principles, usually a northern member of the Democracy who chose to appease the South. He did so for intersectional harmony and because only a unified party apparatus could lift him to political power. Self-interest and Unionism entwined within him. Van Buren became the archetypal doughface, having led his Albany Regency faction of the Democracy into intimate alliance with Jackson. He frowned on movements, such as antislavery, that threatened the Democratic Party, and on sectional uproar that might tear apart the Union. During the 1840s and 1850s, in the era of the New Democracy, Van Buren and his faction changed sides completely. But in the Jacksonian heyday of the 1820s and 1830s they 16

Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 409–12, 423.

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cemented a North-South coalition in which Northerners put up with southern slavery in return for a coherent party, a unified country, and profitable trade relations. Old Democrats North and South thus remained proslavery.17 Institutional mechanisms within the Democratic Party reinforced doughfaced inclinations. At every national nominating convention since 1832, Democrats adopted rules requiring a two-thirds majority for election as a candidate. In practice, this meant that no one could win nomination without the assent of the South. Any Democrat who dared to make antislavery noises faced political ruin, and the northern Democrats who succeeded were almost always doughfaces such as Van Buren, New Hampshire jurist Levi Woodbury, and Michigan Senator Lewis Cass. Beginning in the 1840s, northern Democrats began to resent these arrangements and tried to reorient the group on a new axis. But during the 1830s, northern involvement in the Democracy hardly implied dissent from the reigning proslavery orthodoxy of Jackson’s new party.18 Additionally, the personal beliefs of Jackson and his cronies influenced party politics. Old Hickory despised antislavery agitation and refused to intervene when southern postmasters failed to deliver abolitionist tracts through the mail (which was a federal agency). When Chief Justice John Marshall died after decades of service on the U.S. Supreme Court, Jackson appointed Attorney General Roger Taney as Marshall’s replacement. Taney was a proslavery judge who would rule notoriously against black political rights in the Dred Scott decision 22 years later. And Taney was not alone. A roll call of the Democratic leaders who first rose to prominence in the 1830s – William L. Marcy, James Buchanan, Thomas Hart Benton – marks them as either proslavery southerners or doughfaced northerners. The weak antislavery appeals of Democrats William Leggett and Thomas Morris remained ineffective, exceptional voices in the wilderness. Under Jackson, the Democratic Party consolidated its proslavery identity, making it clear that all its branches were committed to the development of southern plantation agriculture on the backs of forced black laborers. An Agrarian Democracy The republican ideology of the American Revolution, discussed earlier, valued a particular kind of laborer. Only a producer, someone who actually made something with his hands and hence understood the true value of work, would display the virtue necessary to self-government in a republic. Those who merely manipulated wealth or served as intermediaries and parasites were only 17

18

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780– 1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2000); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, completed and edited by Ward McAfee (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). On these and other institutional mechanisms that allowed sectionalism to fester, see William E. Gienapp, “The Crisis of American Democracy: The Political System and the Coming of the Civil War,” in Gabor S. Boritt, ed., Why the Civil War Came (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 81–124.

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contributing to the corruption that might turn a republic into a dictatorship. For followers of Jefferson and Madison, there was no question that farming and agriculture turned a man into a repository of virtue. Only by feeding himself and his family through farming could a man nurture the independence key to his self-respect. If he relied on connections or dependencies – for example, should he need to purchase food or use credit and loans – his sturdy independence could be compromised, and along with it his magnanimous civic spirit. Dependencies created interests, which then damaged one’s sense of obligation to the common good. This was only a vision, however. Pure subsistence agriculture seldom prevailed among English settlers and later American citizens, certainly not by the turn of the nineteenth century. Farmers who grew their own foodstuffs tended to cultivate extras for the market, and increasingly to import manufactured goods through roads, turnpikes, and canals. The eighteenth-century colonies imported large quantities of European manufactures in their efforts to stay fashionable and up-to-date. This spread of impersonal connections through new transportation facilities, along with the resulting changes in social and economic life, has come to be known as the “market revolution.” Those on the Jacksonian side of the political coin tended to distrust market change, to see in the transportation revolution ripe opportunities for wealthy interests to enslave them in new channels of dependency. And once they became accustomed to, say, finished European goods arriving through the Erie Canal, or to proceeds from cash crops being delivered by metropolitan merchants, it would be difficult if not impossible to return to an independent way of life. Rot would irrevocably set in. For this reason, President Jackson used his office to destroy institutions that he thought damaged the independence of American citizens. The Second Bank of the United States, for instance, struck Jackson as an elitist agency that hurt virtuous agricultural producers while lining the pockets of speculators and bankers. It could expand the currency by issuing paper notes, and then suspend specie payments and call in loans when times worsened. No one institution, certainly not one dominated by a plutocracy, should be able to exert so much influence on the everyday lives of ordinary people, thought Jackson. The Bank’s director, Nicholas Biddle, applied for recharter in 1832 – much earlier than was necessary. Jackson saw this as an affront to his opinion and pledged to destroy the Bank. He vetoed recharter that year and removed federal deposits from the Bank in 1833; it lost its federal status when its charter expired in 1836 and thereafter became the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania. For Jackson, destroying the Bank meant revitalizing the independence of America’s yeoman agriculturalists. If the new nation hoped to retain its virtue and public spirit, it needed to stay producerist. In order to remain so, it had to satisfy Americans’ drive for new land by expanding its territorial boundaries. Jefferson fulfilled this condition by acquiring Louisiana from France, and Jackson took it a step further by evacuating Indians across the Mississippi. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, which he signed, prompted the “Trail of Tears,” an anguished migration of

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Native Americans to the West later in the 1830s. As tribe after tribe cleared out to make way for American settlers, Democrats expressed confidence that the agricultural bent of the national economy could continue. Democrats desired new land not only for the yeoman farmers who comprised their core constituency, but also for the northeastern wage workers who increasingly joined their coalition. As the industrial revolution reached America in the 1820s and 1830s, young men and women who earlier would have worked at home or apprenticed in small workshops now toiled for hourly wages in factories organized on principles of mass production. With the growth of workingclass consciousness in the 1830s, laborers began to organize unions. And they typically sided with the Democratic Party. They saw the great West as a safety valve, a national inheritance that might allow them to regain lost independence by becoming farmers as Jefferson had told them they should. Thus, the quest for more land stood to benefit America’s new wage earners as well as its existing farmers.19 Democrats’ priorities were to make as many people as possible into producers with as much independence as they could maintain. This republican vision appeared urgent as industrialization and the market revolution picked up speed by the mid 1830s. Whereas Whigs welcomed industrial growth and heralded the huge commercial potential of new goods to trade and factories to man, Democratic communities throughout the nation reacted with anxiety. Children would leave the farm for the iniquities of the urban scene, agrarian communities would become dependent on faraway institutions, and the virtuous fabric of American life would unravel as it had already in Europe. This defensive attitude toward market change distinguished Democratic opinion during the 1820s and 1830s. As always, there were Democrats who felt less anxious about modern opportunities, and even those who sought to profit from emerging economic activities by, say, speculating in railroads. Certain factions of the Democracy embraced banking and dismissed “Locofoco” agrarianism as a bygone chimera. But, overall, Jacksonian Democrats responded to the market revolution with ambivalence. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, this picture would change. New Democrats came to terms with economic growth and saw not only that commercialization was acceptable, but also that it could prove quite lucrative. They began to reverse what had been a standard, suspicious response to the fearsome engines of progress. An Insular Democracy For the first 40 years after independence, the United States was concerned with external threats. Internal growth and betterment played second fiddle to maintaining the viability of American autonomy. The Paris peace treaty of 1783 19

Wilentz, Chants Democratic; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).

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with Great Britain almost seemed to commence, rather than end, a period of international hostility. First, residual problems with England kept the infant republic from realizing the fruits of its battles. Britain refused to evacuate western outposts, menaced American aims from Canada, and encouraged Indian unrest on the frontier. Even the treaty it negotiated with American John Jay in 1795, flattering as it was to Albion, failed to resolve outstanding issues. In particular, with the outbreak of the Napoleonic wars in Europe early in the nineteenth century, England began to violate American neutral rights by seizing U.S. ships and often impressing their crews into the British Navy. For these reasons, President Jefferson enacted a controversial trade embargo in 1807. Relations with France, by contrast, had been good since the years of Revolution. Thanks to Benjamin Franklin’s shrewd diplomacy, Louis XVI signed a treaty of alliance with the United States in 1778. But in the 1790s, France too began prying into American maritime activity. President John Adams directed a short, undeclared naval war against France in 1798–9, although tensions persisted through the following decade. The Jeffersonian republic was caught in a bind, for if it sided with England, France would continue its encroachments, and vice versa should it aid the Gauls. Jefferson and Madison instead determined, in accordance with George Washington’s celebrated advice, to protect American neutral rights and avoid “entangling alliances.” Spain occupied the final corner of this thorny triad, and importantly so given its control of the Mississippi River and New Orleans. Spain at times blocked ˆ of New Orleans, preventing western American farmers access to the entrepot from sending their crops to market and receiving goods from abroad. Without entr´ee to New Orleans, Jefferson’s agrarian dream faced doom, for American farmers could not otherwise export their agricultural produce in these pre– canal and railroad days. Stopgap measures such as the Pinckney Treaty of 1795 opened New Orleans to American trade, although early American administrations were forced constantly to negotiate chronic tensions with Spain. A long-term solution surfaced only in 1800, when control of the Mississippi River valley shifted back to France, which had governed the territory before the Seven Years’ War ended in 1763. Failing to realize his imperial dreams in North America, Napoleon sold the area, called Louisiane, to Jefferson in 1803. No longer would western farmers worry about access to the seas. The Louisiana Purchase solved many problems for the early republic, but violation of American neutral rights continued to plague its foreign commerce. With the failure of “peaceable coercion” through embargo, President Madison decided upon war with England in 1812. Comprised largely of southerners and westerners, the “war hawk” coalition plunged the nation into its second quest for independence. Affairs went badly for a time, as British troops burned and occupied Washington, the newly built federal capital. But American success on the Great Lakes, among other achievements, forced Britain to negotiate a treaty that left conditions as they existed before the outbreak of hostilities. Andrew Jackson’s surprising victory over British regulars in New Orleans capped the mythic accomplishments of this second anti-imperial war.

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The year the war ended, 1815, became a decisive turning point – and not just in American history. Napoleon faced defeat at Waterloo, while European nations assembled in convention to establish a balance of power that became the stable “Pax Britannica” of the nineteenth century. The seemingly endless period of international turmoil between the 1750s and early 1800s had come to an end. The United States confirmed its independent place within the community of nations and secured its borders and seas against foreign depredations. Ominous signs persisted at the end of the war, to be sure: Spain still enjoyed a foothold in Florida, and England in Canada. But these and other crises would find resolution in the coming years. Most importantly, America had given notice through its second war against England that it could defend itself and would fight colonization attempts tooth and nail. An era of peace and prosperity was at hand. Foreign threats virtually eliminated, the United States could focus on domestic improvement. In ending this era of early national instability, President James Monroe in 1823 issued his manifesto against European attempts to colonize the western hemisphere. The parameters for internal American growth, for an era when Americans could focus on their own development rather than on national security, were set. To this second political generation, sons and daughters of the patriots and framers, fell the task of internal building and maturation. From the 1820s to the 1840s, policymakers battled over the patterns this development should take. As noted earlier, basic divisions emerged between the Democratic legatees of Jefferson and the National Republican, then Whig, followers of Hamilton. Whereas the former desired geographic expansion and the continuation of a virtuous agrarian republic, the latter salivated at infrastructural, economic improvements within a limited territory that had yet to be adequately developed. The Second Party System of Whig-Democratic competition, a steady pattern of partisan dueling established by the election of 1840, turned primarily on these domestic economic issues. Freed from international concerns, American politics could develop along lines dictated by internal policy. Indeed, the major disputes of the Jacksonian era – banks, corporations, monopolies – centered on different visions of internal economic growth. It was a luxury that other nations, embroiled in foreign quarrels or situated in geographically unfavorable locales, wished they enjoyed. It was also a period of growth that laid the groundwork for America’s emergence as an industrial colossus and world power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What would happen to leaders schooled in this type of politics when the dynamics of policy changed in the 1840s? In that decade, the United States awoke, like Rip Van Winkle, from its long foreign slumber. For the first time since the War of 1812, foreign policy began to occupy center stage, and Democratic statesmen who grew up in the Jacksonian era were forced to adapt. Many could not, leaving the way open for a younger generation of politicians and activists who eagerly embraced the international challenges of a new era. This budding cohort, sons of the Jacksonians and grandchildren of the Founders, came to be called Young America.

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Reform in Other Hands In identifying the central features of antebellum culture, historians commonly cite an upsurge in social reform movements. They usually trace these idealistic quests for change to a wave of religious revivalism that swept parts of the United States during the first third of the nineteenth century. This “Second Great Awakening” reignited embers of devotion from the hamlets of upstate New York to the grasslands of Kentucky. Unlike its predecessor and namesake, this second groundswell of evangelical religion emphasized individual human agency, or what disapproving Calvinist ministers called “Arminianism.” Instead of the predestination that had taught Puritans the irrelevance to salvation of good works in the temporal world, the theology of the Second Awakening suggested that individual effort toward a perfect social order was achievable and significant. Revivalists encouraged listeners to take personal responsibility for making the United States a more charitable and Christian country.20 Indeed, when one takes stock of the wide variety of reform movements in Jacksonian America, the evangelical and messianic thrust behind them becomes apparent. Temperance, for example, appealed to middle-class Protestants who sought to regulate the rowdyism of Irish Catholic immigrants. Abstinence from drink, and the proposal for Sunday Laws to enforce it, came from a religious outlook led by Protestant ministers. These religious means in turn served the ends of capitalists who sought sober, industrious workers. Similarly, the early history of immediatist abolitionism shows that it spoke primarily to religiousminded reformers who saw bondage as an ungodly sin. For this reason, followers of Garrison refused to participate in electoral politics, seeing any dalliance with the constitutional system as collusion with the devil. Most, though not all, of the major antebellum reform movements reflected a Protestant evangelical orientation. Politically, this meant that Whigs rather than Democrats were drawn to the spirit of reform. Northern Whigs, in particular, were more likely than Democrats to be God-fearing Protestants intent on spreading order, thrift, sobriety, and other middle-class values. More northern Whigs than Democrats joined the abolitionist movement, as seen in the sources of Liberty Party support. And Democrats were usually perceived (at least among their opponents) as the party of stasis rather than progress. Granted, Democrats counted several varieties of reform as their own: the workers’ movement and early trade unionism, for instance, pitched tents in the Jacksonian camp, as did the effort to regulate monopolies and prevent concentrations of the “money power” from preying on the helpless people. But most well-known reform efforts stood on the Whig side, or at least on the northern evangelical side, of the political-religious spectrum. 20

For example: Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill & Wang, 1976); and George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

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The American Colonization Society, forerunner to Garrisonian immediatism, attracted Whigs like Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln. Where Democrats defended the continuation of southern slavery, moderate Whigs such as Clay tried to find a way out of the dilemma by proposing gradual emancipation followed by colonization. Masters would slowly emancipate blocks of slaves, who could then sail for Africa in order to avoid future racial friction in North America. Although both parties remained officially proslavery in the Jacksonian era, northern Whigs counted more antislavery leaders among their ranks than did Democrats. Horace Mann, the educational reformer and spokesman for primary schooling, became an antislavery crusader and Free Soil congressman; previously he had been a Whig. Dorothea Dix advocated better treatment of the mentally ill, and she relied on Whiggish notions of Christian charity and upright morality to win converts. The array of antisocial utopian communities that sprouted in the 1830s also tapped the evangelical promise of withdrawal from society as a means of salvation and renewal. And Transcendentalism in New England, the most intellectual of reforms, included more Whigs than Democrats among its followers. It seemed to contemporaries and also to historians that the Whig-evangelical mindset held a lock on the politics of antebellum reform. Naturally so, for the Whig language of individual Protestant morality offered more for social improvement than the Democratic vocabulary of hard-headed accommodation to reality. Although historians have long recognized that certain types of reform touched the imaginations of Jacksonian Democrats, most have sustained the dominant view that antebellum reform was a Whig-evangelical tradition.21 Yet the Democratic Party in the 1840s and 1850s displayed much overlooked evidence of a social and bettering spirit. The ethos of perfectibility, albeit put into action in very different ways, began to operate on the Democratic consciousness. A growing generation of Democrats appropriated the Whig lexicon of social change in order to bolster their own Young American idealism about the world. Reform, usually in other hands, made its way to a novel group of Jacksonians in the era of the New Democracy. In all of these ways, the old Democracy of Andrew Jackson differed from the youth movement that reoriented it after 1844. Orthodox Jacksonianism, the fundamental political ideology with which New Democrats had grown up, valued a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, such that federal authority could never reach tyrannical levels; respected the reserved powers of state governments, which held discretionary authority in all matters not explicitly delegated to Washington; defended the practice of southern slavery as a sacrosanct property right that increasingly seemed a “positive good”; wished to extend and consolidate the Jeffersonian republic of virtuous farmers and artisans so as to 21

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in The Age of Jackson, was one of the few who took Jacksonian reform seriously. For others, see Chapter 6.

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minimize the disruptive effects of economic change, particularly the growth of market connections and manufacturing technology; remained insularly focused on domestic matters, such that foreign policy was not a salient aspect of political affairs; and ceded reform and the spirit of human perfectibility to Whigevangelical opponents who painted Democrats as reactionaries without heart. In all of these ways, as well, did the New Democracy, the spirit of Young America, challenge basic premises of orthodox Jacksonianism. For the creative generation that rose to power in the 1840s and 1850s faced entirely new circumstances, such as the rise of slavery as a political issue and the explosion of conflict with England and Mexico. In the course of responding to these unexpected challenges, opportunities and crises for which the world of traditional Jacksonianism ill prepared them, New Democrats slowly began to alter what it meant to be a Democrat. By the outbreak of secession in 1860, Democrats still spoke, ritualistically, in the republican vocabulary of their elders. But they acted, innovatively, with the gusto of blustering youth.

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2 Trade and Improvements: The Economic Orientation of Young America Democrats

In 1860, when Stephen A. Douglas prepared his run for the presidency, he invited New York banker and financier August Belmont to become national chairman of the Democratic Party. Belmont had arrived in the New World barely 20 years earlier, at age 24, and now he was helping to run the campaign of the Democracy’s most prominent leader. As a representative of the Rothschild family in New York, and as one of America’s richest men during the nineteenth century, Belmont symbolized the East Coast establishment, or what Jacksonians loved to call the “money power.” Yet he remained a staunch Democrat throughout his life, never wavering in his commitment to the coalition established by Old Hickory in the 1820s and 1830s. How could someone so seemingly un-Jacksonian fit so well within the leadership of the antebellum Democratic Party? The answer is Young America. On the eve of the Civil War, the Democracy no longer stood for the same economic policies, no longer defended the same outlook, that had dominated its heyday of the 1830s. Between the time when Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren served as the leading Democratic icons and the moment when Stephen A. Douglas and August Belmont took their places, an important transformation altered the core of Democratic ideology. This chapter will address the economic orientation of Young America Democrats. What beliefs about commerce and finance transformed the party of Jackson and Van Buren into the party of Douglas and Belmont? In the late antebellum period, New Democrats started to leave behind the outmoded philosophy of agrarianism and republican virtue in favor of market opportunity and international commerce. Tempted by the market revolution, Democrats finally came to terms with the challenges of economic growth, in the process discarding much of their strict construction constitutionalism. New or Young America Democrats reoriented their party to become more economically progressive, hungry for prosperity and trade, and no longer so worried about monopoly and corruption. In fostering this shift, Young America Democrats moved their 36

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organization closer to the traditional views of Whiggery, with consequences for the party realignments of the 1850s. The agency in Young America’s transformation came from below. Constituents and party operatives on the local and state levels pressed their congressional representatives to endorse federal funding for new economic ventures. The growth and prosperity of local communities became more important to many Democrats of the 1840s and 1850s than fidelity to the constitutional principles established by their party. New Democrats embraced the promise of market change, shepherding their party into a more modern age. They recognized an unprecedented era of international free trade, which they harnessed in order to secure favorable commercial conditions in countries throughout the world. They justified federal involvement in internal improvements projects that had heretofore seemed the purview of state and municipal regimes. And they used the growth of the new western states, specifically their need to make waterways navigable, as a way to demonstrate their commitment to economic progress sponsored by the general government. Numerous books and articles have showcased the agrarian-republican worldview of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition. On the whole, Democrats tended to distrust market change, to see in the transportation revolution new chances for the wealthy and unscrupulous to exploit them. Although exceptions such as the existence of probanking Democrats complicate the picture, and although Democrats could be seen as aides to small-time capitalism, the overall thrust of the party remained producerist, suspicious of economic development, and jealous of concentrated power. Jacksonian Democrats put these well-worn convictions into action by opposing federal subsidies for internal improvements, challenging the prevalence of banks and exclusive corporate charters, and insisting on a sparingly administered federal government exercising expressly delegated powers. Young America Democrats flouted these tenets of party orthodoxy. By 1857, one magazine concluded that “if it were not for the tide of immigration from the Old World, we should soon be without laborers, so vulgar does Young America hold it to cultivate the soil.”1 Free Trade August Belmont played an important role in this party transformation. President Franklin Pierce appointed him minister to the Netherlands in 1853, a perch from which Belmont did all in his power to further American commerce. Most notably, he opened the Dutch East Indies to American trade. Continuing his mission, Minister Belmont wrote to Secretary of State William L. Marcy in 1

Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine 37 (1857), 71, quoted in Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 23. See Chapter 1 for the historiography of Jacksonian politics.

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1856 in an effort to have the United States raise tariff duties on certain articles – a decidedly un-Jacksonian position. Belmont applauded the establishment of banks in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and other parts of Europe, with little hint of the blush that such praise might elicit given the anti-Bank, Independent Treasury course of radical Democrats thus far. He argued that the proliferation of European banking would stimulate Continental industry, which might increase the flow of European goods to America. The way to meet such competition, he told Marcy, was by raising duties. At other times, Belmont wished to lower trade barriers, although in this instance he argued for raising them. “I am and have been a strong adherent to the principles of free trade,” he wrote Marcy, “but these principles must never blind us to the exigencies of our own peculiar position, and the somewhat reckless spirit of enterprise of our people.”2 Belmont, the epitome of the New rather than old Jacksonian Democrat, appeared willing to put aside the economic principles of his party for the ends of commercial prosperity. Belmont had only served in the Netherlands for a few months before he asked Marcy for authorization to spend part of his time furthering Young America’s program of domestic economic expansion. He thought it in his power, he wrote Marcy, to assist materially some of the large works of public improvements, such as Canals and Rail Roads now being in the course of completion in the different sections of our country & which are so essential to the development of our national wealth[;] this I can do by imparting to leading Bankers & Capitalists such information of the resources & prospects of these enterprizes [sic], as will give them sufficient confidence to invest their money in them.

Belmont expected that “a very large amount of European Capital will most likely” wash up on American shores, especially as escalating tensions led to the Crimean War in 1854. He wished to use his European financial ties to further internal improvements in the United States. After meeting with the Queen Mother of Holland, Belmont reported that she seemed most impressed by “our magnificent steamers, our extensive system of Rail-Roads[,] and our wonderful progress in general.”3 So was he. Bearded and robust, Belmont grew up in the German Rhineland and worked as an intern in the local Rothschild family banking office during his youth. In 1837, the Rothschilds dispatched him to Cuba to investigate the island’s financial prospects. Stopping in New York, young August fell in love with the United States and never left. Though impressed by the mushrooming metropolis that was New York City, he arrived on the eve of the Panic of 1837. Lessons about economic fragility thus accompanied amazement at business opportunity. 2 3

August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 25 February 1856, in Belmont, Letters, Speeches, and Addresses of August Belmont (New York: Privately Printed, 1890), 16. August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 18 October 1853, August Belmont Papers, New York Public Library; August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 8 November 1853, ibid.; August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 9 January 1854, ibid.

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By the mid 1840s, Belmont had opened a banking firm of his own, August Belmont and Company. Riding around New York in his trademark four-in-hand carriage, he picked up a reputation as the town’s most eligible bachelor. Young ladies gravitated toward his dark personality and seemingly romantic European origins. He even fought a duel that left him partly paralyzed for months. Never down for long, Belmont quickly grew rich through foreign exchanges; loans; real estate, corporate, and railroad investments; and as a government financier during the Mexican War. At the time of his death in 1890, he bequeathed between $10 million and $50 million to his heirs. But financial success still required the seal of social approval, and in this respect Belmont’s Jewishness stood in the way. In 1849 he married Caroline Slidell Perry, daughter of Commodore Matthew C. Perry and niece of Louisiana Senator John Slidell. He converted to Episcopalianism, securing his station in New York’s mercantile elite. By 1852, he was working as a local manager for James Buchanan’s failed presidential nomination, though he endorsed Franklin Pierce after that year’s national Democratic convention. Belmont received his reward when the new president offered him the diplomatic mission to the Netherlands. In future years, he supported both Douglas and Buchanan, spoke as a “war democrat” in the 1860s, and founded the Belmont Stakes horse race. One could not imagine a more successful immigrant tale.4 Belmont had begun to vote Democratic since his naturalization in 1844, although the precise reasons for his attraction to the party remain unclear. Colleagues viewed his allegiance as strange, given that most bankers and merchants supported the Whigs. Two explanations seem likely, however. First, it was Belmont’s uncle-in-law John Slidell who first urged him to explore politics, and this family connection may have allowed Belmont to think the Democracy his shortest route to power. Second, Belmont resented the nativist and antiSemitic jibes thrust at him by Whig newspapermen, driving him snugly into the arms of the Democracy. There he remained for the rest of his life. Belmont provides an example of the link between Democracy and commercialization during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. He conceived of a coming American empire focused on trade. As he wrote in 1853, The far West is brought to our very doors by a net of railroads, carrying the products of its virgin soil to our seaports, from thence to provide the marts of the world. And the time is near at hand when, either by the energies of our private citizens or by the action of Congress, our possessions on the Pacific will be united to their sister States on the Atlantic by a public work which, in grandeur of conception and execution, will outstrip any human enterprise the world has yet seen.

Belmont looked forward to a transcontinental railroad with a mania close to that of Stephen A. Douglas, whose champion he was soon to become. Belmont’s 4

See Irving Katz, August Belmont: A Political Biography (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1968), and David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York: Dial Press, 1981).

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own father-in-law, Commodore Matthew Perry, played an important role in spreading America’s commercial empire worldwide when he sailed to Japan that very year. And all knew, Belmont said, “that any nation which can secure to itself the trade of the East is sure to command the trade of the world.”5 Parties in the nineteenth century included both politicians who campaigned and held office, and operatives and fund-raisers who maintained the party organization. Belmont fell into the latter category, becoming a financier who helped raise the vast sums necessary for the work of the Democracy.6 The historian George Bancroft also served as a Democratic diplomat, having become minister to Britain in late 1846. He and colleagues at home rejoiced at England’s repeal of the Corn Laws that year. This great reform in European mercantilist orthodoxy inspired New Democrats to believe that an unprecedented and lucrative era of free trade was at hand. It motivated them all the more to jettison old-fashioned Jacksonian agrarian ideas; there was simply too much money and opportunity to be had. And the Walker Tariff of 1846 paralleled England’s reduction of protectionist barriers. As Ohio Senator William Allen noted, “It is commerce, which now regulates the international relations of the world. It is upon commerce, that the new code of the law of nations is based.”7 A party that could not accommodate this new era had, by the professions of its own leaders, no business administering the country. Free trade had always been a Jacksonian article of faith. But a newer breed of Democrat pressed it with a different rationale in the 1840s, as the nation began to recover from the depression of 1837–43. Now free trade seemed more important than before, as the volume of exchange with other countries ballooned and Democrats began to express particular concern with commercial prosperity. During the 1830s, they had been committed to free trade on the basis of opposition to the Whig program of special privileges for minority groups such as manufacturers. That position constituted an important part of their ideology of “special privilege for none, equal opportunity for all.” But it was not so closely linked to the relentless drive for commercial opportunities, to the almost missionary quest for new markets and adventures. Free trade during the 1840s became a means to an end, a way to achieve the empire of commerce desired by Young America. It was no longer just part of an equalitarian social ideology. In this vein, the Democratic Review applauded Britain’s decision to reverse its protective system, a structure harking back to the mercantilist philosophy against which the American colonies had once chafed. This change was 5

6 7

August Belmont to Jacob Westervelt, et al., 12 August 1853, in Letters of Belmont, 6; August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 23 January 1855, ibid., 12. For Belmont’s desire to acquire Cuba as part of his free trade scheme, see August Belmont to James Buchanan, 22 November 1852, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 81. “Speech of Hon. William Allen of Ohio,” 10 and 11 February 1846, page 17, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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significant, said the journal, because it increased America’s trading capacity. In the “active state of the export trade of the United States we recognize . . . the confirmation of the soundness of free trade principles.” Free trade became an urgent priority because it was now more directly tied than before to the growth of international commercial ties.8 England’s repeal of the Corn Laws at the moment Democrats were in power sparked this transformation. One might say that the purpose of traditional Jacksonian economic ideology remained the prevention of monopolistic special interests from obtaining undue social and political influence. By contrast, the purpose of these ideas by the mid 1840s became commercial growth. The Democracy moved from a strictly negative to a positive economic function. New Democrats justified low tariffs and minimalist governments by pointing to the prosperity they would generate, to the momentum they would create, less to the encroachments they would prevent. In 1847, the Democratic Review celebrated the nation’s fresh and hardwon productivity, claiming that Democratic financial nostra, from abolition of the Bank to creation of the Independent Treasury, were responsible: “The degree of commercial prosperity which now prevails in the Union, is probably greater than any to which, as a whole, the country ever before attained. It is based on abundance of commodities, or available capital, the profitable interchange of which, both with foreign countries and different sections of this, has given life to every channel of trade.” The New York Evening Post exulted that “it is no longer affirmed . . . that high duties are indispensable to the success of manufactures. It is acknowledged that they would spring up and flourish without them wherever they are really wanted.”9 This reveling in international free trade, this use of commerce as a yardstick by which to measure party policy – these were new elements in the Democratic vocabulary. For, in Jackson’s day, maintaining stability and protecting private property, not generating financial growth, remained expected functions of government. Crucial to this shift were Great Britain’s new mercantile policies. In 1846, English liberals led by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel succeeded in repealing the Corn Laws. These were tariffs that protected British grain producers by raising prices on cheaper foreign competition. By lowering such tariffs, British liberals promised the middle and working classes inexpensive food, although they also threatened Britons’ livelihoods because tariff reduction could lead to a decline in domestic industry and jobs. 1846 marked a strong break from British economic thinking with centuries of precedent behind it. The maturation of free trade at the Court of St. James made Democrats believe that a new era of commerce was at hand, that finally they could reap the financial benefits denied them for as long as mercantilist orthodoxy dominated British policy. No longer would Britain’s Foreign Office heed the parochial philosophy emphasizing the pure self-interest of the metropolis at the expense 8 9

Democratic Review 20 (Jan. 1847), 3. Also see the Illinois State Register, 4 January 1849, 2. Democratic Review 21 (Nov. 1847), 447; ibid., 21 (Sept. 1847), 269; New York Evening Post, 12 September 1850, 2.

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of colonies and other countries, the philosophy that established closed markets within the British Empire, the philosophy that concentrated manufacturing in England and looked to colonies as producers of raw materials and consumers of finished goods. This long-pervasive way of thinking was now discarded in favor of free and open trade. For this reason, both George Bancroft, as minister to England under Polk, and August Belmont, as envoy to Holland under Pierce, considered it their primary mandate to lobby for tariff reductions and the establishment of favorable trade conditions. Bancroft called it a “repeal of the British Navigation Acts, this opening of the British colonial and indirect trade.”10 The 1840s became, in this sense, the economic revolution that Americans had awaited as a follow-up to the political outbreak they staged in 1776. The fact that Democrats picked up on this shift in English ideas, that they attached ` so much importance to it vis-a-vis American prosperity, showed how enlivened they became by the possibilities of a new world order in the 1840s. When speaking of the Oregon dispute in 1846, for example, Stephen Douglas could not help mentioning the expected repeal of the Corn Laws and the new era of trade it augured.11 Coupled with the European political revolutions of the 1840s, it seemed that Americans were living through a political, intellectual, and economic ferment as momentous as that of the late eighteenth century. In the end, they were wrong, of course: revolutions failed, and the forces of reaction held the day (though free trade was here to stay). Yet they could not have known this at the time, and it is vital for the historian of the antebellum Democratic Party to enter this electric mindset, this short-lived, wondrous sense of possibility.12 As President Polk told Congress in late 1846, By the simultaneous abandonment of the protective policy by Great Britain and the United States new and important markets have already been opened for our agricultural and other products, commerce and navigation have received a new impulse, labor and trade have been released from the artificial trammels which have so long fettered them, and to a great extent reciprocity in the exchange of commodities has been introduced at the same time by both countries, and greatly for the benefit of both.13

Following up on the events of 1846, Congress began looking into reciprocal trading agreements between the United States and other countries. President Polk concluded a mutual free-trade pact with Brazil in 1847, and by late 1848 the United States signed reciprocal trade treaties with New Granada 10 11 12

13

George Bancroft to John Davis, 4 May 1849, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Stephen A. Douglas to Augustus C. French, 20 February 1846, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 134–5. For examples of the possibilities Democrats envisioned as a result of Britain’s turn to free trade in the 1840s, see C. Cushing to George Bancroft, 14 August 1846, Bancroft Papers; George Bancroft to James K. Polk, 3 November 1846, ibid.; George Bancroft to Robert J. Walker, 17 August 1847, 18 November 1847, ibid.; New York Evening Post, 27 November 1845, 2. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 11 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1897–1908), IV, 501.

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(now Panama and Colombia), Peru, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Belgium, Hanover, and several other German states. In 1850, the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain established equal claims to a future canal across the Isthmus of Panama, demonstrating the commercial, free trade spirit prevailing at the time. By 1853, America added Paraguay and the Argentine Confederation to its roster, not to mention Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s pathbreaking visit to Japan.14 Even a Whig like New York abolitionist Lewis Tappan agreed with the Democratic free trade scheme, urging Britain to revise her Navigation Laws. Tappan’s support shows how the New Democracy’s economic orientation could generate appeal across party lines, moving Democrats closer to the standard Whig position. Yet on the whole they still saw Whigs as protectionist nemeses, and they analogized the English contest between supporters and opponents of the Corn Laws with their own domestic battles. In both countries, the forces of liberty confronted holders of special privilege. Lowering duties on both sides of the Atlantic seemed a coordinated victory for the democratic – and Democratic – principle worldwide.15 The Democratic Illinois State Register of Springfield celebrated the fruits of free trade in 1849. The Walker Tariff of 1846, it argued, spawned prosperity unseen in the days of the high and hated Whig tariff of 1842. The amount of funds in the national treasury increased, net federal revenue rose, the balance of trade with Europe remained favorable despite the unsettling political situation on the Continent, and all signs pointed forward. “The increase of our commerce during the two years since the enactment of the bill of ’46, has been so great.”16 In the old Democratic era, partisans discussed the tariff in terms of privilege and special interest, the ways in which it contributed to the growth of a northern manufacturing sector at the expense of planters and farmers. But New Democrats mentioned the tariff, and free trade in general, in the language of prosperity and economic growth. The standard, the threshold, the rationale, had changed. So synergistic and reciprocal did America’s and Britain’s resort to free trade seem that Whig critics pointed to a cabal between the two countries. They accused Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker of collusion with British Premier Robert Peel to sabotage the protective tariff. Democrats denied the claim, though there was no denying the simultaneous emergence of a new commercial era in the western world.17 New Democrats saw their chance to inaugurate a golden age of American commerce and productivity, and Belmont, Bancroft, and Walker did all in their power to make this vision a reality. 14

15 16 17

Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 2 Session, 2 January 1849, 130; ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, 29 January 1850, 238; Messages and Papers, IV, 522–3; ibid., 629; ibid., V, 226. On the Perry expedition, see the New York Daily Times, 31 October 1853, 2, and the Illinois State Register, 9 November 1853, 2, as well as Chapter 5. Lewis Tappan to George Bancroft, 30 April 1849, Bancroft Papers; Ohio Statesman, 6 March 1846, 2, 4 June 1847, 2; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 30 January 1846, 3. Illinois State Register, 4 January 1849, 2. Ohio Statesman, 6 March 1846, 1; New York Evening Post, 4 March 1846, 2.

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Internal Improvements Young America Democrats pursued an opportunistic economic course at home as well as abroad. As historians have shown in recent decades, the market revolution was in many ways a local affair, affecting towns and communities by causing anxiety that led to such results as evangelical revivals and Jacksonian loyalties.18 But by the late 1840s and early 1850s, Democrats in locales nationwide no longer opposed it, instead wondering how it could line their pockets and those of their communities. They began to pressure their Democratic representatives to put aside Jacksonian strict construction ideology in favor of infrastructural developments – internal improvements – that would accelerate the flow of commerce. Typically these requests centered on transportation facilities, and often in western boomtowns itching to expand. A Democrat from Marshall, Illinois, wrote to Young American Senator Sidney Breese lamenting the loss of a prized congressional appropriation for development of the Cumberland Road, for example. The Road, begun in 1811, was then stretching westward and would reach Illinois’s original capital, Vandalia, in 1850 before continuing to the Mississippi. This party man conceded that it seemed better to lose the money and maintain Jacksonian scruples, but at the end of the letter he seemed to change his mind and asked Breese whether there was “any hope for an appropriation to the Cumberland Road, passing the House, as an independent measure?” It proved much more difficult to insist on principles of limited government when the direct economic health of one’s own region and constituency stood in the balance. To be sure, the Cumberland Road, like many internal improvement projects of the Jacksonian era, covered a large enough span of territory to be seen as a national interest properly within the jurisdiction of the federal government. Jackson, after all, objected to federal funding for internal improvements when it benefited only certain parts of the country or specific classes within society, and the Cumberland Road seemed to serve a general enough purpose. But the motivations behind letters such as this one were parochial; the writer and his New Democratic colleagues seemed primarily concerned with the development of their own regions of the country, and the effect that prosperity – or lack thereof – would have on their political careers.19 One assertive constituent of Ohio Senator William Allen also demanded congressional funds to extend the Cumberland Road. “I hope and trust you will use your utmost endeavorz [sic] to secure an appropriation on the road 18

19

Among many examples, see Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981); and Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817–1862 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996). J. P. Cooper to Sidney Breese, 2 April 1845, James K. Polk Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Also see Jacob Foos to William Allen, 24 December 1844, Allen Papers.

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as early as possible,” he petitioned. “An appropriation is what we want and what we expect to get this session.” Again, the National Road had been a federal project from the beginning, so subsidizing it may not seem to be such a strong departure from established practice. But the rationale behind letters such as this was local, as communities nationwide began to appreciate the economic benefits of canals, roads, and railways passing through their districts. It is this emerging local pressure on New Democrats that shows a burgeoning market orientation within their party. The Ohio legislature’s instructions to its congressional representatives illustrate this reasoning. It complained of delays in the transmission of mail in the West and asked for federal funding to build a bridge that would be part of the National/Cumberland Road and would help the mails along. A national interest was involved here, to be sure, but also and perhaps preeminently a local need.20 When a constituent of Mississippi Congressman John Quitman requested federal aid in 1856, for example, he directly stated his local development objectives. He noted that the Treasury Department had decided that Ship Island in Mississippi should no longer operate as a port. In the 1840s, Congress had established Ship Island as a port of trade and staffed it with a collector. Several years later, it even paid to buffer it with fortifications.21 Now residents of this part of Mississippi stood to lose the privilege. The closure threatened the state’s newly bustling economy: “In the Course of the present year, There will be fully 20 Ships loaded at the Island with timber, bound for different ports in Great Britain.” Limiting such a trade precisely at the moment when Mississippi was recovering from the depression of the 1840s appeared damaging and needless, the writer noted. He appealed to Quitman to have Congress overrule the administration by declaring Ship Island “a Port of Entry and Delivery.”22 Similar requests came from other parts of the Union, as Young America senators and representatives began to speak out more insistently for their constituents’ economic interests. Isaac Walker, Democratic senator from Wisconsin, wanted Congress to designate Milwaukee a port of entry and to donate land for a railroad. He felt frustrated by his colleagues’ foot-dragging on these issues. And the lobbying of Kentucky editor George Sanders and New York steamship magnate George Law continually pushed Congress toward ever higher improvement appropriations.23 In other words, local self-interest – the desire to sustain 20

21 22 23

Nelson Hilling to William Allen, 6 January 1846, Allen Papers Samuel Anderson to William Allen, 20 February 1846, ibid.; Joint Resolution of the Ohio State Legislature, 22 January 1846, ibid. Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 30 March 1848, 563; ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 3 January 1851, 165. D. W. Bean to John A. Quitman, 22 December 1856, John A. Quitman Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 11 April 1850, 703; ibid., 12 April 1850, 720; ibid., 33 Congress, 1 Session, 31 January 1854, 288; Riepma, “Young America,” 119; A Sketch of Events in the Life of George Law (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855). On Sanders, see Merle

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and expand the economic growth encountered by many parts of the Union as the market revolution swept onward – accounted for the more commercially minded orientation of Young America Democrats. It was often not so much a top-down change in ideology as local economic necessity that led to promarket attitudes among this generation of Democrats. Breese, Quitman, Walker, and other New Democrats acted as brokers between troubled western constituents and the Polk administration. Breese declared to a friend that he intended to make Polk aware “there is a west & possessed of important interests.”24 The American Old Northwest was still struggling to develop in the 1840s and was very much concerned with establishing transportation and communication networks for purposes of commerce. In one representative flare-up of frontier opinion, Breese reported to President Polk that a Chicago meeting had requested a rivers and harbors improvements bill, and that he (Breese) had to be the one to caution them that this cut against the grain of Jacksonian orthodoxy, under which the federal government did not interfere with internal improvements that remained fundamentally local in character. Here lies a telling case of constituents pushing their representatives toward more market-oriented opinions because of local economic interests, exerting pressure on leading Democrats to become New Democrats and focus on commerce rather than stick-in-the-mud constitutional rigidity.25 As Whig Congressman Garrett Davis noted in sympathizing with the Young Americans, “Sir, I do not share the constitutional scruples of some among the strictest constructionists of the House. I see not that we are forbidden to improve and adorn the grounds around this Capitol, or to purchase a library of Congress, though neither object be expressly specified in the Constitution.”26 Sidney Breese moved from New York to the new state of Illinois in 1818, where he apprenticed with a state politician and began work as a lawyer. From 1827 to 1829, he served as U.S. district attorney. After Andrew Jackson ousted him as a political opponent, Breese took up editing a virulently anti-Jackson paper called the Western Democrat. Thus, Breese may not have been as wedded to Old Hickory as other staunch Democrats. This may account for why he felt comfortable departing from Jacksonian orthodoxy during the 1840s. Nevertheless, he joined the Democratic Party because of his support for states’ rights. After 1841, he sat on the Illinois Supreme Court, and the following year he won election to the U.S. Senate. His heterodoxy shone through after he began leading the Committee on the Public Lands. Legislating land grants for canals and railroads, Breese tried to line the pockets of his adopted frontier state, regardless of the Democrats’ party line on such policies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the party refused to nominate him for another term, settling instead on feisty Lincoln rival James Shields.

24 25 26

Curti, “George N. Sanders – American Patriot of the Fifties,” South Atlantic Quarterly 27 (Jan. 1928): 79–87. Sidney Breese to E. D. Taylor, 18 May 1845, Polk Papers. Sidney Breese to James K. Polk, 8 July 1847, ibid. Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 3 April 1846, 601.

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Returning to the high bench in Illinois, Breese proved instrumental in issuing rulings that regulated big business and upheld the rights of employees. The U.S. Supreme Court heard his most famous case, Munn v. Illinois, on appeal in 1876. It confirmed Breese’s judgment that Illinois could establish maximum rates for grain storage in warehouses and other facilities. Breese has thus been remembered in the annals of law as a pioneer in industrial regulation on behalf of labor. Obviously these activities did not keep him busy enough because after marrying he fathered 14 children. Weakly tied to Jackson’s Democracy, concerned first and foremost with the financial health of his own state, and unashamed to act independently, Breese blazed new Democratic trails in the realm of internal improvements. He understood better than most the constitutional barriers to expansion on this front, though he devised an ingenious solution.27 Breese and other development-minded Democrats used land grants to skirt the question of the constitutionality of federally sponsored internal improvements. Congress would donate public lands so that state governments themselves could use them for improvements. This would obviate endless controversy about the propriety of directly creating a road or lighthouse and would contribute to the same goal of building up the new western states. When desirous of constructing a railroad, for example, Congress would grant alternate sections of public land for the project. The sections of land not donated could then be sold at a much higher price, since the availability of rail transportation nearby would make them suddenly more lucrative. In 1846, the Senate discussed such a measure for the state of Michigan, and Breese went further than most to argue that Congress “had a right to grant land to make the road, or to make it by its own action; for no State right is infringed if the United States own the land in the new states.” In other words, the strict constructionists’ objection to direct federal involvement in development did not apply because Congress was using land it already owned, either by donating it to the states or by developing it on its own. Traditionalists such as Senator John Niles of Connecticut dissented from the measure on old Jacksonian grounds. To grant land to a state for the purposes of internal improvement, Niles argued, seemed tantamount to involving the central government in those schemes. Such an action remained unconstitutional because it infringed on states’ rights, and unwise because it concentrated excessive power within a possibly tyrannical national regime.28 Nevertheless, Breese repeatedly used his chairmanship of the Senate Committee on the Public Lands to introduce land grants to states for the purposes of internal improvements. He engaged in something of a race with Young America colleague Stephen Douglas to see who could facilitate the building of a western railroad sooner. Breese’s bills granting land for railroads tended to fail, and

27 28

American National Biography Online, s.v. “Breese, Sidney,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1. harvard.edu/articles/11/11–00100.html (accessed 18 March 2003). Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 29 April 1846, 745; ibid., 11 March 1846, 481.

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Douglas won the contest by securing ground for the Illinois Central Railroad in 1850.29 Breese and Douglas became estranged over the question of who bore more responsibility for the Central Railroad bill. Their quarrel showed two Young America politicians trying to out-perform one another as local economic boosters. Their main point of contention centered on the recipient of congressional land grants for the railroad. Breese had contracted with a private individual to build the railroad; under his rejected plan, this person would automatically receive the land grants. Douglas objected to this concentration of economic power within one individual and his company, and he made sure this individual’s charter was revoked and that the land grants would go instead to the state government. This is one reason why his bill, not Breese’s, passed Congress in 1850.30 Breese supported such a method of federally subsidizing improvements for personal reasons: in the mid 1830s he helped to create and administer the Illinois Central Railroad Company, a private organization. Illinois’s state legislature chartered the corporation in 1836 and charged it with building a railroad from the Ohio River to Galena. Breese played a central role in the venture before his election to Congress. So both Breese and Douglas (who invested in the Illinois Central Railroad venture that he ended up passing) acted out of self-interest, inclinations that only partially explain their actions on the floor of the Senate. For beyond self-interest stood the welfare of their state and the health of their constituents, all key priorities that moved them away from party-line thinking.31 Douglas and Breese weathered criticism outside the halls of Congress. A New York paper angrily charged that their schemes “distribute their benefits very unequally, and . . . they force the government out of its proper orbit.” Maine stood to gain little from the Illinois Central Railroad, it observed, so why should Washington become involved? Moreover, the proposed railroad would accelerate westward migration and the depopulation of the eastern seaboard. And “the government has no business to interfere in any way with emigration between the states.” As this article suggested, East-West tensions played an important role in various Democrats’ attitudes toward internal improvements.32 Indeed, Douglas’s victory for the Illinois Railroad was hard fought, accentuating the novelty of his position. Traditional Jacksonians, especially from southern states, charged him with hypocrisy for coming out in favor of internal improvements in this seemingly underhanded way (i.e., through land grants to the states). Other senators complained that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to raise land prices on the alternate sections of land that it did not 29

30

31 32

Ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Session, 29 July 1848, 1010; ibid., 30 Congress, 2 Session, 18 December 1848, 46; ibid., 19 December 1848, 58; ibid., 30 January 1849, 409; Stephen A. Douglas to Sidney Breese, 5 January 1851, in Letters of Douglas, 198–206. Stephen A. Douglas to Sidney Breese, 22 February 1851, in Letters of Douglas, 208–14; Sidney Breese to Stephen A. Douglas, 25 July 1850, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Stephen A. Douglas to Augustus C. French, 27 December 1849, in Letters of Douglas, 181. New York Evening Post, 3 May 1850, 2.

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donate for the railroad. For years leading up to 1850, Douglas stood on the defensive because of these constitutional difficulties, and, reading through the debates, one is struck by his monomaniacal longing for the railroad. Party scruples fell by the wayside in his single-minded quest to advance the transportation revolution (and to line his own pockets, as an investor in the railroad company). In a candid moment, Douglas said that “the grants of lands to the new States” for purposes of internal improvement “have been advocated upon the ground that they enhance the value of the residue of the public domain.” They were “expedient for commerce, and for the enhancement of the value of the lands.”33 In addition, proponents of this quintessentially Young American bill saw how it might alleviate sectional tensions. Since “it is to connect the North and South so thoroughly,” observed Senator James Shields, “it may serve to get rid of even the Wilmot proviso, and tie us together so effectually that the idea even of separation will be impossible.” Young America tried to act as a sectional unifier, keeping the Democracy and the Union together longer than would otherwise have been possible. A gradually expanding railroad would tie together diverging regional economies and societies, members of the movement predicted.34 By 1853, the Illinois State Register was focusing not on slavery in the territories, but on the new pleasures of the Central Railroad. It made residents of Bloomington, for instance, feel that “our little city had recently changed its location, or that ‘the rest of mankind’ had changed theirs.”35 Douglas’s and Breese’s colleagues in Congress emulated their strategy, and by the late 1840s and early 1850s a slew of bills proposing to grant public lands and rights-of-way for the building of railroads, canals, and telegraphs filled the dockets of Senate and House. Senator David Yulee of Florida even wanted to streamline the process by equalizing all the land grants given to states for internal improvements. The race for growth was on. It was on for state governments as well, which had borne the burden of economic development for a longer period of time than the federal government. Unhindered by the constitutional scruples that kept the central government small and weak, state governments had been responsible for projects such as the Erie Canal since the 1810s and 1820s. Now they continued to receive petitions for railroads and harbors, accelerating the transportation revolution.36 33 34 35 36

Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 3 May 1854, 1067. Ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, 29 April 1850, 844–54; ibid., 30 April 1850, 869; ibid., 3 May 1850, 904. Illinois State Register, 7 June 1853, 2. See, for example, the Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 3 June 1850, 1111; ibid., 6 August 1850, 1530, 1532; ibid., 31 December 1849, 88; ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 31 January 1851, 401. Ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, page xix of the index, provides a revealingly long list of such bills, as does ibid., 33 Congress, 1 Session, pages xliii–xlvi. On Yulee’s motion, see ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, 6 May 1850, 916. Also see Samuel Allen to Samuel J. Tilden, 8 March 1846, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library; D. Valentine to Samuel J. Tilden, 20 March 1846, ibid.; John L. O’Sullivan to Samuel J. Tilden, 28 March 1846, ibid. Finally, see George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951).

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In spring 1846, as American guns began booming against Mexico, senators discussed a bill giving federal land to the state of Mississippi for the construction of a railroad. The central government would not itself have a hand in the building project, but would merely aid it through land grants. Yet their opponents said they were not fooled. Senator Arthur Bagby of Alabama argued that it made no difference whether the central government or the state of Mississippi undertook the railroad project; the federal regime remained implicated because of the land grants. Making federal involvement less direct did not lessen its unconstitutional role in the project. Money that should remain in the national treasury (the proceeds from government land sales), Bagby said, would be spent on indirectly promoting a railroad (when the land was donated to Mississippi). Bagby remained staunchly opposed to building “a railroad at the expense of the General Government.” But in a sign of how times had changed since the days of Jackson’s administration, even John C. Calhoun supported the measure, arguing that no constitutional ambiguity was involved at all. Calhoun thought the land grants would contribute more, not less, money to federal coffers in the long term. He joined a familiar cast of Young Americans in supporting them: William Allen, David Yulee, and Sidney Breese. Significantly, the votes in favor of the bill were also bipartisan: Whig Senators John Clayton of Delaware, Willie Mangum of North Carolina, and Thomas Corwin of Ohio endorsed the legislation, showing how the two parties inched closer together on economic issues as the 1840s and 1850s wore on. (Three years later, freshman Whig Congressman Abraham Lincoln spoke in favor of these land grants as well, foreshadowing the Homestead and Morrill Acts later passed under his watch).37 The nay votes encompassed Old Republican strict construction types, such as former South Carolina nullifier George McDuffie.38 Several years later, senators again fought the constitutional question of federal railroad development, this time on a bill extending mails and rails to the Pacific. The proposal would have made the president of the United States head of the new railroad corporation, raising red flags for strict constructionists. Proponents of the bill became restive in response. “Let us have no more of this raw-head and bloody-bones business of allusions to the United States Bank, and talk about Democracy,” huffed one lawmaker. New Democrats increasingly came to resent allusions to their Whig-like financial course. Already feeling anguish about departing from the tenets of Jacksonian Democracy, they felt even worse when more traditional members of their own party pointed out the contradiction.39 But New Democrats had little choice. Caught between the vise of party regularity and bottom-up constituent pressure, they chose to follow the latter. In an egalitarian age that celebrated the wisdom of the common man, this 37 38 39

Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 2 Session, 13 February 1849, 533. Ibid., 29 Congress, 1 Session, 30 April 1846, 751–2. Ibid., 32 Congress, 2 Session, 2 February 1853, 474.

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appeared the safest course to follow. Should politicians neglect the popular will as expressed in public meetings and numerous pleading letters, they could be turned out of office. Yet, once elected, they faced an uphill battle in obtaining support for their newfangled expansion measures. The depth of constituent feeling on internal improvements grew intensely through the 1840s and 1850s. Local party operatives wrote frankly to their representatives with requests for new regional infrastructure. And once they received these letters, Young Americans in Congress were forced to choose between the two priorities outlined earlier. The party split – often along regional lines, but usually through a generational divide. Citizens of newly established Wyandotte County, Ohio, remonstrated for federal land grants in order to obtain territory and thus revenue for erecting public buildings. Part of the county was carved out of ceded Indian territory, and local elders wished to see it grow and move toward incorporation. They regarded the federal government as an important influence in that process.40 Writing to Senator William Allen, they made the case that he, as their delegate to the federal government, should help them accomplish their goals. Allen had to make the difficult choice: party regularity or constituent pressure? In many cases, he selected the latter. Stephen Douglas felt the pressure acutely, since he was the most prominent lawmaker to stake his claim on Young America. A “large public meeting of the citizens of Franklin County,” Illinois, petitioned Douglas for new construction projects in 1848. First, they demanded a railroad from the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to Chicago and north to other parts of the Mississippi. They considered this a proposal “the importance and benefits of which are incalculable. [N]ot only to the agricultural and commercial interests of the inhabitants of this state but to all the people of the United States.” Though they mentioned the latter constituency, their primary concern appears to have been the former, which they noted first. Next they clamored to repair lakes and harbors, a growing complaint among progress-hungry westerners. The Great Lakes “in the winter are blocked up with Ice,” they explained, “and the navigation of the rivers obstructed by low water in summer.” They closed by urging the Illinois congressional delegation to obtain “a liberal grant of lands” in order to fund their ambitions.41 Douglas usually responded to these pleas positively. His own investments in Illinois real estate magnified his desire to see the state settled and developed. 40

41

G. Worth to William Allen, 5 February 1845, Allen Papers; “Resolution, relative to the appropriation, by Congress, to the County of Wyandotte,” 8 February 1845, ibid.; Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 31 December 1845, 121, and passim, traces the course of the relevant legislation. R. E. Frost, Secretary, et al., to Stephen A. Douglas, [no day, no month], 1848, Douglas Papers. For other examples, see S. P. Lacey to Stephen A. Douglas, 28 January 1849, ibid.; R. G. Moloney, chairman, et al. to Stephen A. Douglas, 15 January 1852, ibid.; L. H. Langworthy to Stephen A. Douglas, 5 February 1852, ibid.; James K. Scott to Stephen A. Douglas, 12 February 1850, ibid.

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As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, however, he sometimes dealt with improvement requests from outside his home as well. In 1850, he secured congressional funding for various public buildings, including a prison, in Minnesota. Settlers had written to him about the need for establishing social institutions, a goal dear to Douglas’s heart, and he responded with federal largesse. Even citizens from a community in Mississippi addressed Douglas, putting pressure on him to secure a proposed railroad. As one correspondent testified, “The people have become aroused upon the subject so much so that we have taken considerable stock and hope that you will aid us . . . in so great an enterprize [sic] as it will be.”42 Since Douglas viewed internal improvements as contributions to the national growth of the United States, it is unsurprising that citizens from various parts of the Union tried to enlist him in their causes, and that he responded affirmatively to their wishes. Douglas’s career and personal history prepared him well for his role as development booster. Born in Vermont and raised in upstate New York, he settled in Illinois during his twenties, lonely and penniless. Reading law as an apprentice, he rose to become a circuit court judge, traveling the state while hearing cases. For years thereafter, proud constituents tapped their friend “Judge Douglas” when they needed assistance. He proved invaluable in organizing the early Democratic Party in Illinois, remaining true to his hero Andrew Jackson. By the early 1840s, he won election to the House, and by 1847 he entered the U.S. Senate. Squat and fat, with stubby legs and chubby cheeks, Douglas nevertheless radiated a personal magnetism that endeared him to allies at home and colleagues in Washington. No other figure better personified the restless “spirit of the age” and the impetuous curiosity of Young America.43 Before his pro-southern Kansas-Nebraska Act made him a darling of slavery expansionists in 1854, Douglas became known as someone “too closely identified with steamship, railroad, and all sorts of stock-jobbing enterprises and speculations upon the public treasury, to be a safe guardian over the public finances.” Douglas stood for “progress all over, in every direction, and in every thing.” His very soul appeared barely to contain the panoply of exciting investment opportunities, business transactions, democratizing measures, and political campaigns that punctuated his busy but shortened life (he died at age 48 in 1861).44 As Senator Edward Everett of Massachusetts reported, Douglas “is the leader of ‘Young America,’ that is of the extreme gauche of the democratic party. . . . the recent indication[s] in our domestic politics are not flattering to that subdivision of the democratic party.” The first part of Everett’s assessment proved correct, though not the second.45 42 43 44 45

Alex Ramsey to Stephen A. Douglas, 11 July 1850, Douglas Papers; Edward L. Bowen to Stephen A. Douglas, 20 June 1851, ibid. See Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (1973; Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), and The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989). New York Herald, 4 June 1852, 1. Edward Everett to Lord Aberdeen, 26 April 1853, Edward Everett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

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The adversarial New York Daily Times called Douglas “the most suggestive, original, daring, and unscrupulous leader the party now has.” “No man of Stephen A. Douglas’ age, ever stood in so popular a light before the people throughout the United States,” boasted a more sympathetic paper. And his friend Senator James Shields waxed that Douglas’s “success” was “working out the destiny of a mighty people.”46 The New Democracy could not have become a major force within the party if not for the constant prodding of Illinois’s Little Giant. Douglas and his commitment to local prerogatives facilitated the revamped economic outlook of Young America Democrats. But sometimes local pressures produced a more market-oriented Democracy in other ways. In certain parts of the Union, local circumstances conflicted with national party stands. For example, the usually low-tariff Democracy came up against strong support for protective duties in places like Kentucky (because it grew hemp), Louisiana (because it grew sugar), and Pennsylvania (because it mined metals). In these states, Democrats were repeatedly forced to alter the principles on which they ran campaigns. Such exercises conditioned them to adopt positions at odds with the national platform of their party. As New York Van Burenite Silas Wright noted in 1844, Pennsylvania Democrats “will try to beat the Whigs as high tariff men, and the democratic party can never fight a strong battle, when the controversy is which party shall have possession of the enemy’s own ground.” As Whigs gleefully remembered, the Pennsylvania legislature had endorsed resuscitation of a national bank, and its favorite son James Buchanan even supported the high Whig tariff of 1842.47 In New England, too, Democrats despaired of gaining power due to the tariff issue: “The excessive tariff brings benefits so great and direct to the manufacturers of New England, and so general & persevering an effort is made on the part of our opponents to excite geographical jealousies, that I am afraid, the democratic party is destined for some time yet, to remain in the minority in Massachusetts.” So wailed one despondent Bay Stater.48 Assimilating these local demands, the national party press sometimes altered its stand on public issues. In 1846, the Polk administration organ endorsed tariff reduction with a somewhat novel explanation. It noted that the “[W]higs habitually discuss the tariff, as if their opponents were opposed to the manufacturing industry of the country. This is a singular error.” It repeated the traditional Jacksonian rationale for opposing protective tariffs, though it also made sure to register its support for a new and growing industrial sector.49 46 47

48 49

New York Daily Times, 3 July 1852, 1; Illinois State Register, 6 August 1851, 2; James Shields to Stephen A. Douglas, 12 January 1845, Douglas Papers. Silas Wright to George Bancroft, 8 April 1844, Bancroft Papers. For other examples see William L. Marcy to Samuel J. Tilden, 16 June 1854, Tilden Papers, and Duff Green to William L. Marcy, 31 March 1852, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; American Whig Review 15 (April 1852), 312. G. Bragg to George Bancroft, 25 December 1844, Bancroft Papers. Washington Union, 4 February 1846, 2.

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Polk’s chief economic spokesman, Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker, sanctioned this line of reasoning. Previously a senator from Mississippi, he had no trouble taking New England’s relatively new status as a manufacturing center as a given. Yet he argued that the reduced tariff of 1846, which he helped engineer, would aid those manufacturers more than the high Whig tariff passed in 1842. This symbolized a different logic for antitariffism than seemed evident in the Jacksonian heyday of the 1830s, when solicitude for agricultural interests and liberty-loving yeoman farmers remained the primary reason for opposition to import duties.50 In a variety of ways, then, constituents and party operatives on the local level exerted pressure and produced an effect on their national political representatives. Young America Democrats heeded these wishes because of their passion for the development of their home states as well as their fascination with the new world of trade, invention, transportation, and technology. In an earlier period of American history, however, the desires of constituents might not have swayed congressmen and senators so decisively. Representatives had typically enjoyed wide latitude to act as they saw fit, and this, to many thinkers, was the genius of America’s republican system. Such a scheme might not have always operated in practice, though it was certainly the vision of the republic’s federalist founders. The advent of Jacksonian democracy during the 1820s and 1830s altered whatever was left of these founding expectations. During the early republic, independence remained the most highly prized quality of a political representative. Constituents expected senators, congressmen, and local leaders to make policy decisions using their own best judgment. In this way, they would remain free from compromising dependencies of any kind, including rigid attachment to those they represented. Parochialism would be checked, and a magnanimous spirit of patriotism and civic virtue would take its place in the nation’s deliberative bodies. This custom fulfilled Madison’s hope, expressed in The Federalist, that legislators from a large swath of territory with diverse people would contribute to the common good and prevent local conspiracies from dominating national policy. Under this earlier American logic, the true nature of representation was independent action. Anything less conflicted with the country’s founding republican ideology, according to which dependencies and constraints fed corruption and led to slavery. Once political slavery arrived, according to theories of the time, a republic would degenerate into anarchy and then absolutist despotism. The French Revolution and its aftermath perfectly set the pattern for this slippery slope. Starting in the 1830s, however, the idea of “instructions” gained currency. Now the public expected representatives to take orders from their constituents, especially the state legislatures that elected senators as their deputies. During the nineteenth century, it was widely understood that the federal House of Representatives covered the people of the Union, and that the Senate represented the state governments. As Calhoun famously said, the people had no direct 50

Robert J. Walker to George Bancroft, 27 March 1847, Bancroft Papers.

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relationship with the federal government, and certainly not through the Senate, whose members represented their respective state-level administrations. Hence senators were seen to be especially beholden to their legislatures. William Allen of Ohio took this new imperative to heart, usually following the winds of public opinion at home rather than trying to mold or soften the sometimes-thoughtless demands of those he represented.51 Newly bound by instructions, policymakers felt tied to the local, usually economic, interests of those to whom they answered. The grand statesman-like notion of unencumbered action, and the enlightened self-interest it was meant to encourage, faltered. The rise of “instructions” meant that legislators more closely did the bidding of their constituents, and contemporaries hailed it as a consummation of the Jacksonian democratic spirit. For the New Democracy, this transformation meant that jealous local interests – interests that desired railroads or land grants or canal repairs – now felt more comfortable “instructing” their representatives to vote for them. It became more difficult to resist local desires because of this change in the nation’s political culture. For example, when Wisconsin’s New Democratic Senator Isaac P. Walker prepared to vote on a bill to construct a canal around Niagara Falls, he informed the Senate that he needed to wait for instructions from his state legislature. Stephen Douglas fell into hot water in 1849 when he refused to vote for the Wilmot Proviso on the instructions of the Illinois legislature.52 Purely independent representational action diminished. The rise of “instructions” during the Jacksonian era made it harder for politicians to resist local demands. It increased the probability of representatives heeding their constituents’ wishes, which, for Democrats, meant increasingly contradicting the strict construction faith of their party. If politicians were now more likely than before to push for a railroad or a river repair, they were consequently more likely to break the strict construction barrier established by their Jeffersonian-Jacksonian predecessors. And they did so because of constituent pressure from below. Local bottom-up demands thus pushed certain Democrats – especially those from budding frontier communities – to advocate federally funded internal improvements at the expense of constitutional strict construction. Rivers and Harbors The periodic rivers and harbors improvements bills emanating from Congress became bitter battlegrounds between old and New Democrats in the 1840s and 1850s. These laws mostly sought to make the nation’s waterways navigable 51 52

Reginald C. McGrane, William Allen: A Study in Western Democracy (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1925), 259–63. Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 2 March 1854, 516; Illinois State Register, 14 March 1849, 2, 14 March 1850, 2. Also see Samuel J. Tilden to William L. Marcy, 21 June 1853, Marcy Papers.

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avenues of commerce. The new western states struggled to take advantage of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and numerous other waterways. They recognized the enormous potential of inland harbors and aquatic shipping routes. Yet they felt frustrated by the persistence of snags and shoals, sand dunes and floods. If the West’s natural resources were to be harnessed, they reminded national policymakers, human beings first needed to master their environment. And pioneers could not achieve this mastery by themselves. Help from Washington was what they needed. Whereas both Presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce vetoed such bills on strict construction grounds, New Democrats, primarily from the West, tried to skirt traditional Jacksonian constitutional beliefs in their attempts to obtain valuable appropriations for economic development.53 Ohio-based constituents of Senator William Allen pleaded with him for the federal government to fund a lighthouse, for instance. “We are the only harbor on the whole lakes without a light house,” they complained. The reason such an improvement proved necessary was largely economic – “our exports are increasing” – and local citizens turned to the general government for help.54 Residents of the Old Northwest wished to obtain federal assistance for removing obstructions to ship travel on a river emptying into the Great Lakes. “Over these bars at the usual stages of water, vessels drawing 7 1/2 feet can pass[,] but the disruption incident to the tides often makes their passage difficult,” reported one of them. Trying to validate the intervention of Washington, a correspondent argued that “the removal of these obstructions is a matter of large and national interest.” It would affect trade on the Erie Canal and other channels. “The Public, Naval, as well as the commercial interests of the United States call for the removal of these obstructions.” But President Polk appeared unmoved by such appeals and vetoed the appropriations bills repeatedly. Still, increasing numbers of Democrats began asking for this kind of government intervention, altering the outlook of their party on internal improvements and constitutionalism. As the market revolution matured, so did Democratic beliefs about the proper role of government in enhancing prosperity.55 One correspondent of President Polk contended that “the power to make appropriations to objects of a national and not local interest, independent of the power to carry into effect the object for which the appropriation is made, cannot be denied to exist in the general government.” At heart this statement did not represent such a radical departure from the standard Democratic position. But the fact that party members became embroiled in disputes over this question and increasingly felt forced to defend their newfound support for economic development indicates the pressures of the market economy at work, and the 53

54 55

For examples see the Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 8 March 1846, 449; ibid., 30 Congress, 2 Session, 7 February 1849, 469–70; Stephen A. Douglas to Sidney Breese, 20 October 1846, in Letters of Douglas, 144. Charles P. Indson[?] to William Allen, 20 May 1846, Allen Papers. [Unknown] to William Allen, [no day, no month], 1846, ibid.

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way in which they led Democrats toward new and more open-minded positions on economic growth.56 Even though correspondents indicated the broad national importance of their improvements requests, local and national interests proved difficult to disentangle. In Chicago, shifting bars of sand made the harbor treacherous to navigate, depending on the wind direction. City officials wished to obtain money from Congress to improve the situation. Until this time “appropriations for the improvement of our harbor have been made . . . with so sparing a hand as to result in great detriment to the Lake Commerce of the City.”57 Heeding their call, editor George Sanders in 1852 pushed the federal government to live up to its responsibilities with regard to national transportation improvement projects: This interest can no longer be satisfied or silenced by that local and narrow policy, which, whilst finding power for the Federal Government to erect light-houses on salt water, will discern none to authorize it in undertaking the removal of snags from a river. . . . Its calls will now be respectfully heard by all statesmen who can grasp new or unsettled questions with that comprehensive sagacity necessary when the proper time has come, to give them a full solution.

Sanders’s blunt statement could have served as a rallying cry for the reformulated economic ideology of Young America Democrats. He even revealed the basic motivation of this new, less strict-constructionist vision: it would “promote commerce, which is our great and fruitful source of revenue.”58 Sidney Breese of Illinois asked for federal funds “praying the improvement of the Des Moines and Rock River rapids of the Upper Mississippi,” along with a plea for grants to help in constructing a railroad. He explicitly linked the rivers and harbors allotments to prosperity and economic growth, pointing to Chicago and Milwaukee as examples of the “extraordinary progress of trade and commerce in consequence of these appropriations.” Douglas told him that much of the North supported him in this course, and a convention of New York Democrats met in 1847 to endorse these sentiments.59 The New York Evening Post, incensed at a candidate for state office who proclaimed Whigs the party of internal improvements, retorted that more construction projects were due to Democratic than Whig leadership of the Empire State. DeWitt Clinton’s Erie Canal proved a prominent exception, but other canal projects “were commenced and finished by democratic administrations; and the acting commissioners under whose superintendance [sic] the canals were constructed, were, with one exception, also democrats.” Less important than the veracity 56 57 58 59

John W. Tibbatts to James K. Polk, 21 February 1846, Polk Papers. Chicago Daily Tribune, 28 December 1850, 2. Democratic Review 30 (Jan. 1852), 13, 16. Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 8 March 1846, 449; ibid., 29 Congress, 1 Session, 21 July 1846, 1123. For other examples of such proposed projects during the late 1840s, see ibid., 30 Congress, 2 Session, 7 February 1849, 469–70; Stephen A. Douglas to Sidney Breese, 20 October 1846, in Letters of Douglas, 144; Albany Argus, 19 June 1847, 2.

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of this claim is the fact that Democrats saw fit to make it. Not only were they now supporting river and canal improvements, they wanted the public record unambiguously to reflect this new position.60 The following year, the Post continued, “We have been accused of belonging to that political sect who would deprive the government of nearly all agency in public affairs, and leave such things to manage themselves. This charge is unjust.” Certain spheres of public life required no government intervention in order to thrive, the paper conceded. Witness the phenomenal economic growth that mushroomed after the imposition of a free trade regime in both England and the United States in 1846, for example. “But there are some things which, in the present state of the country, must be done by the government, and these things we are in favor of doing well.” Among them stood lighthouses and other improvements necessary for interstate commerce. Quoting a report from a recent investigation into American lighthouses, the Post noted that European lighthouses worked much better and seemed more efficiently managed. Congress should catch up, not wallow in “the trifling matters which occupy them from day to day.”61 Angry, Stephen A. Douglas thought it absurd for strict constructionists and states’ rightists still to argue about internal improvements. As one reporter said of Douglas: It occurred to him . . . that there were some powers in this Government that, by this time, ought to be conceded; that there were some principles which ought to be considered settled. . . . He made these remarks because of the attempt of some of his friends to read out of the republican [i.e., Democratic] party those who might differ with them.62

Citizens of the Old Northwest, led by Douglas, complained that successive national congresses and presidential administrations had neglected their interests, and that the Democracy had come into the hands of easterners. As one Illinoisan warned Navy Secretary George Bancroft in 1845, “The Valley of the Mississippi will give laws to the union in a few years, and those who have been so tardy in affording encouragement and protection to our growing commerce, may live to regret their participation in so great an injustice to the West, and so decided an injury to the nation.”63 Douglas had no qualms about voting for appropriations to construct harbors and canals, including for states and territories besides his own. He felt continually frustrated by the internal improvement vetoes of Presidents Tyler, Polk, and Pierce on strict construction grounds, and he defended the Illinois congressional delegation as progress-hungry visionaries thwarted by presidential backwardness.64 John Wentworth, Douglas’s Democratic colleague in the 60 61 62 63 64

New York Evening Post, 7 October 1851, 2. Ibid., 23 April 1852, 2. Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 13 March 1846, 497. William S. Wait to George Bancroft, 12 June 1845, Bancroft Papers. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 6 July 1850, 1348; ibid., 30 August 1850, 1719; Stephen A. Douglas to the Editors of the Illinois State Register, 28 June 1845, in Letters of Douglas, 114.

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House, agreed. He couched the campaign for rivers and harbors improvements in the international terms of the New Democracy. Rather than seeing them as internal improvements forbidden by constitutional design, Congress should treat them as fortifications and defenses against British Canada. Left unprotected, communities in Illinois and Michigan could suffer attack by the British; the federal government had a duty to look after these areas. The economic and communications revolutions of recent years made western improvements objects of international concern. “Indeed, beef is now packed at Chicago for the British market direct. And yet members call these lake harbors internal improvements!” laughed Wentworth.65 Another erstwhile Douglas lieutenant, George N. Sanders, also bashed Democratic elders for “quarrelling about the Constitution.” These classic Jacksonian debates had no place in the New Democracy, he thought. As the Sanders-influenced Washington Sentinel grumbled, “It is a strange and unaccountable thing to us that a man cannot declare himself a friend of progress, without being at once proclaimed a foe to the Constitution, and a reviler of its honored framers.”66 During an earlier session of Congress, Douglas and Wentworth had supported funding for construction on the Illinois River. This meant that Congress would have funded an improvement plan within one state only, falling below the threshold of “interstate commerce” stipulated by the Constitution. It is a measure of how radically Douglas departed from Democratic orthodoxy that he pushed so hard for this clearly intrastate project. Local prosperity trumped adherence to party faith and traditional beliefs in limited government. As a result, Douglas took much flak for his position when southern Democrats including South Carolina’s Robert Barnwell Rhett accused him of being a Federalist in favor of big government. Even within his own state, Douglas feared that the legislature would repudiate his actions and side with the Polk administration.67 Indeed, Douglas objected to the unusually vehement resistance he encountered, primarily from residents of older Atlantic seaboard states who did not thirst so needily for improvements. “A large and intelligent portion of the American people, comprising, perhaps, a majority of the Democratic party,” he wrote, “are in the habit of considering these works as constituting a general system of internal improvements by the Federal Government, and therefore in violation of the creed of the Democratic party and of the Constitution of the United States.” No wonder Douglas and his Young America faction faced an uphill battle.68

65

66 67 68

Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 10 February 1846, 354–5. It seems worthwhile to remember that only by internationalizing the need for internal improvements, by viewing them as key to national security, did many Jeffersonian Republicans come to accept Henry Clay’s economic nationalism following the War of 1812. Riepma, “Young America,” 228, 309–10. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 132–6; Stephen A. Douglas to Sidney Breese, 19 November 1846, in Letters of Douglas, 148. Stephen A. Douglas to Joel A. Matteson, 2 January 1854, in Letters of Douglas, 275.

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By the early 1850s, Douglas changed his mind. He argued that state governments should tax ships using their waterways (“tonnage duties”) and use these funds to pay for their own improvements. President Polk had proposed this scheme in the 1840s, and Douglas eventually accepted the idea because he needed southern strict constructionist support for a possible presidential bid in the 1850s. He had also become disillusioned with the difficulty of obtaining federal appropriations for these projects on a regular basis. He hoped that the central government would take the initiative on rivers and harbors, but he switched in favor of state tonnage duties because he saw the impediments to obtaining federal largesse. There remained too much opposition. In other words, Douglas gave up on federally funded improvements because he expected too much, not too little, of Washington policymakers. They failed to live up to these expectations by appropriating too low and too itinerantly, and Douglas eventually responded by transferring his allegiance to the realm of state government operations. He was willing to champion an expanded federal role in these projects, but Congress let him down.69 So did some of the party rank-and-file. As one Philadelphia Democrat wrote in 1852, Douglas was subverting the cardinal principle of states’ rights, upending the most basic shibboleth of Jackson’s Democracy. The writer acknowledged Douglas’s leading place in the “Young Democracy” and said that he “looked upon you as the worthy leader of that wing of the party.” But certain statements that Douglas made in the Senate troubled the man. “I am one of the Young Democracy,” he conceded, “but only so far as they favor the re-juvenesence [sic] of the old strict interpretation of the Articles of the Constitution. This is undoubtedly the foundation stone upon which rests our security and perpetuity. Other portions of our partizan [sic] superstructure may be torn down – replaced or become useless from age but as long as this one principle is kept steadily in view.” The writer went on to record his fear that Douglas’s new loose constructionism meant he acknowledged a congressional power to ban slavery from new western territories (i.e., the Wilmot Proviso). Such a “heterodox” position seemed unacceptable.70 Opponents such as this correspondent continued to charge that the general government enjoyed no constitutional power to improve rivers and harbors. In the House, one congressman moved to strike out part of a river and harbor improvements bill because he said it veered too close to the Whig line of thinking, which legitimated “a general system of internal improvements.” The contested appropriation would have provided a $20,000 subsidy “for the improvement of the harbor of Dubuque, on the river Mississippi.” The government 69 70

Ibid., 276–7; Washington Sentinel, 24 November 1853, 2. Francis Grant Umsted to Stephen A. Douglas, 3 April 1852, Douglas Papers. Douglas’s favored formula of popular sovereignty did implicitly recognize congressional power over slavery in the territories, as the correspondent feared. It empowered territorial legislatures, which acted as extensions of Congress in the field, to decide the question of slavery as they saw fit.

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should certainly repair navigational problems along the river, this lawmaker argued, but not create a harbor. If it formed such a harbor, it ought to do so for every municipality: “every town on the Mississippi is as much entitled to a wharf as the town of Dubuque.” He thus deployed the classic Democratic ideal of equal opportunity without special privilege. John Wentworth heartily disagreed and resented being called a Whig in disguise. “I am free to confess,” he admitted, “that the policy of the Democratic party has not always been consistent in relation to this question.” In fact, it changed significantly as the market revolution wore on through the 1840s. Constituents wanted economic development, and Young America Democrats responded. Even more revealingly, Wentworth noted, “A great deal is said about the powers of this Government, but I find that when a man wants a thing under this Government, he finds a power to do it.” No clearer statement of economic expediency over constitutional scruple could have been pronounced. Once dissenting Democrats presented this calculation openly, the days of party orthodoxy were numbered.71 Even some stalwart old Jacksonians tried to rationalize the New Democratic policy of commercial expansion. During senatorial debates on the rivers and harbors bill of 1846, Lewis Cass of Michigan argued that “it was the duty of Congress to legislate with a regard to local as well as general interests.” It was now time, he and others thought, to do some good for the Old Northwest. “Old Bullion” Thomas Hart Benton justified federal appropriations by explaining away Jackson’s strict construction views: Gen Jackson adopted a rule for his own government merely, with the view of checking extravagant expenditures, by which appropriations were to be confined to objects below ports of entry and delivery. He did not pretend that such was a constitutional limit. . . . We can discover no constitutional rule laid down by him which forbids appropriations for the navigable rivers of the west, or for river or lake harbors.72

Benton was correct: Jackson disapproved of certain appropriations, but not of rivers and harbors improvements, which he saw as truly national in purpose.73 Joining Benton in favor of the 1846 rivers and harbors bill were Young Americans William Allen of Ohio, Edward Hannegan of Indiana, and Breese of Illinois. One paper advised, “We think politicians would do better to give up their . . . chase after the unconstitutional item, and take bold ground for or against the whole bill. Shall we have Lake harbors and shall we improve our great navigable national high ways, or shall we not?”74 Cass’s and Benton’s endorsements of these bills stemmed from their own status as 71 72

73 74

Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 2 Session, 17 February 1851, 559–60; ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Session, 15 December 1847, 39; ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 17 February 1851, 565. Newspaper clipping on Rivers and Harbors Improvements, 8 October 1846, Polk Papers. On East-West tensions over internal improvements, also see John King to William Allen, 26 January 1846, Allen Papers. See David P. Currie, The Constitution in Congress: Democrats and Whigs, 1829–1861 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), 13–16. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 5 April 1848, 5.

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western representatives. Their actions also complicate the generational identification of Young America, showing how on certain issues older Democrats joined their younger colleagues. Overall, however, it was younger politicians who embraced New Democratic priorities. Defenders of the budding West clung together as they realized that the health of their region increasingly stood in the balance. In Iowa, one congressman tried to amend the state constitution in order to meet the desires of the burgeoning West. He proposed that a new constitutional convention meet every decade, since the state’s “wants 10 years hence can’t be judged of, today. Young America I think will be pleased with the idea.”75 Congressman John Pettit of Indiana, a Democrat who felt proud to support the Polk administration on nearly every other policy, called the president a dogmatist who followed “those opinions which were formed early in life, closing the mind to the light of experience” and making him “unworthy of an intelligent being.” Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana presented a joint resolution of his state legislature requesting congressional appropriations to build a canal around Ohio River waterfalls that interfered with trade and communication. He refused to stop his campaign for federal funds merely because of the administration’s recalcitrance.76 Representative William A. Richardson, a Young American Douglas acolyte, clearly conceded the “constitutional power” to make improvements. “People 3000 miles off separated by dreary wastes & snowy mounts will never consent to be governed by the people of the Atlantic States unless some more rapid communication can be established,” concluded another Douglas lieutenant.77 Fiscally conservative, Presidents James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce nevertheless held the old party line, aggravating relations with the younger, western wing of the organization. In explaining his veto of a rivers and harbors bill in August 1854, Pierce justified his objection primarily on constitutional grounds. Internal improvement projects that contributed to the national good were acceptable objects of federal funding, he clarified, but the legislation recently presented to him included projects more local in character. To fund these plans with money from the federal government seemed to Pierce unconstitutional. It also appeared unwise, cutting against the widely held respect for a limited and economically administered government. Congress enjoyed power to make improvements in territories but not in the states, since territories remained under its direct jurisdiction while states were administered by their own governments through powers reserved by the Constitution. Pierce acknowledged that the country remained divided over this question, and that “expediency” as well 75

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James Thorington to William Penn Clarke, 2 November 1856, William Penn Clarke Papers, Iowa Historical Society, Des Moines. Thorington was a Whig, although his attribution of credit to Young America highlights the origin of these ideas. I am indebted to Silvana Siddali for bringing this piece of evidence to my attention. Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 20 January 1846, 220. Ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Session, 15 December 1847, 39. On Richardson, see ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 17 February 1851, 565. For the last quotation, see Charles Fletcher to Stephen A. Douglas, 3 August 1846, Douglas Papers.

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as constitutional scruple was at issue. Many citizens understandably wished to jump-start America’s economic engine. But the president’s long-formed ideas on this subject prevented him from acting on the bill.78 As President Polk put it in an earlier veto message, “It is not easy to perceive the difference in principle or mischievous tendency between appropriations for making roads and digging canals, and appropriations to deepen rivers and improve harbors. All are alike within the limits and jurisdiction of the States, and rivers and harbors alone open an abyss of expenditure sufficient to swallow up the wealth of the nation.”79 Young Hickory feared that passing the rivers and harbors bill would encourage legislators to compete for favors for their home districts – a type of corruption that would spell doom to the virtue of the republic. Polk recommended, instead, that the state governments impose tonnage duties in order to raise money for their own river and harbor projects. Polk’s fears of ballooning expenses, at least, may have been accurate. The Democratic Review reported that the total national cost of transportation improvements rose from $200 million to over $800 million between 1830 and 1849. It was no accident that New Democrats came to power precisely during those years.80 Rivers and harbors bills represented new types of legislation. They emerged during the 1840s in response to westerners’ desires for economic development and closer ties to the rest of the country. Whereas most Democrats had already staked a position on more traditional kinds of improvements, such as railroads and turnpikes, rivers and harbors allowed them to break with conventional party wisdom and adopt novel measures to aid the West. Once they saw that old Democrats, many of them from the South and East, objected, intraparty fissures on this question became salient. Young America faced down the old Democracy and argued that the turn of the 1840s signified a new era. No longer would Democrats feel ashamed about supporting the market revolution. No longer would they allow strict construction beliefs to cloud their judgments regarding the accumulation of wealth. Once they appreciated the sums of money they could acquire in a new world of free trade and internal improvements, old republican principles of agrarianism and limited government loosened in response. 78 79

80

Franklin Pierce, drafts of speeches on public works, 4 August 1854, 30 December 1854, Franklin Pierce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Messages and Papers, V, 216. Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 15 December 1847, 30–3; ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Session, 15 December 1846, 30; Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 342. Also see Allan Nevins, ed., Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845–1849 (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1929), entries for 4 October 1848, 13 October 1848, 348–9. As one historian has noted, Polk’s veto placed him in an awkward situation. On the one hand, he furthered western expansion through the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, creating a need for transportation networks and improvements. On the other, he blocked congressional bills that would have provided precisely these services. See John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001), 240. Democratic Review 27 (Aug. 1850), 148.

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However solicitous of free trade and internal improvements New Democrats became, they seldom spoke directly about the benefits of a manufacturing economy or of the need to bolster industry in addition to agriculture. And they rarely endorsed high tariffs. These omissions are characteristics that continued to separate them from the Whigs. As progressive Democrats rather than true Hamiltonians, Young Americans touted internal improvements and other symbols of economic progress rather than industrialization per se. Their party’s early ties to the land prevented them from envisioning a Whig-style society of industrial capitalists in urban centers. Still, their views on federal appropriations moved them closer to their opponents than they had been before. August Belmont, George Bancroft, John Wentworth, Sidney Breese, Stephen Douglas – these men and their allies strode onto the Democratic stage as a new generation. Revering the organization’s founders, they nevertheless realized that the future of the country lay in their hands. Only with local prosperity and absorbent outlets for export could America realize its productive promise. Only by moving beyond the nation’s infant fears of concentrated power could it muster the economic strength necessary to defend itself in the larger world. The policies of the old Democracy seemed left over from another age, not the fast-moving era of telegraphs, railroads, and new international commitments. As August Belmont and Stephen Douglas geared up for the presidential race of 1860, they could look back on 30 years of Democratic development. The party stood by its bedrock principles of states’ rights and popular sovereignty. But it now recognized that these imperatives were part of a continual calculation, a constantly negotiated balance between scruple and interest, tradition and opportunity, suspicion and chance.

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3 Rails, Canals, and a New Commercial Spirit

The transatlantic achievement of free trade and the local expansion of federally sponsored internal improvements remained the most obvious markers of New Democrats’ commercial dynamism. By lowering protective barriers, young Democrats allowed economic ties with Europe and its colonies to flourish. These connections in turn led to a greater desire for political involvement in Continental affairs, especially following the failed revolutions of 1848. Similarly, by relaxing the constitutional barriers to federal funding of important national infrastructure, New Democrats contributed to the growth of a national market. In their eyes, these priorities went hand in hand, as domestic commodities traveling on cleaner lakes and faster rails demanded foreign outlets with sympathetic trade conditions. In addition to these specific policy initiatives, Young America Democrats celebrated the growth of the market in more general terms. Through speeches, articles, and correspondence, they gave notice that the Democracy no longer frowned on stocks and corporations, banks and businesses. Beyond individual congressional measures, in other words, New Democrats displayed their heightened interest in commercial exploits in a variety of ways. Often these signals came explicitly, in the form of remarks introducing a new party agenda. At other times they slipped in unnoticed, as when an investor, in passing, expressed frustration at the traditional course of the Democratic Party. In both ways, leading Democrats showed that they were becoming restive about the Locofoco economic ideology of the 1830s, and eager to reach the imagined commercial utopia of the 1840s and 1850s. This chapter begins by discussing the causes of New Democrats’ refashioned economic outlook and then considers rails and canals as further examples of this shift. Though internal improvements like any others in some sense, they justify inclusion in a separate category because of their international dimensions. Unlike projects such as the Cumberland Road or various rivers and harbors bills, rails and canals usually involved the United States in foreign policy decisions that had not formed a major part of the Democratic platform until this 65

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time. They captured New Democrats’ imaginations in a different way than the more domestically oriented improvements discussed in the last chapter. In fussing over rails and canals, the young Democracy displayed its heart and soul. Steamships and locomotives served as metaphors for the never-flagging energy characteristic of the new generation, and they symbolized the core of New Democratic ideology in a more direct, visceral manner than other improvements projects could. The chapter will then discuss changing views of the Independent Treasury, a Democratic article of faith, and close by showcasing the more general expressions of promarket sentiment produced by New Democrats. Through debate on funding rails and canals, as well as discussion of the broader meaning of a new commercial era for the party, New Democrats tried to move their organization closer to the global liberal order of the mid nineteenth century. Causes and Explanations The preceding chapter developed what appears to be the primary cause in the rise of a new market orientation within the Democracy: local pressure upon politicians from constituents and state-level party operatives. Various American communities came to their senses, in a sense, and decided that living in boomtowns and accruing wealth trumped rigid adherence to outdated shibboleths from on high. In the case of the canals and railroads discussed in this chapter, greed and ambition served as parallel motives. Yet contemporaries pointed to several other factors as well, and it is worth paying attention to what they said. Most importantly, a few Young America Democrats understood that the nation’s recent economic cycle had much to do with the philosophies emerging within their party after 1844. The speculative boom of the 1830s, fed mostly by western land sales, came to a screeching halt with the Panic of 1837. Banks collapsed or suspended specie payments, making their paper notes worthless and turning sky-high inflation into miserable depression within weeks. Historians and contemporaries spent years arguing about the reasons for this breakdown, with fingers alternately pointing to Jackson’s Specie Circular, Van Buren’s Independent Treasury, and a host of other, sometimes global, factors. For New Democrats who lived through this major industrial depression, lessons came hard and never faded. When the economy picked up again after 1843, they took with them the searing images of poverty and unemployment recalled from those lean years. The economic boom of the mid to late 1840s may have encouraged the more commercially minded attitudes of a reoriented Democratic Party. Buffeted by displeasure at the depression of 1837–43, Democrats responded to good times by accepting the previously reviled forces of the market. The depression, in other words, convinced at least some of them that the stale policies of the 1830s needed to go and that a new day was at hand.1 Certain members of the younger 1

William T. Kerrigan, “‘Young America!’ Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843– 1861” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1997), 99, 172. Also see Dale R.

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generation blamed party elders for everything that went wrong after 1837. They staged a mutiny, took control of the ship, and altered course.2 For example, John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review saw the Democratic reverses stemming from the depression as a rebaptism of the party, purifying and emboldening it to become a better organization. Periodic loss humbled the long-dominant Democracy, the journal acknowledged, and prevented the inevitable corruptions of power. Eventually “the Democratic party will enter upon the new epoch in a more healthy state of purity.” The Review detailed Democratic travails beginning in the late 1830s: “It is engaged in its natural and proper mission, that of Reform; and therefore must necessarily expect to encounter the hostility . . . of those among its own former leaders interested in the perpetuation of the evils against which its efforts are now directing themselves.” Sounding more optimistic tones, John O’Sullivan predicted that “a splendid career is opening upon our party, and its high and holy cause; a new era is indeed . . . dawning upon our country.” “The democracy has recovered from its paralysis of panic, and is beginning to put forth again the energies of its renewed youth.”3 O’Sullivan saw the Panic of 1837 and the depression that followed as a clear break between an older, Jacksonian-era Democratic Party and an altered, chastened Democracy that could rise phoenix-like to even greater heights. The first deployment of this New Democracy would occur with Polk’s election in 1844. In addition to the depression of 1837–43, New Democrats capitalized on the fact that fresh issues started captivating public attention during the 1840s. Consequently, when they shifted course on old policies, they did not feel the public glare as intensely as they otherwise might have. In the place of banks and corporations now stood wars with England and Mexico, the Wilmot Proviso and the territorial dispute over slavery, and the revolutions of 1848. As President Polk himself realized toward the close of his administration, the “old issues which divided the political parties . . . have been virtually settled.”4 Making the transition toward New Democracy became easier during the 1840s, that is, because party competition turned less and less on fiscal questions. Democrats could not have made this switch during the depressed years of the Van Buren administration, when old-school, hard-money agrarianism defined their response to market collapse. But they could do so after 1844, when territorial growth became more of a priority and the economy started to rebound. Then a transition in values could take place quietly and with little embarrassment. The Democratic Party’s relationship with immigrants provides one example of this shift in public discussion. During the foundational period of the 1830s, Democrats could benefit from fears of the market revolution. But by the

2 3 4

Prentiss, “Economic Progress and Social Dissent in Michigan and Mississippi, 1837–1860” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford Univ., 1990), which articulates a break in Democratic Party history. Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 4–5; Prentiss, “Economic Progress and Social Dissent,” 28, 159. Democratic Review 1 (Jan. 1838), 257; ibid., 3 (Sept. 1838), 5–6; ibid., 2 (June 1838), 320; Robert D. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2003), 34. James K. Polk to George Bancroft, 15 September 1848, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

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1840s, the danger of rotting morals and political subversion seemed to come not from bankers, but from immigrants. Whereas earlier the bank stockholders and mill owners seemed the villains, now treacherous Catholics shouldered the blame. And since immigrants and Catholics became associated with the Democracy more than any other party, the organization suffered accordingly. If the Democrats had been in a perfect position to take advantage of popular fears in the 1830s, now many old-stock Protestants blamed the Democratic Party itself for accommodating the immigrants who disrupted their lives. For the New Democracy, this meant that the danger changed: it was no longer simply the rise of commercialism, and consequently New Democrats could embrace market values. It proved easier to become more economically progressive when the immigrants, not the capitalists, turned into the enemies.5 Finally, international exigencies produced an economically refashioned Democracy as well. Increasingly enmeshed in the North American West and in the flaming barricades of Europe, Young America Democrats saw dollar signs wherever they turned. In Italian polities like Sardinia, for example, American financiers helped to bring about a laissez-faire trade regime and the building of a new railroad. And when the revolutions of 1848 erupted across Europe, New Democrats expressed concern about their financial backlash. The “utter dislocation of business relations,” commented the Democratic Review, “growing out of the affairs of the continent, is gradually working out results that cannot but be disastrous.”6 The California Gold Rush of 1849 elicited similar notice. Put into international circulation, argued the ubiquitous Review, gold will help Americans purchase more goods and increase their wealth. As President Polk wrote in a message to Congress, “The amount of our constitutional currency at home would be greatly increased, while its circulation abroad would be promoted.” It would make the U.S. government less dependent on other sources of revenue and also portended large changes in world prices. America’s comparative economic advantage therefore became a key criterion for evaluating the new California finds. For this reason, President Polk urged the speedy creation of a U.S. Mint branch in California so that gold could efficiently be turned into valuable American currency.7 The Review also advocated more government supervision in order to control and regulate the new mineral reserves. Suddenly “a mint or government agency” seemed desirable in order to store and guard the gold. The government should receive a percentage of the gold dug, the Review’s writer suggested, and ensure that it benefits “the whole community in its operation upon the trade and 5 6

7

Michael F. Holt, “The Democratic Party, 1828–1860,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), I, 529. Gemme Paola, “Imperial Designs of Political Philanthropy: A Study of Antebellum Accounts of Italian Liberalism,” American Studies International 39 (Feb. 2001): 19–51; Democratic Review 22 (June 1848), 561. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 11 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1897–1908), IV, 636–7.

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prosperity of the Union.” The U.S. Navy should become the transporter of gold to the Atlantic coast, the writer even concluded. The author of this piece took pains to note that government regulation could easily translate into oppression, and that vigilance should remain the watchword for all true republicans. But deeper state intervention in regulating and fostering gold digging, along with fascination at the commercial opportunities it promised, remained the central themes of the article.8 In sum, we can ascribe New Democrats’ market orientation to their searing experiences during the depression of 1837–43; the gradual eclipse of economic issues by questions related to foreign policy and domestic slavery; the intrusion of international considerations, including the European revolutions of 1848 and western adventures like the Gold Rush; and, of course, the overarching imperative of bottom-up pressure by progress-hungry American citizens. Motivated by this causal quartet, the younger generation of the Democratic Party deftly plotted an original course.

Rails and Canals Static improvements such as buoys and lighthouses danced vividly in the New Democratic imagination. But what truly fueled the faction’s frenzy was rail power. Young America comprised a generation that had grown up with locomotives and viewed railroads as central to their God-ordained takeover of North America. As former Calhoun sidekick Duff Green observed in 1852, “the Rail Road interest” now represented an important segment of the party, one that would not allow candidates opposed to its expansionist plans nomination for public office. Such was the result of “the conflict between the old & the young ‘fogies.’”9 By contrast, the older generation of Jacksonians had grown up watching turnpikes and canals, and, whereas they saw the possibilities of the railroad, their thoughts did not become so wrapped up in its promise when compared with the Young Americans. For the latter, rail power remained connected with their schemes for the expansion of trade so that transportation, communication, and commerce became aspects of one grand futuristic vision. This transition bears similarities to that between the old Jeffersonian Republicans and the new, more nationalistic Republicans led by Henry Clay. Just as the National Republicans, guided by Clay and Calhoun, began to dominate their party after 1816, so New Democrats affected the course of their organization after 1844. They moved closer to the Whig position, which espoused federal appropriations for these transportation improvements. 8 9

Democratic Review 24 (Jan. 1849), 3–13; New York Herald, 13 January 1849, 1. Duff Green to William L. Marcy, 31 March 1852, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; George Stevens to Stephen A. Douglas, 5 December 1853, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

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In order to understand how the railroad craze departed from the old Democracy, one need only remember that railroad development became a Republican program during and after the Civil War. Engineers and workers completed the transcontinental line during a period of Republican hegemony in 1869, Gilded Age railroad barons such as Leland Stanford associated with the GOP, and Republican-backed capitalists represented railroad interests by the late nineteenth century. In other words, the railroad would eventually become associated with the party of unquestioned economic growth and nationalism. Yet during the 1840s and 1850s, Stephen A. Douglas remained the arch-exponent of the railroad, and he was a Democrat par excellence. What links these two periods? What accounts for the prorailroad position originating with the Democrats before the Civil War yet becoming Republican after it? The New Democracy: the forward-looking stances of a young group of antebellum Democrats. This transition demonstrates the impact of the New Democrats not only on their own party, but on the emerging Republican organization as well.10 No more determined visionary of the railroad spoke from the stump than Stephen A. Douglas. For Douglas and his fellow New Democrats, the railroad represented a sign from God, a symbol of the means by which they would civilize the rude western territories, spread democracy, and enrich America. In 1845, Douglas looked forward to the completion of a line to the Pacific, a postbellum event that he never lived to celebrate. Yet he presciently predicted how it unfolded: It will be the work of years . . . and progress gradually, from east to west, keeping up a connected chain of communication, and following the tide of emigration, and the settlement of the country. In addition to the India and China trade, and the vast commerce of the Pacific ocean, which would pass over this route, you must create a further necessity for the road, by subduing the wilderness, and peopling it with a hardy and industrious population, who would soon have a surplus produce, without the means of getting it to market, and require, for their own consumption, immense quantities of goods and merchandize [sic], which they could not obtain, at reasonable rates, for want of proper facilities of transportation; and that necessity will make the road.11

Douglas echoed the old Jeffersonian argument that transportation and infrastructure were essential for the maintenance of an agrarian – hence virtuous – republic. Only through such channels could farmers move goods to market and also import consumer necessities, keeping them thriving as tillers of the land.12 In the vision of Douglas and his fellow New Democrats, the railroad would ˆ of middle America, “one of the principal make Chicago a golden entrepot 10 11 12

Democratic Review 21 (Oct. 1847), 339; ibid., 23 (Nov. 1848), 405–12; ibid., 25 (Sept. 1849), 243–8. Stephen A. Douglas to Asa Whitney, 15 October 1845, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 130–1. See Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980).

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internal cities of the continent, if not the greatest,” as one paper put it. Chicago in 1853 already used six different railroads, and nine more were projected for later that year. It boasted 16 miles of wharves for steamboat access, not to mention increasing improvements to its harbor. The city’s export rate remained high for commodities such as grain, beef, pork, hides, and dairy. Finally, Chicago’s population was approaching 50,000 and rising by about 20% annually. The railroad would abet this growth and make Douglas’s home state the locus of America’s new commercial empire.13 Self-interest and regional pride as well as idealism and romantic vision animated the Douglas dream. Douglas hoped to line his own pockets as a major real estate investor in the Chicago market, as well as to enrich a city that in 1850 was not yet the colossus it would become after the Civil War. Like so much in the Young America program, the western railroad seemed the product of both material and ideal considerations. By granting the West access to established population centers, it spread democracy and the values of an ordered, settled society. In this respect, no agent of Manifest Destiny appeared as important as the railroad. Yet it also promised to enrich the far-sighted few who provided capital for its extension, not to mention the frontier communities that would become overnight boom towns once the “iron horse” arrived. For figures such as Douglas and George Sanders, there was little distinction between these two priorities. Individual prosperity seemed the natural result of a foreign policy true to the nation’s founding republican ideals. It was therefore no accident that many New Democratic leaders at some points in their careers became railroad promoters and speculators. Railroads became the dominant investment of the 1850s, and Young Democrats such as Douglas, financier Dean Richmond of New York, Mississippi Senator Robert J. Walker, future New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden, and New Jersey Senator Robert F. Stockton all staked their economic futures on the rails. True to form, Democrats wanted the federal government to sponsor their transcontinental railroad. When Senator Thomas Hart Benton introduced a bill for a great “Highway to the Pacific” in 1850, he again donned a Young America cap and envisioned total responsibility by Washington. Benton desired a thoroughfare that would include both a railroad and a regular road. He believed that “nationality requires the work to be done by the National Government, and owned by it when it is done. . . . The construction and the jurisdiction of the highway are both to be in the hands of the General Government; and these are the hands in which every public and national consideration would require them to be.” Once again a Democrat showed that he felt comfortable with strong federal oversight. Benton also saw the railroad as a national unifier, in the tradition of Henry Clay’s “American System.” By following a central route through the continent, it would fulfill the needs of various regions and ameliorate mounting 13

Illinois State Register, 19 March 1853, 2, 12 May 1853, 2; Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 December 1852, 2; Charles Fletcher to Stephen A. Douglas, 3 August 1846, Douglas Papers.

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sectional tensions.14 The New York Herald, an organ of Young America, agreed with Benton and in 1853 expressed disgust with “the old hackneyed plea of the Congressional ignoramus” to the effect that federal involvement in the railroad scheme would be “unconstitutional.”15 Late that same year, Congressman John Wentworth introduced a resolution in the House proclaiming the “power for the federal government to construct a railroad to the Pacific.” Given the pitched constitutional conflicts over improvements in those years, Wentworth’s resolution seemed deliberately provocative. Echoing themes he sounded regularly, Wentworth peddled the federally funded railroad as a boon for national security. Congressional authority to construct a railroad, he held, remained part and parcel of the federal responsibility for “the common defence [sic] and general welfare.” Wentworth’s resolution nevertheless sparked heated controversy. “Against such a dangerous, unconstitutional and demoralizing scheme we have uttered our solemn protest,” cringed one Democratic paper. It declared the federal railroad “an anti-republican project.” The newspaper hoped that “the National Legislature” would not “lose sight of republican principles so far as to give its sanction to such an undertaking.” Most revealingly, it continued: “Constitutional barriers should not be permitted to give way before considerations of mere convenience. The principles of the sacred compact must not yield precedence to expediency.” It seemed easy to imagine the dangers lurking behind every expansion of government power: “the door would be opened wide to extravagance, profligacy, and corruption, and the government would become the mere appendage to a railroad company, or the Executive would be clothed with such power and patronage as to destroy and overthrow the checks and balances of the Constitution.” The House tabled Wentworth’s motion, but other boosters continued their attempts to secure the railroad. Stephen Douglas and his Kansas-Nebraska Act were the most well known.16 Born and raised in New Hampshire, Wentworth moved to Chicago after graduating from Dartmouth and studying law at Harvard. Although he started his career as an antibank, hard-money Locofoco, by the 1840s he expressed dismay at President Polk’s vetoes of improvement bills and began to alter his stance. So enamored did he eventually become of a nationalist domestic policy that he joined the Republican Party during the 1850s. Mayor of Chicago shortly before the Civil War, he ended up supporting the Lincoln administration. Although his later career steered clear of Stephen Douglas, Wentworth’s Young America years displayed interesting parallels with his friend. Both were New Englanders transplanted to the West, and both remained obsessed with the 14 15 16

Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 2 Session, 16 December 1850, 56; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 2 November 1847, 3. Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 257. Washington Sentinel, 15 December 1853, 2. For the paper’s earlier comments against the railroad, see ibid., 5 October 1853, 2, 27 November 1853, 2.

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buildup of frontier social structure at federal expense. Unlike Douglas, “Long John” Wentworth towered at six feet six inches and at one point weighed more than three hundred pounds. Illinois thus boasted a Little Giant as well as a bigger giant in its battles for congressional aid. An adversarial newspaper once said that Wentworth had “the impudence of Satan, without half the talent or moral honesty.”17 One cannot know for certain, but it seems a reasonable supposition that Wentworth’s time at the vanguard of the New Democracy prepared him for the more centralizing and nationalist opinions that later led him into the GOP. As we will see in subsequent chapters, Wentworth was only one of several Young Americans whose New Democratic careers prepared them for entrance into the party of Lincoln.18 Wentworth and Benton served as important spokesmen for the West. But, as in the case of rivers and harbors and other transportation projects, bottomup pressure from constituents themselves proved the moving force behind the New Democracy. The railroad, wrote one such resident from Ohio, “is a work of importance paramount with all other interests, in our estimation.” He then implied that the government should play a role in its construction. His line of argument ran this way: “the whole American people” will support the railroad project; since the people are the source of political power, once they expressed their views to their representatives, such views ought to become “the law of the land.” This was an oblique way of hinting at the manner in which popular enthusiasm for a national railway might be translated into governmental support for such a monumental project. In fact, the rail line could not be built without government involvement in some measure, at least in providing land grants. An Ohio newspaper estimated that $80 million would be needed to fund it, and most of it would have to be raised domestically. Throughout the 1840s, Congress appropriated sections of public land for the building of smaller railroads and began serious consideration of a transcontinental line to unite the country along an east-west axis during the 1850s. Interrupted by secession, the project benefited from private investment and reached completion in 1869.19 If a federally operated railway could link North America, thought young Democrats, an interoceanic canal would complement it by connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review during the 1840s, was a New Democrat captivated by new technologies, and among many pet projects he touted a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, the better to realize American trade potential and easy passenger transportation. When President Martin Van Buren heard of O’Sullivan’s dream for an interoceanic canal, 17 18 19

Illinois State Register, 23 April 1849, 2 (quoting the Quincy Herald). See Don E. Fehrenbacher, Chicago Giant: A Biography of “Long John” Wentworth (Madison, Wisconsin: American History Research Center, 1957). Harman Slidgee[?] to William Allen, 8 February 1846, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 15 January 1846, 208; ibid., 29 April 1846, 751; ibid., 30 Congress, 2 Session, 7 February 1849, 473–4; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 2 November 1847, 3.

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he dismissed the plan as airy speculation. Not only would the construction of such a project prove unrealistic, held Van Buren, but also the constitutionality of federal government involvement seemed doubtful. O’Sullivan, undeterred by the stubbornness of his elder, insisted not only that the idea for a canal should be pursued, but that the federal government take the lead in surveying the territory and possibly helping to build it. This debate exposed the fundamental fault line between old and New Democracy. Van Buren not only lacked the entrepreneurial temperament necessary to imagine such a venture, his strict construction constitutionalism prevented him from allowing any federal role in the plan. O’Sullivan understood that government involvement in the canal proposal contradicted strict construction and federalism, but he argued to Van Buren that the “national interest alone, which our Gov’t possesses in it (apart from its commercial point of view) as an avenue of communication with the Northwestern Territory, seems to me amply to justify such a step on the Constitutional ground.” O’Sullivan stood willing to loosen Jacksonian-era constitutional ethics in return for the economic opportunity and global expansion central to Young America’s program. An old Jacksonian like Van Buren could not enter this frame of mind, but a fiery Young Democrat like O’Sullivan saw the canal as an example of human enterprise taking charge of the natural environment, as the inevitable progress divinely guaranteed to the United States. O’Sullivan confessed that he could not “realize either the impropriety or the danger which you regard as attending it.” Voluntary private enterprise will prove necessary to build the proposed canal, he assured Van Buren. But since the project lay in the jurisdiction of no specific state and in fact touched on foreign policy, what more legal ground could exist for federal government intervention? Was Van Buren not, O’Sullivan wondered, “standing so straight upright as to lean a little backward?” Unable to appeal to Van Buren’s weak commercial sense, O’Sullivan instead pitched the scheme in the kind of partisan and political terms that the man from Kinderhook could understand. Should Whigs take up the canal issue, he threatened, Democrats would lose out on a valuable public relations gambit and appear inflexible and unwilling to pursue the national interest. Better to make the policy their own so they could maintain control and make sure the federal government pursued the matter constitutionally. Each man saw his own position as self-evident, and both stood divided by a generational cleavage within the party.20 O’Sullivan felt strongly about internal improvements domestically no less than abroad. While a member of the New York Assembly in the early 1840s, he proposed a general incorporation law for internal improvement companies. Normally a state legislature would charter a company for a specific purpose, 20

John L. O’Sullivan to Martin Van Buren, 17 December 1840, Martin Van Buren Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; New York Evening Post, 30 April 1847, 1; New York Herald, 2 June 1852, 4; Elijah Hise to Stephen A. Douglas, 14 February 1853, Douglas Papers.

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such as constructing a railroad. This charter would effectively guarantee it a monopoly, since other corporations would not be authorized to work in that field. Politicians regularly succumbed to bribes by entrepreneurs hungering for such a monopoly charter. Instead of legislatures granting exclusive charters to improvement corporations, however, O’Sullivan thought that “voluntary associations” could come together to build roads and canals without petitioning the government for each project. This would eliminate the temptation of legislative corruption and allow a community’s infrastructure to be limited only by the energies of its citizens acting in concert. O’Sullivan’s colleagues were not ready to go so far, fearing that roads and bridges would suddenly appear “by every man’s door or across every man’s farm.” Once again appeared a gap between his forward-looking ideas and his political colleagues’ unwillingness to move ahead.21 O’Sullivan, the quirky originator of the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” represented the spirit of Young America in some of its most refined and intelligent aspects. Descended from Irish Catholics, the 23-year-old O’Sullivan cofounded the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in Washington in 1837. As a politico-literary journal, it aimed to do for the Democracy what the North American Review was doing for Whig New England: provide an imprimatur of sophistication and marshal well-reasoned arguments for supporting the party cause. A prot´eg´e of Van Buren and a confidante of Democratic insider Benjamin F. Butler, O’Sullivan also began serving in the New York legislature after 1840. He is usually portrayed as a blustery expansionist, although O’Sullivan actually operated on a surprising set of contradictions or dualities: he ended up endorsing southern secession but was at one time a Free Soiler; fiercely nationalistic, he also became one of the most well-informed, cosmopolitan journalists in the country; as a reformer he advocated equality and self-determination, but he also condemned abolitionist agitation and refused to address the slavery issue. In 1851, O’Sullivan aided the failed Cuban filibustering expedition of anti´ Spanish dissident Narciso Lopez, for which he was indicted and later acquitted. Based in New York except for the short period of time during which he edited the Review in Washington (1837–40), O’Sullivan served as American minister to Portugal during the Pierce administration. He returned home only in 1860 but left quickly thereafter, feeling out of touch with the society he deserted almost a decade earlier. Remaining in Europe after the war, O’Sullivan lived in Paris, London, and Lisbon before finally returning to New York in 1879, where he died in 1895.22 Many contemporaries saw O’Sullivan as something of a loose cannon; isolation and poverty scarred his otherwise promising life. Yet in his heyday of 21 22

Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 93. Widmer, Young America, 27–63, 201–9; Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan. On O’Sullivan in exile, also see Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1983; New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1998), 337.

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the 1840s, O’Sullivan’s friends felt inspired by his proposals, and the isthmian channel was no exception. When the Polk administration wished to act on the canal project, Vice President George M. Dallas picked up where O’Sullivan’s argument with Van Buren left off. In a letter of 1847, Dallas wrote: As to your enquiry whether the constitution presents any provision with which an appropriation of money by Congress for this purpose would be inconsistent, I say unhesitatingly that I can conceive none. If, as no one now-a-days disputes, we could purchase Louisiana, and Florida, or might purchase Cuba, or the navigation of the river St. Lawrence, so could we purchase Mexico; and being constitutionally competent to buy the whole, we can surely buy as much of it as may be wanted [in order to carve a canal]. As a mode of regulating commerce, the power may be considered to be an expressed one.

Dallas connected Young America’s program of territorial expansion with the more elastic constitutional powers envisioned by New Democrats. He pointed to the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to cover his loose constructionist turn, one clearly at odds with what his party once represented. The New York Evening Post noticed this contradiction, editorializing that “Mr. Dallas puts his conclusions upon the assumption that the federal government can do such acts as are not prohibited by the constitution, rather than on the ground expressed in the instrument itself, that all powers not therein distinctly conferred are reserved by the people to themselves.” Dallas now sided with the Constitution’s “elastic clause,” and not, as a good Jacksonian Democrat should, with the Tenth Amendment.23 Constituents and the press also spoke strongly in favor of the canal proposal. The prospect of a commercial intercourse with the eastern shores of Asia, and the growing importance of the Pacific coast, the gold fields of Australia – we may, perhaps, say of the Pacific – all combine to render this canal a matter of actual necessity to the commercial nations of both the Old and New Worlds; and the present is the time for its commencement and speedy consummation.

So noted the New York Herald. The proposed canal would enhance the value of possessing California, the paper continued, dreamily mentioning Japan and Australia in its salivation for an empire of commerce. As friends of Stephen Douglas argued, in language only a Whig would have endorsed 20 years earlier, “Railroads and canals are the ligaments of domestic and foreign trade, that unite mankind and encourage reciprocal enterprise and commerce.”24 The Isthmus of Panama fed New Democratic aspirations in several ways. Though their primary target remained the digging of a canal, O’Sullivan, Dallas, and company also championed the construction of an isthmian railroad, 23 24

New York Evening Post, 30 April 1847, 1. Democratic Review 6 (Oct. 1839), 287–307; ibid., 6 (Nov. 1839), 413–24; New York Herald, 23 May 1849, 2, 2 June 1852, 4; Illinois State Register, 23 January 1849, 2.

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presenting it as a joint project with the country of New Granada, which owned the relevant territory: This is done by two republics – Powers of the New World – acting together in making this treaty, and taking into their own hands, as appropriate, the great work which is to carry into effect the great idea of Columbus, in proposing to go west in order to arrive at the east. It is now in our power to accomplish it.

So claimed Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri in 1848. He was reacting to the Treaty of New Granada, engineered by the Polk administration to guarantee a right-of-way across the Panamanian isthmus.25 The projected transcontinental railroad was a long-term project without immediate gratification, said Benton. But the isthmian railroad could be built relatively quickly through private enterprise, showcasing American capital and ingenuity on the world stage. For Benton, it symbolized an assertive American nationalism in the western hemisphere, a cashing of the check represented by Monroe’s Doctrine. The president of the Panama Rail Road Company pledged “not to stop till the locomotives are whistling over the Isthmus.”26 A congressional committee in 1848 concluded that the prospect of commercial dominance by the United States outweighed any reluctance to use federal largesse for an isthmian railroad. The possibility of competing with or even overtaking Europe in the realm of commerce was too tempting. Establishing a railroad across Panama would also ensure that European trade passed through American ports, another boon to the venture. Once again Democrats showed that, if forced to choose between wealth-building and trade on the one hand and republican limited-government principles on the other, they would lunge at the former.27 But for other Democrats, the proposal became a dangerous precedent for curbing competition. By granting an exclusive contract for building the isthmian railroad to a private concern, the federal government would create a monopoly and so neglect the welfare of the American people as a whole. Ohio Senator William Allen took this stance. Young Americans wished to expand, but – like good modern-style reformers – not by creating an unhealthy concentration of economic power. Stephen Douglas tellingly sided with Benton and could not see how a monopoly would result from the isthmian railroad bill. As stakeholder in and booster for the Illinois Central Railroad, he felt the need for railroad extension quite personally, and perhaps stood for exactly the type of private monopoly feared by William Allen. For Douglas the New Democrat, old-fashioned fears about powerful conspiracies against liberty no longer seemed as relevant as economic growth. However, in other contexts, the Little Giant took the opposite tack, such as when he objected to the granting of an exclusive contract 25 26 27

Messages and Papers, IV, 511–13; Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 2 Session, 18 December 1848, 49; ibid., 19 December 1848, 60–1. John L. Stephens to Stephen A. Douglas, 6 August 1850, Douglas Papers. Albany Argus, 29 January 1849, 2.

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for the Illinois Central Railroad in 1850 (mentioned in the preceding chapter). Douglas may have nurtured different fears depending on whether the danger lurked within or outside American borders. More likely, though, is that his ambivalence reflected soul searching about the proper way to promote improvements. Still suspicious of exclusive charters and monopolies, yet lusting after material wealth, he needed to calibrate the balance carefully depending on the project. For the Illinois Central, he supported one solution, and for Panama, another. In sum, Young Americans wished to realize economic growth by establishing an isthmian railroad, yet they wrestled with the old Jacksonian question of monopolies when considering this issue. For forward-looking Democrats such as Douglas and Benton, the prospects of easier interoceanic commerce proved the more alluring priority.28 Democrats argued not just about building canals, but also about funding and repairing them. During New York state elections in 1851, Whigs and Democrats clashed over plans for enlarging the Erie Canal, which had been completed largely with state funds in 1825. Democrats had denounced the Whig policy of issuing canal revenue certificates in order to subsidize improvement of the waterway. The Free Soil Barnburners, in particular, tended to remain fundamentalist and Locofocoistic on Jacksonian economic issues (however progressive they became on slavery). They raised the traditional party cry against inflationary paper notes not backed by specie, which they predicted would one day bring the fragile economy crashing down. Their factional opponents the Hunkers, by contrast, sometimes supported Whig plans for refurbishing the canal. Yet after all the Democrats met in a state convention in Syracuse, the naysayers changed their minds. In the resolutions put forth as the platform of the party, a new ground was assumed. They seem to have discovered that after all their furious opposition to the measure for the completion of the canals, and all their solemn warnings in relation to the worthlessness of the canal revenue certificates, the measure was likely to be sustained, and that there was actually money to be made out of the certificates.29

In other words, Democrats (including the Barnburners) realized the financial possibilities of canal bonds and shifted their position. The prospect of wealth and prosperity could do strange things to party ideology. In the end, none of these grand transportation schemes came to fruition in the antebellum era – not the canal and not the railroad. The politics of sectionalism distracted policymakers from implementing them beginning in the mid 1850s. And persistent disagreements between old and New Democrats, between allies of O’Sullivan and followers of Van Buren, plagued the engines 28 29

Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 2 Session, 18 December 1848, 49; ibid., 19 December 1848, 60–1. New York Daily Times, 20 September 1851, 2; ibid., 27 September 1851, 2; ibid., 15 October 1851, 2. For a similar example, see the newspaper clipping in “Tilden Speeches” drafts, [no date], Box 16, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library.

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of progress. Like other aspects of Young America’s program (e.g., free western homesteads, overseas territorial expansion), rails and canals would have to await the Gilded Age. Only then would Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt try to exert control over Panama, or Leland Stanford over the railroad. But the vision that culminated in Republican-led American international assertion after the Civil War began in the New Democracy. The Independent Treasury Following Andrew Jackson’s destruction of the Second Bank of the United States, government deposits found their way into various state banks. Some proved solvent and responsible, others less so, though all were loyal to the Democratic Party. By the late 1830s, however, the newly organized Whigs were clamoring for another national bank. And Democrats realized that they needed a viable alternative in order to capture the growing roll of first-time voters. They devised the Independent Treasury, or sub-Treasury, first implemented under President Van Buren in 1840. The Independent Treasury was a government repository for federal monies. Unlike a bank, it held no authority to issue loans and extend credit, thereby weakening its ability to regulate the economy and wreak the kind of havoc allegedly perpetrated by former bank director Nicholas Biddle. Rather, the central government would secure its funds in a safe place with no responsibility to outside subscribers and boards of directors. Out of harm’s way, the deposits could not jeopardize the economy a` la the Panic of 1819, the Bank deposit scandal of 1833, and the Panic of 1837. Van Buren Democrats celebrated the “divorce of bank and state” symbolized by the new financial institution. What began as a classically Democratic scheme to quash special privilege and preserve equal opportunity, however, turned into an avenue of commercial growth and prosperity. Leading Democrats sustained the Independent Treasury throughout the 1830s and 1840s, but their rationale for the repository subtly changed. Where they deployed antimarket justifications during the 1830s, they began to insert progrowth explanations in the 1840s and 1850s. The policy did not change, but the reasons for its defense did. This transformation seems similar to that seen in the world of free trade, as noted in the last chapter. In both cases, support for the outward measure stayed constant, but the rhetoric lurking underneath no longer tapped the same themes. As soon as the Independent Treasury Act passed in 1840, Democrats started to present it as a commercially minded measure. John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review argued that Democrats “are in truth the best friends of legitimate credit, desiring only to purify it by reforming its vicious abuses and excesses. . . . the only ‘destructive agrarianism’ which exists in this country is on the part of the ‘Credit System’ school.” O’Sullivan understood the liability of being portrayed as an unsophisticated farmers’ party, and here he tried to turn the tables on his Whig opponents. In his mind, Democrats merely wished to regulate and control the Whig-favored system of corporate charters, bank incorporations,

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and paper money, not to do away with it. “What true friend of legitimate banking can object to it?” his journal asked. O’Sullivan had once embraced radical Jacksonians’ hatred of banking, though by the turn of the 1840s he came to terms with limited and local banking activity. State banks that did not exist by virtue of special legislative charters and that refrained from handling federal monies he considered legitimate.30 Samuel J. Tilden, a young party organizer from New York, soft-pedaled the effects of the Independent Treasury when he delivered a speech on the subject during the 1840s. He promised that the “Independent Treasury will not produce a metallic currency.” A pure hard-money system, of the type that radical Jacksonians desired, was not its purpose. Also, even if federal funds now went out of general circulation, banks could still loan out nonfederal capital, he suggested, keeping their operations intact. And even if the nation’s currency became “harder,” or more specie-based, that did not mean that prices would drop. Tilden assured New Yorkers that the Independent Treasury would do nothing to damage, and everything to benefit, the economy. It “will tend to make business and prices more stable and prosperous.” As a friendly newspaper predicted, “It is calculated to give a stability to the currency, and hence a steadiness to our manufactures not less desirable to the capitalist than to the laborer.” Democrats now pitched their old antibanking scheme in language that a banker would love.31 By the late 1840s, the criterion by which Democrats judged the Independent Treasury became highly commercial. No longer satisfied that it merely obviated the constitutional objections to a national bank, they were now also concerned that it perpetuate the country’s economic boom. After weathering the devastation of the late 1830s and early 1840s – the nation’s first major industrial depression – the economy ballooned in the late 1840s and the 1850s. Trade increased, railroads expanded, and the price of cotton rose. The Independent Treasury needed to fit these developments, rather than retarding commerce and manufacturing, if New Democrats were to continue embracing it. As Polk noted of the legislation, it succeeded “without loss to the Treasury or injury or inconvenience to the trade of the country.” This now became the all-important threshold, one he also applied to the reduced Walker Tariff of 1846. Polk took special pains to emphasize that the tariff did no harm to American industry and remained fully compatible with the economic growth desired by Young America Democrats.32 In 1848, Polk actually argued that the Independent Treasury, or what he partisanly called the “constitutional treasury,” had cushioned America’s economy 30 31

32

Democratic Review 8 (Aug. 1840), 104, 108; Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 144. Samuel J. Tilden, “Effect of the Democratic Policy,” speech draft, [no date], Box 16, Tilden Papers; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 11 November 1853, 2; New York Evening Post, 26 August 1845, 1. Messages and Papers, IV, 556. On Polk and the tariff, see ibid., 647–8.

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from the worst effects of the European depression that erupted because of the revolutions that year. Had there been no sub-Treasury, said Polk, the country’s revenue would have made its way into various banks, which would have issued paper currency “probably to an amount not less than $60,000,000 or $70,000,000.” The presence of this growing and inflated currency would have fed wild speculation, which eventually would have come crashing down as it did in 1819 and 1837. By preventing numerous banks from expanding the currency, and instead housing federal revenue in a stable repository without power to issue money or credit, Democrats kept banks in control and the economy free from the inflation that would have inevitably led to depression. So ran Polk’s logic, correct or not. The accuracy of his arguments is less relevant than the standard he and other New Democrats set for themselves: public policy should encourage economic growth and trade, and in no way hinder it. The goals had changed, and even New Democrats such as Polk, who held to traditional Jacksonian economic dogma, rationalized it in ways that fit the expansive commercial spirit of the times.33 Altered explanations for the Independent Treasury emerged as part of an ongoing partisan dialogue with the Whigs, to be sure. In 1846, congressional Whigs charged that the Independent Treasury retarded the nation’s recovery from the depression that had begun in the late 1830s. Democrats retooled their rhetoric in order to address these Whig accusations and persuade voters that their banking alternative would perpetuate an economic rebound. In making such an argument, Democrats found themselves defending a position they had rejected 10 years earlier.34 One paper boasted that the “friends and foes” of the sub-Treasury “must now confess, that never were the banks stronger; never were the merchants more prosperous; never were the manufactories more fully in operation; never were there fewer laborers seeking employment; and never were all classes in our country in a better condition, or the exchanges better regulated.” What more could any probanking Whig desire? Apparently little, responded Virginia editor Thomas Ritchie. In 1848, he lambasted Van Buren’s old plan because it concentrated too much power in the executive office and fulfilled U.S. Bank Director Nicholas Biddle’s dream of destroying the state banks. For him it seemed no better than the Whig alternative that Jacksonians fought tooth and nail to destroy. Ritchie was a fundamentalist states’ rightist of John Tyler’s “Virginia School,” and by the late 1840s he condemned the Independent Treasury’s weakening effect on traditional Democratic beliefs. What began as an exercise in retrenchment became a tool of growth and expansion. Even worse, New Democrats celebrated this transition.35 33 34 35

Ibid., IV, 649. See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 233–4. New York Evening Post, 22 February 1848, 2; Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 7 February 1848, 306.

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In the late 1830s, radical Jacksonians had rolled out the Independent Treasury as part of their agrarian antibanking philosophy. By the late 1840s, they were justifying its existence on commercial grounds, as an agent of progress that fueled boom times no less than any national bank. New Feelings for the Market: Individual Cases Concrete policy disputes provide a sense of the ideologies and thought processes that New Democrats brought to Congress. Examining the views of specific individuals in detail brings depth to this picture, showing how devoted Young Americans became to a new economic mindset over the course of their careers. For New Democrats did not simply champion improvements and the sub-Treasury in the House and Senate and leave matters at that. They spoke out publicly at rallies and campaigns, making listeners aware that this was not their fathers’ Democracy. An important naval commander, railroad investor, and senator, Robert Field Stockton of New Jersey personified several aspects of the New Democracy. In his roles as politician on the stump, captain on the sea, and financial planner on the rails, Stockton moved his party toward progressive positions on a variety of public policy questions. He saw naval combat during the War of 1812 and later cruised off Africa, among many maritime assignments. Most famously, he served as a fleet commander in the Pacific during the Mexican War, with crucial victories securing California to his credit. He worked closely with thenSecretary of the Navy George Bancroft to strike Mexico at the right time; the Bear Flag revolt, followed by California’s annexation to the Union, was his prize. Today thousands of commuters pour through the central California city of Stockton, oblivious of what they owe to this eastern mariner. The Democracy of the 1840s was certainly aware, however, since Stockton had worked as a loyal party operative during the presidential campaign of 1844.36 That year’s election marked a transition between the economically centered politics of the old Jacksonian era and the territorial and sectional disputes of the new Young America epoch. To then-Captain Stockton, the presidential canvass seemed to turn on financial questions, most of all the nature of the currency and the constitutionality of a national bank. He came out strongly against recent Whig attempts to revive the Bank destroyed by Jackson in the 1830s. If not for President John Tyler’s vetoes, congressional Whigs led by Senator Henry Clay would have succeeded in reestablishing the institution. Stockton rejoiced that this had not taken place, and in damning the Bank, he compared it with one of his and his state’s most prized financial interests, the Canal and Railroad Companies in which he invested. Whereas the Bank floated unsteady paper notes, “the capital of the Canal and Rail Road Companies is three million of dollars,” 36

For a glimpse into Stockton’s Navy activities, especially during the Mexican War, see Robert F. Stockton to Stephen A. Douglas, 23 November 1846, 5 February 1847, 15 February 1847, Douglas Papers.

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he boasted. The Bank would infiltrate the whole Union, whereas the railroad company lay within the confines of New Jersey. The Bank was expansive and susceptible to corruption, the rail and canal companies economical and small in scale. In this way, Stockton tried to persuade New Jersey voters that the private improvement companies newly sprouting up in their state posed little of the threat that Democrats associated with the Bank. Stockton did not couch his criticism of Whig economics in the republican language of agrarian independence, but in the more modern terms of dollars and cents. He thought the Canal and Railroad Companies were good investments, both for individuals like himself and for the state of New Jersey altogether.37 Stockton next exulted in New Jersey’s commitment to internal improvements. After “due deliberation,” the state decided to employ private enterprise by chartering rail companies. For Stockton, this marked not the advent of irredeemable corruption, but the maturation of a profitable economy. In addition, he recognized the necessity of a moderate tariff both to provide revenue for the federal government and – incidentally – to protect fledgling American industries. “Those great and important products, essential to our defence [sic] in war, and indeed to our independence as a nation, require and demand the vigilant and protective energies of government, against all hostile competition.” This hardly sounded like something a Democrat would say, at least an old Democrat. Yet Stockton uttered it in 1844, when the transition toward Young American Democracy was just getting under way. Democrats remained in principle committed to free trade, Stockton recognized. Indeed, as discussed elsewhere in these pages, the 1840s fulfilled the promise of transatlantic free trade as no other decade before. But “there is no such thing as a ‘Free Trade’ man in this country,” Stockton admonished his audience. Even Democrats were committed to a moderate tariff, if only to provide for government revenue. Should Congress completely abandon the protective tariff, he argued, it would be forced to impose direct taxation on personal property for income. Better to avoid such a fate by relying on reasonably pegged duties. Stockton went so far as to endorse the high Whig tariff passed in 1842. Whig policymakers that year had raised duties to their highest levels since the nullification controversy of 1832–3. The compromise that ended that crisis projected a reduced tariff schedule through 1842, and at that point Whigs took advantage of the lapse to pass a new set of duties that would help the manufacturing classes. Stockton thought this tariff “will yield an adequate revenue, and extend at the same time adequate protection to the great interests of the country, without augmenting, correspondently, the pressure upon the consumers.” He 37

Speech of Capt. R. F. Stockton, Delivered at the Great Democratic Meeting, at New Brunswick, New Jersey, Wednesday, September 24, 1844 (New York: Jared W. Bell, 1844), 7. Stockton’s Canal and Railroad Companies in fact became air-tight monopolies in New Jersey, his defenses notwithstanding. See Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 53. There is no biography, nor even a manuscript collection, on Stockton, although his correspondence is scattered throughout the collections of his contemporaries.

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even spoke for candidate James K. Polk, suggesting that he also “acquiesces” in the present tariff. Polk balked, later instructing his Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker to craft a reduced rate schedule. But Stockton seemed nevertheless confident in his predictions.38 A business leader and entrepreneur, Stockton invested in the Delaware and Raritan Canal Company and in the Camden and Amboy Railroad, helping to preserve monopoly power for the corporations. John Jacob Astor, among others, became his financial partner in these ventures, and Stockton served as president of the canal company after leaving the Senate in 1853. So completely did he advance the interests of his railroad – through such tactics as buying newspapers and offering free rail passes to politicians – that New Jersey for a time became known as the “Camden and Amboy state.” Stockton was becoming the Republican robber baron of Gilded Age stereotype. Yet while he worked in Congress in the early 1850s, he remained a New Democrat.39 Perhaps Stockton adopted these unconventional Democratic views because of conditions he encountered while sailing in the Navy. He appreciated foreign threats, and the consequent need for preparation by bolstering American industry and productive capacity, to a greater extent than his land-based compatriots. As an officer in the Navy Department he also exhibited less fear of centralized authority than older Democrats. And thanks to his fervent campaigning, President Polk became the first Young American to occupy the White House. Senator William Allen of Ohio started his career as an orthodox Democrat, but like Stockton eventually saw the light of progressive economics. Orphaned at an early age and made a saddler’s apprentice, Allen became a committed Buckeye Democrat. For the rest of his life, he remembered an inspiring episode in which he came face to face with Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in 1815, the hero of New Orleans tapping him encouragingly on the head. Profoundly influenced by this encounter, and lacking mentors who could have influenced his political education otherwise, Allen became a staunch Democrat largely on the strength of his personal attraction to Old Hickory. In 1832, at age 29, he captured the congressional seat for Ohio’s seventh district, starting a political career that ended with his term as Ohio’s governor during the 1870s. He nurtured a reputation as a booming orator, for which he earned the nickname “Fog Horn Allen.” And he fully bought into the new Democratic style of mass politics and popular participation. In 1837, the Ohio legislature elected him to the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate. Bolstering his Young America pedigree as nothing else could was his age, since Allen remained the youngest senator in both of the sessions in which he served. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Allen gained notice for his blustery handling of the Oregon dispute in 1845 and 1846. He 38 39

Speech of Capt. R. F. Stockton, 8–10. American National Biography Online, s.v. “Stockton, Robert Field,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1. harvard.edu/articles/04/04-00960.html (accessed 29 April 2003).

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coined the phrase “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight” to denote an extreme position insisting on all of Oregon to the point of war. Heading the group of Democratic ultras who pushed Polk toward a confrontation with England, Allen expressed disappointment in the settlement of the Oregon question just as the Mexican War broke out.40 Allen’s most important contribution to the Young America movement appeared in the realm of foreign policy. On most economic questions, he remained a traditionalist, perennially haunted by his boyhood encounter with Jackson. Yet toward the end of his career, he changed course and approved an unlikely economic proposal: Greenbacks. During the Civil War, the Union government issued paper notes in order to support the fighting financially. Unbacked by specie, the notes could produce inflation, raising the ire of traditional hard-money Jacksonians. Jackson, after all, had issued the Specie Circular shortly before he left office in order to curb speculation fed by unsound bank notes. Now the federal government itself was issuing notes as a war measure. With the end of the fighting came a reduction in Greenback circulation. Following the Panic of 1873, however, a movement endorsing the government notes formed, led by a new Greenback Party. Proponents of paper notes charged that their increased circulation would jump-start America’s failing economy. But to old-fashioned Democratic veterans, they spelled the rise of the Whig-turnedRepublican “money power” all over again. “Fog Horn” William stuck faithfully to hard money throughout his years in Congress during the 1840s. But in 1873 he became “Rise Up William,” as his campaign literature for the Ohio gubernatorial race proclaimed. And “Rise Up” changed his mind on the currency question, now approving the resuscitation of the Civil War Greenbacks. In a speech in 1875, Governor Allen advised the audience to respect the integrity of paper currency because trying to discredit it was tantamount to destroying the wealth and property of their country. He explained to them how credit worked: that it was based on faith in monetary institutions such as banks and the government. “Credit has a political virgin quality,” he quipped. “It will not do to call its purity in question. When it is once blighted it is gone, and forever.” He continued: “To call the greenback a worthless and an irredeemable currency is to impugn the honor and credit of the Government.” Old-time Jacksonians cared more for the honor and credit of their states, the virtue of their people, and the integrity of republicanism, less for the reputation of the federal regime. Allen explicitly addressed the inconsistency between his hard-money political youth and his Greenback maturity: But, say our Republican friends, you Democrats have a hard money record. How can you be for rag money now? I can say to them that circumstances change policies. When we were a hard money party, hard money was possible, and it was for the interest of the masses. . . . There is not a Democrat in the land who will oppose a resumption of specie 40

See Baker, Affairs of Party, 42–5, and Reginald C. McGrane, William Allen: A Study in Western Democracy (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1925).

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payment, when it can be brought about without paralyzing industries and impoverishing and distressing the people. But we do not make such an idol of metallic coin as to be willing to breed communistic revolts and fill our land with paupers to force resumption [of specie payments].41

“Circumstances change policies.” No doubt the experience of the Civil War itself, in addition to the stark depression of the 1870s, led Allen to embrace soft money. In the early 1870s Allen was also responding to a newer, more liberal wing of the Ohio Democracy, whose platform cautioned that “in the return to the specie payments care should be taken not to seriously disturb the business of the country or unjustly injure the debtor class.”42 Yet one cannot help wondering whether the New Democracy of the 1840s and 1850s did not also aid in moderating Allen’s negative views of soft money. Did the party’s increasing comfort with trade and credit in the closing decades of the antebellum era make a dent, lost from the historical record, in Allen’s thinking about currency policy? Perhaps Allen’s post–Civil War Greenback loyalties were, to some extent, a delayed expression of the New Democracy that he experienced 30 years earlier. Perhaps, as he now let on in old age, policies and principles seemed more fluid than he would have earlier wished to admit. No direct evidence supports this supposition, but we do know that Allen made a significant switch in opinion when he became governor in 1873. The Democratic Party as a whole had departed from the “sound money” faith of its fathers by the 1870s. Many Democrats followed William Allen’s course, now siding with farmers and debtors and fearing that a return to a specie-only currency would sink their constituents and plunge the country into depression. If Andrew Jackson’s Democracy supported gold specie, the Gilded Age Democracy endorsed more inflationary policies, not to mention a bimetallic currency. In 1896, Democrats adopted the Populist platform recommending the coinage of silver in addition to gold as specie. It was Republicans, on the other hand, who now stood for “hard money.” And Democrats who clung to the old dogma, such as August Belmont, felt awkward and pass´e. Thus, the Democratic Party lost its “sound money” orthodoxy by the end of the century. The New Democracy of the 1840s and 1850s operated as a stepping-stone to this revamped postbellum party, moving Democrats toward an acceptance of more modern and flexible business practices. William Allen remained a traditional Jacksonian on economic policy throughout much of his career. He only changed his mind, at least publicly, after the Civil War. But other New Democrats, whether Robert Stockton or August Belmont, arrived at a more progressive philosophy during the antebellum 41 42

“Speech of Gov. William Allen,” 17 July 1875, Allen Papers. McGrane, William Allen, 194, 203–4, 237. McGrane, Allen’s biographer, interprets Allen’s new stand as a response to popular opinion in the 1870s: this is what the people now wanted. Most westerners were debtors and farmers who would be crushed by a return to a specie-only monetary structure, and Allen thought he provided relief by championing a Greenback system that would put more money in circulation and help them pay back loans.

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decades themselves. Some made their mark through the railroad, like Stockton; others dabbled in banking, like Belmont; and still others, such as New York businessman George Law, placed their bets on ocean steamers. Law further exemplifies the connections between Democratic politics and forward-looking capitalism. His career combined the New Democratic qualities of business acumen, international vision, and technological innovation. Law’s biographers presented his life as a classic rags-to-riches tale. Reared on the open-air hardiness of a New York farm, he spent hours in self-study and honed both practical and intellectual skills. By age 28, Law had retired after amassing a $50,000 fortune through business dealings and investments. He sank his teeth into some of the major public improvement projects of his day, among them roads and canals in the Northeast and Upper South. Indeed, he filled his youth with the stuff of Young America: steam engines, railroads, locks, and bridges. Not only did he finance such ventures, he also spent time as a hired laborer – an experience that brought him closer to the mostly Democratic workingman’s world. Law’s central contribution to the New Democratic program lay in the realm of communication: he established permanent steam service between America’s Atlantic and Pacific footholds, boosting commerce and the opening of the Far East. When Americans of the 1840s and 1850s thought of oceanic steamships and the growth of an American steam navy, they conjured up Law and his daring enterprises.43 “He has had the management of more steamships than have, at any time, belonged to the United States; surpassing the government in the speed of his vessels, the efficiency of their equipments and the economy of their expenses,” rejoiced one admirer. Law also used his steam ownership to promote a plan for arming European revolutionaries after 1848. He and editor George Sanders thought they could use Law’s ships to transport American firearms left over from the Mexican War to European revolutionaries (they were too late). He also hoped to detach Cuba from Spain, the sine qua non of Young America Democrats. Above all, Law cultivated his identity as a youngish capitalist suitable for the progress-conscious spirit of the age. The fact that he never served in political office made his youthful purity, his distance from the plodding Jacksonian politicos, all the more salient. Still, he maintained connections with important New Democrats such as George Sanders and John Van Buren (the ex-president’s son). At a dinner in Law’s honor in 1852, those attending or sending complimentary letters included future Tammany “Boss” William Tweed, Michigan Senator Lewis Cass, Lone Star icon Sam Houston, and Commodore Matthew C. Perry.44 Like his party colleague August Belmont, Law showed that he could serve as a loyal Democrat and also establish a foothold in New York’s mercenary dens of capital. For Democrats of the 1850s, this did not present a contradiction. 43 44

See Samuel J. Tilden to [Unknown], 29 November 1850, Tilden Papers. A Sketch of Events in the Life of George Law (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), 19, and passim.

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As America’s fastest growing metropolis, New York naturally sheltered financially progressive Democrats. Alongside August Belmont and George Law worked Dean Richmond, a railroad promoter and investor. Reared in Syracuse, he entered the family salt-producing industry before moving to Buffalo and starting a grain-transporting service. He also founded the Buffalo and Rochester Railroad, which merged with other lines to become the New York Central Railroad in 1853. Richmond became its president during the following decade, balancing his business interests with active service in the Democratic Party. In 1850, he took the chairmanship of the New York Democratic Committee. After unsuccessfully working for the Stephen Douglas campaign in 1860, Richmond tried to regenerate the Democracy during the Civil War. He criticized Lincoln on the issues of emancipation and civil liberties and tried to foment a movement of moderate Unionists to oppose the Radical Republicans. In 1866, he died in the home of fellow New Democrat Samuel Tilden. Through the twists of Richmond’s life two allegiances never wavered: his devotion to the Democratic Party and his involvement in business affairs. Hardly tempted to become a Republican – supposedly, the new party of enterprise and economic growth – Richmond believed that he could remain a financier and still a Democrat.45 One did not need to live in New York in order to straddle these two identities, however. John A. Quitman, best known as a Cuba filibuster, exemplified them in Mississippi. Born in New York in 1799, Quitman at first followed his father into the ministry. Then he taught English in Philadelphia before moving to Ohio, where he passed the bar in 1821. Reeling from the post-1819 economic collapse, Quitman decided to try his luck as a lawyer in Natchez, Mississippi, and he quickly rose through the ranks to become a leader in the Mississippi State Bar Association. He married into the planter family of Eliza Turner in 1824, providing himself with a mansion, several plantations, and countless slaves. Like Sidney Breese, he proved prolific in offspring as well as words, producing 10 children before his untimely death in 1857. Quitman founded a volunteer Mississippi militia, called the “Natchez Fencibles.” He led them into Texas to help with its revolution in 1836 but arrived too late to see action. Following his service as a volunteer brigadier general in the Mexican War, he was decorated for his valor at the Battle of Monterrey. Winfield Scott in 1847 appointed him governor of Mexico City, where he presided over the conquered capital. After 1850, he devoted his public life to the “liberation” of Cuba from Spain and its annexation to the American Union. ´ Participation in the filibustering expeditions of Cuban dissident Narciso Lopez forced him out of the Mississippi governorship.46 45

46

American National Biography Online, s.v. “Richmond, Dean,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1. harvard.edu/articles/04/04-00847.html (accessed 8 May 2003). Hardly any primary or secondary material related to Richmond exists, although several of his letters can be found in the Tilden Papers at the New York Public Library. American National Biography Online, s.v. “Quitman, John Anthony,” http://www.anb.org. ezp1.harvard.edu/articles/03/03-00408.html (accessed 16 August 2002). Also see Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1985).

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In the 1830s, Quitman had been president of a railroad company in Mississippi, as well as a land speculator and director of the Planters’ Bank. After taking office as governor, he exhibited a New Democratic economic sensibility by calling for more state-funded internal improvements and a common school system as part of the “progressive age.” We will meet Quitman again as a prime agent of Young America’s international ambitions, though here it is important to recognize that he also fit the New Democratic mold in the realm of economic policy.47 Robert F. Stockton, William Allen, George Law, Dean Richmond, and John Quitman lived very different professional lives. Stockton spent most of his career on the high seas, Allen in Senate hearing rooms and at his estate, Law in the offices of steamship companies, Richmond as a mobile entrepreneur, and Quitman as a military adventurer and governor. Yet all five men remained loyal Democrats. Collectively they demonstrated that both the Whig and later the Republican parties never held a monopoly on procommercial economic thinking. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans such as these five saw no incompatibility between Democratic politics and a progressive market ideology. And this symbolized an important shift from the party’s identity in the 1830s. A Broad Spirit of Enterprise Peter Horner, a New York–based correspondent of Samuel J. Tilden, had had enough. In 1846, he complained about a proposed regulation of the Long Island Railroad, in which he owned shares. “We democrats,” he wrote to Tilden, “are very much circumscribed in the variety of property for investment – eschewing Bank & manufacturing Corporations – and little is left but Railroads.” Horner’s unguarded comment suggests that Democrats hungered for investment opportunities yet felt restrained by what they thought their party told them to believe. An array of similar revelations highlights the general restiveness of the Democratic rank-and-file, showing impatience with the party’s antimarket orthodoxy. Bank Democrats had always existed, as just mentioned, though the Democracy’s dominant public identity remained agrarian and producerist. It is this primary party image that Democrats such as Horner chafed against.48 Like Horner, George Bancroft felt that he could not wait for things to change. Although historians usually depict him as the consummate man of letters and politics, in fact Bancroft cultivated business connections and savvily dabbled in the market. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, he attended Harvard College and then took the unusual step of sailing to Germany to study for a Ph.D. Goettingen opened his eyes to a world of research scholarship then virtually unknown in America, and by the time he returned to the United States, Bancroft began to write in leading publications. The first volume of his monumental history of the United States emerged in the early 1830s, and thereafter crowds greeted the 47 48

Prentiss, “Economic Progress and Social Dissent,” 241–5. Peter Horner to Samuel J. Tilden, 18 February 1846, Tilden Papers.

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publication of every new volume with accolades and purchases. By midcentury, Bancroft was the most popular historian in the United States. He combined a grand romantic narrative style with a teleological emphasis on divine purpose and destiny. Few Victorians could resist the combination. In spite of his scholarly and commercial success – or perhaps because of it – Bancroft elicited resentment within the ivied halls of his alma mater. He faced difficulty in obtaining academic appointments and was further proscribed when his Democratic loyalties became evident. At the time, few abnormalities seemed as fatal as professing Democracy in Whig Massachusetts. Bancroft remained outside of the Commonwealth’s premier power circle, which clustered around Daniel Webster, and he never returned to the Bay State after he joined Polk’s cabinet in 1845.49 Bancroft became a confident investor when he married into the wealthy Dwight family of Connecticut. Involved in bank subscriptions and other speculations, he concealed this part of his identity. Indeed, most contemporaries thought of him as the quintessential scholar-statesman. In truth, he spent much time traveling to Washington and other destinations in order to look after business affairs and embraced in his own actions the calculating commercial mindset of his cherished New Democracy.50 Bancroft might have felt more at home within the party, and American society altogether, had he seen what we now know: there were many others like him, irritated by the agrarian identity of the Democracy and eager for trade, improvements, and investment opportunities. The New York Herald was one Democratic paper that continually celebrated the commercial spirit of the age. ˆ replacIt argued that New York was destined to become tomorrow’s entrepot, ing Liverpool, Venice, and other great centers of trade whose time had passed. Through “the irresistible revolution which has now commenced, springing out of steam and electricity,” it argued, “nothing can prevent this great metropolis, New York, from being the centre of the commercial, as it will eventually be, of the civilized world.” President Polk concurred, accurately predicting that New York would displace London as the globe’s commercial center.51 John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review engaged in a typical act of backpedaling as early as 1838: The absurd cry of “Agrarianism” was raised and re-echoed by a large majority of the press, till, by dint of repetition and clamor, it was able thoroughly to unsettle the public mind. A use was made of the unfortunate word “Loco-Foco,” (a very innocent compound, to those who understand it rightly) alone sufficient to frighten fifty thousand very honest and worthy people from the ballot-boxes. The great banking interest of the State, – with its vast array of influential personages, officers, stockholders, and 49 50 51

See Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). John Crittenden to George Bancroft, 12 June 1844, Bancroft Papers; Handlin, Bancroft, 108. New York Herald, 24 January 1848, 2; Messages and Papers, IV, 643.

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expectants of “favors,” – was alarmed by the grossest misrepresentations of the tendency of the reform policy of the [Democrats].

Whigs represented the Democrats as Old Republicans and agrarians, protested O’Sullivan, whereas in reality the picture appeared much more complicated.52 In private correspondence, one constituent expressed a similar feeling. Grumbling to John Quitman about a Democratic governor, he wrote, “I am inclined to think that the Gov [sic] is a little too aggrarian [sic] and radical in his proclivities.”53 It took foreign insult to elicit full support of Whiggish economic doctrines from John O’Sullivan. Responding to European charges that American state governments had defaulted on their debts, the editor justified this temporary malfeasance by highlighting public works funded by the loans. The borrowed money was contracted for the purpose of covering the expense of important works of public improvement. . . . New communications have been opened by rail-roads and canals between different parts of the country. . . . In some few cases the rage for speculation and facility of obtaining loans, which characterized the period when the debts were contracted, may have given rise to projects, not precisely of this character; but of these the worst that can be said of them is that they are premature.

The various states will fund their debts as their improvement projects become gradually more profitable, O’Sullivan assured European creditors. But the important point is that, in his mind, a credit system was becoming increasingly necessary for the kind of material expansion he and other New Democrats envisioned.54 The old guard, of course, kicked into high gear when it heard such protests. So-called Old Fogies reemphasized the agrarian image of their party all the more vociferously during the 1850s, as their organization became increasingly open to commerce and economic growth. “A few Democrats made their names by resisting the commercial orientation of the party in the 1850s, upholding the mantle of Jackson and adopting his confrontational style,” writes one historian. Politicians such as Alabama’s Governor John Winston, Georgia’s Joseph Brown, William Woods Holden of North Carolina, and Andrew Johnson of Tennessee “gained political prominence by voicing yeoman resentments in Jacksonian language.”55 They knew which way the party was turning, and they did all 52 53 54 55

Democratic Review 1 (Jan. 1838), 258. A. G. Haley to John Quitman, 11 May 1854, John A. Quitman Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Democratic Review 14 (Jan. 1844), 4; ibid., 21 (Oct. 1847), 314–32; Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 133. Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001), 47. So closely associated with commercial values did Young America Democrats become by the late 1840s that one study even uses them as proxies for the Whigs when considering attitudes toward the market revolution: Prentiss, “Economic Progress and Social Dissent.”

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in their power to resist it. Economically progressive Democrats had always existed, to be sure, but they did not cast such large shadows early on in the party’s history. In agitating for external improvements such as the Panama canal and railroad, New Democrats tried to augment the power of the federal government. By subtly altering their rationale for the Independent Treasury, they transformed the legacy of Jackson’s anti-Bank battle into a campaign for profit and trade. Over the course of long individual careers, figures such as George Law and Robert Stockton exemplified a shrewd entrepreneurial sense through their professional and business activities. Rank-and-file Democrats and the party press then responded by articulating their frustrations with the old agrarian ideology and their desires for a new openness regarding market prospects. All of these stories constitute snippets of life under Young America. In different ways, they all demonstrate that a venerable political party had undergone a remarkable transformation between 1844 and 1854. Over the course of that decade, the city replaced the farm in the Democratic imagination, the counting house took the place of the corn mill, and the federal state began, ever so slightly, to encroach on the prerogatives of local government.

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Most Americans were scandalized when they heard the news. George Sanders, the prickly former editor of the Democratic Review, had hosted a well-attended London dinner. Appointed American consul to London by Franklin Pierce, in early 1854 he invited leading European revolutionaries to his home in honor of George Washington’s birthday. From Italy, Giuseppe Mazzini came with Garibaldi in tow. Two decades earlier, they had both launched the Young Italy movement as a revolutionary attempt to unite the peninsula’s fiefdoms into a cohesive republican state. From Hungary arrived Louis Kossuth, unsuccessful challenger to Habsburg rule over the Magyars. From Paris emerged AlexandreAuguste Ledru-Rollin, hero of the French barricades of 1848. American minister to England James Buchanan presided, jokingly asking Mrs. Sanders how she felt playing hostess to such flammable elements. For most Americans, and certainly for European monarchs fearful of the democratic example provided by the United States, the Sanders dinner symbolized America’s unseemly sympathy with European rebels. By hosting such a mix of dissenters in one place within Europe itself, and by having a senior American representative such as Buchanan present, Pierce’s administration sent a menacing signal to European elites.1 Sanders’s 1854 dinner, however, did not represent the first such warning. Since the mid 1840s, Young America Democrats had been prodding successive national administrations to intervene in European political affairs. For them, America’s sense of democratic mission implied an obligation to help European republicans achieve freedom on their own soil. The United States would inevitably lead the rest of the world toward democracy by example, 1

On the Sanders dinner of 1854, see August Belmont to George N. Sanders, 21 March 1853, George N. Sanders Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; George N. Sanders to Anna Sanders, 4 May 1853, ibid.; Daniel E. Sickles to James Buchanan, 3 March 1854, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Merle Curti, “George N. Sanders – American Patriot of the Fifties,” South Atlantic Quarterly 27 (Jan. 1928): 79–87; Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 74, 198–9, 267.

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New Democrats argued. But this did not mean that individual efforts to help the cause were not necessary. During the late antebellum period, they cultivated an intense interest in the European revolutions of 1848. Believing that a critical juncture in world affairs was at hand, that 1848 represented an apocalyptic clash between democracy and aristocracy, Young America Democrats geared for battle alongside their European counterparts. Following the failures of the 1848 revolutions throughout the Continent, Young Americans bided their time and waited for new opportunities. They never lost their determination to foster republican government abroad, giving way only when in 1861 sectionalism overwhelmed their own country with blood. Young America and Young Europe New Democrats acquired unusual self-consciousness – indeed, acquired their very name – because of their ability to observe similar movements abroad, including Young Italy and the Young Hegelians who arose following the philosopher’s death. Their place at the vanguard of a worldwide quest for liberty became clearer and more urgent in the context of European attempts to substitute democracy for monarchy. Although also driven by a fascinating domestic agenda of economic and constitutional change, they drew major inspiration from events unfolding across the Atlantic. The Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini had founded the Young Italy movement in 1831, attempting to unify the Italian states by focusing on a common culture. An Italian expatriate even formed a New York branch of the organization. Young Germany, though not explicitly seeking unification, focused on national values and native culture. A conservative variety of nationalism emerged through Young England, associated with Benjamin Disraeli. It looked back to the supposed glory of feudalism and the middle ages. “Young England, like Young America, has never been famous for logical consistency,” explained the North American Review.2 Finally, the overtly anti-English Young Ireland movement, established in 1840, sought to unite the Emerald Isle and wrest it from foreign control. Together these movements defined the priorities of a new political generation throughout Europe, one chafing under the old assumptions of absolutism and feudalism. Linked by a struggle for national unity and often for republicanism as well, Young Europe sent shock waves overseas by lighting a political fuse in 1848. In Switzerland in 1834, members of Young Poland, Young Italy, and Young Germany convened to issue a manifesto. Calling themselves “men of progress and liberty,” the nationalists joined to create a “brotherhood” named Young Europe. They spent the 1830s and early 1840s plotting and attempting, never to any avail and always to dire punishment. But in 1848 their efforts paid off. Stereotypically in the vanguard, France led the way when shots rang out in Paris in 1848. In quick succession, other members of Young Europe fell into 2

North American Review 61 (July 1845), 238.

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line. Young Germany and Young Italy started their own uprisings later that year, followed by subjugated Austrian minorities such as the Hungarians. Only an aborted Chartist conspiracy disrupted England’s stately calm. The dissidents promoted the principles of democracy, national unity, and selfdetermination that made Continental revolutionaries attractive allies for Young America.3 Indeed, members of the Democratic Party began paying attention to the activities of European revolutionaries early on. The Democratic Review, as quasi-official party organ, was one of the first publications to grasp the meaning of overseas developments. It articulated the sensibility of romantic nationalism that pushed Young Americans toward sympathy with Young Europe. John O’Sullivan’s journal began covering Young Italy in mid 1841, when it published an article investigating secret Italian societies that had been launching unsuccessful insurrections. The type of empathy felt for the Italian radicals, complained the author, was still too general and uninterested. Americans must instead participate more directly in the cause. One way to do so involved reading its periodicals and understanding its goals, which O’Sullivan began to do at this time. He wrote: “A society of distinguished men, devoted to the dissemination of liberal principles, of pure morals, which inscribes on its banner the holy watchwords of human freedom and equality – and which, destitute as it may be of efficient means, yet dares openly to raise that banner high aloft, and to proclaim an uncompromising war against tyranny, cannot be unworthy of our attention and sympathy.” The article recounted the first revolt of Young Italy in 1831, blaming its managers for the movement’s failure after a defeat by invading Austrian armies. But it praised the continued efforts of exiled dissidents led by Giuseppe Mazzini, who labored “only to persuade” the world of a need for a united democratic Italy. O’Sullivan reserved special scorn for the Austrian government and its interference during 1831, as well as for the barbarous punishments inflicted by the forces of reaction in Italy.4 Then O’Sullivan moved northwest. Speaking of the Young Ireland movement in 1848, the Democratic Review intoned: But in times present, it cannot be questioned that democratic communities may, and of right ought to display a generous and justifiable sympathy for the welfare of mankind oppressed, and they proclaim, therefore, this right to give utterance to their opinion; voice to their censure; and aid and advice to the victims of tyranny and abuse all over the world. This is our charter signed by humanity, and endorsed by reason, and we acknowledge no other allegiance.5

Inherent in the idea of being a freeman, this passage suggested, was the duty to affiliate with seekers of democracy elsewhere. The Review merged the romantic 3 4

5

Democratic Review 15 (Dec. 1844), 569–70. Ibid., 9 (Sept. 1841), 260–76. For comments on Young Ireland see ibid., 13 (Aug. 1843), 115–28; Albany Argus, 11 May 1848, 2. For continuing interest in Italian republicanism in 1848, see the Democratic Review 22 (Jan. 1848), 86; New York Herald, 1 July 1849, 2. Democratic Review 23 (Aug. 1848), 149.

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idea of an epic struggle for liberation with the Enlightenment emphasis on natural rights. Although Americans had expressed this sentiment since their founding (and even earlier, given the Puritan idea of mission), Young America Democrats became the first to suggest that leading by moral example was not enough. The United States should help Manifest Destiny along by sending arms and troops to Europe. Typical of the American interest drawn by Young Europe was a New York meeting in support of Young Ireland that took place in August 1848. Participants compared Ireland with the United States, suggesting that if one former British colony could revolt successfully, so could another. “A voice has come across the ocean, crying for help; and should we withhold our aid?” Even reviled New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley made an appearance, warning against religious divisions within the Irish nationalist cause and pledging American backing for the island’s independence. Most participants were Irish themselves, and Democrats certainly understood the resonance of this international question in their quest for immigrant votes at home.6 Endorsement of Young Europe spread from such local community meetings to the nation’s highest tribunals. For example, Michigan Senator Lewis Cass became a persistent booster of European republicanism, advocating the cessation of diplomatic relations with Austria as a way of protesting its ironclad rule. Cass also asked Congress to plead with the British government for the release of Young Ireland rebels, suggesting that a gentle protest could work wonders. And he championed the cause of Hungarian exile Louis Kossuth as he arrived on American shores late in 1851.7 Congress, said Cass, should not sit silently while the Habsburgs punished Hungarian dissidents who struggled for liberty. On most issues, New Democrats considered the aging Cass an Old Fogy, though he proved surprisingly pliant when it came to European republicanism (as he did on the rivers and harbors improvements discussed in Chapter 2). Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire added that Russia should be treated in the same way as Austria, making American displeasure with the Old World clear to all. And Pierre Soul´e of Louisiana wanted the motion specifically to acknowledge support and admiration for Louis Kossuth and his band of rebels. Unsurprisingly, these major boosters of Young Europe tended to be Democrats. Whigs, primarily President Millard Fillmore and Secretary of State Daniel Webster, remained uneasy with any overseas commitments. Like the early national Hamiltonians they emulated, Whigs tended to focus on building up the nation where it was rather than reaching outward beyond its existing borders.8 The thinking of New Democrats worked in precisely the opposite way, imagining a geographically expansive future rather than a gradually growing present. Senator James Shields of Illinois spoke for this approach and aided Cass in the 6 7 8

New York Herald, 10 August 1848, 1; ibid., 25 August 1848, 2. Also see the Ohio Statesman, 17 March 1847, 2. Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, 28 January 1852, 408–9; ibid., 11 February 1852, 530–1. Ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, 7 January 1850, 113–16; ibid., 5 February 1850, 293.

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effort to release a group of Irish protesters. He suggested that a mild resolution that would not be seen as an affront could prove helpful to jailed Irish dissidents. Shields, a native of Ireland, noted that he wished to intercede for the rebels’ release and subsequent patriation in the United States. Playing to Irish immigrants who cast valuable votes for Democrats, he observed that “Irish blood runs warmly in the veins of more than half the people of the United States.” Shields then exercised a bit of Young America hubris, suggesting that 1852 would be a perfect time to make a request for liberating the Irish rebels from England, given the growth in American leverage. “Not only England, but the world begins to see and acknowledge, that this nation is destined to future supremacy. America is the predestined mistress of the future. Such is not the condition of England herself.” Shields expressed interest in liberating the Irishmen because of the romantic notion of national self-determination that he shared with other Young Americans, although he also wanted an opportunity to display the recent growth in America’s international prestige. Then Shields changed tone and invoked the growing threat to England posed by the Continental monarchies. In such a situation, England might desire closer ties with the United States, making it easier to marshal support for releasing members of Young Ireland. Shields also appealed to the heart, of the English no less than the Americans. How could anyone blame the Irish radicals for trying to reclaim their country? Their “ancestors were kings in Ireland” only centuries earlier. Ireland fit the common pattern, said Shields, of nations that have given much to the world and received little in return: the Jews contributed Jesus but suffered centuries-long persecution, Greece gave high culture but chafed under Roman and Ottoman rule, Poland and Hungary “saved Christendom” but now groaned under the weight of Habsburg and Romanov chains. Such weepy romantic nationalism became the first appeal of young Democrats for Old World republican sympathy. When it failed, they advocated stronger schemes such as outright intervention.9 A somewhat na¨ıve and obscure congressman from Alabama (Felix McConnell) even proposed to the House of Representatives that the United States annex Ireland. He placed the island in the same category as Mexico, ´ and Texas, as a downtrodden area that should feel fortuOregon, the Yucatan, nate to join the American Union. Remarkably, he “presumed, he said, that there would be no objection,” which of course there was. One might think such a suggestion shocking even for this time and place, but in 1852 young Democrats called for the annexation of Canada too.10 9

10

Speech of Hon. James Shields, of Illinois, on the Resolutions Expressive of Sympathy for the Exiled Irish Patriots (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe Office, 1852). On his friend Stephen Douglas’s support for the Irish insurgents, see John Costigan et al. to Stephen A. Douglas, 4 March 1852, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 6 January 1846, 146–7. McConnell committed suicide later that year: see Allan Nevins, ed., Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845–1849 (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1929), entry for 10 September 1846, 147. On the annexation of Canada, see the New York Daily Times, 23 July 1852, 1; Albany Argus, 8 October 1849, 2.

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Shields proved a stalwart supporter of Young Europe, even though he had lived in the United States since 1827. Moving from Ireland to Illinois, he became a lawyer and Democratic Party organizer during the 1830s. Such a career path naturally moved him into the same circles as his patron Stephen A. Douglas. Both were newcomers who were roughly the same age (Shields was seven years younger than Douglas), and both decided to build a future on the northwestern frontier. They came to the conclusion that their new home presented no better vehicle for their personal and political aspirations than the Democracy. While Douglas ended up traveling circuit as a state judge, Shields found himself in the Illinois legislature after 1836. In 1842, he challenged Springfield lawyer Abraham Lincoln to a duel when he heard that Lincoln had written public letters calling Shields a “dunce” and a “liar and a fool.” The duel was averted when Lincoln insisted that he did not write the letters. Shields’s confrontation with Lincoln displayed his tempestuous and unstable personality. In any other setting, these traits would perhaps have made him unfit for office, though in the circle of Young America Democrats they garnered little notice. President Polk appointed Shields commissioner of the public lands in 1845, a post he resigned the following year in order to fight in the Mexican War. Wounded badly during combat, he came home to recover and continue his political career. In 1849, the Illinois legislature selected him as their senatorial replacement for Sidney Breese. Shields’s appointment caused a scandal because he had only been naturalized for a short period of time. Still, he served out his term and stuck close to Judge Douglas on most matters. Illinois turned him out of the Senate in favor of Lyman Trumbull in 1855 as part of the anti-Nebraska backlash produced by Douglas. The rest of Shields’s life reads like a fictional sketch. He moved to Minnesota in 1855, where he became an investor and railroad promoter. He served again in the Senate for a short term in 1857, thereafter moving to San Francisco and marrying a 25-year-old Irish immigrant. Appointed a brigadier general during the Civil War, Shields served under Nathaniel P. Banks and scored a victory against Stonewall Jackson in 1862. Lincoln recommended his promotion to major general, but the Senate vetoed the motion. Shields then resigned, returned to his law practice, and eventually moved to Missouri, which he also represented in the U.S. Senate. He remains perhaps the only person to have served as senator from three different states. Troubled and peripatetic, restive and thorny, Shields epitomized the unyielding international assertion that led Young America to the doorsteps of Young Europe.11 Among the Barricades, in Person and in Spirit Although most American support for the European revolutions of 1848 came in the form of financing and emotional affinity, some activists put their money 11

American National Biography Online, s.v. “Shields, James,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1.harvard. edu/articles/04/04-00905.html (accessed 9 May 2003).

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where their mouths were. George Law hatched a scheme for arming European rebels with muskets left over from the Mexican War. He and George Sanders, host of the infamous London dinner, joined forces in the late 1840s. The firearms would be transported on Law’s ships and would allow revolutionaries such as Kossuth and Mazzini to stage another round of outbreaks. Sanders himself was rumored to have fought in the Paris barricades of 1848, though his exported guns arrived too late to make a difference. Growing up in Carroll County, Kentucky, young George Sanders learned the values of economic growth from his father, who popularized free trade and other reform ideas during the depressed years of the 1840s. He was descended from a military officer who helped pass the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 in opposition to the Federalists’ Alien and Sedition Acts. Sanders’s first real taste of politics came in the presidential campaign of 1844, when he pushed for Texas annexation and rallied for Polk and the Democrats. He may have gone too far given his youth and inexperience because Polk rejected him for a postmastership in 1845. From then until 1851, Sanders lived in New York City, working as an entrepreneur and lobbyist. He planned to develop copper mining in Michigan and to inaugurate a new steamship line to Africa (an “Ebony Line” that would speed black colonization). In late 1851, Sanders purchased the Democratic Review with the help of Stephen Douglas and other backers, and began publicizing Douglas for the 1852 presidential nomination. Sanders’s shrill denunciations of Democratic elders cost Douglas the nomination, however, as he alienated many party regulars. Douglas chastised him for his audacity, although it was too late and the Democratic convention had chosen Pierce. An opportunist first and foremost, Sanders lost no time in conciliating the new president, resulting in a short-lived appointment as American consul to London (the Senate refused to confirm him in February 1854, and he was recalled). During his short tenure in England, though, Sanders managed to ruffle a number of feathers. He overtly called for the assassination of Louis Napoleon and hosted the controversial dinner attended by the revolutionaries.12 During the Civil War, Sanders passed through Europe and Canada as an agent of the Confederate government, and after the war ended he resided in Europe and associated with leaders of the 1871 Paris Commune. He returned to New York and died in 1873. One can hardly imagine a more colorful public life, and for this reason it is easy to write Sanders off as a crackpot or eccentric. No one who has read through his papers, however, can doubt that he sincerely believed in the integrity of every action he undertook. He genuinely thought that his mockery of Democratic elders would help to launch a new party heyday under Douglas, and that his individual agitation could spark another powder keg on the Continent. In Sanders, one sees the power of self-confidence, the 12

Sanders’s inflammatory activities in Europe, coupled with his reckless course at home earlier, earned him a number of enemies in the Senate, who refused to confirm his nomination and sent him home.

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quintessentially Young American faith that taking personal responsibility for something could actually make it happen. From there, it seems only a short step to the Romantic cult of hero worship, the longing for the great man of history. No doubt Sanders was not that man, although his unshakable belief that he was influenced every decision of his life.13 A more sober, philosophical turn of mind led Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller Ossoli upon the same European path as Sanders. Unlike Sanders, Fuller was a Yankee who befriended Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott. Like George Bancroft, she was a New Englander with unfashionable Young America leanings. During the early 1840s, she edited The Dial, a liberal intellectual journal reflecting the thought of the “Concord school” and its sage. Embarking for Rome in 1846, she hoped to cover the course of democratic agitation as a journalist. She corresponded with Giuseppe Mazzini and Horace Greeley, among others. Love found her unexpectedly, and Fuller married an Italian revolutionary, bore a son, and established her place at the vanguard of the European unrest. She weathered the French, pro-papist siege of Rome in 1849 and managed to escape with her family as the city fell. Steaming back home in 1850, her ship sank within sight of New York, killing her and her new relations. Distraught, Emerson sent Thoreau to scour the wreckage off Long Island. But all seemed lost, except for one item: her diary. Fuller’s journal, recovered from her shipwreck in New York harbor, vividly and personally describes the events surrounding the revolutions of 1848 in Rome. Proceeding through its once-wet, now-musty pages, the reader is transported back into the optimistic world of artillery fire from the Castle St. Angelo, of torch-lit celebrations, and of new revolutionary flags finding their way into the sculpted hands of Marcus Aurelius statues. Jeering crowds tore blistering papal excommunications to pieces. “Such is the finale of St. Peterdom!” Italian states prepared for war with one another and with France, as revolutionaries drunk with expectation laughed the Pope “to scorn” and pushed “forward liberal measures.” Efforts to reform the governance of Rome turned into a “Constituento, not only Romania but Italiana. Now, indeed, Italy has taken a great step forward.” Fuller looked upon the tentative steps of Roman citizens to vote for a representative assembly. Insecure residents at first turned up and looked at each other warily, but eventually they cast enough votes for the counting to begin. It showed that the “retrogrades” had been turned back. Meanwhile the forces of reaction were gaining the upper hand in France, leading Fuller to fear a Gallic attack. “Monstrous are the treacheries of our times.” But the Roman republic survived, at least temporarily, and Fuller lived to see the arrival of deputies to a representative assembly. They “walked on foot,” she observed, “ornamented only with the tri-colored scarf to the sound of the Marseillaise.” Her 13

Dale R. Prentiss, “Economic Progress and Social Dissent in Michigan and Mississippi, 1837– 1860” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford Univ., 1990), 139–44; Curti, “George N. Sanders,” 79–87; Sanders Papers.

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friend Mazzini, originator of Young Italy, returned from exile and was made a Roman citizen and a representative of the Roman Assembly. “The people went under his windows, and he made them a noble simple address, in which he said he should stay with them to the last.” Fuller also remained well informed about the progress of related Continental revolutions, commenting on the Magyar uprising against Austria and on the ever-changing situation in France. Viewing these events, she felt a premonition of the downward course of things to come. Little by little the monarchists gained ground lost to the republicans, and by the end of her short diary Fuller registered the disappointment and disillusionment of her Roman republican colleagues (and, now, family). “The tragedy so begun is tending to a close.” Political utopia existed for a short time when all seemed possible; now it was time to wake up and go home.14 Unsurprisingly, Fuller remains an anomaly. Both because she was a woman active in the political sphere and because she became one of the few Americans actually to participate in the revolts, she stands out even among Democrats who waxed lyrical about events on the Continent. For most Young America Democrats, sympathy for the 1848 revolutions extended to statements of support or actions promoting their success monetarily and technologically. For Fuller, it meant marrying an Italian revolutionary and placing herself in the thick of the action. Unlike other European adventurers, Fuller never cultivated close ties with leading Democrats. In fact, she once lived with, and continued to write for, the arch-Whig journalist Horace Greeley. But in sailing to Rome and participating in the revolution, by advocating women’s rights at home and republicanism abroad, Fuller effectively became a Young American. The leading American advocates of foreign intervention to help Young Europe were by far the Democrats, and Fuller identified with their plans for a new era. Moreover, in the mid 1840s she socialized with the Young America literary circle in New York, and she kept in contact with that veritable author-Democrat, Nathaniel Hawthorne.15 Even though the majority of Young Americans never traveled to Europe, it is hard to overestimate the exuberance they displayed. Though they could not get as close to the barricades as Sanders and Fuller, they lived vicariously through the daily ups and downs of the revolts. Anticipation and excitement boiled over 14

15

Entries for 1 January 1849, 2 January 1849, 6 January 1849, 16 January 1849, 17 January 1849, 26 January 1849, 5 February 1849, 13 February 1849, 18 February 1849, 5 March 1849, 6 March 1849, 17 March 1849, 18 March 1849, 29 April 1849, Margaret Fuller Diary, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Also see Fuller, “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), and Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Nathaniel Hawthorne to Margaret Fuller, 1 February 1843, Margaret Fuller Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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when a steamer arrived from the Old World bearing news of fresh insurrection and the establishment of European republics. The many headlines printed by the New York Herald in April 1848, one below the other, almost tripped on themselves, as if editor James Gordon Bennett could never stop the inexorable flow of welcome political information: “The Progress of the European Revolutions,” “Revolt in Lombardy,” “Fighting in Milan and Flight of the Viceroy,” “Riots in Munich,” “Abdication of the King of Bavaria,” “Revolution in Hungary,” “The New Constitution of Rome,” “The Republic of Luxembourg,” “The Progress of the French Republic,” “Postponement of the Revolution in Ireland” – all this and more crowded into less than six inches of paper. Reading such headlines, Democrats thought their moment had come, and that they could, and should, rightfully step into a global leadership role on behalf of republican institutions worldwide.16 Historian George Bancroft, President James K. Polk’s minister to the Court of St. James, could barely contain his excitement, or hide it from the circles of horrified English nobility in which he traveled. He asked: “Has the echo of American Democracy which you now hear from France, & Austria & Prussia & all Old Germany, no power to stir up the hearts of the American people to new achievements? Can we show ourselves lukewarm, while the old world is shaking off its chains & emancipating & enthroning the masses?” He predicted that, “if France succeeds, there will not be a crown left in Europe in twenty years, except in Russia.” Bancroft’s Paris-based friend George Sumner, brother of the future antislavery senator, looked confidently to “Hungary regaining its independence, – Bohemia & the Slavonic proving also, Lombardy joining Italy, & Austria proper taking its modest place in the United States of Germany.” The Herald expected that “the revolutionary movements in Europe will exercise an important influence on the American continent, and that a future, a new era, will ere long dawn upon Canada, Cuba, and, perhaps, the British West India islands, which will entangle us, more or less, with the old world.” Following European examples, Canada might revolt from England and Cuba from Spain. America had to be ready to act on such opportunities, whether in pursuit of direct territorial annexation (as in the case of Cuba) or less overt economic penetration (as was probable in the case of an independent Canada).17 What made Europe in 1848 notable was that it became involved in two movements very relevant to the United States: the quest for national selfdetermination and democratic reform. America had struggled to preserve its rights as an independent country through 1815, and the Jacksonian period of its history witnessed an unprecedented democratization of the franchise. Europe now pursued these twin goals, suggesting that it followed the American example. For a country that had watched Europe stray under Napoleon, this new 16 17

New York Herald, 10 April 1848, 1. George Bancroft to James Buchanan, 24 March 1848, Buchanan Papers; George Sumner to George Bancroft, [no day, no month], 1848, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; New York Herald, 18 April 1848, 2.

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alignment – and the rise of free trade discussed earlier – seemed a sign from the heavens. To miss their chance to spread democracy, thought Young Americans, meant dereliction of the charge of Manifest Destiny.18 Consequently, New Democrats in Congress mobilized quickly in order to display their transatlantic sympathy. On the Senate floor, William Allen introduced a resolution congratulating France for establishing a republican form of government. He said he understood what such a gesture implied (a reference to the possibility of American intervention in Europe). Allen cited a precedent from 1820, when the House of Representatives passed a resolution applauding Latin American states recently emancipated from Spain. He believed his motion to be simple and congratulatory, and said the Senate could vote on it immediately without sending it to committee. John C. Calhoun, with characteristic foresight, thought the measure premature and worried that the French revolution would fail. Further sabotaging Allen’s plan, Democratic Free Soiler John P. Hale of New Hampshire proposed an amendment lauding the French for freeing slaves in their colonies. This addition would make Allen’s resolution unacceptable to southern senators. The course of this seemingly straightforward bill demonstrated how the politics of slavery could overtake other issues, and how eventually the sectional crisis would spell doom to Young America altogether. But in 1848, New Democrats stuck together in their desire to support France. Senator Edward Hannegan of Indiana played sidekick to William Allen, as did Stephen Douglas. “All republicans throughout the world have their eyes fixed upon us,” thundered Douglas in the Senate chamber. “Here is their model. Our success is the foundation of all their hopes. Shall we, then, turn a deaf ear to the voice that comes to us from France?” Senate colleague Pierre Soul´e, himself a former republican dissident in France, gave assurances that the French would suffer no one to quash their new government. In the end, Democrats prevailed when the Senate passed Allen’s resolution unanimously and without the slavery provision. The groundwork for American support of Young Europe had been laid.19 After Louis Napoleon secured control of France in the early 1850s, calls arose for the United States to sever its diplomatic relations with the Gauls. New Democrat Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin presented a memorial of mechanics and unskilled laborers to this effect in 1852. Unsurprisingly, it elicited less support than the earlier motion of Congress to express sympathy with the inchoate revolution of 1848. Now that the forces of reaction held the day, senators thought it inexpedient to act rashly. The sense of disillusionment, of wonder that they could have been so optimistic as to believe in the French republican experiment, made them wary of such behavior in the future.20 18 19

20

New York Herald, 10 August 1848, 1. Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 28 March 1848, 549; ibid., 30 March 1848, 568–9; ibid., 3 April 1848, 580; ibid., 7 April 1848, 592; Illinois State Register, 12 December 1849, 2. Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, 2 January 1852, 184–6.

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A similar debate had taken place in the House in 1848, also with a northern antislavery representative injecting the question of bondage into the proceedings. Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio wanted the congratulatory resolutions to mention the end of slavery in the French colonies specifically, though he knew such an amendment would never pass because it struck nerves too close to home. Support for French democracy thus seemed inevitably to come into conflict with the practice of American slavery. In the House, positive reference was made to the French Revolution of 1789, and discussions similar to those that Americans conducted regarding France during the early 1790s began to take place. In this light, it seemed hardly surprising that Democrats, as the ideological descendants of Jefferson, proved Francophilic and Anglophobic. Unlike the disputes of the late eighteenth century, however, the House debates of 1848 quickly degenerated into pro- and antislavery invective. In the final analysis, there were too many people in the United States in the 1840s who could not sympathize overtly with Young Europe because they saw too clearly the inconsistency of such a position with their status as slave owners, or as citizens of a country in which slavery remained legal. And, in the end, this inescapable fact prevented Young America’s program of foreign intervention from coming to fruition.21 It should be noted that the Young Americans desiring foreign intervention on behalf of the revolutionaries were a minority even within the Democratic Party. It appeared, even at the time, risky or foolish to embed American troops within such an unstable situation. All of the presidential administrations in power during the period of the revolutions – Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, and Pierce – thus never seriously considered deploying U.S. forces. Instead, congressional Democrats with Young America leanings delivered speeches and made rhetorical gestures of support for the rebels. The broad outlines of American foreign policy, in other words, were still based on the values of prudence and neutrality. A handful of progressive Democrats who wished for something more, however, unsuccessfully attempted to change the country’s direction. The revolutions of 1848 – and American hopes of aiding them – had universally failed. Yet as the turn of the decade of the 1850s flew by, momentum and discussion regarding overseas intervention accelerated once again in Congress. Some politicians still thought they could revive Young Europe. Heated debates pitted Young American supporters of European democracy against saner heads who thought violation of George Washington’s famous “neutrality” dictum foolhardy. Senator Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin became one of the leading congressional opponents of the doctrine of American noninterference in foreign affairs. He desired “the abandonment of our now impolitic, unwise, and unjust system of neutrality.” “I contend,” he continued, “that what was our policy in our infancy and weakness, has ceased to be our true policy now that we have reached to manhood and strength.”

21

Ibid., 30 Congress, 1 Session, 3 April 1848, 572–9.

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Walker argued that Washington’s parting advice to beware of “entangling alliances” was merely intended as an expedient for the early republic, not as a permanent principle of foreign policy. He ridiculed fellow senators who shied away from foreign intervention, determining not to let another free Poland fall, another Roman Republic pass from history. “No! Never!” Walker distinguished between the early, child-like United States and the current adolescent of the 1850s. What seemed right for the former did not at all apply to the latter. For example, he thought Americans would never again face an invading army such as Britain’s in 1814. Instead, armies of immigration would replace them, filled with expatriates devoted to the cause of liberty. America should tap, rather than ignore, this new resource. So long as monarchical regimes acted ethically, said Walker, America should not interfere. This would amount to violating the sovereign rights of other nations. But once a people under the yoke of despotism organized and rose up, the issue became international, he said. In that case, all good Americans had an obligation to raise their voices for an assertive foreign policy. And Walker meant action: no more lip service to ideals of global democracy, followed by shameful prosecutions of those who actually did something about them. The neutrality laws had to go, argued Walker in consonance with John O’Sullivan, John Quitman, and associated filibusters.22 Congressman William H. Polk, a New Democrat from Tennessee, agreed with his Senate colleague. He expressed regret that Lewis Cass, heretofore a champion of exporting American liberty, had weakened his support for intervention by 1853. Worse, a Democratic representative from North Carolina (Abraham Venable) followed Cass’s course and now came in for ridicule by Polk. This traitor “has thrown off all of youth, and gone soul and body to ‘fogyism.’” Polk expressed outrage that the Fillmore administration did nothing to avenge the wrongs inflicted on American citizens captured and punished ´ by Spain as invaders of Cuba in the recent Narciso Lopez expedition (a failed invasion of the island that sought to detach it from Spain and annex it to the United States). The Whig New Yorker in the White House brought disgrace to the American flag. “Sir, what sort of respect can we look for from any foreign country?” Polk asked the House. He went on specifically to criticize the weak conduct of U.S. diplomats in Europe, charging that they appeased monarchs and became sycophants in imperial courts.23 If Fillmore and the American envoys could not be trusted, then perhaps the presidency itself needed reform so that it could better defend American honor abroad. Congressman Edward Marshall of California, a young Democrat from the West, believed strongly in the international mission of the United States. Typically for a Young American, he also trusted the executive branch enough to urge that Congress appropriate discretionary sums so that the president could respond to foreign policy crises while Congress recessed. Marshall suggested 22 23

Ibid., 32 Congress, 1 Session, 16 December 1851, 104–6. Ibid., 32 Congress, 2 Session, 4 January 1853, 209–10.

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a $10 million account for this purpose, and a colleague even wanted to make it $20 million.24 Louisiana Senator John Slidell abetted Marshall’s attempt. In 1854, he introduced a resolution that would allow the president to repeal the country’s neutrality laws (barring activities such as filibustering) by proclamation should Congress happen to be in recess at the time. The “Africanization” of Cuba by Spain that year galvanized him into action. Fearing an imminent American invasion for the purpose of annexation, Spain began a hastily conceived emancipation program. It deliberately tried to frighten slave owners in the American South, still smarting from the black takeover of Haiti decades earlier. Slidell dared not imagine an all-black Cuba, perhaps swallowed up by England, menacing America off the coast of Florida. The fast-moving pace of the times demanded presidential flexibility, and Marshall and Slidell displayed little of the classical republican fear of concentrated power that hindered traditional Democrats. As in the case of internal improvements, the course of democracy in Europe proved too important to allow domestic constitutional hang-ups to get in the way.25 If sending troops, arms, or money across the Atlantic proved too brash for most legislators, softer alternatives beckoned. Bancroft’s friend George Sumner proposed a mild form of American intervention that squared well with the economic orientation of the New Democracy. He argued that reducing American tariffs on selected items manufactured in France would generate more demand for those products and help the French economy. This would allow the mass of French workers to avoid starvation. Following the classic logic of the American founders, he argued that republics could only exist when their people were content. A populace materially deprived could never remain virtuous, and an unchaste population could not remain democratic for long. In this case, starvation in France would prevent the success of its experiment in free government, and the United States could help by generating demand that would stimulate France to new degrees of prosperity. This vision combined the optimistic freetradism of New Democrats, their sunny belief in economic production and growth as the result of low-tariff policies, and the sense of obligation to an old continent just beginning to follow the Western example.26 Despite Sumner’s focus on the economic stimulation of Young Europe, New Democrats suffered from one blind spot. They seldom attended to the socioeconomic dimensions of European turmoil. They almost never mentioned the squalor of Europe’s industrial working classes, the popularity of new socialist panaceas, and the bottom-to-top aspects of the European revolutions. Foremost in their minds remained the more contained quest for national sovereignty and self-determination. As long as a democratic Hungary freed itself from Austria, in other words, they cared little about economic conditions within Hungary 24 25 26

Ibid., 32 Congress, 2 Session, 17 January 1853, 326–7. Ibid., 33 Congress, 1 Session, 1 May 1854, 1021. [George Sumner] to George Bancroft [no day, no month], 1848, Bancroft Papers; George Bancroft to George Sumner, 21 March 1848, ibid.

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itself. Most likely Americans felt that addressing these deeper issues would open the revolutions to even greater instability, not to mention bringing to light socioeconomic tensions within the United States. Better to focus on democratic forms of government and on national sovereignty, which would unite Young Americans behind the cause. Additionally, the limited-government beliefs of most antebellum Democrats fit ill with the kind of state action presumably necessary to rectify economic inequalities in Europe. Balancing living conditions within a foreign country was a very different proposition from liberating it from external rule and making it a democracy. The safest course was to make Europe’s wars seem most like America’s own revolution: a nation’s quest to rule itself through a republic. The Magnificent Magyar For all the idealism of 1848, monarchist armies came down with a heavy hand upon the revolutionaries. French troops helped the Pope to destroy the Roman Republic that so inspired Margaret Fuller; Czarist Russia interceded on behalf of the Habsburgs, exiling Hungarian rebel Louis Kossuth and disappointing Magyar dreams of independence; and in Paris Louis Napoleon staged a remarkable coup that turned French expectations of a republic into a mockery. The revolutionary fervor did not expire with these defeated political movements, however. European republicans continued to protest, traveling the world collecting money for future uprisings. One of their stops was the London home of American consul George Sanders in 1854. Indeed, perhaps the expatriate rebels proved more successful as exiled campaigners than they did as upstart political leaders. And none of them gained wider acclaim in the years following failed revolution than Louis Kossuth of Hungary, who arrived in the United States in 1851 on a triumphal fund-raising trip. Kossuth was a revolutionary leader who spearheaded an insurgency against Austria’s Habsburg monarchy. The Habsburgs had subsumed Hungary within their empire and paid little heed to its yearnings for national self-determination. After Russia sent reinforcements to suppress the Magyar revolt in 1849, Kossuth escaped into Ottoman custody, awaiting his fate. Through the intervention of members of Congress and the administration, the United States offered Kossuth and his entourage safe passage to America. Although there were radicals, such as the famous German “Forty-Eighters,” who settled permanently in the West, Kossuth determined to tour the country on a fund-raising circuit. In his mind, he merely awaited the next opportunity to return to Europe and strike again. “Governor Kossuth,” as Stephen Douglas called him, entered New York Harbor in December 1851, greeted by a throng of well-wishers that almost sent the city into anarchy. The Kossuth mania became so intense that it threatened public order. With parades, gala dinners, fund-raising speeches, private interviews, and the selling of Kossuth-ized merchandise, young Hungary’s bearded rebel turned into a commercialized American celebrity overnight. “He has made a deep impression

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upon our society,” reflected a Washington correspondent.27 This was by design, of course, for Kossuth chiefly hoped to raise money for a new revolt. By the time he left New York in June 1852, he had visited Washington, enjoyed a swing through the South, and made his way to Boston. Over the course of these months, however, Americans’ hysteria for Hungarian republicanism died down. The Fillmore administration doggedly refused to support Kossuth openly. Southern proslavery ideologues distrusted him as unreliable on black slavery and as bringing to light the disparity between American pretensions to freedom and the practice of racial bondage. And northern abolitionists grew frustrated by his unwillingness to condemn the South’s “peculiar institution.” When Kossuth left in mid 1852, hardly a notice passed compared with the jubilation attending his arrival. The American appetite for European intervention proved short-lived.28 For Young America Democrats, Kossuth’s visit nevertheless became a crystallizing event as momentous as Commodore Matthew Perry’s visit to Japan in 1853, or as galvanizing as the first news of the 1848 revolutions on the Continent. These types of episodes made young Democrats believe they stood on the right side of history, with a benevolent God blowing wind at their backs. Stephen Douglas said it well around the time of Kossuth’s arrival: That the despotic powers of the Old World would prefer to have us withhold from this distinguished champion of freedom every act of courtesy and evidence of sympathy, is doubtless true; for they would take his life, and consign his name to infamy, for the very deeds which endear him to every American heart, and make him the representative of the liberal movement in the Old World. We love and honor him for the same reason that they hate and fear him.29

In order to appreciate what men like Douglas and Sanders saw in Kossuth, one need only glance at a mid-nineteenth-century map of Europe. A far cry from the liberal democratic picture of today, the Continent before 1914 nurtured absolutism like a fertile garden. French republicanism lay trampled under the feet of Bourbons, Orleanists, and Bonapartes – all oppressive dynasties of the nineteenth century. Brutal rulers, including the Pope, kept the various disunited states of Germany and Italy in a chokehold. The Habsburgs controlled the Austro-Hungarian Empire with such a tight grip that the constitutional monarchy of England seemed progressive by comparison. Perhaps the most hated symbol of European absolutism, Czarist rule in Russia struck Americans as the worst anachronism of the Old World. Laborers tied to the land and to their titled superiors ensured the continuation of a feudal system gone even from much of imperial western Europe. Moscow’s growing aspirations to 27 28

29

New York Daily Times, 8 January 1852, 1. Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1977); John H. Komlos, Louis Kossuth in America, 1851–52 (Buffalo: East European Institute, 1973). Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, 11 December 1851, 71.

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world power prompted the nations of western Europe to join the Ottomans in waging the Crimean War against Russia during the mid 1850s. In sum, except for the federated Swiss cantons, all of continental Europe groaned under despots. For a beacon of light such as Kossuth to survive a revolt against these vested interests, and to tour the country that symbolized humanity’s dearest hopes for democracy, was an excitement too grand for many Americans to bear without hoopla. Understood in context, it becomes clear why Kossuth’s visit made young Democrats feel as if the world was divided between good and evil, with themselves standing on the side of right. The romanticization of democracy – the paintings of flag-waving liberators, the culture of hero worship, the missionary sense of spreading human contentment – makes sense only after looking at this old European map. Declaiming on America’s place in the world, Senator Robert F. Stockton voiced these sentiments eloquently in 1852: Sir, when we cast our eyes over the world – everywhere – with the exception of America – we see the surface of the whole earth appropriated by absolute monarchs. The only country which enjoys republican Government, and whose people adequately appreciate free institutions, is the United States. Those free institutions comprehend all that survives of free principles and political liberty. In them is concentrated all that is valuable of what man has ever achieved in qualifying himself for self-government. The Mosaic Republic – Rome and her Empire – the transitory Commonwealths of Italy and Germany, which heralded the revival of learning – all stand as beacon-lights to warn and instruct us. All that is of value in the institutions of the Great Alfred or modern Britain is ours – improved, perfected, and divested of every element which can interfere with, or enfeeble the sovereignty of the people. We are, in truth, the residuary legatees of all that the blood and treasure of mankind expended for four thousand years have accomplished in the cause of human freedom. In our hands alone is the precious deposit. Before God and the world, we are responsible for this legacy. Not for our own benefit only, but for the benefit and happiness of the whole family of man. What course, then, shall this Government take to perpetuate our liberties and to diffuse our free institutions over the world?

Stockton’s idea of American purpose was as historical as it was divine. In other words, what stood out in his remarks was not just the notion of Godly purpose, so strong in the writings of George Bancroft, but also the sense of human experimentation with democracy, and the lessons gleaned from it, all devolving upon the United States. He felt very immediately that America had become the historical culmination or distillation of all previous human attempts at democratic government. The responsibility was awesome.30 Perhaps the best assessment of Kossuth’s appeal came from none other than “Georgie” Sanders, Jr., young son of George Sanders, Sr. Kossuth’s speeches, this precocious child wrote to his mother, are “replete with eloquence[,] sound logic[,] and animation[,] so that the gestures flow spontaneous to the thought. No wonder that Kossuth’s gestures were inimitable. It was because his speeches 30

Ibid., 32 Congress, 1 Session, 2 February 1852, 438–9.

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were inimitable. . . . No orator, whom I have read, save Cicero, pays so much attention to oratorical rythm [sic].”31 Kossuth “holds the German vote of this country in his hands,” wrote another, somewhat older, correspondent. New Democrats certainly paid attention to this political dimension of his tour, since immigrant votes had become a key part of their coalition by the early 1850s.32 But the Kossuth mania fizzled, and by the time the Magyar “governor” departed New York in June 1852, the papers hardly took notice. Although he raised a substantial amount of money in the United States, Kossuth never launched another revolution. Young America Democrats did not see Kossuth’s fall as indicative of their own failures. Animated by a delusional optimism, they resolved all the more to take matters into their own hands and foment democratic revolutions abroad. Where Kossuth and the Forty-Eighters faltered, sympathizing Democrats thought they would succeed. They could do nothing during the Whig administrations of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, both of which halted Democratic plans for western expansion and overseas intervention. But with the election of New Hampshire congressman and Mexican War veteran Franklin Pierce in 1852, Young America Democrats once again found a friend in the White House. Innocents Abroad Under Pierce, various Young Americans joined the foreign service, often intriguing jointly in order to acquire territory and advance their program of worldwide republicanism. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who associated with the New York literary circle clustering around John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, became a government representative in Liverpool, England; O’Sullivan himself was stationed in Lisbon; George Sanders became a consul in London before being recalled for failure of Senate confirmation; August Belmont was a minister at The Hague; New York politician Daniel Sickles became secretary of the legation in London; former Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker embarked on an abortive diplomatic appointment to China; South Carolina essayist Edwin De Leon was sent to Egypt; and Louisiana fire-eater Pierre Soul´e made an embarrassing showing as the American minister to Spain.33 Pierce even hinted that he might appoint former Buckeye Senator William Allen as minister to China (following Walker’s resignation), thus deploying Young America to the Orient. 31 32 33

George Sanders, Jr. to Anna Sanders, [no date], Sanders Papers. Nathaniel P. Banks to Caleb Cushing, 9 June 1852, Caleb Cushing Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Widmer, Young America, 74, 198–9, 267; Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 273–6. Soul´e’s mania for obtaining Cuba at any cost led him into unseemly connections with antiSpanish dissidents at the same time that he served as American minister to Madrid. Always on the verge of instability, he challenged the French minister to a duel because of a comment on Soul´e’s wife. See Amos Aschbach Ettinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soul´e, 1853–1855 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1932).

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Allen had been brooding at his Chillicothe estate ever since the Ohio legislature turned him out of the Senate in favor of Salmon P. Chase in 1849.34 Most of these appointees sought nomination and went abroad with the express purpose of catalyzing European revolutions. As August Belmont noted shortly before his selection by President Pierce, no one could aid the cause of democracy in Europe more efficiently than he. Belmont cited the “moral influence” of the United States on Europe, which he thought could exercise a grand impact on Old World politics. In this he saw the role of a country “destined to be foremost among the nations of the earth.”35 After spending about one year at The Hague, he surveyed the prospects for reigniting European republicanism. They were dim, he concluded, although “we all know that it is always darkest immediately before the break of day.” Forces of reaction were gaining the triumph in Paris, Kossuth’s Magyar revolt had long been suppressed, and the establishment press of the Continent heaped continuous scorn upon the Pierce administration. But the day of revolution would come again soon, thought Belmont, and Americans should be ready to support the dissidents by building up their navy in the meantime.36 In London, Sanders felt restive and ready for action, and had a premonition that the administration was “afraid to trust me.” No doubt this had to do with the fact that he called for the assassination of Louis Napoleon and made a habit of entertaining European incendiaries at his home.37 President Pierce acted deliberately in his diplomatic appointments, hoping to revive the international engagement that was the hallmark of Polk’s administration. He sought to name foreign service officers in one fell swoop, in order to show that a tableau or configuration of agents had been decided upon rather than a random assortment of appointees. This demonstrates his sensitivity to the Young America faction of the Democracy, as well as showing the selfconsciousness of the movement. New Democrats thought they were posturing for history, and they saw themselves as latter-day Washingtons and Jeffersons. The thought that within years the idealism of the moment would crumble under the weight of sectionalism never crossed their minds.38 Although the young Democracy seemed well represented in Pierce’s appointments, the new president snubbed Stephen Douglas. He refused to tap Douglas as a cabinet member, did not ask him for advice, and failed to act on his patronage suggestions. Pierce disagreed with Douglas’s philosophy of rewarding the 34 35 36 37 38

Franklin Pierce to William Allen, 5 September 1853, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 20 January 1854, August Belmont Letterbooks, New York Public Library. August Belmont to George N. Sanders, 19 September 1854, Sanders Papers. August Belmont to George N. Sanders, 21 March 1853, Sanders Papers; George N. Sanders to Anna Sanders, 4 May 1853, ibid. New York Herald, 10 May 1853, 8. On Young America and maneuverings over the Pierce cabinet nominations, also see Jesse D. Bright to James Buchanan, 6 February 1853, Buchanan Papers, and the Chicago Daily Tribune, 6 September 1853, 2.

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political faithful, wishing instead to appease diverse factions of the party and appoint men from all quarters. Both New York’s antislavery Barnburners and conservative Hunkers, for example, received offers from Pierce. Though estranged from New Democratic icon Douglas, by his appointments and actions Pierce made it clear that he intended to become a bona-fide Young American nonetheless. He favored a renewal of territorial expansion, appeared particularly enamored of purchasing Cuba from Spain, and wanted to recapture the Democratic glory of the 1840s.39 Deploying a group of foreign service officers with such a self-conscious agenda of international change seemed radical, though it had been on New Democrats’ minds since those days of Polk. Indeed, during the 1840s, Senator James Shields brought up this idea in a limited fashion, requesting from Secretary of State James Buchanan a diplomatic appointment for a German expatriate he had befriended. This man had left his country 15 years earlier but was now anxious to return in order to help with the revolutions of 1848. Since he lacked funding, the only way for him to cross the Atlantic lay in Buchanan’s offer of an ambassadorial post. Shields seemed genuinely interested in aiding European dissidents, though he was also conscious of the domestic political benefits of courting immigrant populations, particularly groups that had been exiled from monarchical Europe, such as the famous German Forty-Eighters. As Shields added when writing to Buchanan, “You know that without German votes we could not carry some of the states, and as a party we owe them much.” His request once again exemplifies the mix of disinterested humanitarianism and political calculation that lay at the heart of New Democrats’ fresh international consciousness.40 Operating on these dual motivations, Young America’s diplomatic corps arrived in Europe flush with anticipation. Working in concert, they believed they could foster democracy in a superannuated repository of despotism. But issues of a more symbolic nature initially took center stage, costume being first on the list. Looking back to the simple republican dress of Benjamin Franklin’s missions to Europe, New Democrats abroad rejected the extravagant court attire required of diplomats by European monarchies. Pierce’s secretary of state, William L. Marcy, issued a “Dress Circular” instructing diplomats to don ordinary civilian clothing. August Belmont virulently defended his right to appear at court in civilian garb as a result. And he argued that the United States should elevate the ranks of American diplomats serving in democratic countries as a way of displaying symbolic empathy with these constitutional regimes.41 Queen Victoria subsequently refused to receive American minister to England James Buchanan and Senator Stephen Douglas because they did not appear in the 39

40 41

Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (1973; Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), 374–8. See the long line of Douglas patronage suggestions in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 260–6. James Shields to James Buchanan, 20 October 1848, Buchanan Papers. August Belmont to Stephen A. Douglas, 14 November 1853, Douglas Papers.

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proper wardrobe. But in time some European powers overlooked the breach in protocol, and Americans also conciliated by dressing up and agreeing that penetration of the court’s inner circles trumped a stubborn and symbolic act of New World defiance. The dress issue was important as a signal that Young America Democrats intended to change the parameters of world politics, insisting on accommodation to American ways.42 Young Europe expressed pleasure at the landing of these newfound allies from across the ocean. One European friend of Young America saw the position of U.S. minister to Constantinople as the lynchpin of democratic reform. The appointment did not offer prestige or social grace, but in 1853 it seemed critical for American efforts to intervene in Continental republicanism. Constantinople would become the staging ground for American initiatives on behalf of Louis Kossuth, he thought. “I hear that George Law and young America exert themselves” for an appointment in Constantinople compatible with their desires. He suggested William Corry, a socialist politician from Ohio, as his top choice for the post. If someone like Corry, who resided in Europe during the revolutions, could run American foreign policy in Eastern Europe, democracy might spread even faster than most Democrats anticipated. As this letter shows, Young Americans and their supporters did not see revival of the revolutions of 1848 as a chimera but instead as an actual possibility given appropriate coordination. And with Pierce’s cooperation in scattering so many diplomats of one mind throughout Europe, they thought they stood on the verge of a breakthrough.43 In reality, they stood on the verge of collapse. A series of embarrassing international incidents, coupled with a domestic explosion in public agitation of the slavery question, brought New Democrats’ foreign experiment to an abrupt conclusion. First, hot-tempered mavericks such as Sanders and Soul´e stretched American credibility too far. Both ended up back at home almost as fast as they originally steamed eastward. However solicitous the Pierce administration appeared, it could not afford to station agents in European capitals who explicitly called for and abetted the overthrow of those very governments. The Cuban filibustering expeditions in which John O’Sullivan and John Quitman participated further damaged American integrity, portraying the United States as a nation of outlaws. Moreover, Secretary of State Marcy was still licking wounds incurred through two altercations. In the first case, the Spanish government had confiscated the American steamer Black Warrior in Havana seemingly without cause in 1854. Young America called for war, hoping that a pretext for conquering the island was at hand. Instead, Spain released the ship and narrowly 42

43

New York Herald, 20 February 1854, 1; August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 1 November 1853, Belmont Letterbooks; Riepma, “Young America,” 290–1; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 14 January 1854, 1. Francis Pulsky to George Bancroft, 16 March 1853, Bancroft Papers. Pulsky was a Kossuth aide who traveled with the Magnificent Magyar on his visit to the United States in 1851–2. See Riepma, “Young America,” 147, 274–5, 314; Francis Pulsky to Stephen A. Douglas, 21 March 1853, Douglas Papers.

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averted open hostilities. That same year, Austria-Hungary captured a republican dissident who had defected to the United States and only released him into U.S. custody after tense negotiations. Shaken by these events, the administration had had enough overseas adventure. The most fatal occurrence of the year for New Democrats’ European aspirations ironically came from Stephen Douglas himself. His Kansas-Nebraska Act began as an effort to advance Young America’s goals of railroad construction and western expansion by establishing governments for new frontier territories. But when his bill invalidated the Missouri Compromise, it transformed this typically Young American piece of legislation into a sectional maelstrom from which the nation never recovered. For the historian, it often seems remarkable to see how quickly public attention shifted to sectional issues after 1854, almost as if a gun had gone off. The North-South standoff of the period 1846–50 had certainly alarmed most American politicians, although those feelings had been cleared away temporarily after passage of the great compromise in 1850. In 1854, the bitterness of the earlier period suddenly returned. Swept from the discussion rapidly were railroads, steamships, red European republicans, and Manifest Destiny. The Nebraska bill, together with European missteps and confrontations, prevented New Democratic diplomats from realizing their dreams on the Continent. Young America’s European adventure ended with a bang, not a whimper, in the Belgian town of Ostend. There the ministers gathered in 1854, issuing a manifesto that called for the annexation of Cuba. Domestic and international outrage at this document proved so intense that it spelled the end of future intriguing in Europe. President Pierce, now under tremendous pressure, reined in his young lions and put a stop to their collusion. Congress and the administration recalled the chief incendiaries (Sanders, Soul´e, and English Legation Secretary Daniel Sickles), and ensured that the remaining envoys (O’Sullivan, De Leon, Belmont, and the rest) behaved discreetly. New Democrats’ project of fostering European republicanism withered in the mid 1850s. Like so many aspects of Jacksonian culture, it fell victim to resurgent North-South sectionalism. Imperialistic projects that enjoyed national support during the 1840s now suffered criticism from either North or South. For instance, one of the most important projects pursued by Pierce’s Young America diplomatic corps was the annexation of Cuba from Spain. This would be arranged, much as in Texas two decades earlier, by fomenting revolt within Cuba and then peacefully integrating it into the American Union (though they also attempted to purchase the island). Young America diplomats called for this move explicitly in the Ostend Manifesto. Insufficiently anticipating the sectional dimensions of their document, they endured violent criticism from the North, where many saw Cuban annexation as a proslavery venture. It would add more slave territory to the United States, tipping the balance of political power in southerners’ favor. Intervention in Europe faced a similar fate. Southern strict constructionists came to fear that the degree of federal government

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centralization needed to aid European republicans might also threaten slavery. Antislavery northerners, meanwhile, embarrassingly linked the issue of liberating Europe to that of freedom for black slaves in the American South. Sectionalism thus proved an insurmountable barrier to Young America’s program of promoting worldwide democracy during and immediately after 1848. Equally important, though, was the failure of European dissidents themselves to prosecute their cause successfully. Even the most hotheaded New Democrat recognized that the United States could only abet, not spark, a republican revolution on the Continent. Democrats thought such a moment had come in 1848, and they continued to hope for its reemergence through the early 1850s. Once they came to terms with the fact that they had wagered incorrectly, that the Manichean clash between democracy and monarchy was not to take place in their generation, a mood of disillusionment set in. Overcome by the regional tensions leading to civil war, Young America and its foreign projects drifted out of sight. Only in the 1890s, after painstakingly hurrying to bury its sectional hatchet, did America try once again to jump-start a program of foreign intervention and expansion.

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5 A New International Consciousness

Thinking metaphorically about the history of the United States, New Democrats conceived of themselves as the middle link between infancy and ripeness. Nations proceeded through life cycles just as human beings did, and now it was time for America to grow up. According to this symbolic vision, Young America’s forefathers were children, and the New Democrats had grown to become adolescents. Their own offspring would mature to adulthood, and their progeny, to middle age. Each stage in the country’s history mirrored that of a human life. The Founders and the Jacksonians appeared to them as originators of a grand experiment. Now that it was proven to work, the new cohort needed to fulfill its responsibilities by maintaining and cultivating it. The two generations preceding Young America took George Washington’s advice to heart. In his farewell address, Washington warned against “entangling alliances,” leading the Founders and the Jacksonians to isolate themselves. They certainly dealt with foreign policy when it required attention, as in the case of Jefferson’s embargo or the purchase of Spanish Florida in 1819. But they usually pursued such measures in order to promote domestic security, not to acquire new territory or to bring their notions of democracy to people across the sea. The foreign policy of the Founders and the Jacksonians was defensive, sometimes preemptive, but typically not aggressive.1 Young America Democrats self-consciously accepted a new era of foreign relations. They made no bones about the demands of a more internationally connected age. For them, understanding that America faced responsibilities in the larger world meant maturation from the republic’s childhood into its adolescence and adulthood. A North Carolina Democratic congressman said that 1

On generational consciousness in antebellum America, see George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).

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a very important change has taken place in public opinion in relation to matters which deeply concern the interests of our country. There was a time when it was supposed we had territory enough on which to employ our capital and labor. . . . But in this age of progress we have heard it said in high places that we have the capacity of swallowing Mexico, and then annexing the islands thereto – such is our power of expansion.2

New Democrats awoke from the slumber of two generations to discover that their country could play a more assertive role in global, or at least hemispheric, affairs than they had been told. They wished to flex their national muscles in order to see how far they could reach and what they could obtain. Beverley Tucker, a publisher who edited the Pierce-leaning Washington Sentinel, in 1853 declared that “the change in the position of the United States requires in its bearing the rejection of antiquated ideas, of inapplicable maxims, and of hoary prejudices.” Then he described precisely what had transpired: “Our vast extension of territory, and increase of commercial business, have brought us into immediate contact with all the nations of the world, and have imposed on our government obligations to exercise the greatest vigilance and firmness.”3 No longer could policymakers hope that two oceans would protect the United States, ensuring its survival and preventing the need for involvement in matters outside the North American continent. Even if they could, thought Young Americans, there was no reason to maintain the old position given America’s new capabilities. Manifest Destiny and the spirit of conquest moved them toward expansion and international leadership. The Democratic Review in 1846 performed its usual service of explaining such New Democratic thinking: The general policy of the democracy is to favor the settlement of the land, spread the bounds of the future empire, and to favor, by freedom of intercourse and external commerce, the welfare of the settlers, who are, for the most part, men of simple habits and strong hands, looking to mother-earth for their only capital, and to their own labor as the sole means of making it productive.4

When George Sanders began editing the Review in 1851, he delivered this message even more bluntly. “It is about time that Americans were learning the importance of having a foreign policy,” he insisted. “We understood the whole duty of man to be so far as politics was concerned, summed up in discussions on tariffs, banks, internal improvements, public lands, army and navy, the mint, and the Indians, with such an episode occasionally as Texas, Oregon and California.” However, “the events which have convulsed Europe for four years past . . . invite us to enter the career which belongs actually to the young but huge experiment in self-government so successful here, in aiding and encouraging all 2 3 4

New York Herald, 4 January 1853, 1. Washington Sentinel, 24 September 1853, 2. Democratic Review 19 (Aug. 1846), 86.

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who are emulous of our example.” Stephen Douglas thought it “time that America had a foreign policy – a foreign policy predicated upon a true interpretation of the law of nations – a foreign policy in accordance with the spirit of the age.”5 This chapter will explore New Democrats’ international initiatives outside of Europe. Young Americans, however, linked the crusade for republicanism in the Old World with their ambitions for territorial expansion in the American West and the Caribbean. Bringing Cuba and Mexico into the liberty-loving folds of Union seemed no different from helping Louis Kossuth to shrug off autocracy in Hungary. In both cases, New Democrats believed they fulfilled the mission assigned by God to their rapidly growing nation. The chapter begins with an examination of the rationale New Democrats employed for a fresh international outlook and then documents the issues that dominated foreign policy during Young America’s heyday. They include the Oregon crisis, the Mexican War, the unsuccessful quest for Cuba, and the American opening of Japan. The results of New Democratic internationalism during the 1840s and 1850s turned out ambiguously. Though they conquered Mexico and acquired its northern provinces, though they obtained much of the Pacific Northwest, young Democrats also faltered badly on Cuban annexation and accelerated the territorial crisis over slavery that ultimately led to disunion. Nevertheless, by introducing a new expansionist ideology into the Democratic Party, or at least by forcing the party to act on its promises of open land and individual opportunity, New Democrats injected a dose of urgency into a plodding and divided organization. They diversified its ideological offerings and foreshadowed the imperialism of the Gilded Age. Reviving Monroe’s Doctrine In 1846, the Democratic Review critiqued French and British intervention in the internal politics of South America. The two European powers had interceded in the chronic civil wars of the lately decolonized Latin America, claiming that they merely aimed to mediate conflict and pacify an unstable region. Ensuring free trade in South America seemed their real goal, claimed the journal. It then defended American rights to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. It seemed selfevident that European interference in the “American states of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Argentine Confederation” trampled upon rights to the western hemisphere declared by the United States. Americans in 1846 remained especially suspicious of British actions, beyond the normal Anglophobia pervading pre–Civil War America. Hostility toward England persisted since the Texas annexation controversy of 1844–5, when leaders feared that Britain would preemptively acquire Texas, make it a free territory, and threaten the existence of slavery in the South. Coming on the heels 5

Ibid., 30 (May 1852), 401; Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 163.

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of such a panic, further British intervention in the Americas seemed intolerable. The United States, claimed the Review, is “called on to raise its voice – not yet to take up arms, against European intervention in the affairs of North America. We hail the omen.” Indeed, Americans of the 1840s started to revive the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823 to assert American control of the western hemisphere to the exclusion of European powers. Since the extreme annexationists of the 1840s and 1850s were consistently Democrats, it comes as no surprise that Young Americans led the charge for taking back control of their international neighborhood. During the 1830s, Democrats remained consumed by nullifiers and bankers, but by the 1840s a new generation decided that it was time to enforce President Monroe’s proclamation.6 On the eve of the Mexican War, the Review recognized that morning had dawned upon American relations with the world. For years, Americans heeded Washington’s counsel to avoid “entangling alliances.” During that time they focused instead on building up internal infrastructure and increasing commercial ties. Through that self-cultivating process, the United States had become a power to be reckoned with by the 1840s. Paradoxically, by following George Washington’s advice (focusing on domestic issues and building up the country internally), America had reached a point when it could no longer continue to do so. “Thirty years of peace have now resulted in placing the United States among the foremost nations of the earth; and as they have religiously abstained, hitherto, from seeking to interfere with the balance [of power] in Europe, the leading powers there now seem disposed” to meddle in the affairs of the western hemisphere. The implication of the Review’s claim was that America could no longer afford to live with its head in the sand, that it had become sufficiently sturdy to exercise a regulatory voice on the international scene, particularly with regard to its own continent and region of the world.7 Others echoed the Democratic Review. A party activist in Washington compared the dismissive perception of Monroe’s Doctrine in 1842 with the more imposing understanding reached by 1853. In 1842, foreign rivals and Americans themselves hardly made good on the promise to protect North America from encroachment. Monroe’s earlier resolve translated into empty words under the tutelage of Jacksonian-era elders. Yet by 1853 the country had awakened to a sense of its interests and responsibilities, and would not return to an earlier complacency.8 From Democratic regulars these views filtered up to the presidency. James K. Polk, the country’s first Young America president, took office with a clear understanding of the importance of foreign relations. Not only did the Texas question, involving possible British intervention, dominate his election campaign, but the Young America clamor for all of Oregon loomed on the horizon 6 7 8

Democratic Review 18 (March 1846), 163–84. Ibid., 18 (April 1846), 273. C. Jones to Stephen A. Douglas, 11 February 1853, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

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as well. In his annual message to Congress of 1845, Polk called for a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine, which had lain relatively dormant since the 1820s. It seemed essential, Polk argued, to reassert the principle of European noninterference at the current, sensitive time for U.S. relations with the world. America would not allow Europeans to play their favorite game, the quest for a “balance of power,” in North America. At the time of his message, Polk felt pressured by British designs on Texas, which Americans desired, and by an anticipated struggle with Britain over disputed claims to the Oregon Territory. For these reasons, he thought it opportune to revitalize Monroe’s pledge. William Allen, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, acknowledged Polk’s call and introduced a resolution to this effect in January 1846. Congress would place Europe on notice against further mobilization in the western hemisphere. But John C. Calhoun opposed it, thinking it was a ploy underhandedly to commit the country to defending all of Oregon against Britain. Looking down upon a young, unseasoned Democrat like Allen (then 43 years old), Calhoun called for consulting the “oldest member” of the Foreign Relations Committee, Lewis Cass (who ended up siding with Allen). Calhoun thus highlighted a growing generational cleavage within the party. Indeed, joining Allen in support of the resolution stood fellow young Democrats Edward Hannegan of Indiana, David Yulee of Florida, Jesse Bright of Indiana, and Sidney Breese of Illinois.9 Congress saw fit to redeploy this resolution in 1853, when it discovered that Britain had established a colony (the Bay Islands) in Central America. English settlement violated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, charged many senators, since that compact pledged both nations to equal rights in the region. John Bull sought instead to ensure his sovereignty over the area that would probably house a future isthmian canal. Democrats made support of the Monroe Doctrine a party issue by alleging that Whigs sympathized with England in this matter. Only the Democrats defended American rights in the western hemisphere, complained the Ohio Statesman.10 New Democrats resented the passage of the Whig-brokered Clayton-Bulwer Treaty altogether. By granting rights to other countries across the Isthmus of Panama, it seemed to foreclose future annexation of that territory to the United States. It closed the door on Manifest Destiny by temporizing with England. As a result, one Democratic leader called for “a more formal and emphatic 9

10

Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 14 January 1846, 197–8; James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 11 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1897–1908), IV, 398. A similar resolution emerged again in 1850: Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 6 February 1850, 295. Also see Allan Nevins, ed., Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845–1849 (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1929), entries for 21 October 1845, 24 October 1845, 16, 18. Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 2 Session, 6 January 1853, 237; New York Daily Times, 14 May 1852, 2; Illinois State Register, 7 March 1854, 2; Ohio Statesman, 17 January 1853, 2. For another example, related to American designs on Hawaii, see William L. Marcy to John Y. Mason, 16 December 1853, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine than has ever yet been made.”11 But Europe, accustomed to U.S. passivity in foreign affairs, laughed off Young America’s hubris. The French Assemble´e Nationale railed against “the presumption and the pride of a child-people” and, as one American newspaper paraphrased, “predicts that the future will display the spectacle of the excesses and the follies of young America.”12 The fact that New Democrats took interest in a revival of Monroe’s Doctrine was no accident, since pressing questions of national security and territorial expansion began to dominate the political agenda after 1844. By looking back 20 years into their past, politicians and editors unearthed a neglected policy statement with serious implications for the dawning age. By shining a spotlight on this classic blueprint, they paved the way for the international activities pursued by Young America. “Fifty-Four Forty” By 1844, Britain and the United States jointly occupied the Oregon country by treaty. However, New Democrats, primarily Senator William Allen, pushed for a clarification of each country’s sovereign rights in the region. Thinking England weak and uninterested in defending a faraway territory, Allen and his allies tried to precipitate a resolution favorable to the United States. They recommended giving notice to Great Britain, as required by the joint occupation treaty, that the United States would no longer tolerate an ambiguous split occupancy. For the expansionists who lusted for all of Oregon, dislodging England from North America represented a firm new deployment of the Monroe Doctrine. They argued that European powers held no claim to the American West, allegedly reserved by God for American settlement. In the months leading up to the 1844 presidential election, public attention focused on Democratic plans for settling the Oregon boundary dispute with Great Britain. Democrats considered the Oregon Territory a commercially useful site, a place for population growth and economic development. Some believed the United States should forcibly occupy the contested territory. If a pollster had been on hand to question them about the prospects for war with either England or Mexico in 1844, they no doubt would have chosen the former.13 Oregon involved national pride as well as valuable western resources, and the Polk Democrats who took control of Congress and the administration in 1845 intended to teach their old colonial master a lesson. One fervent Young American expressed his views on the Oregon issue to William Allen, who had been appointed to the strategically valuable 11 12 13

R. J. Walker to Stephen A. Douglas, 4 May 1850, Douglas Papers; R. A. S. to Stephen A. Douglas, 15 March 1853, ibid.; E. George Squier to Stephen A. Douglas, 24 December 1852, ibid. New York Evening Post, 7 April 1853, 2. More liberal European newspapers often applauded the course of Young America, however. Democratic Review 12 (April 1843), 339–59.

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chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He endorsed Allen’s uncompromising defense of American rights to the whole of Oregon up to 54 degrees 40 minutes. Pessimistic about a peaceful resolution of the standoff, he welcomed war as beneficial to the United States and its principles in several ways. First, war with England would extend America’s free government to new areas. The spirit of “republicanism must sooner or later be spread over the whole of North America, & the sooner the better.” In other words, the United States’ Manifest Destiny to export liberty demanded that it act forcefully. Second, he hoped that an Anglo-American skirmish would liberalize the Old World and “revolutionize many of the despotic & tyranical [sic] governments of Europe.” Hence challenging Britain over Oregon would allow the United States to enter European politics and shepherd democratic enlightenment eastward. “It is our duty to achieve this great object, even at the expense of blood & treasure, but as a people we shall come out of the struggle in better condition than we shall enter into it.” He thus went beyond even many of the die-hards on Oregon and Texas, and seemed willing to pay a high cost for political principles and their exportation. Lastly, he thought that militarizing the conflict would “be extremely popular, and will bind us more firmly together.” In a few years, this writer received such a nationalizing and unifying war, only with Mexico rather than England. He assumed that the populations of Oregon Territory and Mexico would see it as a blessing to enter the American Union, and even that residents of Europe would support the United States. “We have more people who would like to do the fighting than we should require to conquer both Canada & Oregon as well as Mexico, and who are eager for the strife.”14 Another friend counseled Allen that it remained Congress’s prerogative to annul the treaty of joint occupation with Britain. He implied that Allen and his Committee on Foreign Relations held sufficient authority to decide the Oregon question as they saw fit, enhancing the confidence of the ultras.15 Allen himself coined the phrase “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight” to designate the position of the extreme Young Americans on Oregon, which envisioned a full occupation of the territory up to 54 degrees 40 minutes on the map. In the hands of Allen and his disciples, “Fifty-Four Forty” became a seriously worded threat. One of them assured Allen that “if the arrogant pretensions of Britain in that regard remain unabated and war thus becomes necessary for the proper maintenance of our national rights to Oregon, it will be waged with the almost unanimous approval and enthusiastic support of all men of all parties.” He was wrong, because southerners never cared so much about Oregon as about more southerly territories, and Whigs in general adopted an antiexpansionist stance during the 1840s. Thus exaggerating, he thanked “God, there are but few in this vicinity pusillanimous enough to truckle to the audacious demands put forth by 14 15

[Illegible][Daniel Sickles?] to William Allen, 7 January 1846, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. [Illegible] to William Allen, 6 January 1846, ibid.

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Great Britain.” The idea of standing down a European power attracted New Democrats girding for a fight.16 Young America seemed pleased that English diplomats took note of their bravado, and they felt flattered by the attention given to them in the old country. Her diplomacy with America showed that she was beginning to respect the power lying across the Atlantic. A country barely 70 years old, exulted an Ohio paper, now “excited the fears of the powers of Europe.” Britain applied “the ‘balance-of-power’ doctrine to this continent,” a sure sign that the United States had gained international respect.17 But the shouting New Democrats captured only one of Britain’s ears. English distraction and lack of interest proved as vital to ultimate peace as Young American brinksmanship. Britain was preoccupied with Old World affairs and wished, in Foreign Minister Lord Ashburton’s words, to let the matter “sleep again for another half century.” Ashburton and his compatriots recognized the future economic importance of the Pacific Northwest: he saw it, as did Young America, as a gateway to the commerce of the Far East. Just as Egypt served as the lynchpin of Britain’s Indian Empire, so Oregon might prove crucial to an Oriental foothold. But he thought that the territory should “not be governed either from Washington or Westminster.” The new “Pacific republic” should be “founded by our own race,” wrote Ashburton, and it ought not to be administered as a colony by England or America. Here Ashburton tried to pretend that England staked no claims to Oregon in order to diminish the controversy and buy more time. Few doubted, then and even today, that had England desired it, she could have occupied Oregon. At the time Britain did not wish to act forcefully, and Ashburton was probably stalling rather than relating his true beliefs. As a result, rumors swirled suggesting a compromise between the two countries, and by mid 1845 the 49th parallel already seemed to insiders the basis of a possible border negotiation.18 For William Allen and his colleagues, this arrangement seemed more like a betrayal. They worried that President Polk, a slaveholder, would not push hard enough for all of Oregon and would settle, as he eventually did, for territory below the 49th parallel. Northern Democrats such as Allen suspected that southern expansionists did not care about obtaining all of Oregon because it would obviously remain free soil, whereas movement into Mexico and the Caribbean might offer territory out of which they could carve future slave states. John C. Calhoun, for example, had pushed hard for Texas annexation while serving in the cabinet of John Tyler. But he changed course and resisted a fight with England for all of Oregon. Proponents of “Fifty-Four Forty” naturally saw 16 17 18

William B. Arven to William Allen, 28 December 1845, ibid.; Charles Stickney to William Allen, 2 January 1846, ibid. Ohio Statesman, 4 March 1846, 2. Lord Ashburton to William Sturgis, 2 April 1845, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; William Sturgis to George Bancroft, 25 May 1845, ibid.; George Bancroft to William Sturgis, 2 June 1845, ibid.

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a southern conspiracy at work – the usual machinations of the Slave Power – though tension also turned into East-West disagreement. As one constituent wrote, “The hero of nullification [Calhoun] cannot make Western [residents] respect him for abusing Western Senators, at least so long as he occupies the British side of the question.” Thus the issue of Oregon and of 1840s expansion generally turned on both North-South and East-West friction.19 The Oregon debate – whether to compromise with England at the 49th parallel or to insist on 54 degrees 40 minutes at the point of the bayonet – brought with it a sharp escalation of these two kinds of regional tension. As previously noted, northerners questioned southern motives, given that southern Democrats spoke out stridently in favor of Texas annexation and even of prosecuting a war against Mexico, yet waffled on Oregon because it would yield no slave states. But East-West sectional consciousness emerged in 1846 as well. Western Democrats felt besieged and neglected by their party, and even by fellow westerners including President Polk. Polk negotiated with England, much to the dismay of William Allen’s ultraist followers. Western politicians felt they spoke for distinct interests of growth and development that affected their region of the country in particular. For much of the antebellum period, westerners had dabbled in alliances with the North and the South. Northern politicians would aid in growth and internal improvements and would provide a model of strong government as the West built itself up. Southern connections would protect the virtuous agrarian character of the West and preserve its autonomy from Washington. Yet by the time of the Oregon crisis, many western Democrats concluded that neither North nor South safeguarded their rights and that they spoke for a unique part of the country. The fact that Democratic colleagues temporized on Oregon convinced them that they alone stood for western interests. As we have seen, President Polk’s refusal to approve funding for rivers and harbors improvements exacerbated their sense of grievance.20 These forms of regional identification became important to Young America for two reasons. First, they threatened the airy nationalism that otherwise unified the party and the country. If allowed to fester, sectional resentments could lead to a breakup of the Democracy and ultimately of the Union. Second, these tensions showed that a large part of the spirit of Young America came from western Democrats, from men such as Edward Hannegan and Jesse Bright of Indiana, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, William Allen of Ohio, and – on certain issues – Lewis Cass of Michigan. The Old Northwest functioned as a 19

20

J. Hithcart to William Allen, 14 January 1846, Allen Papers; George Newell to William Allen, 18 January 1846, ibid.; M. A. Goodfellow to William Allen, 1 February 1846, ibid. On the sectional dimensions of the Oregon issue, see Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 230–1, and Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 39. George Patterson to William Allen, 17 March 1846, Allen Papers. Also see Robert W. Johannsen, The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989).

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key repository of the Young America ethos that influenced the conduct of the Democracy after 1844. Apart from regional divisions, New Democrats’ understanding of the Oregon crisis also involved commercial considerations. A new market orientation was evident in their handling of Oregon, as well as in the realms of internal improvements and free trade. When a correspondent of William Allen weighed settlement of the Oregon question with Great Britain, commerce immediately came to mind. The writer implied that the Oregon issue and the policy of tariff reduction were both important matters affecting America’s economic prospects. Another Allen ally insisted that “the whole West is interested in having Oregon, not merely as territory for settlement, but as the shortest road to China, and the source of an immense commercial interest.” He compared possession of Oregon, economically speaking, to the role of New England in the nation’s shipping economy in the East. The West would become profitable as linker of these two North American seaboards. “And like New England, Oregon above [the] 49[th parallel] abounds in all the means of manufacturing.” According to this reasoning, New England should support the American annexation of Oregon, especially since it would create shorter passages to the Orient and provide new markets for New England manufactures. “And if France will keep the British out of Egypt, and we keep them out of Mexico, and thus exclude them from a short passage by the Red Sea, or the Isthmus of Panama, we have them! But if they have Oregon, or only the portion above 49, they have us!” This constituent articulated the mixed commercial and geopolitical logic underpinning Young Americans’ program of expansion.21 Whether they saw the acquisition of Oregon in commercial terms or not, Young Americans mobilized against England because of constituent pressure from below. As with economic development in the New Democracy, bottom-up demands motivated politicians to adopt novel stances. Just as Young Americans turned toward a more progressive market orientation because their constituents requested it, so the drive for territorial expansion was linked to claims and appeals from settlers and constituents upward toward their representatives. A petition sent to Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1844 illustrates this dynamic. The claimant, an American, had immigrated with his family to the Oregon Territory and had purchased land and built a house. A British speculator preempted him by subdividing his new land and trying to sell it. The American was pursuing justice through the courts, on the grounds that the Briton’s actions violated the English-American treaty of joint occupation in Oregon. It also cut against the established American principle of preemption rights, under which squatters and settlers gained title to land by living on and improving it. Here, the plight of a local resident placed pressure on leaders of the New Democracy such as William Allen, and politicians heeded these wishes in their push for Manifest Destiny. Oregon pioneers also organized a local government in preparation for 21

W. King to William Allen, 10 December 1845, Allen Papers; Russell Jarvis to William Allen, 9 March 1846, ibid.

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drafting a constitution, attempting to enact the quintessential Young America scheme of peaceable entry into the American community of states.22 In the end, both countries were forced to compromise, for Polk did not fulfill the most extreme wishes of the northern-based all-Oregon faction. He divided the territory with England at the 49th parallel, guaranteeing to America the valuable harbor surrounding present-day Seattle as well as the breathtaking Columbia River gorge. But Young Americans expressed dissatisfaction, as much because of the president’s seeming capitulation to England as because of the loss of land. Allen, joined by ultraist Senators Sidney Breese and Edward Hannegan, as well as by that old stand-by Lewis Cass, voted against acceptance of the president’s negotiated settlement.23 They predicted that Polk’s name would go down in disgrace, and they compared his concession to Great Britain with that made by Whig Secretary of State Daniel Webster in 1842 over a boundary dispute along the Maine border (the Webster-Ashburton Treaty). In both cases, statesmen not fully committed to the preservation of American honor weakly gave in to “John Bull,” tarnishing the country’s international prestige. A “foul deed” was “consummated,” grumbled the Ohio Statesman.24 His efforts unrewarded, William Allen self-righteously wrote home to his wife. “All my instincts and reasonings are for the liberties of the People and the rights and glory of my country,” he reflected. “I am, therefore, compelled by every [part] of my nature to denounce treason and oppression wherever and whenever I find them. My course this session will give me more favor with the People than all my past life together.” Allen continued to worry, however, that placating Britain would encourage her to interfere in America’s relations with Mexico “and to bring France with her into the matter.” Though denied all of Oregon, Allen made a relatively seamless transition to harping on all of Mexico. He considered California only “nominally a part of Mexico” and wished the United States to thwart European, particularly British, plans for acquiring it. Mexico must lose California to some power, Allen thought. The only question was which one it would be. “Mexico is, therefore, but a nominal party to the question – ‘who shall have it?’” Allen warned his Senate colleagues that Britain would try to assume Mexico’s debts and peacefully acquire California, and that Mexico would very likely accept this offer as an option preferable to conquest by the United States. Allen considered it the highest priority of the American government to prevent this result. As long as he battled America’s old foe John Bull, Allen kept charging forward 22

23 24

Petition from Alvin F. Waller to Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, 28 February 1844, Allen Papers; Primary Meeting of the People of Oregon, 17 February 1841, ibid.; Organic Law for the Temporary Government of Oregon Territory, 5 July 1843, ibid.; Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 8 December 1845, 24; Messages and Papers, IV, 584–6; New York Evening Post, 23 May 1846, 2. Also see Edward Smith to Stephen A. Douglas, [no day, no month], 1844, Douglas Papers. Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 1 Session, 10 August 1846, 1223. Joseph Cable to William Allen, 24 June 1846, Allen Papers; Ohio Statesman, 22 June 1846, 2.

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with the full head of steam that distinguished New Democrats from other politicians.25 The Oregon crisis provided New Democrats with their first major international encounter. James K. Polk, the first “young Democrat” to be elected president, entered office pledging to expand his country’s “empire of liberty.” Negotiating a clear title to Oregon became his first opportunity to make good on this promise. Young Americans used the confrontation with Britain to test their newfound commitment to enforcing the Monroe Doctrine, ensuring that North America awaited their destined westward advance. Their appetite whetted by a new northwest, New Democrats turned their attention to a long-coveted southwest. Texas and Mexico Although war with Britain seemed imminent in 1846, a conflagration with Mexico erupted first. The roots of the conflict stretched back to long-standing grievances over American speculation and settlement in northern Mexico, but the immediate impetus was the American annexation of Texas in 1845. President John Tyler, alienated by the Whig caucus because of his obstructionism on economic policy, seized on the Texas issue as his ticket to another term. Thinking that he could make Texas annexation the foundation of a new political movement, Tyler unsuccessfully introduced an annexation treaty into Congress. His labors bore fruit immediately before he left office, however, when Congress acquired the new state through a joint resolution. By that point, James K. Polk had made the Texas position his own, leading him to victory over Henry Clay. As late as February of 1844, conventional wisdom held that the upcoming presidential election would focus on standard economic divisions between Whigs and Democrats. Voters would once again try to assign blame for the recent depression, with Democrats hoping that Van Buren could finally take his “stolen” second term. But by spring the Texas controversy burst upon the party scene, threatening to introduce dangerous sectionalism and to reorient the structure of party competition. “It is believed by some,” reported the Democratic Review, “that it will deeply convulse the whole North, and become a subject of new party division sufficient to destroy and reconstruct our present organization of parties.” Antislavery northerners feared upsetting the balance of slave and free states by adding yet another of the former, and Democrats in general expected that Whigs would oppose annexation, as their nominee Clay eventually did. Van Buren’s candidacy proved impossible after the rise of the Texas issue due to southern distrust of his weak stand on territorial expansion, and movement toward the Pacific overtook all previous questions as the election season approached. Polk won largely because of his pro-Texas position, 25

William Allen to Effie Allen, 28 June 1846, Allen Papers; “Mr. Allen’s Remarks in the Senate,” 6 August 1846, ibid.

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though Tyler had already put the new state into the Union by the time Young Hickory took office in 1845.26 What made the Texas episode new and unusual was the degree of American interest in foreign perceptions of the annexation. American politicians remained intensely concerned about the state of international, particularly British, feeling on the subject. After all, their annexation of Texas had been partly motivated by anxiety over British attempts to take over the Lone Star Republic and abolitionize it. The Texas controversy thus stirred a new international consciousness, as Democratic champions of annexation paid close attention to views of the affair abroad.27 No country took a keener interest in Texas than its old owner Mexico, which refused to recognize the legitimacy of the American annexation. Mexicans further claimed that the Texas boundary ended at the Nueces River, not – as the United States maintained – at the more southerly Rio Grande. Continued instability along the Texas-Mexico border prompted Young Americans to gird for their next fight. Future New Jersey senator Robert F. Stockton, then in the West through service in the Navy, chomped at the bit to engage the Mexicans. He wrote to Washington that settlers in Texas would have opposed annexation if they did not think that the American government would defend the Rio Grande boundary line. Ongoing disputes over this southern border between the United States and Mexico provoked war between the two countries in spring 1846.28 Stockton, a stubborn Young American in the military, called for a full defense of the Texas border. He even suggested to Navy Secretary George Bancroft that he (Stockton) would supply U.S. troops “in a private way with provisions and ammunition.” Stockton felt so strongly about defending the Texas border that he volunteered his own private resources for the venture. And they were considerable, given the wealth and eminence of his New Jersey family. He demonstrated how personally invested in their international project New Democrats became. One sees the same attitude in New York financier George Law’s offer personally to subsidize the arming of European revolutionaries after 1848, and in the efforts of 1850s Cuba filibusters such as John Quitman. For Young America Democrats, the world became an oyster not just for their country, but also for the exercise of their own individual ambitions.29 True to their existing priorities, New Democrats used the Mexican War as an opportunity to foster a stronger executive branch. This comported with their long-term pattern of increasing federal authority and refusing to shrink toward rigid strict constructionism. Indeed, support of the Polk administration – and opposition to the antiwar Whigs – placed New Democrats in an awkward posture. It made them argue that the threat of executive tyranny 26 27 28 29

Democratic Review 14 (April 1844), 423; ibid., 15 (June 1844), 559–64. Washington Union, 27 August 1845, 2. For background, see Joel H. Silbey, Storm Over Texas: The Annexation Controversy and the Road to Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). Robert F. Stockton to George Bancroft, 27 May 1845, Bancroft Papers.

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was not credible and that their president was prosecuting the war without aggrandizing undue power. Normally the Whigs stood for a centralization of authority, while Democrats carped about the consequent threats to liberty. But during the war Democrats defended strong executive action while Whigs railed against presidential tyranny. This was the second time the parties fought in such attitudes: during Jackson’s Bank War the inchoate Whig opposition united around the belief that Jackson had become a despot upending the popular will. So in 1833 and 1834, as well as between 1846 and 1848, Democrats defended robust presidential leadership. They had championed a vigorous executive when Jackson was in power, though they had let this aspect of their ideology wane following Old Hickory’s two terms. Now they picked up this theme again under Polk. The Mexican War conditioned them not to be as wary as they recently had been of the executive branch, and to put more trust in one man’s ability to shape policy. After all, if Polk could prosecute the war with iron will and without the slide into corruption and tyranny, perhaps the federal government was not such a fertile breeding ground for despotism. It did not pose such a danger to Democrats when Jackson was in office, though more recently it had seemed to do so under Tyler. In late 1846, Democratic Congressman Andrew Kennedy of Indiana entered this debate, defending Polk’s right to speak out against Whig critics of the war. “As to executive usurpation, the most pertinacious, captious quibbler could find nothing to quibble about,” he sputtered. “Where was all this to end? Did gentlemen mean to cripple the Administration in carrying on this war?” “All this noise about an Executive war was nothing but a poor mean effort in gentlemen to escape the responsibility of their own act.”30 The young Democracy faction of the party responsible for boosting Polk to power specifically championed a strong executive. Such well-known figures as Samuel J. Tilden, John L. O’Sullivan, and George N. Sanders played prominent roles in this effort. Fulfilling their expectations, Polk acted decisively as chief executive. In his first annual message to Congress after ending hostilities with Mexico, the president commended officers of the executive branch for their role in coordinating the military effort. Without them, he boasted, the large and farflung American force could not have been well supplied and coordinated while it fought two thousand miles away from Washington. The federal government, and more specifically the executive branch, nursed the country through the traumas of war.31 For all the optimism and bravura of the fight against Mexico, there were still some New Democrats who wished to conciliate their southern neighbor. Before war broke out John O’Sullivan wrote to Secretary of State James Buchanan. 30

31

Congressional Globe, 29 Congress, 2 Session, 16 December 1846, 47–9. On Polk’s strong wartime leadership, see Benjamin Z. Galper, “Lessons Learned from James K. Polk: Presidential Power and the Mexican War, 1846–1848” (Senior Honors Thesis, Harvard Univ., 2002). Messages and Papers, IV, 632; Riepma, “Young America,” 74.

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Quoting a friend who opposed the march to violence, he made the case that Mexico had conceded on a variety of previously outstanding issues involving the United States and that war was therefore unnecessary. Mexico stood impotent, O’Sullivan wrote, and to take advantage of its weakness would not befit a virtuous nation like the United States. O’Sullivan felt the same way about war with England over Oregon. Regardless of the issues at hand, he wrote Navy Secretary George Bancroft, his pacifist principles led him to “regret our present warlike attitude.”32 O’Sullivan was indeed a pacifist, ironically enough given his reputation as a Manifest Destiny crusader. His vision of American empire did not involve conquest, but voluntary adherence to the democratic principles of the United States. Nations would overthrow their own despotic regimes, whether in Europe or in Mexico, and then of their own accord enter the American Union. “There is no need of a drop of blood to cement [Cuba’s] annexation to our Union,” he once wrote.33 The wisdom of American democratic convictions would become self-evident, so that populations worldwide would desire U.S. protection. Texas remained the perfect model of how Young Americans such as O’Sullivan hoped to acquire territory. There the United States was not officially involved in hostilities, and a group of (admittedly mostly American) settlers themselves revolted against the Mexican government and then petitioned for entry into the Union. As O’Sullivan put it, Napoleon looked “eastward” toward conquest, while “‘Young Democracy’ looks westward with the arts of peace as the means to attain the same end.” O’Sullivan’s expansionist ally Jane Cazneau “would not see our eagle merely a bird of prey!”34 O’Sullivan’s attitude, futile though it became, highlights a neglected aspect of Democratic thinking during the 1840s. Too often historians portray the young lions of that decade as violent conquerors devoid of empathy. In fact, New Democrats seriously considered the implications of their war with Mexico, particularly its impact on the Mexican population. The United States, noted the Democratic Review, needed to effect “the seizure of all the large cities, including Mexico [City], occupying them by strong garrisons, and, while suppressing every species of Mexican military force, protecting the people from every kind of oppression, and, affording security to property, throwing the whole open to the free trade of all nations.” Their priority remained the assimilation of 32

33 34

John L. O’Sullivan to James Buchanan, 21 September 1845, James K. Polk Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; John L. O’Sullivan to George Bancroft, 24 August 1845, Bancroft Papers. Although O’Sullivan was a pacifist who believed in voluntarism and ethnic and religious pluralism, he later became a symbol of violent imperialism and racial parochialism because he coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” See Robert D. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 2003), 192. John L. O’Sullivan to James Buchanan, 19 March 1848, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 199; Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 227.

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new populations into the democratic political culture of the United States, and the increase of America’s international trading capacity. The pains taken by this author to suggest that civilians should not be harmed, but rather incorporated into a grand commercial network, shows this more muted aspect of Democrats’ war plans during the 1840s. American assimilation, in their view, remained the touchstone of a new and inevitable world order based on reason and prosperity. In their minds, at least, nothing could be further from conquest or land-grabbing. The reality turned out far differently, of course, placing Mexican citizens under the new yoke of American suzerainty.35 After one year of war, the Review boasted that their places of worship have been held sacred by our commanders and soldiers; their priests have been respected. . . . The Catholics are a large and prosperous sect in the United States, and the Catholic citizens of any part of Mexico that may come under the dominion of the United States, would, in every respect, receive the same treatment as those of other States of the Union.36

That year President Polk wrote to Congress: “Our commanders in the field were directed scrupulously to respect their religion, their churches, and their church property, which were in no manner to be violated.”37 The actual conduct of the battles strayed far from clean eastern injunctions. Yet New Democrats continued to see their war in a benevolent light. They regarded themselves as cultured saviors of democracy, holding out future promise whether the victim was Mazzini in Italy or a peon in Mexico. In their minds they, not antiwar Whig New Englanders, appeared the progressive and enlightened partisans, since they were the ones who were willing to risk all for the freedom of Mexicans and Texans. To stay at home and refuse to fight, like Thoreau, seemed to them shortsighted and parochial; to launch democratic government in Europe and in Mexico appeared the noble and altruistic course. As the Review article suggested, the Mexican War also displayed Democrats’ newfound love for the market. One of Polk’s first initiatives following the conquest of Mexico was to open its ports to commerce under a free trade regimen of low tariffs, for example. Mexicans themselves would take advantage of this opportunity, as the Democratic Review placed surprising confidence in their business and mercantile classes. It assumed that the Mexican polity remained too weak to operate independently, and that Mexicans were as yet incapable of 35

36 37

Democratic Review 20 (Feb. 1847), 101. On the discrepancy between the high-minded rhetoric of O’Sullivan and Polk, on the one hand, and the actual conduct of the war, on the other, see Paul Foos, A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair: Soldiers and Social Conflict During the MexicanAmerican War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002) and Richard Bruce Winders, Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1997). Democratic Review 20 (June 1847), 484. Messages and Papers, IV, 546.

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the self-government that would justify bringing them into the Union immediately. Instead, it counseled, American troops should occupy the entire country while Mexicans themselves propped up their regime and reformed themselves until they could join the United States. The key agent for such internal reform became Mexico’s business community, the financiers and capitalists who could establish infrastructure, maintain stability, and build up healthy political habits. After all, it noted, “The curse of Mexico . . . is the absence of the commercial principle, that great conservator of peace and internal tranquility.” The fact that a Democratic journal placed such hopes in the hands of a business class, a class that its elders purportedly distrusted in the United States, signifies the change in attitude that the Democracy had undergone. For an idealistic group within the party, intervention in Mexico meant new commercial opportunities as well as the spread of democratic institutions.38 Thus emboldened by a sense of mission, New Democrats hungered for Mexican territory. The New York Herald, a daily organ of Young America sentiment, in early 1848 considered the merits of occupying Mexico. It noted that most of the U.S. military’s top brass endorsed at least a limited presence, primarily because they felt that America was obligated not only to destroy Mexico’s government and social structure, but also to rebuild. The Herald reported on a dinner held in honor of Generals John Quitman and James Shields before their return to the United States, at which American military officials calculated the results of occupation. Not surprisingly given the Young America pedigree of these Democratic leaders, discussion quickly turned to commercial matters. Mexico seemed ripe for the picking not only because of desires to spread democracy and uplift a degraded people, but also because of the financial possibilities of new markets under stable regimes. As the Herald editorialized: The valleys of Mexico and Toluca are the most beautiful and highly favored in the world. The soil produces every grain, plant and fruit, which is demanded by the wants, or sought after by the taste of civilized man. The immense number of poor Indians and Peons supply an abundance of labor. All that is wanting to render this region the most productive and wealthiest in the world is a good, stable government, which, by giving security to property, person and capital, will attract thither the labor and capital of other people, and open it to the commerce and enterprise of foreign nations.

Here in a nutshell emerged the New Democratic program of spreading liberal government worldwide in order to create favorable economic opportunities. Although such an arrangement seems one-sided and exploitative today, Young America Democrats hoped it would produce a reciprocal situation: Mexicans (or, as the case may be, Europeans) would receive a democratic government and the promise of trade, while Americans could fulfill their divine mission of spreading freedom at the same time they lined their pockets. The Young 38

Ibid., IV, 548; Democratic Review 21 (Nov. 1847), 381.

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America project seemed to them like a mutually advantageous scenario. “And this large commerce,” the Herald continued, will naturally and inevitably fall into the hands of our people – the imports will be chiefly from the States – the carrying trade will belong to our ships – and thus new impulses will be given to the manufacturing and shipping interests of our country. The new markets which will be opened to the trade and enterprise of our countrymen in Mexico will far exceed, in the extent and profitableness of their demands, all other foreign markets.39

The Herald merely echoed what fast became basic Democratic opinion. John O’Sullivan famously opined that it was America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Stephen A. Douglas wrote, “The Northern Provinces of Mexico including California ought to belong to this Republic, and the day is not far distant when such a result will be accomplished.” He believed in this prophecy so deeply that when war with Mexico erupted, he briefly considered leaving Congress and enlisting.40 When the United States not only fought valiantly, but also occupied Mexico City and stood to annex the entire country, New Democrats cheered. American performance in the war vindicated their worldview and parlayed their nation into eminence on the world stage. “The results of the war with Mexico have given to the United States a national character abroad which our country never before enjoyed,” exulted Polk following ratification of the peace treaty. Americans showed old Europe that a citizen-soldiery unprepared for combat, rather than a professional standing army, could not only defend its own soil, but also conquer foreign territory. As the president realized, the Mexican War represented the first moment when America seemed to have the potential for becoming a world power. Its victory against England in the War of 1812 led to respect of the United States as a feasible independent entity, but not to an expectation of its rise to global stature. When Americans defeated Mexico, a well-armed imperial government, they created the impression that Polk and the Young Americans were leading the country to international greatness. A nation esteemed primarily for its sovereignty after 1815 now earned respect for its potential world, or at least hemispheric, dominance. “The war with Great Britain in 1812 was to a great extent confined within our own limits, and shed but little light on this subject,” ruminated Polk, “but the war which we have just closed by an honorable peace evinces beyond all doubt that a popular representative government is equal to any emergency which is likely to arise in the affairs of a nation.”41 39 40

41

New York Herald, 3 January 1848, 1. Democratic Review 17 (July 1845), 5; ibid., 17 (Oct. 1845), 243–8; Stephen A. Douglas to James K. Polk, 25 August 1845, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 119–20; Stephen A. Douglas to John J. Hardin, 16 June 1846, ibid., 140. Messages and Papers, IV, 587, 631–3. On the spirit of Young American romanticism as manifested in the Mexican War, see Robert W. Johannsen, “Young America and the War with Mexico,” in Richard Francaviglia, et al., eds., Dueling Eagles: Reinterpreting the U.S.-Mexican

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So confident did Polk feel about the conduct of the war that he made further ´ incursions into Latin America though the fighting had barely ended. Yucatan, a province of southern Mexico, had seceded from Santa Anna’s government in 1839 and returned to its fold by 1843. Objecting to the centralization ´ of Mexican rule, Yucatan’s white elites withdrew again in 1846. Two years later they begged protection from Britain, Spain, and the United States. The province’s white upper crust hoped to avert defeat at the hands of the area’s large Indian population as well as Mexico itself. President Polk considered the request and referred it to Congress, adding that he was certain the British would annex the territory if the United States did not act promptly. Some argued that ´ as a stepping-stone to Cuba. Britain wanted Yucatan In favor of intervention (perhaps resulting in annexation) stood Secretary of the Treasury Robert J. Walker, along with Young American Edward Hannegan ´ Senator in the Senate. In defending at least a temporary occupation of Yucatan, Hannegan argued that the crisis represented an opportunity for Americans to act on Polk’s reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine. The president had recently insisted on reiterating America’s commitment to protecting the western hemisphere against European intrusion, and Hannegan tried to implement this policy by heading off British action in Central America.42 New Democrats argued on racial as well as geopolitical grounds, suggesting that America could not tolerate the defilement of fellow whites in the Caribbean (memories of Saint Domingue circa 1791 no doubt in their minds). Calhoun opposed intervention because he distrusted Polk’s motives and did not believe that the British would step in without American provocation. Still, Hannegan and his Senate committee introduced an occupation bill, which failed of passage following a two-week debate. The “all-Mexico” contingent, recently frustrated by the partial Mexican annexation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, ´ as an alternative means by which to achieve their saw the occupation of Yucatan ´ it would likely maintain a presence goals. If the United States invaded Yucatan, ´ movement faltered because imporin Mexico proper. Ultimately the Yucatan tant individuals and constituencies did not rally behind it: Calhoun opposed it, leading Democratic politicians and editors did not follow through on the issue, and Whigs and conservative Democrats spoke out against it. Like Cuba in the ´ debate showed that Young America could dream and over1850s, the Yucatan reach as well as conquer actual territory and intervene successfully in foreign affairs.43

42 43

War, 1846–1848 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 2000), 155–75, and Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). As Johannsen notes at the beginning of the latter work, “Older values of patriotism and civic virtue seemed threatened by newer concerns for commercial, industrial, and material advancement” as a result of the war (vii). Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 5 May 1848, 729. Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission, 202–7. Also see Hietala, Manifest Design, 211–12; clipping enclosed with letter from John L. O’Sullivan to James K. Polk, 10 May 1848, Polk Papers; Messages and Papers, IV, 581–3.

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When the Sonoran dust settled, the year was 1848. Young America had moved from a rhetorical affirmation of the Monroe Doctrine to a symbolic showdown through the Oregon crisis, and then to a full-blown war in defense of their new hemispheric prerogatives. Proud and complacent, they began to see the United States as a major power in the world. More to the point, they introduced a cosmopolitan perspective into the Democratic Party, one that helped the organization to throw off its parochial, agrarian identity. The New Democracy saw itself as a global, not local, institution. Pearl of the Antilles In 1848, John O’Sullivan and Stephen Douglas visited the White House together. They talked with President Polk about an island whose presence in their imagination exceeded its size a thousand-fold. Cuba beckoned from the Caribbean, its slave-manned sugar plantations ripe for Dixie picking. Barely did the Mexican War end when Young Americans began their next foreign campaign: the quest to annex the island. O’Sullivan held that “further delay now would be criminal” and “imbecile.”44 He and the others tried Texas-style tactics (American infiltration leading to revolution and ultimate U.S. annexation) as well as outright purchase, failing at every turn. Though Cuba remained Young America’s most hard-fought and unsuccessful venture, it nevertheless placed New Democrats in an innovative, forceful posture on the world stage. America should strike in 1848, thought O’Sullivan, while Democrats still held national power and Europe remained preoccupied with the revolutions. He wished to take advantage of European instability in order to dislodge Cuba with a minimum of violence and confrontation. The island’s transition to American sovereignty would occur peacefully, claimed O’Sullivan, as its population would naturally rally to the superior American form of government. He wrongly predicted that filibustering expeditions to Cuba would succeed if they only managed to reach the island’s soil. There was never a people “more unanimous in their longing for emancipation from their tyranny.”45 He wrote off the dangers of European interference in this scheme as follows: Even if the “bugaboo” of English and French intervention had ever been worthy of any serious consideration, it is entirely exploded now. The French Republic (God bless it!) would be on our side, and England will have enough to do to mind her own business at home. They will not & cannot interfere, and if they did we need not mind their interference a rush. A few thousand of our troops returning from Mexico via Cuba to honor the ceremony of the change of flags . . . would settle all difficulty of that nature. 44 45

John L. O’Sullivan to James Buchanan, 19 March 1848, Buchanan Papers; Polk: The Diary of a President, entries for 10 May 1848, 30 May 1848, 9 June 1848, 17 June 1848, 321, 326–8. John L. O’Sullivan to Samuel J. Tilden, 17 May 1850, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library.

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But if the United States failed to take the initiative on Cuba, in time England and France would ally with Spain and establish a dangerous foothold in the Caribbean. This was a chance the country could not afford to take. O’Sullivan even justified Cuban annexation on antislavery grounds, arguing that acquiring the island was the only way of dampening the international slave trade. “We Barnburners [i.e., antislavery Democrats] will be as much pleased at it as the Southerners themselves.” Rather than seeing it as a proslavery gambit, O’Sullivan thought that Cuba would appeal to Free Soilers and abolitionists. It could be used as a base from which to police the international traffic in slaves. And what better way to excite the party rank-and-file in preparation for the presidential contest of 1848? The Cuba boom thus began in earnest in the midst of Manifest Destiny’s apex in the 1840s.46 The movement to acquire Cuba drew together the themes of Manifest Des´ tiny and European republicanism. By aiding Cuban rebel Narciso Lopez and his revolutionaries, Young Americans were liberalizing a despotic European regime at the same time that they pushed forward their own expansionist ambitions. Because Cuba lay in the West, it fell into the orbit of American expansionism and the desire for North American hegemony; because it remained a Spanish colony, it also fed into Democratic hopes for the future of Europe. It therefore highlights the intertwined New Democratic priorities of gaining more territory and republicanizing Old World governments. Young Americans explicitly connected the acquisition of Cuba with America’s role as a beacon of liberty in Europe. “The admirers of our constitution desire that we shall acquire it in a just manner,” wrote U.S. diplomat A. Dudley Mann, “in order that our fair fame may continue to exercise a salutary influence on Europe.”47 The championing of liberty ushered in by the European revolutions of 1848 spread fast to the western hemisphere as the Cuban annexation movement elicited growing support. Couched as a liberation from Spain, the New Democrats’ plan seemed akin to Texas’s escape from Mexico or, for that matter, the colonies’ dethroning of mother England. The movement for Cuban independence was gaining steam both among the island’s own dissenting community and within the United States. In early 1850, the Democratic Review published an ´ admiring portrait of General Narciso Lopez, leader of the movement for Cuban independence. His solicitation of support within the United States became a practice run for the more celebrated visit of Hungarian exile Louis Kossuth in late 1851. ´ Several of Lopez’s failed invasions, in which John O’Sullivan and John Quitman participated, attempted to seize the island from Spain. Anticipat´ ing an uprising by Cubans themselves, Lopez and his comrades were disappointed to discover little aid forthcoming. O’Sullivan escaped with his life, but ´ Spanish authorities captured and executed General Lopez in 1851.48 As for the 46 47 48

John L. O’Sullivan to James Buchanan, 19 March 1848, Buchanan Papers. A. Dudley Mann to William L. Marcy, 24 August 1854, Marcy Papers. John L. O’Sullivan to John A. Quitman, 29 August 1853, 8 September 1853, 10 July 1854, John A. Quitman Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Quitman also maintained contact

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Americans, Millard Fillmore’s administration unsuccessfully tried O’Sullivan and Quitman for violating the nation’s neutrality laws.49 Democrats protested the heavy-handed move. The Democratic Review argued that American neutrality laws violated basic human rights. Did not patriots in previous ages, it asked, enter “into the service of foreign nations at war with each other, while their own government was neutral[?] . . . None of these cases were held to be a violation of neutrality, nor were those, thus employed, stigmatized as pirates and outlaws.” The Review noted that lack of American support remained the ´ primary reason for the failure of the Lopez expeditions, and that Americans should assist the Spanish colony. This logic of course paralleled earlier and later Young American arguments to the effect that the United States should become involved in the European revolutions of 1848.50 As ex-Mississippi Governor John Quitman wrote in outlining his reasons for endorsing a Cuba filibuster, white safety was at stake, since Spain “has determined to Africanize Cuba” and arm “the black against the white.” Here he referred to the Spanish emancipation program introduced in 1854 in order to frighten the United States. He therefore concluded that there existed a “Danger both to Cuba & ourselves.” The island might become another Haiti, menacing slaveholders of the American South from too close a distance. “Sympathy for an oppressed people [the Cubans, not their slaves] & duty to our own country prompt us to aid a revolution with money[,] arms[,] & men.” Purchasing Cuba from Spain would never work, according to Quitman. “Spain has no right to sell,” since it exercised despotic and thus illegitimate authority. And Congress would never ratify an appropriation for the purchase. Only armed revolution supported by the United States would ensure the island’s liberty and protect American southerners from racial danger in the Caribbean. Hence Quitman envisioned “aiding a revolutionary movement in Cuba with from three to four thousand well armed and well provided men embarked in swift and safe steamers. . . . On landing we shall be joined by as many men as we can arm.”51 Because visionaries like Quitman continued to nurse the dream, throughout the 1850s desperadoes made repeated attempts to launch liberating attacks upon the Spanish island. American neutrality laws and the gradually weakening stomach of President Franklin Pierce prevented these expeditions from achieving their goals. In addition, Spain held tightly to the island, largely for economic reasons. Its commercial interests reaped the benefits of a closed mercantilist

49

50 51

with Illinois Senator James Shields, who served with him during the occupation of Mexico in the late 1840s: see, for example, James Shields to John Quitman, 25 November 1857, ibid. Democratic Review 26 (Feb. 1850), 97–112. Also see the New York Herald, 6 April 1852, 3. On antebellum filibustering more generally, see Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002). Democratic Review 29 (Oct. 1851), 291–301; John L. O’Sullivan to Franklin Pierce, 26 June 1852, Franklin Pierce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. John A. Quitman to B. F. Dill, 18 June 1854, Quitman Papers; John A. Quitman to C. A. L. Lamar, 5 January 1855, ibid. Also see Robert E. May, John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1985).

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system, one in which the colony (Cuba) was seen strictly as a market for finished exports manufactured in the metropolis, and as a source of raw materials for the home country. It was forbidden to trade with areas outside the Spanish empire. The crown naturally felt reluctant to part with such a favorable arrangement, one that even England had given up during the 1840s.52 If Spain retained Cuba for economic reasons, then monetary enticements might detach it. August Belmont thought financial pressure the surest method of wresting it from Spain. He offered to use his business connections to make it possible for the United States to purchase Cuba, leaving it unexplained, at least on paper, exactly how he would do so. The following year, however, he did expound on the French interest in America’s annexation of Cuba, claiming to Louis Napoleon that Cuba’s productive capacity and its vitality as a market for consumption would increase greatly if it came under American control. Belmont saw the folly of appointing unstable elements such as Pierre Soul´e and John O’Sullivan as ambassadors to Spain and Portugal, respectively, and he blamed them both for botching the Cuban acquisition drive. His light-handed “economic” approach would have produced results, he thought. Perhaps Pierce’s greatest mistake as president, next to signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was deploying the firebrand Soul´e rather than Belmont as minister to Spain.53 During the winter of 1852–3, France and England invited the United States to take part in a summit on the Cuba issue. The three nations would pledge not to attempt acquisition of the island. Such an abjuration seemed to New Democrats akin to the Whigs’ Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, which instituted a hands-off policy in New Granada (now Panama). Franklin Pierce refused to take the bait, since he wanted the island badly.54 Pierce and his Young America Democrats hoped to pick up the Cuba mandate, disregarded by the Whigs for four years, when they took office in 1853. Pierce’s bold European diplomatic appointments, discussed in the last chapter, signaled his intentions. He selected the unpredictable French emigr´e-turned-senator Pierre Soul´e as minister to Spain. Secretary of State William Marcy armed the envoy with instructions to obtain Cuba without purchase (i.e., by encouraging and then participating in a revolt). Meanwhile John Quitman of Mississippi was organizing the kind of filibustering expedition that should have sent the island into cataclysms of violence. However, an irate Spanish court met these provocations by “Africanizing” Cuba. It emancipated blacks who arrived after 1835 and took 52

53

54

See, for example, A. S. Alexander to John A. Quitman, 26 April 1855, ibid.; John Elbert, et al. to John A. Quitman, 21 June 1854, ibid.; John L. O’Sullivan to James K. Polk, 10 May 1848, Polk Papers. August Belmont to James Buchanan, 22 April 1853, Buchanan Papers; August Belmont to Franklin Pierce, 20 June 1854, August Belmont Letterbooks, New York Public Library; August Belmont to James Buchanan, 1 April 1854, Buchanan Papers. Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 2 Session, 23 December 1852, 139; Riepma, “Young America,” 254.

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steps to suppress the international slave trade. Spain also seized the American ship Black Warrior in Havana, returning it only after the United States paid a fine that it continued to protest.55 The initially indulgent mood of the Pierce administration toward acquiring Cuba by force quickly changed after these Spanish maneuvers, and the president made it known that he would not look favorably upon such an action. Secretary Marcy instead wrote to Soul´e that he should attempt to purchase Cuba for up to $130 million. Unsurprisingly, Spain refused to hear the offer, and the Cuba boom seemed ready to die down in mid 1854. The last great act of Young America, however, came at Ostend, where American minister to Britain James Buchanan met Pierre Soul´e and ambassador to France John Mason. President Pierce had instructed them to confer and to pen a strong declaration on the subject of Cuba.56 In response, they issued the explosive Ostend Manifesto, demanding annexation of the island and claiming that it remained as integral to the future of the Union as any current state. Northern outrage at this pronouncement coincided with anger at the pro-southern Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Ostend Manifesto effectively spelled the end of Manifest Destiny. Expansionism foundered because it had become too closely entwined with sectional and slavery-related questions, and it would not pick up again until the 1890s.57 Land of the Samurai Although Cuba sparked dreams of capitalist excess and hemispheric hegemony, it seemed to float within the realm of possibility. Because New Democrats could imagine owning Cuba, they spent years scheming after its takeover. What they anticipated with more difficulty, however, was the fulfillment of Columbus’s dream to reach Asia. Britain had economically penetrated India and China, but insular Japan remained closed to Western influence through the 1850s. One of the pivotal global events for New Democrats, however, occurred in 1853, when Commodore Matthew C. Perry of the U.S. Navy reached Japan with his squadron. Perry and his expedition bore more than ideological affinity with Young America, for the Commodore was the father of August Belmont’s wife, Caroline. Perry’s arrival signaled the beginning of American efforts to open the Far East to influences such as free trade and Christianity. Eastern civilizations felt the presence of the West before 1853, to be sure. The British had long occupied India and would soon strengthen their rule in response to mutiny in 1857. The Opium Wars of the early 1840s, pitting England against China, brought Western economic and cultural infiltration of the East into relief as well. But Perry’s visit was one of the first to touch Japan, the most feudal 55 56 57

Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 17 May 1854, 1199. Daniel E. Sickles to James Buchanan, 15 August 1854, Buchanan Papers. For background on these developments, see David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 183–91.

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and reclusive of the Far Eastern societies, and one that had not been exposed to Western influences to the extent of some of its neighbors. Perry sailed with the intention of peace, although observers also desired a show of American strength. “Sir, you have to deal with barbarians as barbarians,” exclaimed Senator Willie Mangum matter-of-factly. Still, he admitted that “the great leading object is to extend the commercial relations of the United States.” Most national lawmakers who spoke about the Japan expedition saw it in commercial terms. Senator James Shields, for example, anticipated a burgeoning trade with Japan. He thought that Perry could use a group of Japanese sailors who had been recently stranded in California as leverage to gain entr´ee to Japan while bringing the lost mariners home.58 Perry’s flagship, the Susquehanna, dropped anchor in the Japanese Bay of Jeddo (near Tokyo), where the commander warned approaching local authorities that he intended to fire if they expressed hostile intentions. After that all was quiet. “The appearance of the steamers – the first ever seen in Japanese waters – with the other vessels in tow, moving with all sails furled, at the rate of nine or ten knots an hour, appeared to produce considerable sensation among the Japanese.” Several days later Perry set foot on shore for an interview with officials of the imperial Japanese government, depositing with them a letter from President Pierce before departing. The basis for negotiation was set.59 Perry returned to Japan after his first voyage of 1853, and by summer 1854 President Pierce presented a U.S.-Japanese treaty of mutual understanding to the Senate. Japan opened three ports to American commerce and agreed to provide coal refueling to American ships. The New York Daily Times salivated at the prospect of Japanese resources finding their way into Western hands. “Japan Opened,” its headline proclaimed. The paper pointed out Japan’s fisheries, minerals and precious metals, agricultural productions, and its unique manufactures, until then “confined almost exclusively to their own domestic wants.”60 New Democrats felt proud that the United States played a pioneering role in the “opening” of old Japan. Perry’s journey implied that American reach extended beyond the western hemisphere and even Europe, and that Manifest Destiny stretched westward across the Pacific Ocean, not just the North American continent. Since New Democrats remained the leading American expansionists, Perry’s voyage spoke most directly to their ambitions for global power. It also bolstered their campaign, begun in the mid 1840s, for free trade agreements worldwide. With Perry’s advance Democrats thought they saw a new era of commercial prosperity, international openness, and American dominance over the horizon. What they really discerned was the Civil War. 58 59 60

Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, 1 April 1852, 942–8; ibid., 12 April 1852, 1044; New York Daily Times, 31 January 1852, 8. New York Daily Times, 31 October 1853, 2; Illinois State Register, 9 November 1853, 2. Messages and Papers, V, 243; New York Daily Times, 13 June 1854, 1.

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The Grand Tour It would take several decades after Perry’s visit for Americans and other Westerners actually to travel to Japan. In the meantime, New Democrats steamed abroad to Europe as part of President Pierce’s stalwart diplomatic circle. Pierce’s New Democratic predecessor James K. Polk had also made some strategic European appointments. In addition, New Democrats traveled to Europe as private citizens. Both types of overseas experience further led Young Americans toward a cosmopolitan sensibility. Although Pierce made an important statement by appointing Young America to represent the United States abroad, his action was not unprecedented. President James K. Polk had sent his secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft, to become American minister to England in 1846. Bancroft was a Boston Brahmin historian who dissented from the mores of staid New England by joining the Democracy and adopting an openly egalitarian ideology. He was as close as New England came to the spirit of Young America. In sending him to Britain, Polk knew he would make a good impression, since Bancroft remained a man of letters and was also a Democrat. Like Orestes Brownson and John O’Sullivan, he gave the Democracy an intellectual veneer that contrasted with its usual image of backwoods boorishness and working-class rambunctiousness. He kept in touch with O’Sullivan and even offered him a Navy Department appointment, turned down by the editor because he valued the independence of not holding office. Bancroft had studied under Harvard Unitarians such as Andrews Norton and then earned a German Ph.D., but he also became a confidante of arch-Democrats such as Polk and Buchanan. A man who could be both an elite Bostonian and a Democrat was a rare specimen indeed.61 Bancroft wasted little time in lobbying for free trade between the two countries and in lining up European support against Mexico during the war. Midway through the fighting he wrote jubilantly to Polk that England fully appreciated what Young America had done for the United States: The last news from the United States was too great, too important, & too Manifest to permit of being concealed or undervalued. “You are the Lords of Mexico”! [sic] said Lord Ashburton to me. “How could you take the earth by Vera Cruz so soon”? [sic] said Lord Greg, one of the secretaries of state. . . . They see our growth to be certain.

Bancroft also reported on the tantalizing economic changes wrought by the commercial spirit of New Democracy: the English “have found out also that America is growing rich. The slightest improvement in the rates of exchange was a few weeks [ago] announced by telegraph from Liverpool as the great event of the day; men speculated on how much gold is likely to go to the United States.” Bancroft’s proud and exuberant prose radiates from the page years 61

John L. O’Sullivan to George Bancroft, 23 May 1845, Bancroft Papers; George Bancroft to James K. Polk, 3 December 1846, 23 February 1847, Polk Papers. Also see Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

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later and gives a flavor of the urgent sense of possibility felt by New Democrats abroad.62 Others disagreed with this rosy picture. One American living overseas held that all the countries of old Europe, including England, frowned on republican forms of government and would do anything in their power to crush subversion instigated by Young America. Not quite right, argued Polk’s treasury secretary, Robert J. Walker. He thought that “John Bull is becoming rapidly Americanized – How can he help it poor fellow when we furnish him food & raiment – cotton & corn. . . . [he is] destined to be a good democrat in time.” Walker and Bancroft represented the optimistic spirit of Young America, whereas the skeptical writer spoke for Whigs and more conservative Democrats who still hesitated before engaging Europe.63 Polk also appointed Gansevoort Melville, brother of the author of MobyDick, as secretary of the American legation in London. Melville had canvassed vigorously for Polk during the 1844 campaign and Stephen Douglas interceded with the new president to secure him a diplomatic post. Significantly, Douglas wrote to Polk that Melville’s “appointment would be particularly gratifying to the Young Democracy of the country.”64 Polk and the New Democrats understood that their powers of appointment would prove essential to Young America’s international success, and Franklin Pierce picked up where they left off when Democrats returned to power after 1852. Apart from foreign service appointments, Young Americans also traveled abroad as private citizens. Often they wrote down impressions of old Europe in transition, and their lengthy “grand tours” allowed them to see America and the Democratic Party in a new light. Transcendentalist and reformer Margaret Fuller spent several years in Rome during the late 1840s, egging on Italian revolutionaries and eventually marrying one of them before drowning at sea on her return voyage home. Writer Caroline Kirkland settled herself in Paris among the barricades of insurrection of 1848. Minister to England George Bancroft joined her to sample a firsthand whiff of the new, short-lived French republic. Stephen A. Douglas made the rounds of Europe in 1853, staunchly proud of his simple American pedigree and contemptuous of the gilt and ceremony he saw in European courts. And New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett paraded throughout Europe as well. Perhaps these private visits did as much as the official appointments to breathe an international air into the antebellum Democracy.65 62

63 64 65

George Bancroft to James K. Polk, 18 May 1847, 3 June 1847, Polk Papers; George Bancroft to James Buchanan, 3 November 1846, 18 May 1847, 18 October 1847, Buchanan Papers; Illinois State Register, 13 March 1849, 2. James Graham to William Allen, 24 January 1846, Allen Papers; Robert J. Walker to George Bancroft, 27 March 1847, Bancroft Papers. Stephen A. Douglas to James K. Polk, 16 April 1845, in Letters of Douglas, 112. For an excellent discussion of Young America’s private travel experiences in Europe, see William T. Kerrigan, “Young America! Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843–1861” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1997), 99–165.

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Young Americans kept up connections across the Atlantic even when they did not reside in Europe. George Bancroft, for example, achieved a respectable European profile due to widespread positive reception of his History of the United States. In 1844, he received an offer to translate the work from an admirer in Turin. Through mutual contacts he also made acquaintance with a variety of other Europeans, including Harriet Martineau. It was easy to transform such connections into more explicitly political ties once revolutions started after 1848.66 Senator Stephen Douglas, struck with grief after the simultaneous death of his wife and infant daughter, sailed for Europe in May 1853. August Belmont and Robert J. Walker gave him letters of introduction, highlighting the close connections among members of Young America. In London, Douglas met with English radicals and attended a reception for investors in the Illinois Central Railroad. After being informed that he would have to appear in formal court dress for an audience with Queen Victoria, he refused and departed for the Continent. He visited Constantinople/Istanbul, a significant destination given the strategic value of that location for possible American intervention in AustroHungarian affairs. Indeed, while Douglas was there, a controversy erupted in which a Hungarian refugee appealed for American protection after seizure by Austrian authorities and eventually obtained transfer to an American warship.67 Relieved, Douglas moved on to the Crimea, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, where he reviewed troop maneuvers with Czar Nicholas I. One could not imagine a more telling, or amusing, image than the short, squat, arch-democrat Douglas riding a horse next to this symbol of Old World tyranny. Douglas made the rounds not long before the Crimean War sent this part of the world into paroxysms of bloodshed, so his visit brought him into the thicket of great power politics in terms of time as well as geography. By way of Copenhagen, Berlin, Prague, and Frankfurt, Douglas made his way to Paris and met with Napoleon III, after which he returned by steamer to New York. Perhaps Margaret Fuller had travelers such as Douglas in mind when she wrote in 1847: Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and proud of – he knows not what – He does not see, not he, that the history of Humanity for many centuries is likely to have produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by. With his great clumsy hands only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are young and alive.68 66 67 68

Charles Carenzi-Gallesio to George Bancroft, 7 January 1844, Bancroft Papers; R. Wickliffe to George Bancroft, 9 May 1844, ibid. Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 2 February 1854, 313; Messages and Papers, V, 210. Margaret Fuller, “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), 162.

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This five-month tour certainly confirmed Douglas’s faith in American democracy. He felt proud for resisting the charms of European pomp and circumstance, for not indulging in the fawning and attention in the way that diplomats such as Benjamin Franklin and, more recently, George Bancroft had done. Most importantly, the fact that a Young America party leader met with these European heads of state highlighted the international orientation of the New Democracy.69 New Democrats awoke in the 1840s to find that their parents’ generation had formulated a Monroe Doctrine that they subsequently ignored. Resolving to reinstate American honor through a newfound enforcement of Monroe’s dictum, they declared that Britain had no business meddling in the Pacific Northwest. Having settled the conflict peacefully, and having acquired the new state of Texas, they prosecuted a war against Mexico that exemplified the ethos of Manifest Destiny like no other event. When another peace came they turned toward the Caribbean, eyeing Cuba as a plum for the picking. Following failure after failure, Young Americans resigned themselves to a Spanish Cuba for several decades more. In the meantime, they took heart at the American “discovery” of Japan, as well as traveling abroad both privately and officially. Through these experiences young Democrats made clear that they intended no quiescence in foreign policy. Politicians and editors including William Allen, George Bancroft, John O’Sullivan, James K. Polk, Robert J. Walker, Franklin Pierce, George Sanders, Stephen Douglas, and August Belmont pushed their Democracy to live up to its pretensions of defending American honor and creating a landed endowment for future generations. The spell of 1815 to 1844 was broken, and no longer would the country focus almost entirely on internal growth. After 1854, of course, domestic priorities once again absorbed public attention. But the revived imperialism of the late nineteenth century stood on the shoulders of Young American giants from the 1840s and 1850s. To them the country owed its thanks for a new international consciousness. 69

Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (1973; Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), 382–6; Johannsen, The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas, 80–1; New York Daily Times, 11 November 1853, 2.

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In 1848, the New York Herald took stock of the various “isms” sprouting in the North throughout the Jacksonian period. Fourierism, socialism, the free land or homestead movement, anti-Masonry, abolitionism, and other “fanaticisms” dotted the Yankee landscape. By 1848, it concluded, it was Martin Van Buren and his breakaway antislavery Democrats the Barnburners who united “all those various shoots into one immense movement.” All of the “isms” the paper enumerated seemed to culminate in the Democratic reform of the Van Buren Free Soilers in 1848. True, the new Free Soil Party also tapped former Whig and Liberty Party strength. But the driving force behind its organization lay with groups like the New York Barnburners, which for many contemporaries typified the truer reform instincts of the antebellum era.1 Only in our day do historians assume that Whigs and evangelicals represented the essence of antebellum reform. At the time, and in some limited historiographical contexts, New Democrats symbolized the vanguard of social change.2 Southern domination of the party, coupled with its imperialistic course during the 1840s, has prompted observers to write off the Democrats as racists and reactionaries. Although on the whole this may have been true, there were numerous strands of the Democracy that hungered for human perfectibility no less than the Whigs. Democrats pursued their reform in different ways (focusing less on religion than the Whigs, for example), but they championed improvement as fervently as their opponents. Young Democrats, in particular, introduced a variety of visions and proposals, making their party a beacon for those 1

2

New York Herald, 10 August 1848, 2. One historian sees Democratic reform emerging with the ascendancy of Van Buren and his Albany Regency-turned-Barnburner faction after 1844. See James C. N. Paul, Rift in the Democracy (1951; New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1961), 13. For example, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 1945); Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004); and William T. Kerrigan, “Young America! Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843–1861” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1997).

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who embraced the forward-looking “spirit of the age.” Far from being the classical conservatives often portrayed, New Democrats embraced elements of modern life that made their party dynamic rather than backward and plodding.3 Young America Democrats blended orthodox Jacksonian ideology with the spirit of humanitarian perfectibility. They took the previously disparate strands of Jacksonian politics and romantic reform and combined them, producing by the 1850s a new discourse of change and activism in the Democratic Party.4 In his landmark synthesis, The Age of Jackson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued that Democrats remained the true reformers of Jackson’s day, eclipsing Whigs and utopians in actually fighting for change through the political process. Indeed, for Schlesinger the Jacksonians became the reformers, regulating the conduct of privileged capitalists and setting precedents for the Progressives and New Dealers he adored.5 This chapter both confirms and amends Schlesinger’s judgment. It depicts Democrats as bona-fide reformers, and hence as visionaries and moderns, but it also suggests that the rise of a new generation of younger Democratic politicians proved necessary to help the party reach maturity in this realm. Under the New Democracy the party fully exemplified its reform orientation in a variety of areas. They include bureaucratic changes and the creation of new institutions, social regulation and technological innovation, liberal attitudes on race and immigration, monopoly regulation, and challenges to that iconic Democratic structure, the spoils system. These are highlights, and do not present a comprehensive survey, of New Democratic reform ideas. Their purpose is to provide examples of the mindsets and policies that guided Young Americans toward an acceptance of the evolving nineteenth-century world. Most of the reforms discussed in this chapter came from the North, so the picture presented here may at first seem to be a regionally exclusive one. However, there were several southern New Democrats who originated policies of their own and also championed proposals that began in the North. Andrew Johnson, Robert J. Walker, George Sanders, and James K. Polk are four examples among several discussed in this chapter. New Democratic reform was a bisectional phenomenon. However few in number the southern reformers may have been relative to their northern brethren, each of them remained a central participant in Young America. Sanders and Polk, for instance, were hardly negligible figures in the movement; they advanced its designs more single-mindedly 3

4

5

Jean Baker portrays northern Democrats as Burkean conservatives and classical republicans: Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1983; New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1998), 177–211. Wallace Hettle concludes that southern Democrats were antidemocratic and reactionary: Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2001). David B. Danbom, “The Young America Movement,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (June 1974): 294–306; Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 54, 58, 77. Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 361–8.

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than most others. Young America thus united the sections within the Democracy, a theme developed in Chapter 8. The Democratic Review put it best when it observed that “the spirit of improvement, as well as of enfranchisement, exists chiefly in the great masses.”6 Meaningful social change could not emerge from the senility and anarchy of raging individual minds, only from the momentum and divine inevitability of democratic consensus. William Lloyd Garrison and the Beechers could pontificate all they liked about Christian charity, said Democrats, but real transformation came from the ballot box and from the floors of Congress. Indeed, the sharpest difference between Whig and Democratic conceptions of reform stemmed from religion. For Whigs, an individual heart mirrored the image of God and its demand for goodness and brotherhood. For Democrats, God operated not personally, but through the great democratic masses. The collective voice of the people, because it spoke through the morally supreme system of democracy, was the only verdict of the almighty. One sees such a notion of Godly action in the New Democratic idea of Manifest Destiny, as well as in the way Young America pursued its reform career.7 Democrats took up the reformist priorities of their era in their own way, insisting that they were the real shapers of society. The “boasted reforms which have taken place in the various nations of the earth are merely nominal or theoretical,” huffed the Review. The “political power of the masses is not really increased.”8 Instead of retreating into utopian communities and Transcendentalist philosophies, rather than persuading Irishmen to stop drinking, Democrats hoped to spread liberal government throughout the world and to increase social mobility at home – this, for them, constituted authentic reform. They pledged to make their world better through collective, majoritarian effort rather than through individualistic moral-suasion. Free Land New Democrats’ Jacksonian heritage meant that, no matter how revisionist their policymaking, they retained sentimental ties to the land. The North American soil remained the enabler of their aspirations for white men’s democracy, providing every freeman with a chance to maintain some semblance of an independent lifestyle. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the distribution of federally owned land to frontier settlers became a goal of Young America. By giving out property to seaboard Americans, the government could stimulate pioneer settlement at the same time that it bolstered the authority and stability 6 7

8

Democratic Review 6 (Nov. 1839), 427–8. On “communal” Democrats and “individualistic” Whigs, see Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989). Democratic Review 23 (July 1848), 27–30.

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of the yeoman. These individual tillers of the earth conserved virtue for the republic, preserving its health and longevity. By providing free land, the federal state would also unscrew a western safety valve for an emerging northeastern proletariat. Individual distribution of western land to settlers by the federal government became a trademark Young America reform. Led by printer-farmer George Henry Evans, the land reformers disparaged the “monopoly of the land” among the rich, and wanted western areas set aside for individual workers. In some cases, they wished to keep the terrain free of ownership altogether, to allow “these lands hereafter to be freely occupied by those who may choose to settle on them.” One of their circulars explained the movement’s goals: “We propose that the Public Lands hereafter shall not be owned, but occupied only, the occupant having the right to sell or otherwise dispose of improvements to any one not in possession of other land; so that, by preventing any individual from becoming possessed of more than a limited quantity, every one may enjoy the right.” Important Young America statesmen such as Senators James Shields and Stephen Douglas endorsed the land reform agenda, which echoed workingclass agitation for similar goals in England. Free land reform was an outgrowth of the labor movements of the 1830s and a reversion to the farming ideals of Thomas Jefferson and other eighteenth-century “republican” writers. The American frontier, reformers thought, would provide a release for the tensions of the country’s eastern cities. Laborers slaving in mills and factories could recover their independence and virtue by moving to their own lands and farms thanks to federal largesse. In this way, the incipient troubles between labor and capital that had been arising as a result of America’s industrial revolution could be stopped in their tracks. The frontier provided the answer to America’s growing pains.9 Due to the prodding of young Democrats, free land reforms periodically made their way to the halls of Congress. In late 1848, Representative Andrew Johnson of Tennessee introduced a bill to “make the ‘soil free’ or provide an inalienable home of one hundred and sixty acres of the public domain for every poor man who is the head of a family and a citizen of the United States.” In 1850, Sam Houston of Texas presented another proposal before the Senate. He told his colleagues that when they turned their eyes upon the cities of the North and the cities of the whole Union, you will find millions of citizens, millions of people there, who are dependent . . . on their daily labor for their subsistence; and if you can transfer them to our western and southern borders, you will place them in a position to establish a state of profitable independence and respectability. 9

National Reform Association Central Committee to James K. Polk, 20 April 1844, 1 June 1844, James K. Polk Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; New York City Land Reformers to Franklin Pierce, 5 July 1852, Franklin Pierce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Also see Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), and Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2005).

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Stephen A. Douglas spoke in favor of land reform as well, introducing a bill to this effect in 1849, as did Senator Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin and various other New Democrats. William Corry, a Young American editor from Ohio, petitioned for land grants to Miami University, presaging the Morrill Act passed during the Civil War.10 Although some southerners questioned the constitutionality of congressional land grants to individuals, a sufficient number of them endorsed homesteading (including Andrew Johnson and Sam Houston) to make it a signature New Democratic reform bisectionally, at least for the antebellum period. Congress did not ratify a Homestead Act until 1862, however. Like railroads, imperialism, and other Young American ideas, free land was a reform that originated in the era of the New Democracy but did not bear fruit until years later.11 Whig Senator William H. Seward of New York introduced a surprising twist to the land reform platform. He proposed that Congress set aside western soil for exiled Hungarian refugees, who would use the American territory as asylum from Old Europe’s repressions. Needless to say, this kind of action by a Whig was rare. Even Dorothea Dix, spokeswoman for the mentally ill, asked for a slice of the pie: she requested a congressional land grant for the “insane.” And then there were war veterans who clamored for lands as pensions for their national service – an idea with ancient Roman roots. James Shields of Illinois, among others, supported the soldiers’ claims, enacted as a bounty land bill in 1850. He and Isaac Walker of Wisconsin also endorsed Dix’s hope of land grants for the disabled. This was an era when the frontier lay open, and men and women of midcentury America saw it as a cure-all for a variety of eastern ills. Land remained the nation’s most precious commodity, the chief measure of American uniqueness in the world, and the promise of its salvation.12 Figures such as Douglas endorsed land distribution based on the Democrats’ older agrarian ideology at the same time that they championed railroads and other transportation improvements. How could they do both? The answer is that the historical actors we study did not always behave rationally or consistently, particularly during moments of transition. This era was a time of change for the party, and leaders such as Douglas needed to support the old dogma at the same time that they gradually introduced innovations that expanded the market. After all, they were not Whigs, but progressive Democrats. Transportation improvements, moreover, actually supported territorial expansion by linking pioneers with settled eastern areas. 10 11

12

William Corry to Stephen A. Douglas, 11 March 1852, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 2 Session, 11 December 1848, 25; ibid., 16 February 1849, 548; ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, 30 January 1850, 263; ibid., 24 December 1849, 75, 87; ibid., 25 July 1850, 1449; Stephen A. Douglas to James H. Woodworth, 5 March 1850, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 188; J. S. Sandford to Stephen A. Douglas, 1 July 1850, Douglas Papers. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 9 January 1850, 128; ibid., 25 June 1850, 1290; ibid., 6 May 1850, 915; ibid., 28 August 1850, 1691; ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 30 December 1850, 137–8; ibid., 32 Congress, 2 Session, 3 March 1853, 1104–6.

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By advocating land reform, New Democrats maintained an ideological link with the early history of their party, as well as doing something practical for their own generation of wage earners and farmers. Most importantly, their activism foreshadowed a wartime push for western land grants on the part of the Republicans. After 1861 the Republican Party integrated the granting of western land into its broader program of economic nationalism. The passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act and the Homestead Act in 1862 demonstrated its commitment to this philosophy. Forgotten during the Civil War, however, was the fact that only recently had this reform turned Republican. Its origins lay in the New Democracy, where figures such as Douglas, Evans, Shields, and Johnson introduced it as a way to make good on their Democratic pedigree. Knowledge and New Institutions Historians usually single out Progressive thinkers of the early twentieth century as hard-headed organizational reformers. They reinforced the regulatory apparatus of the federal government and cleaned up the political machines in order to purify and make efficient what had been seedy and corrupt. Young America Democrats exemplified some of the same attributes. Their approach to the organization of new knowledge, new inventions, and new needs highlighted their willingness to pursue institutional change. These kinds of mass reforms contrasted sharply with the individualistic course of Whig-sponsored social action. For Whigs, persuading an individual to behave morally remained more important than reshaping or bolstering the federal bureaucracy. But for New Democrats, large-scale institutional shifts stemming from majoritarian decisions seemed the most efficient way to improve society.13 Young Americans established or strengthened several national agencies during their time in power. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, they felt sufficiently comfortable with federal authority to make these alterations. Polk’s administration oversaw the founding of both the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, for example. The Smithsonian’s creation fulfilled the bequest of an Englishman from the 1820s, while establishment of the Naval Academy was the brainchild of Navy Secretary George Bancroft. Congress chartered the Smithsonian in 1846 after a long delay caused by disagreements and legal complications related to the bequest of James Smithson. Smithson’s posthumous gift of 1825 led to the establishment of the institution as a forum for the dissemination of scientific knowledge. President Polk signed the congressional charter into law, and his vice president, George M. Dallas, served on the inaugural Board of Regents before being elected chancellor. Dallas also delivered the keynote address at the dedication of the cornerstone. Polk 13

George Fredrickson famously posited a shift from individualistic methods of reform toward more corporatist or organizational styles following the Civil War. Examination of the New Democracy suggests that the latter variety existed during the antebellum decades as well. See George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

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himself took an active hand in constructing a building for the institution, personally traveling to inspect prospective sites. Even Stephen Douglas served on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents from 1854 until his death in 1861. Young Americans thus became personally and actively involved in the long-overdue creation of this national scholarly landmark. In doing so, they demonstrated that a new generation of Democrats esteemed scientific exploration. No longer would the Harvard-Whig-Unitarian alliance enjoy a monopoly on learnedness and cultivation.14 George Bancroft advocated the creation of a Naval Academy in order to provide a professionally trained marine service. The plan meshed well with his other proposed reforms to improve efficiency and professionalism, examined later. Finally, the era of Young Hickory Polk was also one of ferment for the Library of Congress, chartered in 1800 and fortified by the acquisition of Jefferson’s book collection in 1815. In 1846, Polk signed legislation designating the Library of Congress a depository for all copyrighted material, a key development in making it the comprehensive research tool it remains today. Polk also approved an exchange system so it could trade materials with other repositories. These were small modifications, to be sure, but they become part of a pattern when placed alongside the array of institutional reforms spearheaded by New Democrats.15 Stephen Douglas, often reviled as an unlettered boor, joined Polk in the institutional revitalization of the arts and sciences. Douglas understood that the spirit of American progress encompassed not just political revolution, but movements forward in all realms of society. As his modern biographer writes, “The American mission also demanded excellence in the arts and sciences, in agriculture, in commerce, and in manufacturing. . . . Science, technology, and the arts were not the domain of an intellectual elite; they belonged to the people, and this, to Douglas, was the secret of American success.” Judge Douglas advocated an increased emphasis on the teaching of basic scientific subjects such as geology and chemistry, and he called for the foundation of a national university system to disseminate scientific knowledge. In 1856, Douglas donated ten acres of his own land, costing $50,000, to found the “first” University of Chicago, assuming its presidency until 1861. To him, institutions that embodied the noble quest to master and understand the human environment were essentials, not luxuries.16 14

15 16

See Paul H. Oehser, Sons of Science: The Story of the Smithsonian Institution and Its Leaders (New York: Henry Schuman, 1949); James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 11 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1897– 1908), V, 218; New York Evening Post, 1 May 1846, 2. On Douglas, see Robert W. Johannsen, The Frontier, the Union, and Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 83. See John Y. Cole, For Congress and the Nation: A Chronological History of the Library of Congress (Washington: Library of Congress, 1979). Johannsen, Frontier, Union, and Stephen A. Douglas, 81–3; C. H. Koenitzer, “History of the First University of Chicago, 1856–1886,” typescript in Special Collections, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (1973; Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), 558. By the turn of the twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller had endowed the second, current University of Chicago in Hyde Park.

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Young America displayed its confidence in institutional power not only in the realm of arts and sciences but also through regulation and administration. One of President Polk’s most enduring achievements, for example, remains the formation of a federal Department of the Interior. Polk, America’s youngest president at the time, felt comfortable restructuring government operations for a new age and understood the value of efficiency and bureaucratic streamlining. He signed an act creating the new “Home Department” on the eve of his departure in March 1849. He was responding to the chaos of the California Gold Rush, pressure from western settlers who needed civil regulation, and a quintessentially New Democratic need to create order and professionalism in public administration. Agencies that had operated under other auspices soon joined the Interior Department, notably the Patent Office, the General Land Office, and the Office of Indian Affairs. In an earlier message to Congress, Polk hinted at the reasons such a realignment proved necessary. Americans had invented so many new techniques and technologies in recent years that the business of the Patent Office swelled to daunting proportions; it needed reorganization. The new climate of material improvement and innovation created pressures on government institutions, and Polk responded by reforming the operations of the state. This was a typically New Democratic way of dealing with change.17 The novelty of Polk’s creation of the Interior Department was revealed by the president himself, who seemed to regret his decision almost as soon as he signed the bill. “I fear its consolidating tendency,” he confided to his diary. “I apprehend its practical operation will be to draw power from the States, where the Constitution has reserved it, and to extend the jurisdiction and power of the United States by construction to an unwarrantable extent.” Polk understood the results of his proposal but created the new Home Department regardless. New Democrats had come to terms with the idea of a stronger federal regime enacted through institutional reorganization. Whigs themselves testified to this centralization of authority under the Democracy. They assaulted Polk’s administration for “wanton extravagance” in public spending. Democrats, they charged, were starting not to live up to their own professions of limited government.18 Young Americans further evidenced their passion for institutionalizing knowledge and administration when they called for a new bureau of statistical analysis in 1845. The Democratic Review championed the creation of such an agency in order to help politicians formulate wise policy and to aid all Americans in better understanding the changing conditions of their country. The magazine tapped a growing national interest in statistical analysis, one that arose to make sense of the new industrial landscape. Statistics explained 17

18

Messages and Papers, IV, 373, 415. Tellingly, John Quincy Adams had called for the creation of an Interior Department as early as 1825. See Charles G. Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991), 270. Allan Nevins, ed., Polk: The Diary of a President, 1845–1849 (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1929), entry for 3 March 1849, 387; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 16 October 1852, 2.

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and naturalized the economic and social dislocations accompanying the rise of factories, ever-stretching trade networks, and mechanization. They made antebellum Americans comprehend the changes transforming their agrarian republic into an industrial democracy.19 Although Democrats certainly held no monopoly on new forms of knowledge assimilation, they did participate in this somewhat Whiggish endeavor. For example, Massachusetts Hunker Caleb Cushing corresponded with the proprietor of a “Boston Directory, State Record and Statistical Office” – someone, in other words, who made his life the analysis of information in a scientific manner. Following his retirement from public office, George Bancroft served in a new “Geographical and Statistical Society.” Again, the point here is not that Democrats tapped these opportunities exclusively, but that such activities are usually seen to be the purview of Whigs and that in many cases Democrats acted in defiance of well-worn partisan stereotypes.20 By establishing new institutions such as the Interior Department, the Smithsonian, and Annapolis and by bolstering existing ones such as the Library of Congress, New Democrats showed that they cared about the arts and sciences and about scientific approaches to the formulation of public policy. This should come as no surprise given their ongoing absorption with emerging technologies such as railroads and steamships. Fascination with the marvels of modernity, not repulsion by the corruption of contemporaries, marked their attitude toward life at midcentury. A Social Conscience New Democrats supplemented institutional reform with a more traditional, Whiggish focus on social adjustment and humanitarian benevolence. They picked different battles than the Whigs, but they demonstrated concern for ordinary American citizens equivalent to that of the more well-known reformers. Frequently their proposals stemmed from a long-standing Jacksonian devotion to the principle of equality, and revulsion at the idea of human hierarchy. If the voice of God was that of the people, as the popular saying went, then no man should rise unnaturally above his peers; all voices spoke equally. Old-school Jacksonians harped most stridently upon economic inequality, and their offspring the New Democrats pressed this claim further by arguing for a federal income tax. This call emerged from Democrats’ traditional preoccupations with the rights of workers under a wage-labor economy. It also fit well with their concern for free land distribution, since both solutions stood to better the condition of the common laborer. As in the case of institutional 19

20

Democratic Review 16 (March 1845), 291–303; Michael Zakim, “A Labor History of the Bourgeoisie: Merchant Clerks, Industrial Statistics, and the Fate of Free Soil,” lecture delivered at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 19 February 2004. George Adams to Caleb Cushing, 12 January 1852, 17 January 1852, Caleb Cushing Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; New York Evening Post, 9 June 1852, 2.

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reform, taxation highlighted the forward-looking nature of Young American ideology, its quest for fresh solutions to old problems. A writer in the Democratic Review called for the introduction of government income taxes as a way to lessen reliance on that classic Democratic hobgoblin, the protective tariff. The article in question alleged that the “government now has the right of raising money by direct or internal taxes.” The federal regime, under this scheme, would collect a reasonable amount of dues from state tax assessments, and this would compensate for lost revenue caused by a reduction in the protective system. In this way, excessive government spending might be reined in, as “the constituency . . . will directly feel in their [tax] assessments the result of such votes.” When Americans paid for costly internal improvement schemes directly, they would feel the pinch of money and put pressure on their representatives to curtail spending accordingly. Thus, the income tax would fulfill the traditional Jacksonian end of quashing overzealous policymaking and narrowing the size of the federal bureaucracy. But it would do so through a novel solution that old-fashioned Jacksonians did not consider, and that only twentieth-century Progressive reformers actually implemented on a permanent and national level.21 Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania became a champion of direct internal taxation in the 1840s. During the Mexican War, he proposed levying taxes in order to defray military expenses and, again, to avoid reliance on a protective tariff. He feared that Whigs might otherwise try to raise import duties on the pretense of funding the war, and that the Democrats’ carefully crafted international free trade structure would come tumbling down. Instead, Wilmot hoped to use the special circumstances of wartime to argue for an increase in domestic taxation, leaving the Walker Tariff of 1846 to operate at its low revenue level. Imposing direct taxes would also help to retire the public debt and fill the coffers of the Treasury. Whigs would not be allowed to take advantage of tough times in order to revive their anachronistic tariff system, which had been rebuked by British repeal of the Corn Laws no less than by the Walker Tariff.22 “Is it not the strangest thing in nature,” asked an Ohio Democratic paper, “that the landless and laboring classes who have nothing to protect, but who really pay nearly all the expenses of government, do not rise in their might and declare for ‘Free Trade and direct taxation!’” Internal duties seemed a fairer way of collecting government revenue than a protective tariff benefiting the rich because under the former system “according to what a man has, shall he pay.” Additionally, “the people paying their taxes directly instead of having it stolen from them as now, by this unequal and outrageous tariff system, would hold their servants to stricter accountability.”23 However, New Democratic tax 21 22 23

Democratic Review 27 (Nov. 1850), 397–8. Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 7 February 1848, 304–6; ibid., 1 February 1848, 281. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 29 September 1852, 2.

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proposals fell by the wayside until the Republican ascendancy of the Civil War and, more consequentially, the activist resurgence of the early twentieth century. Later reformers did not consciously borrow any ideas from New Democrats, though it is still worth noting that progressive Democrats experimented with tax plans before the Civil War. Apart from economic disparities, a small number of Young America Democrats attempted to root out atavistic social evils long bedeviling American society. The Democratic Review targeted the practice of dueling, still relatively common in the nineteenth-century South and West. The dueling instinct came out of modern civilization’s barbarous, Germanic origins, claimed one editorialist. This meant that the fighting spirit was congenital and difficult to eradicate, like the martial animus so detested by pacifist John O’Sullivan. Only through “a moral heroism of principle” could the duel stop taking lives. James K. Polk, the country’s first Young America president, joined the Review’s antidueling crusade. While in the Tennessee legislature during the 1830s, Polk both introduced and helped to pass a law prohibiting the ritual.24 Particularly alarming was evidence of dueling among members of Congress, part of a pattern of parliamentary violence that escalated along with the sectional crisis. Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine had been killed by his colleague William Graves of Kentucky in 1842. Observers blamed a duel taken too far and allegedly egged on by Henry Clay himself. The experience deeply troubled John O’Sullivan, who lamented Cilley’s martyrdom and the archaic tradition that caused it. In 1844, O’Sullivan printed an antidueling statement by the president of Amherst College in the campaign newspaper he then edited with Samuel J. Tilden. “The blood of murder is on the hands of every one who votes for a duelist [sic],” it read. O’Sullivan and his periodicals avoided mentioning that Jackson had been a notorious duelist, with a bullet lodged in his chest due to one trying episode. This would have embarrassed the party and put O’Sullivan’s principles at odds with his partisanship. But the connection – the implied censure of Jackson and his violent habits – would not have escaped contemporary notice.25 The Democratic Review did not stop with dueling, moving on to comment upon temperance as well. In 1851, it endorsed liquor reform, though in an uncharacteristic manner. It suggested that physicians and clergymen should prepare public opinion by convincing voters of the need for alcohol regulation. Only then would the time for coercion through legislation arrive. Democratic organs did not usually advocate moral-suasion, the reform strategy of Garrisonian abolitionists and Protestant ministers. But in this instance the Review suggested that argument and inducement, followed by prudent lawmaking, would ameliorate problems of intoxication. “I appeal to every citizen in the state to 24 25

Democratic Review 11 (Sept. 1842), 312; ibid., 29 (Dec. 1851), 547–53; Robert D. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, OH: Kent State Univ. Press, 2003), 169. Democratic Review 11 (Oct. 1842), 423; Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 54–7; The Democratic Campaign, 5 October 1844, 2.

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say,” wrote a more forceful contributor, “whether it is not high time that some coercive measure should be adopted to vindicate the law in the matter I have discussed. I most earnestly appeal to the bench and the bar to give their powerful assistance in this great and most important struggle.” This writer may have been an exception. But the Review, as the marquee party organ, emblazoned individual opinion with the seal of partisan orthodoxy simply by publishing the work. Indeed, it was no accident that few articles in the magazine came with authorial attribution; the anonymity ensured a sense of party unity and coherence. By publicizing such a position in the preeminent Democratic periodical of the time, the editor of the Review tried to foment a change in the party’s philosophy.26 John O’Sullivan and the magazine he founded thus exemplified a Democracy often forgotten: generous, socially concerned, and eager to leave behind some of the rawness and frontier rowdiness typifying the early history of the United States and the Democratic Party. In no realm did this moral devotion shine more brightly than pacifism and the abolition of capital punishment, both reforms dear to O’Sullivan’s heart. O’Sullivan and his Review became dogged opponents of war, arguing that the martial spirit tarnished and corrupted the public life of nations. For generations, children had been socialized into a culture of blood lust, he noted. Zealots mobilized Christianity on behalf of warfare. But a republican country should appreciate the misery caused by this attitude and reform itself accordingly. The peace movement in the United States dated from the “era of good feelings” following the War of 1812. And partly because of its youth, O’Sullivan continued, that movement did not yet have a chance to effect much change. But over time the hard hearts of men would open to the promise of peace. O’Sullivan blamed the “office-holders and the office-seekers” for instigating war, implying that the great democratic masses would soon come to their senses. He urged the establishment of a “Congress of Nations” that would arbitrate international disputes and applauded the increasing number of altercations resolved peacefully. During the year in which he wrote this, the United States and England in fact managed to settle a long-simmering Maine-Canada border dispute through the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. In O’Sullivan’s mind, pacifism remained a byproduct of republicanism, so that the forces crushing violence, like much else in his worldview, naturally emanated from American shores. Lastly, he clarified that he in no way endorsed treason a` la the Hartford Convention, only that he opposed war in principle. Once a nation began to fight, then all citizens must rally to its support, though they should strive to avert the onset of warfare altogether. These views were strange indeed for a man accused of being the driving force behind the imperialism of the 1840s.27 O’Sullivan also lobbied for the abolition of capital punishment in the state of New York. Like dueling and warmongering, execution seemed an incongruous 26 27

Democratic Review 29 (Aug. 1851), 105–15. Ibid., 10 (Feb. 1842), 107–21; ibid., 10 (March 1842), 211–23; Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 92.

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throwback to European traditions with no rightful place in republican society.28 O’Sullivan insisted that the desire to abolish capital punishment was the only reason he became a representative in the New York legislature during the early 1840s. Though his bills ending the practice fell by the wayside, they generated support among fellow New Democrats. O’Sullivan’s advocacy launched a grassroots campaign against capital punishment, with Polk’s Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker, Vice President George M. Dallas, and Massachusetts Barnburner Marcus Morton in tow.29 O’Sullivan chided clergymen who used scripture to rationalize capital punishment and held that the customs of archaic societies had no place in modern democracies including the United States. The execution of prisoners robbed citizens of their respect for human life, conditioned society toward violence, and hardly worked as a deterrent against future crime. In a lengthy report on capital punishment that O’Sullivan prepared for the New York State Assembly, he marshaled evidence showing that crime rates for particular offenses generally rose when the penalties for those transgressions became capital. Twice bringing his proposed abolition reform to a vote, he failed by a close margin.30 O’Sullivan’s conception of reform differed from Whig prescriptions by enmeshing itself within a limited-government ideology of freedom from coercion. Whereas evangelicals and Whigs attempted to root out sin by government legislation, ministerial intervention, and other types of force, O’Sullivan thought that voluntary action within an open civic sphere was the way reform should unfold in a democracy. He did not have in mind the kind of Darwinian laissez-faire beliefs advanced by thinkers later in the century; rather, he hoped that an unfettered society would naturally lead to equality and individual rights. Keeping America free was the best method, he thought, by which to achieve equality of social condition. O’Sullivan’s reform efforts spanned women’s rights, temperance, labor organization, prison regulation, the abolition of capital punishment and other forms of violence, pacifism, primary education, and spiritualism. He published Democratic Review articles on Fourierism, “animal magnetism,” and other innovations of his fermenting age.31 He tried to ensconce the Democracy within a modern, liberal world order, something it could not do in the more heavily proslavery, anti-Indian days of Andrew Jackson. In those times, the promise of white men’s democracy took center stage. By the mid 1840s, with the franchise successfully expanded, the party could proceed toward other issues and constituencies. One of these populations was women, a group excluded from formal participation in electoral politics but persistently influential outside the voting booth. 28

29

30 31

Democratic Review 10 (March 1842), 272–88; ibid., 11 (Dec. 1842), 651–5; ibid., 12 (March 1843), 227–36; John L. O’Sullivan to Martin Van Buren, 29 November 1841, Martin Van Buren Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. John L. O’Sullivan to George Bancroft, 17 January 1841, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; George C. Baker to Samuel J. Tilden, 25 February 1846, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library; Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 106. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 96–105. Ibid., 30, 90, 94, 106.

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Although women could not vote, they organized antislavery and other reform societies, attended rallies and torchlight parades, and – most importantly – influenced male family members at home. Although it would be difficult if not impossible to prove that Democrats began to hold more liberal opinions on women’s rights during the 1840s, there are scattered pieces of evidence that indicate a surprising open-mindedness on the part of some. John O’Sullivan had always held reservations about women’s exclusion from the political sphere, for example. It was “a practice as old as history,” he wrote, “and almost universal. . . . Whether such an exclusion is justifiable upon principle, it is not our province now to discuss.” When the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on a speech describing the spirit of Young America, it noted that the New Democrat ideally “would have all the rights of men – aye, and of women too.” The typical Young American “would have advised the Czar to recognize Mrs. Kossuth as President of Hungary.”32 An Ohio Democratic paper celebrated the “Age of Woman,” mentioning Queen Victoria, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others as positive examples of a new receptivity toward female participation in public life. “May the man who wishes it were otherwise,” it admonished, “never have the memory of a mother, the joy of a wife, the knowledge of a sister, or the smack of a sweetheart.” A young woman from New Orleans wrote an article for a Democratic newspaper in 1853, claiming that men must join women in reform. Women should be allowed to engage in useful occupations, and “fashionable young men” must also learn practical skills. Too many of them became dandies, whiling away their time in the parlor while their wives worked the spindle. Both women and men, she charged, should find opportunities for useful education. Reforming the upbringing of women needed to go hand-in-hand with a similar movement for males. “Kate” entitled her article “How to Educate Young America.”33 In 1844, the Democratic Review published an article, written by an anonymous female, proposing a revision of the laws toward equalizing the condition of women with men. Editor O’Sullivan even included a special prefatory note expressing approval. The writer argued that property owning by women would enhance the blessings of marriage, in that wives would not feel economically dependent and so give their affections more freely. Husbands should not have control over women’s wages and debts, she continued. How much better the relations of man and wife would become if women felt able to exercise their natural rights fully.34 Before the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 placed women’s rights on the national agenda, some exceptional Democrats thus joined the call for refashioned gender interactions. Such rhetoric fit perfectly with their pretensions of forward-looking reformism, economic egalitarianism, and welcoming internationalism. 32 33 34

Ibid., 123; Chicago Daily Tribune, 14 December 1853, 2. Ohio Statesman, 2 May 1853, 2; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 22 October 1853, 2. Democratic Review 14 (May 1844), 477–83. The author may have been Jane Cazneau, the leading female Democratic activist of the 1840s, who often wrote anonymously for the journal.

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In addition to scattered appeals for change, a few individual women played roles in Young America, particularly in foreign policy. Journalist and reformer Margaret Fuller, for example, spent several years in Italy during the mid to late 1840s in an attempt to enlist fellow Americans in the Italian republican crusade. George Sanders dubiously eulogized Fuller by admitting that “by intellect she was a man among women.” Caroline Kirkland, a New York–based author, visited Paris in the wake of the 1848 revolutions and reported on its depressed conditions even before the rightist reaction set in. And Jane Cazneau, a Texas settler and landholder who conducted intimate political dealings with President Polk, wrote a book and numerous articles in defense of western expansion. Cazneau remains noteworthy for her written attempts to defuse the antislavery struggle and to unite the nation on a course of territorial growth. She was the most significant woman involved in the New Democracy.35 Cazneau speculated in Texas during the 1840s and became a major proponent of western expansion. She moved to Eagle Pass, Texas, with her husband, eventually writing a book about her frontier experience. Thousands of Americans also encountered her writings in the Democratic Review, the New York Sun, and other periodicals (she used the pseudonym “Cora Montgomery”). There is even speculation that Cazneau, not John O’Sullivan, wrote the famous Review article coining the phrase “Manifest Destiny.” In 1852, she returned eastward to work for the Franklin Pierce campaign.36 Cazneau became an unremitting jingoist during the Mexican War, urging acquisition of the entire country in the peace treaty. She also wanted to broker a deal whereby the United States would exchange the “Liberian colonies for British America.” Alternatively, she thought that Britain could take Puerto Rico and the Philippines and leave Cuba to the United States. She hopped on the buy-Cuba bandwagon before the Mexican treaty ink had dried and reiterated the conventional view that the island would voluntarily throw itself into the Union once America – once the Democrats – took the initiative. She thought “the native Cubans are wild for annexation.” But Cazneau feared that England would intervene and free the island’s slaves, creating another Haiti. Spain of course followed this course in response to heavy-handed American efforts to take over the island in the early 1850s.37 In order to exercise influence and see these proposals through to fruition, Cazneau cultivated her connections among the Democratic political elite. She 35 36

37

Kerrigan, “Young America,” 128–36; Democratic Review 30 (June 1850), 513. Linda S. Hudson, Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2001); Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 225–30. See Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 245 for discussion of the controversy surrounding authorship of the well-known expansionist language. Jane McManus Storm Cazneau to James Buchanan, 24 August 1847, 18 January 1853, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Jane McManus Storm [Cazneau] to George Bancroft, [no day], September 1846, Bancroft Papers; Jane McManus Storm [Cazneau] to George Bancroft, [no day], February 1848, ibid.

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became especially close to President Polk, who sent her to Mexico on a peace mission when war broke out in 1846. She moved among the party’s political men like a stern old matron, chastising Buchanan and other party leaders for taking the organization in errant directions. As she admonished Buchanan, “It has become time for party leaders to think of their tactics. Democracy has outgrown its old catechism[;] like other bright scholars it is ready for a new text book. What shall this be?” Clearly she believed in the party reorientation sparked by Young America. Furthermore, Cazneau wrote patronage letters as if she were a senior male party operative, warning Secretary of State Buchanan that she intended “to consider your Department in a state of siege until the affair is settled” and the desired political post dispensed. Much better to take her advice instead of the “blockheads you sometimes employ.” During the campaign of 1852, she lectured former War Secretary William Marcy about the necessity for a cheap party newspaper in New York City. In 1853, she even asked for a diplomatic appointment for herself.38 Cazneau could speak this way and navigate the world of high politics more deftly than some of her male counterparts because women were expected to be jocular and coy. She could make her points flirtatiously and speak to political leaders in a manner unbecoming man-to-man talk. When Cazneau wished to further the construction of a channel across Central America, she penned a brusque note to Stephen Douglas. “Hear me Senator Douglas you must upraise the banner now and strike a bold blow for your country and your honor.” She urged Douglas to intervene in any negotiations respecting rights to the isthmus. “We must not let an imbecile and corrupt cabinet trifle with it.” Cazneau hinted that defending American rights to the south would abet Douglas’s presidential aspirations. But “do not think this presumptuous,” she closed.39 Cazneau even expected access to the circles of the Democratic Review. She tried to obtain the subscription lists of its editor George Sanders, “that wild knight of democracy.” She felt entitled to a takeover of the venerable Democratic journal following the election of 1852.40 What prompted this unusually blunt woman to involve herself in the innermost policy disputes of the New Democracy? Cazneau’s hardy temperament, honed on years of pioneer work in Texas, weaned her off traditional assumptions about women’s social place. Life on the Texas-Mexico border also instilled within her a missionary desire to improve the North American West by bringing it under the orbit of American democracy. Articulate and prolific, she connected with eastern readers by composing vivid accounts of what they were fighting 38

39 40

Jane McManus Storm Cazneau to James Buchanan, 8 July 1847, 19 July 1847, 24 August 1847, 18 January 1853, Buchanan Papers; Jane McManus Storm [Cazneau] to George Bancroft, [no day, no month], 1846, 24 August 1846, Bancroft Papers; J. M. Cazneau to William L. Marcy, 17 September 1852, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Jane M. Cazneau to Stephen A. Douglas, 13 July 1852, Douglas Papers. Jane M. Cazneau to Stephen A. Douglas, 29 March 1853, ibid.

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for. Her years-long contact with Polk, Buchanan, and Douglas shows a woman preoccupied with the political stuff of Young America. Cazneau knew she could not hold office or exercise direct political influence, but she pushed women’s role to the limit. One could argue that she proved as instrumental as John O’Sullivan in the formation of Democratic ideology during the 1840s. New Democrats put their social conscience on display when they advocated such measures as direct federal taxation, pacifism, the abolition of capital punishment, temperance, an end to dueling, and a rethinking of women’s marginalized role in politics. Not all Young America Democrats embraced these visions, and exceptional figures like O’Sullivan and Cazneau were responsible for most of them. But the fact that they existed at all, and in most cases generated enthusiasm among at least several high-profile Democratic politicians and editors, belies the stereotype that Democrats remained reactionaries unconcerned with community welfare. When it came to social issues, New Democrats could prove as devoted as their Whig nemeses. Race and Immigration Because of Stephen Douglas’s relentless race-baiting in his debates with Lincoln in 1858, historians reserve accusations of Negrophobia for the Democrats. The southern-dominated Democracy disliked abolitionism and free soil more than most Whigs, holds a common view, and Democrats more than Whigs tried to keep blacks in their downtrodden place. Territorial expansion remained just another method of enforcing white racial superiority.41 However, just as an emerging generation of Democrats pursued annexation for idealistic as well as materialistic reasons, their views of race were also more complicated. On blackwhite relations New Democrats mostly held the party line, although they did loosen their opinions on slavery (as described in Chapter 7). But when speaking about other minorities and world populations, a small and exceptional number of New Democrats exhibited an open-mindedness that eluded most Whigs and old Democrats. The unprecedented international encounters of the 1840s placed New Democrats in contact with groups they had not yet confronted on a large scale, such as the Irish (with regard to immigration), the Mexicans (on the 41

See, for example, Baker, Affairs of Party, 24. Baker argues that the antebellum Democracy became more racist, rather than racially liberal, over time. Also see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1990); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981); and Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). These books correctly interpret Democrats’ views on black-white relations, but they distort the nature of the antebellum Democracy by ignoring the party’s receptivity to other minorities that many during the nineteenth century considered separate races.

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question of annexation), and the Italians, Hungarians, and Germans (vis a` vis the revolutions of 1848). When they came across these groups, some Young Americans demonstrated a comparatively liberal position on race relations. New Democrats supported the rights of European immigrants both as a way to bolster their crusade for intervention abroad and as part of their inclusive, Whitman-esque vision of American citizenship. Where Whig critics of the European revolutions believed that Old World populations lacked the capacity for self-government, some Young Americans held that the political character of a people responded to circumstances. Under favorable conditions republicanism and freedom could prevail on the Continent; Europeans could conceivably govern themselves. Similarly, Young Americans oriented toward western expansion saw Mexicans as assimilable participants in newly established democratic societies. Possibility, not rigidity, was their guide.42 First and foremost, of course, New Democrats angled for immigrant support in order to swell voter rolls and launch the party to victory. In this strategy, they succeeded. German communist Herman Kriege actually subtitled his new American newspaper the organ of “Jungen Amerika,” and he organized a regiment of German immigrants to fight in the Democrats’ war against Mexico. Stephen Douglas’s popularity among German Forty-Eighters rested on his membership in the “‘Young Democracy,’” counseled one supporter, “and that you are a man of the present rather than a past day.” And during the presidential campaigns of 1848 and 1852, Democrats made specific efforts to line up German votes on the “right” side by officially calling for European intervention.43 In reporting on Young America movements in the Democratic national convention of 1852, one paper explicitly associated the cause of young Democracy with new, particularly Irish, immigrants.44 Democrats had long counted European immigrants as valuable members of their coalition, and their affiliation intensified during the high tide of Young America in the 1840s. The rate of immigration accelerated as refugees from the Irish potato famine and the revolutions of 1848 fled westward. Democrats welcomed them with open arms, easing them into urban political machines that delivered votes for the party. Just as Democrats’ longtime support for free trade acquired a new significance when commerce ballooned and Britain abolished the Corn Laws, so the party’s trademark solicitude for European refugees took on a different meaning in the context of foreign turmoil and its ensuing 42

43

44

On ethno-racial inclusiveness within the Young America movement, see Kerrigan, “Young America,” 164, 199. Again, Democrats remained comparatively rigid when it came to black-white relations, and the discussion here concerns other minorities that caught the public eye during the 1840s and 1850s. Merle Curti, “Young America,” American Historical Review 32 (Oct. 1926), 40–1; Widmer, Young America, 55; Kerrigan, “Young America,” 86, 97; Pierre Soul´e to Franklin Pierce, 30 June 1852, Pierce Papers; Horace Wheaton to Samuel J. Tilden, 12 July 1848, Tilden Papers; William W. Peck to Stephen A. Douglas, 8 January 1851, Douglas Papers. New York Herald, 2 June 1852, 4.

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exodus. In both cases, the party’s policies remained the same, but they became more visible and important because of fresh international developments. New Democrats registered these events, reemphasizing the old positions in a drastically altered world. Young Americans made a range of comments sympathetic to both European immigrants and former Mexican citizens. In doing so, they painted the Democracy as the only party fulfilling America’s promise of refuge for liberty lovers everywhere. In 1846, the Democratic Review published a spoof ridiculing attempts to curtail freedom of speech and to drive unwelcome minorities such as Mormons away from mainstream American life. By including this message in their journal, the Review’s editors hoped to show immigrants and others unpopular in American communities that their concern for minority rights remained intact. They too could participate in American citizenship and the liberty it promised, the Review seemed to be saying. The author of this piece thought that Mexicans could, in time, learn the arts of self-government. This would make the Mexican War a worthwhile enterprise, planting democracy where it most needed to take root. As for the Indians, “We owe to these tribes the duties which are imposed on us by our higher civilization. They occupied the continent on the arrival of our ancestors, whom they received with kindness.”45 The Democratic Review almost always displayed this gentler, more muted aspect of the Democracy, though most ordinary voters and operatives did not. Still, there were other New Democrats who followed a moderate course with regard to race relations and immigrant rights. President Polk’s message to Congress of 1847 welcomed immigrants “of every lineage and language,” as did the pro-Douglas Illinois State Register. It took pride in the alleged absence of nativist feeling in the Northwest compared with Whig-dominated parts of the country. “We say, then, let them come – come by thousands and millions.” George Sanders wished to see the gates of migration to America kept open, in defiance of the platform advanced by the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s. He applauded “the wise policy of Naturalization” and excoriated the “Democratic demagogues in high places that subscribe to the Jesuit doctrine that there are no Europeans of sufficient virtue and capacity to organize a Republican Government.” Those leading rebellions across the ocean had the potential to live up to America’s example; if they failed, they should be given the opportunity to adopt the United States as their country.46 August Belmont, Pierce’s minister to the Netherlands, was a German immigrant subject to the finger-pointing of nativist Whigs. They criticized his appointment in 1853, and the Democratic Illinois State Register rushed to 45

46

Democratic Review 19 (Aug. 1846), 103–5; ibid., 17 (Oct. 1845), 245–6; ibid., 18 (May 1846), 334. John O’Sullivan, who edited the Review until mid 1846, remained generally sympathetic to immigrant rights: Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 104. Messages and Papers, IV, 533; Illinois State Register, 26 November 1851, 2; New York Daily Times, 28 June 1855, 8.

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Belmont’s defense. Naturalization qualified him for office according to the Democrats, though Whigs could not accept this rationale. Representatives of “our Country abroad have always been Americans,” they protested.47 Belmont’s difficulties led him toward empathy with fellow immigrants. While minister to the Dutch, he implored an American steamship captain to “take such a course as will not affect injuriously the poor & helpless emigrants under the protection of your flag.” He thought the American practice of refusing to grant passports to prospective immigrants a “hardship,” and wanted to help potential new citizens who renounced their allegiance to other governments. For Belmont, the rising tide of immigration during the 1840s and 1850s promised the arrival of “means, education, and industry to our shores.” Immigration became a staple of his communications from the Hague, and always in a positive vein. Given his prominence within the Democratic Party, one should not take this fact lightly.48 Like Belmont, Senator James Shields of Illinois saluted the contributions of immigrant labor to America’s thriving economy (Shields was an Irish transplant himself). He also praised Franklin Pierce for supporting the removal of a religious test for officeholding that had been part of New Hampshire’s constitution. Shields sought to highlight Democrats’ laudable record on religious and ethnic pluralism, one that shone beside the chauvinistic Anglo-Saxonism of the Whigs. He and Young America colleagues pointed to Chief Justice Roger Taney as a Catholic official chosen by a Democratic president (Andrew Jackson). Massachusetts Barnburner Marcus Morton thought that “no man is less influenced by sectarian prejudices or more liberal to the Catholics than myself.”49 These New Democrats claimed that race, ethnicity, or creed mattered less in their party than under the Whigs, and in large measure they were correct. Most Democrats may certainly have presented extreme attitudes on black racism, but a number of them remained open-minded with regard to groups such as Mexicans and non–Anglo Europeans.50 47

48

49

50

Illinois State Register, 18 June 1853, 2; August Belmont to John Slidell, 28 December 1854, August Belmont Letterbooks, New York Public Library. The final quotation comes from Robert B. Minturn [?] to Alfred Pell, 19 February 1853, Daniel E. Sickles Papers, New York Public Library. August Belmont to D. Sears, 9 October 1853, Belmont Letterbooks; August Belmont to William L. Marcy, 24 October 1853, 8 November 1853, 28 February 1854, ibid. Belmont was trying to forestall the departure of an evacuated American ship whose passengers had been temporarily taken ashore for quarantine against the cholera. Marcus Morton to John M. Niles, 12 February 1846, Marcus Morton Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Marcus Morton to Charles G. Atherton, 18 February 1846, ibid.; Marcus Morton to Edmund Burke, 26 February 1846, ibid. Letter of Hon. James Shields, Addressed to a Committee of His Fellow Citizens, at Galena, Illinois ([no place, no publisher], 1852); Albany Argus, 6 September 1852, 2. All of the New Democrats profiled in this subsection were northerners, to be sure. But, as noted in the Introduction, not all Young America Democrats could represent all aspects of the movement, and southerners were predictably less welcoming of liberal racial ideas, not to mention inexperienced in the reception of immigrants.

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Shields excoriated the very notion of racial difference – a position out of tune with the rise of scientific racism during the 1850s. He angrily wrote: If anything was wanting to prove that this age is an age of imbecility and false philosophy, it is furnished in this drivel about races. The Anglo-Saxon race and the Celtic race, and this race and that race, seem to be the latest discovery of the present time to account for all moral, social, and political phenomena. This new theory is founded neither on Christianity nor philosophy. Christianity recognizes no such distinctions. . . . Philosophy recognizes differences, but these differences have their origin in circumstances, not in races.

Shields had the conflict over Ireland in mind and was not speaking here of black slavery in the South. But the theories, or refutations, he presented seem surprising for a midcentury Democrat, holding implications that he and his contemporaries could not have overlooked given the political context of the 1850s. So-called men of science such as Louis Agassiz and Josiah Nott wrote about innate racial differences, phrenology became a craze that promised to associate physiognomy with behavioral traits, and the sectional conflict over slavery began to simmer. In this setting, the voice of Shields pierced through the argumentative thicket with a form of Enlightenment environmental determinism out of place by the middle of the nineteenth century.51 A small group of New Democratic leaders reacted positively to their experiences with European immigrants and southwestern populations during the 1840s. Their reforming, crusading instinct sparked a desire for spreading liberty to all human beings regardless of color or religion (black slavery remained a crucial blind spot, and is discussed in the next chapter). A common generalization holds that Whigs remained more comfortable with intrawhite hierarchy, whereas Democrats detested white divisions but had little difficulty with racial partition. Young America’s generation of Democrats did not necessarily follow this pattern, revealing generous sentiments toward non-Anglo populations looked down upon by Whigs and often considered separate races. New Democrats were far from racial egalitarians, and figures such as George Law even logged time in the Know-Nothing movement. Yet they could be more openminded with regard to certain groups than one would expect. And although they remained a minority within their party, their views complicate the usual image of the Democracy. Investigation and Technology Young American reformers interpreted “progress” technologically as well as politically. They wrapped their imaginations around steamships, locomotives, and a range of gadgets and inventions. In many cases, they understood that federal involvement in researching new products would prove essential to their 51

Speech of Hon. James Shields, of Illinois, on the Resolutions Expressive of Sympathy for the Exiled Irish Patriots (Washington, DC: Congressional Globe Office, 1852).

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development. So consumed did they become with the promise of innovation that they felt comfortable loosening the strings their party had tied around Washington. Nothing marked the New Democracy as a forward-looking movement more than its commitment to technological growth, already seen in the case of railroads and canals. Samuel Morse’s telegraph had become the exciting new technology of the 1840s, and President Polk’s administration organ reprinted an article suggesting that it needed to operate under government oversight: The power which the sole ownership of such a line of instantaneous communication would give to individuals and associations would be a dangerous monopoly, and, therefore, [the telegraph] must be finally under the control of a department of the government pledged to diffuse its benefits with an impartial hand, reserving to the government the first right to use it as an organ of official command and instruction.

This commentary tapped traditional Jacksonian antimonopoly fears and suggested that the new system of communication, if controlled by private interests, might lead to abuse. However, it was also un-Jacksonian in the comfort with which it spoke of state supervision and the priority it gave to government use of the telegraph for official purposes. In 1850, one congressman unsuccessfully introduced a motion to have the federal government operate the telegraph, highlighting the common pattern in which reforms advocated and publicized in the early to mid 1840s found themselves on the congressional agenda in the early 1850s.52 Tempted by the telegraph, Senator Thomas Hart Benton pushed for the testing of electric power more generally. He moved a congressional appropriation for this purpose with the understanding that federal involvement was essential. Experiments in electricity having been partly successful, Benton urged Congress to invest in an electric-powered warship or trading vessel. He tried to convince the Senate that electric power, when made cost-effective, would prove a huge advance over steam and its dangers. The risk and the investment were well worth it to Benton, and he thought the federal government had a responsibility to oversee this experimental new technology. He secured a $20,000 congressional appropriation at first, and then asked for $40,000 ($10,000 more than Samuel F. B. Morse had received for testing his telegraph). In this case, Benton assumed a Young American role, and his colleague Lewis Cass adopted the Old Fogy strict construction perspective. Cass thought “the Government should be the last agent to interfere with these matters, and that they should be left to individual enterprise.” Along with other opponents he defeated the measure.53 52

53

Washington Union, 1 May 1845, 2; New York Herald, 9 October 1848, 1. For a proposed “atmospheric telegraph,” see the New York Evening Post, 3 March 1854, 2; Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 11 March 1850, 500. The congressman in question was James Brooks of New York, who began political life as a Whig but later became a Democrat. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 9 August 1850, 1554; ibid., 23 September 1850, 1925.

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But New Democrats enjoyed a momentum lacking in the traditionalists. And achievements such as the telegraph persuaded skeptics to follow their lead. Stephen Douglas took on a major role, as he always did within the party. Though he devoted most of his attention to railroads, in 1850 Douglas began to explore air travel. Remarkably for his time, Douglas presented a memorial from a scientist who claimed to have pioneered human flight through balloons. “The memorialist states that he has devoted sixteen years of his life studiously to the science of aeronautics; that during that period he has made about one hundred aerial voyages successfully and with safety.” The implications seemed wondrous to Douglas: mail and passenger transportation, not to mention warfare. The inventor offered to float one of his balloons above the White House or the Capitol as a demonstration and bragged that he could fly from St. Louis to England with passengers aboard. Douglas seemed fascinated by the idea, yearning to harness new experiments with boyish wonder. Needless to say, his Senate colleagues merely laughed. They joked that nobody knew which committee should take charge of the memorial. Douglas suggested Roads and Canals, but Jesse Bright recommended the Committee on Foreign Relations. Flustered, Douglas told the senators to take him seriously and moved that the petition go to the Committee on Naval Affairs.54 In the early 1840s, Douglas had expressed interest in a “‘Ball proof’ iron Frigate,” prefiguring the rise of ironclads during the Civil War. And he also proposed that the federal government invest in a line of mail steamers, so that the nation’s business could operate faster with the aid of the latest technology. He cultivated ties with George Law, the nation’s premier steamship entrepreneur, in order to further this goal. Naturally, New Democrats expected the federal government to take the lead in financing all of these ventures.55 For men such as Douglas, failure was no deterrent, since only through constant experimentation could the country advance technologically and industrially. Hence government investment seemed a justified risk. In 1852, Congress considered Douglas’s proposal for mail steamers, plunging legislators once again into a debate over strict construction. Some congressmen argued that the federal government lacked the necessary constitutional authority to build these ships. It seemed as though every point of discussion involved the philosophical issues of strict construction and big government, and one could see Young Americans growing restive under this broken-record restraint. As in most cases, the desire for growth and progress led to a weakening of traditional Jacksonian constitutionalism. Democratic Representative William H. Polk of Tennessee, for example, thought that the government should, as a matter of national pride, appropriate money for delivering overseas mail. Polk 54 55

Ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 30 December 1850, 132. Unsurprisingly, the flight proposal made no headway in Congress. Johannsen, Frontier, Union, and Stephen A. Douglas, 82; George D. Prentice, et al. to Stephen A. Douglas, 31 March 1852, 7 April 1852, Douglas Papers; Samuel B. Knapp to Stephen A. Douglas, 7 December 1844, ibid.

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chose to couch his attack in the generational terms common to New Democrats: “Am I, sir, to remind older men – men who have been indulging in politics for years, that we owe a sacred and glorious duty to our country?” What a humiliation would befall America, Polk sobbed, if it relied on its former colonial master to carry its mails. Polk grew impatient with colleagues who doubted the constitutionality of expending money for international mail delivery. “Sir, how are we to send any mails, then, beyond our limits? Are we to appropriate our money to foreign Powers to take charge of our mails . . . ?” He effectively merged traditional Democratic Anglophobia with a loosening of strict construction orthodoxy. In his sharpest break with the old Democracy, Polk declared: “I scorn and despise that principle of economy which, to save a few dollars, would strike down American interests and pride in the face of the foe. I am willing, for the sake of progress, to vote a hundred millions of dollars to-day for the protection of the commerce of the country.”56 Polk and his colleagues explicitly made trade, not strict construction, their new priority. In addition to mail steamers, other young Democrats devoted their attention to various pet projects as well. James K. Polk’s administration looked into the repeating gun invented by Samuel Colt and tried to commence large-scale manufacturing of his firearms by the federal government. When Bay State Democrat Caleb Cushing became mayor of Newburyport in 1851, a correspondent urged him to experiment with the new gas streetlights then becoming popular. “It would be a profitable investment pecuniarily,” he promised, “as well as conducive to the comforts of the citizens of the place.” Eventually these ideas clustered in one location: the world’s fair. At the London Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, Americans put their mechanical inventions on display together. One New York piano maker bided his time until Queen Victoria and Prince Albert paid a visit, at which point his hired performers launched into a loud rendition of “Yankee Doodle.” The Queen demanded an encore, “bring[ing] down the house.” A newspaper reported the episode under the headline “Young America may Crow!” Thus, contemporaries linked the Young America Democracy with technological advancement and scientific investigation.57 However, fantastic inventions such as airships, ironclads, and machine guns still lay in the future. The main technology of the day was steam, and New Democrats pushed for its more widespread application through both commercial and military uses. Young Americans had seen the steamboat revolutionize commerce while they grew up, and they were eager to employ its advantages for America’s navy. In preparation for war with England (over Oregon) and Mexico (over Texas) in 1846, proponents of an increased use of steam power envisioned transforming the U.S. Navy. As in the case of the proposed

56 57

Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, 8 July 1852, 1699; ibid., 9 July 1852, 1718. Messages and Papers, IV, 580–1; F. G. Macy to Caleb Cushing, 12 January 1852, Cushing Papers; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 16 August 1851, 2.

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transcontinental railroad, the federal government would play a key role in funding and logistics.58 In his first annual message to Congress, President Polk deemed it imperative to acquire a steam navy, since competing powers were already doing so. He called on lawmakers for “liberal appropriations” to modernize and protect American maritime activity. “Whatever may have been our policy in the earlier stages of the Government,” Polk reasoned, “when the nation was in its infancy, our shipping interests and commerce comparatively small . . . that policy must be essentially different now that we have grown.” Relying for national defense on the mythic citizen-soldier of American lore would not work in the age of steam power, he concluded. One newspaper compared America’s weak steam arsenal with that of Britain, hinting at the United States’ aspirations for global dominance. “Great Britain has fifty four steam vessels in commission, and the United States have four. . . . Great Britain has forty six vessels building and in ordinary, and we have about one fourth as many.” England had also increased the size of her navy within the past ten years, a testament to Parliamentary support of national defense on the seas. Congress, by contrast, until then had responded weakly to demands for an expanded American navy.59 Yet with the rise of a potentially republican Europe after 1848, thought August Belmont, America needed more than ever to shore up its steam navy, a dream he shared with Commodores Robert Stockton and Matthew C. Perry. Eyeing another coast, Senator James Gadsden recommended that the United States increase its naval presence on the California shore in order to counter Mexican threats to American shipping.60 From all Young America quarters came calls for an increased reliance on steam in order to realize America’s potential as a world power. As one correspondent of New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden envisioned the plan, private enterprise would create a line of commercial steamers that could then be transformed into warships should the need arise. This seemed to him the most economical way of bringing American maritime activity up to standard.61 The international pressures of the 1840s made it necessary for Polk to prescribe an increase in the size of America’s army and navy altogether. He made this request before any hostilities started and as preparation for possible future action. This growth chafed against the classical republican suspicion of standing armies and respect for the spontaneous chivalry of the citizen-soldier. As Thomas Hart Benton noted several years later, “A standing army was always condemned by the American people. . . . It was a British policy.” But Polk saw 58 59 60 61

William Parry to William Allen, 12 April 1846, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Messages and Papers, IV, 413; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 5 May 1845, 2. August Belmont to George N. Sanders, 19 September 1854, Belmont Letterbooks; James Gadsden to William L. Marcy, [no day], December 1853, Marcy Papers. Freeman Campbell to Samuel J. Tilden, 3 February 1846, Tilden Papers; Samuel J. Tilden to [unknown], 29 November 1850, ibid.

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some type of military expansion as crucial in case of war with England over Oregon and with Mexico over Texas. “Without cost to the Government or danger to our liberties,” he later observed, “we have in the bosom of our society of freemen, available in a just and necessary war, virtually a standing army of 2,000,000 armed citizen soldiers, such as fought the battles of Mexico.” Franklin Pierce made the same call for “augmentation” of the armed forces when he first reported to Congress in 1853. His Navy Secretary James Dobbin followed through and made naval enlargement a priority of his service. War Secretary Jefferson Davis took up the army cause, suggesting that new international responsibilities similarly necessitated enlargement.62 Revealingly, few fears about “consolidation” accompanied proposals for growth in the armed forces. One Democratic organ thought it a mistake to insist blindly on “notions of economy.” Too many politicians thought that “the people only desire to save a few dollars – that they hold that to be the great end and aim of government.” Instead, “the people are for economy in the management of governmental affairs; but they are utterly opposed to that system . . . which costs more than a thousand times what it succeeds in accumulating at half a dozen minor points, by the terrible loss which it causes on some great field of action.” Democrats should still insist on limited government, but new international priorities demanded an alteration of the strictest governmental accounting.63 In sum, so enlivened did New Democrats become by the possibilities inherent in steam power that they once again demonstrated a willingness to loosen their strict construction constitutionalism. However scientific and entrepreneurial New Democrats appeared, they sometimes encountered the superstitions of their age. In 1854, Senator James Shields presented a petition from 15 thousand constituents asking for an investigation into supernatural phenomena. The signers concurred on what they experienced – strange sounds, lights, objects moving seemingly without human force – but disagreed about the cause. They wanted Congress to investigate. Shields thought that “the prevalence of this delusion, at this age of the world, amongst any considerable portion of our citizens, must originate, in my opinion, in a defective system of education, or in a partial derangement of the mental faculties.” One senator joked that the three thousand northern clergymen who had recently remonstrated against the Kansas-Nebraska Act should take charge of this petition, while another argued that it should be referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations. The larger point is that New Democrats remained open to new ideas and inventions, but that they took a scientific and analytical tack in addressing them.64 62

63 64

Messages and Papers, IV, 426–8, 633; Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 30 March 1854, 803; Messages and Papers, V, 215, 287; Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 285. Ohio Statesman, 13 May 1846, 2. Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 17 April 1854, 923.

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Monopolies and Regulation Old Democrats had always feared powerful cabals against the people’s liberties. Unsavory concentrations of financial power troubled them especially. New Democrats picked up where their elders left off by attempting to break growing corporate monopolies and establishing an atmosphere of equal opportunity and competition. Their reformist orientation, in other words, extended to the world of business and economics as well as race and technical innovation. In this sense, they echoed the anxieties of their Jacksonian forebears as well as foreshadowing the trust-busting proclivities of their Progressive successors. With the rise of general incorporation laws (usually favored by Democrats), the government encountered a variety of private concerns specializing in everything from transportation to food processing. New Democrats furthered their party’s antimonopoly stance by trying to mold this ungainly world into a marvel of fair competition. Stephen Douglas even restrained his monomania for the railroad in order to ensure that private malfeasance did not taint his locomotives. He raised objections to an entrepreneur’s plans for the transcontinental railroad during the 1840s because of the authority it would bestow upon an individual. Asa Whitney, a New York merchant, had submitted a proposal to build a railway to the Pacific. Whitney would wield total control over the project and would enjoy, by Douglas’s estimate, a profit of over $50 million (larger than it seems, given nineteenth-century standards). Douglas read over the plan and concluded that it would supply inordinate wealth and power to one man, and perhaps his investors and associates. Instead, he wished to apply the formula of popular sovereignty to the railroad project: let each state receive a congressional grant of alternate sections of public land, he argued, and then decide how best to construct its portion of the railroad. This would diffuse responsibility and prevent an unhealthy concentration of power. Given his concern over private enterprise, perhaps Douglas was lucky not to live to see the fattened railroad barons of the Gilded Age.65 Douglas also campaigned for the revocation of an Illinois railroad charter that would have delivered federally granted lands directly to a private company. Under this contract, lands donated for railroad development by Congress would have gone directly to the company that would construct the line. Douglas understood that this might create a monopoly and lobbied for ending the charter before securing land grants for the Illinois Central Railroad in 1850. Not to do so, he said, would impugn the “character of the State.” “It would disgrace the whole delegation in Congress.”66 Douglas argued that any kind of corporate charter, including one for construction of a railroad, conferred only the specific powers mentioned within it upon the corporation. He worried that 65 66

Stephen A. Douglas to Asa Whitney, 15 October 1845, in Letters of Douglas, 127–33. Stephen A. Douglas to Augustus C. French, 27 December 1849, ibid., 178–81; Stephen A. Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, 2 October 1850, ibid., 196; Stephen A. Douglas to Sidney Breese, 5 January 1851, ibid., 198–206.

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private investors would interpret their charters loosely, as granting authority to do anything not explicitly prohibited. Instead, he suggested, the state should reserve all plenary powers not expressly delegated in the charter. His worry was private and corporate extravagance, not state power.67 Douglas’s strained negotiation between state and private authority illustrated the dilemma that New Democrats encountered as their party and country matured. For old Democrats, strict construction scruples would not allow the federal government to take the lead in improvement ventures such as railroads. These had to be constructed, instead, by voluntary enterprise. At the same time, all Democrats continued to distrust unaccountable monopolies and private interests. John O’Sullivan called this the “monopoly & special privilege character.”68 Yet which was the greater threat to popular liberties: the government or the corporation? Through the 1840s and 1850s one sees Democrats veering between these twin dangers, sometimes allowing greater federal oversight before pulling it back, at other times resorting to private enterprise before prescribing more government regulation. This remained a careful balancing act. But on the whole New Democrats felt comfortable with a stronger role for the federal government, as both proprietor of improvements and regulator of corporations. This is the trend defining their political generation. As Douglas once wrote in a pamphlet, “The operations of the Government have not been sufficiently rapid to keep pace with the spirit of the age.”69 Another New Democratic crusader for government regulation was publicist and attorney Samuel J. Tilden of New York. Born in 1814, he attended Yale for one term and then dropped out. He subsequently enrolled in a three-year law program at the University of the City of New York, graduating in 1841. Tilden then established a lucrative law practice specializing in railroad organization and financing, allowing him to observe the chicanery of New York’s chaotic business world firsthand. But young Tilden nursed political ambitions too, and during the early 1840s he chose the Democracy as his vehicle. Attending the party’s national convention in 1844, he founded a Polk campaign newspaper with John O’Sullivan, entitled the New York Morning News. After 1846 he began serving in the New York State Assembly. Unlike many Democrats, Tilden opposed Polk’s policies of expansion and adamantly defended the Wilmot Proviso. He stood in the front ranks of the Barnburner revolt of 1848, during which New York’s antislavery Democrats bolted the party and ran an independent Free Soil ticket. Tilden supported Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren that year, a decision that prevented him from obtaining nominations for years to come. During the Civil War, Tilden remained a Union Democrat who balked at Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation policies. At the same time he resisted the Copperhead faction of the party and tried to steer a moderate course toward 67 68 69

Stephen A. Douglas to “Gentlemen,” 19 June 1851, Douglas Papers. John L. O’Sullivan to Samuel J. Tilden, 19 February 1846, Tilden Papers. Stephen A. Douglas to Joel A. Matteson, 2 January 1854, in Letters of Douglas, 276.

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peaceful reunion. Tilden served again in the state legislature starting in 1872, and as governor of New York after 1874. Nominated by the Democrats for president in 1876, he ran on a platform of “Tilden and reform” against Grant and scandal. The results of that year’s contested election and the end of Reconstruction are well known. Tilden’s most enduring legacy may have come late in life, however. Before dying in 1886, he bequeathed funds for the creation of a free public library in New York City. Visitors to the main branch of the New York Public Library can still gaze at portraits and inscriptions commemorating Tilden’s foundation of a great institution.70 Tilden’s personal achievements did not match his political and cultural ones: he never married, devoted all his energy to party work, and toiled laboriously and single-mindedly for the Democracy. Throughout his career Tilden displayed a crusading, almost muckraking penchant for exposing corruption and contributing to sound government. In 1852, he was eager to get at the books of a departing gubernatorial administration in New York, convinced that its mismanagement of internal improvements hindered the state’s transportation network. Around the same time Tilden wrote down his philosophy of statesmanship, through which he made clear his respect for honesty in officeholding. The American public naturally feared demagogues and professional politicians, he noted. Those who scrambled for office or favor justly attracted suspicion for seeming to be avaricious and power-hungry. The highest offices, he thought, descended upon the citizen who quietly retired to private life and was then called to public service – a classic statement of republican political ideology, recalling Washington as Cincinnatus. Tilden supported “a simple & frugal administration, and ever against all devices of plunder, against all forms of questionable expenditures.” It was the people’s “aversion to intrigue and selfishness which [made] them distrust often services of professional statesmen.” Tilden demonstrated the New Democracy’s concern with reform and good government, with scientific administration and an end to municipal corruption.71 Tilden valued “reform in public administration . . . [and] Accountability of public officers, enforced by better civil and criminal remedies.” He effectively pushed for the removal of New York state judges who misbehaved, and in a state constitutional convention he proposed term limits for U.S. presidents.72 Twenty years later Tilden led the force investigating the “Tweed ring,” a corrupt Tammany Hall mayoral administration in New York City, and of the “canal 70 71

72

American National Biography Online, s.v. “Tilden, Samuel Jones,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1. harvard.edu/articles/04/04-00989.html (accessed 8 May 2003). Samuel J. Tilden to George W. Neivil [?], 1 January 1852, Tilden Papers; Tilden notes, time period 1849–52, [no place], Box 4, Tilden Papers. Tilden’s plea for “frugal administration” should not be seen as contradicting the New Democracy’s commitment to a stronger federal government: see note 83. Samuel J. Tilden, “Draft of Syracuse Speech,” [no date], Box 16, Tilden Papers; John Bigelow, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Samuel J. Tilden, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), I, xiv. On presidential term limits, see the Washington Sentinel, 17 May 1856, 3.

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ring,” a group of white-collar criminals who embezzled funds from the state waterway improvement system. Indeed, Tilden’s doomed presidential campaign of 1876 explicitly brought him forward as an opponent of the chronic seediness associated with Ulysses S. Grant.73 Young America Democrats kept up their party’s attacks on unregulated private capital and governmental corruption, showing that in their world reform meant honest administration. Whether they spoke, like Stephen Douglas, of unctuous railroad entrepreneurs or, like Samuel Tilden, of political spoilsmen, they insisted on straightforward procedures and fair competition. As in the case of many other proposals previously mentioned, members of the New Democracy laid the groundwork unwittingly trodden by future generations. In this case, Progressive reformers of the early twentieth century finished the work of cleaning up government, punishing corruption, and regulating monopolies. They did not consciously borrow ideas from antebellum Democrats, and no link suggests direct causation. Nevertheless, if one traced these improvements to an earlier point of activity, Douglas and Tilden would certainly stand out. The Spoils System “The amount of patronage in the hands of the Federal Government is by far too great not to jeopardize the purity of the elective franchise.”74 So concluded the Democratic Review after nearly 20 years of witnessing that quintessentially Jacksonian practice, the spoils system. Although Jackson and his cronies may not have invented the idea of rewarding the party faithful with offices, their movement became closely associated with its implementation. It was Democratic elder William L. Marcy who famously remarked that “to the victors belong the spoils.”75 By 1848, however, the Review understood that distributing patronage based on political affiliation conflicted with the growing democracy of the antebellum era. If politicians empowered the common man, how could they simultaneously undermine him by elevating a class of bureaucrats to power merely because of their party position? Young Americans who came of age during the 1840s had to face the politically influenced distribution of patronage, and they rarely admired what they found. They called for reform of officeholding, presaging the civil service activists who mobilized in the 1870s. Making the distribution of patronage more efficient and less corrupt fit into their larger campaign for honesty and fair dealing in both public policy and private enterprise. For the same reason that Samuel Tilden broke up Boss Tweed’s ring, or that Stephen Douglas tried to restrain the power of private investors, other New Democrats criticized the spoils system and argued for more transparent appointment procedures.76 73 74 75 76

One could also add that Tilden anticipated the liberal reformers of the Gilded Age, who clamored for the “best men” to beat back the political bosses. Democratic Review 22 (Feb. 1848), 101. Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 178. In his account of corruption during the 1850s, Mark Summers lauds President Franklin Pierce and his lieutenants for showing “a personal integrity that the government needed badly.” Overall,

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Why did New Democrats attack the political feeding trough? The country was growing and they no doubt realized that centralization and sound management were essential in order to reap the benefits of development. In this sense, their reforms fit into the progressive economic orientation they exhibited when discussing internal improvements and technological investigation. New circumstances, in other words, required new men and new measures. Furthermore, by the time the New Democracy arose in the mid to late 1840s, Democrats had more experience with political power residing in the enemy party. Whiggery had become a substantial force, attaining the presidency in 1840 with the use of Democrats’ own electioneering tactics and performing well bisectionally both in Congress and on the state and local level. Democrats thus appreciated the feeling of being out of power and seeing political supporters summarily dismissed from the government. The maturation of Second Party System competition between Whigs and Democrats, that is, gave Young Americans a taste of what it was like to be on the losing side, much more so than in the era of the old Democracy during the 1830s. This experience may have motivated them to reevaluate established party practices including the spoils system. Such was certainly the case for Massachusetts Democratic icon Marcus Morton. After being appointed Boston Customs Collector by Polk, and exercising ruthless influence in the distribution of patronage, Morton himself was forced to resign by the incoming Taylor administration in mid 1849. Only then did he fully realize the deficiencies of the spoils system, which brought to office “the least respectable and competent portion of the party.” A great practitioner of spoils politics in the 1840s, someone who turned out many operatives for political reasons, thus was made to understand the problems of the system when his party went out of power. He pleaded with President Taylor, who had run on a “no party” platform, to end the wholesale removals. But he understood why Taylor failed given the long-established partisan forces arrayed against reform. Nevertheless, after his own bitter experiences with removals and appointments, Morton still hoped for something better. He learned his lesson; perhaps other Democrats did too.77 The Democratic Review led the charge as usual. It recommended that more public offices become elective and that civil servants be removed only for reasons of competence, not partisanship. It cited New York as a state where reform of the spoils system had made many bureaucratic positions elective rather than subject to the control of victorious politicians eager to reward their supporters.78 The journal also prescribed a nineteenth-century version of campaign

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however, he interprets Young America as antithetical to reform of the spoils system. See Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 179–80, 190–200, 239. Marcus Morton to J. E. Wool, 30 March 1849, Morton Papers; Marcus Morton to Zachary Taylor, 1 May 1849, ibid. For further evidence that Democrats newly felt the sting of the spoils system at the hands of Taylor Whigs, see “The Spoils doctrine [sic],” 1849, nine-page manuscript, Marcy Papers. Democratic Review 9 (Oct. 1841), 344–51; ibid., 13 (July 1843), 99; ibid., 22 (Feb. 1848), 105.

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finance reform. It complained that profligate administrations were submitting expenses for party activities to Congress, which then reimbursed them through the power of appropriations vested in the House of Representatives. Instead of the great body of the people, through their House, deciding which activities government monies should fund, agencies of the executive branch were dictating requests that the House then rubber-stamped. Partisanship was getting in the way of responsible policymaking.79 O’Sullivan remained the moving force behind the Review for much of the 1840s, though he also spoke out individually for changes to the spoils system. When President John Tyler attempted to use executive patronage to create his own personal political following, for example, O’Sullivan balked. Tyler, “His Accidency,” had become president upon the death of William Henry Harrison one month into office. Clashing with congressional Whigs led by Henry Clay, Tyler vetoed charters for a new national bank and did everything he could to scuttle Clay’s “American System.” Democrats had disowned him when he broke with the party after the nullification crisis in 1832–3, while Whigs repudiated him as an apostate because of his wayward course as president. Left without a party, Tyler realized that his hopes for reelection centered on his ability to create his own new political organization. He used offices at his disposal as president to try to cement such a following. O’Sullivan saw this as an abuse of power, arguing that patronage corrupted the presidency. He condemned both Whigs and Democrats for civil service abuses, recommending that proscriptions take place only in cases of incompetence. Additionally, he advocated compression of the presidential term to only one or two years. This might reduce the intense office seeking that bedeviled every new chief executive, he thought.80 Twenty years later O’Sullivan continued to criticize the spoils system. He blamed the rise of sectionalism and the outbreak of civil war on executive patronage. The desire for office created excessive partisan and sectarian commitments, making people inflexible and unwilling to compromise. The presidential term was too long, he continued, exacerbating this clawing for office. Instead, O’Sullivan desired a professional civil service that would take officeholding out of the realm of politics. In making this recommendation, he cut against the grain of long-standing Democratic practice. And today few remember that O’Sullivan and the New Democrats championed this reform, only that postbellum Republicans implemented it through the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883.81 Whereas General Jackson had gained renown for augmenting the prestige of the presidency, for making the executive branch a repository of popular confidence akin to Congress, O’Sullivan wished to lessen the importance of the office. He called for annual presidential elections and austerity in the bureaucracy that fed the corrupt patronage practices he detested. “The Roman Consuls 79 80 81

Ibid., 26 (March 1850), 194. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan, 148, 151. Ibid., 230.

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were annually selected – why not our Presidents?”82 he asked. If Jackson pulled for a strong presidency, the age of the New Democrats in fact highlighted the opposite trend: relatively weak and little-known figures such as Polk and Pierce rose to office, and key politicians (e.g., Douglas, Cass) came from Congress. To some extent this had been true in Old Hickory’s day, with the great triumvirate of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster remaining on Capitol Hill. But in the earlier period both Jackson and Clay provided models of stronger – or, in the case of Clay, potentially stronger – executive leadership. This was no longer the case after Jackson’s heyday, when civil service–minded Young Americans like O’Sullivan championed reform. They did not fully dilute presidential power, however, for, as we have seen, New Democrats such as Polk in fact enhanced the authority of the office. Reform and suspicion coexisted with a sense of the need for vigorous federal authority in some areas.83 When Tyler left and James K. Polk took office, the new president felt sufficiently concerned about corruption in the national bureaucracy to devote part of his inaugural address to the problem. He admonished civil servants that “a strict performance of duty will be exacted from all public officers.” For government employees handling collections and disbursements of federal funds, he delivered a special message: “Any culpable failure or delay on their part to account for the moneys intrusted [sic] to them . . . will in every instance terminate the official connection of such defaulting officer with the Government.”84 Yet by 1854 Democratic critics were complaining that Franklin Pierce swelled the ranks of government patronage extravagantly. He sacrificed Jacksonian principles of limited government in an attempt to doctor the financial health of job seekers, they charged. Plans for renovating the U.S. Capitol suffered from claims that the administration was handling the project irresponsibly and expensively. The era of the spoils system seemed nowhere close to ending, lamented the New York Herald. “The ‘cohesive power of the public plunder’ is paramount, and must be till the plunder is exhausted.” The breakdown of party divisions in the 1850s seemed to magnify the problem, as supplicants of all political stripes raided Washington in search of patronage.85 As the Democracy haggled over the spoils of Pierce’s victory, Buffalo industrialist Dean Richmond pressed his claims to office along with everyone else. But, unlike others, he insisted on honesty and principle as benchmarks for 82 83

84 85

Democratic Review 16 (April 1845), 316–18. Although figures such as O’Sullivan wished to curtail presidential power in order to purify the patronage system, they simultaneously called for an augmentation of overall federal authority, as has been demonstrated throughout these pages. They sought a balance under which the federal state needed to become fair and pure, but also strong enough to implement grand visions of internal improvements and European deployments. In other words, New Democratic comments disparaging an overly powerful chief executive should not be taken as contradicting their heterodox support for a stronger federal role overall in economic development and foreign policy. Messages and Papers, IV, 382. New York Herald, 13 January 1854, 4.

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presidential appointments, even when these imperatives clashed with the supremacy of his own wing of the party. He wrote to Secretary of State William Marcy that several candidates allied with Richmond’s Barnburner faction were unsatisfactory because they were implicated in the “Canal frauds” and other misdeeds. “No unsound speculative Barnburner satisfys [sic] us. I had just as [soon] have a dishonest Hunker or Whig.” He cared about factional balance between Barnburners and Hunkers, but more so about those who were “plundering the state.”86 New York steamship owner George Law lashed out at the “corrupt and demoralizing spoils system, enforced by a degenerate race of men.” Samuel Tilden reached the conclusion that the “possession of patronage is at best a very doubtful benefit to an administration.” He argued that competence and professionalism should trump party regularity in the quadrennial distribution of the spoils. Tilden focused on the position of appraiser as one example, complaining that “what is needed in the appraisers is general administrative capacity & general acquaintance with business.” For New York, Tilden proposed a system of graduated appointments to the police force, so that a “class” of officers would rotate out of service each year and prevent the entrenchment of a bureaucracy. In forming these opinions during the 1840s and 1850s, Tilden paved the way for his later blowup of the Tweed ring in the 1870s.87 Stephen Douglas agreed with Law and Tilden about the unsavory influence of office seekers. For this reason, he refused to make any patronage commitments as he prepared to run for president in 1852. He wished his friends well, “but in the performance of public trusts favors to friends must be consistent with or subordinate to the public interests.” Douglas resented the dominance of old party hands in various positions, and for personal reasons. In late 1851, he futilely tried to have his friend Samuel Treat appointed secretary of the Senate. His failure convinced him that the Senate was willing to “keep the old fogies in office for life.” In 1853, Douglas also railed against the influence of congressional lobbyists on the Senate floor. Looking out over the gallery, he “could begin and call a very long roll by name within the reach of my vision now.” “I do not like it. I think it ought to be stopped,” he snapped.88 Douglas’s New Democratic colleagues in Congress felt so strongly about patronage reform that they unsuccessfully introduced several bills that aimed to overhaul parts of the bureaucracy. In 1848, the House passed a bill to regulate executive appointments geographically and through other criteria. Instead of the chaos accompanying the start of every new administration, Congress should 86 87

88

Dean Richmond to William L. Marcy, 28 April 1853, Marcy Papers. For another example see Horatio Seymour to William L. Marcy, 5 November 1853, ibid. A Sketch of Events in the Life of George Law (New York: J. C. Derby, 1855), 92; Samuel J. Tilden to William L. Marcy, 20 May 1853, Marcy Papers; [Illegible] to Samuel J. Tilden, 22 April 1846, ibid. Stephen A. Douglas to George Roberts, 8 September 1851, in Letters of Douglas, 231; Stephen A. Douglas to Samuel Treat, 15 December 1851, 232, ibid.; Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 2 Session, 26 February 1853, 869; Illinois State Register, 4 August 1853, 2.

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(and had the authority to, they argued) establish basic principles of officeholding. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee proposed a system whereby patronage would be shared throughout the country based on representation and divided by congressional district. In this way, neglected interests such as the West might also be mollified. Johnson wished to divide executive department clerks into four categories, with one class of workers departing every two years. In this way, an early version of professional civil service might find support. Rather than focusing on merit, however, proponents of the bill used geographic variation and tenure in office as the basic criteria. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury ideas of expertise and training as the bases for public service had not yet taken hold.89 Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana offered to impose term limits on assistant postmasters general of the United States, and to require their approval by the Senate. This would bring a new degree of professionalism to the mails. Postmasterships were some of the most coveted political spoils of the nineteenth century, and term limits would reduce their political nature and make them seem more authoritative. One of Bright’s House colleagues tried to go even further, proposing a constitutional amendment under which Congress would choose the postmasters. In this way, the bloated patronage network of the executive branch would suffer some overdue deflation.90 Bright called the Senate’s attention to the fact that the assistant secretary of the Treasury was selected without congressional confirmation. He recommended that the Senate oversee this appointment along with all the others. And in 1849 he applauded a commitment by President Zachary Taylor not to remove civil servants unless specific and substantiated charges of malfeasance or incompetence were lodged against them. By 1851, he expressed disappointment upon learning that the Whig administration had in fact dismissed many government officers for partisan reasons. He spoke out against this in the course of Senate debates on Taylor’s removals. Attention in early 1851 centered particularly on a territorial governor of Oregon whom the administration allegedly removed without cause. This amounted to “sheer, naked proscription,” thundered Bright. Although critics could easily ascribe Bright’s stance to his own partisanship, his actions cast a different light when contextualized within the broader array of civil service reforms championed by New Democrats.91 Born in 1812, Bright grew up to be a hulking two-hundred-pound man with a memorable swagger and a daunting presence. He started a law practice in Indiana after moving from Kentucky, and earlier from New York. Entering the U.S. Senate in 1845, he antagonized colleagues with an uncompromising 89

90 91

Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 1 Session, 31 May 1848, 800–3. Also see ibid., 32 Congress, 2 Session, 3 March 1853, 1164; ibid., 32 Congress, 1 Session, 18 August 1852, 2250; ibid., 19 August 1852, 2260. Ibid., 31 Congress, 1 Session, 19 July 1850, 1417; ibid., 32 Congress, 1 Session, 14 June 1852, 1566; ibid., 17 December 1851, 121. Ibid., 33 Congress, 1 Session, 13 December 1853, 40; ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 2 January 1851, 154–5.

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style and a contentious temperament. His positions usually mirrored those of other moderate northwestern Democrats who formed the backbone of Young America. When secession erupted, he hoped for reconciliation and opposed the use of force to restore the Union. In 1862, evidence surfaced that Bright had corresponded with Jefferson Davis and connected him with an arms dealer, leading the Republican-dominated Senate to expel him. After 1864 he lived in Kentucky and Baltimore, where he died in 1875. Like Douglas, William Richardson, and George Sanders, Bright was the quintessential New Democrat: bumptious, blustery, young, headstrong, unyielding, and imaginative. From such traits emerged part of Young America’s movement for civil service reform.92 One measure of New Democrats’ commitment to patronage reform was their attention to methods of promotion in the armed forces. Setting their sights on the Army and Navy, they asserted that merit and experience should replace favoritism and politics as the means of staffing the officer corps. After George Bancroft became President Polk’s secretary of the Navy in 1845, for example, he instituted reforms intended to bring efficiency to a nepotistic and insular branch of the federal bureaucracy. One of the proposals involved opening the Navy to public application, so that aspirants no longer required congressional nomination or other special connections to merit a place in military academies and the service. Commissions would be tendered on the basis of fitness rather than association. As one paper editorialized: “We have brave, bright, capable boys, who have served faithfully in the apprentice ranks, but not one of them has a near relation in Congress.” These alterations aroused the ire of legislators accustomed to pulling strings for their constituents, though Bancroft was determined to bring the Navy into a new age. Although his merit reforms failed, he did professionalize the Navy by establishing an academy at Annapolis.93 Future Congresses considered additional changes to conventional methods of appointment. As Robert F. Stockton observed in 1853, nearly universal support for a reorganization of the Navy prevailed in Congress.94 Shortly after Bancroft retired to private life, Senator James Shields took up his reformist spirit. During the early 1850s, Shields served as chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs. He prodded Congress to establish a mechanism for jettisoning old and “superannuated” officers with a view to increasing military efficiency. Too many senior, admittedly often-distinguished, officers were crowding the ranks, and the armed forces would operate better, said Shields, if these men retired. Stephen Douglas and John Slidell were the two Young Americans voting for Shields’s measure. In addition, Shields continually pushed a bill “to regulate the pay and increase the efficiency of the Army.” 92 93

94

American National Biography Online, s.v. “Bright, Jesse David,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1. harvard.edu/articles/04/04-00145.html (accessed 9 May 2003). Newspaper clippings enclosed with letter from Jane McManus Storm [Cazneau] to George Bancroft [no day, no month], 1846, Bancroft Papers. Also see the New York Evening Post, 22 August 1846, 2. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 23 September 1850, 1916; ibid., 31 Congress, 2 Session, 3 December 1850, 7; ibid., 32 Congress, 2 Session, 3 February 1853, 483.

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Streamlining and efficiency remained his watchwords while overseeing the nation’s military.95 Robert Stockton, the New Democrat closest to the Navy, joined Shields in following Bancroft’s reforming course during the 1850s. This “young fogy,” as the New York Daily Times dubbed him, listened “to the word reform without asphyxia.” Stockton had served as a naval officer for many years, most recently in the Mexican War, and entered the U.S. Senate in the early 1850s. He pledged to improve naval operations by following in Bancroft’s footsteps of efficiency and professionalism. Stockton also condemned corporal punishment in the Navy, causing a protracted debate about discipline.96 In addition, Stockton jumped on the growing bandwagon of retirement reform. He joined James Shields in urging that the Navy establish a mechanism for retiring senior officers and circulating new blood into command. In a committee report, he observed that “a prudent man intrusts [sic] not the ordinary affairs of life to agents whose powers are on the decline.” Hailing Stockton, one newspaper wrote: “For twenty years or more old fogyism has had full sway, and on board our ships of war, in actual service, the junior officers might, in looking to their supreme head for instruction, as well appeal to the figure heads of their vessels. . . . The young, ambitious, and accomplished officers have been kept down.” It listed the reforms proposed by Commodoreturned-Senator Stockton, including “increase of pay to the men, a system of rewards for good behavior, [and] selecting candidates for Midshipmen from deserving youngsters in actual service.”97 Bringing up the new generation was his priority; it fit perfectly with New Democrats’ keen generational consciousness. A group of New Democrats including Douglas, Bancroft, Shields, Stockton, and Morton thus began to chip away at the distributional edifice crafted by their political elders. They understood that, in order for America to amount to much, to continue its upward trajectory toward power and prosperity, new methods of merit and efficiency required implementation. What seemed acceptable for an infant republic did not necessarily fit the needs of a mass democracy. Professionalism appeared the best way to order Young America’s new world, exporting liberty and opportunity through skill and experience. The diversity of reforms pursued by various Young Americans provides a taste of the forward-looking mindset characterizing this generation of Jacksonian Democrats. For some, expanding the Jeffersonian dream by granting free land to western settlers seemed essential to surviving the industrial revolution. For others, creating institutions that could accommodate a groundswell of knowledge, inventions, and technology appeared the primary concern. Still other New 95 96 97

Ibid., 33 Congress, 1 Session, 31 January 1854, 293–4; ibid., 15 March 1854, 630; ibid., 21 March 1854, 695; Messages and Papers, V, 287–8. New York Daily Times, 14 January 1853, 4; American Whig Review 15 (April 1852), 315. New York Evening Post, 14 January 1853, 1; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 3 March 1853, 2.

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Democrats focused on social needs, opining on subjects ranging from women’s roles to dueling to capital punishment. On the more political side stood New Democrats who wished to intensify the party’s pursuit of unequal concentrations of wealth, as well as those, like Samuel Tilden and Jesse Bright, who tried to bring order and transparency to civil administration. These reformers shared a passion for organizing the United States most effectively for what they thought were the challenges ahead. They came from both North and South, unifying the New Democracy in its pursuit of social change. Most of the reforms discussed in this chapter became associated only with a handful of atypical Democrats. But the point here is not the number of politicians who espoused each of these solutions or ideas, but the fact that they enjoyed any kind of life within the Democracy at all. Jane Cazneau stood on the Texas frontier, arms open to women’s political influence and to the assimilation of Mexican citizens. James Shields rose to the stump railing against anti-immigrant discrimination and insisting that no arbitrary divisions plague American society. John O’Sullivan thought it outrageous that the state of New York executed criminals, and that the United States as a whole still needed to fight wars. Stephen Douglas asked the federal government to search high and low for every new piece of technology that might offer the key to domination of the natural environment. George Bancroft insisted that schooling and skill should occupy a place in the training of soldiers and seamen. This tableau of Young Americans faced the future with eagerness and excitement, originating several ideas that played important roles later on in American history.

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7 The Antislavery Democracy

Arthur and Lewis Tappan grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, surrounded by the trappings of evangelical Christianity. Their mother infused orthodox piety into their youth, and by the time the brothers reached maturity, religious devotion dominated their lives. Lewis temporarily converted to Unitarianism, though he ultimately repented and joined his brother Arthur as a merchant in New York. Successful in their business, the two Tappans invested their earnings in philanthropic crusades ranging from Sabbatarianism to temperance to colonization. By the mid 1830s, they had become firm believers in William Lloyd Garrison’s brand of immediatist abolitionism. Straddling the workaday world of New York commerce and the reformist mindset of evangelical perfectibility, the Tappans opened their pockets to a wide variety of Romantic causes. American historians routinely emphasize their importance in the abolitionist struggle before the Civil War.1 Arthur and Lewis had a brother, one equally committed to ending black bondage but relatively neglected by scholars of abolitionism. Benjamin Tappan moved to Ohio, joined the Democracy, and embraced a radical style of antibank agrarianism during the 1830s. Eschewing his family’s church, Benjamin put his faith in hard-headed political reform. The floors of legislature and courtroom were his chapels, bills and injunctions his weapons against sin. Among many causes, Benjamin Tappan began to labor for antislavery. Like his brothers Arthur and Lewis, Benjamin considered the southern institution immoral and worked steadily to eradicate it. Unlike his siblings, however, he deplored the weepy, sentimental, religious reformism that animated so many abolitionists. Arthur and Lewis Tappan fit well into the standard antebellum narrative of 1

Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 107–11; Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 33–5, 80–1; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1969).

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Christian evangelical reform, whereas Benjamin does not. Yet, as in the case of numerous other causes, Democrats such as Benjamin Tappan acted on moral beliefs against slavery too. By the late 1840s and early 1850s, Democrats could boast a robust antislavery tradition within their own organization. No longer did Whigs and nonaffiliated reformers alone champion an end to black servitude in the South. Some of the Democracy’s leaders of the 1840s and 1850s became New Democrats through antislavery, pushing their party toward condemnation of an outmoded and indecent practice. As in the case of free trade, internationalism and foreign intervention, a new market orientation, and forward-looking reform, Jacksonian antislavery highlights the softer, progressive bent of the antebellum Democracy. Not all Young Americans decried slavery, of course: Pierre Soul´e and John Quitman provide two examples of New Democratic fire-eaters. But a formidable strain of northern Democratic antislavery nevertheless arose during the heyday of Young America. It presented party members with a challenging alternative on an issue long ignored by the followers of Old Hickory. The phrase “antislavery” carried several meanings when applied to the antebellum Democracy. It almost never meant outright abolitionism, but depending on the person and the context it suggested colonization, popular sovereignty, or free soil. Democrats rarely argued against slavery in the southern states themselves, though they embraced more moderate antislavery reforms such as a belief in the repatriation of blacks to Africa, the delegation of slavery-related decisions to local majorities, and the exclusion of bondage from western lands thought to be the birthright of free white northern males. Although a number of New Democrats, such as Samuel Tilden, for a time affiliated with the Free Soil Barnburner Democrats of New York, others presented arguments for popular sovereignty, colonization, and free soil while remaining firmly entrenched within other wings of the party. And although some left to join the new Republican Party in the mid and late 1850s, others continued to see the Democracy as the only reasonable vehicle for social change. Slavery was not a defining issue for this group, but it was a dilemma that anyone living in their time needed to address, and one that ultimately sabotaged their agenda. Barnburners and Others Old Hickory attracted Benjamin Tappan on the strength of his economic views. In the 1830s, Tappan became a religious skeptic and outspoken Jacksonian. He railed against banks and corporations, supported equal opportunity for downtrodden workers, and insisted on hard money as the nation’s currency. He also nursed a blistering grievance against southern slaveholders, denouncing the Missouri Compromise and cheering Nat Turner’s Virginia rebellion of 1831. A friend to northern free blacks as well as southern slaves, Tappan gained a reputation as an uncompromising hater of servitude. So objectionable did he seem to southern Democrats that in 1834 many of them broke party ranks in the Senate and rejected his appointment as a federal judge.

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Tappan may not have been an immediate abolitionist: he never joined the Liberty Party or the American Anti-Slavery Society that his brothers helped to found. Instead, he viewed the Democracy as the progressive agent for social change in all walks of life. Democrats were the true forward-looking and reformist party, to Tappan and to party thinkers such as George Bancroft, Orestes Brownson, and David Wilmot. Since Democrats remained the ones committed to ending aristocracy and unfair privilege, to elevating the dignity of workers and to guaranteeing equal rights, it seemed only natural that they would take the lead on slavery. Progress on one freedom would lead to action on another. By attacking the undue power of banks, the Democracy was beginning the process of eventually spreading liberty to oppressed populations such as Russian serfs and southern slaves. A naturalist with scientific interests, Tappan also thought that research and a clear presentation of facts refuting notions of black inferiority would lead policymakers to end slavery. This expectation clashed with the saccharine, individualistic moral-suasion tactics preferred by Garrisonians and other Whiggish antislavery reformers. But it comported perfectly with New Democrats’ emphasis on efficiency and investigation. Tappan most differed from Whig or evangelical antislavery in his aversion to institutional religion. He ridiculed Christian doctrine as “nonsense and absurdity.” Coming out of the tradition of Jeffersonian skepticism and Enlightenment rationalism, he believed in a linear progression of society toward freedom through reason (exactly the way in which George Bancroft was then writing American history). The Democratic Party became his hope for realizing this vision of progress, rather than the sentimental approach favored by William Lloyd Garrison and Tappan’s own brothers Arthur and Lewis.2 He has “commanded the approval of the entire Democracy of Ohio – and of the Union,” exulted the Democratic Review in 1840.3 The Democracy’s usual stock of reformers joined Tappan’s antislavery campaign. Like him, they substituted reasoned political action for emotional individual appeals. John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review bemoaned “the slavery which we sigh to behold in a portion of our own, whether in a moral, social, or political point of view.” It criticized “the existence of so extraordinary an anomaly in a country of absolute freedom in most respects, while we [a]wait with patience the workings of an overruling Providence in behalf of our black brethren, through the operation of such human agencies as may be at the same time wisely efficient toward this end.”4 O’Sullivan believed that slavery was destined naturally to die out in the South as that region’s population drained to newly annexed territories. Hence the acquisition of Texas, by dispersing the slave population and moving it off to the infertile West, put servitude on a healthy road to elimination in the Old 2 3 4

Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 48–74. Democratic Review 8 (July 1840), 48. Ibid., 11 (Sept. 1842), 262–3.

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South. Within 43 years, the Review predicted in 1844, the problem would be settled in some way.5 O’Sullivan desired the abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, agreeing with many antislavery reformers that the symbolism of America’s national capital overseeing black bondage seemed embarrassing for a country ostensibly founded on principles of personal liberty. And he socialized and sided with leading New York Barnburners such as Senator John Dix and attorney Samuel J. Tilden. In correspondence with such figures, O’Sullivan spoke of himself as a Barnburner and kept keen watch on the faction’s prospects leading up to the 1848 presidential campaign.6 Human rights should apply to all humankind, opined O’Sullivan’s Review, because phrenologists had demonstrated that “the same natural faculties and dispositions have been found in all.”7 O’Sullivan’s Barnburner faction of the New York Democracy turned into the party’s most insistent voice for antislavery, defining itself in opposition to the conservative Hunkers. Barnburners became leading Democratic Free Soilers who bolted the party in 1848 to champion Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams. Originating with the “Bucktail” faction of New York Democrats who had rallied to Van Buren in the 1810s and 1820s, and becoming the “Albany Regency” that controlled state politics by the 1830s, Barnburners had long wielded power in the Empire State. On economic questions they remained fairly traditional, espousing strict constitutional construction and opposition to banks and internal improvements. They mustered great strength in areas of the state relatively unaffected by market change. By contrast, the Hunkers tended to be more New Democratic in their Whiggish economic outlook. They felt more comfortable with state spending on infrastructural improvements and other economic stimuli, though they tolerated the Slave Power more than the Barnburners. Thus, on economic questions it was the Hunkers who were more forward-looking. Both factions of the Democracy exhibited elements of a new party orientation, depending on the issue: Barnburners on slavery and Hunkers on economics. This shows that Young American sensibilities cut across traditional factional lines and affected different parts of the party in different ways and at different times. 5

6

7

Ibid., 15 (July 1844), 11–16. Jane Cazneau, O’Sullivan’s Democratic friend and ally and a leading voice for expansion, held many of the same views. She argued that “the evil of slavery has been deplored by all parties, north and south [sic] since the formation of the government” (Cazneau cited in Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005], 228). The theory that slavery would drain off into the southwest was associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert J. Walker of Mississippi: see Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 563. John L. O’Sullivan to James K. Polk, 15 February 1845, James K. Polk Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; John L. O’Sullivan to Samuel J. Tilden, 30 April 1848, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library. Democratic Review 9 (Nov. 1841), 463. Also see the discussion of ethnology in ibid., 11 (Aug. 1842), 113–39.

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Barnburners grew restive as the 1840s wore on, impatient with the southern pandering practiced by the Hunkers through such policies as the “gag rule” and Texas annexation. Shortly before their great revolt of 1848, a friend of Samuel Tilden appraised factional affairs: only the outward appearance of comity prevailed, thinly masking growing party tensions. He pointed to “a deep repugnance of feeling and to some extent of principle between the great body of the party and certain conservatives who claim to be or to lead a large section of the party.”8 Even within the Barnburner faction, generational divisions threatened party unity. Younger Barnburners such as Preston King became more concerned about free soil principle than anything else, while the faction’s elders, like Azariah C. Flagg, placed greater importance on party unity and the winning of office. In 1847–8, the period leading up to the Barnburner split with the Hunkers, older Barnburners questioned the assertive and separatist tactics of the younger generation, who wished to organize a new movement explicitly around the issue of free soil. The young Turks prevailed, birthing the Free Soil Party in 1848.9 Barnburner John Dix’s response to the teachings of radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith provides one measure of how committed to antislavery this Democratic faction became. “He makes strong antislavery, (and [sic] reform and free-trade speeches, speaks kindly of Whigs & Democrats, and treads on nobody’s toes,” reported Dix to William Marcy.10 Smith was one of the most unyielding antebellum immediatists, and progressive Democrats such as Dix nevertheless saw him as a reasonable figure. Again, New Democrats who opposed slavery felt just as strongly as Whigs and evangelicals about the practice. They differed in the more institutional, policy-oriented approach to change that they saw as the only hope for a black future. There were Democrats such as David Wilmot, to be sure, whose free soil devotion stemmed from vulgar Negrophobia. Yet there were also those, including Dix and Benjamin Tappan, who expressed moral revulsion at black bondage and concern about the plight of the slave. Human equality and individual dignity, after all, seemed to these Democrats the hallmarks of their party. They parted ways with their colleagues in the extent to which they sought to make good the party’s egalitarian pretense. Joining Dix in the Barnburner vanguard was Samuel J. Tilden, a wet-behindthe-ears party organizer in the mid 1840s. Tilden led the delegation evacuating the regular Democratic convention of 1848. Outraged by their exclusion from the gathering because of free soil beliefs, Tilden and the Barnburners regrouped in Utica to nominate their own candidates. Later they invited free 8 9

10

F. Follabury [?] to Samuel J. Tilden, 13 February 1846, Tilden Papers. Jonathan H. Earle, “The Undaunted Democracy: Jacksonian Antislavery and Free Soil, 1828– 1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton Univ., 1996), 131–43; also see the book version of Earle’s dissertation, published as Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004); Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 83. John A. Dix to William L. Marcy, 21 October 1852, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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soil delegations from other states to meet in Buffalo, where they assembled a third-party ticket whose successors would in 1860 capture the executive office under Lincoln. Tilden seemed indignant that the South proposed to nationalize, rather than localize, slavery by extending it westward. This inverted the familiar formulation that slavery remained local and freedom national. “We are called upon to repudiate as unconstitutional the power of Congress over the territories which has been exercised from the very foundation of the government and under all administrations,” he seethed. The federal government outlawed slavery in future western territories both in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Now southern Democrats asked the North to believe that such legislation had been unconstitutional. The New York Morning News celebrated that the “democrats of this state took, long ago, their stand upon the question of opening free territory to slavery. The democratic Representatives in Congress from this state, with but one or two exceptions, and those insignificant ones, voted for the [free soil] Wilmot Proviso.”11 Had the Barnburners made permanent their defection from the Democracy in 1848, conservatives might have taken control of the party. Instead, by 1852 they rejoined the organization, ensuring that a vocal antislavery element would play a role in its debates during the coming years. Benjamin F. Butler, Van Buren’s attorney general and antislavery Democratic operative, explained in 1852 why Free Soil Democrats like him and Salmon P. Chase were returning to the coalition. As the New York Daily Times summarized his views, free soil would be best advanced by “electing Pierce and King. They are Democrats. The original principles of Democracy are identified with freedom and progress. Whig principles are marked by devotion to property rather than to the rights of man.” New Democrats thought their party the true reform organization, the best hope for realizing antislavery in their day, and a bulwark against the conservatism and hierarchicalism they associated with Whiggery.12 Butler’s colleague Robert F. Stockton did his part to welcome back formerly dissident members into the party. In 1853, he spoke to a New York rally of Hard Hunker Democrats. Within the world of Hunkerdom, factions divided into “Softs” and “Hards.” The Softs, or Softshell Hunkers, tended to be more conciliatory to the returning antislavery Barnburners than the Hards, who adopted a stringent and punitive approach. The Hards seethed with betrayal and lusted for vengeance against the Barnburners. They resented Franklin Pierce for trying to pacify the party by including Barnburners among his appointments. But Stockton told the Hards that the party should remain open-minded and forgiving. Barnburners had been “deceived,” he said, and followed a destructive and ill-chosen path. But now that many realized the errors of their ways and had voted for Pierce rather than Free Soiler John P. Hale in 1852, the Hards should 11 12

John Bigelow, ed., The Writings and Speeches of Samuel J. Tilden, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1885), 563; New York Evening Post, 22 October 1847, 2. New York Daily Times, 9 August 1852, 2.

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avoid intemperance. They should remember, instead, that “all Democrats were to be considered of the same family.” Stockton was an antislavery Young American who soon joined the Republican Party, and here he tried to make the Democratic organization more accepting of its growing free soil element.13 Barnburner leaders agreed with Stockton’s prescription. John Van Buren, politically active son of the eighth president, offered to abstain from holding office for ten years if New York’s embattled Democratic factions could reconcile by the election of 1856. He saw a future for a reunited Democracy like the kind his father helped create decades before – and, most significantly, one that included an antislavery presence. The Albany Argus, longtime organ of Van Buren’s Albany Regency faction of the Democracy, condemned its former patron, who “adopted principles alike new and at variance with the settled policy of the democratic party.” Yet it called for “a re-union of all sincere and upright democrats.” In short, by returning to the Democracy antislavery Barnburners ensured that the party would include a strong dissident voice. By the mid 1850s, and particularly after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, many antislavery Democrats left the party for good. But until that point a growing reform presence influenced the organization.14 Inspired by New York’s Barnburners, a number of prominent Democrats lodged increasingly vocal reservations against the Slave Power. David Wilmot had given his name to the famous proviso urging no slavery in newly acquired western territories. Like most antislavery Democrats, by 1852 he was ready to support the mainstream party and declared his allegiance to Franklin Pierce’s candidacy. He even rejected a groundswell of support favoring his own nomination by the Free Soilers and remained a stalwart Democrat during the tumultuous early 1850s. At the same time, he lambasted the South for its dominance in national affairs. He saw “in the mighty interests of Slavery, a power hostile to the rights of the people, and dangerous to the institutions of the Country.” Wilmot remained a good Democrat on other issues. He told Pierce that he agreed with him on virtually all matters of public policy except for the threat posed by the Slave Power.15 One did not have to leave the party temporarily, like Wilmot’s Barnburners, in order to support free soil. The Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer declared its intention as of 1848 to “contend for free trade, free labor, and free territory, in opposition to Tariff Monopolies and the further extension of slavery.” The Ohio Democracy would “rebuke Doughfacism in the North.” The paper sounded themes that would come to dominate the Republican Party of the 1850s, including the unwillingness to “degrade their own labor to the standard of the Slave!” Yet the Plain Dealer refused to break ranks with the 13 14 15

Ibid., 24 November 1853, 1. Ibid., 30 November 1855, 1; Albany Argus, 4 May 1849, 2. Also see Marcus Morton to John Van Buren, 17 October 1852, Marcus Morton Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. David Wilmot to Franklin Pierce, 13 July 1852, Franklin Pierce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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regular Democracy and its candidate for 1848, Lewis Cass. Only those with a one-track mind would insist on the need to join New York’s Barnburners, it claimed. The paper would not so readily yield to a Whig victory by dividing Democrats during an election year. Later that season the Plain Dealer ran a notice for an upcoming “Democratic Cass and Butler Free Soil Meeting,” suggesting that faithful Democrats could both support the party ticket and express their antislavery convictions. Ohio Democrats could remain free soil and Democratic at the same time, since they agreed with Cass on virtually every other question. To do otherwise would mean holding the party hostage to a pet issue. To them Democracy and free soil presented no contradiction.16 Not only were the two priorities compatible, they also followed one from the other. In 1852, Massachusetts Democrat Robert Rantoul debated slavery with a Cotton Whig colleague (the “hunker whiggery,” one paper quipped). He argued that the “True Democratic Doctrine” of the party remained antislavery, and that the image of northern Whigs as an abolition party was misleading. Webster Whigs had temporized with the Slave Power for decades because of their southern-dependent textile industry. Now it was Democrats who rose to the antislavery challenge against the Whigs. On the heels of David Wilmot and Benjamin Tappan, Samuel Tilden and John O’Sullivan, Democrats would create the Free Soil movement that ended slavery in North America.17 Even Democrats who joined the Liberty Party, an overtly abolitionist organization active after 1840, could endorse Jacksonian principles. Liberty candidate James G. Birney, for example, in 1844 explained that he was “and ever have been, a Democrat of the ‘Jeffersonian School.’” He thought he best fulfilled the spirit of the Democracy “by advocating abolition principles.”18 Both Democrats who remained within the party, such as the editors of the Plain Dealer, and those who joined the Free Soil third-party movement, such as the Barnburners, steered the organization toward an antislavery course. The former did so by persisting within the party and clamoring for free territory in the West. The latter did so by launching a protest movement, and also by subsequently returning to the party fold with their free soil convictions intact. By 1852, both types of activists could find a place in the organization, belying Whig and abolitionist claims that Democrats were the party of slave owners. Colonization, Popular Sovereignty, and Free Soil Commodore Robert F. Stockton took seriously this connection between Democratic ideology and antislavery policy. Stockton remained an ardent colonizationist throughout his long career. He subscribed to the American Colonization Society, an officer of which he once accompanied by ship to Africa. The 16 17 18

Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 5 April 1848, 5, 6 June 1848, 2, 11 August 1848, 2, 4 October 1848, 2. Ohio’s western reserve remained fertile soil for antislavery sentiment in general. Ibid., 16 March 1852, 2. New York Evening Post, 1 November 1844, 2. Charges surfaced that the letter in which Birney related these sentiments was a fraud, so its authenticity remains somewhat in question.

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two men signed a treaty with the area’s indigenous inhabitants in 1821, providing land that eventually became the African-American expatriate colony of Liberia. Stockton did not stop there, assuming the presidency of the New Jersey Colonization Society and doing his part to stop the international slave trade by capturing French and Portuguese traders off the coast of Africa. In 1844, he touted Texas annexation as a step toward the abolition of slavery. He predicted that slaves would scatter over the new state, where they would come into contact with “a race who care but little for difference of complexion.” Gradually assimilated into the local southwestern population, black slaves would cease to exist as a distinct social entity. Such was the “dispensation of Providence.”19 In 1850, Stockton wrote an open letter to Senator Daniel Webster, who that same year joined the cabinet of newly inaugurated President Millard Fillmore. The subject was slavery, considered in the context of the compromise measures also passed in 1850. At the outset of his letter Stockton acknowledged that slavery was a moral, not political, issue. This presents a revealing stance for historians inclined to see Democrats as unprincipled demagogues treating slavery as just another campaign issue. In this case, it was Stockton, a hard-headed Navy veteran, who took the moral approach to the problem. Stockton thought that antebellum crises involving slavery were mainly the fault of the federal government. Instead of heeding strict construction scruples, which would have kept the government out of slavery’s way, national policymakers gradually brought their power to bear over the institution. Stockton had in mind everything from the Missouri Compromise to the “gag rule” effectively banning antislavery petitions from Congress starting in the 1830s. Stockton also recognized that the American Union remained a product of statesmanlike compromise, and in this tradition he wished to continue. Abolitionism thus seemed out of the question because it failed to recognize the untouchable reality of slaves as property. Stockton instead adhered to the popular sovereignty formula of his colleague Stephen Douglas, presenting himself as a classic procompromise moderate. But true to his long-standing beliefs, he also argued for a new effort at colonizing slaves in Africa. Miscegenation and race war were among the conceivable products of black persistence in North America, he thought. In a return to Africa lay peace for American whites and liberty for blacks. All nations needed oversight and guidance in their youth, said Stockton, and slavery provided this tutelage. Colonization, out of favor when he wrote this in 1850, still seemed to him the best means of transferring African Americans from this middle stage of development to their full destiny as a mature civilization.20 19 20

Speech of Capt. R. F. Stockton, delivered at the Great Democratic Meeting, at New Brunswick, New Jersey, Wednesday, September 24, 1844 (New York: Jared W. Bell, 1844), 11. Letter of Commodore Stockton on the Slavery Question (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1850). George Fredrickson described this position as “romantic racialism”: George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1987), 97–129.

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In the mid 1850s, Stockton broke with the Democracy and joined the Republicans, although he logged time in the Know-Nothing movement along the way. He felt particularly aggrieved by Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise, an event he called an “indefensible violation of that compact of peace.” By 1856, party operators even mentioned his name as a possible Republican presidential contender. And during the Civil War, shortly before his death in 1866, Stockton commanded a militia repulsing Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. Nevertheless, throughout the heyday of New Democracy between 1844 and 1854, he remained an important Democrat, infusing antislavery principle into the organization.21 Fellow mariner George Law followed Stockton’s journey to the Republicans, defecting from the Democracy in 1856. That year he pledged “to go for the man who most nearly represents the American sentiment, and the sentiment in relation to Slavery of the freemen of the North, which declares that Slavery is sectional and that Freedom is national.”22 Yet he too remained a loyal antislavery Democrat for many years. One can raise questions about the extent to which Stockton’s colonizationism counted as antislavery dogma. Removing blacks to Africa could function as a racist program designed to rid the United States of an undesirable population. However, in the heated political climate of the late 1840s and early 1850s, colonization represented a moderate compromise solution – indeed, one endorsed by the arch-compromiser Henry Clay, not to mention young Abraham Lincoln. The fact that New Democrats such as Stockton supported colonization illustrates their middling, cohesive role in the sectional crisis. It shows how they kept their party and their country together by adopting moderate positions, and how they continually tried to solve the thorny problem of slavery while remaining within the Democracy for most of the antebellum era. Besides Stockton, other New Democrats adopted colonization as their way of challenging slavery while preserving the Union and the Democracy. Ohio Senator William Allen nurtured connections with the American Colonization Society, and his colleague Edward Hannegan of Indiana presented a petition on behalf of blacks seeking transportation to Africa.23 Following the Mexican War, Allen noted that he supported the Wilmot Proviso and would, if called upon, use his vote to prevent the further expansion of slavery. He also maintained a friendship with Benjamin Tappan and in 1854 spoke out against the KansasNebraska Act and its repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Allen’s mouthpiece, the Ohio State Democrat, criticized Stephen Douglas and presented its patron as a Free Soiler. Allen believed that masters would manumit slaves “when free 21

22 23

New York Daily Times, 6 May 1856, 4; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 333; American National Biography Online, s.v. “Stockton, Robert Field,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/articles/04/04-00960.html (accessed 29 April 2003). Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 344. W. M. Sain to William Allen, 26 June 1845, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Congressional Globe, 30 Congress, 2 Session, 5 January 1849, 162.

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labor becomes cheaper than slave.” He saw no means by which emancipation could be effected except through an appeal to slaveowners’ interests. That day would come, he was certain. He worried, however, that freedmen would flood the North and destabilize free society, a common anxiety among antebellum northerners repulsed by bondage but jealous of their prerogatives as white men. Colonizing ex-slaves in Africa was a solution to this problem.24 Colonization increasingly appealed to George Sanders as well. In the late 1840s, he attempted to create an “Ebony Line” service to transport blacks to Africa. Sanders anticipated the formation of a “colonization party” and thought this solution would unite Democrats on the slavery issue. Sanders’s young son even drew him a map of Liberia and told him that he supported the “Ebony Line,” so it became something of a family project.25 Joining Sanders in these comparatively mild attitudes toward slavery were longtime compatriots Stephen Douglas and August Belmont. Douglas wished to appropriate funds for the American Colonization Society in 1850, specifically for the upkeep of former slaves who had made it back to Africa. Unless Congress allotted money to take care of the freedmen once they reached their “own” shores, it would be impossible to transport African Americans in the future, and the entire scheme would become impractical, he argued. When Douglas had married his first wife (the daughter of a slave owner), her father offered him 150 black slaves, which he refused. After his father-in-law died, followed by other family members and finally by his own wife in 1853, Douglas inherited the family plantations and their slaves. This fell to him by default, and he continued to manage the family’s properties, leading critics to charge that he was a slaveholder. But he argued that he never wanted the slaves because he understood the political liabilities that their ownership entailed in the North.26 August Belmont went further, refusing to recognize slaves as property that could be bought and sold. He did not resist interaction with slave owners, but sought no part in business transactions that would force him to dabble 24

25

26

William Allen to James Johnson, 6 February 1849, Allen Papers; William Allen to Benjamin Tappan, 8 May 1841, 13 May 1845, Benjamin Tappan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Reginald C. McGrane, William Allen: A Study in Western Democracy (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1925), 138; William Allen notebook, [no date], Allen Papers. Anna Sanders to George N. Sanders, 6 August 1850, 6 September 1850, George N. Sanders Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. As an earlier student of Young America wrote, “It should be understood that, although Young America said nothing concerning the freedom of the Negro slave in the South, few of its protagonists thought his bondage a good in itself, as did the more extreme Southern apologists. More national and humanitarian in outlook, Sanders and [William] Corry and most of their associates seem to have accepted slavery as an evil too great to be done away with except by the passage of time. The Young American remedy was colonization, epitomized by Sanders’ work for the Ebony Line.” See Riepma, “Young America,” 131, 326. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 11 September 1850, 1804; Stephen A. Douglas to Charles H. Lanphier, 3 August 1850, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 190; New York Daily Times, 6 October 1854, 3.

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in human bondage. Slave owners who wished to trade with Belmont had to mortgage their slaves and use the resulting money to repay loans to him or otherwise invest in his businesses. Senator David Yulee of Florida was once forced to do this when paying back a loan to Belmont.27 Colonization never became the most extreme or insistent variety of antislavery ideology, and neither did Stephen Douglas’s formula of popular sovereignty. According to Douglas (and the plan’s originator, Senator Lewis Cass), governments of new western territories would themselves decide the status of their domestic arrangements, including whether to allow slavery. Popular sovereignty used majority rule to take the slavery issue out of Congress and into local communities, where American citizens could themselves decide how to run their states. It represented the standard Democratic response to the territorial crisis that erupted after David Wilmot’s Proviso hit the House floor in 1846. Although popular sovereignty has been seen as temporizing with slavery because it allowed local communities to legalize the institution, in the context of the times it represented a moderate political course on the part of New Democrats. Instead of reaching Garrisonian or fire-eating extremes, Young Americans such as Douglas adopted a middle course calculated to end slavery eventually (Douglas thought that much western soil would be naturally unsuited for black bondage, and that the practice would therefore die out peacefully if popular sovereignty were adopted). In other words, New Democrats used the moderate antislavery policies of colonization and popular sovereignty to try to end a social evil while preserving their party and their country. If one accepts these two solutions as mildly antislavery positions (which is how they should be seen given the political context of the 1840s and 1850s), then the strong antislavery tradition within the late-antebellum Democracy becomes apparent. Popular sovereignty, in particular, symbolized a weakening of old Democrats’ proslavery rigidity. By opening up the possibility that local communities could outlaw slavery, Douglas’s idea flew in the faces of southern rights ultras, upholding the power of the federal government (and its offspring, local territorial legislatures) to make law in this realm. This was an important constitutional step, validating northerners’ claims that Washington held legitimate authority to act on slavery. Indeed, the fact that so many southerners despised popular sovereignty, mostly for the reason just cited, suggests how threatening to the expansion of slavery it seemed at the time. In evaluating New Democrats’ antislavery credentials, one must also compare them with their party predecessors of the 1830s, who often held extreme views on the institution. By contrast, dominant Young Americans such as Douglas and Belmont altered what was considered acceptable within the party. Giving ordinary Americans a chance to outlaw slavery was a large step forward from the time when Andrew Jackson’s administration refused to forward abolitionist tracts through the mail. Popular sovereignty served as a wedge that propped open the lid of the antislavery Democracy. Figures such as Douglas 27

David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York: Dial Press, 1981), 183.

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gave it and more assertive forms of antislavery a respected place within the organization. And although historians credit Lewis Cass and Daniel Dickinson with originating this idea, it achieved its widest following in the hands of the young Stephen Douglas. Belmont, Douglas, and Sanders steered a middle course, one that may fail to impress twenty-first-century audiences. But John Wentworth, a New Democrat from Chicago, like Robert Stockton became a full-fledged Free Soiler while remaining in the Democracy for much of the antebellum period. A native of New Hampshire and a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard, Wentworth became, as Douglas once said of himself, “a western man.” Yet he retained New England’s dislike of slavery and endorsed the Wilmot Proviso during the late 1840s. He felt so strongly in favor of the Proviso that he refused to support the bill organizing Utah and New Mexico as territories unless it made them free. Having failed in that attempt, he successfully saw California admitted directly to statehood without slavery. He also attacked the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a key part of that year’s compromise passed by his colleague Stephen Douglas. Wentworth’s dissent from the Compromise of 1850, and his later vote against Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, instigated a breach between the two Illinois Young Americans. Remarkably, given this antislavery history, Wentworth made peace with Douglas and did not waver in his support of the Democracy. He refused to join the Free Soilers and Van Buren in 1848, and he championed the candidacy of his fellow New Hampshirite Franklin Pierce in 1852. “The idea of bolting any nomination, at any time, even the most distant, has never occurred to me,” he declared in 1848. Wentworth pointed to his agreement with Democrats on the issues of river and harbor improvements for the West, Van Buren’s Independent Treasury, and tariff and banking policies as reasons for staying within the party. Not until he ran for mayor of Chicago in 1857 did he become a Republican.28 How can one explain Wentworth’s persistent Democratic loyalty in the face of such strong antislavery convictions? The answer lies in his evaluation of priorities. Like most Young Americans, Wentworth was concerned about issues whose primary champions remained the Democrats, namely foreign expansion and the economic development of his new western home. But just because he stayed in the Democratic Party and focused his energies on different issues does not mean he refrained from vocalizing opposition to slavery. Wentworth continued to steer this middle course through the Civil War: he supported both Abraham Lincoln and the most famous of Democratic Copperheads, Clement Vallandigham. He thus stood in the front lines of New Democrats’ milder approach to the slavery issue: firmly within the confines and traditions of the party, yet unabashedly antislavery.29 28 29

Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 25 July 1848, 2. American National Biography Online, s.v. “Wentworth, John,” http://www.anb.org.ezp1. harvard.edu/articles/04/04-01047.html (accessed 18 April 2003). Also see Don E. Fehrenbacher, Chicago Giant: A Biography of “Long John” Wentworth (Madison, WI: American History Research Center, 1957).

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Even Democrats who lived in the abolitionist bastion of New England toed a fine line between antislavery and Democracy. Never tempted by Garrison and Wendell Phillips, by William Ellery Channing and by Harriet Beecher Stowe, they resented the abolitionist takeover of antislavery and persisted in speaking out against bondage from a Democratic perspective. For example, Marcus Morton was a Massachusetts Democrat who presented a credible antislavery alternative to voters in the Bay State. Adhering early on to the precepts of Jacksonian states’ rights ideology, Morton helped to organize the Democratic coalition in Federalist-Whig Massachusetts. He served for years as a justice on the state supreme court, where he authored the celebrated Charles River Bridge antimonopoly opinion. He also campaigned for governor periodically, serving in that post for two terms by the mid 1840s. Since most Whigs accommodated slavery because of their cotton dependencies to the south, Morton became the only antislavery option for voters who did not wish to reach Garrisonian extremes. Morton’s career exemplifies the counterintuitive nexus between Democracy and antislavery, between rock-solid allegiance to Jacksonianism and equally fervent commitment to ending human bondage.30 In 1837, Morton acknowledged that “for one human being to hold others, whom the Almighty has created his fellows, in bondage, is entirely repugnant to that principle of equality which is founded in religion as well as in natural right.” Slavery, in other words, was a moral evil, detestable from the reasoned perspective of natural rights and democratic equality as well as in terms of Godly design and Christian brotherhood. “It is true, I am, in principle, decidedly opposed to slavery,” he continued. “But I am also equally opposed to all the measures and the whole organization of the Abolition party.” Morton, as a staunch Democrat and a Bay State official, wanted and needed to stay true to the Democracy, although he also felt no qualms about speaking plainly of his antislavery beliefs. “I must go for Free Territory and for Van Buren,” he admittedly vacillated in 1848, “be the consequences what they may. And what I do must be done openly.” Morton firmly held “that Democracy and Slavery were antipodes” and that “Slavery is anti-democratic.” The egalitarian pretensions of the Democratic Party, that is, ought to make slavery indefensible within the organization.31 30

31

Jonathan Earle, “Marcus Morton and the Dilemma of Jacksonian Antislavery in Massachusetts, 1817–1849,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 61–87. Also see Earle’s pathbreaking book on Democratic varieties of antislavery, which proves the importance of Jacksonian reformers to the end of human bondage in the United States: Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. recognized the significance of Democratic antislavery when he singled out leaders such as David Wilmot, Preston King, Hannibal Hamlin, Theodore Sedgwick, and John and Martin Van Buren as key exemplars of this trend (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson [New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 1945], 450–68). Earle, “Marcus Morton,” 74; Marcus Morton to George Bancroft, 26 December 1845, Morton Papers; Marcus Morton to John M. Niles, 25 July 1848, ibid.; Marcus Morton to Seth Whitmarsh, 21 August 1848, ibid.

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As he noted, during the election of 1848 Morton broke with old party friends by refusing to support Cass, the regular Democratic candidate, and siding with Van Buren’s Free Soilers instead. He told Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana that he supported Van Buren for three reasons: his statesmanship and leadership qualities, his free soil sentiments, and his offering the best chance for maintaining Democrats in power. “The radical Democracy will rally for human liberty,” he wrote, “while the conservatives will go for slavery for the sake of the pelf [the spoils]. The Convention which nominated Van Buren was composed of the most pure and radical Democrats in the country; while that which nominated Cass was a packed Convention composed of Old Hunkers.”32 Morton understood the spirit of the Democratic Party as a leveling one (hence he called it “radical”), and therefore thought it should condemn slavery outright. Solicitude for other Democratic positions kept him in the party (excepting the Barnburner revolt of 1848), but his understanding of that party differed from the traditional Jacksonian proslavery view. His lifelong commitment to the Democracy ensured that Morton returned to the party after the election of 1848. He could not pry himself from the group, showing how a principled free soil politico could still remain within the Democracy and steer it toward a more antislavery course. “It is a source of great self congratulation that I never identified myself with the organization of the Free-soil party,” Morton told John Van Buren somewhat disingenuously in 1852. Free Soilers, to him, were mere disappointed office seekers who jumped ship to join a new party for another chance at the spoils. “I love old-fashioned Democracy,” he waxed. “If we expect any progress, or reform, or movement in favor of liberty, we must look to the Democratic party for it. Let us then exert ourselves to improve and purify that party.” Morton thought that abolition would never materialize if entrusted to Whigs or Free Soilers or any other group but the Democrats.33 Much more important, he thought, to stay within the party and reform it than to defect. In 1846, he mentioned New Democrats “Allen, Hannegan, Bright, Breese, Semple, Atchison or Benton” as his allies. Better to reach them with antislavery rhetoric than to become an abolitionist maverick, he believed.34 For Morton, it was not just longtime party experience and devotion to trusted allies that ultimately kept him within the Democracy. Rather, his basic understanding of Democratic ideology led inevitably, in his mind, to antislavery beliefs. Since Democrats represented the moral force of egalitarianism and equal rights, the prerogatives of the laborer and the farmer, they should be the ones also helping the downtrodden slave. Whigs stood, instead, for hierarchy and aristocracy, for exclusivity and privilege. Democratic doctrine thus naturally 32 33 34

Marcus Morton to Jesse Bright, 4 August 1848, ibid.; Marcus Morton to Seth Whitmarsh, 9 August 1848, ibid. Marcus Morton to John Van Buren, 7 February 1852, ibid.; Marcus Morton to Robert Rantoul, 2 April 1852, ibid. Marcus Morton to Benjamin Tappan, 21 April 1846, ibid.

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fed antislavery opinion, he thought. The free soil creed championed by David Wilmot, in particular, comported well with Democratic beliefs about the value of open terrain and manly independence grounded in land ownership. The glorious West must be kept free from slavery as a Jeffersonian birthright for common American citizens. Everything the Democracy meant to Morton, therefore, seemed compatible with antislavery. Since abolitionism remained a marginal, anarchic movement, and since Whigs clung to their hierarchical notions, only Democrats remained to combat slavery sanely and effectively.35 Jacksonian champions of free soil made antislavery rhetoric further fit their Democratic traditions by arguing on the basis of strict construction. They repeated the common formula that slavery remained local while freedom was national. Slavery was a local institution controlled by the states and therefore Congress enjoyed no authority to interfere with it. In attempting to expand slavery westward, however, the South was trying to make its “peculiar institution” a national concern, trumping the national-level priority of liberty. This effort to nationalize slavery flew in the face of southerners’ own claims that bondage was an autonomous local practice, and allowed northern antislavery Democrats to argue against the institution with Jacksonian strict construction reasoning. Instead of egging on the federal government positively to interfere with slavery, as some immediatists wished, Jacksonian free soilers urged the national state to remain aloof as it supposedly always had been, and not suddenly to become involved in the practice of extending slavery outside the South. Democrats in this way argued against slavery on their own traditional strict construction, limited-government terms.36 John O’Sullivan recognized abolitionism as a dangerous political force after the election of 1844. Seeing that the Texas issue threatened to derail two-party politics, he advised readers to take the antislavery menace seriously. This became an especially urgent warning given the foothold antislavery held within the Democracy: the “Democratic portion of Abolitionism,” as O’Sullivan described it. The editor distinguished between abolition, the justifiable and widely held 35

36

For further discussion of the links among Democratic ideology, free soil beliefs, and antislavery, see Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil. Earle traces the Democratic origins of free soil politics, highlighting the existence of a neglected strain of antislavery activism rooted squarely within the Jacksonian tradition. Instead of middle-class, Garrisonian, evangelical, Whiggish antislavery reform, Earle shows that a Democratic, politically oriented antislavery movement emerged in the 1840s, culminating in the election of 1848. Jacksonian antislavery was a political movement that drew on Democratic themes of equal rights and worker’s prerogatives, and on republican traditions of respect for producers and open land. It capitalized on the Jacksonian antimonopoly crusade to suggest equal rights for all white farmers and workers in the new western territories. Epitomized by both state and national free soil insurgencies against the alleged proslavery tint of the Democracy, Jacksonian antislavery came to be represented by figures such as Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, and Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 91; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery, completed and edited by Ward McAfee (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 291.

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desire for an ultimate end to slavery, and abolitionism, the irresponsible political movement wreaking havoc on national politics. Although Democrats like O’Sullivan distrusted immediatists, they nevertheless harbored at least flexible attitudes toward the growing surge of antislavery reform. And they resented the nationalization of the slavery issue by southern extremists led by Calhoun, whose conduct in urging expansion and in supporting the “gag rule” promised to abolitionize the North.37 Observers and constituents noticed this new strain of Democratic free soil. When Georgia Whig Robert Toombs took stock of the northern antislavery threat, he singled out not just the Free Soil Party and the abolitionists, but the two major parties as well. Antislavery, he said, “is also virulent and dangerous both in the Whig and Democratic party at the North.” The Barnburners, antislavery revolts in the Democratic parties of northern states such as New Hampshire and Ohio, and the loosening of proslavery ideology represented by the popular sovereignty doctrine all contributed to Toombs’s judgment.38 “It seems possible to sacrifice too much to the negro juggernaut,” wrote a concerned citizen to Samuel Tilden.39 Americans of the 1840s noted that increasing numbers of northern Democrats cultivated antislavery convictions, culminating in the defection of many to the Know-Nothings and the Republicans following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Through the late 1840s and early 1850s, the basic position of many New Democrats remained a humanitarian concern for the evils of slavery tempered by a shrewd political sense of the destabilizing influence of abolitionism. Slavery, a national sin, had become an intractable problem bequeathed by earlier generations. But to sacrifice the Union and the Democracy with reckless northern ideologies was like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, they believed. Numerous Democrats of the time had not made the transition toward the “positive good” justification of slavery. They attempted to find a gradual political solution to what they in fact did recognize as a moral dilemma. In their minds, opposition to human bondage and continuing faith in the Union were not incompatible.40 Antislavery Democrats came, unsurprisingly, from the North. Southern Young Americans such as George Sanders did not champion an end to black bondage, and they became supporters of the Confederacy after 1861. However, throughout the decade of Young America’s strength, they united with northern New Democrats based on a commitment to issues on which both parts of the movement could agree: territorial expansion, free trade, internal improvements, and intervention in European and Asian affairs. Though Democrats did 37 38 39 40

Democratic Review 16 (Jan. 1845), 3–9; ibid., 16 (Feb. 1845), 107–8. Mr. Soul´e’s Speech at Opelousas, Louisiana, Delivered on the 6th of September 1851 (New Orleans: J. L. Sollee, 1851), 12. E. C. [unknown] to Samuel J. Tilden, 14 March 1846, Tilden Papers. Democratic Review 23 (Nov. 1848), 399–404.

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not concur on slavery, they were able to paper over their differences until the mid 1850s thanks to Young America’s mix of romantic, nationalistic principles. Furthermore, Democrats could find limited common ground on slavery by focusing on colonization, which southerners such as Sanders supported. By the mid 1850s, conditions became too polarized to sustain free soil within the Democratic Party. Stephen Douglas’s passage of the Nebraska bill in 1854, especially, made northern Democrats’ continuance in the party untenable. Robert Stockton, George Law, and John Wentworth moved to the KnowNothing Party and eventually to the Republicans, convinced that eradicating slavery had become the chief concern of their day. Gone from the agenda rather quickly were steam service, western exploration, free trade agreements, and European revolutions. Young America’s moment had passed. In moving to new organizations, they seemed to recognize this, forsaking their earlier faith in the romantic spirit of progress and coming to terms with the need for a purer free soil coalition. They also brought with them into the GOP the Democratic Party’s newfound enthusiasm for state-sponsored economic development and social reform, again showing how the young Democracy operated as a steppingstone for those who eventually joined the Republicans. No overarching trend governed the course of New Democrats, however. Some remained within the Democracy to their dying day, while others became lifelong Republicans. The fates of various young Democratic leaders thus mirrored America’s sectional course throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Samuel Tilden, Stephen Douglas, William Allen, August Belmont, and George Bancroft all remained loyal Unionist Democrats, at the same time that they harbored a dislike for slavery. Still, they appeared reluctant to embrace Lincoln’s emancipation policy. Belmont wished to see a vigorous prosecution of the war to reunite the Union but also wanted to contain its social effects, including the demise of slavery. Bancroft held a similar attitude that veered on overt sympathy for the Confederacy. Pierre Soul´e, Edwin De Leon, John O’Sullivan, and George Sanders supported the Confederacy and became leading diplomats on behalf of the secessionist cause. Sanders worked as a Confederate agent in Europe before his death in 1873, as did O’Sullivan.41 New Democrats thus interpreted antislavery in a variety of ways and with unpredictable results. Northern members of the group advocated solutions ranging from colonization to popular sovereignty to free soil. These positions led a number of them to leave the party and eventually to join the Republicans, while others decided that the Democracy remained the only true home for reform. Still others, such as John O’Sullivan, reneged on their Barnburner free soilism and joined the campaign for southern independence. Southern Young Americans usually did not heed any of these nostra, further splintering the movement as disunion approached. In surveying the end of slavery in the United States, historians should nevertheless grant more agency to free soil Democrats who supported the cause 41

See Widmer, Young America, 204–5, 208.

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during the heyday of Young America. The fact that they do not fit our contemporary notions of morality, or that they calculated Union and antislavery as equal imperatives (as did Lincoln), should not detract from their commitment to ending the “peculiar institution.” Marcus Morton felt as strongly as many abolitionists about the sin of slavery. So concerned was he with how to eradicate it that he pursued the kinds of practical, political solutions that immediatists eschewed: election to state legislatures or Congress, speeches and bills in those bodies, and coalition building within the Democratic Party. For leaders such as Morton and Benjamin Tappan, politics seemed the surest way to uproot black bondage. At the time they thought they were doing more to end slavery than most hands-off abolitionists, who dismissed participation in electoral politics and turned either to pie-in-the-sky idealism or to violence. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he might have looked back to the 1840s and remembered David Wilmot and Benjamin Tappan, not William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.

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8 New Democrats and the Coming of the Civil War

Every student of the antebellum Democracy knows that the party split along sectional lines in 1860. Southern delegates walked out of the national convention following their northern colleagues’ refusal to endorse a federal slave code for the western territories. By that point, the Democracy was ailing, fractured by old divisions between Van Burenites and Calhounites, antislavery Barnburners and secessionist fire-eaters. The handwriting of disunion was on the wall. In the middle, representing the once-unifying spirit of Young America, stood moderate Democrats such as Stephen Douglas, August Belmont, and Jesse Bright. They spoke for a conservative unionism that tried to keep the party and the country together without overreaching constitutional bounds. Stepping into this role was a natural move for the Young Americans, since their ideology had offered an amalgamating rallying cry for the party since the 1840s. Instead of asking why the national Democracy collapsed in 1860, one might instead inquire how it managed to stay together for so long after the rise of sectional turmoil in 1846. This is the more illuminating question, given the sharp factional and sectional fissures that plagued the party during Young America’s apex. New Democracy provides an answer to this question. The attitudes adopted by Young America Democrats kept their organization intact in times of crisis, softening differences by turning Democrats’ eyes toward expansion, foreign intervention, and domestic economic growth. Without the rise of a Young America Democracy, the party (and perhaps the country) might have broken up sooner than 1860. Although one can never know for certain with counterfactual questions, the evidence suggests that Young America unified the organization longer than would have otherwise been possible. This conclusion represents one way in which New Democrats influenced the political realignments of the 1850s and the coming of civil war. The following pages explore how Young America affected the sectional crisis, how in some ways it postponed and in other ways accelerated it. On the whole, New Democrats exercised a positive influence on their party, operating as an 202

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adhesive that glued it together in moments of distress. However, at other times Young Americans introduced divisive issues that ended up leading to secession. Young America Democrats produced an important though ambiguous effect on events leading to the Civil War, and in the final analysis their influence on these crises is a valuable measure of their significance. A Partisan Glue Between 1844 and 1854 Young America rose to its greatest power in the Democratic Party. During that same period, the sectional endgame leading to civil war erupted. Congressman David Wilmot introduced his free soil proviso in 1846, sparking violent debate about the status of slavery in America’s recently acquired territories. Two years earlier the Democracy had almost sundered over bickering between followers of Martin Van Buren and John C. Calhoun. And by 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act began the complicated process that formed the northern Republican Party. Throughout these tumultuous years the ideology of Young America offered a focal point for the Democracy, turning attention to issues that united various members of the party and preventing disunion within the organization (and perhaps without, as well). In order to understand how New Democrats played this important role, one must first appreciate the gravity of the crises facing the party during this tenyear period. The presidential election of 1844 offers a prime example because contemporaries believed that a party breakup was imminent. Acolytes of Van Buren began assuming “an attitude” that would be “fatal” to party harmony, reported the Democratic Review.1 They threatened to bolt the organization if it endorsed a pro-southern ticket headed by Calhoun, rather than nominating Van Buren once again. Such betrayal seemed intolerable given that northern Democrats had waited four years to let Van Buren have his revenge over the Whigs. Conversely, southern Democrats began to see Van Buren as unreliable on slavery, a fear confirmed by his public opposition to Texas annexation. John O’Sullivan worried that Democrats would split over the presidential nomination of 1844, throwing the election into the House of Representatives and auguring yet another “corrupt bargain.” Supporters of Calhoun threatened to leave the Baltimore Democratic convention, in part over a dispute regarding representation and also in case of Van Buren’s nomination.2 “The Texas question threatens to break us up,” reported one operative to George Bancroft. Future Vice President William King of Alabama thought almost apocalyptically about Democrats’ position in 1844. “The prospects of the Democratic Party were never in my opinion more gloomy than now. Discontent, division, despondency, seems to have taken complete [possession] of a large portion 1 2

Democratic Review 13 (July 1843), 100. Ibid., 13 (Oct. 1843), 339–45; ibid., 13 (Nov. 1843), 542–7.

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of our prominent men. . . . We are a doomed party.” What occurred in 1860 seemed, to observers in 1844, imminent.3 On the eve of the general election, O’Sullivan wrote frantically to Van Buren urging him to make a public proclamation sustaining Polk, the compromise candidate endorsed by the Democratic convention. Otherwise, he informed the former president, some of Van Buren’s more zealous supporters would vote Young Hickory down. Van Buren needed to rein in his loyalists, making them see the broader logic of doing what was best for the Democracy, rather than expressing their displeasure at the nominating process. This potential factional split carried clear sectional overtones, as the central tension raged between northern supporters of Van Buren and southern disciples of Calhoun.4 Across the dangerous chasm stepped Young America, in the person of James K. Polk. Young Hickory staked his claim to the presidency on the issue of Texas annexation. This quintessential New Democratic value of territorial expansion ended up saving the Democracy from division in 1844, as both northerners and southerners turned their attention toward western growth. Polk was the first “dark-horse” candidate in the nation’s history, enhancing his defusing effect: party men deliberately brought him forward as a compromise candidate whose lack of prominence could unify various factions of the Democracy. Polk and Texas annexation – a nationally obscure young man and his Young America platform – saved the party at this crucial juncture. The Texas issue certainly remained divisive that year, and geographic expansion was becoming indistinguishable from sectional rancor. But the overall concept of territorial growth was still something around which the party could unite.5 The Polk movement also expressed many Democrats’ desire for a generational change of leadership, one that could draw the party together in a way the Old Fogies could not. In Rochester, an “unprecedented meeting of the Young Democracy” convened citizens who had become eligible to vote since 1840. They assembled a “Young Hickory Hall” and proceeded to declare their “resolution of manhood.” A New York paper observed that we have a mass of young and rising democrats who will and must participate in advocating and enforcing our principles. They are entitled to, and will have, a voice in public 3

4 5

[No name] to George Bancroft, 2 May 1844, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; William R. King to George Bancroft, 12 May 1844, ibid. For background on the perils threatening the Democracy in 1844, and on their equally bright resolution through the nomination of James K. Polk, see James C. N. Paul, Rift in the Democracy (1951; New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1961). John L. O’Sullivan to Martin Van Buren, 28 October 1844, Martin Van Buren Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. See, for example, Eric Foner’s interpretation of the Wilmot Proviso, which suggests that Polk’s territorial ambitions even attracted the northern antislavery wing of the Democracy. This faction, concludes Foner, hatched the Proviso in order to eliminate northern objections to expansion by making new territory free of slavery. Thus its purpose was, paradoxically, to unify the party around a basic Young America goal. See Eric Foner, “The Wilmot Proviso Revisited,” Journal of American History 56 (Sept. 1969): 277–8.

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affairs. . . . The young democracy should not, and will not, be postponed in their usefulness, until the elder members of the party pass off by paying the debt of nature; they should and will be brought into active and useful operation.6

From the beginning of the campaign, therefore, Polk supporters thought selfconsciously of their candidate as fresh blood, as someone who could rise above the petty factional infighting hindering elders such as Van Buren and Calhoun. Van Buren himself, disappointed after not receiving the nomination, publicly affirmed that it “has been subsequently ratified in every possible form by the Democracy of the nation; and . . . I can see no possible ground on which their support can be withheld, by any Democrat who approves of their principles.” Old Andrew Jackson wrote from the Hermitage that Polk’s nomination would “secure the harmony and concert of action, necessary to bring the whole party into the field.” Like a shot in the arm, Polk’s young Democratic candidacy forced new issues including Manifest Destiny onto the table, focused partisan attention on generational consciousness, and prevented the Van Buren-Calhoun schism from destroying the organization.7 Once elected, Polk took his role as party unifier seriously. He warned members of his cabinet that “if they do not attend more to the general interest & demands of the democratic party, he will take the reins into his own hands.”8 Polk “was desirous of having a cabinet of which every member would be already a man of national portion,” wrote John O’Sullivan.9 When distributing patronage, the new president tapped both the southern and northern branches of the Democracy. Signs abounded that his work was having the desired effect, bringing together warring parts of the party into one nationalistic administration. In Massachusetts, for example, Polk proved acceptable to both factions of the Democracy: the antislavery types led by state Supreme Court Justice Marcus Morton and the more doughfaced Hunkers such as editor David Henshaw.10 In Boston, George Bancroft’s presence in a sensitive patronage post quieted intra-Democratic tensions threatening to spin out of control. The effect was similar to that produced by the election of Polk himself, in which a Young American committed to nationalistic principles brought together discordant 6

7 8

9 10

The Democratic Campaign, 5 October 1844, 4; New York Evening Post, 17 July 1844, 2. For another example of how the slogan “Young Democracy” became a political catchphrase during and after the campaign of 1844, see William S. Allen to Caleb Cushing, 10 January 1845, Caleb Cushing Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Martin Van Buren to John L. O’Sullivan, 30 October 1844, Van Buren Papers; New York Evening Post, 27 June 1848, 2. Jonathan H. Earle, “The Undaunted Democracy: Jacksonian Antislavery and Free Soil, 1828– 1848” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton Univ., 1996), 269; also see the book version of Earle’s dissertation, published as Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004); Samuel Medary to Martin Van Buren, 22 May 1845, Van Buren Papers; James K. Polk to James Buchanan, 17 February 1845, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. John L. O’Sullivan to Martin Van Buren, 1 March 1845, Van Buren Papers. Earle, “Undaunted Democracy,” 269.

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elements. Marcus Morton praised Bancroft for reconciling “hostile elements of political strife” while serving as collector of the port of Boston. In part, this was due to the public image Bancroft cultivated by virtue of his historical writings, which tended to be triumphalist narratives of the growth of American democracy. Someone identified with such grand principles – with the Young America manner of practicing politics, that is – made party factionalism seem trivial and united Democratic elements that otherwise could not work together. Franklin Pierce praised Bancroft for bringing “concert, harmony, [and] enthusiasm to the party.”11 Polk’s inaugural address reinforced the Young American themes that enabled him and Bancroft to heal the party. He felt humbled for being “honored with this distinguished consideration at an earlier period of life than any of my predecessors.” Forty-nine years old when delivering his speech, Polk appreciated the precarious yet exhilarating sense of his administration as a youthful experiment. “If the more aged and experienced men who have filled the office of President of the United States even in the infancy of the Republic distrusted their ability to discharge the duties of that exalted station, what ought not to be the apprehensions of one so much younger?” The new president sounded traditional Jacksonian notes of strict construction and limited government, though he reminded his fellow citizens that the federal regime exercised sovereignty in the realm of foreign affairs. Polk’s administration showed that this reminder was not a minor admonition, but an important means by which New Democrats enhanced federal power and projected their ambitions outward. Young Hickory reveled in the peace and prosperity of the American Union since 1815. Great minds now invented stunning technologies and means of harnessing nature to the happiness of humankind, while American trade increased throughout the world. The United States had become more equal and democratic than at any other time in its short history. Polk also spoke more cautiously, warning Americans to persist in the spirit of sectional compromise that infused their Constitution. He repeated the Young American logic of territorial expansion, according to which Americans sought voluntary new members to share in the liberty of their confederation, not imperialistic aggrandizement by military channels. As we have seen in Chapter 5, Democrats betrayed this promise by conquering Mexico officially and infiltrating other parts of Latin America privately. Polk’s address did not anticipate this failure, instead continuing in a romantic vein. Recent decades showed that America could remain a republic while expanding its size, refuting Montesquieu’s idea that free government could exist only in circumscribed locales. Hence the road to expansion lay open, Polk concluded. For the rest of his address, he told listeners why Texas should be part of the Union and prepared them for the acquisition of the trans-Mississippi West that defined his tenure.12 11 12

Marcus Morton to Martin Van Buren, 7 December 1840, Van Buren Papers; Franklin Pierce to George Bancroft, 4 June 1844, Bancroft Papers. James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 11 vols. (New York: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1897–1908), IV, 373–82. On Polk in the

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If James Polk’s nomination and election mended a lurking schism within the Democracy, the new president could not focus attention on the Young American issue of expansion forever. Indeed, by pressing forward on western growth Polk brought the country closer to sectional feuds involving the status of slavery in those new territories. By the election of 1848, the therapeutic effect of his presidency on the party had faded, and intra-Democratic squabbles once again took center stage. This time New Democrats could not bind up the party’s wounds, and northern antislavery members followed Van Buren out of the party. The Barnburner revolt of 1848 was the one time in their history that Young Americans could not maintain party integrity. Portents of a schism had floated through the air since at least 1844, when Van Burenites and Calhounites threatened to bolt if their opponents obtained the presidential nomination. As noted previously, however, the spirit of Young America kept the party together during that crisis, so that a consensus candidate pledged to territorial expansion (Polk) provided a way out of the partisan morass. Between 1844 and 1848, however, war with Mexico made northern Democrats like Van Buren increasingly uncomfortable with the allegedly prosouthern tint of their party. If Texas annexation seemed a proslavery gambit that Van Buren could not abide while still maintaining northern support, the annexation of Mexican territory appeared even more to be the handiwork of the Slave Power. Coupled with President Polk’s soft stance on the Oregon question, in which he negotiated a compromise with England that did not give the United States all of this future free-state territory, it seemed as though the Democracy had become untenably southern. And once young David Wilmot presented his legendary amendment to a war appropriations bill in 1846, it seemed only a matter of time before the party divided. In 1848, the conflict broke into the open, as antislavery Democrats including Wilmot left the party and nominated Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, Sr. under the Free Soil banner. The renegades, led by the progressive Barnburner or “radical” Democrats of New York, could no longer stomach pandering to Dixie’s master class. Regular Democrats charged that Van Buren and company were merely indulging their hunger for office and exacting vengeance on a party that would not nominate him in 1844. Free Soilers claimed that Democrats had sold their soul to the Slave Power and that they were the ones fulfilling revered party principles of freedom and fair play.13 Democratic splintering allowed Zachary Taylor to win the White House in 1848. Between then and the next presidential election, a gradual process of reconciliation ushered Barnburners back into the party. And once again a New Democrat played a pacifying role in the rapprochement. Stephen Douglas steered a moderate course between 1848 and 1852, using the popular

13

1840s, see, among many secondary sources, Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1987) and Charles G. Sellers, James K. Polk, Continentalist, 1843–1846 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966). Contemporary discussion of the 1848 Barnburner revolt can be found in the Democratic Review 23 (July 1848), 3–12 and ibid., 23 (Aug. 1848), 97–108.

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sovereignty formula as a way to balance the antislavery Barnburners with the more proslavery regular or Hunker Democrats. The Democratic Review thus noted Douglas’s “prominent position . . . in relation to the union not only of the States, but of the Democracy.” James Buchanan testified to Douglas’s unifying effect in 1851, while the dethroned Democracy was plotting its next pounce. He predicted that, should Douglas win support for the 1852 nomination, the “feud between the Rival Houses of Montague & Capulet, the Barnburners & the Hunkers[,] will be ‘in the deep bosom of the ocean buried.’”14 Douglas and his New Democrats thought the younger generation could put aside their elders’ factional quarrels and reunite the party on the principles of Young America. If Democrats would merely turn to the young men around them, they could recreate the integrated core that would lead them to victory. Douglas approved this call for dropping “the older politicians altogether and tak[ing] younger men, who better represent the spirit of the time.” One Barnburner asked, “Suppose the [Democracy] should . . . nominate men of this generation?” “All the young democrats” and perhaps even “young whigs” might then rally together. The secret to a strong Democratic future, one that might even attract wavering members of the opposition, lay in the next generation.15 Poised for battle and reunited around their youth, Democrats looked forward to the presidential contest of 1852. As in 1844, a dark-horse Young American provided the answer to bitter personal and factional wrangling that threatened to upend the party. Once again, too, New Democrats praised the glories of younger men as their solution to party disagreements. A journalist present at the Democratic national convention in Baltimore that year characterized the Young Americans there as opposed to old men, old fogies, old principles, and in favor of new men, young fogies, new measures, and new principles, including the great measure of the extension of the area of the republic in every direction, and the great principle of intervention in every quarter of the world, wherever the cause of liberty may demand it. The mass of this branch of the democracy is from the Northwest.

They seemed to have a good chance of nominating their candidate, Senator Stephen Douglas, because a tremendous outside pressure is operating in favor of [him]. . . . Steamship men are for Douglas, and some of them are here. The Cuba men, in and out of the convention, are all for Douglas. . . . A large proportion of extreme Southern men are for Douglas, under the same idea . . . and Young America is for him, because he is one of them – is with them, if necessary, even to the liberation of Hungary by an invasion of Russia and Austria.16

14 15 16

Ibid., 28 (June 1851), 566; James Buchanan to William L. Marcy, 30 September 1851, William L. Marcy Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. [Illegible] to John Van Buren, 19 June 1848, Samuel J. Tilden Papers, New York Public Library. New York Herald, 3 June 1852, 1.

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Efforts to unleash a “Young Democracy” took flight outside the convention hall too. George Sanders, the new editor of the Democratic Review, assembled lists of young Democrats who would sustain this vision for the party, while Stephen Douglas accepted countless pledges of support from the “young Democracy” nationwide. In Columbus, Ohio, a Young Democrats’ club sprouted in mid 1852, determined to see Franklin Pierce through to victory (both Douglas and Pierce were young candidates, and both drew endorsements from New Democrats). Local citizens then erected a Young Hickory pole, poleraising being a routine political custom among party operatives seeking to rouse their following. Speaking of a party convention in Ohio, one paper recorded the presence of the “old democracy” and noted that “the young democracy were here also, full of zeal and energy.”17 A rank-and-file Democrat from Missouri hoped “that old Fogyism will not be in the ascendant in Pierce’s cabinet.” He continued: “The Democratic principles of the party have become, in a measure, obscured by the selfishness of the old men, and heretofore leaders, and many of them no doubt would gladly see the party prostrated rather than successful with younger men at the helm. . . . These men are but fetters on the young and vigorous limbs of Democracy.”18 The way to preserve the Democracy as a unified organization and to elevate it to victory as a successful one lay in the younger politicians and editors knocking on the doors of public office. When members of the “young Democracy” met at Tammany Hall in late October 1852, they made clear that Pierce was one of them. On his election rode the fortunes of American destiny, the commercial and territorial growth that God had supposedly ordained for the most blessed nation on the earth. Unable to attend, Senator Robert J. Walker of Mississippi sent a letter praising the “spirit now animating the democratic young men of America, which has augmented our States from thirteen to thirty-one.” He thanked the young Democrats for ensuring that “the retrogressive policy of our opponents can never prevail” and urged them on to victory in the upcoming election. Thomas Dorr, leader of Rhode Island’s enfranchisement “revolution” ten years earlier, congratulated the group on its newfound ascendancy. And even Old Fogies such as James Buchanan wrote letters to the meeting, showing that they understood the influence of Young America on the party and were eager to tap its dynamism for their own political benefit. Young Democrats ended up taking Pierce as their standard-bearer and saw 1852 as the apex of their sway in party councils. At age forty-eight, Pierce was the youngest president the United States had ever elected. Apart from his youth, he also brought with him a thankfully 17

18

M. R. H. Garnet to George N. Sanders, 17 April 1851, George N. Sanders Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; Thomas Richardson to Stephen A. Douglas, 16 September 1851, Stephen A. Douglas Papers, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago; J. B. Hayne to Stephen A. Douglas, 8 April 1852, ibid.; Ohio Statesman, 12 August 1852, 2, 17 September 1852, 2; New York Evening Post, 14 January 1853, 1. D. M. Armstrong to Stephen A. Douglas, 12 January 1853, Douglas Papers.

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slim political record from the sectional stalemate of the late 1840s, thus making him palatable to a variety of factions.19 No partisan took the rhetoric of Young America more seriously that year than George Sanders, previously occupied in Europe and now editor of the Democratic Review. During the period leading up to the national convention in Baltimore, Sanders launched into blistering critiques of established Democratic politicians: “We declare that the young democracy, either in its principles or its action, has no connection either in blood, policy, consanguinity or look, with those antiquated, stiff-cravated personages, who have hitherto regarded themselves as the owners of the democratic party, as the holders of the key of its principles.” As the campaign season wore on Sanders became progressively more exercised, personally insulting Democratic stalwarts including John C. Breckinridge, Benjamin F. Butler, and Lewis Cass, whom he accused of holding no principles. Breckinridge had delivered a speech attacking the new temper of the Review and urging restraint on the spirit of progress, which Sanders exploited to label him an Old Fogy. As for Cass, he once supported the dethroned French regime of Louis-Philippe. All, said Sanders, once groveled at the feet of Andrew Jackson like parasites, waiting for the spoils which they now still held to be their due. Sanders specifically defined an Old Fogy as a “solemnly fat old gentleman” who “owns the party, who has claims upon the country. . . . The man who fought in Mexico, and thinks he is a big gun, therefore, in politics.” Sanders boasted at his takeover of what had previously been, he said, a boring and corrupt journal that placated party elders. He ridiculed the “political portraits with pen and pencil” series that for years graced the Review with short biographies of leading Democrats. The new guard wanted to “avoid any comparison between the present management of the Review, and the principles upon which it had been previously conducted.” In sum, within a few short months of taking over, Sanders had insulted the entire Democratic establishment. He did endorse Douglas, saying he had no family heritage to decipher, no corrupt practices to indict, and no gentlemanly bearing to contrast with the spirit of young Democracy. Douglas hailed from the western frontier and could be chosen as the candidate of “Young America.” In supporting Douglas and virtually criminalizing the actions of other Democratic regulars, Sanders made 1852 a climactic political year during which the most extreme New Democrats thought they might gain control of the party for good.20 19 20

New York Herald, 31 October 1852, 1. Democratic Review 30 (March 1852), 202–24; ibid., 30 (April 1852), 366–84. Sanders may not have composed much of this invective himself, but delegated it to sympathetic writers such as the politician-editors William M. Corry of Ohio and John L. O’Sullivan of New York. By 1852, he nevertheless owned the magazine and directed its overall editorial policy. See Siert F. Riepma, “Young America: A Study in American Nationalism Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Western Reserve Univ., 1939), 172; W. Grandin to Stephen A. Douglas, 7 February 1852, Douglas Papers. The stubborn insistence characterizing Sanders’s public life presents a surprising contrast with his poignant private and domestic dealings, in which he appears as a

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Sanders’s critique of the Review’s previous incarnation indicates, again, the self-contradiction and controversy surrounding the Young America label. For Sanders, it obviously represented something very different than it had for O’Sullivan. Because various New Democrats continually disagreed about the meaning of Young America, cherry-picking the policies they thought it suggested, New Democracy remains a lax form of consciousness that permeated different parts of the Democracy quite inconsistently. Sanders not only chided O’Sullivan, but eventually even Douglas himself. He sabotaged Douglas’s nomination through his vitriol, and even when Douglas specifically asked him to stop the carping, Sanders could not resist. Douglas earlier thought that “entire confidence can be placed in his discretion,” but he learned his lesson and tried to hold him in check. The fiery editor dashed off a letter to his favorite, charging that “the fogy atmosphere of Washington makes cowards of you all.”21 Even though Sanders repudiated John O’Sullivan’s earlier stewardship of the Review, he nevertheless maintained O’Sullivan’s commitment to fresh perspectives, heterodox party challenges, and reverence for the younger members of the organization. Both O’Sullivan and Sanders pressed against the established boundaries of the Democracy and tried to create conditions under which new political thinking could flourish. This common purpose was obscured, however, by the staggering stylistic differences between the two men. Where O’Sullivan had been gentle, cerebral, and prudent, Sanders was brash, impatient, and confrontational. Reactions to Sanders’s diatribes varied. Some applauded him for having “killed off all the ‘Old Fogies’” and bringing “‘Young America’ . . . on the track.”22 But elder statesmen bitterly resented him. They had served the Democracy faithfully for years, as James Gadsden wrote, but now had “to be postponed” by the premature pretensions of a Boyish Democracy – In more antient [sic] times the wisdom of ages and of experience had its just claims, but in these days of disorganization & fanatical progress, those who have scarcely passed through the “horn books” of Democracy; are to be placed in positions; for which neither education or experience have prepared them; while others are to claim advancement, by appeals as derogatory to individual respect as to the interests of our Country & Institutions, which are to be protected.23

Revising the party’s seniority system to accommodate brash Young Americans challenged the orderly course of political careers to which professional politicians had become accustomed during the Jacksonian era. One confidante of

21

22 23

gentle spirit. This is documented by several remarkable letters between him and his wife, Anna, in the Sanders Papers. Stephen A. Douglas to Robert M. T. Hunter, 6 May 1851, in Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1961), 218; George N. Sanders to Stephen A. Douglas, 11 February 1852, Douglas Papers. B. Peyton to George N. Sanders, 28 August 1852, Sanders Papers. James Gadsden to James Buchanan, 14 April 1852, Buchanan Papers.

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Samuel J. Tilden associated the efforts of a “young democracy” with apostasy. For him, it meant giving office to junior Democrats who had not paid their dues, rather than to operatives who served long and hard on behalf of the organization. Caleb Cushing, Massachusetts’ leading Hunker Democrat, thought Sanders’s course unwise and injurious to the party.24 Affronted by endless personal insults from Sanders, Congressman John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky lashed out at “Judge Douglas” and suggested that he underhandedly held the reins of the Democratic Review. Breckinridge implied that the invective spewed by his fellow Kentuckian George Sanders was in fact the handiwork of Douglas. He warned party members that Sanders was diverting the Review from its original, more aloof or literary, purpose. It was never meant to become an ordinary campaign sheet, said Breckinridge accurately, but was intended to rival the Whigs’ North American Review as an organ of polite letters showcasing Democratic high culture. Now under new management, it turned into a partisan rag as fiery as the ordinary dailies. What was worse, it targeted leaders within the Democracy itself rather than the opposition.25 Charges also flew that the big steamship companies controlled Douglas, not an unreasonable speculation given Sanders’s closeness with New York steam executive George Law.26 Douglas’s sidekick in the House, William Richardson, rose to his defense and assured his colleagues that Douglas did not control Sanders and dabbled in no unseemly interests. This was only partially true, for Douglas had known about and subsidized Sanders’s effort to purchase the Review, even if he began to demur once the tenor of his impulsive prot´eg´e’s first articles became apparent. By insulting prominent members of the Democracy, Sanders thus hurt Young America’s cause. Douglas’s association with Sanders cost him his candidacy in 1852, although Franklin Pierce also displayed affinity with the New Democrats once he won the nomination. Indeed, Sanders endorsed Pierce soon after the Baltimore convention, giving him a Young America gloss early on.27 He made his Washington home a headquarters for Pierce and Young America. Ohio politician and editor William Corry, Tennessee Congressman William Polk, John O’Sullivan, South Carolina writer Edwin De Leon, and Pierre Soul´e became just a few of the New Democrats holding court at his residence, plotting their way into the new administration. One Douglas supporter viewed “the nomination of Gen. Pierce as a . . . triumph of Young America, and the end of old fogies and old fogyism forever.”28 24 25 26 27 28

John B. Scott to Samuel J. Tilden, 19 January 1846, Tilden Papers; Stephen A. Douglas to Caleb Cushing, 4 February 1852, in Letters of Douglas, 237–8. Congressional Globe, 32 Congress, 1 Session, 10 March 1852, 710–14. Roy F. Nichols, The Democratic Machine, 1850–1854 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1923), 110–11; George N. Sanders to Stephen A. Douglas, 3 February 1852, Douglas Papers. Democratic Review 30 (June 1852), 481–92. James M. Morgan to Stephen A. Douglas, 7 June 1852, Douglas Papers; Riepma, “Young America,” 271–2.

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As in 1844, Douglas’s campaigning, Pierce’s selection, and the deployment of Young America unified a fractured organization and prevented it from spinning out of control. Had the Democracy divided sectionally in 1852, serious repercussions for the integrity of the Union would have been involved. It was no accident that secession emerged the year after the Democrats finally split in 1860; partisan division sparked disunion, since America’s political parties had long tied together divergent regional interests. In other words, the stakes of a party rift in 1852 were high, as was its probability. By focusing attention on the younger generation and on New Democratic issues such as expansion and involvement in European republicanism, Young Americans kept their organization together at a critical juncture. One can gain an appreciation for this unifying influence by examining the comments made in 1852 about Stephen Douglas, early on the presumptive nominee of Young America. From New York came word that both Barnburners and Hunkers, those obstinately estranged Democratic factions, could agree upon his candidacy. In Pennsylvania, too, Douglas heard that “my name would unite the Party.” Much of this information comprised the usual pandering to a possible candidate, and the wishful thinking of an ambitious politician. “None but friends write to me,” he admitted. But Douglas, as a spokesman for the New Democracy, truly did have the ability to unite the party in a way that no one else, until Pierce appeared, could.29 As in the case of James K. Polk – and, after Douglas lost the contest, Franklin Pierce – the Little Giant could heal the party because of his youth and relative lack of political baggage. He felt a keen sense of generational consciousness as he prepared his bid for 1852 and thought that his youth could produce a new golden age for the Democracy. “I am young and can afford to wait,” he confided to a Boston editor. Others, “whose age will not allow them to wait,” will seek the presidency as well. These others were James Buchanan, William Marcy, and Lewis Cass, the usual cast of old Democrats. Douglas was only thirty-nine when he wrote this. To have won the presidency at such an age would have been remarkable; to run for the office was almost as unusual.30 “The country in which we live is a young country,” observed one newspaper. “The age in which we move is a new age; our democracy is a young democracy.”31 And it ended up choosing Franklin Pierce, a more obscure young Democrat than Douglas, though one with the same unifying power over the organization. Democrats were overjoyed by the strong rebuke that Pierce delivered to Winfield Scott in November. The Whigs seemed moribund as their candidate captured only four states (254 versus 42 electoral votes), although he garnered 29 30

31

Stephen A. Douglas to William J. Brown, 21 June 1851, in Letters of Douglas, 227; Stephen A. Douglas to George N. Sanders, 12 July 1851, ibid., 228. Stephen A. Douglas to George Roberts, 8 September 1851, ibid., 231; Fred A. Snyder to Stephen A. Douglas, 14 October 1851, Douglas Papers; M. A. Daly to Stephen A. Douglas, 14 January 1852, ibid. Illinois State Register, 10 February 1852, 2.

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44% of the popular vote as opposed to Pierce’s 51%. Rounding out the canvass was Free Soil candidate John P. Hale with 5% of the popular vote. Whig inability to attract Free Soilers to Scott, coupled with southern anxiety about Scott’s possibly pro-northern policies, cost them the election. Conversely, the return to the party of Barnburner Democrats, who in 1848 had bolted for Free Soil, sealed Pierce’s victory. Democratic unity, a fruit of Young America, was the order of the day. The voters’ verdict of 1852 allowed New Democrats finally to leave the earlier history of their party in the dust. It allowed them to leave “even old Hickory himself, in the back ground” and charge forward with their reformatted organization. “This is a revolution,” the New York Herald thundered, “a great, significant, and genuine revolution. . . . We shall look to General Pierce’s administration for a domestic policy and a foreign policy which shall not only promote the internal glory and prosperity of the Union, but the extension of its power and influence among the nations of the earth.”32 An Old Fogy still slinking around, former Secretary of State James Buchanan, felt the mood of the country and predicted that Pierce would tap no members of previous Democratic administrations for service in his own cabinet. “‘Old things have passed away & all things have become new,’” he wrote despondently.33 Buchanan’s prediction proved somewhat accurate, at least for the next four years. Pierce did pick old Democrats like Marcy for key cabinet positions, though he also facilitated New Democrats’ project of European intervention through his bold diplomatic appointments. By trying to appease all factions of the party, however, Pierce seriously damaged his ability to govern. In order to massage factionalism into coherence and direction, therefore, he set a youthful tone for his administration from the beginning, harping on trademark Young America policies in his inaugural address of March 1853. Celebrating the persistence of the federal Union since the precarious days of the early republic, Pierce dwelled on the growing population, territory, and natural resource use driving the country through the nineteenth century. He promised not to be “controlled by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion,” though he insisted that his administration would obtain new land “through no grasping spirit.” If America’s history remained “limited,” Pierce continued, “your future is boundless. Its obligations throng the unexplored pathway of advancement, and will be limitless as duration.” New England’s Young Hickory called for increased commercial ties both in the western hemisphere and beyond. He hinted at Young Americans’ desire for European intervention by suggesting that the prospect of increased commerce could be used as political leverage on the Continent. He repeated the Monroe Doctrine, warning the Old World against all attempts at “interference or colonization.” Pierce noted a by-then almost-ritualistic adherence to the “finality” of the Compromise of 1850 and 32 33

New York Herald, 3 November 1852, 4. James Buchanan to George Bancroft, 8 January 1853, Bancroft Papers.

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an end to sectional agitation. “I believe that involuntary servitude, as it exists in different States of this confederacy, is recognized by the Constitution.” Again, most of these statements were quintessentially Young American unifying themes that cemented a fraying Democratic coalition together once again. Following the turmoil of 1848 and the Barnburner revolt, the party wisely turned toward a young Democrat for reconciliation.34 Democrats’ ability to rally around a Young America candidate prevented party factionalism and sectional tension from spiraling out of control. Young America acted as a glue touching Barnburners and Hunkers, Van Burenites and Calhounites, northerners and southerners. Because voters and activists could unite around the values defining Pierce’s candidacy – expansion, commercial growth, American empire – bitter disputes remained contained for several more years. The spirit of Young America, embodied in Pierce’s nomination as in Polk’s, forestalled Democratic splintering.35 And, as in the case of Polk’s election, the likelihood of Democratic collapse had seemed high before the nominations. Disaffected southern Democrats threatened to launch a separatist movement in states ranging from Alabama to Arkansas, for instance. This “Southern Rights” insurgency endorsed George Troup of Georgia for president and archfilibuster John Quitman as his lieutenant, though it ultimately fizzled. South Carolina, perennial thorn in the side of presidential administrations, threatened to throw its votes away if an unsuitable Democratic candidate emerged from the party’s Baltimore convention. Pierce encountered much difficulty in leading this fractured group, though as a good Young American he tried as best he could to balance competing branches within the organization.36 Faced with divisions, desperate to retake the White House after the debacle of 1848, and haunted by memories of near-collapse in both 1844 and 1848, Democrats knew they needed a unifying figure. “Wanted – A man to suit all tastes, Principles, measures, parties, colors,” wrote George Sanders.37 Once they found their man, Franklin Pierce, they seemed delighted, even surprised, by how completely party discord subsided. “General Pierce was taken up as a compromise candidate, on whom the friends of the different candidates could unite in harmony and good feeling,” rejoiced one paper. “No dissenting voices are heard,” wrote an anonymous author. “The Democratic ranks are better agreed than ever before.” As one filibustering friend of John Quitman wrote, the Young America values of territorial expansion and republican government were “higher and more important than any party question[s].” When they 34

35

36 37

Inaugural Address, 4 March 1853, Franklin Pierce Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. On the revived spirit of Young America during the early Pierce Administration, also see the Washington Sentinel, 19 November 1853, and passim. Michael F. Holt, “The Democratic Party, 1828–1860,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties, 4 vols. (New York: Chelsea House, 1973), I, 525; Nichols, Democratic Machine, 169–220. Edwin De Leon to Franklin Pierce, 21 September 1852, 16 October 1852, Pierce Papers; James Gadsden to James Buchanan, 13 May 1852, Buchanan Papers. Democratic Review 30 (July 1852), 64.

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turned to the new generation, in 1852 no less than in 1844, Democrats enjoyed harmony and success.38 As Sanders noted in the Review, “The ‘fires of sectional strife’ are what have burnt asunder the bands of the democratic party. New ties are to be woven, new harmonies revealed.” The fact that the Baltimore convention voted through an unprecedented 49 ballots, enduring deadlock after deadlock, showed how badly splintered Democrats had become. And the fact that Pierce’s nomination then proved, as the New York Herald put it, “nearly unanimous” showed how crucial the spirit of Young America was to maintaining party unity.39 “There was a general feeling of unanimity on the part of the convention,” reported the Herald with satisfaction. Coming out of the gathering, Pierce uttered his own best campaign slogan: “No North, no South, no East, no West under the Constitution; but a sacred maintenance of the common bond and true devotion to the common brotherhood.” “[Pierce’s] record is faultless,” wrote a party operative privately. “His principles and the practice of his life are in strict accordance with the sentiment he has uttered, ‘No North, no South no East no West.’”40 Florida Senator David Yulee put sectional tensions behind him as soon as Pierce won the election: “With all who now make no war upon southern institutions, and who are united in the support of democratic principles, I am brother.”41 “General Pierce is a good man and a young man – a representative of ‘Young America,’ but a discreet one,” editorialized the Herald. “If all the sections of the party unite warmly together (which is now highly probable), [Pierce] will beat General Scott most terribly before the intelligent democracy of this free country.”42 This is precisely what happened, and New Democrats’ unification of an embattled Democracy had everything to do with it. Pierce was a young candidate and committed to the unifying Young America platform of territorial growth, international engagement, and free trade. His inauguration began “a new epoch – a new departure in the bearings of the ship of State – and a positive, emphatic, and courageous and dignified foreign policy, in the place of the repudiated stand-still neutrality policy of the late [Fillmore] administration.”43 An Arkansas friend of John Quitman demonstrated how the Young America administration of Pierce kept the party – and maybe even the country – from 38

39 40

41 42 43

New York Herald, 7 June 1852, 1; Ohio Statesman, 29 July 1852, 2; John Marshall to John Quitman, 18 September 1854, John A. Quitman Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Also see George W. Lamar to Stephen A. Douglas, 12 June 1852, Douglas Papers. Democratic Review 30 (Feb. 1852), 130; New York Herald, 7 June 1852, 1. New York Herald, 7 June 1852, 1; Albany Argus, 25 July 1852, 2; Roy F. Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 220; R. M. Johnson to George N. Sanders, 23 July 1852, Sanders Papers. Also see George Bancroft to Franklin Pierce, 7 June 1852, Pierce Papers. David L. Yulee to Stephen A. Douglas, 5 February 1853, 8 February 1853, Douglas Papers. New York Herald, 6 June 1852, 2. Ibid., 6 March 1853, 4. The Herald’s editor, James Gordon Bennett, further applauded “the principles and policies which have already produced a salutary effect in Europe” (James Gordon Bennett to Franklin Pierce, 15 December 1852, Pierce Papers).

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dividing sectionally. He first noted his readiness to support southern rights and his impatience with sectional politics. “My health is no better than when I saw you last,” he wrote Quitman, “but I am able to pull a trigger, and nothing would give me more satisfaction than to pull one on an abolitionist.” But then the man changed tone and expressed admiration for President Pierce, whom he had long distrusted. The president’s “recent message to Congress is so able a document – so full of patriotic and statesmanlike views as regards our foreign relations, so entirely sound conservative and conclusive in its arguments on the subject of slavery, that I can not withhold my vote for him [if he were to run again].” Pierce’s Young America principles – a desire for territorial expansion, an attempt to avoid the divisive slavery question, a willingness to welcome dissident Democrats back into the party – brought a fire-eating southerner to the point of supporting a northern politician still. Because of the principles espoused nationally by a northern New Democrat, even a southern extremist could keep a place in the party for the time being. Pierce could have focused on classist or sectional issues, the types of questions dominant in the mid 1830s and late 1840s. But the fact that he instead concentrated on New Democratic preoccupations cemented partisans from all parts of the country to his coalition.44 A critic might argue that the only reason southern ultras such as this writer supported northern Democrats including Pierce is because the latter remained pliant doughfaces, beholden to the will of the South. Indeed, Pierce’s sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act made him seem like a Slave Power lackey. But doughfaced northern Democrats were not just southern appeasers; they usually held long-term policy positions that transcended sectional politics. This is true for Douglas as well as Pierce. For example, both men hungered for a return to the expansionist spirit of the 1840s, and Pierce attempted to annex Cuba for this reason. Douglas wished to complete the building of a transcontinental railroad, and Pierce aided him by overseeing the purchase of additional Mexican territory under James Gadsden in 1853. American nationalism, not sectionalism, undergirded these desires. In other words, to write Pierce off merely as a southern appeaser is to miss much of the motivation that led him to act in certain ways regardless of southern demands. It was this complex of Young American ideals – expansion, growth, transportation – that kept his party together, at least for a time. Certainly, Pierce’s early patronage policies needlessly damaged administration unity. And many northern Democrats bolted the party in autumn 1854 because of the Kansas-Nebraska fiasco. But before those crises and even after them, having a president committed to the consensus principles of the 1840s kept the party, and the Union, healthier than they might otherwise have been. New Democrats testified to this effect explicitly. For instance, in 1850 Samuel Tilden explained why the Democracy and the Union were able to stay together. 44

R. M. Gaines to John A. Quitman, 5 February 1856, Quitman Papers. Also see Thomas Harney to John A. Quitman, 3 May 1856, ibid.

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“The idea of American nationality – progress and destiny – is the masterthought in the minds of our people, and creates a tendency to unity in the govt. quite strong enough,” he wrote. That is, the widely recognized impulsion to follow providence would bring Americans of varying stripes together. Following Young America to national greatness meant continued cohesion. But unity was not just the result of letting Manifest Destiny run its course. It was also a prerequisite for American success. Tilden thought “that the Union is an essential condition to the destiny we appear appointed to fulfil [sic].” Thus, in order to achieve their God-ordained glory, Americans needed to start united, and their success would also reinforce and uphold their bonds. Young American Democratic nationalism remained crucial to this cycle.45 Renowned Stockbridge jurist Theodore Sedgwick made the link between Democratic integrity and perpetual Union clear when he wrote of his “very strong wish to see the Democratic Party kept right side up & the Union kept together.” For antebellum Democrats, these concepts went hand-in-hand.46 From the South, Georgia Democrat Howell Cobb recognized the unifying influence of Young America when he discussed railroad construction. Cobb served as speaker of the federal House of Representatives after 1849, and he claimed that New Democrats’ project of railroad-building fused their party together. For example, Stephen Douglas’s then-pending Illinois Central Railroad bill could bring together the Old Northwest, the Northeast, and the South, preventing sectional fissures and keeping the country together. If gentlemen desired the perpetuation of this Union, in all probability they could do nothing more effective towards securing this object than to tie the Northwest with the extreme South, thereby binding not only the Northwest, but the Northeast to the South, by a railroad connecting the several sections of country. All we had to know to bind us together was that our interests were identified; and there was no surer way of identifying the interests and the feelings of the various portions of the country than by establishing facilities for easy communication with each other.47

Cobb did nothing more than reiterate the logic of nationhood articulated by Henry Clay circa 1816. What was new about his comment was the fact that he was a Democrat and that he implicitly attributed credit to Young Americans, now the country’s preeminent railroad boosters. Like railroads, filibustering expeditions could draw the party together when sectional issues threatened to tear it apart. To be sure, many northern Democrats saw such escapades as biased toward the South. Yet widespread support for expansionism, for returning to the Manifest Destiny heyday of the 1840s, also 45

46 47

Samuel J. Tilden to Mrs. Franklin Chase, 29 November 1850, in John Bigelow, ed., Letters and Literary Memorials of Samuel J. Tilden, 2 vols. (1908; New York: Books for Libraries, 1971), I, 70. Theodore Sedgwick to William L. Marcy, 18 March 1853, Marcy Papers. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 23 July 1850, 1437. Cobb may have had his own recent experience in mind: he ended up as the hard-fought compromise choice for speaker after the House deadlocked bitterly – and in part sectionally – over the nomination in 1849.

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existed north of Mason-Dixon. Foreign adventuring appeared a sure way to regenerate the Democracy and head off bitter regional resentments. After all, it worked well to this effect in the 1840s. In 1853, New York Congressman Mike Walsh wrote to John Quitman, then organizing his unsuccessful Cuba expedition, pledging his support for the enterprise. Walsh called himself a “champion of the Young Democracy” and led a Locofoco offshoot of Tammany Hall named the “Young Spartans.” He wished to preserve the Democracy by cleansing it of elements “tainted in any way with abolitionism,” and he wanted a place in the upcoming Cuba dash. He hoped the movement to annex Cuba would produce “an outburst of patriotic enthusiasm” akin to the nationalism of the late 1840s. The bisectional affinities established through Young America values, as revealed by his correspondence and others like it, helped the party survive the turbulent 1850s.48 Moderate Young Americans had also contributed to sectional peace when they voted for the Compromise of 1850. Historians have often noted that the Compromise, the set of bills that averted secession in 1850, was not truly a settlement, but an armistice. After having been proposed by long-time sectional mediator Henry Clay, it failed of passage. Stephen Douglas took it on and passed it through Congress as a set of individual acts. But the number of senators and representatives who voted for legislation they opposed in this larger adjustment was so small as to make it seem not a compromise at all. Legislators merely voted for the bills they favored, which tended to be those benefiting their own section (e.g., the Fugitive Slave Act for the South, the abolition of slave trading in the federal district for the North). Moderates who held the balance of power shifted from section to section, assuring victory for each Compromise bill. But there was no large intersectional majority for all the bills, or for the Compromise as a whole. Significantly, the list of senators who voted for four of the main planks of the Compromise included a number of New Democrats. Among them stood Jesse Bright, Stephen Douglas, Sam Houston, and James Shields. It was no accident that the very small list of senators voting for more than one of the Compromise bills included a number of Young Americans, for they had been skilled in the arts of sectional compromise.49 The overall impact of Young America on the antebellum Democracy was therefore a healthy and unifying one. The airy nationalistic rhetoric, coupled with the goals of internationalism and commercialism, put party factionalism and sectionalism in perspective. Candidates pledged to New Democratic values, 48

49

Mike Walsh to John A. Quitman, 3 October 1853, 6 September 1854, Quitman Papers. On Mike Walsh, see Riepma, “Young America,” 62, and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 326–35. Quitman was lionized in Albany, New York, after he returned from fighting in Mexico: New York Herald, 10 February 1848, 1. Also see the Albany Argus, 11 February 1848, 2, for coverage of Quitman’s reception by New York Freemasons. And see the entire contents of Folder 250 in the Quitman collection at the Houghton Library, which is filled with friendly northern correspondence. Congressional Globe, 31 Congress, 1 Session, 16 September 1850, 1829.

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mainly James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce, were brought forward at strategic moments in order to cement the organization in time for a general election. Since it appeared likely that the party would divide during the elections of 1844 and 1852, and since it actually did splinter in 1848, Young America’s contribution was significant. Contemporary politicians recognized this achievement, lauding young Democrats for preserving their party and their country. Of course, one must also recognize the opposite perspective. In many ways, Young America exacerbated the sectional crisis, provoking regional conflicts that accelerated the march to secession. Their overall influence was cohesive, although in several ways they stimulated disagreement. First, southern Democrats often opposed the activist foreign policy desired by northern Young Americans. They feared the concentration of power that would accrue to a more globally involved federal government, as well as possible disruption to cherished cotton-based trade patterns. They did, however, support more aggressive action in regions that might inflate their slave empire, particularly Cuba and Mexico. But on other matters of foreign policy, where they had little to gain directly (e.g., Europe), they remained more diffident. Support for Louis Kossuth’s Hungarian revolution, for example, tended to remain more northern than southern.50 Southern Young Americans could also ally with their Whig colleagues during critical moments. When discussing the proposed transcontinental railroad, for example, southern Whigs and Democrats coalesced in favor of their proposed route through Dixie, rather than the Douglas-backed northern path.51 And even when they did link bisectional arms with northern New Democrats, the group’s understanding of American nationalism could operate superficially, above clarifying details. The nationalistic language of Young America could mask particularistic, sectional understandings of what Americanism meant. For northern Young Americans, it might imply sending troops to France in order to prop up a precarious young republic; for their southern brethren it could mean mobilizing arms for a Cuban filibustering expedition that expanded the empire of slavery.52 50

51 52

Merle Curti, “Young America,” American Historical Review 32 (Oct. 1926), 37; Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 193; Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1977), 99–102, 154–8. William Kerrigan argues against this, suggesting that southerners were just as enthusiastic about supporting Young Europe as northern New Democrats: William T. Kerrigan, “Young America! Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843–1861” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1997), 100–1. Jere W. Roberson, “The Memphis Commercial Convention of 1853: Southern Dreams and ‘Young America,’” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 33 (Fall 1974): 279–96. Kerrigan, “Young America,” 23–7. Kerrigan suggests that Young Americans remained caught between two aspects of their nationalism. On the one hand, they glorified national selfdetermination and self-expression, advocating European republicanism and a romanticized vision in which every nation contributed something new and different to the international mix. On the other, they increasingly called for American expansion and the imperialistic acquisition

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Furthermore, New Democratic proposals for territorial expansion and economic growth led directly to events that accelerated the party breakups of the 1850s. Acquiring land through Manifest Destiny created the territorial struggle over slavery that took center stage from 1846 to 1850 and again from 1854 until 1861. Without Polk’s western land grab, the parameters of lateantebellum political friction would have been entirely different; civil war might have resulted, though perhaps not as soon as it did.53 Instead, ownership of vast new western territories sparked tension between North and South over the status of slavery in these areas. Similarly, New Democrats’ advocacy of economic expansion and technological development contributed to the financial boom experienced by the North between 1840 and 1860. Engineers laid out ever-growing rail networks, the volume of commerce expanded as free trade agreements were negotiated with foreign partners, and manufacturing grew beyond the small-scale textile mills of New England. Such developments widened the gap between northern and southern society, allowing each section to see the other as an increasingly alien influence. Most significantly, Young America’s pet project of a Pacific railroad sparked sectional explosions heard around the country. Stephen Douglas introduced his bills organizing Nebraska Territory for the purpose of constructing rail lines across the plains. Douglas’s scheme for creating government and order in the West was part and parcel of his railroad dreams. Yet the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which thus started as a typically Young American piece of legislation, ended up becoming the most sectionally polarizing law ever passed by Congress. Historians usually see the Nebraska bill as an opening shot in the sectional endgame leading to secession. By overturning the Missouri Compromise, a long-cherished arrangement that blocked future slavery north of the line 36 degrees 30 minutes, the bill outraged northerners, who became increasingly eager to check the designs of the Slave Power and began jumping ship to new political organizations. The Kansas Civil War, the death of the Whig Party, the rise of the Republicans, Lincoln’s political maturation – rarely have so many consequences been ascribed to one measure and its sponsor. The Kansas-Nebraska Act certainly deserves its reputation as a sectionally crystallizing event. But it also had a history that was a vital part of Young America. It manifested the unifying designs of New Democrats (western expansion and railroad development), and it also spelled the end of Young America and the beginning of the final phase of the sectional conflict. Because it straddles this fence, the Nebraska bill can be seen as the demarcation line between the high point of the New Democracy and all the turmoil that followed. It represents

53

of Cuba and sometimes Canada. Most Young Americans, he argues, skirted the tension between these imperialistic and romantic notions of nationalism, arguing that campaigns to help European Forty-Eighters were emancipationist gambits of the same kind that motivated, say, the Mexican War: through American expansion, they were only aiding the inevitable self-realization of other, previously repressed nations (ibid., 152). See Gary J. Kornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 76–105.

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both culmination and tragic end to the optimistic era of Young America. One can see Kansas-Nebraska, like New Democracy as a whole, both as part of Young America’s integrative vision and as a polarizing event that perhaps made disunion inevitable. This paradoxical dual perspective mirrors the ambiguity of Young America’s effect on the sectional crisis. Douglas first reported a bill for the organization of Nebraska Territory in 1844, when he entered the House of Representatives. Having failed once, he continually revived the proposal to no avail. Douglas’s recurring bill combined several Young American priorities. It sought to extend western settlement by establishing government and order in a hinterland untamed since Jefferson purchased it from Napoleon. It was to lay the groundwork for a transcontinental railroad. Specifically, by organizing this territory, Douglas hoped that his preferred northern rail route, with a Chicago terminus, would come to life. And it was to encourage settlement and to spread democratic institutions to the Pacific and beyond. No other piece of legislation smacked so obviously of the Young America spirit. Yet no other piece of legislation is remembered more for what came after, for its relationship to the North-South conflict, and not for its grand, nationalistic intentions. A bill expressive of American holism and nationhood turned into a symbol of disunion. Because of this double history, the Nebraska bill became both apotheosis and end for the age of the New Democracy.54 In short, New Democrats did plenty to usher in sectional turmoil. Against this record one must weigh their unifying influence, which in the final analysis seems more impressive. Given how imminent the collapse of the Democracy and the Union appeared in 1844, 1848, 1850, and 1852, it is a wonder that the party and the country stayed together. They did so because, at least for a time, they could focus on the popular policies of economic growth and territorial expansion that defined Young America. They could point to a new generation of leaders that promised to leave the past behind. In the end, New Democrats’ intentions smashed upon the rocks of North-South bitterness, though they exerted a unifying influence for a significant period of time. A Bipartisan Drawstring As New Democrats brought their own organization closer together, they exerted a similar pull on the nation’s two-party system as a whole. By molding the Democracy to be more forward-looking, reformist, market-oriented, and international, New Democrats inched their way closer to the classic positions of Whiggery. As they clamored for federal aid to internal improvements, for the enlargement of federal authority to help revolutionaries in Europe, and for the federally sponsored investigation of new technologies and the foundation of 54

Stephen A. Douglas to J. H. Crane et al., 17 December 1853, in Letters of Douglas, 268–71. For more on the Nebraska bill and its tangled historiography, see Yonatan Eyal, “With His Eyes Open: Stephen A. Douglas and the Kansas-Nebraska Disaster of 1854,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 91 (Winter 1998): 175–217.

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modern institutions, Young America Democrats brought their party ever closer to the Whigs. This narrowing gap, culminating in overlap by the mid 1850s, lubricated the party realignments of that decade and the coming of the Civil War.55 Economics formed the main reason that New Democrats moved closer to the Whigs. As they came to terms with the market revolution and with the promise of overseas commerce, they found themselves adopting attitudes that their party forebears of the 1830s, particularly the radical Locofocos, abhorred. Whig economic doctrines such as national unification through trade, transportation, and communication networks; federal investment in national infrastructure; and governmental involvement in various reform measures all found a place in the Democratic Party by the early 1850s. By 1854, Young America Democrats could claim to be as welcoming of the modern economic world and its possibilities as their Whig opponents. Americans of the time noticed this shift, occasionally with alarm and often with gratification. As devoted Democrat Nathaniel Hawthorne described the scene in 1853, “The two great parties of the nation appear – at least to an observer somewhat removed from both – to have nearly merged into one another; for they preserve the attitude of political antagonism rather through the effect of their old organizations, than because any great and radical principles are at present in dispute between them.”56 Since the old economic divisions of the 1830s no longer seemed urgent, and since a group of Democrats now adopted the Whig economic line on such matters as internal improvements, party salience was beginning to fade. After a rivers and harbors improvement bill passed Congress in the fall of 1852, an Ohio paper taunted the opposition: “Now that the River and Harbor Bill is a law – passed by a Democratic Congress – [we] wonder if the whigs will still have the impudence to claim, as heretofore, that the policy of internal improvements of that sort is exclusively whig?”57 55

56

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On the “plasticity” of American politics during the “party period,” see Michael F. Holt, “Change and Continuity in the Party Period: The Substance and Structure of American Politics, 1835– 1885,” in Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000 (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2001), 105–13, and Mark Voss-Hubbard, “The ‘Third Party Tradition’ Reconsidered: Third Parties and American Public Life, 1830–1900,” Journal of American History 86 (June 1999): 121–50. My conclusions echo Holt’s view that the “party period” framework is an accurate rubric for analyzing antebellum politics, but that change and fluidity more than continuity marked this era. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (London: George Routledge & Co., 1853), 134. For an identical observation see A. H. Grass to Stephen A. Douglas, 20 January 1852, Douglas Papers. Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 2 September 1852, 2. As Michael Morrison notes, “Traditional economic issues, like the bank and the tariff, had lost much of their salience. On others, such as internal improvements, a large portion of the Democratic Party, in particular Young Americans, occupied a position similar to that of the Whigs.” See Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997), 141.

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One example of this new bipartisan consensus came from the House of Representatives in 1854. That body was then considering its response to President Pierce’s veto of a rivers and harbors appropriation bill. As we have seen, New Democrats from the Old Northwest supported these expenditures for purposes of economic growth, despite their incompatibility with traditional Jacksonian constitutional views. Congressman William Richardson of Illinois, Douglas’s aide in the lower house, regretted Pierce’s decision. He saw the veto as a form of eastern discrimination, since development had once been approved for the seaboard states but now not for the Mississippi Valley. Congress should adorn all locales equally, he argued, or forfeit the business of improvements altogether. Representative William Barksdale of Mississippi then questioned the company Richardson kept in defending the improvement appropriations: We have heard of various combinations which have been recently formed in this country. Fusion between those who claimed to be Democrats and Whigs, Free-Soilers and Abolitionists. I have not been particularly astonished at these combinations and fusions and striking of hands. Nobody has been. But I must confess that I am somewhat astonished at the fusion we have witnessed here this morning, and I think the country will be astonished. Antipodes have met to-day. The gentleman from Ohio [a Whig] . . . and the gentleman from Illinois [William Richardson, a Democrat] have “struck hands” in the American Congress [over the rivers and harbors improvements issue].

Barksdale accused Richardson of falling into bed with the Whigs because he now supported internal improvements funded by the federal government. He could not have made a more damaging charge in the eyes of Democrats strongly committed to their party. But Richardson’s response proved revealing: “I have laid down the position upon which I stand, and I stand there, I care not who stands with me, or who against me.” In other words, crossing party lines and cementing new political alliances on behalf of these growth-minded principles hardly seemed out of the question.58 Signs of amalgamation between the two parties dated back to the presidential campaign of 1852, if not earlier. In Boston, the Whigs were reported to be “very friendly to Pierce,” suggesting that they felt comfortable with an opposition candidate to a degree that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. One historian has found evidence that Whigs “materially” aided “Pierce’s triumph.” A group of “younger Whigs,” in particular, became Pierce supporters.59 By 1852, Democrats were already expecting that Whigs might back their party under favorable circumstances. For example, wrote one activist several years earlier, should New York Governor Silas Wright win a Democratic presidential nomination, and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts fail to obtain the Whig nod, “New England manufacturers and protectionists” would go for the Democracy, preferring Wright “to any other Northern man on the democratic side.”60 58 59 60

Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, 1 Session, 5 August 1854, 2221–3. John P. Davis to George Bancroft, 4 November 1852, Bancroft Papers; Riepma, “Young America,” 265, 267. John D. Kellogg to Samuel J. Tilden, 10 June 1846, Tilden Papers. Also see H. A. Tilden to Samuel J. Tilden, 24 September 1846, ibid.

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In New York, the longtime-Whig business classes first began moving into the Democratic Party in large numbers in the 1850s. During the presidential election of 1852, especially, many of the city’s merchants and bankers voted for Franklin Pierce, presaging their entrance into the Democracy. Their leader in this movement was longtime New Democrat August Belmont, who chaired the party’s national committee after 1860. For this heavily business-oriented constituency, the Democracy became a welcoming home now that it embraced formerly Whig values.61 Observing these losses, the American Whig Review in 1852 complained that Democrats were inching too close to Whig policies. It resented the fact that Democrats successfully stole the instruments of reform and perfectibility from the Whig toolbox. Young America’s spirit made Democrats seem the ushers of progress, whereas for years it was Whig activism that appeared to pave the way for the future. Whig leaders also expressed displeasure at Democratic stances on the protective tariff: Locofocos touted free trade repeatedly but kept protective duties at a moderate “revenue” level, sufficient to operate the federal government. For Whigs, this meant hypocrisy because even though Democrats ran campaigns on a free trade platform, they still maintained a moderate tariff. In both cases – the question of reform and the level of duties – Whigs sensed that their traditional opponents were increasingly invading their turf.62 In 1852, worried Democrats foresaw that Whigs would attempt to influence the patronage decisions of President-elect Pierce. They would try “to secure the appointment of democrats as nearly like whigs as possible.” By 1853, one paper concluded, prematurely, that the Whig Party had died, and it half-jokingly invited former Whigs to join the Democracy on a probationary basis. The New Democratic position on economic issues greased the wheels of such a move.63 A satirical piece in the Whiggish Chicago Daily Tribune went even further. It admonished incoming President Pierce to remember that the Whig party is dead and buried, so you haven’t got to fight agin [sic] that no more. And you must remember, too, that the Whig party has left considerable valuable property, and that the Dimocratic [sic] party is the natural heir to it. So you can take up the Bank, and the Tariff, and Internal improvements, and such kinds of notions, and use ’em quietly for the benefit of the great Dimocratic party, and say nothing about it – Only you must take care to fix ’em over into Dimocratic Bank, Dimocratic Tariff, and Dimocratic Internal Improvements, and then nobody won’t say a word agin ’em.64 61 62 63 64

Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 86–7. American Whig Review 16 (July 1852), 80–1. Illinois State Register, 8 December 1852, 2, 9 July 1853, 2; Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 15 April 1853, 2. Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 January 1853, 2. This article used the fictional character Jack Downing, an antebellum symbol of popular political participation. See Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 38–9.

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The Tribune was making fun of Democrats’ gradual adoption of more progressive economic dogma, beliefs distant from the founding ideology of their Jacksonian coalition. It exaggerated the magnitude of the transformation, however: New Democrats never took up the Bank per se, and their proudest accomplishment remained advancing free trade across the Atlantic. But this article felt the pulse of the subtle shift in party ideology that had been under way since the election of 1844. As Michael Holt has argued, this consensus, a lack of salient divergence between the parties, decreased voter interest and turnout and numbered the days of the competitive Second Party System. Without sharply etched policy distinctions, the antebellum party structure withered. Voter turnout and partisan activism tended to increase when party differences were vast, and the gap between Whigs and Democrats narrowed so much during the early 1850s that it seemed as though there was no real competition between the two camps, no true issues on which to battle. For this reason, Holt argues, figures such as Stephen A. Douglas tried to make party differences clear by proposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas’s bid, says Holt, was an effort to reinvigorate the Second Party System by introducing difference once again.65 By moving closer to the Whig position, New Democrats ensured that the sharply etched feuds of the Second Party System would funnel into a damaging bipartisan consensus. They made the parties appear too similar to each other by the early 1850s and thus unable to rally voters to the polls based on their divergent worldviews. Exploration of New Democrats’ progressive economic and reform career, in other words, bolsters this “consensus” interpretation of the early 1850s. Young America Democrats moved their organization so near to the Whigs that differences began to fade, eventually leading to the collapse of the Whig Party and the rise of the Know-Nothings and Republicans.66 The two major parties lost their differences because they both supported the Compromise of 1850 as an end to sectional agitation (“finality,” as they called it). But they also came together and obscured previous squabbles because of the reformed orientation of the New Democracy: its promarket views, softening on slavery, and loosening of constitutional interpretation. As New Democrats refashioned their party through the 1840s and 1850s, they moved it closer to the Whigs and created a situation under which there were too few issues dividing 65

66

Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978), 101–38; William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 66–7, 87; Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 141. For quantitative confirmation of party convergence and consensus during the early 1850s (including the state level), see the rollcall analyses conducted by Holt in Political Crisis, 113–16. Holt documents decreasing indices of disagreement on economic issues in several state legislatures, as well as the propensity of a growing number of Democrats to vote for bank charters on the state level. Mills Thornton deploys this argument in explaining the success of secessionists in Alabama during the 1850s. See J. Mills Thornton, III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978).

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the antagonists by the early 1850s. This became an important cause of the party realignments of the 1850s, and hence of the Civil War. Consensus led politicians such as Stephen Douglas to launch new initiatives in order to re-create party divisions. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 is one example. And proposals such as the Nebraska bill led to the party shifts of the 1850s, Bleeding Kansas, and ultimately to southern secession, as voluminous other literature has shown.67 In a sense, most American politicians came to regard economic growth and international involvement as positive developments. No longer was there any need to argue about the propriety of federal participation in such activities. As a response to this agreement a new Civil War party system eventually emerged. But the early 1850s represented those crucial few years when the parameters of an older competition were fading and the dynamics of a new one were still budding. Young America Democrats served as agents of this transition. By making their party fit the forward-looking consensus of the times, New Democrats may also have made it easier for members of other parties to join them later in the 1850s. As the Whig Party began crumbling between 1854 and 1856, and as the Know-Nothings retreated after the election of 1856, some of their former loyalists could find a home in the New Democracy. They might not have felt comfortable flocking to a party that still symbolized the fearful, agrarian temperament of Andrew Jackson. But by 1854 Young America ensured that the Democracy was an organization fit for the modern world of midcentury. In short, New Democrats made it easier for ex-Whigs and their like to cross old party lines when they brought their coalition close to what had previously been a Whig sensibility. Conversely, Democrats who abandoned the party in the 1850s may have felt comfortable joining groups like the Republicans because the New Democracy had already conditioned them to espouse liberal promarket principles. This fluidity suggests that the impact of the New Democracy was felt not only within the Democratic organization, but also within the new Republican Party to which some of the former Young Americans now decamped. On the whole, the spirit of Young America exercised a powerful, cohesive influence on the Democratic Party. It unified the organization at crucial moments of factional and sectional turmoil, heading off party division and national disunion. In other respects, Young America Democrats helped to cause secession, though overall they aided in preserving the Democracy and the Union. The same transformation that allowed Democrats to remain united most of the time also made their party more like the Whigs, generating a bipartisan consensus on many issues by the early 1850s. This short-lived era of good feelings disrupted established party competition, which depended on an appearance of prominent difference between the two parties. Such a disruption led to the formation 67

For example, David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 145–76; Gienapp, Origins, 69–127; Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2004).

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of new political coalitions, ultimately ushering in disunion and the Civil War. The relationship of Young America Democrats to the sectional crisis therefore remains ambiguous, as complicated and uneven as the time in which it flowered. Both the centrifugal and centripetal effects of Young America, however, testify to its significance in antebellum politics.

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Conclusion Lincoln on Young America

We have all heard of Young America. He is the most current youth of the age. Some think him conceited, and arrogant; but has he not reason to entertain a rather extensive opinion of himself? Is he not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future?1

So began Abraham Lincoln’s address to a “Young Men’s Association” in Illinois. Speaking in 1859, Lincoln felt the benefit of hindsight. He knew that the era of the New Democracy had passed, and that the slavery issue now took center stage. Sectional politics had for several years eclipsed the spirit of Young America, as battles on the Kansas plains, assaults on the Senate floor, and the reorganization of political parties amply demonstrated. As an obscure Whig legislator Lincoln had disparaged Young America. He opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, refusing to advance the blustery romantic nationalism that inspired Stephen Douglas and his circle. By 1859, when he delivered this address, Lincoln was still a relative nobody. He lost a high-profile U.S. Senate race to Douglas and had only served one unremarkable term in the federal House of Representatives during the late 1840s. But his speech betrays a poignant, almost-tragic understanding that the Young America moment had passed and that the future lay on his, not Douglas’s, side. Lincoln ridiculed Young America Democrats, but in some ways he admired them. Most of all, he evinced a surprising level of consciousness about the transition from the expansionist, nationalist politics of the New Democracy to the sectional maelstrom that benefited his own party. Rarely did a contemporary figure grasp so keenly the precipice on which he perched, the turn of events he newly stood to affect. Lincoln began with description, commenting on New Democratic habits. The Young American sampled material goods from around the world, he reported: 1

“Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” 11 February 1859, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1953–5), III, 356–63.

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“Silk from France; furs from the Arctic regions, with a buffalo-robe from the Rocky Mountains.” New Democrats’ worldly interests, especially their zeal for commercial expansion, had indeed enriched them with a variegated trade. Lincoln also touched on Young America Democrats’ fascination with technology: “The iron horse is panting, and impatient, to carry him everywhere, in no time.” And he bore witness to the Young America sense of divine purpose, of God acting on their side. The figure of the “Young American,” introduced to the nation by Emerson in 1844, “owns a large part of the world, by right of possessing it; and all the rest by right of wanting it, and intending to have it.” Lincoln belittled Young America’s impatience with and lack of reverence for the old. If “there be any thing old which he can endure, it is only old whiskey and old tobacco.” Lincoln’s broader theme was experiment and innovation; this is why he chose to mention Young America. But his point remained that invention and creativity depended on what came earlier. All that is new relies on precedent, he said. Hence earlier creations such as speaking, writing, publishing, and peopling new continents all held the keys to future discovery. This is what Young America could not realize, restless as it was. Even “the invention of negroes,” noted Lincoln, “or, of the present mode of using them,” testified to the “fruitfulness” of the early modern period and its establishment of a baseline for future innovation. Progress depended on past achievement, and the “yankee” lived in advance of the rest of the world because he knew this. The “Mexican greasers” of California, said Lincoln, left untouched the gold mines that Anglo-Saxons exploited within a few short years of taking over the North American West. Innovation depended as much on precedence and reverence for the past as on quick-witted optimism and unconventionality, and most Americans understood this.2 Still, Lincoln admired parts of the Young America temperament, even if he was unwilling to say so directly, and even if he qualified that spirit by suggesting a greater need for historical consciousness. “In anciently inhabited countries,” he closed, “the dust of ages – a real downright old-fogyism – seems to settle upon, and smother the intellects and energies of man.” This seemed a Young America sentiment if ever there was one. Lincoln’s address thus connoted a hint of wistfulness at the demise of Young America, the way in which its nationalistic optimism could not survive the sectional upheavals of the 1850s. Though he poked fun at New Democratic hubris, he also spoke solemnly and longingly about the end of Young America’s moment: its refreshing optimism, airy nationalism, and progress-hungry yearning to fulfill God’s mandate on earth. Lincoln grasped better than most of his contemporaries how the promising 2

The more pluralistic New Democrats would not have spoken of western Hispanics in Lincoln’s crude terms. Instead, they romanticized them as a nation yearning for democracy and deserving of American help and pity. Thus, the looser reform and racial posture of Young America Democracy comes through when reading Lincoln’s speech.

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Democratic-centered politics of the late Jacksonian era had turned, all so suddenly, into the Republican-dominated fracas that became the Civil War.3 Six years earlier, in 1853, Lincoln saw a radically different world. New Democrats stood poised to consolidate their power over their party and country. Recently reunited after the Barnburner debacle of 1848, they expected to resume their antebellum position as the republic’s dominant political party. The Compromise of 1850 had supposedly settled the slavery and territorial questions forever, and Young Americans could return to the excitement of steamboats, railroads, and expeditions to Europe and Japan. When Franklin Pierce took office that year, all signs pointed toward a painless resumption of national growth. Within those short six years, however, dreams of success turned into nightmares of uncertainty. By the time Lincoln spoke of Young America in 1859, the nation seemed more unstable than during the crisis of 1846–1850 – indeed, more precariously situated than at any point in its history. The long train of events leading to Lincoln’s address gained their own destructive momentum. But the specific moment at which the nation’s political landscape shifted came in 1854, with Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act. This law served as the pivot on which turned the politics of the 1850s, separating the hopeful year 1853 from the clouding horizon of Lincoln’s 1859. Until Douglas introduced the Nebraska bill in 1854, an impressive quiescence pervaded America’s body politic. Isolated groundswells of opinion, such as reactions to the Fugitive Slave Act and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, punctured the calm of the early 1850s. Yet, on the whole, the Compromise measures were delivering the consensus they promised. Douglas’s legislation, however, reignited the sectional firestorm of the late 1840s. By invalidating the Missouri Compromise, his proposal brought simmering northern anger to a boil. By organizing the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska, he set the parameters for what became Bleeding Kansas and the assault on Senator Charles Sumner in 1856. Perhaps the greatest and final irony of Young America, then, is that its most representative figure so single-handedly ushered its heyday to an end. For few other events besides passage of the Nebraska bill can be isolated so specifically as causes of a great national disturbance. If 1844 saw the first burst of a “young Democracy” devoted to Polk, then 1854 brought this shining moment to a close. In 1849, Ohio’s state legislature voted New Democrat William Allen out of the U.S. Senate, replacing him with Salmon P. Chase. Chase wrote to Allen in 3

“Second Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions.” For a probing exegesis of Lincoln’s remarks on Young America, see Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 2003), 15–48. Winger does not believe that Lincoln sympathized with Young America Democrats in this speech, only made fun of them. He argues, overall, that Lincoln’s remarks on Young America revealed his Romantic sensibilities, his earnest moralism and religious commitment.

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1854, long after Allen had left Congress forever, in order to discuss the course of national politics. Their frank correspondence illustrates the sudden change from New Democracy to a focus on slavery and the Republicans. It brought divergent strains of the Democratic Party into contact and demonstrated why the party faltered on the sectional question of slavery. Chase agreed with all of Allen’s policy stances, especially on questions of 1840s expansion and the confrontation with England. “There was and is but one point on which I differed and, I suppose, still differ from you. That point is slavery.” Sectional divisions over the extension of the South’s “peculiar institution” and over the growing political power exercised by the South’s planter elite took its toll on the New Democracy no less than the Union as a whole. Whereas Chase saw “the Slave Power and the Slave Interest as the deadly antagonists of Reform & Progress and real democracy,” Allen thought it “the wisest course to abstain from all interference with Slavery outside as well as inside of state limits.” Allen was a free soiler, as described in Chapter 7, and wanted to exclude slavery from newly acquired territories. But he would never countenance forcible federal intervention, and this marked his split with fellow Democrats who supported him on virtually every other issue. The ChaseAllen exchange shows why a unified, Young America Democracy could no longer exist. It pitched a dated representative of national unity against an 1850s practitioner of the politics of slavery. In doing so, it foreshadowed the intraDemocratic showdown of 1860, when southern members of the organization walked out of the Charleston convention and broke apart the bonds of party, the bonds created by the spirit of Young America.4 The most important reason for the decline of Young America after 1854 was therefore sectional bitterness. New Democrats who joined together on the issues of expansion and trade could no longer find common ground when it came to slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska Act symbolized this disagreement, bringing to an end the golden age of New Democracy. However, Young America disintegrated due to several other causes as well. Among them were the alienating and vitriolic rhetoric spewed by the most brash of New Democrats, foremost among them George Sanders; the movement’s inability to demonstrate results, particularly in its failed attempts to annex Cuba and to foster democracy in Europe; the conservative temperament of most Americans, who feared entanglement in foreign affairs and the expansion of federal authority that it augured; the negative lessons learned from the southwestern experiences of the 1840s, when Americans faced difficulty in conquering Mexican territories and assimilating local populations into the Union; and southern anxieties about the federal power needed in order to realize Young America’s vision fully. In addition, the upsurge of nativism during the 1840s and 1850s indisposed many antebellum Americans to help European comrades with their revolutions. The clearest source of New Democracy’s decline, however, was the rise of sectional turmoil 4

Salmon P. Chase to William Allen, 8 April 1854, William Allen Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

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and the powerlessness of Young America to address the challenges it posed. An ideology that united party members on many issues ultimately failed to do so on the crucial subject of bondage.5 Nevertheless, the ten-year period during which New Democrats enjoyed prominence saw a significant transformation in the nature of their party and country. Young Americans came to accept the market revolution, supporting internal improvements and free trade in their efforts to bolster local prosperity. They mobilized aid for European dissidents who challenged oppressive monarchies in the Old World. They colluded on the acquisition of new territories ranging from Texas to California to Cuba, deploying American power on the world stage more assertively than ever before. They pursued an array of reform campaigns, condemning anti-immigrant discrimination and the spoils system and launching new institutions and practices to address the problems of the modern world. They cultivated an antislavery tradition within their own party, one that posed a challenge to Whigs and abolitionists. And in doing all this, New Democrats unified their organization for a number of tenuous years, preventing it from becoming a victim of both sectional and factional turmoil before 1860. Young America Democrats tried to make their party a more progressive, forward-looking organization in all of these realms. Lost in the background was the Democracy of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the cautious agrarian sensibility that made Democrats conservative and Whigs more modern during the 1830s. Instead, New Democrats anticipated certain policies of the Gilded Age and the early twentieth century, prefiguring both liberal mugwump reformers and Progressives. In calling for direct income taxes and federal subsidies for research and development, in arguing for a professionalizing reform of patronage distribution, and in marshaling federal power in order to project an American presence overseas, New Democrats showed that many of the ideas dominant after the Civil War had an earlier life, in a party that faded from power after 1860. Their history also suggests a hitherto unrecognized consonance between the outlook of the early Republican Party (particularly its emphasis on economic nationalism) and the late antebellum Democracy. The outbreak of disunion obscured antebellum Democrats’ contribution to these ideas, establishing a teleological affinity between Whigs and Republicans. Exploration of the New Democracy suggests that the latter link was only partially true, for some Democrats had as much to do with free land and free labor, with centralized authority and reformist social policy, as did their opponents. 5

See David B. Danbom, “The Young America Movement,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 67 (June 1974): 294–306. Donald Spencer argues that Young America declined because its spirit of idealism functioned on a highly symbolic and abstract level. Louis Kossuth’s visit brought this vision down to the world of realities and practicalities that the movement’s leaders did not want to engage. On a symbolic level it could exist, but on a practical one it could not. See Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1977), 183.

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After the Civil War the Democracy did return to a suspicious, agrarian character for a time. The career of William Jennings Bryan and the Democrats’ short-lived alliance with the Populist Party suggest that it had not completely shed its Jeffersonian-Jacksonian heritage. Yet Bryan’s Democracy represented a final revival of the past, not the direction of the party’s future. By the time that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt came to define Democratic ideology, the Populists and their allies had indeed morphed into an urban, middle-class coalition supportive of well-regulated capitalism. Progressivism reflected the leading ideals of the New Democracy, not the old, and the heyday of Young America laid an important foundation for this transition.6 As Lincoln delivered his address in Illinois, the central agents of Young America’s Democracy scattered forlornly at home and abroad. John O’Sullivan, the editor whose Democratic Review became a clearinghouse for New Democrats, lived in Europe, estranged from a country he could no longer understand. William Allen, exiled from his senatorial seat, passed his time quietly in Chillicothe, Ohio. George Sanders was nowhere to be found, his public energies exhausted for the moment, while Stephen Douglas combated ill health and prepared for a presidential campaign that ended up fracturing the party he worked so hard to build. George Bancroft no longer served in presidential cabinets and diplomatic posts, but wrote history volumes in his study, watching with horror as his subject the United States collapsed. Robert Stockton and George Law had become Republicans, convinced of the need to isolate slavery within the South and to defy secessionist saber-rattling. James K. Polk had lain in his grave since 1849, the same year he surprised many Democrats by creating a new executive department and urging greater federal appropriations for various projects. Franklin Pierce, the other president who had shown solicitude for Young America, left the country to travel abroad, his legacy tarnished by the Nebraska bill and Bleeding Kansas. The only New Democrats who remained in the public eye were conservative Unionists such as August Belmont and Jesse Bright, men whose boldness and audacity now turned to sour suspicion of the Lincoln administration. Thus, no uniform path guided the careers of the Young Americans. Some, whether John Wentworth or George Law, joined the Republicans. Others, including Douglas, Belmont, and Bancroft, remained lifelong Democrats. Still others, such as John Quitman and George Sanders, became Confederates. By 1861, Young America no longer operated as a unifier. The generational consciousness that mobilized Young America Democrats between 1844 and 1854 gave way to regional parochialism and hatred, to individual adventures abroad and to lives altered by warfare at home. Yet before 1854, New Democrats believed in the promise of a prosperous, connected 6

See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 131–214, and Robert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967).

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world, one linked together by a strong federal government overseeing transportation and communication. They expected more wealth, more peace and preeminence, and more American cohesion to result from their efforts. The magnitude of their disappointments matched the loftiness of their aspirations. For their generation was destined, after all, to endure hardship and turmoil, not to enjoy the bounty envisioned in 1844. Having established the groundwork for the improved human society of which they dreamed, they were left only to pass the torch to yet another generation. Young America’s children would need to overcome the bitterness of the Civil War in order to relaunch their parents’ program, though their violent life experiences prevented them from displaying the grandiose buoyancy that marked their predecessors. Nevertheless, New Democrats left behind valuable precedents that enabled Victorians and Progressives to work to finish what they had begun.

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Index

1848, European revolutions of, 14, 137 beginnings of, 94 and coinage of the phrase Young America, 6 and Democratic views on race and immigration, 162 failure of, 104, 107 and George Law, 87 and Margaret Fuller, 100 related to Cuba movement, 135 related to New Democratic economic outlook, 65, 68 relevance to the American situation, 102 role in party competition, 67 socioeconomic aspects of, 106 Young American interest in, 94 Abolitionism, 185, 196 and Arthur and Lewis Tappan, 183 and context of northern reform, 145 and John L. O’Sullivan, 75, 198–99 relationship to Democratic Party, 184 Adams, Charles Francis, Sr., 186, 207 Adams, John, 17, 21, 31 Adams, John Quincy, 18, 23 Agassiz, Louis, 165 Albany Argus, 189 Albany Regency, 27, 186, 189 Albert, Prince, 168 Alien and Sedition Acts, 21, 99

Allen, William, 13, 84–6, 89, 103, 110, 144, 234 on the 1846 rivers and harbors bill, 61 as ally of Marcus Morton, 197 as Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 8 and Cumberland Road, 44 and Greenbacks, 85–6 instructions from constituents to, 51, 55, 56 and internal improvements funding, 50 later career of, 8 as lifelong Democrat, 200 and monopolies, 77 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 as Ohio governor, 7 and Oregon crisis, 121–7 pro-French resolution of, 103 views of commerce, 40 views of slavery, 192 voted out of the Senate, 231 as western representative, 124 American Anti-Slavery Society, 26, 185 American Colonization Society, 26, 34, 190, 192–3 American System, 18, 23, 71, 176, 218 American Whig Review, 225 Anti-Federalists, 21 Anti-Masonry, 145 Arcturus, The, 3 Articles of Confederation, 21 237

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238 Ashburton, Lord, 123 Atchison, David R., 197 Auld, Jedediah, 3 Bagby, Arthur, 50 Bancroft, George, 13, 58, 64, 89–90, 100, 102, 106, 128, 130, 141–2, 144, 153, 181–2, 185, 203, 205–6 during Civil War, 200, 234 and European revolutions of 1848, 102 and free trade, 42, 43, 141 and the French revolution of 1848, 142 and Harvard University, 90, 141 as historian, 89, 90, 109, 143, 185, 206 as investor, 89 and Mexican War, 82 as minister to England, 40, 141, 144 as Navy secretary, 180–1 and U.S. Naval Academy, 150–1 young Democracy, as part of, 16 and repeal of the British Corn Laws, 42 Bank of the United States, 22–3, 29, 79 Banks, Nathaniel P., 98 Barksdale, William, 224 Barnburner Democrats, 14, 78, 112, 136, 145, 178, 184, 186–90, 199, 202, 207–8, 213 and antislavery, 184, 186 Dean Richmond as member of, 178 generational tensions within, 187 Hunker Democrats, compared with, 14 John Dix as member of, 187 John L. O’Sullivan as member of, 186, 200 Marcus Morton as member of, 157, 164, 197 relationship with Hunkers, 189 return to the Democracy of, 214, 231 revolt of, 187, 207–8, 215 Samuel J. Tilden and the revolt of, 172 Bear Flag Republic, 82 Beecher family, 147

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Index Belmont, August, 36, 38–40, 64, 86, 88, 138, 139, 143, 144, 164, 169, 234 as banker, 36, 38, 87 and Cuba, 138 and currency policy, 86 Democratic allegiance of, 11, 39, 200, 202 and European revolutions of 1848, 111 and free trade, 37, 38, 42, 43 generational cohort of, 6 as leader of New Democracy, 2, 13, 16, 36, 38 as minister to the Netherlands, 37, 38, 110, 112, 114 as national chairman of the Democracy, 36, 225 and nativism, 163–4 views of slavery, 193–4 Bennett, James Gordon, 13, 102, 142 Benton, Thomas Hart, 10, 169, 197 and electric power, 166 and internal improvements, 61 and railroads, 71, 77 and slavery issue, 28 Biddle, Nicholas, 29, 79, 81 Birney, James G., 190 Black Warrior incident, 113, 139 Bleeding Kansas, 221, 227, 231, 234 Boston Mercantile Association, 5 Breckinridge, John C., 210, 212 Breese, Sidney, 13, 46–9, 64, 88 as ally of Marcus Morton, 197 and Cumberland Road, 44 and Illinois Central Railroad, 48 and internal improvements, 47, 50, 57 and land grants, 47 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 and Oregon crisis, 126 railroad boosterism of, 47 on rivers and harbors bill of 1846, 61 turned out of the Senate, 98 as western representative, 46 Bright, Jesse, 167, 179–80, 202, 234 civil service reform proposals of, 179, 182 and Compromise of 1850, 219 generational cohort of, 6 and internal improvements, 62 and Monroe Doctrine, 120

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Index as New Democratic leader, 13 relationship with Marcus Morton, 197 as western representative, 124 Brown, Joseph, 91 Brownson, Orestes, 141, 185 Bryan, William Jennings, 234 Buchanan, James, 129, 215 in campaign of 1852, 39, 213 and Jane Cazneau, 160 as minister to England, 93, 112 as Old Fogy, 209, 214 and Ostend Manifesto, 139 on protective tariff, 53 relationship with George Bancroft, 141 as secretary of state, 112 and slavery issue, 28 on Stephen A. Douglas, 208 Buffalo and Rochester Railroad, 88 Butler, Benjamin F., 75, 188, 210 Calhoun, John C., 27, 50, 69, 177, 202, 203 and American System, 23 in election of 1844, 203–5 on French revolution of 1848, 103 and land grants, 50 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 and Oregon crisis, 123–4 role of in Hayne-Webster debates, 25 theory of government of, 54 theory of slavery of, 198–9 ´ 134 and Yucatan, Camden and Amboy Railroad, 84 Capital punishment, John L. O’Sullivan’s campaign against, 156–7 Cass, Lewis, 10, 28, 177, 190, 210, 215 in campaign of 1852, 213 in election of 1848, 190, 197 on European revolutions of 1848, 96, 105 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 as Old Fogy, 166 and Oregon crisis, 126 as originator of popular sovereignty doctrine, 194, 195 relationship with George Law, 87 on rivers and harbors bill of 1846, 61

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239 as western representative, 124 Catholics, as targets of public animosity, 68 Causes of New Democratic heterodoxy, 7, 66–9, 73, 125 Cazneau, Jane McManus Storm, 14, 130, 159–61, 182 Channing, William Ellery, 196 Charles River Bridge case, 196 Chartists, 95 Chase, Salmon P., 111, 188, 231 Cherokee Indians, 24 Chicago, 71 John Wentworth as mayor of, 72 Chicago Daily Tribune, 158, 225 Civil War, role of in fostering Young American self-consciousness, 7 Clay, Henry, 69, 82, 177 and American System, 18, 22–3, 71, 176, 218 as colonizationist, 34, 192 in election of 1844, 127–8 as great compromiser, 219 as National Republican leader, 69 role in Cilley-Graves duel, 155 as southern Whig, 26, 34 Clayton, John, 50 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 120, 138 Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer, 189–90 Clinton, DeWitt, 57 Cobb, Howell, 218 Colonizationism, 34, 99, 184, 191–4, 200 Colt, Samuel, 168 Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate, 84, 120, 122, 167, 170 Committee on Military Affairs, Senate, 180 Committee on Naval Affairs, Senate, 167 Committee on Roads and Canals, Senate, 167 Committee on Territories, Senate, 52 Committee on the Public Lands, Senate, 47 Compromise of 1850, 195, 214, 219, 226, 231 Copperhead Democrats, 172, 195 Corn Laws, 40–43, 154, 162

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240 Corry, William, 13, 113, 212 and free land movement, 149 Corwin, Thomas, 50 Cotton Whigs, 190 Crawford, William H., 23 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, 168 Cuba, 75, 88, 102, 113, 114, 118, 135–9, 208, 220 attempted acquisition of, 11, 76, 87, 88, 105, 112, 114, 118, 128, 130, 135–9, 144, 217, 219, 232–3 and August Belmont, 38 George William Curtis on, 1 Jane Cazneau on, 159 and John A. Quitman, 88 southern designs on, 220 Spanish Africanization policy in, 106, 138 as Spanish colony, 138 Cumberland Road (also see National Road), 44–5 Curtis, George William, 1 Cushing, Caleb, 153, 168, 205, 212 Dallas, George M., 76 and capital punishment, 157 and Smithsonian Institution, 150 Dartmouth College, 72, 195 Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 22 Davis, Garrett, 46 Davis, Jefferson, 170, 180 Delaware and Raritan Canal Company, 84 De Leon, Edwin, 5, 110, 200, 212 Democratic Party anticipation of future policies, 174 and August Belmont, 38–40 August Belmont as national chairman of, 36, 164 and Barnburners (also see Barnburner Democrats), 186, 188, 189 and Benjamin Tappan, 183, 185 bottom-up pressure from constituents within, 73 changing issues, 67 after the Civil War, 234 and colonizationism, 192 competing strands of thought within, 19

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Index and currency policy, 86 and Dean Richmond, 87–8 defining the New Democracy within, 10 and Democratic Review, 75 doughfaces within, 27 East-West tensions within, 58 and early attitudes toward slavery, 25 and early labor unions, 30 and European revolutions of 1848, 42, 95, 104 and Franklin Pierce, 205 and free land movement, 148–50 and free soil, 200 and George Bancroft, 90, 141 and George Law, 192 and the grand tour, 142 and Hunkers (also see Hunker Democrats), 186 ideological essence of, 12 impact of Young America on, 4, 203, 227 importance of immigrants within, 68 influence of local pressures, 53 influence of new commercial spirit on in Europe, 141 and internal improvements, 59, 61 and James K. Polk, 168 and James Shields, 98 and Jane Cazneau, 158–61 and John L. O’Sullivan, 8 and John Wentworth, 73, 195 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 222 link with early Republican Party, 13, 227, 233 and Marcus Morton, 196–8 new attitudes toward commercial growth within, 41 and new internationalism of, 59, 79, 142, 144 northwestern contributions to, 125 overlap with Whigs in early 1850s, 2, 43, 222, 224–7 periodization of New Democracy, 12 and Pierce administration, 111 and Pierce’s diplomatic appointments, 111 and popular sovereignty, 194 probanking Democrats within, 30

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Index and the progressive Democracy, 2 and protective tariffs, 53 and railroads, 69–70 refashioned orientation of, 2, 9, 11, 13, 15, 19, 36, 50, 65–9, 132, 144, 223 reform tradition within, 34, 145–6, 156, 157, 163, 185 renewed international vigor of, 118, 135 and rise of bottom-up instructions, 55 and Robert F. Stockton, 82, 83, 192 and Samuel J. Tilden, 172–4, 217 and sectionalism, 124, 147, 219 and Sidney Breese, 46–7 and slavery, 27–8, 161, 184–5, 194–6, 198, 201 split in 1860, 202 and spoils system, 174–5 and state banks, 79 and Stephen A. Douglas, 13, 52, 53, 151 and use of phrase “Young America,” 3 and William Allen, 86 and young Democracy, 7–8, 11, 12, 16, 60, 66, 129, 130, 142, 162, 204, 208–10, 219, 231 strong executive authority under Polk, 152 under Andrew Jackson, 2, 6, 16, 60 under Stephen A. Douglas and August Belmont, 2 unified under Young America reformism, 182 unity of under Young America, 15, 49, 202–4 views of immigrants, 67, 163 writing about Young America’s impact on, 4, 9 Young America’s decline within, 232 young Democracy and immigration, 162 Democratic Review, 63, 68, 110, 118, 147, 212, 216 and American neutrality laws, 137 and Benjamin Tappan, 185 and condition of women, 158 and cultural dimension of Young America, 3

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241 and Democratic rebirth, 8, 67 and Democratic reform tradition, 147, 152, 157, 163 and dueling, 155 and economic orientation of New Democrats, 79, 90 and election of 1844, 203 and election of 1852, 208 encapsulating ideals of Young America, 1 and European revolutions of 1848, 95–6 and free trade, 40 and George N. Sanders, 93, 99, 210 and income taxes, 154 and Independent Treasury, 41 and Jane Cazneau, 159, 160 and John L. O’Sullivan, 3, 13, 73, 75, 234 and Mexican War, 130, 131 and Monroe Doctrine, 119 ´ and Narciso Lopez, 136 and new internationalism of Democratic Party, 117 and slavery, 185 and spoils system, 174, 175 and temperance, 155 and Texas annexation, 127 views of immigrants, 163 as Young American clearinghouse, 10 and young Democracy, 209 Depression of 1837–43, 40, 66 Dial, The, 100 Disraeli, Benjamin, 94 Dix, Dorothea, 34, 149 Dix, John, 186, 187 Dobbin, James, 170 Douglas, Stephen A., 13, 36, 48, 52–3, 60, 76, 142, 151, 167, 171–2, 174, 177, 180, 182, 195, 208, 212, 226, 229, 234 and air travel, 167 and August Belmont, 39 in campaign of 1858, 229 on colonizationism, 193 competition with Sidney Breese over the railroad, 47–9 and Compromise of 1850, 195, 219 and Dean Richmond, 88

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242 Douglas, Stephen A. (cont.) Democratic allegiance of, 200 as Democratic unifier, 208, 212–13, 218 in election of 1852, 99, 208–10, 212–13, 215, 217 in election of 1860, 36, 64 and European revolutions of 1848, 103 and founding of University of Chicago, 151 and Franklin Pierce, 111, 112 and free land movement, 148–50 and free trade, 42 generational cohort of, 6, 64 and George N. Sanders, 59, 99–100, 210–12 and Illinois Central Railroad, 48–9 and instructions from state legislature, 55 on internal improvements and land grants, 49, 51–2, 58–60, 70 and James Shields, 98 and Jane Cazneau, 160–1 and John C. Breckinridge, 212 and John Wentworth, 58, 72–3, 195 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 12, 72, 98, 114, 192, 195, 200, 221–2, 226, 227, 231 as leader of New Democracy, 2, 13, 16, 36, 60 and Louis Kossuth, 107–9 and mail steamers, 167 and Mexican War, 133 and monopolies, 77–8, 171–2, 174 and new internationalism of Democracy, 118, 144 and popular sovereignty, 191, 194–5, 207 on the progressive Democracy, 2 racial views of, 161–3 railroad boosterism of, 47–9, 70–1, 77, 217, 220 railroad investments of, 71 on railroads and Chicago, 70 and rivers and harbors improvements, 59 and Smithsonian Institution, 151

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Index and spoils system, 178, 180, 181 on tonnage duties, 60 as unionist, 202 views of slavery, 193–5 views on size of federal government, 172 visit to Europe of, 112, 142–4 visit to White House with John L. O’Sullivan of, 135 as western representative, 58, 62, 124 and William A. Richardson, 13, 62, 224 and Young Europe, 5 Dred Scott decision, 28 Dueling, 155 Duyckinck, Evert, 3 Dwight family, 90 Ebony Line, 99, 193 Election of 1844, 12, 203–5 Election of 1848, 207 Election of 1852, 208–14 Election of 1860, 202, 213 Electricity, experiments in, 166 Emancipation Proclamation, 201 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 230 and coinage of “Young America,” 5 England America’s Navy, as example for, 169 in Asia, 139 and Canada, 102 and Chartists, 95 and Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 43, 120, 138 compared with Continental absolutism, 108 conflicts with during 1840s, 35, 67 designs on Cuba, 106, 136, 138, 159 and European revolutions of 1848, 93 and free land movement, 148 and free trade, 58 George Bancroft as minister to, 141–2 George N. Sanders as consul to, 99 James Buchanan as minister to, 112 and mercantilism, 42, 138 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 Nathaniel Hawthorne stationed in, 110

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Index and Oregon crisis, 85, 121–6, 130, 168, 170 post-Revolutionary problems with, 31 and repeal of the Corn Laws, 40–1 and Texas annexation, 118 in War of 1812, 31, 133 and Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 156 and Young England. See Young England and Young Ireland rebels, 97 English Civil War, 20 Erie Canal, 49, 56 Evans, George Henry and coinage of “Young America,” 5 and free land movement, 148 Everett, Edward, 52 Federalist Party,17–18, 21–2, 59, 99, 196 Filibustering, 14, 105, 128 Fillmore, Millard, 96, 104, 105, 110, 137, 191, 216 Flagg, Azariah C., 187 Fourierism, 145 Franklin, Benjamin, 31, 112, 144 Fredrickson, George M., 9 Freehling, William W., 26 Free land movement, 12, 30, 145, 147–50 Free Soil Party, 14, 34, 75, 145, 172, 184, 187, 189, 195, 197, 199, 207, 214 Free trade, 7, 37–43, 58, 63–5, 83, 103, 106, 125, 130, 140, 141, 154, 187, 221, 225, 226 and August Belmont, 38 in Europe, 68 and George N. Sanders, 99 and James K. Polk, 13 in Mexico, 131 and Robert F. Stockton, 83 French Revolution, 104 Fugitive Slave Act, 195, 219, 231 Fuller, Margaret, 13, 100–1, 107, 142, 143, 159 Gadsden, James, 169, 211, 217 Gag rule, 191, 199 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 93 Garrison, William Lloyd, 26, 33, 147, 183, 185, 196, 201 General incorporation laws, 74, 171

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243 General Land Office, 152 Generational consciousness of New Democrats, 6–7, 9, 116, 204–6, 208, 213, 216, 234 Geographical and Statistical Society, 153 Giddings, Joshua, 104 Gilded Age, 12, 70, 79, 84, 86, 118, 171, 233 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 20 Gold Rush, California, 68, 152 Grant, Ulysses S., 173 Greeley, Horace, 96, 100, 101 Green, Duff, 69 Greenbacks, 85 Haitian Revolution of 1791, 26, 134 Hale, John P., 96, 103, 188, 214 Hamilton, Alexander, 17, 18, 21, 32 Hannegan, Edward, 13 on the 1846 rivers and harbors bill, 61 as ally of Marcus Morton, 197 and colonizationism, 192 and European revolutions of 1848, 103 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 and Oregon crisis, 126 as western representative, 124 ´ 134 and Yucatan, Hard Hunker Democrats, 188 Harrison, William Henry, 176 Hartford Convention, 156 Harvard University, 72, 89, 141, 195 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3, 101, 110, 223 Hayne, Robert Y., 25 Henshaw, David, 205 Hofstadter, Richard, 9, 21 Holden, William Woods, 91 Holt, Michael F., 226 Homestead Act, 50, 149, 150 Horner, Peter, 89 Houston, Sam and Compromise of 1850, 219 and free land movement, 148 relationship with George Law, 87 Hunker Democrats, 14, 78, 112, 153, 178, 186–8, 197, 205, 208, 212, 213

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244 Illinois Central Railroad, 48, 77, 143, 171, 218 Illinois State Register, 13, 43, 49, 163 Imperialism, New Democrats and, 12, 118, 144, 149, 156 Independent Treasury, or sub-Treasury, 15, 38, 41, 66, 79–82, 92, 195 Indian Affairs, Office of, 152 Indian Removal Act of 1830, 29 Instructions, to representatives from constituents, 54–5 Interior Department, 152 Internal improvements, 12, 15, 37, 44, 51, 56, 57, 59, 63, 65, 125, 186, 199, 233 and Andrew Jackson, 44 and August Belmont, 38 and James K. Polk, 12 and John A. Quitman, 89 and John L. O’Sullivan, 74 and John Wentworth, 58–9 and land grants, 47–9 moving Democrats closer to Whigs, 222, 225 and railroads, 47 and Robert F. Stockton, 83 and Samuel J. Tilden, 173 and Sidney Breese, 46, 47 and Stephen A. Douglas, 52, 58 and western development, 124 and William A. Richardson, 224 Jackson, Andrew, 19, 23–4, 27, 28, 36, 46, 84, 85, 91, 129, 157, 177, 184, 194, 210, 227 and Bank of the United States, 29, 79, 82, 92, 129 and Battle of New Orleans, 31 and currency policy, 85, 86 as duelist, 155 and early Democracy, 2, 6, 15, 16, 18–20, 23, 25, 34, 36, 41, 50, 60, 233 in election of 1828, 23 and election of 1844, 205 and executive authority, 129, 176–7 and internal improvements, 44 and nullification, 24 and Panic of 1837, 66

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Index and protective tariff, 19, 23 and Roger Taney, 28, 164 and Sidney Breese, 46–7 and slavery, 27–8 and spoils system, 174 and states’ rights, 24 and Stephen A. Douglas, 52 and strict constitutional construction, 61 and territorial expansion, 29 theory of the Union of, 24 and the veto, 23 and Whig Party, 18 and William Allen, 84 Jacksonian ideology (also see Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition), 19 Japan, Perry’s expedition to, 139–40 Jay, John, 31 Jay Treaty, 31 Jefferson, Thomas, 17–18, 22, 23, 31, 104 in election of 1800, 17–18 foreign policy of, 31, 116 and Library of Congress, 151 and Louisiana Purchase, 22, 29, 31, 222 party ideology of, 17–20, 24, 29, 30, 32, 148 and trade embargo, 31 and Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 21 and William Allen, 84 Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition, 18, 37, 55, 69, 70, 149, 171 Jeffersonians versus Hamiltonians, 17–18 Johnson, Andrew, 91, 146, 149 and free land movement, 148 and spoils system, 179 Jones, William Alfred, 3 Jungen Amerika, 162 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 12, 52, 72, 114, 138, 139, 170, 189, 192, 195, 199, 203, 217, 221–2, 226, 227, 231, 232, 234 Kennedy, Andrew, 129 King, Preston, 187

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Index King, William, 188, 203 Kirkland, Caroline, 142, 159 Know-Nothing Party, 199, 200, 226–7 Kossuth, Louis, 93, 96, 99, 107–9, 113, 118, 136, 220 Kriege, Herman, 162 Law, George, 14, 45, 87–9, 92 and European revolutions of 1848, 113, 128 journey to Republican Party, 192, 234 in Know-Nothing Party, 200 and Mexican War, 99 relationship with George N. Sanders, 212 relationship with Stephen A. Douglas, 167 and spoils system, 178 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre-Auguste, 93 Lee, Robert E., 192 Leggett, William, 28 Liberia (also see Colonizationism), 26 Liberty Party, 33, 145, 185, 190 Library of Congress, 46, 151 Lincoln, Abraham, 188, 201 as colonizationist, 34, 192 and Dean Richmond, 88 in debates with Stephen A. Douglas, 161 and James Shields, 98 and John Wentworth, 72, 195 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 221 and land grants, 50 and Samuel J. Tilden, 172 on Young America, 15, 229–31 Locofocos, 30, 65, 72, 90, 219, 223, 225 Long Island Railroad, 89 Loose construction of the U.S. Constitution, 17, 22 ´ Lopez, Narciso, 75, 88, 105, 136 Louisiana Purchase, 22, 26, 29, 31 Louis-Philippe, 210 Madison, James, 18, 21–2, 24, 29, 31, 54 Mail steamers, 167–8 Mangum, Willie, 50, 140 Manifest Destiny, 11, 103, 114, 117, 136, 147, 218 and Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 120

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245 and Cuba, 136 end of, 139 and European revolutions of 1848, 96 and Jane Cazneau, 159 and John L. O’Sullivan, 75, 130 and Mexican War, 144 and Oregon crisis, 125 and Perry’s Japan expedition, 140 and railroads, 71 sectionalism as result of, 221 and young Democracy, 205 Mann, A. Dudley, 136 Mann, Horace, 34 manufacturing, 64 Marcy, William L., 187 and August Belmont, 37 in campaign of 1852, 213 and Franklin Pierce, 214 as secretary of state, 112, 113, 138, 178 and slavery issue, 28 and spoils system, 174 Market revolution, 2, 7, 11, 12, 29–30, 36, 44, 46, 56, 61, 63, 67, 131, 223, 233 Marshall, Edward, 105 Marshall, John, 18, 22–4, 28 Martineau, Harriet, 143 Mason, John Y. and Ostend Manifesto, 139 Mathews, Cornelius, 3, 5 Maysville Road, and Jackson’s veto of funding for, 24 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 5, 93–5, 99–101, 131 McConnell, Felix, 97 McCulloch v. Maryland, 22 McDuffie, George, 50 Medary, Samuel, 14 Melville, Gansevoort, 142 Melville, Herman, 3 Mercantilism and free trade, 41 Mexican War, 4, 50, 118, 128–33, 163 and the Democratic Review, 119 end of, 135 and executive branch, 128 financing of by August Belmont, 39 Franklin Pierce as veteran of, 110 and George Law and George N. Sanders, 87 and James Shields, 98

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246 Mexican War (cont.) and Jane Cazneau, 159 opposed by Abraham Lincoln, 229 John A. Quitman as general during, 88 Robert F. Stockton as commander during, 82, 181 and taxation, 154 and William Allen, 85, 192 Mexico, 118, 132–3, 135 British designs upon, 125, 126 and free trade, 131, 133 and Jane Cazneau, 160 John A. Quitman as occupation governor of, 88 and Mexican War, 35, 50, 67, 118, 121, 122, 127–33, 141, 144, 162, 168, 170, 207 occupation of, 132 and Old Fogies, 210 quest to annex all of, 14, 76, 117, 134 southern designs upon, 123–4 and Texas, 128 and William Allen, 126 ´ 134 and Yucatan, Miami University, 149 Missouri Compromise, 26, 27, 184, 188, 191 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 114, 192, 221, 231 Monroe, James, 32 Monroe Doctrine, 32, 77, 144, 214 revival of, 118–21 ´ 134 and Yucatan, Monterrey, Battle of, 88 Montgomery, Cora. See Cazneau, Jane McManus Storm Morrill Act, 50, 149, 150 Morris, Thomas, 28 Morse, Samuel F. B., 166 Morton, Marcus, 14, 164, 175, 181, 196, 201, 205, 206 and capital punishment, 157 views of slavery, 196–7 Munn v. Illinois, 47 Napoleon, 31, 32, 102, 130, 222 Napoleon, Louis, 99, 103, 107, 111, 138, 143 Napoleonic wars, 31

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July 2, 2007

Index National Republicans, 22–4, 32, 69 National Road (also see Cumberland Road), 44–5 Naval Academy, U.S., 150 Navy, United States, 69, 84 Bancroft’s reforms of, 180 proposals for use of steam power in, 168–9 Neutrality laws, 137 Newburyport, Massachusetts, 168 New Democrats. See Democratic Party New Orleans, Battle of, 84 New York Central Railroad, 88 New York Daily Times, 53, 140, 188 New York Evening Post, 41, 57–8, 76 New York Herald, 13, 72, 76, 90, 102, 132–3, 142, 145, 177, 214, 216 New York Literary World, 3 New York Morning News, 172, 188 New York Public Library, 173 New York Sun, 159 New York Tribune, 96 Niles, John, 47 North American Review, 94, 212 Northwest Ordinance of 1787, 188 Norton, Andrews, 141 Nott, Josiah, 165 Nullification, 19, 24, 26, 83, 124, 176 Ohio State Democrat, 192 Ohio Statesman, 13, 120, 126 Old Democrats. See Democratic Party Old Fogies, 8, 91, 96, 166, 204, 208–12, 214, 230 Old Republicans, 23, 50, 91 Oregon, 85, 97, 117, 118, 120–7, 135, 207 Ostend Manifesto, 114, 139 O’Sullivan, John L., 8, 13, 67, 73–6, 78, 90–1, 95, 105, 129, 141, 144, 172, 185, 203–5, 211, 234 and capital punishment, 156, 182 and Cilley-Graves duel, 155 conception of reform, 157 as Confederate agent, 200 and Cuba, 113, 136 as editor of Democratic Review, 10 as Free Soiler, 190, 198 generational cohort of, 6

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July 2, 2007

Index and George N. Sanders, 212 and the isthmian canal, 73 and Jane Cazneau, 161 and literary Young America, 3 and Manifest Destiny, 133, 159 as minister to Portugal, 138 and the New York Morning News, 172 as pacifist, 129, 155–6 and spoils system, 176 views of women, 158 visit to White House with Stephen A. Douglas of, 135 Pacifism, 156 Panama canal, 73, 92 Panic of 1819, 22, 79 Panic of 1837, 38, 66–7, 79 Patent Office, 152 Peel, Sir Robert, 41, 43 Pendleton Civil Service Act, 176 Perry, Matthew C., 1, 39, 43, 87, 108, 139, 169 Pettit, John, 62 Philippines, the, 159 Phillips, Wendell, 26, 196, 201 Pierce, Franklin, 141, 177, 188, 212–16, 220, 231 and August Belmont, 37, 39 and Cuba, 137, 138 and David Wilmot, 189 and European revolutions of 1848, 104 and federal patronage, 177, 188 and George Bancroft, 206 and George N. Sanders, 93, 212 inaugural address of, 214–15 and James Shields, 164 and Jane Cazneau, 159 and John Wentworth, 195 and military reform, 170 and rivers and harbors improvements, 56, 58, 62, 224 role of in Democratic overlap with Whigs, 225 as Young American, 13, 110, 142, 144, 209–10, 212, 217, 234 Pinckney Treaty, 31 Polk, James K., 67, 90, 141, 168, 177, 213, 215, 220, 234

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247 and California Gold Rush, 68 and Cuba, 135 and European revolutions of 1848, 104 and free trade, 42 and George Bancroft, 102, 141–2, 180 on immigration, 163 and the Independent Treasury, 80 and Interior Department, 152 and James Shields, 98 and Jane Cazneau, 159–60 and Marcus Morton, 175 and Mexican War, 131, 133 and Oregon crisis, 123–4, 207 and presidential power, 128–9 and protective tariff, 84 and rivers and harbors improvements, 46, 56–8, 62–3, 72, 124 and Smithsonian Institution, 150 as southern New Democrat, 11, 146 and spoils system, 177 and the telegraph, 166 and Texas, 127 on tonnage duties, 60 and U.S. Navy, 169 as Young American, 12, 13, 84, 119, 127, 144, 155, 204, 207 and young Democracy, 8, 16 ´ 134 and Yucatan, Polk, William H., 105, 167, 212 Popular sovereignty, 64, 171, 184, 191, 194–5, 199, 200, 208 Populist Party, 86, 234 Progressive era, 12, 150, 154, 171, 173–4, 233–4 Puerto Rico, 159 Quasi-war against France, 31 Quitman, John A., 14, 88–9, 91, 215–17 and Cuba, 14, 105, 113, 128, 137–8, 219 in election of 1852, 215 and internal improvements, 45–6 and Mexican War, 132 as southern New Democrat, 11, 184 Race and ethnicity, New Democratic views of, 161–5

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248 Railroads, 89, 92, 149, 171–2, 218, 220–2 in Europe, 68 as part of the New Democratic agenda, 69–72 Rantoul, Robert, 190 Republicanism, classical, 18, 20–1, 28 Republican Party, 203, 221, 226, 231, 234 and currency policy, 86 and Dean Richmond, 88 and free land movement, 150 and John Wentworth, 72, 195 link with New Democrats, 13, 79, 89, 176, 184, 189, 199, 200, 227, 233 and railroads, 70 and Robert F. Stockton, 189, 192 and William Allen, 85 Revolutions of 1848 in Europe. See 1848, European revolutions of Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 59 Richardson, William A., 13, 62, 180, 212, 224 Richmond, Dean, 71, 88–9, 177 Richmond Junto, 27 Ritchie, Thomas, 27, 81 Rivers and harbors improvements, 15, 46, 55–65, 73, 124, 195, 223–4 legislation of 1846, 63 legislation of 1854, 62, 224 Romanticism, 109 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 234 Rothschild family, 36, 38 Sanders, George N., 13, 59, 71, 99, 117, 144, 180, 199, 209, 210, 212, 215, 232, 234 and colonizationism, 193 as Confederate agent, 200 as consul to England, 110 as editor of Democratic Review, 10 and executive authority, 129 and Franklin Pierce, 212 generational cohort of, 6 on immigration, 163 and internal improvements, 45, 57 and Jane Cazneau, 160 and the London dinner of 1854, 93 on Margaret Fuller, 159

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Index and Mexican War, 99 relationship with George Law, 87 as southern New Democrat, 11, 146 and Young Europe, 5, 87, 107, 109, 113 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 146 Scott, Winfield, 88, 213, 216 Second Great Awakening, 33 Second Party System, 27, 32, 175, 226 Sectionalism, New Democracy and, 11–12 Sedgwick, Theodore, 218 Seneca Falls Convention, 158 Seven Years’ War, 31 Seward, William H., 149 Shields, James, 13, 46, 49, 96–8, 170 and Compromise of 1850, 219 and free land movement, 148, 149 and Mexican War, 132 and Navy reform, 181 and opening of Japan, 140 racial views of, 165 on Stephen A. Douglas, 53 views of immigrants, 164, 182 and Young Europe, 112 Ship Island, Mississippi, 45 Sickles, Daniel, 110, 114 Simms, William Gilmore, 3 Slave Power, 124, 186, 189–90, 217, 221 Slavery, New Democrats and, 14, 27 Slidell, John, 39, 106, 180 Smith, Gerrit, 187 Smith, William, 23 Smithsonian Institution, 150 Soft Hunker Democrats, 188 Soul´e, Pierre, 11, 13 and George N. Sanders, 212 as minister to Spain, 110, 113, 138 and Ostend Manifesto, 139 and slavery, 184 as supporter of Confederacy, 200 and Young Europe, 96, 103 Specie Circular, 66 Spoils system, 146, 174–81 Stanford, Leland, Sr., 70, 79 Steam power, 168 Stockton, Robert F., 13, 82–4, 89, 92 and European revolutions of 1848, 109

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Index and Hunker Democrats, 188 journey to Republican Party, 234 and Mexican War, 128 and Navy reform, 169, 180–1 railroad investments of, 71, 86 views of slavery, 190 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 158, 196, 231 Strict construction of the U.S. Constitution, 10–12, 22, 25, 55, 65, 166, 167, 170, 198 Sub-Treasury. See Independent Treasury Sumner, Charles, 231 Sumner, George, 102, 106 Tammany Hall, 173, 209, 219 Taney, Roger, 28, 125, 164 Tappan, Arthur, 26, 50, 146, 183–5 Tappan, Benjamin, 183–5, 187, 190, 192, 201 Tappan, Lewis, 26, 43, 183–5 Tariff, protective, 23, 37–8, 53, 83–4, 154, 195, 225 Taxation, New Democratic proposals for, 12, 154–5 Taylor, Zachary, 26, 104, 110, 175, 179, 207 Telegraph, the, 166 Temperance reform, 155–6 Texas, 127–8, 136, 233 annexation of, 97, 118, 119, 122, 130, 144, 187, 207 annexation of as cause of Mexican War, 127 annexation of opposed by Abraham Lincoln, 229 British designs on, 118 effect of annexation of on partisan politics, 127, 198, 203 foreign perceptions of, 128 and future of slavery, 185 and George N. Sanders, 99 and James K. Polk, 204, 206 and Jane Cazneau, 159, 182 John A. Quitman in, 88 and John C. Calhoun, 123 and Mexican War, 170 revolution of in 1836, 114, 169 and Robert F. Stockton, 128, 191

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249 and Sam Houston, 148 southern Democratic position on, 124 Van Buren opposed to annexation of, 203 Thoreau, Henry David, 100, 131 Tilden, Samuel J., 2, 13, 169, 172–4, 187, 200, 217–18 and Dean Richmond, 88 and executive authority, 129 as Free Soiler, 184, 186, 187, 190 generational cohort of, 6 and the Independent Treasury, 80 and John L. O’Sullivan, 155 as New York governor, 7 and Peter Horner, 89 railroad investments of, 71 and spoils system, 178, 182 and William Tweed, 174 and young Democracy, 8, 212 Toombs, Robert, 199 Trail of Tears, 29 Transcendentalism, 34, 147 Treat, Samuel, 178 Treaty of 1783, 30 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 134 Treaty of New Granada, 77 Trevett, Russell, 3 Troup, George, 215 Trumbull, Lyman, 98 Tucker, Beverley, 117 Turner, Nat, 184 Tweed, William, 87, 174, 178 Tyler, John, 26, 58, 81, 82, 123, 127, 176, 177 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 231 University of Chicago, 151 University of the City of New York, 172 Utopian communities, 34 Vallandigham, Clement, 195 Van Buren, John, 14, 87, 189, 197 Van Buren, Martin, 78, 189, 202, 205, 207 and Barnburner Democrats, 145, 186 and Benjamin F. Butler, 188 as doughface, 27, 28 and early Democracy, 2, 15, 18, 27, 36, 233

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250 Van Buren, Martin (cont.) in election of 1844, 127, 203–5 in election of 1848, 207 as Free Soiler, 27, 145, 186, 197, 207 and the Independent Treasury, 66, 67, 79, 81, 195 and the isthmian canal, 76 and John L. O’Sullivan, 75 and John Wentworth, 195 and Marcus Morton, 196–7 and Samuel J. Tilden, 172 and Second Party System, 27 Venable, Abraham, 105 Victoria, Queen, 112, 143, 158, 168 Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, 21, 99 Walker, Isaac P., 14, 45, 46, 55, 103, 104, 149 Walker, Robert J., 13, 144, 146 and capital punishment, 157 diplomatic appointment under Pierce, 110 and free trade, 43, 54 railroad investments of, 71 as southern New Democrat, 11 and Stephen A. Douglas, 143 and the Walker Tariff (also see Walker Tariff), 84 and young Democracy, 209 on Young Europe, 142 ´ 134 on Yucatan, Walker Tariff, 40, 43, 54, 80, 84, 154 Walsh, Mike, 219 War of 1812, 10, 22, 25, 31, 32, 156 comments on by James K. Polk, 133 compared to the Mexican War, 133 new economic nationalism following, 22 and Robert F. Stockton, 82 role of in fostering Young American self-consciousness, 6–7 Washington, George, 104, 119, 173 Washington Sentinel, 59, 117 Washington Union, 13 Webster, Daniel, 24, 25, 90, 96, 126, 177, 191, 224 Webster-Ashburton Treaty, 126, 156

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Index Wentworth, John, 13, 64, 72–3 generational cohort of, 6 journey to the Know-Nothing and Republican Parties, 200 and Pacific railroad, 72 on rivers and harbors improvements, 58, 61 views of slavery, 195 Whig Party, 7, 9, 18, 53, 64, 81, 85, 89, 91, 142, 151, 161, 190, 196, 233 and Abraham Lincoln, 50, 229 alliances with southern New Democrats, 220 and August Belmont, 39, 163 and Bank of the United States, 79, 82, 129 and Benjamin Tappan, 185 and Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 120, 138 and colonizationism, 34 contributions to Free Soil Party, 145 and Cuba, 138 and Daniel Webster, 25, 126, 190, 224 decline of after Kansas-Nebraska Act, 221 Democratic overlap with in early 1850s, 2, 11, 43, 50, 69, 222–7 in election of 1844, 127, 203 in election of 1848, 190 in election of 1852, 213–14, 224–6 and European revolutions of 1848, 96 on executive authority, 129, 152 formation of in 1830s, 18 and free trade, 43, 154, 225 and Garrett Davis, 46 and George Bancroft, 90 and Horace Greeley, 101 and Horace Mann, 34 ideology of, 11, 30, 64, 79, 96, 188, 197, 198 and the Independent Treasury, 81 and internal improvements, 57, 60, 78 and the isthmian canal, 74 and John L. O’Sullivan, 79 and John Tyler, 127, 176 and John Wentworth, 61 and Lewis Tappan, 43 in Massachusetts, 196 and Millard Fillmore, 105 and Monroe Doctrine, 120

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Index and North American Review, 75, 212 opposition to Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition, 22, 32, 81, 190 opposition to Mexican War, 122, 128, 129, 131 presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, 110 reform within, 15, 33–4, 145, 147, 150, 157, 161 and Robert Toombs, 199 in Second Party System, 27, 32, 40 and slavery, 27, 34, 161, 184, 187, 190, 197 southerners within, 26 and spoils system, 175 and tariff of 1842, 43, 53, 54, 83 on Texas annexation, 127 views of immigrants, 162–5 and William A. Richardson, 224 and William H. Seward, 149 ´ 134 on Yucatan, and Zachary Taylor, 179 Whitney, Asa, 171 Wilentz, Sean, 20 Wilmot, David, 14, 154, 185, 187, 189, 190, 194, 198, 201, 203, 207 Wilmot Proviso, 60, 67, 188, 189, 192, 194, 195, 203 Wilson, Woodrow, 234 Winston, John, 91 Women, Young American views of, 157–61 Woodbury, Levi, 28 Wright, Silas, 53, 224 Yale University, 172 Young America, 9, 158, 168, 208, 209 Abraham Lincoln on, 229–31 and August Belmont, 38 bisectional nature of, 11, 146, 199, 219 causes of the movement, 37, 54, 61, 66, 125 and Compromise of 1850, 219 and Cuba, 113, 114, 135, 136, 138, 144 and David Yulee, 49 decline of, 232, 234 definition and ideology of, 1–2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 14, 233

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251 as Democratic unifier, 15, 49, 202, 207, 208, 212–20, 222, 227, 232 etymology of, 3, 5–6 and European revolutions of 1848, 93, 95, 96, 101, 104, 107, 113 and Franklin Pierce, 13, 111, 141, 212, 214, 216–17 and free land movement, 147–8 and free trade, 40 generational consciousness of, 6–7, 9, 14, 116 and George Bancroft, 206 and George Law, 87 and George M. Dallas, 76 and George N. Sanders, 57, 210–12 George William Curtis on, 1 and immigration, 162, 164 and the Independent Treasury, 80 and industrialization, 64 and internal improvements, 45 internal party evolution of, 11 and James K. Polk, 119, 204 and James Shields, 97, 98 and Jane Cazneau, 160 and Jesse Bright, 180 and John A. Quitman, 89 and John L. O’Sullivan, 74, 75 and John Wentworth, 72, 195 and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 114, 221–2 link with early Republican Party, 13, 73, 79, 200, 227 literary and cultural dimension of, 3–5 and Louis Kossuth, 108, 110 and Margaret Fuller, 100–1 and Matthew C. Perry, 139 and Mexican War, 128–33 new internationalism of, 116–17, 119, 121, 141, 143 New York Herald as organ of, 72, 132 and Oregon crisis, 122–3, 125–7 and orthodox Jacksonian beliefs, 19, 35 and Ostend Manifesto, 114, 139 periodization of, 12 in poem in Democratic Review, 1 racial views of, 162–4 and railroads, 69, 71, 218 refashioned economic orientation of, 36–7, 44, 63, 65, 78, 82

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252 Young America (cont.) reform tradition of, 145–7, 150, 155, 161, 174, 181 and rivers and harbors improvements, 62 and Robert F. Stockton, 82 and Robert J. Walker, 110 role in overlap with Whigs, 223, 225–7 Samuel J. Tilden on, 2 sectionalism within, 103, 104, 115, 124, 200, 202–3, 220–1 and slavery, 184, 194, 201 and Smithsonian Institution, 151 and spoils system, 174–5, 177 and steam power, 168–9 and Stephen A. Douglas, 13, 47, 51–3, 59, 144, 208, 210, 213, 231 and William Allen, 84, 85

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Index women in, 159 and Young Europe, 94, 95, 98 ´ 134 and Yucatan, Young America (newspaper), 5 Young England, 5, 94 Young Europe,5, 94–6, 98, 101, 106, 113 Young Germany, 5, 94 Young Hegelians, 94 Young Ireland, 5, 94–6 Young Italy, 5, 93–5, 101 Young Poland, 94 ´ 97, 133–4 Yucatan, Yulee, David, 13 and August Belmont, 194 generational cohort of, 6 and internal improvements funding, 49, 50 and Monroe Doctrine, 120 on Pierce’s election, 216

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