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The Myth of Class in Jacksonian America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

William E. Gienapp
William E. Gienapp
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

In the mid-1960s, Charles G. Sellers, Jr., was perhaps the most widely respected historian of the Jacksonian era. The author of several seminal articles on the period, he was in the midst of writing a multivolume biography of James K. Polk, two volumes of which had already appeared. Sellers's knowledge of the intricacies of Jacksonian politics, his comprehension of the importance of state politics, and his understanding of the relationship between society and politics were unrivaled. The second volume of his study of Polk received the Bancroft Prize, and Jacksonian scholars eagerly awaited the appearance of the promised third volume, covering the most crucial years of Polk's presidency.

Type
Forum
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1994 , pp. 232 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1994

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References

Notes

1. The fullest discussion of transportation developments is Taylor's, George Rogers now-classic The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951)Google Scholar. Lee, Susan Previant and Passell, Peter, A New Economic View of American History (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, provide an excellent review of the recent literature on economic development in this era.

2. Hofstadter, Richard, The Progressive Historians (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, lucidly explores this tradition.

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4. Schlesinger's interpretation has been subject to extensive and multifaceted criticism. See Sellers, , “Andrew Jackson versus the Historians,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (March 1958): 615–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Most of this criticism applies with equal force to Sellers's book.

5. Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 505 and passim.

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18. Examples include Amos Kendall, who made a fortune organizing the telegraph business; Frank Blair, who got rich from public printing contracts; and Roger Taney, who had long been intimately associated with the Union Bank of Baltimore, in which he was a stockholder.

19. Studies emphasizing ethnocultural influences include Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961)Google Scholar; and Formisano, Ronald P., The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971)Google Scholar.

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25. For a discussion of how Biddle's actions foreclosed any possibility of compromise, see Remini, Jackson and the Bank War.

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27. Sharp, Jacksonians Versus the Banks; McFaul, Politics of Jacksonian Finance; Shade, Banks or No Banks.

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30. This view is most closely associated with Eugene D. Genovese. See, for example, his The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969)Google Scholar. Oakes, James, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982)Google Scholar, emphasizes slaveowners' capitalistic orientation.

31. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War.

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34. Howe, Daniel Walker, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1980)Google Scholar; Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy; Van Deusen, Glyndon G., “Some Aspects of Whig Thought and Theory in the Jacksonian Period,” American Historical Review 63 (January 1958): 305–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Watson, Harry L., Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), 236–37Google Scholar, summarizes these findings.

36. Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 21–46; Goodman, Paul, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826–1836 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Holt, Mickael F., “The Antimasonic and Know-Nothing Patties,” in Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties, 4 vols. (New York, 1973), 1:585–620Google Scholar.

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38. Ashworth, John, “Agrarians” and “Aristocrats”: Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (London, 1983)Google Scholar, presents a similar interpretation. Far more probing is Kohl, Lawrence Frederick, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York, 1989)Google Scholar, curiously not cited in Sellers's bibliography.

39. Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar.

40. Faler, Paul G., Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Albany, 1981)Google Scholar; Laurie, Bruce, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia, 1980)Google Scholar.

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44. Brown, Richard D., Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York, 1976), 144Google Scholar.

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46. Rohrbough, Malcolm J., The Land Office Business (New York, 1968), 192Google Scholar; Mitchell, D. W., Ten Years Residence in the United States (London, 1862), 325–28Google Scholar.

47. Brown, Modernization, 134; Jaffee, David, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 528–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Remini, Robert V., The Revolutionary Age of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1976), 5Google Scholar.

49. Without presenting any evidence to substantiate his interpretation, Sellers dismisses the usual explanation that Jackson did not realize that Rachel Donelson's divorce had never been finalized before they took up living together (298). For a review of the contradictory evidence concerning Jackson's marriage that reaches a conclusion similar to Sellers's, see Remini, Robert V., Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York, 1977), 60–67Google Scholar.

50. Sellers explicitly criticizes Blumin, Stuart M. for this approach in The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

51. A good example of this approach is Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

52. Sellers (353) implies that high taxes forced farmers to enter the market, but taxes in this era were insignificant. The federal government collected no direct taxes, and state and local taxes were very low. Indeed, rising taxes normally followed rather than preceded market penetration of a community.

53. Kohl, Politics of Individualism, is particularly good on this theme.

54. Pessen, Edward, “The Workingmen's Movement of the Jacksonian Era,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (December 1956): 428–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In Chants Democratic, Wilentz lavishes attention on the Working Men's party while all but ignoring workers’ support for the Democrats and especially the Whigs. Indeed, one can read Wilentz's entire book without learning whether workers voted Democratic.

55. Formisano, Ronald P., The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Political Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Goodman, Paul, “The Social Basis of New England Politics in Jacksonian America,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Spring 1986): 23–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 172–216. Less ideological but in a similar interpretive vein is Oestreicher, Richard, “Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870–1940,” Journal of American History 74 (March 1988): 1257–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. “The Equilibrium Cycle in Two-Party Politics,” Public Opinion Quarterly 29 (Spring 1965): 16–38, and the political science studies cited therein.

58. It should be noted that Sellers's graph in his article illustrating the equilibrium cycle over time is based on an invalid methodology. To get the cycle to oscillate gradually, he alternatively graphs two variables together using a different scale for each on the same axis. The cycle disappears if the same scale is used for both variables.