The Market Revolution and Jacksonian Democracy

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1 The Market Revolution and Jacksonian Democracy This is a study guide intended to give you a brief introduction to the period and to some of the assigned readings. "It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society the farmers, mechanics, and laborers who have neither the time nor the means of Satire of Jackson s war against the Bank of the United States, from Library of Congress collection, securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of / their Government. from President Andrew Jackson s veto of the bill to recharter the Bank of the United States in **************************************************** In the thirty years after the War of 1812, the United States experienced a market revolution that integrated the majority of Americans more fully into a market economy and encouraged the spread of more impersonal forms of exchange. Crowding out the traditional, largely self-sufficient farmer, new commercial classes of farmers and planters, artisans and masters produced for an often far-flung and impersonal market. Instead of focusing on family and neighbors within local communities, exchange (buying, selling, and crucially, borrowing) often involved transactions with unknown and unseen individuals and institutions hundreds of miles from one s community. And merchants, manufacturers, retailers and professionals (including the fast-growing ranks of lawyers) made up an increasing percentage of the population. The market revolution, what the economist Karl Polyani called the great transformation, changed everything. Farmers increasingly focused on a small number of marketable crops and borrowed money to purchase new lands and expand production. Master artisans reorganized their crafts and introduced a new wage relationship which supplanted the old mutual obligations and duties of masters, journeymen, and apprentices and introduced new

2 conflicts and divisions. The socialization of production increasingly took economic activities out of the household and into the marketplace and transformed the position of women. The notion of separate sphere emerged as a result. A female, domestic sphere of love, compassion, nurture, sympathy now seemed separate from a male, public sphere of aggression, calculation, self-interest, and ruthlessness. The market revolution also had a profound impact on American politics. American democracy, it has often been said, grew up with American capitalism. Some have argued that democracy expanded in harmony with capitalism, but others (including Charles Sellers, see assigned readings) have argued that democracy emerged in opposition to capitalism. Either way, the conflicts that characterized the period of Jacksonian democracy revolved around issues of the market. George Caleb Bingham, The County Election, , St. Louis Art Museum Jackson s Democratic party generally represented two groups: 1) upstart, often frustrated entrepreneurs who saw government regulation and promotion of the economy as a form of privilege from which they had been excluded and 2) a less powerful group of hard-pressed small producers and wage-earners who felt the logic of the marketplace was too mercenary, too callous, and who still worried that self-interest was supplanting virtue and corrupting American politics. The Whigs, who emerged in response to the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats, also generally represented two groups: 1) established interests with ties to government, eager to use federal power to promote national expansion and advance their own economic ambitions and 2) improvers, men and women (even though they could not vote, women played an important role in a Whig movement that was as much a culture as a party) eager to use both governmental power and voluntary agencies to uplift others, to promote high standards of labor, learning, manners, and benevolence but skeptical of the unaided efforts of the unwashed democracy. Background to Market Revolution: (the Sellers reading will flesh this out): Beginning with the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807 (a failed effort to keep the US out of the Napoleonic Wars) through the end of the War of 1812 (which ended in 1815), US trade with Europe was interrupted. As a result, American manufacturing expanded to replace European imports. In particular, New England merchants began looking more seriously at domestic trade as a source of profit. Merchant capital went into transportation improvements as well as manufacturing experiments like the textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts. Nationalistminded politicians (including, ironically, the future states rights Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina) encouraged federal support for transportation improvements to unite the nation, provide military transport, and generate an alternative source of tax revenues through internal trade (as opposed to tariffs on imports).

3 At the end of the War of 1812, the British began dumping their backlog of surplus goods on the American market, generating a depression in the US. Hard times underscored calls for what Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky called the American system, a federal program of internal improvements (roads, canals, harbors), tariff protections, and a stronger army and navy to protect American interests and produce a market for domestic manufacturers. A strong central bank also became part of this strategy. Much of Jacksonian politics revolved around support for or opposition to the American system. Federal and especially state governments - as well as private entrepreneurs - invested heavily in the turnpikes, canals, and railroads that created an internal, domestic market in the US. The building of the Erie, Miami and Erie and other canals were the biggest construction projects in American history to that time. Canals cut freight rates by 95% and travel times were reduced by almost as much. A two-month trip for freight from New York to Cincinnati in 1817 could be concluded in a mere week via railroad by Four good horses could pull a ton and a half of goods 18 miles a day over a turnpike, but the same four horses could pull 100 tons 24 miles a day on the canals. Agricultural production soared, the cost of food was reduced, while farmers bought more and more manufactured goods in the marketplace, stimulating industrial development. New York City and Cincinnati in the Market Revolution: Metropolitan Industrialization or a Republic of Producers? (think about the documents on the tailor s strike and the description of Cincinnati here): As the nation s metropolis, New York City felt the impact of the market revolution most sharply. An influx of cheap, immigrant labor and the new markets opened by the Erie Canal after 1825 (connecting New York City to all of upper New York State and via Buffalo to the Great Lakes) prompted the reorganization of the crafts in a system called metropolitan industrialization (less a matter of factories and mechanization than a subdivision of work and employment of cheap labor). A sharp, increasingly class-conscious struggle between ambitious masters and frustrated journeymen ensued. In Cincinnati, Queen City of the West, the scarcity of labor and the smaller scale of manufacturing created greater opportunities for workers. Economic downturns Handbill calling artisans to New York City Hall Park to protest the conspiracy conviction of union tailors in 1836 could generate considerable discontent, especially against Eastern-based banks that called in loans and foreclosed on property, but in good times economic expansion seemed to be promoting the commonwealth. Rag to riches, or rather journeyman to master, was a more common story in the west. Cincinnati s labor troubles would not explode for another generation. In the short run, Cincinnati seemed like the republican city on a hill, the place where the promise of the American republic had been realized. Background to Jackson s War against the Bank (the Hofstadter reading will flesh this

4 out): As the great hero of the Battle of New Orleans, the scourge of frontier Indians, and especially the self-made man who made his way by competitive skill rather than privilege, Andrew Jackson rose to political prominence while a group of ambitious politicos organized around his rising star. Though Jackson won the popular vote in the presidential election of 1824 (as many states for the first time provided for the direct election of the electoral college - instead of the state legislatures), he lost the presidency when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives where the caucus system (a small coterie of federal officeholders who had essentially fixed the election of Presidents Madison and Monroe) once again chose the president. The man they chose was Jackson s great rival and key figure in the soon-to-be-born Whig party, John Quincy Adams. Jackson began campaigning immediately for the 1828 election, attacking political privilege and the corrupt bargain and demanding the people s right to choose their own leaders. As president and as a proto-typical Whig before the Whigs actually existed (he would join the party when it formed in the early 1830s), John Quincy Adams promoted an ambitious program of federally-financed improvements. Adams called for federal development of canals and roads, tariff-protection for infant American industries, continuation of the new Bank of the United States (created after the financial disasters in the War of 1812). He also called for the establishment of a national university, a naval academy, subsidies for exploration, patent protection for inventors, a national astronomical observatory, a program of compensated emancipation and colonization - in short a complete scheme of economic and moral improvement. Jacksonians saw these measures as paternalistic, as insulting to ordinary Americans, and especially as a form of political privilege granted to well-placed elites (see quotation at top of this guide). The Bank of the United States appeared to be the most dangerous and corrupting form of privilege. The Spread of the Cotton Kingdom: (the Baptist reading will build on this): Slavery appeared to be a dying institution at the time of the American Revolution as the soils of the seaboard South had begun to decline in fertility. Moreover, the Revolution itself had disrupted the institution (as many slaves fled to British lines) and put slavery ideologically on the defensive ( all men are created equal ). But the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, by the Yankee inventor Eli Whitney, gave slavery a new life by spreading it beyond Rise in cotton production, the seaboard into the piedmont and across the Gulf states. The cotton gin (or engine) facilitated the process of removing the seeds from short-staple cotton. The essential raw material of the cheap textiles industry, short-staple cotton could be grown throughout the region (unlike the finer, luxury long-staple cotton which could only be grown in the richest, coastal soils of the South). Cotton production in the older seaboard states soared eightfold over the next decade and, more importantly, cotton cultivation began to spread across the lower South.

5 Slaveholders carved new plantations out of the richest soils of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, pushing aside the yeomen farmers who first opened these frontiers to white settlement. By the 1840s, slavery had created a far-flung Cotton Kingdom. This spread of slave labor and cotton cultivation across the lower South represented a crucial part of the market revolution. The planters (those slaveholders who owned large plantations and slave work forces) focused on a single crop, usually cotton (but in certain areas also rice, sugar, tobacco, indigo, and hemp) and often borrowed significant sums of money to fund their operations. Thus planters were also at the center of the new, impersonal means of Mock banknote from 1837, satirizing the collapse of the American financial system. Library of Congress Spread of cotton and other plantations by 1860 exchange. As Baptist shows, promises to pay (that is, debt relationships) could become quite distinct from concrete forms of property and real relationships between people and exist in a nebulous realm of abstract values. In a world, trust and confidence in one s associates could become both more important and beings as nothing more than sources of profit. more elusive. And, of course, it could also result in treating human