What Hath God Wrought (40 page)

Freemasonry, introduced into America from Britain in colonial times, had been an important force in the young republic. Its members had constituted a kind of republican elite, with Benjamin Franklin and George Washington prominent among them. The international Masonic brotherhood satisfied longings for status, trust, and metropolitan sophistication in an amorphous new society; its hierarchies and secret rituals offered a dimension lacking in the stark simplicity of much of American Protestantism. Freemasonry promoted the values of the Enlightenment and new standards of politeness. Its symbols of the pyramid and the eye had been incorporated into the Great Seal of the United States. Its ceremonies graced many public occasions, including the dedication of the United States Capitol and the construction of the Erie Canal. But in the Morgan episode, Masonic commitments of secrecy and mutual assistance led to disastrous consequences. To be sure, the Masonic brotherhood succeeded in the short run, protecting members from legal punishment and preventing Morgan from publishing all but the first three degree rituals, which appeared in print a month after his disappearance. But, as American Masonry’s most recent historian has shown, “it lost the larger battle in the court of public opinion.” During the decade after the Morgan affair, thousands of brothers quit the order and hundreds of lodges closed. Although Freemasonry recovered its numbers after the Civil War, it never recovered the influence it had wielded in the first fifty years of independence.
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Reaction against the Morgan crime and (even more) its cover-up led to the formation of an Antimasonic movement. Concerned citizens pressed for judicial investigations of Morgan’s disappearance and more information about Freemasonry. But Antimasonic speakers were harassed and their publishing outlets persecuted by local authorities who belonged to the order. Masons and Antimasons disrupted each other’s meetings and vandalized each other’s property. The conflict soon acquired a political dimension. Since the Morgan episode had occurred in western New York state, the Antimasonic movement arose in an area of strong support for DeWitt Clinton, the People’s Party, and John Quincy Adams. President Adams and his New York campaign manager, Thurlow Weed, showed clear sympathy with the Antimasons; Martin Van Buren and his Albany Regency, on the other hand, treated the movement as a threat. Governor Clinton, a prominent active Mason, could not afford to alienate the Antimasons and trod a fine line, mostly leaving the problem to local authorities. Andrew Jackson was a Mason, but so were a few of the Adams Republican leaders, including Henry Clay. Eventually, the Antimasonic movement organized as a third party but supported Adams in the presidential race of 1828. The party elected members to the New York legislature and spread to neighboring states, notably Pennsylvania, Ohio, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
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The Antimasons became the first third party in American history. Once organized as a political party, Antimasonry developed a political image and stands on other issues. The participants saw themselves as restoring moral order and transparent democracy, defending the little people against a secret cabal with ties to machine politics. Antimasonry appealed to the same attitudes that had been fostering increased democratization of American politics, such as the elimination of property requirements for voting and the popular election of presidential electors. The Antimasons took advantage of the opportunities for influencing public opinion provided by the growth of the printed media. Strongest in rural areas and small towns, their movement nurtured a provincial suspicion of metropolitan and upper-class values (Masonry was strongest in the cities). In their own time and since, the Antimasons have been accused of fanaticism, demagogy, and “paranoid delusions.”
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It seems more accurate to see them as responding to real provocation and reviving a tradition of popular political participation going back to the American Revolution and the English “commonwealthmen.” The Antimasons often supported tenant farmers against landlords. They welcomed the participation of women in their movement, contrasting it with Masonry, which was then all male. (When the Masons created their own women’s branch, the Order of the Eastern Star, in 1852, it helped defuse such criticism.) Many Antimasons eventually moved into antislavery. Antimasonry would remain an identifiable force in American politics for years to come.
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Despite historians’ efforts to correlate Antimasonry with economic interests, the movement in fact cut across economic lines. Including middle-class townsmen as well as poor farmers and residents of areas both prospering and declining, newly settled and long established, Antimasons had in common an ideological commitment to democracy and Protestant Christianity. In many ways the movement was a political precipitation from the evangelical religious awakenings, embracing a variety of denominations.
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Antimasons referred to their cause as “the blessed spirit.” They accused Freemasonry of corrupting Christianity, of being in effect a rival religion. They showed some continuity with the sabbatarian opposition to Sunday mails, though Antimasonry enjoyed broader support. Antimasonry represented a Christian grassroots version of the impulse to “improvement.”

In 1831, the Antimasons would be the first political party to hold a national convention, a practice that evangelical reform movements had pioneered. The convention seemed a more democratic means of selecting a nominee than the congressional caucus, and the other political parties quickly adopted it. While Martin Van Buren has often been credited with creating the modern American political party, in fact his rivals the Antimasons made an important contribution too.
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Van Buren’s concept of party was primarily concerned with organization and patronage. The lasting contribution of the Antimasonic movement to America was a concept of party politics that combined popular participation with moral passion. Antimasonry proved to be a precursor of the Republican Party of the 1850s, devoted to halting the spread of slavery. It can also be likened to the Progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, which would favor popular participation against corruption and secrecy in government and would share something of the same Protestant moral tone.

VI

Henry Clay’s hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, was a thriving commercial crossroads with a diversified economy. Located in the fertile Bluegrass country, it boasted the first newspaper and the first library west of the Appalachians, as well as Transylvania University, founded in 1798. There the aspiring young Clay had earned fame as a trial lawyer and money as counsel to banks and insurance companies. On his plantation, Ashland, just outside town, Clay grew hemp with a labor force of some fifty slaves. He also invested in the rope factory at Louisville that used his raw material. His wife, Lucretia Hart Clay, the daughter of a prominent local merchant and manufacturer, made the perfect plantation mistress, combining social graces with financial good sense. Henry Clay’s political philosophy was his private life writ large. As his own career synthesized commerce, agriculture, and industry with public service, so the Kentuckian aspired to create a harmony of varied economic interests in the United States as a whole. Clay called his program for the nation “the American System.” “I am executing here [at Ashland], in epitome, all my principles of Internal improvements, the American System, &c.,” he correctly observed. Clay’s American System was a full-blown systemization of the Republican nationalism that had found expression in Madison’s message to Congress after the War of 1812.
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As Clay envisioned it, the American System constituted the economic basis for social improvement. It would create, not division between haves and have-nots, but a framework within which all could work harmoniously to improve themselves both individually and collectively. To achieve this goal, Harry of the West was more than willing to enlist the power of government. Through sale of its enormous landholdings, the federal government could well afford to subsidize internal improvements. By levying protective tariffs, the government should foster the development of American manufacturing and agricultural enterprises that, in their infancy, might not be able to withstand foreign competition. The promotion of industry would create a home market for agricultural commodities, just as farms provided a market for manufactured products. Farmers and planters would benefit not only from increased sales to the cities and towns that would grow up around industry but also from the increased value of their lands as internal improvements connected them with markets. Clay could see that the policy of cheap land and rapid settlement favored by westerners like Thomas Hart Benton would multiply agricultural producers and production faster than existing markets could absorb, leading to cycles of overproduction and more panics like that of 1819.
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Clay’s system was “American” in a triple sense. Obviously, it purported to promote the welfare of the nation as a whole. But it was also “American” in its assertion of national independence against the “British system” of unregulated free trade. The Kentuckian feared that a passive policy of economic laissez-faire would leave America in a neocolonial relationship to Britain, the economic giant of the day. Britain, Clay pointed out, protected her own domestic interests with tariffs like the “corn laws” while pressuring other countries to practice free trade.
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In a third sense, Clay also used the term “American System” to apply to his hemispheric trade policy. He was willing, indeed eager, to include Latin America as part of his home market. Clay wanted to synthesize the Madisonian Platform with the Monroe Doctrine. The American System was directed against European, particularly British, commercial hegemony, not against sister republics of the New World.
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In 1824, Clay succeeded in getting the average tariff rates set in 1816 increased from 20 to 35 percent. The Panic of 1819 and ensuing depression had illustrated the dangers of dependence on foreign markets for trade and capital. Reapportionment following the census of 1820 had increased the political power of the Middle Atlantic and Ohio Valley states, where tariff protection commanded popular support. Monroe’s last Congress included many members elected on protariff pledges. The debate in Congress was conducted at a high intellectual level, with free-traders invoking Adam Smith and the classical economists, while protectionists challenged them with arguments about the need to maintain full employment, encourage infant industries, prevent foreign dumping, and secure the national defense. Free-traders argued that individual profit maximization would promote the general welfare, but protectionists declared that republican virtue sometimes demanded short-term sacrifice by the public in the long-run national interest.
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At the end, protection prevailed; among those voting for Clay’s tariff of 1824 was Andrew Jackson, then senator from Tennessee.

In New England, the growth of the textile mills encouraged protectionist sentiment, which by the 1820s overcame the traditional free-trade sentiment of the region’s maritime shipping interests. New England’s most famous congressional spokesman, Daniel Webster, converted from free trade to protectionism while also abandoning the moribund Federalist Party for the “National” Republicans (i.e., the Republicans supporting the national administration). In 1827, Webster pressed for a further increase in the duty on woolen textiles, and the administration supported it. After passing the House, Webster’s bill was defeated in the Senate by the casting vote of Vice President Calhoun. This dramatic action publicly affirmed Calhoun’s break with the Adams-Clay administration and his own protectionist past. Martin Van Buren, eager to underscore the break, arranged for a tie to occur by absenting himself from the Senate chamber so the vice president would have to vote.
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Calhoun’s change of heart on the issue of the tariff reflected the South’s loss of interest in developing a textile industry of its own. In the early years of the cotton boom, it had seemed plausible to suppose that mills might be built near the fields where the cotton was grown. Occasionally a wealthy planter would erect a mill to spin and weave some of his own cotton production, operating it with slave labor, or hire out slaves to work in a neighbor’s mill. But early textile mills depended on waterpower, and sometimes the fall line was inconveniently located far upstream from the best cotton-growing lands. More importantly, it was usually more profitable to keep the enslaved labor force in the fields. During the pre–Civil War years, southern investors complained they found it hard to recruit diligent mill workers among southern poor whites, but after the war they certainly found them. In the final analysis, cultivating the short-staple cotton so well suited to the climate with the gang labor of slaves proved a far more attractive investment opportunity than building factories. For most of the antebellum South, what economists call its comparative advantage was encapsulated in the slogan “cotton is king.”
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New England, with its stony soil and short growing season, had needed to industrialize; most of the South did not. Manufacturing enabled the Yankees to make use of female labor, but the planters found plenty of work for their female slaves in agriculture. The relationship between the planters and the Yankee processors of their raw cotton proved by no means altogether compatible. Two-thirds of the cotton crop was exported, mainly to Britain, giving its producers an interest in free trade. But the American cotton mills needed a tariff to stay in business. Even with its protection, they could only compete in the cheaper lines of product; the finer goods required a skilled workmanship that was prohibitively expensive in the United States.
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The kind of coarse textiles that American mills made from cotton and wool was the kind in which southern masters clothed their slaves. The protective tariff raised the price of textiles and thus diminished the demand for southern cotton at the same time as it increased the cost of maintaining slaves. The cotton planters were morally wrong about slavery, but they were economically right to complain that the tariff did not serve their interest.
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Only three islands of protectionist sentiment remained in the South: the sugarcane growers of Louisiana, Clay’s hemp growers in Kentucky and Missouri, and the Appalachian valleys of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, where the predominantly nonslaveholding population continued to hope for industrial development of their natural resources and water power.