A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (174 page)

79. Ibid., 1:460.

80. Remini,
Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom
, 360.

81. The view that Jackson disliked on principle central banks in general or the BUS in particular is found in a wide range of scholarship of all political stripes. See Hammond,
Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War
; Peter Temin,
The Jacksonian Economy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
The Age of Jackson
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1945); John McFaul,
The Politics of Jacksonian Finance
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962); James R. Sharpe,
The Jacksonians vs. The Banks
(New York: Columbia, 1970).

82. See Schweikart, “Jacksonian Ideology, Currency Control and Central Banking,” 78–102.

83. “Plan for a National Bank,” in Amos Kendall to Andrew Jackson, November 20, 1829, Box 1, File 6, Andrew Jackson Papers, Tennessee Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.

84. Richard Timberlake Jr.,
The Origins of Central Banking in the United States
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), who is perceptive to centralization, still misses this point.

85. James A. Hamilton,
Reminiscences of James A. Hamilton
(New York: Charles Scribner, 1869), 167–68.

86. David Martin’s three articles are critical in determining the Jacksonians’ intentions: “Metallism, Small Notes, and Jackson’s War with the B. U. S.,”
Explorations in Economic History
, 11, Spring 1974, 297–47; “Bimetallism in the United States Before 1850,”
Journal of Political Economy
, 76, May/June 1968, 428–42; “1853: The End of Bimetallism in the United States,”
Journal of Economic History
, 33, December 1973, 825–44; J. Van Fenstermaker and John E. Filer, “Impact of the First and Second Bank of the United States and the Suffolk System on New England Money, 1791–1837,”
Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
, 18, February 1986, 28–40; Fenstermaker,
The Development of American Commercial Banking
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1965); Fritz Redlich,
The Molding of American Banking, Men and Ideas
, 2 vols. (New York: Johnson Reprint Co., 1968 [1947]); Larry Schweikart, “U.S. Commercial Banking: A Historiographical Survey,”
Business History Review
, 65, Autumn 1991, 606–61.

87. Richard Timberlake, “The Significance of Unaccounted Currencies,”
Journal of Economic History
, 41, December 1981, 853–66.

88. Edwin J. Perkins, “Lost Opportunities for Compromise in the Bank War: A Reassessment of Jackson’s Veto Message,”
Business History Review
, 61, Winter 1987, 531–50.

89. Tindall and Shi,
America
, 1:467.

90. The liberal spin on Jackson’s presidency as champion of the common man is near universal. David M. Kennedy,
The American Pageant
, 12th ed. (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002), 271, calls Jackson the “idol of the masses” who “easily defeated the big-money Kentuckian.” Gillon and Matson (
American Experiment
) echo the theme by claiming, “It was clear to most obesrvers that the Democrats swept up the support of the northeastern working men, western farmers, rising entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, and ambitious professionals who favored Jacksonian attacks against privilege….” (385). David Goldfield, et al., in
The American Journey: A History of the United States
, combined edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1998) portray Jackson as the champion of these who “felt threatened by outside centers of power beyond their control” (293) and who alienated “the business community and eastern elites” (301). The National Republican/Whig agenda allows John Murrin, et al. (
Liberty, Equality, Power
) to claim that the “Jacksonians were opposed by those who favored an activist central government” (441), when Jackson had expanded the power and scope of the central government more than Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams combined.
Liberty, Equality, Power
concludes, of the Bank War, that “a majority of the voters shared Jackson’s attachment to a society of virtuous, independent producers…they also agreed that the republic was in danger of subversion by parasites who grew rich by manipulating credit, prices, paper money and government-bestowed privileges” (442). Of course, it isn’t mentioned that the Jacksonians virtually invented “government-bestowed privileges,” and that if one eliminates the “northeastern working men, western farmers, rising entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, and ambitious professionals,” there would have been no one left to vote for Clay, yet the Kentuckian managed 530,000 popular votes to Jackson’s 688,000. In short, either the nation was comprised of big-money aristocracies, or vast numbers of common people rejected Jackson—not a majority, but nowhere near the tidal wave of votes that many of the mainstream histories would suggest.

91. See Temin,
Jacksonian Economy
, passim.

92. Peter Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837,”
Journal of Economic History
, June 2002, 457–88.

93.
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
(White Plains: Kraus International Publications, 1989), I:211, 1114–15. Special thanks to Tiarr Martin, whose unpublished paper, “The Growth of Government During the ‘Age of Jefferson and Jackson,’” was prepared for one of Schweikart’s classes and is in his possession.

 

Chapter 7. Red Foxes and Bear Flags, 1836–48

1. Tindall and Shi,
America
, 1:474.

2. Richard Hofstadter, “Marx of the Master Class,” in Sidney Fine and Gerald S. Brown, eds.,
The American Past
, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 460–80.

3. Maurice Baxter,
Henry Clay and the American System
(Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1995).

4. Ronald Walters,
American Reformers, 1815–1860
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Alice Felt Tyler,
Freedom’s Ferment: Phases of American Social History from the Colonial Period to the Outbreak of the Civil War
(New York: Harper and Row, 1944).

5. Walters,
American Reformers
, passim.

6. The official history of the Seventh-Day Adventists appears at http://www. adventist.org/history.

7. Larry Schweikart,
The Entrepreneurial Adventure: A History of Business in the United States
(Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt, 2000), 210–11.

8. Robert Peel,
Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture
(New York: Holt, 1958).

9. Johnson,
History of the American People
, 297.

10. Walters,
American Reformers
, 27.

11. Quoted at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/religion/finney.html, from Finney’s memoirs.

12. Tyler,
Freedom’s Ferment
, 41; Walters,
Jacksonian Reformers
, 35–36.

13. Ray Allen Billington and Martin Ridge,
Westward Expansion
, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 476–78.

14. Leonard Arrington,
Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966 [1958]); B. H. Roberts,
A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
(Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930).

15. Frances S. Trollope,
The Domestic Manners of the Americans
, Donald Smalley, ed. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publisher Inc., 1974).

16. Johnson,
History of the American People
, 304.

17. Ronald G. Walters,
Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 9.

18. Walters,
Antislavery Appeal
, 62.

19. Walters,
American Reformers
, 50–55.

20. Johnson,
History of the American People
, 301.

21. Tyler,
Freedom’s Ferment
, 110.

22. Walters,
American Reformers
, 50–55; Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The Blithedale Romance
(repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

23. Walters,
Antislavery Appeal
, 94.

24. Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 20.

25. Robert J. Loewenberg, “Emerson’s Platonism and ‘the terrific Jewish Idea,’”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature
, XV, 1982, 93–108; Loewenberg,
An American Idol: Emerson and the “Jewish Idea”
(Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1984), and his “Emerson and the Genius of American Liberalism,”
Center Journal
, Summer 1983, 107–28.

26. Arthur Bestor,
Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970 [1950]), 103.

27. Ibid., passim; Tyler,
Freedom’s Ferment
, 166–224.

28. Tyler,
Freedom’s Ferment
, 485–486.

29. Ibid., 485.

30. Walters,
American Reformers
, 81.

31. Van Wyck Brooks,
The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937); F. O. Mathiesson,
American Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1941).

32. Michael Allen, “Who Was David Crockett?” in Calvin Dickinson and Larry Whiteaker, eds.,
Tennessee: State of the Nation
(New York: American Heritage, 1995), 47–53.

33. William C. Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo: The Lives and Fortunes of David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 86.

34. Even objective biographers, such as Davis, admit that he probably killed more than 50 bears in the season he referred to—an astounding accomplishment if for no other reason than the sheer danger posed by the animals.

35. Davis,
Three Roads to the Alamo
, 313–37.

36. Allen, “Who Was David Crockett?,” passim.

37. David Waldstreicher, “The Nationalization and Radicalization of American Politics, 1790–1840,” in Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger, eds.,
Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775–2000
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001), 37–64, quotation on 55.

38. Tindall and Shi,
America
, 1:477.

39. Larry Schweikart,
Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).

40. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “Martin Van Buren: The Greatest American President,”
Independent Review
, 4, Fall 1999, 255–81, quotation on 261–62.

41. Freeman Cleaves,
Old Tippecanoe: William Henry Harrison and His Times
(Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1939), 284.

42. Michael F. Holt,
Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 95; William J. Cooper Jr.,
Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860
(Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000).

43. Holt,
Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party
, 95.

44. Paul S. Boyer, et al.,
The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People
(Lexington, KY: D. C. Heath, 1993), 279.