A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (48 page)

American Renaissance

Education and the arts also experienced great change, to the point that some have described Jacksonian high culture as an American “renaissance” and a “flowering” of the arts.
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Although such language is exaggerated, it is true that America saw its second generation of native intellectuals, writers, and artists achieve bona fide success and recognition during the antebellum years. Jacksonian writers and artists came into their own, but they did so in a uniquely American way.

American educators continued to pursue aims of accessibility and practicality. New England public schools provided near-universal co-ed elementary education, thanks to the efforts of Massachusetts state school superintendent Horace Mann and a troop of spirited educational reformers. Public school teachers, many of them women, taught a pragmatic curriculum stressing the three R’s (reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic). Noah Webster’s “blue-backed speller” textbook saw extensive, and nearly universal, use as teachers adopted Webster’s methodology of civics, patriotism, and secular but moralistic teachings.

New “booster colleges” appeared to supplement the elite schools and were derided because their founders often were not educators—they were promoters and entrepreneurs aiming to “boost” the image of new frontier towns to prospective investors. Illinois College and Transylvania College appeared west of the Appalachians and eventually became respected institutions. Ohio alone boasted nearly three dozen degree-granting institutions during the Age of Jackson. And although Ohio’s Oberlin College produced excellent scholars (and scores of abolitionist radicals), many booster colleges failed to meet the high standards of, for example, Great Britain’s degree-granting colleges—Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

The arts flourished along with academics in this renaissance. Beginning in the 1820s and 1830s, northern painters Thomas Cole, George Innes, and others painted evocative scenes of New York’s Hudson River Valley. Nature painting drew wide praise, and a market developed for their landscape art that spread to all regions. Missouri’s George Caleb Bingham, for example, earned acclaim for painting scenes of the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys, fur trappers, local elections, and his famed
Jolly Flatboatmen.
Landscape and genre painters adopted America’s unique frontier folkways as the basis for a democratic national art that all Americans—not just the educated and refined—could enjoy.

James Fenimore Cooper did for literature what the Hudson River school did for painting. A native of an elite upstate New York family, Cooper wandered from his socioeconomic roots to create his literary art. After a childhood spent on the edge of the vanishing New York frontier, Cooper dropped out of Yale College to become a merchant seaman and, ultimately, a novelist. In
The Pioneers
(1823) and
The Last of the Mohicans
(1826), he masterfully created what we now recognize as the first Western-genre novel. During two decades, Cooper wrote a five-book series featuring his hero Hawkeye (whose name changed in each book as his age advanced), who fought Indians and wily Frenchmen and battled the wild elements of nature. Hawkeye, a wild and woolly frontiersman, helped to advance the cause of American civilization by assisting army officers, settlers, townspeople, and, of course, damsels in distress. In classic American style, however, Hawkeye also constantly sought to escape the very civilization he had assisted. At the end of every tale he had moved farther into the wilderness until at last, in
The Prairie
(1827), he died—an old man, on the Great Plains, with the civilization he had both nurtured and feared close at his heels.

It is no accident that during this time of industrial revolution and social and political upheaval, America produced a literature that looked back longingly at a vanished (and, often, imagined) agrarian utopia. Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden, or Life in the Woods
(1854) is perhaps the most famous example of American writers’ penchant for nature writing. Thoreau spent nearly two years in the woods at Walden Pond (near Concord, Massachusetts) and organized his evocative
Walden
narrative around the four seasons of the year. His message was for his readers to shun civilization and urban progress, but unlike Hawkeye, Henry David Thoreau traveled to town periodically for fresh supplies! After his two-year stint in the “wilderness” of Walden Pond, Thoreau returned to his home in Concord and civilization only to land in the town jail for tax evasion. He wrote of this experience (and his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War) in his famed essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849).

Although Thoreau’s fellow Massachusetts author Nathaniel Hawthorne was not a nature writer, he addressed crucial Jacksonian issues of democracy, individual freedom, religion, feminism, and economic power in his elegantly written novels
The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and
House of the Seven Gables
(1852). Later, Herman Melville provided a dark and powerful view of nature in the form of the great white whale of
Moby Dick
(1851). Indeed, some experts point to Melville’s and Hawthorne’s artful prose to refute Alexis de Tocqueville’s criticism of the quality of American literature. They note their literary skill and that of their fellow northeasterners—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, and the transcendentalist authors as evidence of an accomplished Jacksonian literati. Yet another school of writers, active at the same time as the New Englanders, actually proves Tocqueville partially correct. The southwestern school of newspaper humorists was not as well known as the northeastern, yet it ultimately produced one of the most famous (and most American) of all American writers, Mark Twain. The southwestern writers were newspapermen residing in the Old Southwest—the emergent frontier towns along the banks of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. In Louisville, St. Louis, Natchez, Baton Rouge, Cincinnati, and New Orleans newspapermen like James Hall, Morgan Neville, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe wrote short prose pieces for newspapers, magazines, and almanacs throughout the Jacksonian era.
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A new, entirely American frontier folk hero emerged through the exploits of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, although contemporaries thought Boone “lacked the stuff of a human talisman.”
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Instead, Crockett captured the imagination of the public with his stories of shooting, fighting, and gambling—all of which he repeated endlessly while running for public office. Crockett liked a frequent pull on the whiskey bottle—phlegm cutter and antifogmatic, he called it—and he bought rounds for the crowd when campaigning for Congress. Crockett named his rifle Old Betsy, and he was indeed a master hunter. But he embellished everything: in one story he claimed to have killed 105 bears in one season and told of how he could kill a racoon without a bullet by simply “grinning it” out of a tree!
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Not one to miss an opportunity to enhance his legend (or his wallet), Crockett wrote, with some editorial help, an autobiography,
Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee.
It became an instant best seller, and far from leaving the author looking like a hick, Crockett’s book revealed the country congressman for what he really was, a genuine American character, not a clown.
³⁵

Nearly all of the southwestern tales, like the Western genre they helped to spawn, featured heroes in conflicts that placed them in between nature and civilization. Like Hawkeye, the southwestern folk hero always found himself assisting American civilization by fighting Indians and foreign enemies and, above all, constantly moving west. Crockett’s life generated still more romantic revisions after his fabled immigration to Texas, where he died a martyr for American expansion at the Alamo in 1836.
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Had Crockett lived long enough to make the acquaintance of a young author named Samuel Clemens from Missouri, the two surely would have hit it off, although the Tennessean’s life may have surpassed even Mark Twain’s ability to exaggerate. In his job as a typesetter and cub reporter for Missouri and Iowa newspapers, Sam Clemens learned well his lessons from the southwestern writers. One day Clemens—under the nom de plume Mark Twain—would create his own wonderful version of the Western. Speaking the language of the real American heartland, Twain’s unlikely hero Huckleberry Finn and his friend the escaped slave Jim would try to flee civilization and slavery on a raft headed down the mighty Mississippi. Like Twain, Cooper, Thoreau, the Hudson River school, and scores of Jacksonian artists, Huck and Jim sought solace in nature—they aimed to “light out for the Territories” and avoid being “sivilized”!

Such antipathy for “sivilization” marked the last years of Andrew Jackson’s tenure. When he stepped down, America was already headed west on a new path toward expansion, growth, and conflict. Perhaps symbolically, westerner Jackson handed over the reins to a New Yorker, Martin Van Buren, at a time when the nation’s cities had emerged as centers for industry, religion, reform, and “politicking.”

The Little Magician Takes the Stage

Martin Van Buren ran, in 1836, against a hodgepodge of Whig candidates, including William Henry Harrison (Old Tippecanoe), Daniel Webster, and North Carolinian W. P. Mangum. None proved a serious opponent, although it appeared that there might be a repeat of 1824, with so many candidates that the election would be thrown into the House. The Little Magician avoided that alternative by polling more of the popular vote than all the other four candidates put together and smashing them all combined in the electoral college, 170 to 124. (Harrison received the most of the opposing votes—73.) Notably, the combined positions of those who preferred to eliminate slavery, constitutionally or otherwise, accounted for more than half the electoral vote in the presidential election.
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Andrew Jackson exited the presidency just as a number of his policies came home to roost. His frenzied attacks on the BUS had not done any specific damage, but had contributed to the general erosion of confidence in the national economy. His lowbrow approach to the White House and diatribes against speculators who damaged “public virtue” in fact diminished the dignity and tarnished the class of the presidency. The vetoes and arbitrary backhanding of states’ rights ate away at important principles of federalism.

Thus, no sooner did Van Buren step on the stage than it collapsed. The Panic of 1837 set in just as Van Buren took the oath of office. Wheat and cotton prices had already fallen, knocking the props out from under the agricultural sector and sending lenders scurrying to foreclose on farmers. Once banks repossessed the farms, however, they could do little with them in a stalled market, forcing land prices down even further. In the industrial sector, where rising interest rates had their most severe effects, some 30 percent of the workforce was unemployed and still others suffered from falling wages. A New York City journalist claimed there were two hundred thousand people “in utter and hopeless distress,” depending entirely on charity for relief.
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Even the shell of the old BUS, still operating in Philadelphia, failed.

Van Buren railed against the ever-convenient speculators and jobbers. Some sagacious individuals promised the president that the economy would rebound, and that land prices, especially, would return. But Van Buren, contrary to the claims that he embraced the concept of a small federal government, hastily convened a special session of Congress to stop the distribution of the surplus. It was static economic thinking: the federal government needed more money, so the additional funds were kept in Washington rather than sent back to the states, where they might in fact have spurred a more rapid recovery. He also advocated a new Independent Treasury, in which the government of the United States would hold its deposits—little more than a national vault.

The Independent Treasury became the pole star of the Van Buren presidency, but was hardly the kind of thing that excited voters. Whigs wanted another national bank, and lost again as Van Buren’s Treasury bill passed in 1840. Meanwhile, without the BUS, the American banking system relied on private, state-chartered banks to issue money.

The panic exposed a serious weakness in the system that could be laid at the feet of the Democrats. A number of states had created state banks that were specifically formed for the purpose of providing loans to the members of the dominant party, particularly in Arkansas and Alabama.
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In other states, the legislatures had provided state government guarantees to the bond sales of private banks. Either way, these state governments made a dramatic and unprecedented intrusion into the private sector, and the legislatures expected to tax the banks’ profits (instead of levying direct taxes on the people). Packing the management of these banks ensured that they provided loans to the members of the ruling party. These perverted state/bank relationships had two things in common: (1) they occurred almost exclusively in states where the legislatures were controlled by the Jacksonians; and (2) they resulted in disaster when the market was subjugated to the demands of politicians. Arkansas and Alabama saw their state banks rapidly go bankrupt; in Wisconsin, Mississippi, and the Territory of Florida, the banks collapsed completely. Stung by their failed forays into finance, Democrats in some of these states (Arkansas, Wisconsin, then later, Texas) banned banks altogether.

And so even as the national economy revived by itself, as many knew it would, Arkansas, Mississippi, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and the Territory of Florida all teetered on bankruptcy; witnessed all of their banks close; or owed phenomenal debts because of defaulted bonds. Lacking any banks to speak of, Missouri—the center of the fur trade—often relied on fur money—hides and pelts that circulated as cash.