American Experiment (68 page)

De Witt Clinton personified this kind of politics. Son of a Revolutionary War major general and nephew of George Clinton, the first governor of New York State, De Witt Clinton after graduating from Columbia rose quickly with his uncle’s help. At the age of twenty, “he had arrived at a position of considerable political influence without having been obliged to serve an apprenticeship in the humble ranks of party workers, a circumstance,” according to a biographer, “which may account for certain defects as a tactician which he showed in later life.” In the personalistic wars of the New York Montagues and Capulets, he took on the Livingston, Jay, and other patrician families, and bolted the Republican ranks to become
Federalist candidate for President in 1812. He ended up in low repute with both parties. Aristocratic in bearing, snobbish in attitude, resentful of criticism, he was, however, just the man to capitalize on his own vision, elite status, and network of personal supporters to drive through the planning and building of the Erie Canal. Having switched back to Republicanism, he was rewarded with the governorship in 1820 and in 1822.

The man who was to take the measure of Clinton as a politician, and lead the way in dissolving for good Clinton’s kind of elitist, personalistic politics, hardly looked like a worthy challenger to the patrician six-foot “Magnus Apollo,” as Clinton was called. Small, smooth, sandy-haired, Martin Van Buren had become an astute judge of human nature listening to great talkers in his father’s tavern, but he had no advantage of social status or commanding presence. What Van Buren did possess was a new concept of democratic politics—the concept of party. And he had a group of followers who shaped with him a remarkable party organization that came to be known as the Albany Regency. These adherents—Silas Wright, William Marcy, Azariah Flagg, Franklin Butler, and perhaps a dozen others—were little known outside the Albany-Troy area where most of them lived and politicked. But they knew what they were against: Clinton and his whole system of politics.

And these “Bucktails” knew what they wanted: a united party organization, collective leadership and responsibility, strong party loyalty and discipline, competition between a majority party and a worthy opposition party, and an extensive party apparatus and network. Regency members subordinated their individual interests and even careers to the demands of party as determined by a majority in the legislative caucus. Editors of party newspapers, such as the famed Albany
Argus
or the New York
National Advocate
, were expected to follow the party line, and they generally did so; when editor Mordecai Noah of the
Advocate
quit over alleged interference with the business aspect of his work, he relented under pressure, returned to his post, and stated, “I yield, as I have ever done, with deference to the wishes of the party, when expressed through its accredited organs.” Regency Republicans in the legislature were also expected to vote the party position (when the party had a position), even at risk to their careers. When seventeen legislators stood against a popular measure opposed by the Regency, in response to Van Buren’s request that they “magnanimously sacrifice individual preferences for the general good,” the lawmakers deliberately staked their posts. A few actually failed of re-election. The only reward for these potential martyrs was a banquet where, as Marcy wrote Flagg, “something approaching to divine honors were lavished on the Seventeen.”

Party solidarity and loyalty came naturally to these men. They trusted one another, consulted with one another, respected one another’s opinions and advice. They played as well as worked together. “Their families interchange civilities,” it was noted, “their females kiss each other when they meet—their men shake each other heartily by the hand—they dine, or drink, or pray, or take snuff” with one another. As governor, Marcy read his proposed speeches to party colleagues in advance for their approval; Van Buren consulted closely with his associates. This kind of collective counsel was especially impressive in light of the quality of these men, no robots or pawns or party hacks but a group of unusually clear-headed, purposeful, thoughtful, honest men of considerable educational attainments and social standing.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of these leaders was to shape, as much in practice as in advance theorizing, a formidable concept of party government and majority rule. That concept embraced the propositions that competition between two strong, unified, disciplined parties was not dangerous to a democracy but vital to its health and maintenance; that harmony and consensus were undesirable and undemocratic when fundamental issues divided the people; that the absence of parties, or the amalgamation of them, would sap the foundations of liberty, especially freedom of speech and press; that party competition, spirit, and discord stimulated popular interest and dispelled apathy; that the parties—a governing party monitored and checked by an opposition party—served as a vital, extra-constitutional set of checks and balances.

Party advocates also emphasized the role of parties as watchdogs. The organized parties, Governor Enos Throop said, “watch and scan each other’s doings, the public mind is instructed by ample discussion of ample measures, and acts of violence are restrained by the convictions of the people, that the prevailing measures are the results of enlightened reason.” Above all, the theorists believed in majority rule, within and between parties.

The ultimate question, however, was what parties stood
for,
as platform makers and policy shapers. It has long been supposed that Van Buren and other Regency leaders during these early years took radical, egalitarian positions on public issues. More recent analysis, however, shows that behind their rhetoric about “Democracy versus Aristocracy,” and “Republicans against Hartford Feds,” was a strongly conservative cast. The Regency’s loudest war cry, as late as 1830, was for states’ rights; Van Buren and associates took conservative positions on the leading reform issues of imprisonment for debt, free public education, and presidential electoral reform. Under the doctrine of party government and majority rule, the
crucial test was not what parties were for or against at any particular time, but whether they could serve as vehicles for political leadership, popular mobilization, and governmental action in the face of new needs and changing public attitudes.

That test came suddenly in July 1832, with Jackson’s dramatic veto of the United States Bank recharter. For years the Regency had been accused of protecting its own “monsters”—its own state banks and Freemasonry. Now Jackson had handed it a new, far more spectacular, and easily hateable Monster, Biddle’s national bank. After the veto message showed the way, Lee Benson wrote, the Regency’s strategy was obvious: “Jump on board the antimonopoly bandwagon, guide it down the state rights road, and crush the Monster in its Greek temple on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.” In effect the Democrats had “dished the Whigs”—had dished even more the Anti-Masons and Workingmen, who had sought to monopolize the egalitarian, anti-”Monster” thunder.

Thus a spectacular national act had catalyzed party conflict in New York State, with powerful implications for national party realignment and competition. Whether Jackson’s act, which immediately transformed 1832 presidential campaign strategy, would have a long-run effect on the American parties as a whole would depend on events also in other states.

Massachusetts, with its established patrician families and newly arrived Irish, its multitudes of farmers and factory hands and fishermen, its Beacon Hill and Brattle Street Brahmins who looked down on the social-climbing elites up and down the Atlantic seaboard, was almost as variegated as New York. The old commonwealth was developing industrially faster, probably, than any other state. Cotton mills were multiplying; railroads were radiating out from Boston; bankers and merchants were thriving and looking for places to put their money; Yankee captains and missionaries were searching for trade and heathen across the seven seas. If political families and factions were less contentious than in New York; religious groups were perhaps more so, as conservative and radical Unitarians debated each other, and orthodox Congregationalists held their ground against dissenting Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers; and all the Protestant sects closed ranks against the expanding Catholic population.

Massachusetts resembled New York and other states, however, in its passage from the old elitist politics of deference to the new politics of egalitarian rhetoric and wider political participation. The passage was illustrated by the contrast between Daniel Webster and the Jackson brand of politician. Webster, product of Exeter and Dartmouth, protégé of
Boston notables, an admired insider in Beacon Hill society, Senate spokesman first of New England merchants and later of manufacturers, was the quintessential elitist transcending superficial popular favor. The widening of the suffrage and the rising winds of equality helped bring a new breed of politician to the fore.

David Henshaw was typical. Born not in Federalist Boston but in the hinterland near Worcester, apprenticed to a druggist at sixteen after a meager education in the village academy, he quickly rose in business and politics to become a powerful voice against the political establishment. Rewarded by Jackson with the patronage-rich collectorship of the port of Boston, Henshaw built a party machine not unlike the Albany Regency, especially in its appeal to rural voters outside the Yankee coastal region, and in its use of a party press, including Henshaw’s own paper, the Boston
Statesman.
A stocky man of medium height and two hundred pounds, Henshaw believed in party leadership, regularity, and loyalty. He was also a conservative, as were many of the early Jackson men in the Commonwealth, but here too Jackson’s bank veto catalyzed state Democrats and produced a swing toward radical rhetoric.

Massachusetts illustrated how, in a system that sustained party federalism as well as constitutional federalism, state politics refracted back upon national. The experience of Kentucky was quite different, but this frontier state also became part of an overall pattern of the decline of deference, the rise of grass-roots parties, and the complex interrelation of state and national politics.

Kentucky had seemed particularly vulnerable to boom and bust. All a Kentuckian needed to set up a bank during the post-1812 war years, some said, was a charter and a printing press. Land-hungry pioneers had borrowed from the state banks to buy more acreage; state banks expanded their circulation to meet demand; the newly re-established national bank in Philadelphia undertook its own liberal program of credit expansion, but then suddenly shifted toward contraction. The Panic of 1819 had left Kentucky with dozens of beleaguered state banks that in turn pressed their debtors harshly. Responding to desperate need, the legislature passed measure after measure to help debtors, most notably a “stay” law giving them an extra two years to pay off notes. Indignant creditors, turning to the courts for relief, won from circuit judge James Clark a ruling that a key debtor-relief law was unconstitutional.

Then followed a battle of Checks and Balances. A committee of the legislature denied the right of the judge to veto a deliberate measure of the government and recommended his removal. This move did not gain the needed two-thirds vote in the legislature. When the court of appeals
sustained Clark, the legislature tried to remove the whole court, and failed again. A “relief party” then appealed to the people in the election of 1824. Showing a striking ability to organize a campaign and to engage with the needs and hopes of the voters, rejecting the old politics of deference in favor of mass campaign techniques, the relief party won the governorship and a majority in both houses of the legislature. Once again the reliefers tried to remove the erring judges from office, but could not secure the elusive two-thirds. Finally, arguing that if they could not remove the judges from their seats, they could remove the “seats from the judges,” the relief party in the legislature removed the old court and authorized the governor to appoint a new one.

Out of the crisis and conflict in Kentucky had arisen a whole new leadership cadre, headed by Amos Kendall and Francis Blair. An editor, slaveholder, and conservative Republican, Kendall had been cool to debt-relief measures, but later he changed his mind, especially when he had to borrow $1,500 from his old friend Henry Clay and several thousands more from his new friend Martin Van Buren. Once enlisted in the debtors’ cause, Kendall became its fiery leader. He pilloried the “court” party as a pack of conspirators and speculators, directed his appeals straight to the dirt farmers and the “common man”—and got chased in his editorial offices by an anti-relief lawyer brandishing a hickory stick. He and Blair also denounced high tariffs and federal improvements, thus widening the breach with their mentor Henry Clay.

The election year of 1828 brought Kendall his supreme opportunity to link up with Jackson. Bypassing the local elite, whose political power was based on a system of self-perpetuating county courts that controlled local appointments, he set up a central committee in Louisville to call for a state convention that would agree on a statewide ticket of Jackson electors. He organized mass meetings of Jackson voters who would meet in local conventions, as well as local committees headed by county and district leaders who reported to state committees.

Kendall, in short, built an integrated mass party in order to outflank the political dominance of the gentry. Where his own party following was inadequate he built alliances with Old Court men. It was only natural that, as the architect of Jackson’s big victory in Clay’s own state, Kendall would move to Washington and join his new mentor. And it was only natural that this fiery editorialist, who had won political influence by demagogic appeals to the common man, should make Jackson’s bank recharter veto message a political arrow that flew straight to the emotional heart of the electorate.

Behind all the sound and fury in Kentucky politics, historians have found
a rational grass-roots demand for economic relief and change, a popular urge for meaningful democratic participation in politics, strong “social and economic aspiration burning in the hearts of Kentuckians.” Although Jackson would fail to carry Kentucky against native son Clay in 1832, the politics of the state had been changed for good, with an organized, competitive two-party system replacing the oligarchical politics of deference. Like Kentucky, each of the other states was unique but virtually all were forced to move toward Jacksonian democracy. And all the states, as they sent to Washington politicians like Henshaw and Kendall and a host of enterprising senators and congressmen, were helping to shape a new national political system, even while they were being shaped by it.