Our Divided Political Heart (28 page)

Yet the democratizing character of the Jacksonian movement is unmistakable. Jackson’s rhetoric in his bank veto message was a plain appeal to the nation’s egalitarian ethos that today’s critics of Wall Street might echo:

Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth
can not 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 securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.

Thurlow Weed, the gifted Whig political maestro, saw the bank veto message as allowing the Democrats “
to enlist the laboring classes against a ‘monster bank’
or ‘moneyed aristocracy.’” The surest proof of the Jacksonians’ success in democratizing American politics was the extent to which the Whigs, disdainful at first of mass party politics, came to imitate their opposition’s democratic ways. They did so with near perfection in their 1840 “Tippecanoe and Tyler, Too” campaign, routing Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s successor and the master builder of his political organization. One Whig campaigner who acknowledged how the Democrats’ approach to elections had transformed the Whigs was a young Abraham Lincoln. “
They
set us the example of organization
,” Lincoln said, “and we, in self-defense, are driven to it.” Or, as the historian Harry L. Watson observed, “
paradoxically . . . the Whigs fought to establish their vision
of a properly hierarchical society by using fervently egalitarian rhetoric.” Sean Wilentz is surely right in seeing “the flawed Jackson Democracy” as the successor to the Jeffersonians in being “
the largest vehicle for expanding democracy
.” They were organized “as a movement of reform to eliminate a perceived recrudescence of privilege” and “
created a new kind of political party
, more egalitarian in its institutions and its ideals than any that had preceded it, unabashed in its disciplined pursuit of power, dedicated to securing the sovereignty that, as its chief architect Martin Van Buren observed, ‘belongs inalienably to the people.’”

Yet the ambiguities of the age of Jackson do not stop there. The Whigs have gotten a better run from historians in recent years, as historical studies have focused more and more on race and gender than they did in the Roosevelt era. If the Jacksonians were the party championing class equality among white men, the Whigs (and before them the Federalists)
paid more heed to equalities of race and gender—even if, by our contemporary standards, very imperfectly. “
Throughout the South, the Whigs showed significantly less enthusiasm
for the expansion of slavery than the Democrats,” Howe noted. “In the North, Whigs, who tended to accept social differentiation, could easily adopt a condescending paternalism toward nonwhites. Ironically, the Democrats’ great insistence on the natural equality of all white men prompted them to make a more glaring exception of non-whites. Taking seriously the motto ‘all men are created equal,’ Democrats called into question the very humanity of nonwhites in order to keep them unequal.” And while the Whigs were hardly protofeminists, they were more open than the Jacksonians to women’s education and began including women in their campaigns in 1840—even if, as the historian Harry L. Watson notes, their presence also reflected “
the burgeoning cult of domesticity
.” Wilentz observes that “
by the time of the 1844 election
, Whig women would speak regularly at rallies and hold their own meetings.” The Whigs, on the whole, opposed the brutality of Jackson’s program of Indian removal—again, an indication of the peculiar interaction between race and class in the politics of the period. The Jacksonian policies were aimed at providing land for landless white men; the Whigs, less egalitarian in class terms, were more humanitarian in the treatment of native people.

And the politics of the period make clear that states’ rights doctrines have always had an intimate connection to the politics of race. This is true not just in the obvious sense, that southern conservatives invoked the rights of states to protect slavery (and, later, segregation). More important, fear that
any
expansion of federal power would eventually allow Washington to abolish slavery led the southern defenders of bondage to oppose national initiatives, including the internal improvements championed by Clay. Two years after he was defeated for reelection, John Quincy Adams was elected to Congress, and he spent the last seventeen years of his life as a brave and consequential member of the House. An ardent foe of slavery and a proponent of federal action, Adams explained to his constituents why slavery’s defenders opposed internal improvements:

If the internal improvement of the country should be left to the management
of the federal government, and the proceeds of the sale
of public lands should be applied as a perpetual and self-accumulating fund for that purpose, the blessings unceasingly showered upon the people by this process would so grapple the affections of the people to the national authority that it would, in the process of time, overshadow that of state governments, and settle the preponderancy of power in the free states; and then the undying worm of conscience twinges with terror for the fate of
the peculiar institution
. Slavery stands aghast at the prospective promotion of the general welfare.

Nathaniel Macon, a stout defender of slavery from North Carolina, succinctly corroborated Adams’s point when he declared: “
If Congress can make canals
, it can with more propriety emancipate.”

In one sense, the Whigs are very familiar to today’s progressives. They can be seen, as the historian Lee Benson has suggested, as advocates of “
the positive liberal state
” whose aim was “to promote the general welfare, raise the level of opportunity for all men, and aid all individuals to develop their full potentialities.” The Jacksonians, by contrast, favored “the negative liberal state” that left people free to pursue their own ends.

The Whigs were certainly institution builders in ways that today’s progressives can only admire. As Watson noted, the Whigs “
lent active government support to a wide range
of useful or benevolent private enterprises: banks; corporations; transportation projects; public hospitals; prisons; institutions for the blind, the deaf, and the insane; public schools; and temperance crusades.”

While there is something to Benson’s view, its problem, as Howe has argued, is that it makes the Whigs sound “
too much like twentieth-century liberals
.” Whig policies “did not have the object of redistributing wealth or diminishing the influence of the privileged.” Although they were innovative, the Whigs “usually thought of themselves as conservatives, as custodians of an identifiable political and cultural heritage.”

And the Whigs were deeply associated with evangelical religion and with projects—including temperance—aimed at improving the moral lives of individuals. What most profoundly separates Whiggery from today’s liberalism were the Whigs’ “
moral absolutism, their paternalism, and their concern
with imposing discipline.” The Whigs may have been the most purely communitarian party in our country’s history, drawing on our republican and biblical traditions to promote both public improvement and self-improvement. “
Though they championed the opportunities of the marketplace
as the ideal vehicles of self-improvement,” Watson wrote, “they looked to family and faith for the moral inspiration that would lift the pursuit of wealth above the sordid level of mere greed.”

There are lessons from the Whigs for today’s conservatives and liberals alike. The linking of politics to religious faith that became common after the rise of the Christian conservative movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s is often seen as a profound break with a long tradition of church-state separation. But the Whigs demonstrate that strong religious and evangelical impulses have played a central role in our politics since at least the 1830s. Separation of church and state is not the same as the separation of religion from politics, and the Whigs’ unapologetic moralism would be quite congenial to many religious conservatives of our era.

But today’s religious right might also note that the Whigs did not confine their moralizing efforts to personal behavior. Their calls for more compassionate treatment of the blind, the deaf, and the insane and the expansion of public education and public hospitals all entailed public action, including government spending, aimed at giving substance to their talk about morality. And as time went on, evangelicals joined with less religious radicals in slowly moving the North’s political center against slavery. In some cases, the evangelicals
were
the radicals. When the personal becomes political, it cannot successfully remain personal for long. When individual piety and private moral commitments spill over into social action, the work of community building begins.

In a certain sense, it is heartening that our current political debate, which seems so savage and so resistant to compromise, would in many respects feel familiar to those on opposite sides of politics in the era before the Civil War. We have been arguing since the beginning of the republic over what the Constitution does and does not allow the federal government to do and also over government involvement in the marketplace, federal spending on “internal improvements,” and federal intervention in the affairs of the states. Our partisan traditions have crisscrossed each other.
Contemporary Democrats can claim in good conscience to be true to the egalitarian traditions of Jefferson and Jackson even as they endorse Hamiltonian and Whiggish notions of federal action on the economy, education, health care, and welfare. It is no wonder that Franklin Roosevelt came to be associated with the prescription of the Progressive Era prophet Herbert Croly that the nation needed to employ Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends. FDR and his successors have been, like Hamilton and Clay, nation builders. But their nation building was always influenced by Jacksonian egalitarianism.

Republicans and conservatives can look back with sympathy toward Clay and Hamilton’s projects of promoting American business and defending the legitimacy of existing economic hierarchies. Like Clay and Hamilton, they believe that the prosperity of the well-off will spill over and enrich the rest of the nation. Yet since their remedy involves a smaller federal government, conservative Republicans draw regularly on the rhetoric of Jefferson and Jackson. One might say they are using Jeffersonian means to Hamiltonian ends.

Above all, the history of the early republic reminds us that so many of the commonplace assertions in our current discourse are simply wrong. The idea that the Constitution leaves room for substantial government action in the marketplace and in the affairs of the states is not a novel concept invented by twentieth-century progressives or liberal jurists. Clay, Hamilton, and their allies battled fiercely on behalf of a robust federal government authorized to intervene in the nation’s economic life by the very commerce clause that New Dealers and latter-day progressives would cite so often. The opponents of the Hamilton-Clay project were just as fierce in insisting on its unconstitutionality, the same claim made by conservatives in the New Deal era and today. But the partisans in our earlier fights were more candid about what they were doing. They accepted that in the new republic, battles over policies and battles over the Constitution elided into each other. They were arguing, after all, about a document many of them had shaped, and which all of them knew they were shaping still. In our day, those who cry about the constitutionality of particular programs reach back into a murky past and insist that its lessons and strictures are far clearer than they are. They pretend that there were no fundamental
disagreements among the founders or in the generations that immediately followed them. Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay—and Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson—would tell them otherwise.

And both the Whigs and the Jacksonians operated within a republican tradition that took for granted the idea that public life and private economic life interacted with each other in a dynamic way. They did not see market economics as the sole or even primary determinant of the common good. “
Although Jacksonians and Whigs did invoke arguments about economic growth
and distributive justice,” wrote Michael Sandel, “these considerations figured less as ends in themselves than as means to competing visions of a self-governing republic.” The devotion of the Whigs to an activist, nationalist, and republican conception of economics is obvious enough in Clay’s American System. As Sandel argues, “
The Whig case for promoting economic development
had less to do with increasing the standard of living or maximizing consumption than with cultivating national community and strengthening the bonds of the union.”

But the Jacksonians were no less committed to republicanism. Their fear of the Whigs’ hierarchical development schemes, Sandel observed, was rooted in worries over “
the threat to self-government posed by large concentrations
of wealth and power.” And the more radical among the Jacksonians cultivated a strong sense of community among the laboring men of the nation’s cities, particularly in New York. As Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz argued, “
republican ideology served perhaps longer
than any other dimension of American culture as a legitimization of working-class values . . . [and] a bulwark against the corrosive power of capitalism.” The early workingmen’s associations, wrote Harry Watson, defended “
a republican vision that stressed the centrality of labor
in defending the common good, and the need for mutual respect . . . of all interests in society, masters and journeymen joined together in craft associations to assert their common role in public life.” In his classic book
The Jacksonian Persuasion
, Marvin Meyers pointed to the great paradox that while Jackson’s followers “
cleared the path for the triumph of laissez-faire capitalism
and its culture in America,” they “held nevertheless in their conscience an image of a chaste republican order, resisting the seductions of risk and novelty, greed and extravagance, rapid motion and complex dealings.”