American Experiment (64 page)

Jacksonian confusion over philosophy and program was reflected in his veto message returning the recharter bill to Congress. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” the President said. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions.” He inveighed against governmental award of exclusive privileges that would “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.…” He went on: “There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.” But how turn government, which the Jacksonians controlled, into at least a qualified blessing? Should the government give special protection to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” as Jackson called them, if Heaven and nature and the rich alike did not?

So in the end, the Jacksonian “wind from the west” blew noisily but left the structure of American capitalism largely intact. Nor did it move that other citadel of power, the slavocracy. Jackson and Van Buren carried the old North-South axis of the Republican party into the Democratic—the alliance built largely by Virginians and New Yorkers and devoted to Jeffersonian agrarianism, individual liberty, states’ rights, and non-interference with liberty. Western leaders and voters did not upset this political
balance; rather they fortified it. Thus the southern Democrats were left with a veto against any effort, gradual or radical, to curb slavery and possibly head off an explosion. Such was the price of Democratic party union, the price of national Union—a price that could not yet be calculated.

The Whigs were hardly more coherent in their own political philosophy, in part because as a party of opportunistic anti-Jacksonians they took on much of the ideological eclecticism of their Jacksonian opponents, a movement originally of opportunistic outsiders, as the two parties tangled—and became entangled—with each other. Like the Democrats, Whigs could deliver grand rhetoric through the mouths of their Websters and Clays, and like the Democrats, they advanced a spate of concrete policies. But the middle, linking level was absent here too. If the Jacksonian leaders lacked a foundation of philosophical radicalism, the Whigs lacked that of philosophical conservatism. The materials of a class system—the aristocracies, peasantries, and proletariats—that had empowered European ideologies were absent in the United States; much of the combat on the American terrain lined up entrepreneurs against entrepreneurs. No wonder Louis Hartz was reminded of “two boxers, swinging wildly, knocking each other down with accidental punches.”

Still, Jacksonianism embodied an explosive force that Whiggism lacked. The Democratic leaders posed democracy itself as the ultimate issue and pitched their appeal to the masses. Jackson as an outsider “went to the people,” and as a popular hero he easily mobilized support from the masses. Van Buren contended that those “who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the face of the universe.” By the people the Jacksonian leaders still meant “adult white men only,” of course, but within those limits they were willing to guide and to follow the popular will as they defined it.

Sustained rhetoric, if honestly meant, has its own impact; orators may come to believe in what they say. As the leaders continued to apotheosize Mankind, the People, Popular Rule, the Majority of the People, and all the other targets of their windy appeals, they bound themselves politically and morally to respond to new popular majorities mobilizing behind rising new leaders.

Thus the Jacksonians were forced to look ahead. The Whigs, more skeptical of popular rule, more cautious about extending the suffrage to poorer persons, were less captive to their own rhetoric about Mankind. Hostile to presidential power, they rejected the kind of majority rule that could be most directly implemented through a plebiscitary presidency.
They had a powerful rhetorical appeal of their own in “Liberty and Union,” but their notions of liberty were as cloudy as their foes’, and the two parties matched each other in their nationalistic appeals. During the 1830s the Whigs could find no national coalition builder to match Jackson or even Van Buren; indeed, they lost their own intellectual hero when John Marshall, still Chief Justice, died in July 1835.

It was said that the great bell in Philadelphia’s old State House—the bell that proclaimed “Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof”—was overtaxed as it tolled Marshall’s obsequies, leading to the fatal crack that appeared a decade later on Washington’s birthday. Symbolists could make of this what they wished. With his belief in national power, an independent judiciary, limited suffrage, rights of property, gradual abolition of slavery (while recognizing its constitutional validity), the old Federalist had become the Perfect Whig. Like the Whigs, he believed in “Liberty
and
Union,” in “ordered liberty,” but on the relation between these two—in a clear definition of these values in all their dimensions and amplitude, on the way in which these values could be realized so that they would broaden and strengthen rather than vitiate each other—on these matters of principle and purpose the Whig leadership was as divided and nebulous as were the Jacksonian leaders on the relationship of Liberty and Equality.

Lacking the political and intellectual leadership in either party that could engage with these transcending questions, the “People” one day might have to decide them, but again the question was posed—with ballots or bullets?

C
HARLES
D
ICKENS WOULD NEVER
forget his astonishment when, early, in January 1842, he opened the door of his stateroom on the steam packet
Britannia
and gazed inside at the tiny chamber hardly bigger than a cab, at the two horsehair seats fixed to the wall, the narrow slabs for sleeping, the pillows no thicker than crumpets. He could not believe that “this utterly impractical, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting house in the city of London.…” The world-famous author of
Pickwick Papers
and
Oliver Twist
suffered more disillusionments as the steam packet encountered terrible January storms that tore the planking out of the paddle wheels and left the usually exuberant Dickens prostrate with seasickness.

Although the steam packet was a British ship carrying Her Majesty’s mails to Halifax and Boston, she was also the start of Charles Dickens’ first tour of America, and the start of a long series of disenchantments he would undergo in the New World, of which he expected so much. Lionized on arriving in Boston, he liked much of what he first saw with his imaginative novelist’s eyes—the bright and gay houses with their “very red” bricks and “very white” stone and “very green” blinds and railings; the handsome State House and other public buildings; the quiet and benevolent and rational influence of the “University of Cambridge”; the healthy young factory girls of Lowell, with their serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls, and clogs and pattens; Hartford, where the legislature, Dickens reported gleefully, once had enacted “Blue Laws” that barred a citizen from kissing his wife on Sunday; New Haven, the City of Elms; and finally New York Harbor, “a forest of ships’ masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags.”

Slowly the disenchantment took over. Dickens made a point of visiting prisons and insane asylums and, while often impressed by American innovations, he was shaken by the plight of the inmates he interviewed.
Escorted by police officers, he prowled through the brothels and thieves’ dens of the Five Points section near the Bowery. In Philadelphia he was appalled by a “pioneering” and dreadful system of solitary confinement. His repulsion mounted in Washington, the region of “slavery, spittoons, and senators—all three are evils in all countries,” he wrote later. He was impressed by John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and some “noble specimens” from the West, but he hardly had time for the President of the United States, and he reserved his most impassioned criticism for members of Congress. Did he see an assembly of honest patriots trying to correct some of the vices of the Old World? Not at all.

“I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves.…in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.…” So fierce and brutal was the strife of politics that “sensitive and delicate-minded persons” had to stand aloof, leaving the battle to the selfish.

For Dickens, the supreme evil was slavery, and the supreme hypocrisy that of men who shamelessly displayed the Declaration of Independence, “which solemnly declares that All Men are Created Equal,” and then would censure a member of Congress for having once risen up and called out to the lawmakers, “A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!” Where now, asked Dickens, was the pursuit of Liberty and Equality?

Dickens traveled west, taking the canalboat across Pennsylvania and the famed portage railway over the Alleghenies. He was struck by Pittsburgh’s great ironworks—“like Birmingham”—and the “great quantity of smoke hanging about it.” He admired Cincinnati, the “prettiest place” he had seen save for Boston, and “honourably famous for its free-schools.” He marveled at the size of the Mississippi, an “enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees.” He admired the old French portion of St. Louis and fulfilled his “great desire to see a Prairie.” He was properly struck by Niagara Falls, and he took time to take a steamboat up the Hudson and then ride overland to Lebanon, where he inspected the Shakers and their austere
community. But he had become increasingly fatigued and dispirited during the trip, and he seemed more repelled by the ugliness of the pious and “stiff-necked” Shaker matriarchs than impressed by their husbandry and fraternity.

Always his thoughts returned to the blight of slavery. He copied scores of advertisements from the newspapers: “Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down”…“Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on her right leg”…“Ran away, the negro Manuel. Much marked with irons”…“Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar”…“Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myrna. Has several marks of
LASHING,
and has irons on her feet”…“Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M”…“Ran away, a negro named Arthur. Has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.”…

Reflecting on his travels in America, Dickens tried to sum up his estimate of the general character of the American people and their social system. He found Americans as a whole “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” The more educated and refined, the more warm and ardent “to a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.” But these qualities were “sadly sapped and blighted” among the great mass of men. Americans as a whole were too distrustful of one another; overly practical and impressed by “smart men,” no matter how rascally; dull and gloomy in temperament; subject to a vicious and rapacious press; and always meanly suspicious of worthy public men.

“There’s freedom of opinion here, you know,” Dickens quoted Americans saying to him when he chided them on their suspicion of their governors. “Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached.” Dickens respected this independence, but he was appalled by the sweaty, stinking, spitting, venal, leveling tendencies of the American people.

This burning question—equality in America—excited the curiosity of scores of European visitors in the 1830s and 1840s. And Americans were even more curious about what the visitors reported about them. Europeans, after all, had a detachment, a perspective, and a basis of social comparison no American observer could match; they were virtually anthropological in their merciless dissection of American manners and customs. Frances Trollope, with her sharp eyes for domestic manners, missed
little, nor did Harriet Martineau, despite her ear trumpet through which people had to shout, nor did Fanny Kemble, with her special concern with the lives of women. Unhappily, the findings of these and a hundred other visitors were quite mixed.

Americans were variously found to be friendly, generous, rude, vulgar, solemn, dull, cold, violent, selfish, boastful, thin-skinned, practical, curious, vigorous, unrefined, materialistic, anti-intellectual. But the findings were often so self-contradictory that the visitors seemed to be describing the human condition, not merely the American. In sum it was a portrait, in Edward Pessen’s words, “of a good-natured but essentially shallow man: clever but not profound, self-important but uncertain, fond of deluding himself, living almost fanatically for the flesh (although not knowing too well how), straining every fibre to accumulate the things he covets and amoral about the methods to be used, a hypocrite who strains at gnats and swallows camels, an energetic and efficient fellow albeit a small one, who takes comfort in—as well as his standards of behavior from—numbers.”