Penguin History of the United States of America (51 page)

But for the moment General Jackson and democracy were victorious, and the people rejoiced. Jackson’s election did not mean that America had become a democracy overnight, though many of his supporters talked as if she had, to the confusion of historians. That particular innovation had been coming on ever since the Revolution. The 1828 election merely proved that the process was complete. Men who, in the eighteenth century, could have expressed themselves only through a riot (as they so often did) could now do so through the electoral process. Although rioting continued, and continues, to be part of American life, the mob, in the old sense – the mob which had a place in the constitution, so to speak, both of colonial Massachusetts and imperial Britain – the mob which Sam Adams had
manipulated – has disappeared. A cynic might argue that the shift was of form, not substance; that while the rights and power of the people were acclaimed, real control remained with the rich, who cared only for the protection of their property; but it makes more sense to see the transfer of power as real. For it was not only the urban rioters who became voters; by 1828 all the farmers, in every section, had the vote and used it effectively. It became ever more necessary for orators to flatter the sovereign people: proof enough, perhaps, that something really had changed, a first step on the road to effective human equality. At the least it must be admitted, even by cynics, that elections remain the road to office in America; and it is the many who decide them, not the few.

The election of 1828 also settled another important matter. On the surface it was a sectional affair: New England was as solid for Adams as the South and West were for Jackson. But in the Middle Atlantic states matters were by no means so cut and dried. Jackson had won, overall, but it was a near thing. Van Buren had had to strain every nerve to be sure that the ticket would carry New York, even to the extent of running himself (successfully) for Governor of the state. In Pennsylvania it was the same story. The Jacksonian agitation had stimulated the admirers of Adams and Clay as well as those of the General. The implications of this were about equally encouraging and discouraging for the two sides. In future, wherever there was not a strong local candidate, there was a good chance of victory for either party; to secure it they would both have to fling in all the resources they had mobilized in 1828. There was no chance that the sublime lightness of one party’s cause would be universally and permanently apparent to most American voters. The system foreshadowed by the rivalry of the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans had at last emerged; two party politics had come to stay.

The story of the twelve years following Jackson’s famous victory is thus largely the story of the consolidation of the Democratic party (as it soon came to be called) and the emergence of the nationwide opposition party which the very process of consolidation provoked. For example, one body could not long contain both Van Buren and Calhoun, rivals to succeed Jackson. The Little Magician’s skill was the greater, and his political position stronger, since, to preserve his political base, Calhoun had to associate himself with the anti-nationalist tendencies of his state, which Jackson, an arch-nationalist, could not abide. So in 1832 Calhoun resigned the Vice-Presidency and went home to South Carolina to mastermind the Nullification movement,
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while Van Buren was chosen to be Old Hickory’s running-mate when he ran for re-election in 1832.

In the same year Jackson found it necessary to launch an all-out attack on the Bank of the United States. He had never liked banks, and he particularly disliked this one, whose cause Henry Clay had made his own.
So had the ex-Federalist, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, in return for a fat fee, frequently refreshed, which he cast away at the gaming-table. When Clay, as candidate for the new National Republican party, thrust the question of re-chartering the Bank into the Presidential campaign by inducing Congress to vote in favour of it, although the old charter had four years still to run, Jackson responded with a veto message that rang like a summons through every poor or Jeffersonian home in the land:

… most of the difficulties our Government now encounters and most of the dangers which impend over our Union have sprung from an abandonment of the legitimate objects of Government by our national legislation, and the adoption of such principles as are embodied in this act. Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union. It is time to pause in our career to review our principles.
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What did it matter that the rich, even in his own Tennessee, now began to abandon Jackson? The many (further stimulated by the folly of the President of the Bank, Nicholas Biddle, who behaved like the bullying aristocrat that Jackson said he was) rallied to the President. Jackson won re-election triumphantly, and continued the Bank War by refusing to deposit any more of the federal revenues with the BUS. He had to dismiss his Secretary of the Treasury to do it, but that merely strengthened the authority of the Presidency, the powers and prestige of which Jackson notably extended during his tenure. The Bank War also reinforced his authority as a party leader, and the buoyant prosperity of the mid-1830s was unaffected by his economic experiments (although their long-term results were disastrous). Jackson seemed to be more than ever the nation’s leader and the people’s President; the National Republican party evaporated; and Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s chosen successor, was elected without the slightest difficulty in 1836. Old Hickory cheerfully went off to retirement in the Hermitage, remarking that his only regret was that he had not shot Henry Clay and hanged John C. Calhoun.

Jackson’s enemies were too much in earnest to give up. By 1836 they had formed a new party, which they called the Whig, after the Sons of Liberty of the Revolution who had defended American freedom against King George III as their self-appointed heirs were defending it against ‘King Andrew the First’. Still in its infancy, the party could not agree on a single candidate to run against Van Buren; but the omens of that election were good. With Jackson off the ticket the Democrats failed to carry Tennessee,
Ohio, Georgia and Indiana, though they won by a landslide in Van Buren’s New York. They might be conquered yet.

The Little Magician proved an unlucky President. The year 1837 was another one of bankruptcies and financial panic. Things improved somewhat in 1838, but in 1839 trouble was renewed. A long depression set in. As always in such cases, the President got the blame – not very justly, for the nineteenth-century Atlantic commercial economy moved in a cycle of approximately twenty years, affected by such things as the state of the European and American harvests, the accumulation or exhaustion of financial credit, and the state (alternating glut and scarcity) of the world market for raw materials and industrial goods. In the late 1830s matters seem also to have been complicated by the movement of silver, which, mined in Mexico, desired in China (where it was used to pay for imports of opium from the British Empire) and managed in London, was almost entirely outside the control of any US administration: New York (not to mention Washington) was a long way from attaining the predominant influence on world trade that it was to acquire in the twentieth century.
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In the crisis, Van Buren’s chief concern was to save the national credit: he wanted no repetition of the emergencies of the 1780s and the War of 1812. It was the most he could do: the federal government was quite without the means to mitigate hard times for ordinary Americans. But the Democrats had happily accepted the credit for good times. Inevitably, they were now blamed. The Whigs captured New York in the state elections of 1838. One of their young leaders, W. H. Seward (1801 – 72), won the Governorship, in the teeth of the Albany Regency, which was never the same again. Van Buren bid fair to be the Democrats’ John Quincy Adams; so the Whigs decided to back their own Andrew Jackson: General William Henry Harrison (1773 – 1841), the victor of Tippecanoe. He lived in Ohio, but was descended from one of Virginia’s leading families: his father had been a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. He was a shrewd old thing, and had done better than any other Whig in 1836, when he got seventy-three electoral votes. He would do. The only person who objected to his candidacy was Henry Clay. He waited in Washington for news from the Whig Presidential convention, gulping down glasses of wine to relieve the suspense and cursing his enemies the while (‘That man can never be my political idol again,’ said an onlooker sadly). When he heard of Harrison’s nomination his fury and despair boiled over. ‘I am the most unfortunate man in the history of parties,’ he cried. ‘Always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for a nomination when I, or any one, would be sure of an election.’

Nevertheless, the election of 1840 was not one of those which are conceded in advance. The Democrats made their thoroughly experienced machine function as never before, and were rewarded by winning more votes for
Van Buren than they had ever got for Jackson. But the Whigs did even better: Harrison won by 234 electoral votes to 60 for the President, although the margin in the popular vote was fairly narrow (1,274,624 to 1,127,781). At bottom, the outcome was settled by the depression. Other factors explain the scale of the victory. Hard work by the Whigs: they did not miss a trick, for example nominating for Vice-President a renegade Jacksonian, John Tyler of Virginia (1790 – 1862), to strengthen the ticket’s appeal in the Upper South. The vague but powerful feeling that the Democrats had been in power long enough. Van Buren’s personal vulnerability: he was distrusted as a Northerner in the South, where he was little known, and regarded as altogether too polished a gentleman by many rough voters. A devastating mistake by the Democrats: one of their aggressive journalists, ignoring Harrison’s genteel antecedents, wrote that he was unfit to be President, he should stay in his log-cabin with his tobacco pipe, his jug of hard cider, and his latch-string hanging out to let strangers in at the door. This snobbish remark was too much for the Americans. If the Whigs were the party of log-cabins and cider, they must be the right party to vote for. Soon every Whig parade, barbecue and clambake (of which there were hundreds) displayed log-cabins borne aloft on sturdy shoulders. Hard cider
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was dispensed in large quantities. Whig leaders rapidly discovered that they had all, or almost all, been born in log-cabins; Daniel Webster explained that he had been born in a house only because, being the youngest, he had come into the world when his family had earned a little prosperity. His elder brothers had done the right thing. Some surrealistic genius constructed a gigantic ball made of tin and began to roll it along the roads of Ohio. Its point was expressed by a chant:

As rolls the ball
Van’s reign does fall
And he may look
To Kinderhook.

(Kinderhook was Van Buren’s home town.) Whig papers reported that the Siamese twins were going to vote for the Cincinnatus of Cincinnati.
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In vain the Democrats fought back, explaining (erroneously) that OK stood for ‘Old Kinderhook’ – that great and good man, Martin Van Buren.
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The slogan ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’ hammered them into the ground.

The election of 1840 was the climax of a long evolution. Even more than
that of 1828 it expressed the new nature of American politics. That Jefferson had beaten Hamilton, and the republic was now a democracy, was patent to all the world. But it was a democracy of a particular kind. Every white male adult citizen was, or could be, involved (the percentage of the electorate voting in 1840 was 80.2 – a proportion to be surpassed only in 1860 and 1876): a legal revolution could occur every four years. A permanent contest had sprung up spontaneously between the Ins and the Outs: whatever the good luck or good management of the reigning party, there would always be an opposition ready to fight. The spoils system gave it something to fight for; the prospect of another election gave it something to hope for; and though a party might be defeated nationally, it would have great reserves of strength in the states, cities and counties which it still controlled – for no party victory has ever been absolutely complete – and, throughout the history of the American party system, local victory has always seemed, to some politicians, more important than a national one. The contest was by no means wholly cynical. Whigs and Democrats stood for significantly different economic programmes, and although both parties tried to appeal to all parts of the country equally, they did not sink all their beliefs in order to do so. The Democrats stuck by the doctrines they had inherited from Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The federal government, they believed, should be weak, the states strong. There should be no national bank, nor paper money, but instead a currency of gold and silver, and an independent Treasury where federal revenues, derived from the sales of public lands rather than the tariff (the Democrats were a party of free-traders), could be kept safe from aristocratic speculators and corrupters. The Whigs were equally loyal to the memory of Hamilton’s reports on manufactures and banking, and to Henry Clay’s American System, which contradicted the notions of the Democracy at every point. The Whigs wanted to build up American national strength by building up the economy; if that meant creating a class of rich men, so much the better. But they were not undemocratic, in the political sense: they enjoyed the game too much for that; nor were they illiberal or reactionary as to social policy. This was a great era of experimental reform, and of noisy egalitarianism. The Whigs, or some of them at any rate, espoused both. Seward, for example, began his career as a leader of the so-called Anti-Masonic party in New York state, which in the early thirties suspected the Freemasons of dreadful conspiracies against democracy; and as governor of New York he showed himself to be a humane supporter of prison reform.