AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 51 Chapter Three at risk. In this way, Channing provides a frame of reference for this essay, which explores the relationship between state building and party form~­ AFFAIRS OF OFFICE tion in the period between~e Missouri crisis 0£1819-1821 and the aboli­ tionist mails controversy of 1835. THE EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS, THE ELECTION OF 1828, This essay contends that the rise of the federal exec.utive departments in the decades preceding Jackson's victory in the electlon of 1828 was a AND THE MAKING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY necessary precondition for the emergence of the Democratic party in the months immediately following Jackson's inauguration. It fur~er con­ tends that the political orbit around which Jackson's Democrati~ par~ revolved had been subtly yet fundamentally reoriented by the Missouri RICHARD R. JOHN crisis of 1819-1821. · The federal executive departments were organized in the first federal Congress (1789-1793) in accordance with principles outlined in the fed­ eral Constitution. The most important were the Treasury Department, the State Department, the War Department, and the Post Office Department. HORTLY AFTER THE INAUGURATION in March 1829 of An­ Their rise during the next four decades was slow yet steady. As they ~r~': drew Jackson as the seventh president of the United States, the in­ larger and more geographically extensive, they assumed n~w respons~b1h­ Sfluential Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing questioned ties increased their organizational capabilities, and acquired a consider­ the rationale for broadening the mandate of the government over which abl~ measure of bureaucratic autonomy-which, by the 1820s, tempted Jackson presided. The Constitution had established a national market, ambitious department heads eager to advance their political careers. the federal courts had brokered disputes that might otherwise turn vio­ The Democratic party received its initial impetus fr?m the het~roge­ lent, and the Post Office Department had created a "chain of syn1pathies" neous political coalition that backed Andrew Jac.kson 1:1.the election of that transformed the far-flung states into "one great neighborhood. "1 1824. The coalition failed when, in a controversial dec1s1on, the House Why should legislators undertake new initiatives that might imperil the of Representatives rejected Jackson in favor of John Quincy Adams, even "actual beneficent influence" that these governmental institutions were though Jackson had received more votes from both the electoral college already exerting? 2 High tariffs impeded "unrestricted commerce"-the and the electorate. It triumphed in 1828 when Jackson defeated Adams "most important means of diffusing through the world knowledge, arts, in the electoral college. In the months immediately following Jackson'.s comforts, civilization, religion, and liberty. "3 Federal public works raised inauguration the coalition became transformed into the Democratlc constitutional questions of "no small difficulty" that would almost cer­ party, the lin~al ancestor of the Democ~ati~ pa~ty of to~ay.. 7 The Demo­ tainly embroil Congress in "endless and ever-multiplying intrigues" and cratic party was a genuinely new kind of mstltut1on, mak1~g its emergen~e 4 become a "fountain of bitterness and discord. " "In our republic," Chan­ an unusual event and as such, one that invites explanation. It was, as is ning concluded, "the aim of Congress should be to stamp its legislation often noted the world's first mass party, in the sense that it was a self­ with all possible simplicity, and to abstain from measures, which, by their perpetuatin~ organization that mobilized a large and divers.e elec:orate complication, obscurity, and uncertainty, must distract the public mind, on a regular basis in order to win elections and shape public policy. In and throw it into agitation and angry controversy. "5 As a people, we want addition, it was the first political party in the United Sta~e~ to unreserve~ly "no new excitement": "Our danger is from overaction, from impatient champion democracy. For each of these reasons, its or1g.1n~ have l~ng m­ and selfish enterprise, from feverish energy, from too rapid growth, rather trigued students of American pu.blic life. Froi:i whence did it come. ;x'hat than from stagnation and lethargy. "6 best explains its emergence during. the opening months of Jacks~n s. ad; Channing's remarks highlight two axioms of American politics that ministration, a half century after the adoption of the federal Constitution. Jackson's contemporaries took for granted but which present-day com­ mentators sometimes forget. By 1829, the central government had already Recent scholarship on the making of the Democratic party traces its ori­ become a leading actor on the national stage, and any broadening of its gins to a constellation of disruptive economi~ changes-;often te~med the mandate was likely to prove Contentious ·and might even put the Union ''market revolution"-that triggered the Paruc of 1819. Jackson1ans and 52 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 53 Democrats are supposed to have opposed market expansion; National The Marshall-Crenson thesis has long been endorsed by political scien­ Republicans and Whigs to have embraced it. Proponents of this view tists interested in probing the origins of the modern American state.14 Yet typically examine party formation from the standpoint of the electorate it rests on a slim empiricp,l base. Several of the bureaucratic precedents rather than party leaders, and dismiss the central government as little that the Jacksonians had supposedly invented had, in fact, originated in more than the arena within which the struggle over market expansion the eighteenth century and had been significantly refined by a previous was waged. To clinch their argument, they highlight social divisions generation of public administrators that included Treasury Secretary Wil­ within the electorate that postdated the establishment of the Democratic liam H. CraMord, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, and Postmaster party. Few demonstrate how these divisions explain the initial organiza­ General John McLean. Once in office, the Jacksonians did little to mod­ tion of the party in the months following Jackson's inauguration, or why ernize the administrative apparatus. If anything, their often clumsy direc­ party leaders made government corruption rather than market expansion tives made the administration of the executive departments even more the focus of Jackson's 1828 election campaign. This is not altogether burdensome and complex.15 s~rprising, since the favored methodology of these historians-the analy­ Symptomatic of the problems with the Marshall-Crenson thesis is its sis of aggregate data using behavioral assumptions-is unsuited to the treatment of the deliberate reorganizations of the executive departments analysis of specific events. that took place during Jackson's presidency-the "first practical test," One limi~ation of the "market revolution" thesis is the tendency of its Marshall gushed, of "innovative techniques of large-scale rational organi­ proponents to exaggerate the aversion of ordinary Americans to market zation on a peculiarly American model." 16 A case in point was the reorga­ expansion. "The pleasing rhetoric of Jackson's moralizing fables notwith­ nization of the Post Office Department that followed the enactment of standing," as one critic has aptly remarked, "Americans demanded the the Post Office Act of 1836. Both Marshall and Crenson attributed this market revolution long before they understood it. ... " 9 There is, in short legislation to Kendall and hailed it as the quintessentialJacksonian admin­ little reason to assume that hostility to market expansion hastened th~ istrative reform. In fact, however, the Post Office Act of 1836 originated Jacksonian ascendancy-or, for that matter, that the "revolution" that with neither the Jacksonians nor the executive. Rather, it was a congres­ swept Andrew Jackson into the White House in 1828 originated with the sional response to a humiliating postal finance scandal that haunted the people rather than with the politicians. On the contrary, as Robert V. Jacksonians during Jackson's second term. It was pushed through Con­ Remini contended almost a half century ago, this "revolution" moved in gress not by Kendall but, rather, by a bipartisan coalition headed by anti­ "one direction only-from the top down. " 10 Jacksonian Whigs. For a time, Jacksonian party leaders actually opposed Just as scholars have exaggerated the economic traditionalism of the its enactment in the fear that public exposure of their administrative Democratic party, so, too, they have overstated its administrative moder­ shortcomings might hurt them at the polls.17 nity. Some three decades ago, historian Lynn L. Marshall and political Marshall and Crenson's erroneous contention that the origins of the scientist Matthew Crenson credited the Jacksonians with introducing to federal bureaucracy did not emerge until the 1830s-a half century after the central government the routinized administrative procedures that the adoption of the Constitution-is emblematic of an even more basic have c~me to be known as bureaucracy. 11 For Marshall, bureaucracy was mischaracterization of the early American state. It has long been a cliche a solution to economic inefficiency; for Crenson, a response to social dis­ to dismiss the central government in the early republic as a "midget insti­ order. Both regarded it as a Jacksonian legacy and hailed Jackson's post­ tution in a giant land. " 18 The early American state, as political scientist master general, Amos Kendall, as its guiding spirit. 12 Stephen Skowronek has declared in a widely influential formulation, was The Mars~all-Crenson thesis neatly inverted the older view, originated a "state of courts and parties," an "innocuous reflection" of the wider by Jackson's contemporaries and endorsed by subsequent commentators society in which executive departments were unimportant and a "sense for almost a century, that the Jacksonians weakened the administrative of statelessness" was a hallmark of American political culture.19 capacity of the central government by dismantling a preexisting bureau­ The origins of this "courts and parties" school are complex.20 Its persis­ cracy and instituting a "spoils system" that replaced meritorious adminis­ tence owes more than a little to the continuing influence of the disparag­ trators with party hacks. For Marshall and Crenson, partisan maneuvering ing-and indeed almost comic-portrait of the early Washington political had the opposite effect of encouraging administrative reform. Or, as one establishment that political scientist James Sterling Young limned in his enthusiastic proponent of their thesis put it: "Spoils bred bureaucracy. ,,13 prizewinning Washington Community.21 In this behaviorist tour de force, AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 55 54 JOHN first published in 1966, Young attributed congressional voting patterns in institutions that included the states and localities as well as federalism the period between 1800 and 1828 less to party loyalty, public demand, and the common law. It is, similarly, not my intention to downplay the or considerations of public policy than to the highly localized, and largely differences between the eikecutive departments in the early republic and idiosyncratic, alliances that legislators forged in Capitol Hill boarding­ the administrative apparatus that has emerged since the Progressive Era. houses. Not until the Jacksonians established the mass party, Young con­ Much could be learned by tracing the continuities and discontinuities be­ cluded, would public figures devise effective ways to link the government tween, say, the War Department in the 1820s under John C. Calhoun an~ and the governed. 22 the Commerce Department in the 1920s under Herbert Hoover. Yet it For over three decades, Young's Washington Community has beguiled would be anachronistic to treat the former as a microcosm of the latter­ historians and political scientists with its methodological novelty, artful or, more broadly, to view nineteenth-century governmental institutions argumentation, and literary charm. Unfortunately, as numerous critics through a twentieth-century lens. This essay contends, on th~ contr~ry, have demonstrated, it is neither a full nor an accurate guide to the main­ that the origins of the Democratic party are best understood 1n relation springs of national politics during the early republic. Young underesti­ to the rise of the executive departments in the period preceding the elec­ mated the organizational capabilities of the executive departments, ne­ tion of 1828. glected policy issues, and discounted discrete events, such as the Missouri Political commentators in the early republic took it for granted that the crisis (whi7h is not even listed in the index).23 In addition, he exaggerated central government was an important institution and that the broadening the insulation of the citizenry from the central government in the period of its mandate could threaten vested interests. Some, like Channing, op­ preceding the advent of the mass party. In particular, he ignored the many posed a broadened mandate; others, like John Quincy Adams, endorsed intermediary institutions that, long before 1828, linked the central govern­ it. Few denied that the central government was an influential agent of ment and the wider world. Of these, the most notable included the petition change. . . . process, the newspaper press, the postal system, and nationally oriented The ubiquity of this mental outlook owed much to the cont1nu~g m- voluntary associations. Most devastatingly, Young embellished his argu­ fluence in the early republic of certain habits of mind that had been influ­ ment with suggestive snippets from primary documents that he sometimes ential in the late eighteenth century among the founders of the American took out of context and that often rested, as critics have politely observed, republic. Known today as the "whig," "classical republican," or "country on a "highly imaginative" reading of the evidence.24 In short, the continu­ party" tradition, this mind-set had been pop~ar~ed in seventee~th-cen­ ing popularity of Washington Community as a foundational text for stu­ tuty England by writers opposed to the consohdat10n of the English state dents of American political developinent says more about the mistaken and the establishment of the Bank of England. Among its tenets were the yet seductive and enduring appeal of a simple and uncomplicated past presumptions that political parties were evil, that economic conditions than it does about national politics in a formative age. were a product of political fiat, and that the manipulatio~ of governmei:t patronage for partisan ends was the essence of corruption.26 Paradox1- The remainder of this essay explores the relationship between the federal ~ally, some of the same historians who treat this mind-s~t with the ~tm~st executive departments and the Democratic party. It builds on the insight, seriousness when it found expression during the revolutionary era dismiss derived from political scientists and historical sociologists, that political it as anachronistic and even paranoid when it was revived in the early events can have political origins and governmental institutions can be republic. This was true even though, by almost any measure, the central agents of change. In so doing, it challenges the common assumption that government in the 1820s was more powerful-in the sens~ of comm~nd­ political events are, in some fundamental sense, the product of deeper ing more resources, controlling more patronage, and reach1n~ farther into or underlyirig social circumstances that originate outside of the political the hinterland-than the imperial state in British North America had been realm.25 in the period prior to 1775. The cultural repertoire of the early republic­ Since arguments about the early American state are often misconstrued, like that of any epoch-was limited, and antistatism was one of its defin­ it may be helpful to begin with a pair of disclaimers. It is not my intention ing motifs. The specter of governmental consolidation, .decl~red Fre~ch to contend that, in the early republic, the American state was synonymous traveler Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in America-m reflecting with the central government {let alone the executive departments). In this on a trip to the United States that he had taken between 1831and1832- period-as today-the American state (or polity) consisted of a variety of was the "one great fear" that haunted public figures throughout the 56 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 57 27 ~nite~ States. Toc~ueville dismissed this fear as overblown, citing the As the executive departments grew larger and more complex, ordinary ~1vers1ty of the American people; for Channing, it was precisely this diver­ Americans ratcheted up their expectations with regard to the kinds of sity that was cause for concern. benefits that they wishe4,,them to provide. In the realms of communica­ tions and transportation, popular demand for new and improved facilities Th~ Dem~cratic party emerged in a political universe that had changed was steady and insistent. Beginning in the 1790s, individuals throughout radICally smce the founders of the American republic drafted the federal the United States successfully petitioned Congress to extend the postal constitution in 1787. The founders' political economy had focused reso­ network throughout the trans-Appalachian hinterland.30 Before long, lutely o:i Europe. With the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, a new many came to regard mail delivery as a fundamental right, or what we generation of statesmen reoriented the American political economy to­ would today call an entitlement. Most postal petitioners requested merely ward the vast North American interior. To facilitate the expansion of the that Congress increase the number of routes upon which the mail was home market, legislators promulgated an ambitious legislative agenda transmitted; only occasionally, and in special circumstances, did they also th~t ':ould later become known as the "American System." Among its demand that the central government improve the roads over which the pr1nc1pal elements were a new national bank, a protective tariff, the or­ mail was conveyed. By the 1820s, this began to change. For many, it now derly s~ttle?1ent of public lands, and the construction of public works. seemed but a matter of time before the citizenry would compel Congress Begmn~ng ,1n 1816, much of this agenda was enacted. Legislative land­ to bring the transportation infrastructure up to the level that the postal marks mcluded the rechartering of the Bank of the United States in 1816· network had already attained. the tariffs of 1816, 1824, and 1828; the Land Act of 1820; and the Gen'. The General Survey Act of 1824 was a legislative response to this popu­ e:al Survey Act of 1824. Its primary judicial expression was the affirma­ lar demand. By creating a Board of Engineers to oversee the design of tion_ of the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States by Chief future public works, it validated the growing popular presumption that Jusnce John Marshall in M'Culloch v. Maryland (1819). the central government had a mandate to construct a national system of Among the public figures to promote this ambitious agenda were Henry roads and canals. In so doing, it paralleled the Post Office Act of 1792, Clay, John Quincy Adams, and John McLean. John C. Calhoun also sup­ which had established an analogous precedent for the elaboration of the ~orte? It early on, only to shift his position in response to changing condi­ republic's postal network. Following the enactment of the General Survey tlons In South Carolina. For these "National Republicans," as they would Act, popular expectations with respect to the kind of public works projects 31 come to be known, the founders' bold experiment in republican govern­ that the central government ought to undertake soared. Between 1824 and 1828, ninety public works projects received federal funding-includ­ ment was open-ended, and the central government a progressive, develop­ mental force. 28 ing the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal-inaugurating an internal improve­ ments boom that would continue well into the Jackson administration. The implementation of this developmental agenda ensured the continu­ Talent gravitates to power, and, in the 1820s, the executive departments ing e!aboration of the federal executive departments, which had been _became nurseries for presidential aspirants. John McLean used his posi­ growing steadily since the 1790s.29 In the United States, no less than in tion as head of the Post Office Department to catapult himself from al­ France, Germany, or Great Britain, big government big business. preceded most total obscurity into a perennial presidential contender. In the elec­ By 1828, over 10,000 people staffed the myriad post offices, land offices, tion of 1824, three of the five principal candidates-Adams, Calhoun, ~nd customhouses that were scattered throughout the country. An addi­ and William H. Crawford-were department heads, while a fourth, ~1onal 12,000 served in the military, half in the navy and marines and half Henry Clay, would soon be appointed secretary of state. Political insiders ill th~ army~ S~ationed mostly in the West. The size and geographical reach took it for granted that Crawford, as treasury secretary, was manipulating ?f this adm1n1strative apparatus far exceeded that of any other institution the four years law-which mandated the reappointment of the principal 11: ~~e country. No private enterprise could match the organizational capa­ treasury officers every four years-to build a political machine. Should b1ht1es of the Post Office Department, the Treasury Department, or the Crawford win in 1824, it was publicly announced that he would sweep War Department. The Post Office Department alone had eight thousand the offices, encouraging speculation about appointments to positions offices, makmg it not only the largest public agency in the United States from which the incumbents had yet to be displaced.32 Calhoun, similarly, but al~o one of the largest, most a-dministratively complex, and most geo­ was assumed to be stealthily building a vast public works empire in the graphically far-flung organizations in the world. Department of War, to which the Board of Engineers had been attached. 58 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 59 In addition, Calhoun was quietly elaborating plans for the relocation of impossible to mount such an elaborate campaign. In the absence of the the remaining eastern tribes to the west of the Mississippi-laying the franking privilege, it would have been prohibitively expensive. groundwork for the enactment, during Jackson's presidency, of the Indian Green recognized in thji1• supposed maladministration of the executive Removal Act. departments a compelling campaign issue, and freely elaborated in the The alleged maladministration of the executive departments was a lead­ Telegraph on themes that Eaton had raised in his Letters of Wyoming. In ing issue in the 1824 presidential campaign. Calhounites accused Craw­ editorial after editorial, Green lambasted the "corruption" that executive ford of official malfeasance, while Jacksonians attacked the federal bu­ patronage had supposedly fostered and trumpeted the need for "retrench­ reaucracy as corrupt. For Jackson stalwart John Eaton, author of the ment and reform." No issue preoccupied Green more than Adams's ap­ anonymous Letters of Wyoming, Jackson's lack of executive experience pointment of Clay as Adam.s's secretary of state soon after Clay had se­ became his most valuable asset-since it ensured that he, alone among cured Adams the vote of the Kentucky delegation during the 1824 the candidates, had never manipulated executive patronage to advance presidential election-an outcome Green derided, in the best tradition of his career.33 For the first time in the history of the republic, a presidential eighteenth-century English opposition writer James Burgh, as a "corrupt aspirant was portrayed as a virtuous outsider determined to take on the bargain." Adams, Green contended, had rewarded Clay with a lucrative Washington establishment. office in an executive department in return for Clay's support in securing The growing prominence of department heads in national politics helps Adams's election. to explain why numerous contemporaries, as well as many historians, In a certain sense, Green's anticorruptionisrn marked a shift in the Jack­ have characterized the executive branch under James Monroe and sonians' appeal. As recently as 1821, Jackson himself had denounced the John Quincy Adams as weak. Whether or not the presidents in this period "mania for retrenchment," while, as a Tennessee senator between 1823 36 were weak is a debatable point; there can be no question, however, that and 1825, he had supported a protective tariff and federal public works. the department heads were strong. The postmaster general, the treasury Yet Green's verbal assault reflected far more than merely his outrage at secretary, and the secretary of war each enjoyed an impressive measure Adams's appointment of Clay. Eaton's Letters of Wyoming, after all, had of bureaucratic autonomy, due, in large part, to their uncontested author­ been published before the House vote that decided the election of 1824. ity over the patronage that their departments disbursed. Predictably, they Rather, Green built upon, and exploited, the pervasive anxiety about the grew accustomed to negotiating directly with power brokers within Con­ evils of governmental consolidation that Tocqueville had reflected upon gress and the states, raising the specter of corruption and occasioning in his Democracy. The rise of the executive departments-declared Jack­ frequent embarrassm-ent for Monroe and Adams.34 sonian stalwart Thomas Hart Benton, in a congressional report on execu­ The executive departments played an equally conspicuous role in the tive patronage that he authored in 1826-"completely falsified" James 1828 presidential campiign. The 1828 election was by far the most ex­ Madison's celebrated contention in Federalist 45 and 46 (1788) that the pensive to have been waged in the United States up to that point in time. central government would never acquire the resources to challenge the Though it is impossible to know for certain, it probably cost around $1 prerogative of the states. Should Congress fail to enact rernedi~l legisla­ million to elect Jackson president. This expense was borne primarily not tion, Benton warned, the central government would soon dominate the by Jackson's supporters but, rather, by the Post Office Department states as effectively as if they were "so many provinces of one vast em­ through various hidden subsidies that postal patrons paid on their mail.35 pire. ,,37 Benton greatly exaggerated the impending demise of states' rig~ts; Of these subsidies, the most important was the franking privilege, which yet his report documented the extent to which the rise of the e~ecut1ve granted cert~in public officers-including postmasters-the privilege to departments had rendered anticorruptioriism plausible. The growing pop­ send an unlimited number of pamphlets, newspapers, and letters through ular demand for public works had an analogous effect. Had Adams not the mail. appointed Clay as his secretary of state, Green would have had little trou­ The Jackson campaign was coordinated from Washington, D.C., by ble inventing some other "corrupt bargain" with which to taunt the ·Duff Green, a Missouri-based entrepreneur who in 1826 had secured the Adamsites and embolden the Jackson campaign. editorship of the Washington-based United States Telegraph. Green used Green's editorial stance helped bridge the ideological divide between the Telegraph to coordinate a far-flung media blitz that embraced a galaxy Jackson's early supporters, most of whom hailed from the West, and the of strategically located Jacksonian newspapers. Had postal facilities re­ many southerners who had initially backed Crawford in 1824, but who mained as limited as they had been in 1800, it would have been technically eventually swung around to Jackson following Crawford's defeat. For 60 JOHN Af'FAIRS OF OFFICE 61 westerners intent on rapid commercial development, anticorruptionism it held out the promise of a rich harvest in offices and contracts should cast ~e central government as an impediment to the release of entrepre­ Jackson prevail. And who could have a better claim on these perquisites ~eur1~l ener~y. ~or .southerners fe~rful that the central government might than the men who had e11gineered Adams"s defeat? rmp~r1! the ~stitut1on of slavery, it provided reassurance that a Jackson Jackson's critics agreed. The "mass" of all the political parties of the a~m1n1strat1on would champion no new government initiatives that day, Everett perceptively observed shortly before the election, was held might put their interests at risk. together not by principle-as political parties had been in the 1790s, when The rise of the executive departments might in other circumstances the Federalists battled the Republicans-but, rather, by the "hope of of­ have bei:iefited the Adams campaign. After all, Adams, as president, had­ fice, and its honors and emolurnents."41 Should Jackson publicly pro­ a: least tn theory-control over the patronage that his department heads claim, Everett wryly predicted, that, if victorious, he would dismiss none disbursed. In practice, however, Adams refused to interfere with his de­ of his political antagonists and appoint no one on account of his political partment heads' autonomy, depriving himself of a resource that might support, this would "cost him every vote out of Tennessee. "42 well have strengthened his campaign. Adams went so far as to retain John For sensitive observers such as Channing, the brazenness of the scram­ McLean as his postmaster general, even though McLean was widely pre­ ble for office was appalling. The selection of a president, Channing sum~d (correctly) to have been surreptitiously dispensing postal patron­ warned, though a "comparatively inferior concern"-in relation to, for age in order to hasten Adams's defeat-and, or so McLean hoped, boost example, to the deliberations of Congress-had become so all-consuming McLean's own presidential aspirations. "Patronage is a sacred trust " that the quadrennial campaigns for the "Executive Department" had Mc~ean sanctimoniously lectured Massachusetts Adamsite Edward Ev:r­ come to pose the single greatest immediate threat to the Union. It would :tt, in rebuffing E~erett's efforts to appoint Adams's supporters to office: be better, Channing concluded, to choose the president by lot, rather than It was never designed for the personal gratification of the individual to "repeat the degrading struggle through which we have recently holding it." Should political supporters be rewarded with official prefer­ passed."43 ~ent, the "struggle for office" would be perpetual and "thus would per­ ish, perhaps forever, the best hope of man. "38 Everett saw matters differ­ Jackson's victory paved the way for the establishment of the-Democratic ently._ P~esident Adams, Everett observed, made the "experiment" of party as a self-perpetuating organization. To set the stage for the much appo1nt1ng public officers with "exclusive regard to merit," and "what heralded purge, Green publicly announced in the Telegraph that Jackson has been the. re~ar~"? A "most furious opposition, rallied on the charge would "reward his friends and punish his enemies. "44 In the "distribution of corrupt d1str1but1on of office, and the open or secret hostility of three­ of the federal patronage"-Green explained to one Jackson supporter, fourths of the officeholders in the Union. "39 In Great Britain, Everett elab­ shortly before Jackson's inauguration-"GeneralJackson will have much orat~d, there existed a multitude of options for ambitious men seeking in his power. He can enrich and strengthen his party by a transfer of public ~enown, including the military and the peerage. In the United the lucrative offices into sound hands." 45 With other Jackson supporters, States, 1n con~ast, there was noth~ng but public office. As a consequence, _Green was more forthright. "How is your postmaster?" Green queried a ~verett expla.1ned, :he lure of offic~al preferment was virtually irresistible: campaign worker shortly before Jackson's inauguration: "Can't I serve Office here is ~amily,.rank, ~er~d1ta~y fortune, in short everything out of you there? Or can't I obtain for you a mail contract? Let me hear from the range .of private life.' This. hnks its possession with innate principles you fully on these points .... I am now in a position where I can serve of our n~r:o~; and truly 1ncred1ble are the efforts men are willing to make, my friends .... "46 the hum1hat1on they will endure, to get it. "40 In response to Green's call, hundreds of would-be-officeholders de­ For Green, the promise of official preferment was a tempting reward to scended on Washington. Little wonder that Jackson's inauguration turned dangle before the party workers who coordinated the Jackson campaign. into a near riot. The principal attendees were not sturdy backwoodsmen Iron1cal~y, t~e very practices that Green attacked as corrupt gave him a drawn to the capital to witness the "first people's inaugural," as genera­ ~ompel11ng incentive with which to tantalize his supporters. By lambast­ tions of historians have naively assumed.47 Rather, they were expectant ing the Adams administration for its manipulation of executive patron­ officeholders ravenous for spoils.48 age, G~een established a plausible rationale for a general sweep of the The partisan dismissals that began shortly after Jackson's inauguration executive departm~nts. In~ee~, it was largely for this reason that party were a genuinely new development in American politics. Long before workers found ant1corrupt1on1sm so compelling. From their perspective, 1829, partisan dismissals had become familiar features of electoral poli- 62 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 63 tics in the Middle Atlantic states-and, in particular, in New York and If o_ne breaks down the postal dismissals by region and level of compen­ Pennsylvania. Yet nothing even remotely like the purge that Green had sation, a more revealing pattern emerges. During the first year of Jack­ prefigured in the Telegraph had ever before taken place in Washington, son's presidency, postal ~ministrators dismissed 38 percent of all the 49 D.C. For the first time in American history, public figures throughout postmasters holding offices worth more than $300 in New England and the country observed the workings of patronage politics as they had come the Middle Atlantic states, and 33 percent in the Northwest. In the South to be practiced in Albany and Harrisburg. For many, including some of Atlantic, in contrast, they dismissed only slightly more than 2 percent of 52 Jackson's oldest supporters, it was an appalling spectacle, and one that the postmasters who fell into this category. • • would dominate popular perceptions of Jackson's administration for one This pattern cannot be explained as a response to the economic ineffi­ hundred years. The revulsion at the Jacksonians' conduct was particularly ciency of the incumbents (pace Marshall) or the social disorder of the widespread in the South, where northern patronage practices remained region in which the dismissals occurred (pace Crens_on). Ma~y too.k plac.e unknown. Writing in 1861, Jackson biographer James Parton articulated in New England, a region much admired for the high quality of its mail the shared consensus. Even if all of Jackson's other executive decisions service and little prone to social disorder. Rather, it was a product of had been commendable, Parton concluded, his acquiescence in the parti­ the deliberate party-building strategy of Jacksonian party leaders such as san dismissal of meritorious public officers would still render his adminis­ Green. The Jacksonians' political base was in the South a~d Wes:; by 50 tration deplorable. Only after civil service reform had supplanted the rewarding supporters in the North and East, party leaders bmlt a national "spoils system," as the Jacksonian patronage policy would come to be party. "The aristocracy will retreat to New England and entrench them­ known, would historians fix the spotlight on other features of Jackson's selves behind local patronage," Green confided to a Jackson supporter administration, such as Jackson's support for Indian removal or his war shortly before Jackson's inauguration: "Our policy then is obvious. We 51 on the bank. must carry the war into the enemies' camp and break down the force of Among the first officeholders to be displaced was McLean. Since their patronage by the influence of our principles and the aid of the federal Mclean had covertly backed Jackson's election, he might seem like an 53 patronage. " • • . unlikely victim of a partisan sweep. Yet Jacksonian party leaders had no While party leaders sometimes claimed that the partisan dismissals had intention of permitting him to retain control over a department that con­ democratized the civil government, in fact, they displayed scant animus trolled such an abundance of contracts and jobs. After all, McLean had against officeholders of high social standing. Displacing incumbents was been a leading proponent of the public trust doctrine and had no desire far less important than rewarding supporters.54 Had party leader_s had to preside over a partisan h1rnout of his staff, Jackson neatly resolved some other kind of perquisite at their disposal, they might well have set­ what might otherwise hf!ve become his first cabinet crisis by appointing tled their debts in some other way and left the administrative apparatus him to a vacant seat on the Supreme Court-somewhat to McLean's cha­ intact. To expose the hidden logic of the Jacksonians' strategy, follow the grin, since he had hoped he might become head of the War Department, gioney. Many of the most lucrative public offices went to men who had with all of the power and patronage that it controlled. Once McLean invested heavily in Jackson's election campaign.55 was out of the way-and the weak-willed William Barry installed as his Party leaders rationalized their patronage policy by invoking the .tim:­ successor-the purge of the Post Office Department could proceed, just honored doctrine of rotation in office, which Jackson announced m his as Green had intended. first annual message in December 1829. Rotation in office had long been The significance of the partisan dismissals is easily overlooked. Con­ urged by political theorists as a precaution against the evils that might sider the changes in the Post Office Department, the source of the vast ensue should ambitious and grasping men monopolize the most powerful majority of federal jobs. During the eight years of Jackson's presidency, and prestigious public offices such as the presidency. The_ Jacksonians' postal administrators dismissed 13 percent of the postmasters in the coun­ innovation was to extend the doctrine to almost every office in the govern­ try. This percentage was not markedly different from that of previous ment including thousands of minor positions-such as village postmas­ administrations-and, in fact, it has often been interpreted as proof that tershlps-that involved little administrative discret~on. Rotatio~ super­ the Jacksonians merely followed time-honored precedent. In fact, this per­ seded-and, in large measure, overturned-the public trust doctrme that centage reveals little. Most postma:sterships paid little and, thus, were not McLean had articulated during his tenure as postmaster general. considered patronage plums. McLean's public tr-Ust doctrine had established the presumption that of- 64 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 65 ficeholders had the right to remain in office unless they had been guilty their campaign debts; rotation in office changed the rules of the game. of a dereliction of duty. Rotation in office nullified this presumption.56 The significance of this shift was independent of, and can in no sense In no sense was rotation in office a core Jacksonian belief. It had never be conflated with, the perco.ntage of officeholders whom the Jacksonians been broached during the 1824 campaign and was not openly discussed dismissed. By creating a mechanism for the periodic replacement of a until after Jackson's inauguration-even by party insiders.57 Jackson him­ substantial fraction of the civil government, rotation established the mate­ self does not appear to have alluded to it in writing until several months rial basis for the mass party as a self-perpetuating organization-a new following his inauguration, when he observed in a private memorandum institution that, along with the voluntary association, was one of the most book that it would "perpetuate our liberty."58 Only slowly and haltingly notable institutional innovations of the age. Prior to 1829, when a na­ would it acquire a prominent place in the political lexicon. Indeed, it tional public figure referred to the spoils of office, he typically had in mind would hardly be an exaggeration to suggest that rotation in office has the benefits that legislators bestowed upon their constituents.62 Following received more approving commentary from twentieth-century historians Jackson's' victory, the spoils would increasingly come to refer merely to than it did in Jackson's own day. In the years immediately following Jack­ the perquisites that party leaders lavished on campaign workers. Rather son's i1:1auguration, for example, Jackson's congressional supporters only than something to fight for, the spoils became, as it were, something to rarely invoked rotation to justify the staffing changes that Jackson's ad­ fight with.63 ministrators.oversaw. And almost never did they echo the blunt yet honest Grafted by party leaders onto a preexisting administrative apparatus, assessment of New York senator William L. Marcy, who in 1832 asserted Jackson's Democratic party grew in fertile soil. In less than a decade, the that the new administration had a right to appoint supporters to office, Post Office Department had been transformed from the central adminis­ since "to the victor belongs the spoils. " 59 Most continued to maintain­ trative apparatus of the early American state into the wellspring of the sometimes with little effort to conceal their blatant hypocrisy-that the mass party. In the process, it helped underwrite the distinctive election­ public trust doctrine remained intact, and that every dismissed office­ eering style that would dominate presidential politics in the United States holder was guilty of some kind of dereliction of duty. This was true even for the next eighty years. though everyone familiar with the specifics of the appointment process understood that the only impropriety with which the vast majority of ex­ President Jackson is often credited with strengthening the presidency by officeholders could justly stand accused was the possession of an office establishing a direct relationship with the American people and by declar­ coveted by party leaders as a reward for party workers. Jackson himself ing, in his nullification proclamation, that secession was treason and the repeated this outrageous canard in a private letter to a longtime supporter Union perpetual.64 as la~e as 1832, in which he dared an opposition editor to name a single Jackson may have strengthened the presidency, yet his administration public officer whom his administration had dismissed who had "not been significantly weakened the organizational capabilities of the central gov­ swindling the government or was not a defaulter. " 60 ernment. This was largely by design. The main thrust of Jackson's admin­ Opposition to rotation was by no means confined to administration istration was to reduce, whenever possible, the role of government in critics. It sparked sharp dissent from wi~hinjackson's cabinet and among American life.65 By blocking internal improvements, endorsing tariff re­ some of Jackson's most loyal supporters. Rotation was also unpopular duction, disbanding the Board of Engineers, vetoing a major land bill, among the influential Washington society matrons who in previous ad­ and opposing the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, Jackson ministrations_ had worked diligently behind the scenes to match promising affirmed his faith in an antidevelopmental, states' right agenda quite dif­ young men with suitable government berths. 61 Few doubted that the new ferent from the prodevelopmental, nationally oriented agenda of Adams doctrine was anything more than a thinly veiled rationalization for the and Clay. Though Jackson is acclaimed a nationalist, in fact, he relied on bestowal of lucrative offices upon campaign workers. In the political vo­ states' rights principles even during the nullification controversy, when he cabulary of the day, this was not reform but corruption-the same charge deployed one variant of states' rights to challenge a competing variant that the Jacksonians had leveled against the Adamsites during the preced­ promulgated by the nullifiers of South Carolina.66 Jackson's opposition ing campaign. to the bank was, similarly, less economic than political, and rooted in the Notwithstanding its unpopularity, rotation in office gave party leaders traditional English "country party" fear that bank officials might deploy the necessary incentives to transform the Jacksonian coalition into the the patronage at their disposal to subvert the regilne-or, what was for Democratic party. The partisan dismissals helped the Jacksonians pay Jackson the same thing, to underwrite the election campaign of his oppo- 66 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 67 67 nents. Even Jackson's notorious struggles with his cabinet over Peggy they strove, that is, to restore the balance of power between the central Eaton and over the removal of the bank deposits had the effect-as may government and the states that the rise of the executive departments had well have been their intent-of curtailing the bureaucratic autonomy of upset. Their project, as o~, historian sagely observed almost half a cen­ his department heads and undermining the relationships they had forged tury ago in reflecting upon Jackson's assault on the bank, was essentially with local notables in the capital and the states. 68 a "dismantling operation."72 Jackson's endorsement of the rapid and inexpensive disbursement of Yet it was ultimately impossible for the Jacksonians to restore the re­ the public lands also had an antidevelopmental rationale. By hastening public to the days of its youth. For the Jacksonians were also heirs to the the privatization of the public domain, Jackson discouraged the accumu­ new political realities that had emerged following the Missouri crisis. °' lation of a surplus in the treasury that might provide the occasion for new They sought, in short, not only to parry the heightened expectations with federal initiatives that could threaten vested interests. Indian removal, the which ordinary Americans looked to the central government, but also to major legislative achievement of Jackson's first term, may have been de­ diffuse the multiple' dangers that the slavery issue posed.73 pendent on the army for its enforcement, yet it greatly increased the stock The Jacksonians fully endorsed the post-Missouri consensus-sus­ of cheap land and, thus, decreased the likelihood that the sale of the public tained by nonslaveholders and slaveholders alike-that it was imperative domain would become a source of general revenue. Tariff reduction had to keep the slavery issue off the national political agenda. In the 1790s, an analogous logic, as did Jackson's determination to eliminate the federal it had been relatively easy to maintain this conspiracy of silence: the gov­ debt, a goal he briefly attained in 1835. If the Treasury Department's ernment was new and its mandate amorphous. The antislavery petition coffers were bare, ambitious congressmen would lack the resources to effort of Pennsylvania Quakers in 1790 may well have sparked an acrimo­ embark on expansive new programs that might challenge the status quo. . nious congressional debate, yet the petitioners' appeals were swiftly re­ Rotation in office was consistent with this antidevelopmental agenda. jected, and the controversy was soon forgotten. 74 By the 1810s, the slavery By lowering the prestige of public office and forestalling the emergence issue had become considerably more complex and less easily disposed of. of administrative expertise, it limited the ability of the executive depart­ During the Missouri crisis, some northern legislators went so far as to ments to perform the tasks they had been assigned. Jacksonian appointees propose the imposition of restrictions on slavery as a condition for Mis­ were almost always less qualified than the men they had supplanted and souri statehood, a direct assault on slaveholder prerogatives that sparked often became embroiled in scandal and graft. In every public agency that a firestorm of opposition among political insiders in the slaveholding historians have scrutinized-the Post Office Department, the General states. And by the 1820s, the national legislative agenda was crowded Land Office, the military armory at Harper's Ferry, and the Army Corps with ambitious proposals to purchase slaves and relocate free blacks­ of Engineers-the Jacksonians' administrative record fluctuated between proposals that were rendered increasingly plausible by the steadily gro~­ the undistinguished and the abysmal. 69 Not until the twentieth century ing organizational capabilities of the executive departments. No one would the executive departments regain the prestige that they had at­ doubted that the Treasury Department possessed the requisite administra­ tained in the years immediately preceding Jackson's election. tive machinery to collect enormous sums of money from tariffs on im­ Early in Jackson's administration, Amos ICendall hailed Jackson's party ported goods-or, for that matter, that the War Department commanded for championing "simple, virtuous, and efficient government" and the the necessary resources to remove entire Indian tribes to the west of_ the abandonment of "all pretensions to power" that would "necessarily cre­ Mississippi. What, then, was to prevent an executive department from ate collisions with the states. "70 On the eve of the election of 1832, admin­ relocating free blacks outside of the country, or even undertaking a gen­ istration critic Alexander H. Everett offered up a rather less flattering eral slave emancipation? assessment. By undermining federal prerogatives, defying the Supreme For slaveholders and their allies, such questions were profoundly unset­ Court, and denying legislators "all their most important powers," the tling. Ever since the adoption of the Constitution, slaveholders had exer­ Jacksonians had attempted to "bring back the present Constitution to the cised a disproportionate influence in national politics. Slaveholders were imbecility of the Old Confederation. "71 the major beneficiaries of the three-fifths clause, which augmented the political power of the slaveholding states. And in 1820, they secured a Jacksonian antidevelopmentalism provides insight into the political ethos major congressional victory when they converted a slim restrictionist ma­ that historians term "Jacksonian Democracy." To the extent that the Jack­ jority into a small antirestrictionist majority in order to secure the admis­ sonians can be said to have had a guiding vision, it was reactionary- sion of Missouri as a slave state.75 68 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 69 Shifting demographics, however, rendered the future uncertain. During ing on enthusiasm"-would undoubtedly "push them to try the question the revolutionary era, many statesmen had echoed James Madison's well­ of emancipation. "79 During the congressional debate that preceded the known prediction that slaveholders would retain control of the levers of enactment of the General iurvey Act, Virginia congressman John Ran­ power following the adoption of the Constitution, since the population dolph gave public expression to Macon's private concern. Should Con­ of the slaveholding states would increase faster than the population of gress enact this bill, Randolph warned, it could "emancipate every slave the nonslaveholding states. By the 1820s, few doubted that Madison's in the United States-and with stronger color of reason than they can prediction was wrong. As the nonslaveholding states surpassed the slave­ exercise the power now contended for." 80 ',j holding states in population, slaveholders recognized that they had best ::i The relationship between a broadened government mandate and anti­ unite to prevent Congress from enacting legislation that might endanger slavery was often oblique. No responsible public figure seriously contem­ prerogatives they had long taken for granted-including the right to own plated attacking slavery directly within the states. Yet few doubted, as the slaves.76 Missouri crisis had revealed, that slavery was vulnerable on the margins. Jacksonians understood the slaveholders' predicament. To articulate it, And here lay the danger. Should Congress enact a major new legislative they recast in a popular idiom the antidevelopmental argument long es­ initiative-such as a national system of public works-it risked not only poused by the "Old Republicans" -a small yet purposeful group of south­ stretching the Constitution, as Macon had feared, but also, and no less ern and, indeed, mostly Virginian statesmen, writers, and editors who had ominously, strengthening antislavery sentiment in the North and the held aloft the mantle of Thomas Jefferson and the Republican party of West. This was because-or so both champions and critics of a broadened the 1790s. Often dismissed as hopeless reactionaries during the presiden­ government mandate assumed-government-sponsored economic devel­ cies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Old Republicans en­ opment would encourage alternatives to slave-based agriculture that joyed a revival beginning in 1818, when they jousted with "National Re­ would increase economic opportunities for free labor. 81 Equally troubling publicans" over the merits of an extensive program of federal public were the various proposals to relocate free blacks outside of the country works.77 This revival stemmed primarily from the growing realization and to compensate slaveholders for the emancipation of their slaves. If among slaveholders that the rise of the executive departments had ren­ enacted, such proposals would almost certainly undermine popular sup­ dered their gloomy warnings about the dangers of governmental consoli­ port for slavery in the border states-where the institution was weak­ dation less a paranoid fantasy than a realistic fear. and build popular support for its conditional termination in the rest of Old Republicans exerted a major influence upon the 1828 election cam­ the country. 82 paign and, eventually, the Democratic party. Few, to be sure, had sup­ Few legislative initiatives sparked more concern than the linkage of a portedJackson's presidential aspirations early on; indeed, most supported compensated slave emancipation with a public land sale. Land-for-slave Crawford rather than Jackson in the election of 1824. Yet with Jackson's swaps had been debated in Congress as early as 1790 and were extensively controversial defeat, many concluded-if often begrudgingly-that Jack­ discussed during the Missouri crisis. 83 "For one," declared Illinois con­ son was a superior alternative to Adams in 1828. gressman Daniel P. Cook in February 1820, "I am prepared to devote Old Republicans provided Jackson not only with votes but also with every inch of the public soil west of the Mississippi, if so much shall be an intellectual rationale for his campaign.78 In particular, they made ex­ necessary, to the redemption of our country from this fatal, this deplor­ plicit the implicit threat that slaveholders had always believed a strong able evil." 84 The issue reemerged five years later, on the eve of Adams's central government posed to the institution of slavery. Even before the inauguration, when New York senator Rufus King proposed that under Missouri crisis, North Carolina congressman Nathaniel Macon had certain circumstances the revenue from all future land sales be "inviolably warned that any augmentation in the mandate of the central government applied" to the effiancipation of slaves and the relocation of free blacks could foster certain kinds of civic engagement that might challenge slave­ outside of the United States.85 In 1832, Clay included in a land bill the holder prerogatives. Macon found especially troubling the recent estab­ proviso that Congress designate revenue generated by land sales for the lishment of nationally oriented voluntary associations such as the Ameri­ relocation of free blacks outside of the country. can Colonization Society (1816). Should legislators "stretch" the Legislative proposals to rid the United States of its black population Constitution by authorizing the construction of public works, Macon are understandably unpalatable to present-day sensibilities, inflected, as warned in a private letter to a political ally, these voluntary associations­ they were, by the pervasive racism of the age. Yet they were the only animated as they were by a "character and spirit of perseverance, border- administrative response to the slavery issue that stood the slightest chance 70 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 71 i'' of enactment. Had Congress opposed the relocation of free blacks, it determination of northerners to make restrictions on slavery a condition could never have considered the question of emancipation, since all pro­ I for Missouri statehood-and with good reason. Restriction, after all, posals to end slavery were vulnerable to the unanswerable objection that l raised the specter that at s~e future juncture the central government they might leave former slaves in close physical proximity to their former might take even more direct steps to restrict slaveholder prerogatives­ enslavers.86 including those of Missouri slaveholders such as Green himself. And for No Jacksonian was more forthright in his analysis of the political impli­ Green, this was the crux of the matter. The very malleability of govern­ cations of the slavery issue than Duff Green. In the final months of the mental institutions made it impossible to know for certain whether some 1828 campaign, Green privately warned several correspondents of the I' antislavery scheme might someday succeed. In an age in which the central perilous consequences for the Union should a North-West political alli­ government was steadily broadening its mandate, the executive depart­ ance agitate the slavery issue to consolidate its power. 87 "The antislave ments were becoming increasingly powerful and autonomous, and volun­ party in the North is dying away/' Green wrote reassuringly to a l(entuck­ tary associations were fast emerging as effective vehicles of popular mobi­ ian a few months before the election, and a Jackson-Calhoun victory lization-and in the absence of stable political parties to direct and diffuse would "put it to sleep for twenty years": "Upon this subject I know more popular dissent-every presidential election became a referendum, not than I can prudently communicate by paper." It has been "part of my only on a particular candidate or on a specific policy agenda, but on the business"~Green boasted, in reference to the slavery issue-to "prevent future of the Union.91 the agitation of that question." Green's sensitivity on this score led him Green's apprehensions concerning possible future assaults on slave­ to oppose the substitution of DeWitt Clinton for Calhoun as Jackson's holder prerogatives were subtly reinforced by his personal familiarity with running mate. Clinton, as a nonslaveholder, might have been expected antislavery activists. Green was related by marriage to Daniel P. Cook, the to appease antislavery voters in the North and, thus, help forestall the Kentucky-born Illinois congressman who had forcefully attacked slavery emergence of a North-West antislavery party. Yet Green opposed him any­ during the Missouri crisis. And Cook, as it happens, was an ardent ad­ way. "The very reasons which induce you as a slaveholder to support mirer of John Quincy Adams-and, apparently, something of an Adams Mr. Clinton," Green explained to the I(entuckian, "prompt me as a slave­ protege. In the critical state-by-state House vote that gave Adams the pres­ holder to oppose him." The only way to "keep down" the "antislave idency, Cook, as the sole Illinois congressman, cast the state's vote for party" in the United States was to identify it with the antiwar Federalist Adams. Several years earlier, during the Illinois statehood debate, Cook, party of 1812, which Clinton had led. 88 as an Illinois newspaper editor, had urged the admission of Illinois as a Characteristic of Green's prosouthern, proslavery orientation was his free state-a controversial position that angered Illinois slaveholders, in­ eagerness to run two slaveholders-Jackson and Calhoun-on the same cluding Green's own brother-in-law, and one that Illinois slaveholders presidential ticket, an eV-ent unique in American political history, and one tried to overturn as late as 1824. And in the fall of 1817, as the slavery that could conceivably have inflamed disunionist sentiment in the North. issue was beginning to emerge as a national issue, Cook published in a "Some object to the nomination of Mr. Calhoun because he is from the Washington newspaper two remarkable open letters on the topic. 92 In south and a slaveholding state," Green conceded. Yet this was "so much these letters, Cook lambasted slaveholders as lazy and tyrannical, com­ the better": "Now is the time to crush the demon of disunion-roll the pared rebellious slaves to the patriots of the American War of Indepen­ chariot wheels of Jackson's popularity over it, and it will be ages before dence, and urged President Monroe to endorse legislation to hasten the it can again raise its head in our land. " 89 abolition of slavery throughout the United States. Should future legislators Green's candor on the slavery issue spoke directly to the new political emulate Cook's antislavery fervor, Green had little doubt that slaveholders realities that had grown out of the Missouri crisis. Green never doubted would find themselves struggling to protect their prerogatives from a that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to regulate slavery North-West antislavery alliance. Almost sixty years later, Green reprinted within the states. Indeed, Green himself had forcefully argued this posi­ a substantial excerpt from the second of Cook's letters in his memoir, tion as a delegate to the Missouri constitutional convention in 1820- with the bold-and highly distorted-claim that their initial publication and had publicly declared that liberty-including, presumably, the liberty in 1817 marked the beginnings of the "antislavery conspiracy" to build a to own slaves-was for him dearer than the privilege of remaining within northern antislavery party. To combat this conspirac)r, Green declared, the Union.90 Green recognized that, at least for the moment, the antislav­ had been the goal of his political career, and the primary impetus behind ery movement was weak and divided. Yet he was deeply troubled by the his endorsement of Andrew Jackson in the election of 1828.93 72 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 73 Green's preoccupation with the slavery issue during the 1828 campaign out of the determination of party leaders-such as Duff Green-to keep was highly atypical, at least within Jackson's inner circle. Neither Kendall the slavery issue off the national political agenda. In pursuit of this g~al, nor Francis P. Blair-nor even Jackson himself-gave the issue more than the Jackson administration su,;pported policies that weakened the organiza­ passing attention. In large measure, this was because they did not have tional capabilities of the central government and protected the vested inter­ to. With the exception of borderland outposts like Missouri and Illinois, ests of the slaveholders who dominated its party's political base. the ramparts of slavery were so well defended that the Jacksonians could The Jacksonian ascendancy-and, with it, the flowering of «Jacksonian focus their attention on issues that were less potentially divisive. The pau­ Democracy" -is best understood as a problem neither of classes, nor even city of references by Jacksonian party leaders to slavery-even in personal of regions, but of entitlements. In the years preceding the election of 18~8, correspondence-during a political campaign notorious for its raucous ordinary Americans presumed themselves entitled to an ever increasing vulgarity has often been cited to demonstrate the unimportance of the array of government benefits. In response to this popular movement, J~ck­ issue. to the Jackson campaign.94 From Green's vantage point-shaped, as sonian Democracy was born. Here, then, was one of the most curious it had been, by his personal familiarity with the precariousness of slavery ironies of the age: the first national political party to call itself democratic in Missouri and Illinois-the submergence of the slavery issue was, on was programmatically committed to limiting the role of the government the contrary, a tribute to his success at preventing it from once again in American life. commanding attention on the national stage.95 The influence of the Jacksonians on the democratization of American Green's Jacksonianism was unabashedly opportunistic. A Calhounite politics is easily exaggerated. White male suffrage antedated the Jackso­ at heart, he abandoned Jackson shortly after the election; by 1830, he nian ascendancy, as did the advent of an avowedly egalitarian and often was endorsing public positions that Jackson opposed. In the 1840 elec­ populistic style of electioneering.98 Long before the maki~g. of the Dem?­ tion, Green backed the Whigs, and, in 1861, he cast his lot with the Con­ cratic party, and long after it as well, voluntary assoc1at1on~, often m federacy, running iron mills in Alabama and Tennessee during the Civil conjunction with third parties and reform movements, po~ularized caus~s War. In 1828, however, these events lay in the future. In the final, frenzied far more progressive than anything even the most radical Democratic months of the 1828 election campaign, it was Green-the prime editorial party leader would have found politically possible to sustain.99 To dismiss spokesman for the Jackson campaign-who rallied the faithful with the such impulses as peripheral to the "partisan imperative" of two-party promise of preferment. In many ways, this made Green the most represen­ competition makes sense only if one assumes a priori that the mass .par~ tative Jacksonian of them all.96 was the logical fulfillment of the promise of democracy. Even rotation in office-the most avowedly democratic of the Jacksonians' innovations­ Almost half a century ago, British political scientist S. E. Finer under­ did little to increase the access of previously underrepresented groups to scored the administratiVe achievements of the central government in the public office. 100 In addition, by institutionalizing what has aptl~ been United States in the period preceding the Jacksonian ascendancy. ('On the called an "alienating grammar of corruption," it might well have discour­ eve of Jackson's election, i• Finer wrote, "the United States administrative aged civic engagement. 101 It may, in short, be time to reconsider :whether system was a going concern, steadily expanding its services and progres­ rotation ought to be regarded as a core element of the democratic creed. sively adapting its organization to the new burdens." As a student of Brit­ The Jacksonians may have succeeded in limiting the role of the govern­ ish public administration-which, in the early nineteenth century, re­ ment in American life, yet they failed to keep the slavery issue off the mained a patronage engine for the well connected and the well to do­ national political agenda. The abolitionist mails controversy in 1835 Finer was in_ an excellent position to acknowledge this notably American dashed their hopes. When the leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Soci­ achievement.97 ety used the facilities of the Post Office Department to agitate the slavery This essay has contended that the rise of the executive departments in issue in the slaveholding states, they sparked a swift and hostile reaction the 1820s was a necessary-though not sufficient-precondition for the not only from slaveholders but also from Postmaster General l(endall .and establishment of the Democratic party. Institutions beget institutions; no­ President Jackson. Almost immediately, antiabolitionist mobs sprang into where was this truism more aptly illustrated than by the changes set in action in the North as well as the South, with the covert endorsement motion with Jackson's victory in _the election of 1828. The Jacksonian co­ of prominent Jacksonians, including Vice President Martin Van Bu~en. alition was midwife to the party the executive departments spawned. Jack­ Jackson himself proposed sweeping antiabolitionist legislation,. :'hi~h, son's Democratic party championed a legislative agenda that grew directly though unsuccessful, fueled the growing suspicion of radical abolitionists AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 75 74 JOHN 1 6. Ibid., 353. that the ~entral government had become the pliant tool of a grasping l 7. In its early years, the Democratic party had no agreed-upon name. As late sla:e~ol~mg.ca~al. No longer would the postal system remain the nation­ as the presidential campaign of 18J2, it was kno.yn officially as the "Republican" bu1ld1ng 1nstltutlon that Channing had proclaimed it to be as recently as party even though, as far back as 1824, it had also been called the "Democratic 1829. Henceforth, it would exacerbate the long-smoldering conflict over l Republican" party and also, occasionally, the "Democratic" party. Samuel Rhea I sl~v_ery that would continue without interruption from 1835 until the -1 Gammon, The Presidential Election of 1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer­ Civil War. 102 sity Press, 1922), 162. Only after the organization of the Whig party in 1834 Jackson's strident antiabolitionism is a pointed reminder of the trou­ l would it become customary for Jacksonian party leaders to call their party "Dem­ blmg legacy of the antidevelopmental agenda that his administration en­ ! ocratic" or, more simply, the "Democracy." dorsed. In the absence of outside coercion, it is unrealistic to assume that 8. The role of the "market revolution" in the making of the Democratic party a full-scale .slave emancipation could have succeeded in the nineteenth­ is explored in Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian j America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), and Charles Sellers, The Market Rev­ century United States. Peaceful emancipations required the intervention olution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, ~fa central government, a~ in the British West Indies; violent emancipa­ 103 1991). See also Harry L. Watson, "The Ambiguous Legacy of Jacksonian Democ­ tions follow~d s~ave rebellions, as in Haiti. The voluntary, state-spon­ racy," in Peter B. Kovler, ed., Democrats and the American Idea: A Bicentennial s?red .emanc1pation up~n which so ~any statesmen of Jefferson's genera­ Reappraisal (Washington, D.C.: Center for National Policy Press, 1992), 29-75. t1?n invested such high hopes-including, albeit fitfully, Jefferson For an incisive critique, see William E. Gienapp, "The Myth of Class in Jacksonian himself-was doomed to fail. America," Journal of Policy History 6 (1994), 232-59. It is impossible to know if the developmental agenda of Adams and. 9. John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: Public Works and the Promise C~ay. might, u~der different circu~~tanc:s, have ended slavery peacefully I of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of w1th~n the l!n1ted States. Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that slaveholder North Carolina Press, 2001), 224. dom1n~nce. m national politics was so formidable that any deliberate aug­ 10. Robert V. Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia and New mentation in the mand~te o~ th: central government would, alternatively, York: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1963), 87. 11. Lynn L. Marshall, "The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party," American have hastene~ the nat1onahzation of slavery-just as Abraham Lincoln Historical Review 72 (1967): 445-68; Matthew A. Crenson, The Federal Ma­ would come m the 1850s to fear. Yet there can be little doubt that-just chine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Jacksonian America (Baltimore: Johns Hop­ as Duff Green had mtended-the antidevelopmental agenda of Andrew kins University Press, 1975). Marshall and Crenson both drew on the "organiza­ Ja:kson and An:ios !Cendall left slaveholder prerogatives intact. By weak­ tional synthesis," a new approach to American history in the 1960s, which took ~n1~g rI:e organ1zational capabilities of the central government-the only as its primary focus the development of large-scale institutions, including govern- 1nst1tut1~n that coul~ have peacefully orchestrated a slave emancipation­ ment bureaucracies. Jackson s Democratic party made the perpetuation of the Union contin­ 12. Marshall and Crenson's highly laudatory assessment of ICendall's adminis­ ~ent on the suppression of antislavery, and the agitation of the slavery trative achievements built on the earlier work of political scientist Leonard D. issue a prelude to civil war. White, whose ]acksonians (1954) credited I(endall with a "Postal Renaissance." For a more detailed discussion of White's treatment of the Jacksonians, see Richard R. John, "Leonard D. White and the Invention of American Administra­ NOTES tive History," Reviews in American History 24 (1996): 344-60. Why White lavished such praise on Kendall's tenure as postmaster general is '.: an interesting question. According to a colleague, White found "immense plea­ . For suggestions and advice, I am grateful to Richard H. Brown, Tom Coens, Patri­ sures" in discovering creative public servants-especially if, like White, they had cia Conley, Daniel Feller, Robert P. Forbes, Meg Jacobs, John Lauritz Larson Mi­ graduated from Dartmouth. Dartmouth, as it happens, was also Kendall's alma chael John Robert V. Remini, W. J. Rorabaugh, and Julian zelizer. Pe~~an, Re~, mater. John M. Gaus, "Leonard Dupee White, 1891-1958," Public Administra­ 1. William E. Channing~ "The Union," in The Works of William E. Channing ~Boston: Geor.ge G. Channing, 1849), 1:353. This essay was originally published tion Review 18 (1958)' 235. The proof text for White's admiring portrait of Kendall was l(endall's Autobi­ 1u May 1829 in the Christian Examiner. All references are to the 1849 edition 2. Ibid., 351. . ography, which I(endall's son-in-law, William Stickney, completed following Ken­ dall's death. Nineteenth-century historians, familiar with Kendall's enviable gifts 3. Ibid., 350. as a partisan polemicist, used ICendall's memoir sparingly. Their twentieth-century 4. Ibid., 351. successors have been less cautious. A case in point was Kendall's account of the 5. Ibid., 345. '1

AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 77 76 JOHN Post Office Act of 1836. In his memoir, Kendall credited himsdf with being the 22. Young, Washington Community, xi. I' 23. Characteristic of Young's underestimation Of the importance oft.he c~ntral primary inspiration for its enactment-a remarkable claim for a department head, l and one that, by marginalizing Congress, ignoring the Whigs, and downplaying I government in the early republicjPas his .erron~ous ass~ption that, m this pe­ the Jacksonians' ovvn administrative shortcomings, has misled scholars for almost riod, the Post Office Department" transmitted little besides personal correspoi:­ fifty years. I dence. In fact, the Post Office Department also conveyed a large volume of public 13. Michael Nelson, "A Short, Ironic History of American National Bureau­ information-including newspapers, magazines, and government documents. cracy," journal of Politics 44 (1982): 760. Ibid., 31-32. d 14. Ibid., 761-62;James A. Marone, The Democratic Wish: Popular Participa­ 24. Allan G. Bogue and Mark Paul Marlaine, "Of Mess and Men: The B~a_r - tion and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990), II inghouse and Congressional Voting, 1821-1842," American Journal of Po!tttcal 87-94; Martin Shefter, Political Parties and the State: The American Historical , · nee 19 (1975): 226. See also Marion Nelson Winship, "The 'Practicable S cte "'ThH Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 67-68. Sphere' of a Republic: Western Ways of Co~ecting to C~ng~ess, 1n e ouse See also Joel D. Schwartz, ed., "Liberty, Democracy, and the Origins of Ameri­ and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Develo?mer:t, can Bureaucracy," in Harvard Law Review 97 (1984): 825-28. Schwartz's essay ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon (Miami, Ohio: Ohio Un1vers1ty critiqued William E. Nelson's Roots of American Bureaucracy (1982), one of the Press, 2002), 145, and Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Process of Government few post-Crenson studies of early American bureaucracy that did not endorse under Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 210, 286, 3?3· Crenson's re,visionism. Predictably, Schwartz faulted Nelson for his supposed "There is no evidence in the records of the petitioning process of the Jeffersonian shortcoming. era"-Cunningham observed, in a point~d rejoinder to Young-"to,,suggest a feel­ 15. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from ing that the national government was distant and ~approachable (303). . Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995)_, 242--48. 25. For a related discussion, see two valuable review essays by Ronald P. Formi­ 16. Marshall, "Strange Stillbirth," 468. sano: "State Development in the Early Republic: Substance and Structure, 1 :~o- 17. Washington Globe, March 26, 1836. See also John, Spreading the News, 1840," in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Politte~! 242-52, and Edward Pessen, review of Federal Machine, in Journal of Southern H'story 1775-2000 ed. Byron E. Shafer and Anthony J. Badger (Lawrence: Uni­ History 41 (1975): 553-54. Pessen_ characterized Crenson's analysis of the admin­ v:rsity Press of I(a~sas, 2001), 7-35, and "The Concept of Political Culture," istrative reorganizations that took place during Jackson's administration as "not Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 _(2001): 393-426. . simply a monocausal explanation of a complex historical phenomenon but in a 26. The continuing influence of English opposition thought Ill the e~ly repub­ sense a giant whitewash of some of the Jacksonian politicians, whose own mis­ lic is the subject of a large historical literature. See, for ~xample, ~an~el Walke_r deeds 'triggered' a clamor for reform" (554). See also Pessen,]acksonianAmerica: Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Ch1c~~o: University of Chi­ Society, Personality, and Politics, rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, cago Press, 1979); Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Pofrttcal Culture of_Nor~h­ 1985), 362. ern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University 18. John M. Murrin, "The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Com­ Press, 1983 ), chap. 4; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Co~rse of~mer­ parison of the Revolution Settlements in England {1688-1721) and America ican Freedom, 1822-1832 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); Maior L. Wilso~, (1776-1816)," in Three British Revolution" 1641, 1688, 1776, ed.]. G.A. Pocock "The-'Country' versus the 'Court': A Republican Consensus and Party. Debate ~n (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 425. the Bank Wai;" Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 619-47; M,,a1or L. Wil­ 19. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of son "Republicanism and the Idea of Party in the Jacksonian Penod, Jo_urnal of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ the 'Early Republic 8 (1988): 419-42; and Richard B. Latn~r, "~reserving 'The sity Press, 1982), 19, 23. Natural Equality of Rank and Influence': Liberalism, Repubhcarusm, an~ Eq~al­ 20. For a more extended critique of the "courts and parties" tradition, see ity of Condition in Jacksonian Politics," in The Culture of the Market:_Historical Richard R. J c;ihn, "Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking Essays, ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichtraeber, III (Cambridge: Cam- American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787-1835," Studies in American Political Development 11 (1997): 347-80. bridge University Press, 1993), 189-230. . . 27. Alexis· de Tocqueville, Democracy tn America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield 21. James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (New and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago P~ess, _2000), 368. Ac­ York: Columbia University Press, 1966). For a recent tribute to Young's book by an eminent political scientist (who termed it "excellent"), see Ira I(atznelson, cording to one Tocqueville scholar, Toc~ue~ille's unde,~est~atton .~.f th: r~le o~ "Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American State building," in Shaped the centril government in American public life was the basic error m hi~ discus by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, sion of the nature and future of the American federation. ~ames .T. S~hle1fer, The ed. Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, MakingofTocqueville's Democracy in America (Chapel Hill: Un1vers1ty of North 2002), 107n29. Carolina Press, 1980), 111. 1 -- '! 78 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 79

28. For an authoritative survey of the public policy debates of the early repub­ 37. Thomas Hart Benton, Report of the Select Committee on Executive Pat- lic, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun ronage, 19th Cong., 1st sess., 1826, S. Doc. 88 (serial 128), 11. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Peterson traces the National Republi­ 38. McLean to Everett, Augus.t. 8, 1828, in Proceedings, 366, 367. cans' legislative agenda to the Madisonian wing of the Jeffersonian Republican 39. Everett to McLean, Auguft 1, 1828, in Proceedings, 362. party and, thus, considers it fitting that it was sometimes termed the "Madisonian 40. Everett to McLean, August 18, 1828, in Proceedings, 376. platform." This ideological genealogy is worth underscoring, since commentators 41. Everett to McLean, August 1, 1828, in Proceedings, 361. often assume-mistakenly-that the American System was little more than a 42. Everett to McLean, August 18, 1828, in Proceedings, 376. warmed-over version of the Federalist political program of the 1790s. See also 43. Channing, "The Union," 358, 355, 359. Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs, 49, 90-91, and Larson, Internal 44. United States Telegraph, November 3, 11, and 18, 1828. Improvement, 160. See also MichaelJ. Lacey, "Federalism and National Planning: 45. Green to C. P. Van Ness, December 28, 1828, Green letterbook, August The Nineteenth-Century Legacy," in The American Planning Tradition: Culture 1827-April 1830, Green Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and Policy, ed. Robert Fishman (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center l 46. Green. to Benjamin F. Edwards, December 17, 1828, Green letterbook, Press, 2000), 89-111. Green Papers. 29. Prior to 1788, the new republic could hardly be said to possess a central 47. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, chap. 9. administrative apparatus at all. The outstanding exception was the Continental See also Remini, "The Democratic Party in the Jacksonian Era," in Kovler, Demo­ crats and the American Idea, 38, and Jeffrey B. Morris and Richard B. Morris, Army. Interestingly, several of the most influential proponents of a stronger central lJ government (including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Mar­ 1 eds., Encyclopedia of American History, 7th ed. (New York: Harper/Collins, shall) had been army officers, while several of the leading critics of the new regime 1996), 188. (including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison) had never served in the military. 48. John, Spreading the News, chap. 6, esp. 210-14. On the legacy of this military heritage-and its often intentional neglect-see 49. Following Thomas Jefferson's victory in the election of 1800, there is no Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and evidence that any government clerk complained about having been discriminated American Character (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979}, against on political grounds. Cunningham, Process of Government, 180. chap. 8, and Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation 50. James Parton, Life and Times of Andrew Jackson (New York: Mason (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), esp. 154-55. Brothers, 1861)) 3: 691-92. RobertV. Re1nini has discountedParton's preoccupa­ 30. Richard R. John and Christopher J. Young, "Rites of Passage: Postal Peti­ tion with Jackson's patronage policy as "praCtically pathological." Remini, An­ tioning as a Tool of Governance in the Age of Federalism," in Bowling and l(en­ drew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833-1845 (New York: non, House and Senate in the 1790s, 100-38. Harper and Row, 1984), 600n26. In fact, Parton's critique was rarely contested 31. Larson, Internal Improvement, 173. and widely shared. Indeed, prior to the twentieth century, the phrase "Jacksonian 32. Everett to McLean, August 18, 1828, in "Use of Patronage in Elections," Democracy" was often used to refer not to a broad social movement but, rather, ed. Worthington C. Ford;Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3d to a narrowly based-and patronage-obsessed-political party sometimes called ser. (1908), 1:374 (hereafter Proceedings). the "Jacksonian Democracy." Richard J. Moss, "Jacksonian Democracy: A Note 33. M. J. Heale, The Presidential Quest: Candidates and Images-in American on the Origins and Growth of the Term," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 34 Political Culture, 1787-1852 (London: Longman, 1982), 57-61. (1975), 145-53. 34. Anticorruptionist rhetoric so dominated public discourse during the Mon­ 51. On the J acksonians as spoilsmen, see William F. Mugleton, "Andrew_J ack­ roe and Adams administratiOns that Robert V. Remini has dubbed the period son and the Spoils System: An Historiographical Survey," Mid-America 59 between 1816 and 1828 the "Era of Corruption." Remini's novel periodization (1977): 117-25, and Frank Freidel, "Jackson's Political Removals as Seen by His­ highlights the perception among public figures in the 181 Os and 1820s that the torians," Historian 2 (1939): 41-52. For a recent reevaluation, see John, Spread­ executive departments were becoming larger and more autonomous and, thus, ing the News, chap. 6 and esp. 334--35n117. Still useful, despite its pronounced more prone to corruption. Yet he conflates perception and reality when he hails anti-Whig bias, is Charles Sellers, "Andrew Jackson versus the Historians," Mis­ Jackson with heading the "first reform movement in American political history." sissippi Valley Historical Review 44 (1958): 615-34. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 13-15, 99. 52. John, Spreading the News, 221-36. 35. Robert V. Remini, "Election of 1828," in The Coming to Power: Critical 53. Green to U. Updike, February 1, 1829, Green letterbook, Green Papers. Presidential Elections in American History, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (New 54. For a different interpretation, see Shefter, Political Parties and the State, York: Chelsea House, 1981), 75. 66-68. 36. Andrew Jackson to James Monroe, February 11, 1821, in The Papers of 55. John, Spreading the News, chap. 6, esp. 220-21. Andrew Jackson, 1821-1824, ed. Harold D. Moser, et al. (I(noxville: University 56. For a different account of the origins of rotation in office, see Robert V. of Tennessee Press, 1996}, 5:10. I am grateful to Tom Coens for this reference. Remini) The Legacy of Andrew Jackson: Essays on Democracy~ India1-t Removal, - AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 81 80 JOHN 67. Rernini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War, 44. and Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 30--31. Jack­ son, Remini contended, supported rotation not merely to "terminate a corruption 68. Shefter, Political Parties and the State, 66-68. 69. John, Spreading the News, chap. 6; Malcolm Rohrbough, The Land Office he believed had long festered within the executive branch" but also to "establish the democratic doctrine that in a free country no one has a special privilege or Business: The Settlement and Alt1ninistration of American Public Lands, 1789- right to control or run the nation" (30-31). See also Remini, The Revolutionary 1837 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), chap. 12; Merritt Roe Smith, Age ofAndrew Jackson (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), chap. 5 ("Who Shall Harpers Ferry and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (Ithaca, N.Y.: Hold Office?"). Cornell University Press, 1977), chap. 9; Todd Shallat, Structures in the Stream: 57. Robert P. Hay, "The Case for Andrew Jackson in 1824: Eaton's Wyoming Water, Science, and the Rise of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Austin: Univer­ Letters," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 29 {1970): 145. sity- of Texas Press, 1994), chap. 5; Forest G. Hill, Roads, Rails, and Waterways: 58. Private memorandum book, cited in Remini, Andrew Jackson and the I The Army Engineers and Early Transportation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Course of American Freedom, 183. Press, 1957), chap. 3. In complementary ways, each of these studies challenges 59. Even Remini conceded that Marcy's attempt to excuse Jackson's patronage I Remini's asseition that the central govenunent was better administered under policy was a "colossal blunder" that gave Jackson's opponents a "telling quota­ l Jackson than it had been under Monroe and Adams. Remini, Andrew Jackson tion with which to bludgeon the administration during the election campaign." j and the Course of American Democracy, 245. Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: W.W. Nor­ 70. l(endall to Francis P. Blair, April 25, 1830, cited in Richard B. Latner, The ton and Co,, 1991), 384. See also Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of Presidency of Andrew Jackson: White House Politics, 1829-1837 (Athens: Uni­ American Freedom, 185. versity of Georgia Press, 1979), 58. 60. Jackson to William B. Lewis, August 18, 1832, cited in Remini, Andreu1., 71. Alexander H. Everett, The Conduct of the Administration (Boston: Stimp­ l son and Clapp, 1832), 76. The "insane man-worship" of Jackson's supporters, Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 379. 61. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Everett added, had strengthened the presidency-and, in different circumstances, Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, would "justly excite the most serious ·alarm for the permanence of our institu­ 2000), chaps. 3, 5. tions." 62. See, for example, Larson, Internal Improvement, chap. 5 ("Spoiling Inter­ 72. Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, nal Improvements"). Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 29. 63. The indispensability of material incentives to the making of the mass party 73. Richard H. Brown, "The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jack­ provides a new perspective on the influential thesis-originated by political scien­ sonianism," South Atlantic Quarterly 65 _(1966): 55-72; Leonard L. Richards, tist Theodore Lowi and popularized by historian Richard L. McCormick-that, "The Jacksonians and Slavery," in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives in the nineteenth century, American politics had a distributional cast. Following on the Abolitionists, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (Baton Rouge: Louisi­ the Jacksonian ascendancy, the primary beneficiary of political largesse was often, ana State University Press, 1979), 99-118; William J. Cooper, Jr., Liberty and and sometimes exclusively, not the electorate, but the party. The preoccupation Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983 ), chap. 8. of niileteenth-century politicians with the judicious disbursement of patronage to 74. Ellis, Founding Brothers, chap. 3. party supporters will be evident to anyone who has read through their correspon­ 75. Robert Pierce Forbes, "Slavery and the Meaning of America, 1819-1833," dence. Many politicians regarded it as one of their most important-arid challeng­ Ph.·D. dissertation, Yale University, 1994, chaps. 4-5. See also Don E. Fehren­ ing-tasks. bacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni­ 64. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War: A Study in the versity Press, 1980), 17-23. Growth ofPresidential Power (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1967); Kenneth 76. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern M. Stampp, "The Concept of a Perpetual Union," in The Imperiled Union: Essays Domination, 1780--1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), on the Background of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 101-6. See also Robin L. Einhorn, "Species of Property: The American Property­ esp. 33-35. Tax Uniformity Clauses Reconsidered," Journal of Economic History 61 (2001): 65. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, esp. 29, 1-34, and Einhorn, "Slavery and the Politics of Taxation in the Early United 116. States," Studies in American Political Development 14 (2000): 156-83. 66. Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States' Rights, 77. Larson, Internal Improvement, 126-35. and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). The nulli­ 78. Norman K. Risjord, The Old Republicans: Southern Conservatism in the fication crisis, Ellis concluded, was "not simply, and perhaps not even mainly, Age of Jefferson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), chap. 9; Remini, a struggle between the proponents of nationalism and states' rights. In a very Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, esp. 29, 31, 116; Remini, fundamental way, it also involved a struggle between advocates of different kinds of states' rights thought" (178). Legacy of Andrew Jackson, 9. ..

82 JOHN AFFAIRS OF OFFICE 83 79. Macon to Bartlett Yancey, March 8, 1818, in Kemp P. Battle, ed., "Letters nineteenth century, Holt suggestively observes, was the belief among political of Nathaniel Macon," in James Sprunt Historical Monographs, no. 2 (Chapel actors that partisan loyalties among voters and leaders might "imminently be Hill: University of North Carolina, 1900), 48-49. "The states having no slaves," displaced" and, thus, that the. entire political system was "malleable, mutable, Macon added, "may not feel as strongly as the states having slaves about stretch­ and open to change and reorgJhization" (106). Holt intended this generalization ing the c·onstitution, because no such interest is to be touched by it" (49). Macon's to apply to the half century after 1835, when two-party competition was en­ assumption that broadening the mandate of the central government would foster trenched; it applies even more forcefully to the two decades preceding 1835, when social activism anticipated the contention of historical sociologist Theda Skocpol it was not. that the expansion in the administrative capacity of the state could encourage 92. [Daniel P. Cook], "To James Monroe, President of the United States of civic engagement. Theda Skocpol, "The Tocqueville Problem: Civic Engagement America," National Register, 13 and 20 September 1817; Duff Green, Facts and in American Democracy," Social Science History 21 (1997): 455-79. Suggestions, Biographical, Historical, Financial, and Political (New York: Rich­ 80. Cited in Larson, Internal Improvement, 143. ardson and Co., 1866), 32. 81. That public works spending would create conditions favorable to free "We were favored by Heaven in our revolutionary struggle," Cook declared in labor may not seem self-evident today. Yet it was taken for granted in the early his second letter, _'.'and believing ourselves injured, we even appealed to the Divin­ ity to aid and assist us-we were fighting for our natural rights; those rights which republic by public figures as otherwise diverse as George Washington, John I Quincy Adams, and Thomas Dew. Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and we believed the God of Nature intended 'all' should 'equally' enjoy. To that appeal the Union (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 60-63; Alison Goodyear Free­ the Heavens bowed propitiously.... With this recent example of the justice of hling, Drift 'toward Dissolution: The Virginia Slavery Debate of 1831-1832 l Heaven before us; can we, with any well-founded hope of escaping a similar visita­ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 202-8. tion of divine justice, expect to go on, inflicting more unwarrantable oppressions 82. William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and upon others than were inflicted upon us? No! The ways of Heaven are alike, are the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 9. unalterable, and for us they will not swerve from their ordered course .... " 83. Betty L. Fladeland, "Compensated Emancipation: A Rejected Alternative," l 93. Green, Facts and Suggestions, 28, 30-33. The goal of this conspiracy, Journal of Southern History 42 (May 1976), 169-86. Green declared, was not to free the slaves but to enslave the "white man" by t~e 84. Annals of Congress, February 4, 1820, 1109. "centralization ·of a corrupt, irresponsible power in the federal government, 1n 85. Register of Debates, February 18, 1825, 623; Fladeland, "Compe-V-sated open violation of the fundamental principles of the Constitution" {34 ). Emancipation," 176. 94. John M. McFaul, "Expediency vs. Morality: Jacksonian Politics and Slav­ 86. Freehling, Reintegration of American History, chap. 7; Ellis, Founding ery," Journal of American History 62 (1975): 24-27; Latner, Presidency of An­ Brothers, 106-8. drew Jackson, 207-12; Remini, Legacy of Andrew Jackson, 86. 87. David Wayne Moore, "Duff Green and the South, 1824-35" (Ph.D. disser­ 95. For the more traditional view, see Remini, Legacy of Andrew Jackson, tation, Miami University, Miami, Ohio 1983). The slavery issue, Moore con­ chap. 3, and Latner, Presidency of Andrew Jackson, 207-12. Remini faulted Rich­ cluded, was "particularly important" in explaining Green's devotion to Jackson. ard H. Brown for exaggerating the role of the slavery issue in the Jacksonians' Throughout the campaign, Green remained "haunted" by the fear that the more ascendancy and claimed that Brown had been misled by the self-serving retrospec­ populous north would "unite in a sectional party hostile to the South's 'peculiar tive pronouncements of John Quincy Adams. Latner contended that the slavery institution'" {18). See also Michael D. Goldhaber, "The Tragedy of Classical Re­ issue had little influence on Jackson's supporters from the western border states, publicanism: Duff Green and the United States Telegraph, 1826-1837" (B.A. the­ the "primary inspiration," in his view, for the program of the Democratic party sis, Harvard University, 1990). (208). Neither devoted much attention to Green, even though he was the primary 88. Green to Worden Pope, January 4, 1828, Green letterbook, Green Papers. editorial spokesman for the Jacksonian party during the 1828 campaign and 89. Green to William Snowden, November 16, 1827, Green letterbook, Green hailed from the border state of Missouri. Papers. 96. The absence of a full-scale scholarly biography of Green is a major gap 90. Fletcher M. Green, "Duff Green," in Dictionary of American Biography, in the literature on nineteenth-century American politics, political economy, and ed. AllenJohnson and Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), proslavery thought. 7, 540. 97. S. E. Finer, "Patronage and the Public Service: Jeffersonian Bureaucracy 91. For a related discussion, see Michael F. Holt, "Change and Continuity in and the British Tradition," Public Administration 30 (1952): 329-60, quotation the Party Period: The Substance and Structure of American Politics, 1835-1885," on 330. Finer based his characterization of American administrative develop­ in Shafer and Badger, Contesting Democracy, 106. Holt's essay includes a compel­ ments on the first two volumes of Leonard D. White's history of American public ling critique of the "party period" synthesis of nineteenth-century American polit­ administration: The Federalists (1948) and The Jeffersonians (1951). ical history that had been developed most fully by Joel H. Silbey arid Richard L. 98. Andrew W Robertson," 'Look on This Picture ... and on This!' National­ McCormick. One of the most important things "structuring politics" in the 'mid- ism, Localism, and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787- 84 JOHN 1820," American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1263-80; David Waldstreicher, Chapter Four In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776- 1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Jeffrey A. Pasley, 'The Tyranny of Printers': Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic THE LEGAL TRANS'FORMATION OF CITIZENSHIP (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia) 2001). 99. Mark Voss-Hubbard, "The 'Third Party Tradition' Reconsidered: Third IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA Parties and American Public Life, 1830-1900," Journal of American History 86 (1999), 121-50. 100. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 249-50. 101. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, "Limits of Political Engage­ WILLIAM J. NOVAK ment in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy;' Journal of American History 84 (1997): ·884. For a book-length We n1ust not thrust our modern "State-concept" upon the elaboration, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: reluctant material. Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ -Frederic William Maitland ton University Press, 2000). While Altschuler and Blumin may well understate the civic engagerµent of ordinary Americans, they persuasively highlight the persis­ tence of popular hostility toward the mass party and the patronage practices that HISTORIANS SEARCH for ways to reintroduce "the political" sustained it. For a parallel assessment, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Union Divided: back into American history, one interpretive possibility that can­ Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Neely challenges the presumption-originated by twentieth-century not be overlooked is the idea of citizenship. The Concept of citi­ 1 behaviorist social science, and popularized among historians by Joel H. Silbey and zenship is in the midst of an extraordinary theoretical revival. For good Richard L. McCormick-that a "party system" propelled by a "partisan impera­ reasons. First, citizenship has the potential to integrate social and political tive" existed in the mid-nineteenth century (187). Neely further contends that the history. Citizenship directs attention precisely to that point where bottom­ patronage practices that sustained the mass parties should not be conflated with up constructions of rights consciousness and political participation meet a program of "management development or equal opportunity": "Patronage did the top-down policies and formal laws of legislatures, courts, and admin­ not cultivate future candidates for public office, and it did not study or attempt istrative agencies. 2 Second, citizenship deals directly with what has be­ to improve government administration. No other part of the two-party system come a preeminent social and political question in our time-inclusion more merited the criticism that parties put self before commonwealth" (192). and exclusion based on identity. Third, citizenship brings the state back 102. John, Spreading the News, chap. 7. in, focusing attention on the claims and obligations of the rights-bearing 103. Robert P. Forbes,."Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment," in Reli­ subject in distinctly modern nation-states. Fourth, citizenship brings de­ gion tind the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, ed. John P. McGivigan and Mitchell Snay (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), 70. "Slaveholders," Forbes ob­ mocracy back in, illuminating issues of civic participation and the con­ 3 serves, "were unanimous in viewing the strong federal government created by the struction of civil society. Fifth (taking a cue from T. H. Marshall's influ­ Constitution as the principal potential threat to slavery" (77). This perception ential discussion "Citizenship and Social Class"), the citizenship had implications not only for the Jacksonian ascendancy but also for Jefferson's framework can expansively incorporate three different kinds of rights­ victory in the election of 1800. By "dismantling the detested apparatus of the civil, political, and socioeconomic-integrating in a single developmental Federalist state and replacing it with the hands-off Jeffersonian government," Jef­ story the early emergence of property and contract, nineteenth-century ferson's victqry "neutralized the one institution in the United States capable of struggles over suffrage, and the rise of twentieth-century social welfare imple1nenting effective measures against slavery" (82). states.4 Finally, the language of citizenship transfers smoothly to the dis­ cussion of transnational politics in an increasingly global, multicultural world. Citizenship thus has much to recommend to American political historians. But the so-called citizenship debates bring one potential hazard to a discussion of American politics (particularly nineteenth-century American politics), and that is the danger of anachronism. For most recent discus­ sions of American citizenship have been framed by the t~oroughly modern THE DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT

NEW DIRECTIONS IN AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY

Edited by MEG JACOBS WILLIAM]. NOVAK JULIANE. ZELIZER

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright 2003 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved To Abigail Helen and Sophia Miriam

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The democratic experiment : new directions in American political history. Edited by Meg Jacobs, William]. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 0-691-11376-9 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-691-11377-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. United States-Politics and government-Historiography. 2. United States-Politics and government. 3. Political culture-United States-History. 4. Democracy-United States-History. 5. Federal government-United States-History. I. Jacobs, Meg, 1969-11. Novak, William J., 1961- Ill. Zelizer, Julian E.

E183.D46 2003 320.973-dc21 2002192499

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Saban

Printed on acid-free paper. oo www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTORS IX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

CHAPTER ONE The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History Meg Jacobs and Julian E. Zelizer 1

CHAPTER TWO Explaining the Unexplainable: The Cultural Context of the Sedition Act Joanne B. Freeman 20

CHAPTER THREE Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party Richard R. john 50

CHAPTER FOUR The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America William]. Novak 85

CHAPTER FIVE Bringing the Constitution Back In: Amendment, Innovation, and Popular Democracy during the Civil War Era Michael Vorenberg 120

CHAPTER SIX Democracy in the Age of Capital: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York Sven Beckert 146

CHAPTER SEVEN Domesticity versus Manhood Rights: Republicans, Democrats, and "Family Values" Politics, 185 6-1896 Rebecca Edwards 175

CHAPTER EIGHT The Case for Courts: Law and Political Development in the Progressive Era Michael Willrich 198 Vlll CONTENTS

CHAPTER NINE CONTRIBUTORS "Mirro~s of Desires": Interest Groups, Elections, and the Targeted Style in Twentieth-Century America Brian Balogh 222 CHAPTER TEN Brian Balogh is Associate Professor of History at the University of Vir­ Pocketbook Politics: Democracy and the Market in ginia and codirector of the American Political Development Program at Twentieth-Century America the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He is the author of Chain Reaction: Meg Jacobs 250 Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Nuclear Power CHAPTER ELEVEN (1991) and is completing two works about the rise of big government: Before the State: Reconciling Public and Private in Nineteenth-Century Th~ Uneasy Relationship: Democracy, Taxation, and State Building since the New Deal America (to be published by Cambridge University Press) and "Building Julian E. Zelizer 276 a Modern State: Gifford Pinchot and the Tangled Roots of Modern Ad­ ministration in the United States." CHAPTER TWELVE All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Sven Beckert is Dunwalke Associate Professor at Harvard University, Twentieth-Century America where he teaches nineteenth-century United States history. He is the au­ Thomas J. Sugrue 301 thor of The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation

CHAPTER THIRTEEN of the American Bourgeoisie (2001). Beckert wrote the essay in this vol­ ume while being a fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers in New Suburban Strategies: The Volatile Center in Postwar American Politics Matthew D. Lassiter 327 York City. Currently, he is at work on a book on the global connections fostered by nineteenth-century capitalism, The Empire of Cotton: A CHAPTER FOURTEEN Global History, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf. From Hartz to Tocqueville: Shifting the Focus from Liberalism to Democracy in America Rebecca Edwards is Associate Professor of History at' Vassar College and James T. Kloppenberg 350 the author of Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Part;y Politics

CHAPTER FIFTEEN from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (1997). She is working on a The Possibilities of Analytical Political History narrative history of the late-nineteenth-century United States and a biog­ Ira Katznelson 3 81 raphy of Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease.

INDEX 401 Joanne B. Freeman is Professor of History at Yale University and author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (2001), and Alexander Hamilton: Writings (2001). Her next book will explore the culture of Congress in antebellum America.

Meg Jacobs is Assistant Professor of History at MIT. She is completing a book, Pocketbook Politics in Twentieth-Century America, to be published with Princeton University Press. She has published articles in the Journal ofAmerican History and International Labor and Working-Class History. Her next book will explore the political economy of postwar America.

Richard R. John is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago at Illinois. He is the author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995). He is currently writing X CONTRIBUTORS CONTRIBUTORS XI Making Connections: Inventing American Telecommunications, 1839- 1919, which will be published by Harvard University Press. He was the Michael Vorenberg is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University. Lloyd Lewis Fellow at the Newberry Library in 2002-2003 and the co­ He is the author of Fini>/ Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slav­ winner of the 2002 Harold F. Williamson Prize from the Business History ery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001), and he is currently working Conf~rence. on a book about the impact of the Civil War on American notions of citizenship. Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. His books include Black Men, White Cities (1973), Michael Willrich is Assistant Professor of History at Brandeis University. City Trenches (1981), Schooling for All (1985, coauthored with Margaret A former journalist, Willrich writes about the history of American law Weir), Marxism and the City (1992), Liberalism's Crooked Circle (1996), and society. He has just published his first book, City of Courts: Socializ­ and Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge after Total War, ing justice in Progressive Era Chicago (2003 ). His articles have appeared Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (2003). in the journal of American History, Law and History Review, and the Journal of Urban History. James T. Kloppenberg is Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism Julian E. Zelizer is Associate Professor of Public Policy, Public Adminis­ in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986), awarded the tration and Political Science at the State University of New York at Al­ Merle Curti Prize by the Organization of American Historians; and The bany. He is the author of Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, Virtues of Liberalism (1998); and is coeditor, with Richard Wightman and the State, 1945-1975 (1998), which was awarded the 1998 D. B. Fox, of A Companion to American Thought (1995). Current projects in­ Hardeman Prize and the 2000 Ellis Hawley Prize. Zelizer, who has au­ clude a history of democracy in Europe and America and a study of his­ thored numerous articles and book chapters on American political his­ tory and critical theory. tory, is currently completing a history of congressional reform since 1945, which will be published with Cambridge University Press, and editing The Matthew D. Lassiter is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Reader's Companion to the American Congress, which will be published Michigan, specializing in the political, social, and metropolitan history of with Houghton Mifflin. Zelizer is a coeditor of the Politics and Society in the twentieth-century United States. He is the coeditor of The Moderates' Twentieth-Century America book series of Princeton University Press. His Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (1998) writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the author of The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt and Albany Times Union. Zelizer received his Ph.D. in history from the South, which will be published by Princeton University Press. Johns Hopkins University.

William J. Novak is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago and Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He is the author of The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth­ Century America (1996).

Thomas J. Sugrue is Bicentennial Class Of 1940 Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include The Origins of the Urban Crisis (1996), winner of the Bancroft Prize and several other awards; W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and the City (with Michael B. Katz, 1998); and more than twenty-five articles on topics such as liberalism, urban history, race relations, affirmative action, labor, and public policy. He is currently finishing a book on the history of civil rights politics in the urban north and writing a history of America in the twenti­ eth century.