Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Revolution

This module is composed of three topics, the market revolution, the rise of Jacksonian democracy, and antebellum reform. The module ends with a consideration of abolition movement, thereby providing a transition to the final module on Disunion and Civil War.

After completing this module, you will be able to:

 Describe the relationship between economic change (the market revolution) and political change (Jacksonian democracy)  Understand the connection between economic change (the market revolution) and social reform (women's rights, abolitionism)  Analyze and interpret the ways in which the market revolution reshaped values and attitudes toward land, labor, and human relationship.

Introduction to Market Revolution and Jacksonian Democracy:

In the thirty years after the War of 1812, the United States experienced a market revolution that integrated the majority of Americans more fully into a market economy and encouraged the spread of more impersonal forms of exchange. Crowding out the traditional, largely self- sufficient farmer, new commercial classes of farmers and planters, merchants and manufacturers, artisans and masters produced for an often far-flung and impersonal market. Exchange, instead of focusing on family and neighbors within local communities as it once had, now often involved transactions with unknown and unseen individuals and institutions hundreds of miles from one’s community. And merchants, manufacturers, retailers, and professionals (including the fast-growing ranks of lawyers) made up an increasing percentage of the population. The market revolution, what the economist Karl Polyani called “the great transformation,” changed everything. Farmers increasingly focused on a small number of marketable crops and borrowed money to purchase new lands and expand production. Entrepreneurial artisans reorganized their crafts and introduced a new wage relationship which supplanted the old mutual obligations and duties of masters, journeymen, and apprentices and generated new conflicts and divisions. The “socialization of production” increasingly took economic activities out of the household and into the marketplace and transformed the position of women. The notion of separate sphere emerged as a result. A female, domestic sphere of love, compassion, nurture, sympathy now seemed separate from a male, public sphere of aggression, calculation, self-interest, and ruthlessness. The market revolution coincided with the expansion of the United States into the vast trans-Appalachian lands. This expansion, and the often violent removal of the native American inhabitants of these areas, added vast new economic resources and opportunities to the market revolution. The market revolution also had a profound impact on American politics, not least in adding more democratically-minded states to the Union. American democracy, it has often been said, grew up with American capitalism. Some have argued that democracy expanded in harmony with capitalism, but others have argued that democracy emerged in opposition to capitalism. Either way, the conflicts that characterized the period of “Jacksonian democracy” revolved around issues of the market.

Assigned Reading

The readings are a combination of primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are from the time period under examination and can reveal the assumptions, motivations, interests, and actions of historical actors or provide insight into the character of an historical period or the way historical forces shaped individual lives. Such things as diaries and correspondence, polemics, political platforms, laws, philosophical treatises, novels, films, as well as material culture from architecture and urban design to consumer goods, photographs, popular music are all examples of primary sources. Secondary sources are second-hand accounts and analyses of historical events, often but not always written by professional historians and based on examination of primary sources.

I recommend you first read the homework questions and the short essay question. Keep these questions in mind. Then read the following materials in the order listed, taking notes that will help you answer the questions. Read the study guide first, and keep it handy, then the primary sources (in order listed), and then the secondary sources (in the order listed). Finally, view the two, short narrated powerpoints (15 minutes each). Your answers to the reading questions and your short essay should reflect your understanding of these materials.

Reading Questions (answer in roughly 100 words each):

1. How did Andrew Jackson’s war on privilege help accelerate the market revolution? Did Americans differ in their views of the costs and benefits of the market revolution?

Richard Hofstadter, “Andrew Jackson and the Rise of Liberal Capitalism” in The American Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948), 44-66.

John D. Fairfield, “Creating Citizens in a Commercial Republic,” in The Public and Its Possibilities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 33-40.

“The Tailors’ Strike of 1836,” from John R. Commons, A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 314-322.

“A Frenchman’s Impressions of Early Cincinnati, c. 1833,” from Howard P. Chudacoff, ed., Major Problems in American Urban History (Lexington, MA.: D. C. Heath, 1994), 62- 65.

“John James Audubon Depicts Squatters of the Mississippi River, 1808-1834” from Carolyn Merchant, ed., Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington, MA.: D. C. Heath, 1993), 148-151.

The essay by Richard Hofstadter was part of a book, published in 1948, in which Hofstadter argued that all Americans generally agreed on the value of individualism, competition, and capitalism (what became known as the "consensus" interpretation of American history). Thus, for Hofstadter, the rise of Andrew Jackson is an example of the complementary relationship between capitalism and democracy; they grew up together, the one encouraging the other. As you will see when you read further, other historians such as Seller have rejected that interpretation and treated American democracy as growing up at least partially in opposition to capitalism. Fairfield’s essay reflects some of that new thinking. He argues that at least some Americans worried that the market revolution would undercut or compromise the commitment to a republican form of government. The three primary documents suggest that one’s view of the market revolution might well depend on location, as opportunity often appeared more abundant in the west than in the more established eastern communities.

2. In what ways did the market revolution change how Americans thought of the land and, more broadly, the environment”?

Charles Sellers, “Land and Market,” from The Market Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3-33.

“James Fenimore Cooper Laments the ‘Wasty Ways’ of Pioneers, 1823,” from Carolyn Merchant, ed., Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington, MA.: D. C. Heath, 1993), 175-177

Americans React To Environmental Change: Short video presentation in three parts.

Writing in 1991, Charles Sellers saw the broad distribution of land as a major factor in the rise of both democracy and capitalism in the United States. Land ownership gave the male heads of households political status in the new republic, while their ownership of real property gave them some allegiance to the principles of capitalism. But as market activity spread and intensified, it undercut the localized and traditional economic and domestic relationships that those same male heads of households had come to expect. Thus Sellers sees democracy and capitalism as developing in tension with one another in this period. The primary document offers a glimpse of a more aggressive attitude to the environment in the Jacksonian period. The narrated presentation suggests that at least some Americans felt troubled by the environmental changes going on around them.

3. How did the market revolution shape the lives of Native Americans and free African- Americans in Georgia in the 1820s and 1830s? What accounts for the similarities and the differences in the treatment of Indians as opposed to free African-Americans?

“Indian Removal” in Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative (New York: Norton, 2009)

Mary Young, “Racism in Red and Black: Indians and Other Free People of Color in Georgia Law, Politics, and Removal Policy,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 (Fall 1989), 492-518.

The advance of the market revolution, and particularly the cotton kingdom, often entailed the removal of Native Americans from their lands. Young’s essay examines how the spread of the cotton kingdom led to restrictions on the choices of both native Americans and free African –Americans. She concludes that a stubborn respect for property rights made for a significant difference in the treatment of Indians as opposed to “other free people of color.”

4. What is Baptist referring to when he uses the term “securitized slaves” and how does that help explain the changing character of exchange in the market revolution, the Panic of 1837, and the coming of the Civil War?

“The Panic of 1837” in Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative (New York: Norton, 2009)

Edward E. Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of 1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Common-Place 10 (April 2010) http://www.common- place.org/vol-10/no-03/baptist/

In 1837, Americans experienced the first great financial panic in their history (although there had been a small panic in 1819).Writing in the wake of the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, Baptist takes us back to an earlier American encounter with a financial bubble, the Panic of 1837. He urges historians – and the public in general – to recognize that financial speculation does not simply create fictitious wealth, as if financial speculation simply involved words (“embarrassed” debtors whose “friends” would not sustain their “credit”; this is what Baptist means by the “linguistic turn” in history, the tendency to reduce everything to language). We treat financial speculation as “fiction” to our own disadvantage, Baptist argues, because financial speculation generates and transfers real wealth and those “transfers can incorporate great violence and disruption for some as the cause of great profit for others.”

Baptist’s essay illuminates many of the themes of this module, including the spread of impersonal forms of exchange, the westward expansion of the U.S. (including the internal slave trade, that moved tens of thousands of slaves from the seaboard states to the Gulf states), the role of the Bank of the United States in expanding slavery and, less successfully, trying to temper speculative expansion, and the ultimate meaning of all this for enslaved people in the cotton fields of Mississippi and the other Gulf states. This is perhaps the most difficult reading of this module; as Baptist says, many of us would prefer not to think about numbers. But the key for you is to recognize what is meant by securitizing slaves (creating financial securities backed by a mortgage on enslaved human beings) and to understand at least some of the consequences of that securitization.

5. How did the market revolution and the second great awakening help give rise to ante- bellum reform? Did antebellum reform change the lives of women and African- Americans in significant ways?

John Fairfield, “The Second Great Awakening and Antebellum Reform” (unpublished essay)

Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 21-40

Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/senecafalls.asp

Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (New York: C. M. Saxton, 1859), 160-170: https://archive.org/stream/twelveyearsslave00nort#page/162/mode/1up

These three readings discuss what is known as antebellum reform, a burst of reform energy in the three decades before the beginning of the Civil War. Fairfield’s essay is a quick overview, highlighting the connections between antebellum reform and the market revolution. Dubois focuses on two of the most influential reform movements, women’s rights and abolition, underscoring the connections between them. The two primary documents concern the first women’s rights convention and the kidnapping of a free northern black man.

Short Essay: Answer in a well-crafted essay of 750 to 1250 words: “History’s most revolutionary force, the capitalist market, was wresting the American future from history’s most conservative force, the land,” writes Charles Sellers in his influential study of The Market Revolution (p. 4). What evidence is there to support Sellers’s contention that the capitalist market proved to be a revolutionary force? What attitudes, values, practices, and/or institutions did it change? Did the wide distribution – and availability – of land limit and soften or extend and intensify those changes?