One of the challenges in understanding the politics of the period between the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Mexican-American War is the reform movement represented by Andrew Jackson and his partisans. Like all major period of reform, it had complicated and contradictory currents. And like all of American history prior to 1865, the issue of slavery and relations with the native peoples are particularly problematic from today’s democratic perspectives.
Following on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s influential book, The Age of Jackson (1945), which focused on the Jacksonian period’s anti-oligarchy economic policies, the growth of labor unions, and the expansion of the franchise, presented Andrew Jackson as a kind of proto-FDR and the older reform period as an early New Deal.
And he was right about that, as far as it went. But the book basically ignored Jackson’s Indian policies altogether, for which late in his life he expressed regret. And he didn’t stress the politics of slavery.
What Schlesinger had to say about Roger Taney, Jackson’s Attorney General who he would also appoint to the Supreme Court and is now remembered as the Chief Justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, illustrates the complications of sorting through the politics of that period:
Roger B. Taney, Attorney General, was the spearhead of radicalism in the new cabinet. A Maryland lawyer, fifty-four years old in 1831, he had once, like McLane, been a Federalist; but he left the party during the War of 1812 and by 1824 was a Jackson leader in Maryland. ... He would speak in low tones, sincerely and without gestures, relying on the lucidity of the argument and his own quiet conviction. His performances before the Supreme Court impressed both [John] Marshall and [Joseph] Story, and his appointment as Attorney General was widely applauded.
While not a dominating personality, … Taney was a man of unshakable determination. His experience as a lawyer had deepened his feeling against the unnecessary concentration of power in the hands of the business community; and from the first, the radicals, somewhat to their surprise, found him their spokesman in the inner council. [Churchill] Cambreleng wrote to [Martin] Van Buren early in 1832 that Taney was "the only efficient man of sound principles in the Cabinet." (1)
Schlesinger didn’t mention there one of the ironies in ‘Taney’s life, which as a young attorney in Baltimore he had done pro bono legal work defending escaped slaves from being sent back to their masters.
But he also points out a situation that had definite affinities to the situation of the Democratic Party in 1945:
The Jacksonians in the thirties were bitterly critical of abolitionists. The outcry against slavery, they felt, distracted attention from the vital economic questions of Bank and currency, while at the same time it menaced the Southern alliance so necessary for the success of the reform program. A good deal of Jacksonian energy, indeed, was expended in showing how the abolition movement was a conservative plot. (2)A lot had happened between Jackson’s election as President in 1828 and the disastrous Dred Scott decision three decades later. The Democratic Party was divided over slavery and the anti-slavery Republican Party had emerged as a strong party movement in the North. Schlesinger writes of Taney’s most significant and disastrous contribution to history:
This decision was profoundly disturbing to most old Jacksonians, as it was to neo-Jacksonians like Sumner. Few of Taney's supporters in his indictment of the overweening ambitions of the Marshall bench were prepared to accompany him in his own exercises in judicial imperialism - even under Taney's own hope that he was thereby removing a critical issue from politics. Montgomery Blair, as Dred Scott's chief counsel, argued the case in the tense, silent courtroom, while his father sat proudly in the audience. … Other men through the North raised in the Jeffersonian school had similar misgivings; and the two who, along with Blair, had been perhaps the closest politically to Jackson, and who, unlike Blair, had refused to break with Jackson's party in 1856, could no longer suppress their contempt for the new doctrines of the so-called Democracy. (3) [my emphasis]It's hard to imagine that an experienced politician like Roger Taney really believed that decision would remove the “critical issue” of slavery from politics. But it was the Slave Power’s (Southern planters’) position, which Taney’s decision endorsed, that the Constitution sanctified slavery and therefore should be removed – specifically abolitionist sentiment should be removed – from the political agenda.
As I noted in my April 6 installment this year, during the most significant slavery-related controversy of Jackson’s Presidency, the Nullification Controversy of 1832, Jackson came down hard on the side of preserving the Union and against South Carolina’s Calhounian trial run for secession in defense of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln resisted the treasonous attempt at secession by the Confederacy, he was acting in a distinctly Jacksonian manner. Lincoln also referred to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson as his most important models for his Presidency.
Gerald Henig noted in 1969 of the anti-abolitionist sentiment in the Democratic Party during Jackson’s Presidency:
[Where the Whig editorials, resolutions, and addresses of the 1830' s tended to display apathy and in some cases friendliness toward the abolitionists, the Democrat writings on the other hand showed a general hostility toward any movement designed to emancipate the slave and, indeed, generally sided with the slaveholders. (4)
And in the actual sequence of events that caused the Civil War and resulted in the end of the institution of slavery, it was the Slave Power’s push in 1860-61 for secession that trigged that conflict.
History is complicated.
Notes:
(1) Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1945): The Age of Jackson, 65. New York: J.J. Little & Ives.
(2) Op.cit., 424-425.
(3) Op.cit., 486.
(4) Henig, Gerald S. (1969): The Jacksonian Attitude Toward Abolitionism in the 1830's. Tennessee Historical Quarterly 28:1, pp. 42-56. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/42623057> (Footnote corrected.)
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