Lecture #3: The Age of Jackson I. The Expansion of the Vote. II.

Andrew Jackson and the Growth of Party Politics. II. Internal expansion III. The Contraction of Native American and Black Americans Life. I. Expansion of the vote A. Before the 1800 most of the original 13 states limited the vote to male property owners or taxpayers. This was an extremely restrictive franchise, allowing less than half of the white male population the vote. Westward expansion also led to an expansion of the franchise. The new western states extended the right to vote to all white males over the age of twenty-one. Starting with Kentucky in 1792, then Tennessee in 1796 and Ohio in 1803 the frontier proved to be an area of an expanded vote. Soon thereafter the older states followed suit. New Jersey opened the vote to all white males in 1807 and Maryland did so in 1810. By 1820 most of the states allowed the vote for all white males. B. As was the case for Native Americans, expansion for some meant restrictions for others. Extending the vote to all white males further defined and clarified the meaning of whiteness and masculinityconsequently further limiting New World Africans and women. Only Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island allowed free black males to vote before 1865. Blacks found that the west offered them very little in the way of freedom. The Ohio constitution denied blacks the right to vote, hold public office, and to sit on juries. The constitutions of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Oregon, and Illinois attempted to ban blacks from their states entirely. C. No women were allowed to vote. In fact, granting the vote to all men solidified the gender differences. In New Jersey, for instance, wealthy propertied women had been allowed to vote. The same year that the vote was extended to white men, however, the state legislature prohibited womens voting without regard to their economic standing. D. Despite these restrictions, the United States still possessed the largest voting population in the western world. II. The Growth of Party Politics. A. The expanded franchise led to a new style of politics. For the first forty years of the republic, politics remained largely in the hands of the wealthy elite. In 1824 the presidential election deadlocked between four Democratic-Republican candidates. Andrew Jackson, who had won 99 electoral college votes, and John Quincy Adams, who had won 84, were the leaders, but with neither candidate holding a majority the election went to the House of Representatives. Adams with his established connections to D.C. won the vote. Jackson, on the other hand, had campaigned as a popular national hero and his loss angered the public. Jackson berated Adams from the outside throughout his four years and won handily in 1828. B. The 1824 and 1828 elections demonstrated the value of mass organizing using political rallies, parades, and name recognition. Political parties developed in

response to these new dynamics. The party became the vehicle to promote ideas and popularize candidates. Parties also became a center of American life, serving as a form of entertainment in much the same way electronic media does today. C. When Jackson ran in 1828 he used the language of democracy and opportunity for the common man, while his fledgling party, the Democratic Republicans, spread the word with large lavish barbecues and parties designed to appeal to the common man. Both Democratic spokesmen and Jackson criticized John Quincy Adams and the National Republicans for their elitism. This time Jackson won 56 % of the popular vote. He did particularly well in the less-developed South and West, where he won over 80% of the vote on average. The Jackson campaign and subsequent victory solidified dozens of scattered local small-scale political organizations into the new Democratic Party. D. Previous to the Jackson administration, American politicians saw themselves largely as representatives of particular areas-generally the South, North, or West. Despite his western (North or South Carolina) origins, though, Jackson saw himself as representative for the entire nation. In line with his sense of a national mandate, Jackson significantly strengthened the executive office. He ignored the heads of government that composed his cabinet and relied instead on an informal group of advisers and western friends. Moreover, with 12 vetoes compared to 9 for the first six presidents, Jackson used the veto more than any previous president to force the Congress to consider his agenda. III. Connecting the nation. A. A top priority of the Jackson administration and all American politicians was the expansion of the nations transportation systems. Most white Americans expected both the federal and state governments to subsidize economic growth. In particular, they wanted the government to aid in the development of a national market. To this end the government dedicated itself to the improvement of interregional transportation, leading to revolutionary changes in the nation between 1800 and 1840. B. One of the precursors to this revolution was the completion of the National Road. At a cost of $7 million, it was the single most expensive federal transportation project to date. The gravel road crossed the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland and finally connected to Vidalia, IL in 1850, opening up the west. C. Overland roads though were slow and costly forms of transportation. Water routes were much cheaper, but most US water routes in the 1820s went North/South. New York Governor DeWitt Clinton conceived of a canal between New York City and the Great Lakes via the Hudson River. At the time, though, the longest canal was only 27 miles. DeWitts canal (364 miles long, 40 feet wide and 4 deep with 83 locks and over 300 bridges) was a monumental undertaking. Nevertheless DeWitt convinced the New York legislature to put out bond issues and raised $7 million from investors. Farmers in the path of the canal were its first workers, but malarial outbreaks led many whites to abandon the job. Consequently 3,000 Irish workers were shipped

in; they were more expensive than white Americans but less likely to quit. This set a precedent for using ethnic and immigrant labor on the canals and later the railroads. Native Americans posed another problem. Seneca Indians lived in the path of the railroad on land granted to them by the United States government, but the government removed them to a small reservation. The Erie Canal was completed in October of 1825 and proved wildly successful. New towns sprung up along the line. And American industry stopped looking toward Europe but towards the interior as a market. Between 1820 and 1840, the country invested $200 million to build thousands of miles of canals connecting the Northeast to the upper Midwest. And newly invented steamboats became the main vehicle for transporting goods over the countrys canals and natural waterways. D. The most important connector though was the railroad. The first tracks opened in 1830, when the Baltimore and Ohio railroad opened 13 miles of line. Yet by 1860, there were 31,000 miles of line. E. Most of the new transportation systems originated out of the North, connecting Northern financiers, industrialists, and markets, to Midwestern agriculture. The South, however, had relatively few miles of track and the growth of economic power in the Northeast became a principle source of tension between the two regions. III. Native American and Black American life in a time of expanded democracy. A. After the American Revolution, Indian removal cleared the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. a. Some statistics: i. In 1790 3.9 million Americans lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. ii. In 1830 there were 13 million Americans and 4.5 of them had crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the Mississippi Valley what Howard Zinn calls that vast expanse of land crisscrossed by rivers flowing east into the Mississippi from east to west. iii. In 1820 120,000 Indians lived east of the Mississippi, but by 1844 less than 30,000 were left. Most of them had been forced to leave 2. Native Americans during the Revolutionary War a. Almost every important Indian nation joined the British during the war. b. Why do you think that was the case? c. When the war ended the British returned home, but their former allies continued fighting and held off the new Continental Army at the at the edge of the frontier. i. The first United States Secretary of War, Henry Knox, decreed The Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of the soil. ii. Similarly, the Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, said that Indians who lived within state boundaries should not have their lives disrupted and that the state should remove white settlers who

tried to take their land. 3. Despite these pronouncements by their government whites continued to move West. a. What about English culture and Indian culture do you believe would lead Americans to move west-ignoring their government. b. When Jefferson was president in 1801 700,000 white settlers had gone beyond the Appalachian mountains-into the future states of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. 4. The Louisiana Purchase a. When Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory from France in 1803 and extended the US past the Appalachians and Mississippi River all the way to the Rocky Mountains, he began to conceive of a new Indian policy. i. If Indians did stay among whites, Jefferson wanted them to take up farming on small tracts of land, and give up hunting. They also should get involved in the capitalist market. Jefferson argued that they could trade parcels of their land for liquidity, then pay off their debt with cropsthus bring them into the market ii. Indians east of the Appalachians who would not adopt a new lifestyle would have to leave. After the War various wealthy Americans, including George Washington and Patrick Henry, bought huge tracts of land much of which had an Indian population. Jefferson felt that this land could not be developed into agriculture by whites without Indian removal. iii. In North Carolina the state put up large tracts of land owned by the Chickasaw Indians. They were one of the few tribes that had fought for with the colonists against the British and they had a signed a treaty with the new government giving them ownership of the land. Andrew Jacksons father in law, John Donelson, got about 20,000 acres of land near what would become Chattanooga, TN and sent a young Jackson to make more land deals for him near Nashville b. Andrew Jackson has been called the most aggressive enemy of Indians in early American History. i. Jacksons background included being a land speculator, slave trader, and merchant. He was well known for his efforts in the War of 1812, which at that time was portrayed as a war of survival against the British, but was really an effort of the settlers attached to the new nation attempting to push into British held Canada and Florida. ii. At the time that Jacksons notoriety was growing, signs of native Americans increasingly seeing themselves as a group manifested themselves. iii. A Shawnee chief, Tecumseh attempted to rally the Indians together

iv.

v.

vi.

vii.

to fight off the white invaders, 1. Siding with the British during the War of 1812, Tecumseh organized a gathering of 5,000 Indians in 1811 in Alabama, where he said Let the white race perish. They seize your land; they corrupt your women, they trample on the ashes of your dead! Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven. But this was not a unanimous sentiment. In GA, AL and MS where the Creeks were the dominant Native group, division was the norm. Some agreed to sell their land and others, known as the Red Sticks, refusedleading to the Creek Civil War. In 1813, Red Sticks massacred a 250 people at Fort Mims, AL General Jackson led the force in retaliation burning down a Creek Village and killing men, women and children indiscriminately. Jackson encouraged other Native groups to attack the Red Sticks too, if either party, Cherokees, friendly Creeks or whites, takes property of the Red Sticks, the property belongs to those who take it. Much of this came to a head at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Tecumseh had allied himself to the British and as we saw early tried to build a Pan-Indian alliance against the US. It was at his urging in large part that the Red Sticks attacked settlers in what Alabama. The Creek Chief Menawa led 1,000 warriors. Jackson led the West Tennessee militia a force of about 2,000, which was supplemented by about 700 cavalry and a force of about 600 Cherokee Indians. As these numbers would predict the battle went well for Jackson. Indeed, over 800 Native Americans were killed and the US force lost only about 50. Jackson was rewarded by being appointed treaty commissioner. What do you think are the ramifications of appointing a conquering general as treaty commissioner? The battle resulted in the Treaty of Fort Jackson, which set a precedent in several ways. 1. In the treaty the Creeks ceded 23 million acres of land in Alabama and Georgia. It was the largest cession of land in the Southern United States. 2. Even though the Creeks were in a civil war, between Red Sticks and Non-Red Sticks or those allied with the British and those allied with the US, Jackson saw them all as them same and took their land. Even though many Creeks fought with the US. 3. Of the 23 million acres the Cherokees were awarded 1.9 million acres, which Jackson would later take back as

c.

d.

e.

f.

g.

president. 4. The treaty also granted various Indians individual tracts of land to break up communal landholdingkeeping within the Jeffersonian vision. Between 1814 and 1824 a series of treaties between whites and Southern Indians allotted whites 3/4 of AL and FL, 1/3 of TN, 1/5 of GA and MS, and parts of Kentucky and North Carolina. Jackson, according to author Michael Rogin, got his friends and family involved in many of these treaties. Jackson then began a program that he supported as a general, treaty commissioner and later governor of Florida. According to Howard Zinn, He encouraged white squatters to move into Indian lands, then told Indians the government could not remove the whites and so they had better cede the lands or be wiped out. A new treaty would emerge promising safety and the pattern would continue. Many of the Red Sticks fled to Florida, which was owned by Spain and in some portion by Britain. Also Spain, in its interests against the United States, had encouraged African slaves to flee to Florida where they would be free. Many Africans did so and they sometimes joined the Red Sticks in the emerging Seminole a multi-tribal group of Natives who had fought encroachment by the US. All of these reasons provided a sufficient rationale for war. In March of 1818 Jackson led a force of about 4,200 soldiers and Creek fighters into the Florida. Jacksons forces attacked Seminole villages and destroyed they few existing forts in the area. The US was already in negotiation with Spain to buy the land, and Jacksons efforts disrupted this process. So the US negotiators declared that Spain and Britain had instigated the war, and the US fought in self-defense. Jackson then became the governor of the new Florida Territory. By the time Jackson was president in 1828 more whites moved further south and west. As whites moved further west, they believed it was necessary to remove the Native American populations in the region. At first they moved Eastern Indian tribes to the edge of the Great Plains, an area which whites had thought so inhospitable and desolate that they called it the Great Desert. Government officials, however, underestimated the speed with which whites would move into those regions and demand more land. The Santa Fe Trail, for example, crossed Indian territory in 1821 and by the 1840s the Overland Trails to California and Oregon brought more people through Indian lands. Consequently, the government reneged on its early treaties with Native people, abolished the northern half of the Indian territory, and created the Kansas and Nebraska territories which they immediately opened for settlement.

The Native Americans in the southern part of the territory, Oklahoma, did better. The Cherokee, Chicakasaw, Seminole, Choctaws, and Creeks, Indian populations removed by Jackson in various points of his career, recreated modes of the life they had left behindeven down to their African slaves. For a time they would remain unmolested by the government. 5. American officials and pioneers justified their relentless expansionism and the consequent displacement of the Native Americans on the idea of Manifest Destiny. Journalist John O Sullivan coined this phrase arguing that it was Our Manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of yearly multiplying millions. Sullivan believed that Americans had a God-given right to bring the benefits of American democracy to other more so-called backward peoplemeaning Native Americans and Mexicanseven if it meant using force. Pride in America combined with racial supremacy proved a powerful rationalization for Americas actions. Moreover, expansion also put off clear tensions developing between the North and the South. Democrats saw the geographical expansion of the nation as an opportunity for expanded agriculture and yeoman farming/slave owning class. C. The Growth of slavery. 1. Much of this tension stemmed from the competition between the increasingly industrial North and slower growing slave society of the South. 2. After the Revolutionary War, slavery appeared to be on the wane. Most Northern states had written gradual abolition laws and there was consensus regarding the eventual prohibition of the international slave trade. 3. In 1793, however, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin (Eli Whitney's Cotton Gin). Cotton had the potential to be a profitable crop, but it proved remarkably difficult to process. It took several hands a whole day to remove the seeds from a single pound of cotton. Whitneys gin, short for engine, was a hand cranked cylindrical device that tore the cotton lint away from the seeds. With one cotton gin, 50lbs of cotton could be processed per day. Almost overnight, cotton became the Souths boom crop. Starting with Georgia and South Carolina, which produced about 60 million pounds of cotton per year, the Southern states all the way to Texas rushed to adopt plantation slavery and cotton production. 4. This led to a tremendous migration west into Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Texas. In this territories the average pioneers, were not white, but black Americans who were forced to clear the areas to make way for their masters great plantations. This migration, as weve discussed earlier, also led Andrew Jackson to push out Five Civilized Tribes. Though learning to read and taking slaves in the manner of Europeans, Native people could not convince whites there was any room for Native American slave-owners in the emerging black white dichotomy. 5. Despite Northern criticism of the Southern economic system, the North clearly profited from it. In the beginning of the new country, slave-produced staple crops

were the most important item in American export and led to the development of the Northern shipping industry. In the nineteenth century, the North depended on the South for textiles to fuel the industrial revolution that had first hit England and then moved over to the Northeast. Still as the export of cotton grew the regions formed distinctly different cultures. Northern cities clustered around industry and trade grew tremendously, while Southern capital remained in large plantations and slave labor. Thus in 1860 Charleston only had a population of 41,000 while Boston and Baltimores populations had risen to 170,000 and 210,000 respectively. And as we saw earlier the North had developed significantly greater transportation and communication lines than the south. How do you think the northern and southern white communities might view each other in light of their differences in development? 6. As slavery grew in the South, southern whites faced greater threats of slave revolt. Planters caught major slave insurrections in the planning stages in 1800 and 1822 in the Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vessey rebellions. In 1831 Nat Turner actually initiated a rebellion. Turner was a literate lay preacher who actually was treated quite well be slavery standards. Yet on August 20, 1831, Turner and five other slaves killed several whites in the night, including Turners master. Going from plantation to plantation Turner eventually gathered a force of 60 men, before they were met by a larger group of well-armed white men. Turner and his men lost the battle and forty of them were executed. Turners revolt shocked the South, for if a slave treated as well as Turner would revolt then all slaves were potential plotters. 7. Clearly, slavery had its most detrimental affects on blacks who suffered from disproportionately high mortality rates, disease, malnutrition, and a far lower life expectancy. However, poor whites suffered from slavery as well. Poor whites bought into the racial system but received little other than the pride of their skin color in return. Between 30 and 50% of all whites were landless, a rate similar to the North. However, poor whites in the South found their opportunities to labor in the lowest jobs blocked by slaves. Many poor whites were tenant farmers who worked under sharecropping arrangements that kept them in debt to the landowner. Others faced an even more detrimental situation as migrant workers, who searched for labor, particularly during harvest times. A number of poor whites labored in the fields with blacks and engaged black slaves in underground trade and sometimes aided in their escape. The majority though fought, often violently, to hold on to a sense of racial superiority. Still, they were often looked down upon and ridiculed by better-fed and better-dressed slaves. IV. In conclusion, while the early nineteenth century witnessed unprecedented expansion of the franchise, transportation, and industrial opportunities, it was time of circumscribed freedom for Native Americans, blacks, and women. The universal franchise for white men came with a better articulated womens sphere and the clear imperative that no woman without regard to her economic standing would be allowed to operate in the world of politics. Growth of the railroad, canals, and steamboat

transportation opened up the west, but allowed a growing stream of invaders into Indian territtory and even led the United States government to go back on treaty commitments it had made to Native Americans. All the while, as settlers clamored to go west for individual freedom, many did so using the labor of African slaves. This is an old and continuing story one that you need to be mindful of. As opportunities come for those of us in the right classes, remember to ask yourself at whose expense are we getting these new rewards.