Society, Culture, and Politics, 1820s-1840s (c) 2003 Wadsworth Group All rights reserved Chapter 11.

Society, Culture, and Politics, 1820s-1840s

(c) 2003 Wadsworth Group All rights reserved

Chapter 11Chapter 11

Constituencies

• Two Parties: Democratic and Whig • A man’s party affiliation showed personal

identity, as well as political preference• Youngest and poorest white men rarely voted• Party loyalists shared political culture despite

diversity of interest groups from which they came• The 2 parties proposed coherent programs that

appealed to their respective political cultures


The North and West

• Whigs– Market revolution– Finneyite revival

• Democrats– Claimed to defend Jeffersonian republic– “Butternuts”– Immigrants


The South

• 1830s and 1840s: Southerners evenly divided their votes between Whigs and Democrats– Party preference tied to difference in economic life

• Isolationist neighborhoods: Democrats• Cosmopolitan areas: Whigs• Prestige of local leaders like John C. Calhoun

influenced party preference• Religion little to do with political preference


Summary of party divide

Whigs• Benefited from or

expected to benefit from Market Revolution

• Wanted government to subsidize economic development

Democrats• Minimal government• Low taxes• Leave citizens,

families, and neighborhoods alone

The Politics of Economic Development

• Whigs and Democrats both wanted market society– Whigs: economically and morally progressive

republic (hierarchical)– Democrats: viewed market society with

suspicion – that it be subservient to republic


Government and Its Limits

• Whigs– Government should foster economic development,

moral progress, and social harmony

– U.S. has harmony of class interests and equality of opportunity

• Democrats– Government and market power must be limited to

protect the civil and legal equality of free men


Banks

• States in control of banking and credit regulation• Whigs: banks agents of economic progress• Democrats: banks agents of inequality used to

enrich the privileged• Uniform banking laws instead of individual

charters• “Hard Money” Democrats• Whigs support right of banks to circulate bank

notes


Internal Improvements

• Democrats block federal funding of internal improvements

• Whigs push for state funded internal improvements – William H. Seward, Whig governor of N.Y.

• Democratic state legislators opposed “partial” legislation: benefiting part of their state at the expense of the rest– Opposed projects leading to taxes and debt


The Politics of Social Reform

• Whigs used government to improve individual morality and discipline– Prostitution, temperance, public education,

asylums and penitentiaries

• Democrats felt morality through legislation was anti-republican

• Social reform provoked angry differences between the two parties


Public Schools

• Common school movement• Whig School reform

– Horace Mann– Henry Barnard– Calvin Stowe– The Thinker, A Moral Reader (1855)

• Party differences about organization of schools– Whigs want state-level centralization– Democrats preferred local school districts


Ethnicity, Religion, and the Schools

• Issues for many Irish Catholic immigrant children– Offensive texts and Bibles used in schools– Some parents refused to send children to school– State subsidy for Parish schools

• Foreign language schools for bilingual instruction created

• State-supported church-run charity schools


Prisons• State governments built and supported institutions

for orphans, dependent poor, insane, and criminals– Market Revolution increased visibility of these groups

and cut them off from family resources– Reformers assert these groups exist because of bad

family situation

• Both political parties favored state-support for criminals and dependents– Whigs favored rehabilitation– Democrats favored isolation and punishment

• “Auburn system”


Asylums

• Dorothea Dix

• By 1860: legislatures of 28 out of 33 states established state-run insane asylums

• Few Democrats supported insane asylums


The South and Social Reform

• Many Southern voters perceived attempts at social reform as “expensive and wrong-headed”

• Southern schools– Locally controlled– Limited curriculum

• Southern prisons– Auburn system

• Temperance succeeds for individuals, but no state level prohibition

• Southern resistance to social reforms– Doomed to failure because of human imperfection– Seen as self-righteous imposition of Northeasterners


Excursus: The Politics of Alcohol

• Whigs demanded social and moral reform

• Democrats feared big government and the Whigs’ cultural agenda

• The question of temperance began to define differences between Whigs and Democrats


Ardent Spirits• American Temperance Society (1826)• Lyman Beecher

– Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance (1826)

• Charles Grandison Finney– Abstinence from alcohol condition for conversion

• Temperance becomes badge of middle class respectability

• American Congressional Temperance Society• Military ends traditional liquor ration 1832• Alcohol consumption cut in half by 1840


The Origins of Prohibition

• Mid-1830s: Whigs made Temperance a political issue

• “Fifteen-Gallon Law” in Massachusetts• Democrats: Forced temperance violate

Republican liberty• Alcohol becomes defining political difference for

many


The Democratization of Temperance

• Democrats not opposed to individual temperance, opposed to prohibition

• Washington Temperance Society– “True Washingtonians”


Temperance Schisms

• Whigs: temperance as an arm of evangelical reform

• Washingtonians continued working class popular culture without alcohol

• Whig reformers tied abstinence to individual ambition and middle-class domesticity

• Washingtonians sought to rescue the self-respect and moral authority of working-class fathers


Ethnicity and Alcohol

• 1840s-1850s: millions of Irish and German immigrants

• Germans: lager beers, old-country beer halls• Irish: whiskey, bars

– Legitimized levels of male drunkenness and violence

• Nativism and temperance politics merge in the 1850s at expense of Democrats


The Politics of Race• Traditional view: God gave white males

power over others

• Whig evangelicals– Marriage changes from rank domination to

sentimental partnership– The emergence of a radical minority

envisioning a world without power– Attacked slavery and patriarchy as national

sin


Free Blacks• North: states began to abolish slavery

– Revolutionary idealism– Slavery was inefficient and unnecessary

• Gradual emancipation (Pennsylvania model)

• Free black populations grew and moved into the cities

• Many took stable, low-paying jobs


Discrimination• Discrimination rises

– White workers drive blacks out of skilled and semi-skilled jobs

– Blacks increasingly politically disenfranchised– Segregated schools

• Blacks build their own institutions– African Methodist Episcopal Church (1816)

• Black Anti-slavery activism– David Walker: Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World

(1829)– Harriet Tubman– Frederick Douglass


Democratic Racism

• Neither Whigs nor Democrats encouraged aspirations of slaves or free blacks

• Democrats make racism part of their political agenda—protect the white republic

• Democrats contributed to rise of anti-black violence– NYC riot victims: Lewis Tappan, Charles

Finney, English actors– Philadelphia riots: “the Killers”


Conceptions of Racial Difference

• Educated whites taught racist “biological determinism”

• White racists regarded blacks with stereotypes:– Incompetent, dishonest, treacherous and secretive

• Herman Melville, Benito Cereno• Democrats: Blacks unfit for citizenship• Some Whigs support Black suffrage


The Beginnings of Antislavery

• First anti-slavery efforts die out in early 1800s• American Colonization Society (1816)

– Gradual, compensated emancipation– “Repatriation” to Liberia

• Slavery abolished many places outside the U.S.– Toussaint L’Ouverture and Haiti– South American Republics– British Caribbean


Abolitionists

• William Lloyd Garrison– The Liberator (1831)– American Anti-Slavery Society (1833)

• Abolition a logical extension of middle class evangelicalism

• American Anti-slavery Society demands:– Immediate emancipation – Full civil and legal rights for African-Americans


Agitation• Abolitionists minority of Evangelicals

– Beecher and Finney say end of slavery will come with conversion of masters

– Logical end of antislavery is civil war

• “Postal Campaign”• Petition campaign• Jackson administration response

– Censor mail

– Right to petition abridged


The Politics of Gender and Sex

• Whig vs. Democratic masculine styles– Whigs: sentimentalized homes of northern

business classes, or Christian gentility of Whig plantations

– Democrats: in favor of domestic patriarchy


Appetites

• Whig reform often more about domestic and personal life than politics

• Sylvester Graham and moderation

• John Humphrey Noyes– Oneida (N.Y.) community


Moral Reform

• Middle-class ideal: combination of female purity and male self-control

• Magdalen Society– First Annual Report (1831)

• Female Moral Reform Society– The Advocate of Moral Reform


Women’s Rights

• Women’s role as missionaries to their family make them public reformers

• Antislavery movement leads women to advocate for equal rights

• State legislative changes in favor of women– Married Woman’s Property Act (New York 1860)

• Women’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, NY (1848)– Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions– Female participation in politics


Conclusion

• 1830s: most citizens firmly identified with one of the two parties: Whig or Democrat

• Whigs: embraced commerce and activist government

• Democrats: localistic and culturally conservative


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Society, Culture, and Politics, 1820s-1840s (c) 2003 Wadsworth Group All rights reserved Chapter 11.

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