Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

Democrats (except for a brief interlude under John Quincy Adams from 1824 to 1828), Clay’s influence in Congress pushed large elements of this “American System” into being anyway. It was not until the election of Andrew Jackson, an unreconstructed Jeffersonian radical, as president in 1828 that the Democrats struck back. Jackson vetoed congressional appropriations for public roads, effectively destroyed the Bank of the United States by refusing to deposit federal money there, and paid off the national debt so that there would no need for federal taxes and (above all) no need for federal tariffs to protect American industries and corporations.27

Jackson’s war against liberal market-based power was, in the long run, far from successful. Clay, in the role of Jackson’s nemesis, remained a powerful figure in American politics, and many banks protected themselves from Jackson’s wrath by obtaining charters from cooperative state legislatures. Still, that lack of success cannot obscure the anger and violence with which Whigs and Democrats—both supposedly dedicated to republicanism—had come to regard each other. By the 1840s, the Whigs had defined themselves as the party of liberal democracy, of an upwardly mobile middle class, willing to embrace the fluidity of the market and eager to promote national unity and government support for railroad construction, canals, and even steamship lines. They spoke for the small-scale manufacturer who worked beside his employees in making boots and shoes, forging iron, tanning leather; for the banker who lent him the money to start up his business and the lawyer who collected his debts; and for the commercial farmer who grew crops for cash sale on distant markets. In an economy where the average number of employees per manufacturing establishment was only fourteen, it was not unreasonable for the Whigs to see themselves as the friends of “the enterprising mechanic, who raises himself by his ingenious labors from the dust and turmoil of his workshop, to an abode of ease and elegance; the industrious tradesman, whose patient frugality enables him at last to accumulate enough to forego the duties of the counter and indulge a well-earned leisure.” Perhaps most important, the Whigs had enlisted the support of a vast majority of Protestant evangelicals, and they wedded their economic gospel of hard work and thrift to the evangelical gospel of moral self-control. 28 They were the party of the bourgeoisie, the “middling sort,” who bridled at slavery and aristocracy in equal portions, and who wanted nothing but the liberty to “improve” themselves without molestation.

The Democrats remained dedicated to resisting “consolidated” national government with its tariffs and “improvements.” They appealed most strongly to the old elite families of the Republic, who feared and resented the ambitious rise of Whig entrepreneurs, and to the poorest farmers and urban workers, who suspected that the Whigs were merely the agents of a “money power” out to rob them, through taxes or through financial chicanery, of the little they had. “An organized, concentrated, and privileged money power is one of deadly hostility to liberty,” warned a Democratic convention in Ohio in 1845. That included “any form or reform of banking” and any encouragement to manufacturing. “Manufactures are not of themselves objects of desire to a free people, or of favor for a free government,” since they “involve the necessity of a crowded population, subject to a very arbitrary control over their comfort by a few wealthy persons, and devoted to unwholesome employment.” Both parties spoke the language of democratic republicanism, but both were also convinced that their brand of democratic republicanism was the best guarantee of liberty. As one historian has summed up, the Whigs were the party of America’s hopes, the Democrats the party of its fears.29

The great danger posed by these arguments over power, liberalism, and republics was the possibility that they might find an outlet in the ramshackle structure of the federal Union. During the War of 1812, New Englanders were hard hit by the naval blockade that British warships imposed on them, and the more they suffered from this blockade, the more the suffering seemed to be the fault of people from other parts of the country, such as President Madison (a Virginian), whose section presumably had something to gain from the war that New England did not. In December 1814 delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island met at Hartford, Connecticut, to express their opposition to the war and make ugly suggestions about seceding from the Union and making a separate peace with Great Britain. The delegations’ threats all blew over because the war ended a month later, but the event was a dangerous indication that states or sections of the country who suspected that their liberties were being leeched by someone else’s thirst for power might take advantage of the autonomy provided them by the federal Union, and leave the Union for good.

A more dramatic example of the intersection of ideology and self-interest occurred in 1832 over the federal tariff. For more than a decade, South Carolina and the other Southern states had been vigorously protesting the use of tariffs to protect American industry. Tariffs such as the one imposed in 1816 boosted the price of imported manufactured goods by 25 percent over their original valuation, and forced consumers to buy American-made goods, which were considerably more costly than the imports had originally been. South Carolina’s John Caldwell Calhoun observed that this was fine for New England, which was home to many of America’s infant industries, but it was very hard on South Carolina, which specialized in cotton growing and needed to buy manufactured goods from elsewhere. Congress was not inclined to give the South Carolinians relief, and in 1828, Congress passed a tariffso stiff (it imposed import duties up to 50 percent on the value of some imports) that South Carolina dubbed it “the Tariff of Abominations.”

Calhoun saw the tariff not just as an economic issue but also as a challenge by the federal government to South Carolina’s liberty as a state. For two years, while he was serving as