6
Late in 1807 President Thomas Jefferson signed a bill that forbade American vessels from transporting goods to foreign countries. This “embargo” was Jefferson’s solution to a dispute with Great Britain and France. Locked in combat during the Napoleonic Wars, both Britain and France had seized and impounded Americans ships purportedly destined for one of the combatants. After the British destroyed much of the French navy at the Battle of Trafalgar, Napoleon resorted to impounding foreign vessels in European ports, while the Royal Navy roamed the sea freely. The British also snatched seamen believed to be British nationals from American vessels, sometimes within sight of American shores.
Jefferson saw three options to address this quandary: war, economic pressure, or nothing. War went against a fundamental tenet of Jeffersonian philosophy, which regarded the maintenance of a large military force as a step toward executive tyranny and a cause of fiscal hardship. But a more immediate impediment was Britain’s possession of the world’s strongest navy, while the United States had hardly any navy at all. Likewise, Napoleon had the world’s largest army on the continent of Europe, and Jefferson would have had to field a military force almost from scratch. Thus, an armed confrontation with France would have been disastrous. But to do nothing perpetuated the humiliating interference by foreign powers. An embargo, however, could be ordered with the stroke of a pen.
Congress granted the president formidable powers to implement the embargo. Its immediate direction was in the hands of Jefferson and his secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin. Their principal assistants were customs collectors, who numbered around eighty-five and were scattered at ports up and down the East Coast. Their instructions were to review the cargo on vessels and deny departure certificates unless the ship intended to stay within coastal waters. Cheating by ship captains led to a tightening of enforcement powers, whereby collectors were authorized to seize ships and their cargoes on the suspicion that a vessel was bound for an illegal destination. In the larger ports, such as New York and Philadelphia, collectors had a few assistants and some revenue cutters. US marshals, district attorneys, and federal courts were called on when legal disputes arose. The country’s small navy was authorized to stop American merchantmen at sea. And, if push came to shove, both the regular army and the state militia could be called to discipline scofflaws, as occurred along the New York–Canada border.
These were extraordinary administrative powers under any circumstances. In Jefferson’s case, they made a mockery of his pledge to limit federal powers and to protect states’ rights. In a technical sense, the policy was successful, as American exports dropped 80 percent; however, it did not stop English or French depredation of American shipping. Moreover, what had seemed like a good idea to the president won few political points in Federalist New England, where maritime commerce provided a livelihood for many.1
ADMINISTRATION
The contention that there was no state in America during the nineteenth century rests largely on the absence of a rationally ordered, centralized national bureaucracy. There is truth to this claim, but it is misleading when considering the entire polity. Fiscal parsimony, fragmented jurisdiction, and antipathy to bureaucracies with full-time career employees were prevalent during the period. But these impediments did not prevent officials from exerting authority or performing numerous tasks. For instance, a small staff of federal employees oversaw the distribution of millions of acres of the public domain, albeit in a process laced with flaws and scandals (see chapter 4). Native Americans were pushed westward—forcibly, when treaty negotiations failed. Natives were uprooted by the thousands in Georgia and surrounding areas and deported to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River in an operation assigned to the US Army. Congress adopted a variety of regulations concerning the collection of customs duties on imported goods, a function handled by collectors in the Treasury Department. The United States also inspected steamboat boilers, levying fines and imprisonment for violations. In these and other instances, the federal government pursued a variety of objectives, despite an underdeveloped administrative establishment.
The Federal Workforce
Notwithstanding congressional penny-pinching, the federal civil workforce expanded in the antebellum years. The national government hired 3,000 civilian workers in 1800; this number grew to 18,000 in 1840 and 37,000 in 1860. The vast majority of these civil servants were local postmasters, most of whom worked part time (retaining their jobs as storekeepers or newspaper editors) and were compensated by fees. Most localities had at least one post office, and many had two or more. Most deputy postmasters lived in small communities.2 The other sizable group of federal employees worked in customhouses collecting tariff duties. New York’s customhouse, the nation’s busiest, had 861 employees on the payroll in 1858. Only 1,000 federal employees worked in Washington, DC, in 1841—a number that doubled by 1861.3
Fear of a standing military force, a reluctance to spend public funds, and the great oceanic barrier that separated the United States from the powerhouses of Europe kept America’s regular army and navy tiny. As the country edged toward war with Great Britain in 1812, it had an army of 6,000; when Polk considered war with Mexico in 1846, the military establishment consisted of 20,000 members, less than half of them army personnel. Both wars required military leaders to rely on militia units (poorly organized, partially armed amateurs) and volunteers (new recruits) to field a creditable army. Andrew Jackson’s force that smashed the British attack at New Orleans in 1815 numbered roughly 4,500 men drawn from the Tennessee and Kentucky militia, two battalions of free African Americans, Choctaw Indians, and a battalion of followers of the Louisiana pirate Jean Laffite. General Winfield Scott, who led the American expeditionary force from the port of Veracruz to Mexico City in 1847, was halted midway because his volunteers decided to return home when their one-year enlistments expired. Even with their replacements, Scott’s contingent that stormed the city numbered only about 6,000. A combined American force of just hundreds routed the Mexican defenders in California.4 Except for some engagements against Indians, who were highly skilled in small-scale encounters, the American military compiled a surprisingly successful record in view of Congress’s budgetary stinginess.
The federal administrative establishment limped along in the antebellum era with an approach that produced only modest improvements in organizational capacity. The emphasis at the presidential level was to pick administrators of known talent and good character to head departments over which they were given wide managerial discretion. Federal department secretaries and bureau chiefs could keep an eye on their staffs in Washington, but much of the government’s work was spread across far-flung places. This complicated the supervision of land offices, post offices, and customs collectors—functions that offered opportunities for fraud and scandal. Land office officials sometimes helped speculators obtain the best acreage. Private vendors schemed to win contracts to transport the mail. Customs officials enforced revenue laws that imposed fines on merchants for violations, a portion of which was retained by the collector. Postmasters, customs collectors, and law enforcement personnel were compensated by fees, a system inherently prone to abuse. The rise of political parties in the 1830s put pressure on presidents to reward loyal supporters with patronage jobs in government, leading to some regrettable appointments. The federal administrative apparatus grew larger as the nation and its business expanded, but it underwent only minimal administrative rationalization. In the Jacksonian era (1828–1850s), good administration rested on choosing individuals of “good character,” not on improving the efficiency of governance.5
Administrative Capacity
Why did administrative capacity remain underdeveloped in the antebellum era? Three factors tell much of the story. First, prevailing ideology did not support a robust bureaucracy. In fact, Jeffersonians of the early nineteenth century and many politicos during the Jacksonian era saw executives as a potential threat to liberty. Congress questioned virtually every item in appropriations requests, becoming even more parsimonious during depression years. Antebellum America at all levels of government, but especially in the states and localities, relied heavily on part-time administrators, most of whom were volunteers who served without compensation.
The norm of amateur, part-time public servants rather than career politicians was reflected in the schedules of Congress and the state legislatures. Congress stayed in session for about 300 days out of each two-year cycle; most House members served a single two-year term. They got along without any personal staff assistance, but with the emergence of permanent “standing” committees by midcentury, the House did hire a clerk. Committee members developed close relationships with administrative department heads. State legislative sessions lasted, on average, a couple of months each year—until constitutional revisions in the 1840s inaugurated the trend toward biennial meetings. Most state lawmakers served only a single term. Committees of legislators at every level, from towns and city councils up to Congress, handled a large portion of administrative business. Ideology reinforced the conventional practice of relying on these elected amateurs and nonelected citizens to attend to public matters.6
Second, the technologies associated with modern administrative practice had not been invented or perfected by 1860. Government workers throughout the antebellum era copied documents by hand using quills and inkwells. Until midcentury, offices were heated by wood-burning fireplaces and illuminated by candles or whale oil lamps. Indoor plumbing and electric lighting were developed after 1870. Typewriters, adding machines, telephones, reliable fountain pens, and modern filing cabinets were advances of the late nineteenth century. Record keeping was haphazard if not nonexistent for certain activities, and there was inadequate safe (e.g., fireproof) storage space for documents. Three generations passed before government employees of the 1830s worked in modern-looking government offices. Their field offices were many miles away from Washington, DC—3,000 miles in the case of the Pacific coast states. A transcontinental telegraph was not operational until 1861. During the Jacksonian era, efforts were made to beef up inspections of field administrators. Still, geography and technology created barriers for the monitoring of administrative activities.7
Third, most civic tasks and the bulk of public administration were handled at the local level, with minimal assistance and oversight from state governments. Few studies of state-local administration exist for the pre–Civil War period, which complicates an assessment of the antebellum polity. What is clear is that the 10,000 or so general-purpose governments at midcentury relied on elected officials and appointed volunteers to oversee various civic functions, from law enforcement and education to care of the poor and road maintenance. Many if not most of these positions were part time and uncompensated. This amateur, citizen-based system fit comfortably with the rising democratic tide that swept the nation during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Nonetheless, a trend toward salaried, full-time administrative personnel for specialized functions (e.g., engineers) was under way in the larger cities by midcentury. The four largest municipalities maintained police forces of more than 2,600 men in the mid-1850s, a figure that equaled the total number of federal employees in Washington. The 1850 census recorded 91,000 public school teachers, exceeding the number of federal employees.8 The city workers who maintained the streets and the rural residents who performed roadwork probably exceeded the number of federal workers as well, including the mechanics and laborers hired for particular projects, such as in navy shipyards. This fragmentary evidence points to a sizable and growing administrative presence at the local level by midcentury.
Foreign Policy and Domestic Security
The lack of a full-time, salaried bureaucracy in most areas of governance in the decades before the Civil War constrained government but was not a fatal handicap. The handling of foreign affairs illustrates this point. The Constitution assigned management of the diplomatic and military establishments to the president of the United States, who delegated oversight of most foreign matters to the Department of State, created in 1789. During Thomas Jefferson’s tenure as its first secretary, the State Department had five ministers (now called ambassadors) and sixteen consular officers, plus several clerks in the home office. In Jefferson’s first term as president, the State Department had nine employees in Washington, including the secretary, who oversaw ten ministers, sixty-three consulates, and thirty-four treaty commissioners and agents. In 1842 the Diplomatic Bureau of the State Department under Daniel Webster (who served from 1841 to 1843) had thirty employees grouped into four areas of responsibility, twenty-one missions (now called embassies), and 160 consulates. Ten years later, the State Department had fifty-seven US-based employees, some of whom were ordinary office workers. Chief clerks of sections in the Diplomatic Bureau were akin to middle managers in today’s world; some had considerable experience in the State Department. The consular service consisted of 121 persons, including twenty ministers, each of whom was granted a one-person secretarial staff in 1855.9
The number of staff assigned to the State Department and its Foreign Service clearly grew between 1789 and 1860. Numeric and geographic expansion, however, does not necessarily mean more effective policy, but this line of reasoning is misleading for diplomacy. Foreign policy is formulated by presidents, sometimes alone but usually in consultation with the secretary of state and, from time to time, other department secretaries and members of Congress. All the presidents between Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams (1801–1829) had been secretaries of state; a number of subsequent secretaries, such as Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, were prominent members of Congress. President James Madison, a former secretary of state and member of Congress, used his secretary of state, James Monroe, to communicate with the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees. President James Buchanan, who had been a secretary of state as well as minister to Russia and Great Britain, handled important foreign policy matters himself. Besides their authority to manage diplomacy, presidents also commanded the armed forces, which enhanced their personal control of foreign relations.10
Prior to 1815, France, Spain, and Great Britain represented the principal international threats to American security. France seized American ships in the Caribbean in the late 1790s, in conjunction with Napoleon’s campaign in Europe. John Adams’s administration strengthened the navy, which countered French depredations, but the president negotiated a settlement in 1800 that sidestepped a larger war. Aside from its bungled intervention in Mexico during the 1860s, France lost interest in North America after the slave revolt in Haiti and its sale of Louisiana. Great Britain was a more durable threat, both along the Canadian border and in the Atlantic, where its ships preyed on American vessels and hindered commerce with Europe until 1815. Unable to negotiate a solution to British impressment of American seamen or the impoundment of American ships, and amid charges that Britain had encouraged Indian attacks in the Great Lakes region, President Madison asked Congress to consider war in 1812. Despite the country’s lack of preparation, Congress voted for a military confrontation. The United States was fortunate to achieve a standoff during the War of 1812, largely because Britain’s primary opponent was Napoleon in Europe.
There was a reduction of diplomatic tensions after 1815. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the world contained far fewer national states than it did after decolonization following World War II. Lacking strong states, Africa and Asia posed no immediate threat to American security. The Napoleonic Wars had sparked independence revolts in Latin America that drove Spain from most of its colonies, leaving weak states in its wake. Mexico, on America’s southern border, lacked the military capacity to repel the comparatively small American invasion force that captured its capital in 1847. The American navy was tiny during the pre–Civil War era, but it had sufficient resources to blockade Mexico along its Gulf coast and along the Pacific coast as far north as San Francisco during the Mexican War. American naval vessels also subdued hostile North African principalities that preyed on US commerce, as well as pirates on dozens of occasions in the early nineteenth century. Commodore Matthew Perry’s eight-ship armada apparently convinced the Japanese in 1854 that it would be better to negotiate a treaty than to take on the US Fleet moored in Tokyo Bay.11
American foreign policy’s success in keeping the ship of state afloat has often been attributed to the country’s geographic isolation from the powerhouses of Europe. There is some truth to this conclusion, but it can also be argued that presidents and secretaries of state made decisions at critical moments that deflected threats and protected the national interest. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy Adams, and James Polk were instrumental in the expansion of the United States, increasing the country’s land area severalfold. All things being equal, more territory meant more wealth and, from an international perspective, greater security.
The most persistent threat to domestic security during the antebellum era came from Native Americans. Pacification of belligerent Indians was the principal activity of the regular army and state militias. Indians were dangerous, but they did not threaten the stability of the republic. Time and again, until 1871, Amerindians were coerced or bribed to enter into so-called treaties in which they relinquished their traditional lands. Thereafter, relations with individual tribes settled into a bureaucratic phase. The nerve center of these transactions was the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the War Department, until it was shifted to the Department of the Interior in 1849. The bureau’s small staff doled out minimal assistance to relocated tribes and attempted to turn Native Americans into literate, Bible-carrying farmers.12
The Courts
Besides adjudicating conflicts, courts also served as administrative units before the Civil War. The tempo of this workload increased as the antebellum era progressed and the statute books expanded. Most of this activity took place at the state and local levels, not only in courts but also in legislatures, county councils, and aldermanic bodies, which had certain judicial powers in the early nineteenth century. In New York and Philadelphia, for example, aldermen functioned as magistrates who dealt with minor criminal offenses. It is also important to note that extralegal justice at the hands of vigilante groups prevailed in the West on occasion.13
Several developments reflect the reliance on law as a tool of administration at the local level. States and municipalities adopted a variety of regulations in the antebellum era, and as the range of these actions increased, so did the legal challenges to them. Many of these actions were upheld by courts under a doctrine known as “state police powers.” Emerging in the early nineteenth century, the concept of police powers held that state governments (and their municipal agents) possessed broad authority to adopt measures that protected the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the community. Clearly, the term “policing” encompassed a much wider scope of activity in the early nineteenth century than it does today. Whereas the modern expectation is that policing involves essentially patrolling to reduce street crime and investigating crimes when they occur, police activity in the antebellum era ranged from maintaining the streets and removing nuisances to restricting offensive behaviors (e.g., cursing) and regulating economic activities (e.g., issuing trade licenses or setting commodity prices). Not directly outlined in constitutions, the police power emerged from state and federal court interpretations of the common law (traditional law) and practical experience, as in the case of the “law of nuisances” and the “rights of necessity.” City officials relied on the latter concept, for example, as a justification to destroy private residences to contain fires. The US Supreme Court acknowledged the concept in several cases between 1824 (Gibbons v. Odgen) and 1850. In Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia (1851), the Supreme Court explicitly accepted the doctrine as a valid state power to regulate the community.14
A second strand of state law was oriented around property rights and economic development, areas in which judges and legislators sparred. Out of these actions and negotiations emerged statutory and legal standards for the incorporation of businesses, guidelines for eminent domain, torts (civil wrongs involving negligence and liability), and contracts. Torts and contracts were concepts developed primarily by state jurists.15
As state and municipal regulations, services, and taxes grew, so did legal challenges. Increasingly, state courts examined the constitutionally of these actions during a process called judicial review. State judges upheld most of these state actions, often based on the police power, but an increasing number of statutes and ordinances were overturned at the century’s midpoint. In New York, for example, sixteen laws were challenged during the 1820s, and one was struck down as a violation of the state constitution; in the 1850s, 127 laws were challenged, and thirty-four were disallowed. In Massachusetts, sixty-two laws were reviewed by the state court through 1860, and ten were declared unconstitutional. In Virginia, by comparison, only two laws failed on grounds of constitutionality. These judicial contrasts reflect the diversity of state actions. Nonetheless, state courts seemed increasingly willing to hold municipalities liable for certain actions that harmed property owners. For instance, in 1842 New York State’s chief justice ruled that New York City was liable for damages to a plaintiff whose mill along the Croton River, which supplied water to the city, was demolished when a dam burst. This case put the city on notice that its efforts to promote the public interest could be deemed harmful to private interests.16
State actions became subject to double legal scrutiny when the US Supreme Court assumed the prerogative of negating statutes as unconstitutional, a power not explicitly expressed in the Constitution. The key event in this judicial development was Marbury v. Madison (1803), in which the court held that section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1801 gave it the power to rule on the constitutionality of an executive action. This decision arose in the aftermath of a tense political period, as the United States confronted France in an undeclared war (1798–1800) and President John Adams and the Federalists in Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), which allowed the deportation of “dangerous” immigrants and jail time for critics of administration policy. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, leaders of the opposition, responded to the Alien and Sedition Acts with resolutions adopted by the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia (1798) that condemned attempts to stifle speech and asserted that states had the right to judge the constitutionality of national actions. Similar charges of misconduct by President Adams continued during the campaign for the presidency in 1800, which Jefferson won. In 1802 the new president and his congressional supporters repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801.
In the last days of his administration, Adams had appointed John Marshall, a Federalist and a strong nationalist, as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Marshall shaped his decision in Marbury to avoid the political pitfalls lurking in the supercharged partisan atmosphere. In a clever move, Marshall held that section 13 of the Judiciary Act violated the principle of the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches and was therefore unconstitutional. This concession reduced the taint of partisanship, yet Marshall went on to assert the Supreme Court’s authority to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. Despite Jefferson’s refusal to accept the ruling, Marbury legitimized the independence of the Supreme Court and elevated the judiciary’s stature as a coequal branch of the national government.
The reach of the Supreme Court expanded into state statutes in Fletcher v. Peck (1810), which held that Georgia had violated the clause of the Constitution prohibiting states from “impairing the obligation of contracts.” During the remainder of his tenure as chief justice (1801–1835), Marshall reviewed numerous state actions, issuing opinions that defined the legal boundaries of federalism and enhanced national authority. Roger B. Taney, a southern slaveholder who served as chief justice from 1835 to 1864, took a less nationalist stance than his predecessor but continued to clarify the relationship between state and national power. Before the Civil War, the high court struck down only two federal laws but negated thirty-five state laws, mostly between the 1820s and 1860. The Marshall court aggressively expanded the Supreme Court’s authority, ruling that it had jurisdiction in all cases involving the Constitution (1816), including those in state courts (1821). Marshall struck down a Maryland tax on the Bank of the United States (1819) as an unconstitutional intrusion on a legitimate federal activity.
In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) Marshall ruled that New York’s charter granting a monopoly to a steamboat company navigating across the Hudson River to New Jersey violated a national law that licensed coastal vessels. Monopoly charters were common in the early republic, and the Gibbons decision was read as an encouragement of private commercial activity. Taney expanded this line of thinking, most famously in the Charles River Bridge case (1837), in which he disallowed an injunction that would have prevented a second company from bridging the Charles River. The same year, the Supreme Court rejected a complaint that banknotes issued by the Bank of Kentucky violated the Constitution’s restriction on states to “emit Bills of Credit.” In Swift v. Tyson (1842), announced in the midst of a severe depression, the justices held that state courts need not be bound by decisions involving disputes between citizens of different states. That ruling opened the way for federal courts to formulate “general principles . . . of commercial jurisprudence,” a doctrine later used to remove state impediments to a national commercial market. The high court questioned state restrictions on slavery as well. In 1826 Pennsylvania adopted a personal liberty law designed to hamper slave catchers’ efforts to retrieve runaways. The Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in 1842 (Prigg v. Pennsylvania), indicating that Pennsylvania’s action conflicted with the national fugitive slave law enacted in 1793. Once again, the Supreme Court had limited state jurisdiction, in this case involving a subject that would continue to cause political and legal tension.17
State and Local Governance
Although the “capacity” of government in the antebellum era has been questioned, it is clear that many jurisdictions, notably large cities, broadened their administrative activities, particularly with regard to police, jails, education, streets, water supply, and fire protection. Boston, for example, appointed superintendents (also called marshals and commissioners) for streets, sewers, health, fire, police, water, and engineering between 1827 and 1851. Cities substantially increased expenditures on these services. Differentiation of administrative units also took place in the states. Between 1827 and 1857, for example, Illinois created boards for the state penitentiary, school for the deaf, hospital for the insane, school for the blind, geology, and education. New York opened Castle Garden in Manhattan to process immigrants in 1855. How much these steps improved states’ administrative effectiveness is unclear, but the enactments themselves indicate that officials were attending to a widening set of civic concerns. A rough parallel exists for the national government, which established the Library of Congress, US Military Academy, Coastal Survey, General Land Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Patent Office, US Naval Academy, Smithsonian Institution, and Government Printing Office between 1800 and 1860. One student of federal administrative units documented a tripling of federal agencies between 1792 and 1860.18
THE EVOLUTION OF ANTEBELLUM GOVERNANCE
Assessing the contours of nineteenth-century governance in the United States must consider all three levels of government, which encompassed nearly three dozen states and thousands of local governments by 1860. Given this array of civic forums and the lack of any comprehensive documentation related to their performance, conclusions about antebellum governance remain partially conjectural. The available evidence, however, points to an incremental expansion of the public sector during the antebellum era, with policy additions accelerating after the early 1840s. This record may look minuscule from the perspective of the twenty-first century, but with 1789 as a base point, this expansion was substantial.19
What drove this evolution? Locating the causes of historical development is a speculative enterprise, given the challenge of weighing the influence of critical factors amid the unpredictable course of historical events. The approach here is to review the dynamics of the most important factors driving civic development. On the short list of key determinants are socioeconomic change, economic depression, the rise of political parties, war, and political structures.
Socioeconomic Change
The United States underwent an extraordinary territorial expansion in the antebellum era, which helped fuel population growth, economic development, and the creation of thousands of new political units. In the early decades of the nineteenth century the nation was filled with young people who were restless and on the move. More than half the population was younger than twenty years old in 1830 and 1850; white males in their twenties and thirties were twice as numerous as older men in both years. The generation that came to maturity in around 1830 experienced the opening of the Erie Canal, the advent of steamboat travel on inland and coastal waters, and the United States’ expansion to the Pacific. Young white men who came of age in around 1850 could have ridden the railroad, likely heard talk of building a transcontinental line, may have seen telegraph wires, and perhaps considered searching for gold in California. Most did not push that far west, yet at midcentury, 45 percent of the population lived outside the boundaries of the original states.20
These changes had two important consequences. First, social and economic development bred new outlooks that were increasingly at odds with the assumptions of pre-Revolutionary America. Religious revivals, new views about personal responsibility and character, and eagerness to participate in the country’s economic progress altered both attitudes and behavior. The proliferation of institutions such as churches, schools and colleges, reform societies, publishers, artisan associations, and political parties helped disseminate new ideas. Charles Sellers, who argued that a “market revolution” spawned competitive commercial activity, saw a host of social consequences following this transformation, especially the erosion of family and communal traditions. In Robert Wiebe’s estimation, early nineteenth-century America created a world of nontraditional “choices” flowing from socioeconomic change, which opened up numerous opportunities in life.21
The benefits of this new sociocultural milieu were largely restricted to white Protestant men and, through family ties, white women. Social reforms forged by legal changes and cultural practices during the middle of the century undercut the traditional male patriarchy, creating separate gender spheres of domesticity, especially in the North. African Americans (most of whom were slaves), Indians, and non-Protestant immigrants remained largely outside these webs of change. But for white males, most of whom became eligible to vote by the 1830s, swirls of nonconventional thinking eroded older civic habits, especially deference to elites who commanded most positions of power through 1815.
Second, socioeconomic change spawned new problems for society. With territorial expansion, officials assumed responsibility for governing a huge landmass that spanned the continent, a task that Europeans thought was impossible in a republic. New technologies generated their own hazards, such as boiler explosions on steamboats and fires ignited by sparks flying out of locomotive smokestacks. People poured into cities, creating difficulties related to increased population density (e.g., sewerage) and conflicts due to ethnic antagonism (e.g., riots).
Economic Depression
The antebellum economy was buffeted by three economic depressions popularly identified as the Panics of 1819, 1837, and 1857. Each financial crisis was followed by an economic slowdown manifested by steep declines in agricultural prices and real estate values, rising unemployment, mortgage foreclosures, business failures, and social turmoil. Sharp, sudden shocks to the economy always have political repercussions; for instance, “tax revolts” can disrupt and redirect the patterns of politics, and their effects can last for years. Generally, the popular reaction to depression is a discrediting of the prevailing political ideology and incumbent officeholders, especially with regard to public finances.22
The depression that following the Panic of 1819 was partially a reaction to the economic consequences of the Napoleonic Wars, very unusual weather in 1816, and the boom-bust cycle in agricultural production that followed. Signs of economic distress were apparent in the decline of agricultural exports, plummeting land sales, banks’ suspension of specie payments, and real estate foreclosures. Numerous state governments enacted “stay laws” that delayed property foreclosures and relief laws that loaned paper money, easing the financial sting of indebtedness. Resentment of paper money and bankers’ cliquish favoritism in issuing loans fueled antibank policies in parts of the country. Cotton production in South Carolina’s Piedmont region never recovered from falling prices, a decline that some southerners blamed on the tariffs of 1824 and 1828. The economic slump, along with the experiences of the War of 1812, generated support for government sponsorship of transportation improvements as a way of regenerating commercial activity. Hard times spawned a backlash against the use of banknotes and appeared to foster the trend toward greater democracy, especially in the West.23
The economic recovery under way by the mid-1820s became an expansionary boom in the 1830s, which lasted until a devastating banking collapse swept across the country in 1837. A mild recovery in 1838 was cut short by a second financial crisis in 1839 that ignited a deep and prolonged economic depression. Urban workers, businesses, banks, and farmers were caught in the grip of a severe commercial contraction. The suspension of specie exchange for banknotes provoked riots. By 1842 roughly half of American banks no longer existed. Agricultural commodity prices stayed low through the middle of the 1840s. Consequently, the depression cut sharply into state governments’ revenue, and as a result, nine states defaulted on their debts, incurred largely to finance transportation projects. The political reaction to what was widely considered fiscally imprudent behavior produced a “revolution against internal improvements.” Most states stopped construction on uncompleted projects, turned to budgetary retrenchment, and amended their constitutions to prohibit state investment in and ownership of corporations. Constitutional limits were imposed on state indebtedness. Because legislators were thought to be complicit in these fiscal crises, states began to substitute biennial for annual meetings of their legislatures.24
These restrictions on the states suggest that public promotion of the economy met an impenetrable roadblock, but that was not quite true. Some states (e.g., Massachusetts) escaped draconian limits on their legislatures, while others found loopholes around constitutional limitations. Moreover, state constitutional changes did not affect most municipalities or Congress. Public assistance to private corporations continued over the next several decades, albeit at lower levels, in part because railroads relied primarily on private sources of capital after the depression lifted. The backlash against state investment in internal improvements was a conspicuous impact of the depression, but it was not the only one. Taking a cue from Horace Greeley, the New York newspaper editor who advised the unemployed to go “to the Great West,” streams of migrants headed to Texas and the Pacific coast. The lingering hard times and the flood of westward migrants during the early 1840s influenced the election of President James Polk, who provoked a war with Mexico over the annexation of Texas.25
Political Parties
The depressions that followed the Panics of 1819 and 1837 had a significant impact on political parties. During the 1790s, Federalist supporters of the Washington and Adams administrations and their Jeffersonian Republican opponents in Congress had battled over financial policy and foreign affairs. After Jefferson’s election as president, this partisan division limped along through the War of 1812. During these years, gentleman elites dominated leadership positions and discouraged a broadening of popular democracy. The depression of the 1820s, which was widely seen as caused by elites’ control of banks and their irresponsible speculation, fanned popular resentment of the privileged classes. This animosity was a factor in undermining the traditional fear of political parties, which had historically been regarded as disloyal factions that threatened the viability of the state. The expansion of eligible voters (through legal changes and population growth), the trend toward popularly elected presidential electors, and the admission of new states fed a growing acceptance of parties as an essential component of electoral politics. Andrew Jackson—Indian fighter, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, slave-owning planter from Tennessee, and bitter foe of banks—took advantage of these trends to win the presidency in 1828. His veto of the bill to renew the charter of the Bank of United States (1832), his hard-money policy (restricting loans that circulated as paper currency), and his aggressive defense of depositing federal revenue in selected state banks galvanized an opposition that coalesced into the Whig Party.26
By 1838 Democratic (Jacksonian) and Whig Parties existed in most states. Unlike the first set of parties, the second party system evolved into competitive electoral organizations that circulated party platforms, held nominating conventions, and sponsored gala electioneering rallies. The impact of this new style of politicking is demonstrated by dramatic increases in voter turnout, especially for national elections. The Panic of 1837 dropped a bombshell on this new political arrangement, and the recovery in 1839 lapsed into depression in the early 1840s. Democrats lost badly in 1840, when Whigs won a majority in Congress and in many state legislatures and defeated incumbent president Martin Van Buren. Then voters punished the Whigs for failing to produce satisfactory remedies to the malaise. The party’s delegation in the House of Representatives was reduced by half, and its majority status in the state legislatures was cut by an even larger proportion. Whig fortunes sank further when the Mexican War and proposals to limit the expansion of slavery in the late 1840s posed stiff challenges to party cohesion.27
Although sectional conflict in the mid-1850s doomed the Whigs, their competition with Democrats over two decades influenced public policy. Democrats opposed a national bank and local banks in many states, supported hard-money policies that favored specie over paper banknotes, and advocated low tariff rates, a position favored in cotton-growing regions. Viewed in broader terms, the Democratic mind-set resisted the development of a market economy that rested on financial credit, governmental promotion of internal improvements, and free public education, positions the Whigs supported. Northern Whigs were hostile to the expansion of slavery in the new territories, advocated restrictions on immigrants and immigration, and favored the regulation of liquor and social reforms, goals that were anathema to Democrats. The party of Jackson consistently supported budgetary parsimony and constitutional restrictions on state fiscal authority.28
In 1857 another financial panic shocked the economy, triggering a commercial slump that lasted until 1860 in the North and influenced party performance. The depression arrived during the birth of the Republican Party, which had replaced the northern Whigs when they fractured over slavery. Initially formed to block the expansion of slavery into new territories, the Republican Party added economic measures to its agenda—namely, free public land (homestead allotments), more flexible banking and credit, and a protective tariff—programs promoted as depression remedies. President James Buchanan and the Democrats hunkered down around Jacksonian proscriptions, opposing all three measures. Republican victories in 1860 and the resignation of southern Democrats from Congress opened the door to the new economic program.29
Political parties, in short, influenced economic policy. But the contributions of the Democrats and the Whigs to statebuilding may have been equally significant. Political parties were the only secular organizations in the United States that bridged the federal system, at least in terms of sharing a common affiliation in elections for Congress, president, and state offices. Parties thus contributed to the national integration of a noncentralized polity. In their electioneering capacities, parties welcomed all white males (certainly for their votes, and usually for their participation in party activities such as electioneering parades) and embodied egalitarian qualities. And in their articulation of common values, such as the connection between the union and liberty, the acceptance of legal constitutionalism, and the characterization of America as a land of opportunity and progress, parties promoted national identity. The tonality of each party’s nationalism differed, but sufficient common ground existed to make political participation a key element of American citizenship.30
War
The United States fought two declared wars in the antebellum era, as well as many engagements against Native Americans. Despite the relatively small scale of battlefield encounters during the War of 1812, the conflict left a significant mark on the new republic. The most important military event was Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British force at New Orleans. Jackson’s victory blunted the possibility of Britain reestablishing a foothold in the center of North America, with an outlet on the Gulf of Mexico. The war’s outcome also led to the demilitarization of the northern border, thereby reducing the probability of repeated conflict with Great Britain. Victory in New Orleans forecast the end of Spain’s control of Florida, which resulted in the 1819 treaty that gave the United States a legal foothold on the Pacific. Finally, New Orleans made Jackson a hero, which he parlayed into a successful run for the presidency in 1828. Jefferson’s embargo and the economic disruptions caused by the war stimulated American manufacturing. Federalist opposition to the war, centered in New England, spelled the death knell for the party. The war also sparked an upsurge in nationalist pride, although this patriotic glow soon faded.
Victory in the Mexican War also had reverberations beyond the modest scale of battlefield operations. The United States reaffirmed its acquisition of Texas and obtained a massive territorial concession from Mexico. Despite a penny-pinching Congress, the American navy was able to mount a blockade of Mexico on two oceans. The war allowed the transfer of Mexican real estate to the United States, which set up a fateful debate over the extension of slavery into the newly acquired territory. Military pacification of hostile Indians, many of whom were resettled west of the Mississippi River, added to the impact of war on American statebuilding.
Political Structures
The Constitution created a governmental framework that reflected ideological axioms of the early United States. The document affirmed the principle that the states and the national government formed a political union in which each component retained the authority to govern in allotted fields of activity. President George Washington saluted this exceptional division of power in his farewell address “as a main prop of your liberty.” Upon his departure from the presidency, Andrew Jackson noted, “in the union of these states there is a sure foundation for freedom.” Antebellum presidents invariably repeated the maxim that the federal union underwrote American liberty. A second axiom emphasized the limited authority of the national government and the semisovereign competency of the states, subject to limitations outlined in the Constitution. Time and again, presidents and political commentators stressed the necessity of carefully observing the limits on national authority so as not to intrude on the sovereignty of the states. As Jackson put it in his 1837 farewell address, citizens had to be on guard against the expansion of federal powers to prevent the creation of a “consolidated” government. While the principle of dual governance was accepted, disagreements repeatedly arose about the precise allocation of this diffused power. This constitutional pact contained one of the central paradoxes of American governance—power was divided and distributed functionally and geographically in an arrangement that obscured the actual aggregate application of sovereign authority.
A third political axiom pledged equal treatment of citizens and condemned favoritism for special interests. This principle reflected the growing embrace of egalitarianism and the influence of democratization in American society during the antebellum era. In Jackson’s words, citizens must be on guard against any “corrupting influence,” by which he meant the “army of powerful interests” that sought to gain public support for private enrichment. At the top of Jackson’s list of political offenses were cabals between government and banks, a theme that Jacksonian Democrats reiterated for decades. Some Democrats and most Whigs regarded paper banknotes and the incorporation of private businesses as useful devices for economic growth. Nonetheless, virtually all political participants concurred that special-interest favoritism offended the public good. The Democratic version of this axiom stressed minimal federal action and the maintenance of a “plain and frugal government,” as President Polk phrased the sentiment. Democrats were the most hawkish party in terms of keeping the lid on government spending and debt. Yet the mantra of no special favoritism and stringent fiscal control formed an ideological penumbra that restrained the use of power, especially among policymakers in Washington.
The principles of diffused power under constitutional federalism and equal treatment before the law established boundaries for policymaking. But rhetorical genuflection before common political axioms and the practical task of governance represented two sides of the governmental coin. Political maxims and actual uses of power coexisted. The rise of new problems and unexpected crises within an increasingly democratized political arena created pressure to use public power. Disagreement over how governments should address these irritants was inevitable in a multilevel representative democracy.31 The political structure eased much of this decisionmaking dilemma by leaving a great array of issues to the states and localities to resolve. This functional duality allowed the federal government to concentrate on a few key activities often undertaken far from the centers of population, thus keeping national governance largely “out of sight,” in Brian Balogh’s formulation.32 States and cities operated under less rigorous legal restrictions and faced competition for people and business from other jurisdictions. America’s political structure allowed the paradoxical situation whereby governments devoted to liberty could use and amplify their powers.33
The political structure’s interactions with socioeconomic change, economic depression, political parties, and war were the primary factors that fostered a modest expansion of the public sector in the antebellum era. The nation’s territory increased severalfold, states and municipalities used their authority in new ways, and a sense of national identity developed, especially outside the South. The national government played an instrumental role in this evolution, particularly in relation to the nation’s borders and in maintaining an independent national state. Collectively, these facts point to America’s central paradox: a nation schooled in the principles of limited government, individualism, and legal constitutionalism actually used its governmental power frequently, and often with significant consequences for statebuilding. Situations that prompted lawmakers to address problems with civic interventions could trump ideology.
The War of 1812 and the Mexican War demonstrate the United States’ willingness to use coercive force to assert American sovereignty. These two conflicts, however, represent only the best-known uses of coercive force during the antebellum period. When lawlessness prevailed or danger threatened, Americans responded with organized force. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton formed a federal military force of 12,500 militiamen to quell a tax rebellion in western Pennsylvania in 1794. The US Navy confronted pirates, including the piratical Barbary States in the Mediterranean, in the early nineteenth century. State and local militias repeatedly drove off Indians, sometimes in collaboration with the US Army. Governors and mayors often summoned militias to suppress urban rioters; some of these encounters resulted in numerous fatalities, as occurred in the Astor Place Opera House riot in New York in 1849. Vigilante justice prevailed in the 1850s in San Francisco and in western mining camps. State and local governments retained capital punishment, including public executions, and allowed city police to carry firearms. In the South, state laws institutionalized slavery and maintained a legal culture that seldom convicted whites for killing Africans.
Viewed collectively, these actions demonstrate the widespread use of coercive instruments in the years between 1789 and 1860. A key characteristic of a state is a monopoly on coercive force.34 This power was used regularly and was an accepted part of civic life in antebellum America.