The Market Revolution and Jacksonian Democracy
This is a study guide intended to give you a brief introduction to the period and to some of the
assigned readings.
"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their
selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government.
Equality of talents, of education, or of
wealth cannot be produced by human
institutions. In the full enjoyment of the
gifts of Heaven and the fruits of
superior industry, economy, and virtue,
every man is equally entitled to
protection by law; but when the laws
undertake to add to these natural and
just advantages artificial distinctions,
to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive
privileges, to make the rich richer and
the potent more powerful, the humble
members of society the farmers,
mechanics, and laborers who have
neither
the time nor the means of
Satire of Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United
securing like favors to themselves, have
States, from Library of Congress collection,
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/app/item/200
a right to complain of the injustice of
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their Government. – from President
Andrew Jackson’s veto of the bill to recharter the Bank of the United States in 1832.
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In the thirty years after the War of 1812, the United States experienced a market
revolution that integrated the majority of Americans more fully into a market economy and
encouraged the spread of more impersonal forms of exchange. Crowding out the traditional,
largely self-sufficient farmer, new commercial classes of farmers and planters, artisans and
masters produced for an often far-flung and impersonal market. Instead of focusing on family
and neighbors within local communities, exchange (buying, selling, and crucially,
borrowing) often involved transactions with unknown and unseen individuals and institutions
hundreds of miles from one’s community. And merchants, manufacturers, retailers and
professionals (including the fast-growing ranks of lawyers) made up an increasing percentage
of the population.
The market revolution, what the economist Karl Polyani called “the great transformation,”
changed everything. Farmers increasingly focused on a small number of marketable crops
and borrowed money to purchase new lands and expand production. Master artisans
reorganized their crafts and introduced a new wage relationship which supplanted the old
mutual obligations and duties of masters, journeymen, and apprentices and introduced new
conflicts and divisions. The “socialization of production” increasingly took economic
activities out of the household and into the marketplace and transformed the position of
women. The notion of separate sphere emerged as a result. A female, domestic sphere of
love, compassion, nurture, sympathy now seemed separate from a male, public sphere of
aggression, calculation, self-interest, and ruthlessness.
The market revolution also had a profound impact on American politics. American
democracy, it has often been said, grew up with American capitalism. Some have argued that
democracy expanded in harmony with capitalism, but others (including Charles Sellers, see
assigned readings) have argued that democracy emerged in opposition to capitalism. Either
way, the conflicts that characterized the period of “Jacksonian democracy” revolved around
issues of the market.
Jackson’s Democratic party generally
represented two groups: 1) upstart, often
frustrated entrepreneurs who saw
government regulation and promotion of
the economy as a form of privilege from
which they had been excluded and 2) a
less powerful group of hard-pressed small
producers and wage-earners who felt the
logic of the marketplace was too
mercenary, too callous, and who still
worried that self-interest was supplanting
virtue and corrupting American politics.
George Caleb Bingham, The County Election, 1851-1852,
The Whigs, who emerged in response to
St. Louis Art Museum
the rise of the Jacksonian Democrats, also
generally represented two groups: 1) established interests with ties to government, eager to
use federal power to promote national expansion and advance their own economic ambitions
and 2) “improvers,” men and women (even though they could not vote, women played an
important role in a Whig movement that was as much a culture as a party) eager to use both
governmental power and voluntary agencies to uplift others, to promote high standards of
labor, learning, manners, and benevolence but skeptical of the unaided efforts of the
unwashed democracy.
Background to Market Revolution: (the Sellers reading will flesh this out): Beginning with
the Jeffersonian embargo of 1807 (a failed effort to keep the US out of the Napoleonic Wars)
through the end of the War of 1812 (which ended in 1815), US trade with Europe was
interrupted. As a result, American manufacturing expanded to replace European imports. In
particular, New England merchants began looking more seriously at domestic trade as a
source of profit. Merchant capital went into transportation improvements as well as
manufacturing experiments like the textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts. Nationalistminded politicians (including, ironically, the future states’ rights Senator John C. Calhoun of
South Carolina) encouraged federal support for transportation improvements to unite the
nation, provide military transport, and generate an alternative source of tax revenues through
internal trade (as opposed to tariffs on imports).
At the end of the War of 1812, the British began dumping their backlog of surplus goods
on the American market, generating a depression in the US. Hard times underscored calls for
what Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky called “the American system,” a federal program of
internal improvements (roads, canals, harbors), tariff protections, and a stronger army and
navy to protect American interests and produce a market for domestic manufacturers. A
strong central bank also became part of this strategy. Much of Jacksonian politics revolved
around support for or opposition to the American system. Federal and especially state
governments - as well as private entrepreneurs - invested heavily in the turnpikes, canals, and
railroads that created an internal, domestic market in the US. The building of the Erie,
Miami and Erie and other canals were the biggest construction projects in American history
to that time. Canals cut freight rates by 95% and travel times were reduced by almost as
much. A two-month trip for freight from New York to Cincinnati in 1817 could be
concluded in a mere week via railroad by 1850. Four good horses could pull a ton and a half
of goods 18 miles a day over a turnpike, but the same four horses could pull 100 tons 24
miles a day on the canals. Agricultural production soared, the cost of food was reduced,
while farmers bought more and more manufactured goods in the marketplace, stimulating
industrial development.
New York City and Cincinnati in the Market Revolution: Metropolitan
Industrialization or a Republic of Producers?
(think about the documents on the tailor’s strike and
the description of Cincinnati here): As the nation’s
metropolis, New York City felt the impact of the
market revolution most sharply. An influx of cheap,
immigrant labor and the new markets opened by the
Erie Canal after 1825 (connecting New York City to
all of upper New York State and via Buffalo to the
Great Lakes) prompted the reorganization of the
crafts in a system called “metropolitan
industrialization” (less a matter of factories and
mechanization than a subdivision of work and
employment of cheap labor). A sharp, increasingly
class-conscious struggle between ambitious masters
and frustrated journeymen ensued. In Cincinnati,
Handbill calling artisans to New York
Queen City of the West, the scarcity of labor and
City Hall Park to protest the conspiracy
conviction of union tailors in 1836
the smaller scale of manufacturing created greater
opportunities for workers. Economic downturns
could generate considerable discontent, especially against Eastern-based banks that called in
loans and foreclosed on property, but in good times economic expansion seemed to be
promoting the commonwealth. Rag to riches, or rather journeyman to master, was a more
common story in the west. Cincinnati’s labor troubles would not explode for another
generation. In the short run, Cincinnati seemed like the “republican city on a hill,” the place
where the promise of the American republic had been realized.
Background to Jackson’s War against the Bank (the Hofstadter reading will flesh this
out): As the great hero of the Battle of New Orleans, the scourge of frontier Indians, and
especially the self-made man who made his way by competitive skill rather than privilege,
Andrew Jackson rose to political prominence while a group of ambitious politicos organized
around his rising star. Though Jackson won the popular vote in the presidential election of
1824 (as many states for the first time provided for the direct election of the electoral college
- instead of the state legislatures), he lost the presidency when the election was thrown into
the House of Representatives where the caucus system (a small coterie of federal
officeholders who had essentially fixed the election of Presidents Madison and Monroe) once
again chose the president. The man they chose was Jackson’s great rival and key figure in the
soon-to-be-born Whig party, John Quincy Adams. Jackson began campaigning immediately
for the 1828 election, attacking political privilege and the “corrupt bargain” and demanding
the people’s right to choose their own leaders.
As president and as a proto-typical Whig before the Whigs actually existed (he would
join the party when it formed in the early 1830s), John Quincy Adams promoted an
ambitious program of federally-financed improvements. Adams called for federal
development of canals and roads, tariff-protection for infant American industries,
continuation of the new Bank of the United States (created after the financial disasters in the
War of 1812). He also called for the establishment of a national university, a naval academy,
subsidies for exploration, patent protection for inventors, a national astronomical
observatory, a program of compensated emancipation and colonization - in short a complete
scheme of economic and moral improvement. Jacksonians saw these measures as
paternalistic, as insulting to ordinary Americans, and especially as a form of political
privilege granted to well-placed elites (see quotation at top of this guide). The Bank of the
United States appeared to be the most dangerous and corrupting form of privilege.
The Spread of the Cotton Kingdom: (the Baptist reading will build on this): Slavery
appeared to be a dying institution at the
time of the American Revolution as the
soils of the seaboard South had begun to
decline in fertility. Moreover, the
Revolution itself had disrupted the
institution (as many slaves fled to British
lines) and put slavery ideologically on the
defensive (“all men are created equal…”).
But the invention of the cotton gin in 1793,
by the Yankee inventor Eli Whitney, gave
slavery a new life by spreading it beyond
the seaboard into the piedmont and across the
Gulf states. The cotton gin (or engine) facilitated
the process of removing the seeds from short-staple cotton. The essential raw material of the
cheap textiles industry, short-staple cotton could be grown throughout the region (unlike the
finer, luxury long-staple cotton which could only be grown in the richest, coastal soils of the
South). Cotton production in the older seaboard states soared eightfold over the next decade
and, more importantly, cotton cultivation began to spread across the lower South.
Rise in cotton production, 1800-1860
Slaveholders carved new plantations out of the richest soils of Alabama, Mississippi,
Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas,
Texas, pushing aside the yeomen farmers
who first opened these frontiers to white
settlement. By the 1840s, slavery had created
a far-flung Cotton Kingdom. This spread of
slave labor and cotton cultivation across the
lower South represented a crucial part of the
market revolution. The “planters” (those
slaveholders who owned large plantations
and slave work forces) focused on a single
crop, usually cotton (but in certain areas also
rice, sugar, tobacco, indigo, and hemp) and
often borrowed significant sums of money to
fund their operations. Thus planters were also
Spread of cotton and other plantations by 1860
at the center of the new, impersonal means of
exchange. As Baptist shows, promises to pay (that is, debt relationships) could become quite
distinct from concrete
forms of property and
real relationships
between people and
exist in a nebulous
realm of abstract values.
In a world, trust and
confidence in one’s
associates could become
both more important and
more elusive. And, of
Mock banknote from 1837, satirizing the collapse of the American
course, it could also
financial system. Library of Congress http://lccn.loc.gov/2008661306
result in treating human
beings as nothing more than sources of profit.