Jacksonian Democracy and the Market Revolution
This module is composed of three topics, the market revolution, the rise of Jacksonian
democracy, and antebellum reform. The module ends with a consideration of abolition
movement, thereby providing a transition to the final module on Disunion and Civil War.
After completing this module, you will be able to:
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Describe the relationship between economic change (the market revolution) and political
change (Jacksonian democracy)
Understand the connection between economic change (the market revolution) and social
reform (women's rights, abolitionism)
Analyze and interpret the ways in which the market revolution reshaped values and
attitudes toward land, labor, and human relationship.
Introduction to Market Revolution and Jacksonian Democracy:
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 selfsufficient farmer, new commercial classes of farmers and planters, merchants and
manufacturers, artisans and masters produced for an often far-flung and impersonal market.
Exchange, instead of focusing on family and neighbors within local communities as it once
had, now 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.
Entrepreneurial artisans reorganized their crafts and introduced a new wage relationship
which supplanted the old mutual obligations and duties of masters, journeymen, and
apprentices and generated 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 coincided with the expansion of the United States into the vast
trans-Appalachian lands. This expansion, and the often violent removal of the native
American inhabitants of these areas, added vast new economic resources and opportunities
to the market revolution. The market revolution also had a profound impact on American
politics, not least in adding more democratically-minded states to the Union. American
democracy, it has often been said, grew up with American capitalism. Some have argued
that democracy expanded in harmony with capitalism, but others 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.
Assigned Reading
The readings are a combination of primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are
from the time period under examination and can reveal the assumptions, motivations, interests,
and actions of historical actors or provide insight into the character of an historical period or the
way historical forces shaped individual lives. Such things as diaries and correspondence,
polemics, political platforms, laws, philosophical treatises, novels, films, as well as material
culture from architecture and urban design to consumer goods, photographs, popular music are
all examples of primary sources. Secondary sources are second-hand accounts and analyses of
historical events, often but not always written by professional historians and based on
examination of primary sources.
I recommend you first read the homework questions and the short essay question. Keep
these questions in mind. Then read the following materials in the order listed, taking notes
that will help you answer the questions. Read the study guide first, and keep it handy, then
the primary sources (in order listed), and then the secondary sources (in the order listed).
Finally, view the two, short narrated powerpoints (15 minutes each). Your answers to the
reading questions and your short essay should reflect your understanding of these materials.
Reading Questions (answer in roughly 100 words each):
1. How did Andrew Jackson’s war on privilege help accelerate the market revolution? Did
Americans differ in their views of the costs and benefits of the market revolution?
Richard Hofstadter, “Andrew Jackson and the Rise of Liberal Capitalism” in The American
Political Tradition (New York: Knopf, 1948), 44-66.
John D. Fairfield, “Creating Citizens in a Commercial Republic,” in The Public and Its
Possibilities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 33-40.
“The Tailors’ Strike of 1836,” from John R. Commons, A Documentary History of
American Industrial Society (New York: Russell and Russell, 1958), 314-322.
“A Frenchman’s Impressions of Early Cincinnati, c. 1833,” from Howard P. Chudacoff,
ed., Major Problems in American Urban History (Lexington, MA.: D. C. Heath, 1994), 6265.
“John James Audubon Depicts Squatters of the Mississippi River, 1808-1834” from Carolyn
Merchant, ed., Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington, MA.: D. C.
Heath, 1993), 148-151.
The essay by Richard Hofstadter was part of a book, published in 1948, in which Hofstadter
argued that all Americans generally agreed on the value of individualism, competition, and
capitalism (what became known as the "consensus" interpretation of American history).
Thus, for Hofstadter, the rise of Andrew Jackson is an example of the complementary
relationship between capitalism and democracy; they grew up together, the one encouraging
the other. As you will see when you read further, other historians such as Seller have
rejected that interpretation and treated American democracy as growing up at least partially
in opposition to capitalism. Fairfield’s essay reflects some of that new thinking. He argues
that at least some Americans worried that the market revolution would undercut or
compromise the commitment to a republican form of government. The three primary
documents suggest that one’s view of the market revolution might well depend on location,
as opportunity often appeared more abundant in the west than in the more established
eastern communities.
2. In what ways did the market revolution change how Americans thought of the land
and, more broadly, the environment”?
Charles Sellers, “Land and Market,” from The Market Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 3-33.
“James Fenimore Cooper Laments the ‘Wasty Ways’ of Pioneers, 1823,” from Carolyn
Merchant, ed., Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington, MA.: D. C.
Heath, 1993), 175-177
Americans React To Environmental Change: Short video presentation in three parts.
Writing in 1991, Charles Sellers saw the broad distribution of land as a major factor in the
rise of both democracy and capitalism in the United States. Land ownership gave the male
heads of households political status in the new republic, while their ownership of real
property gave them some allegiance to the principles of capitalism. But as market activity
spread and intensified, it undercut the localized and traditional economic and domestic
relationships that those same male heads of households had come to expect. Thus Sellers
sees democracy and capitalism as developing in tension with one another in this period. The
primary document offers a glimpse of a more aggressive attitude to the environment in the
Jacksonian period. The narrated presentation suggests that at least some Americans felt
troubled by the environmental changes going on around them.
3. How did the market revolution shape the lives of Native Americans and free AfricanAmericans in Georgia in the 1820s and 1830s? What accounts for the similarities and the
differences in the treatment of Indians as opposed to free African-Americans?
“Indian Removal” in Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative (New York: Norton, 2009)
Mary Young, “Racism in Red and Black: Indians and Other Free People of Color in Georgia
Law, Politics, and Removal Policy,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 (Fall 1989),
492-518.
The advance of the market revolution, and particularly the cotton kingdom, often
entailed the removal of Native Americans from their lands. Young’s essay examines
how the spread of the cotton kingdom led to restrictions on the choices of both native
Americans and free African –Americans. She concludes that a stubborn respect for
property rights made for a significant difference in the treatment of Indians as opposed
to “other free people of color.”
4. What is Baptist referring to when he uses the term “securitized slaves” and how does
that help explain the changing character of exchange in the market revolution, the Panic
of 1837, and the coming of the Civil War?
“The Panic of 1837” in Tindall and Shi, America: A Narrative (New York: Norton, 2009)
Edward E. Baptist, “Toxic Debt, Liar Loans, and Securitized Human Beings: The Panic of
1837 and the Fate of Slavery,” Common-Place 10 (April 2010) http://www.commonplace.org/vol-10/no-03/baptist/
In 1837, Americans experienced the first great financial panic in their history (although
there had been a small panic in 1819).Writing in the wake of the bursting of the housing
bubble in 2008, Baptist takes us back to an earlier American encounter with a financial
bubble, the Panic of 1837. He urges historians – and the public in general – to recognize that
financial speculation does not simply create fictitious wealth, as if financial speculation
simply involved words (“embarrassed” debtors whose “friends” would not sustain their
“credit”; this is what Baptist means by the “linguistic turn” in history, the tendency to
reduce everything to language). We treat financial speculation as “fiction” to our own
disadvantage, Baptist argues, because financial speculation generates and transfers real
wealth and those “transfers can incorporate great violence and disruption for some as the
cause of great profit for others.”
Baptist’s essay illuminates many of the themes of this module, including the spread of
impersonal forms of exchange, the westward expansion of the U.S. (including the internal
slave trade, that moved tens of thousands of slaves from the seaboard states to the Gulf
states), the role of the Bank of the United States in expanding slavery and, less successfully,
trying to temper speculative expansion, and the ultimate meaning of all this for enslaved
people in the cotton fields of Mississippi and the other Gulf states. This is perhaps the most
difficult reading of this module; as Baptist says, many of us would prefer not to think about
numbers. But the key for you is to recognize what is meant by securitizing slaves (creating
financial securities backed by a mortgage on enslaved human beings) and to understand at
least some of the consequences of that securitization.
5. How did the market revolution and the second great awakening help give rise to antebellum reform? Did antebellum reform change the lives of women and AfricanAmericans in significant ways?
John Fairfield, “The Second Great Awakening and Antebellum Reform” (unpublished
essay)
Ellen Dubois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 21-40
Declaration of Sentiments, Seneca Falls Convention, 1848:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/senecafalls.asp
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (New York: C. M. Saxton, 1859), 160-170:
https://archive.org/stream/twelveyearsslave00nort#page/162/mode/1up
These three readings discuss what is known as antebellum reform, a burst of reform energy
in the three decades before the beginning of the Civil War. Fairfield’s essay is a quick
overview, highlighting the connections between antebellum reform and the market
revolution. Dubois focuses on two of the most influential reform movements, women’s
rights and abolition, underscoring the connections between them. The two primary
documents concern the first women’s rights convention and the kidnapping of a free
northern black man.
Short Essay: Answer in a well-crafted essay of 750 to 1250 words: “History’s most
revolutionary force, the capitalist market, was wresting the American future from history’s
most conservative force, the land,” writes Charles Sellers in his influential study of The
Market Revolution (p. 4). What evidence is there to support Sellers’s contention that the
capitalist market proved to be a revolutionary force? What attitudes, values, practices,
and/or institutions did it change? Did the wide distribution – and availability – of land limit
and soften or extend and intensify those changes?