Chapter 6 - Land of Hope PDF

CHAPTER SIX FROM JEFFERSON TO JACKSON The Rise of the Common Man THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THOMAS JEFFERSON’S PRESIDENCY and the two Federalist presidencies that preceded it was as much a matter of style as of substance. Washington and Adams both believe...

CHAPTER SIX FROM JEFFERSON TO JACKSON The Rise of the Common Man THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THOMAS JEFFERSON’S PRESIDENCY and the two Federalist presidencies that preceded it was as much a matter of style as of substance. Washington and Adams both believed it important to surround the presidency with an aura of grandeur and high dignity; think, for example, of Washington’s insistence on traveling in a carriage drawn by a team of impressive white horses. Such elevated self-presentation was not for the sake of leaders’ egos but instead was meant to serve an important public purpose. But it troubled those of a more republican sensibility, who feared the infiltration of monarchical ideas and practices into the new office of the presidency. Jefferson accordingly chose to depart from his predecessors’ example. In pointed contrast with them, he decided to walk rather than ride to and from the Capitol for his inauguration, and he went on to establish a tone of low-key, unpretentious republican informality in his dress, his manners, and his way of entertaining visitors to the brand-new presidential residence known as the White House. But the Jefferson administration had its own kind of glamour. Jefferson was not an especially gifted public speaker, but he was well known for his dazzling intellect, personal magnetism, and singular charm, all which he put to effective use in intimate dinner parties at the White House with carefully chosen members of Congress, Federalist and Republican alike. On these occasions he would serve his guests the superb cuisine produced by his French chef and ply them with excellent wines, all the while engaging them in brilliant conversation, getting to know them better than they realized, and subtly working his influence on them. There was an iron fist beneath this velvet glove, however, for Jefferson was also a far more partisan figure than his predecessors. Indeed, he consciously embraced the role of party leader and, unlike Washington and Adams, appointed only men of his own party to the top cabinet positions. He excelled at this kind of strategic discipline, and over the two terms of his presidency, he enjoyed remarkable success in firmly establishing Republican dominance and putting the Federalist party out of business and on the road to extinction. Even so, despite his manifold skills, there was one area of the national government that eluded his control and remained in the hands of the Federalists: the judiciary. This was extremely frustrating to Jefferson. Like many of his Anti- Federalist and Republican allies, he had a visceral dislike for judges and the exercise of judicial power and authority. The judiciary was, after all, the least democratic branch of government, deliberately insulated from the influence of political majorities and more generally from the current wishes of the people, which could often be inflamed by fleeting passions or passing circumstances. Instead, it drew its authority from the objectivity and permanence of laws and precedents that living people had little or no role in formulating or approving. And that chafed at Jefferson’s democratic sensibility. “No society,” he wrote to Madison in 1789, indicating his skepticism about the Constitution that Madison himself had largely drafted, “can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.” In addition, Jefferson distrusted the tendency of judges to seek expanded influence, by using the questions before them to establish new precedents and extend their powers – or, in his colorful phrase, “to throw an anchor ahead, and grapple further hold for future advances of power” – all of it in ways designed to circumvent the will of the people as expressed in their democratic institutions. These complaints were not only abstract and philosophical. Once Jefferson became president, they became practical and immediate. He was infuriated that Adams had, in the last days of his presidency, appointed the Virginia Federalist John Marshall, a distant cousin for whom Jefferson had little personal or political use, as chief justice of the Supreme Court; and then Adams had gone on, by means of the hastily passed Judiciary Act of 1801, to create six new federal circuit courts and staff them entirely with Federalists, from the judges down to the clerks. Thanks to these rather crafty court-packing moves, the judiciary would remain a Federalist redoubt for years to come, with Marshall serving as an exceptionally commanding chief justice for an astonishing thirty-four years, until 1835. Much of the Court’s enduring influence owed to the brilliant and savvy leadership of Marshall, who was not widely read in the law and had no previous judicial experience but made up for those liabilities with his strong sense of the Court’s proper place in the constitutional order and his uncanny ability to maneuver events and cases toward the Court achieving that status. It was clear to a great many Americans after their experiences with the Alien and Sedition Acts that there needed to be some check on the executive and legislative branches, to serve as insurance against another such time when those two branches again combined to pursue an unconstitutional end or pursue a legitimate end by improper means. It seems fairly certain that the Framers had wanted for the Supreme Court to play such a role, but they failed to spell out exactly how the check would operate. Marshall succeeded in establishing just such a check, the Court’s right of judicial review, through the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, the first important case to come before his Court and a truly impressive example of Marshall’s skillfulness in pursuing his goals. It was a crafty decision, just the kind of judicial move that made Jefferson’s blood boil. The roots of the case involved Adams’s “midnight” appointments to the circuit courts that had so angered Jefferson. When he discovered that several of the documents commissioning justices of the peace in the District of Columbia had inadvertently not been sent out, even though they had been duly signed by Adams, Jefferson decided to hold on to them, thus effectively stopping the appointments themselves. In response, one of the appointees, William Marbury, sued for a Court order, or writ of mandamus, that would compel Madison, who served as Jefferson’s secretary of state, to deliver his commission.  This situation presented Marshall with a sticky problem. If he refused to issue the order, it would avoid a collision with the new administration, but it would appear that he was kowtowing to Jefferson, a perception that would set a bad precedent, greatly damaging the prestige and independence of the Court and undermining the separation of powers, even as it deprived the judiciary of another Federalist judge. And besides, Marbury had a rather strong and substantial claim to the position, which fact made the avoidance strategy seem all the more untenable. But if Marshall agreed to issue the order to grant Marbury his commission, it was likely that Madison would ignore him, and the mood of the country, still very sour toward the Federalists, would likely back Madison up. Such a turn of events would be a disaster for the Court, because it would amount to an advertisement of the Court’s impotence and yet another way of undermining the separation of powers. What, then, was he to do? The strategy at which he arrived was ingenious. First, he argued that yes, Marbury had a right to his commission, under his reading of the thirteenth article of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which had set up the federal court system in the first place. But the article that Marbury invoked was, Marshall argued, unconstitutional. Congress could not legally grant the Supreme Court the power to issue writs of mandamus. This problem of jurisdiction in turn meant that the law Marbury was invoking was null and void and could not be used to further his claims. Marbury therefore would not be able to receive his commission. The brilliance of this solution might not be immediately apparent. But it is important to keep in mind that the work of courts, and especially courts of appeal, is built around the authority of legal precedents. And like a chess master who sacrifices his pawns to get at his opponent’s queen, Marshall sacrificed Marbury’s commission to take possession of something much larger. He in effect refrained from pursuing a small and unimportant potential Federalist gain (Marbury as a single Federalist judge) in exchange for a much larger gain: establishing a precedent that could be used again and again, because it served to underscore the independent power of the Supreme Court to rule an act of Congress unconstitutional. He gave Jefferson the decision Jefferson wanted, but he did so by means of reasoning that Jefferson did not want at all. But there was nothing that Jefferson could do about it, since the actual result of the decision was completely in line with his wishes. It was the reasoning, not the result, that would prove to be consequential in the end, allowing the case to establish a vital argument for limited government. The precedent and long usage of Marbury placed a very important circumscription on the power of Congress. Talk about throwing an anchor ahead, and grappling toward future advances of power! And this gain was made all the more annoying to Jefferson because of the Federalist domination of the courts. Jefferson was not through fighting yet and went on to resist judicial Federalism by pressing for the impeachment and removal of judges whom he considered particularly noxious and partisan. But that campaign failed miserably – Jefferson badly overreached in trying to remove Samuel Chase, a revolutionary-era patriot and associate justice of the Supreme Court – and with only one exception, the Federalist judges remained in place. Marshall was left largely unscathed and, through a series of landmark decisions passed down during his many years in office, was able to strengthen the hand of the Court and of the central government – notwithstanding the dominance of Jefferson’s party and the Federalists’ banishment from executive and legislative power. He would manage this by proceeding in a steady, methodical, case-by-case way, along the path that he had already pioneered with Marbury v. Madison. In Fletcher v. Peck (1810), the Court established that a state law could be declared unconstitutional. In Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816), the Court rejected the idea of a compact theory of union and established its jurisdiction over state courts on matters of constitutional interpretation. In Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), it declared that the Constitution prevented a state from altering a contract for a private corporation. In McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), the Court forbade a state to tax a federal institution (in this case, the Bank of the United States) and confirmed the constitutionality of the Bank – and, in the process, once again rejected the “compact theory” of the Constitution’s origins, resting them instead upon the sovereignty of the people acting in aggregate. He thus endorsed a strong doctrine of the federal government’s “implied” powers under the “necessary and proper” clause. In Cohens v. Virginia (1821), the Court established the principle that the Supreme Court could review a state court’s decision on any matters touching upon the power of the national government. And in Gibbons v. Ogden (1821), the Court asserted the federal government’s primacy in the regulation of interstate commerce. So even despite his popularity, Jefferson had to accept a measure of compromise with the opposition on the Court, just as he had accepted most of the Hamiltonian economic program to achieve national peace. Jefferson came into office with his own vision of the American future and well-developed ideas and firm convictions about the right ordering of political society. But like every American president in the nation’s history, he had to adjust his ideas to the realities of practical politics in a complex and changing world. Nor were these aspects of the Federalist legacy the only ways that Jefferson’s administration had to depart sharply from Jefferson’s principles to govern effectively. Perhaps the single greatest achievement of his first administration, and quite possibly of his presidency, was the American acquisition in 1803 of the Louisiana Territory, more than eight hundred thousand square miles of land west of the Mississippi River, an act that more than doubled the size of the country and at the same time removed the possibility of a dangerous foreign presence at the mouth of a great river crucial to western commerce. It opened the way for the United States to go from being a coastal nation to a sprawling continental one. But it was also an act that involved Jefferson in what was arguably a violation of the Constitution – and certainly a violation of Jefferson’s own understanding of the Constitution and of the principles of constitutional interpretation, as he had insisted upon them in his fierce battles with Hamilton during the Washington administration. The lands in question had in 1800 been secretly reacquired by the French from the Spanish, reflecting Napoleon’s interest in possibly reviving the French empire in the New World. This possibility rightly alarmed Jefferson, and he sent his protégé James Monroe, then governor of Virginia, to join ambassador Robert R. Livingston in France, with authorization from Jefferson to spend up to $10 million to purchase the city of New Orleans, which controlled commerce on the Mississippi and thus represented a potential chokepoint for American trade. WILLIAM MORRIS, LICENSED UNDER CC BY-SA 4.0 The Louisiana Purchase, superimposed upon the boundaries of the present-day states. At the time of the acquisition of Louisiana, most of the area to the south and west was owned by Spain. Monroe joined Livingston in Paris in April 1803. Much to the two American ministers’ surprise, they found that the French had experienced a change of heart about reviving their North American empire. Given Napoleon’s inability to put down a bloody slave revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), and his need for money to support an impending war with Great Britain, he was only too happy to unload the territory at a bargain price. They offered to sell all the Louisiana Territory, a huge swath of land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, extending north from the Gulf of Mexico to present-day Montana and west as far as Colorado and Wyoming, for a mere $15 million, or 60 million francs. Livingston and Monroe did not hesitate. Even though it meant exceeding their instructions, they said yes to the offer and signed a treaty. Clearly they were right to do so; it was the deal of the century, if not the millennium. But it left Jefferson with a dilemma. He and nearly all Americans clearly saw the benefit of the Louisiana Purchase to the nation’s future. For Jefferson, who wanted the United States to stay a primarily agricultural polity as long as possible, the purchase was a godsend, making available vast tracts of land that could enable the nation’s development to take just such an agrarian track, and to do so at negligible cost. He could not say no. There was a problem, though: there was no provision in the Constitution authorizing a president to add new territory to the United States by the purchase of land. Strict-constructionist Jefferson was now caught between high principle and high-stakes governance. It would have been unthinkable to pass up this offer – but how could it be justified within a strict-constructionist reading of the Constitution? He dithered for a while and tried to come up with a constitutional amendment, either before or after the Senate ratified the treaty, but finally concluded that the best path ahead would be to ignore the “metaphysical subtleties” of the issue; “the less we say about constitutional difficulties the better.” Congress ratified the treaty, and that was that. Jefferson would cruise to a landslide reelection in 1804, and his popularity would soar as never before. Observe the many layers of irony here. Just as Jefferson consolidated the Hamiltonian economic program rather than reversing it, so too he more than reinforced the Hamiltonian interpretation of the Constitution, rather than reversing it, by means of the single greatest exercise of executive power in the country’s history to that point. And at the same time, he consolidated his own power, and the power of his party, for a generation to come. The fortunes of the Federalist Party sank further and further – even though some of the most consequential actions taken by Jefferson, actions that greatly bolstered his popularity, would seem to have supported their principles far more than they did his. It would not be the last time that a president would find it necessary to consolidate and secure some of the very initiatives and ideas he had opposed before taking office – not out of cynicism or opportunism but out of political and pragmatic necessity. It only added to the irony that a bitter rump group of defeated Federalists in New England, known as the Essex Junto (because so many of them were from Essex County, Massachusetts), began hatching schemes to secede from the Union and tried, unsuccessfully, to get Hamilton to join them. Federalists as secessionists and Republicans as nationalists: the world did seem to be turning upside down again. But with the acquisition of the vast Louisiana Territory, it was as if a page of history was being turned and a new chapter begun, with a whole rich field of activity in the American interior being opened up for the American people. Jefferson, whose lively intellectual interests included a passion for scientific knowledge and research, could hardly wait to find out what mysteries and wonders awaited the nation in its new uncharted territory. In fact, he had already been planning a transcontinental expedition even before the chance to acquire all of Louisiana fell in his lap; among other things, he hoped to find a waterway linkage between the Missouri and Columbia rivers, yet another iteration of the old dream of a Northwest Passage. He had already been organizing an exploratory mission, called the Corps of Discovery Expedition, led by his private secretary Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark, both of them army officers with a record of frontier service, to study the area’s topography and animal and plant life, establish relations with the indigenous peoples, and inventory the available natural resources – and to deliver a full and comprehensive report of their findings, complete with maps, sketches, and journals. They set out from St. Louis in May 1804, a party of some fifty men in a large keelboat and two dugout canoes, and, after traveling up the Missouri River, crossing the Continental Divide, and proceeding to the Pacific Ocean by way of the Columbia River, reached the site of present-day Portland, Oregon, in November 1805. After accumulating an amazing record of adventures, and an even more amazing treasury of information and artifacts relating to the lands through which they had passed, they finally returned to St. Louis in September 1806 under national acclaim, their assigned mission more than accomplished. The national celebration attending the triumphant return of Lewis and Clark underscored the extent to which the exploration and settlement of the vast and ever-growing American interior would become an important focus of the nation’s energies in the years of the nineteenth century. But there were still nagging questions of foreign relations to be resolved before that focus could be brought into a commanding role. Most of these problems revolved around the American effort to protect its neutral status and assert the principle of free trade in the larger world. First, Jefferson sought to reverse his predecessors’ practice of paying tribute to pirates from the Barbary States of North Africa as a way of buying protection for American shipping in the Mediterranean. By dispatching a small fleet of the U.S. Navy to the region, he gained a measure of respect and protection for American trade in the area. Much more difficult were the problems with the British. The United States still found itself caught in the middle of the struggle between the British and the French, at a time when British control of the seas and French control of the landmass of Continental Europe were near- complete and each nation was trying to use economic warfare to cripple or disable the other. The American doctrine of neutral rights, permitting the United States to trade with all belligerents equally, was not tenable under the circumstances. The British especially made a mockery of American neutral claims with the practice of seizing American sailors whom they claimed to be British subjects and “impressing” them into service in the British Navy. Like Washington and Adams before him, Jefferson did not want war, and in fact his reductions in military spending had made the weak American military even weaker. As an alternative, he persuaded Congress to pass the Embargo Act in 1807, which prohibited American merchant ships from sailing into foreign ports. He hoped that British dependence on American goods and shipping would force their hand and lead to a peaceful settlement of the issue. But unfortunately, the embargo backfired disastrously and caused far more hardship at home than it did to Britain, which was easily able to find substitutes for the lost American trade. After causing a near- depression in the New England states, Jefferson was succeeding in nothing so much as giving the Federalists, and the Essex Junto, a new lease on life by rallying public opposition to a much-hated law. Finally, as one of his last acts as president, he called for the repeal of the embargo. Jefferson could have run for election a third time; there was no constitutional prohibition against it. But he believed in the importance of following Washington’s example of retiring from office after two terms, as a practice befitting a genuine republican form of government. Even if he had not believed that, though, he would have been likely to retire. Four years after winning reelection by a lopsided margin, his fortunes had turned for the worse, and he was leaving office a weary man, debt-ridden, exhausted, defeated by seemingly insoluble problems, and overwhelmed with rheumatism and persistent headaches and other physical ailments. He came to refer to his presidential experience as “splendid misery” and even seemed to wonder for a time whether he had been miscast for his role in politics, whether he was made for a more contemplative existence. He wrote to a French economist friend just before the end of his second term, “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived, have forced me to … commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions. I thank God for the opportunity of retiring from them.” But the sixty-five-year-old Jefferson was irrepressible, and his energies were soon restored by leaving politics behind and returning to his beloved home of Monticello outside Charlottesville. Not only he did he busy himself with scientific work, one of his life’s unalloyed joys, but he would go on to establish the University of Virginia, an important step toward the fulfillment of his grand democratic dream of a free public education for all comers, irrespective of their social class or economic level. If there was a central feature of Jeffersonian democracy, it was this belief in education as the great equalizer, the force that could potentially raise any man to the level of any other – and education as the essential factor in forming citizens who would be capable of self-rule. “The qualifications for self government in society,” he wrote to Edward Everett in 1824, “are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training.” Or, as he had said several years before, in rather more ominous tones, “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” With the election of 1808 and Jefferson’s retirement, the problem of the British was now passed to his successor, James Madison, whose two terms as president would be dominated by that problem and would, despite all efforts to the contrary, result in war. And as had so often been the case before, the sources of conflict were the violation of neutral rights at sea, which now involved the French as well as the British, and conflicts with the British on the western American frontier. This time around, however, things were different. For one thing, the diminutive, reflective, and soft-spoken Madison was no match for the impatient forces that were gathering on all sides and making the movement toward war nearly irresistible. Madison found himself unable to restrain the British, unable to arrive at a coherent and effective trade policy with the warring parties, and unable to control expansionist and insurgent forces at home. Settlers and land speculators on the frontier continued to press for expansion and provoked resentment and violence among the Indian tribes, who were losing more and more of their land. In response, the Shawnee warrior leader Tecumseh attempted to unite all the tribes east of the Mississippi into an Indian confederacy. Indian attacks were blamed on the British influence, operating especially from the Canadian province of Ontario. And a group of young and intensely nationalistic Republican congressmen, dubbed the “War Hawks,” would be satisfied with nothing less than an invasion of Canada. Madison was overwhelmed. Thus, despite the continued low level of American military preparedness, Madison yielded to the accumulating pressure and reluctantly asked for a declaration of war on June 1, 1812. Ironically, the British had decided at the same time to revoke the orders in council that had sustained their interference with American shipping. But thanks to the difficulties of transatlantic communication, their decision was not known until it was too late; war had been declared, and the requirements of war had taken on a momentum of their own. About the war itself, the best that can be said for the United States is that it was lucky to get out of it intact. Had the British not been preoccupied with the war against Napoleon in Europe, the war would almost certainly have had a catastrophic effect upon the Americans. Indeed, after Napoleon’s defeat in 1814, the British began to win a string of victories, including the capture and burning of Washington, D.C., that could easily have led to the war being a humiliating and permanently damaging setback for the United States. In addition, the war was deeply unpopular in the Federalist northern states, where it was disparaged as “Mr. Madison’s War,” and very nearly led a convention of New England states meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, in December 1814 to consider seriously the possibility of secession from the Union. Fortunately, by then, there had been a few significant American triumphs, notably the defense of Fort McHenry in Baltimore against British bombardment, where the proud survival of the American flag inspired a lawyer named Francis Scott Key to write the lyrics to what would become “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the eventual national anthem. More importantly, a war-weary Britain was ready to call it quits and find a settlement that would save face for all. The Treaty of Ghent in December 1814 was the result, a treaty that simply restored the status quo at the war’s start without making any determination about neutral rights or any of the other questions that had been at issue. There were no territorial concessions on either side. It was to be as if nothing had happened. Of course, with Napoleon out of the picture, the very reason for the struggles over neutral rights at sea had largely disappeared. But there was one unexpected bright spot for the Americans, again a result of the slow speed of transatlantic communication. A British force had been sent to New Orleans to capture the city and cut off the West from the rest of the country. It was met by General Andrew Jackson and his motley force of frontier militiamen, pirates, free blacks, and French Creoles. The British regulars regarded the Americans with contempt and made a frontal assault directed at them on January 8, 1815. But Jackson’s men, who included some highly skilled marksmen and artillerymen, had managed to create well- fortified positions, from which they were able to rain down deadly fire upon the British and defeat them resoundingly. While U.S. forces suffered little more than a hundred killed, wounded, and missing, British losses exceeded twenty-five hundred. It was a smashing, thoroughly impressive American victory, perhaps the most impressive such in the nation’s history to date. For many Americans, the glory of it more than made up for all the humiliations that had come before. Even so, the great victory at New Orleans came after the peace treaty had been signed at Ghent. which meant that it could not have influenced the treaty deliberations. But that did not mean that it was of little importance – far from it. For one thing, the resounding victory ensured that the treaty would be ratified quickly by both governments; there would be no dilly-dallying or revisiting of the issues. But more importantly, this conspicuous win allowed the United States to come out of an ill-considered, badly waged, and carelessly misconceived war – a war that began as a result of miscommunication, teetered on the edge of debacle, and whose most significant battle occurred after the war had ended – with something to be proud of, with demonstrated military prowess and a greatly heightened sense of national pride – not to mention a new national hero. There was yet another consequence. It is worth noting that the Republicans and Federalists once again had switched roles, the former playing the role of the vigorous nationalists and the latter taking the role of those advocating for states’ rights and strict construction of the Constitution – much as it had happened before, at the end of Jefferson’s administration. This time around, however, the Federalists’ position assumed a darker countenance than before. It would become associated in the public mind with the wartime disloyalty of the Hartford Convention, a near-treasonous stigma from which a once-great party would never recover. Jackson’s great triumph at New Orleans was the icing on that unlucky cake, and the many songs, speeches, celebrations, and commemorations of that victory nearly all contained a rebuke, open or implicit, of the Federalists. It soon became clear that the Federalist Party was perhaps the greatest casualty of the War of 1812. Its days as a national party were numbered. It managed to field a presidential candidate in 1816, but that would be its last such effort. The “Virginia Dynasty” that had dominated the presidency since 1789, interrupted only by Adams’s single term, would continue with little or no opposition. James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820, and by 1824, the Federalist Party had collapsed altogether. With its collapse came also an end to the first party system of the United States and a period of complete Republican dominance. Thus the War of 1812, for all of its military inconclusiveness, had major effects on the domestic politics and economy of the United States. With the war’s conclusion, the nation was soon on the road to being largely free of its chronic entanglements in European affairs and would be able to concentrate – at last! – on the pursuit of its own internal ambitions without major distractions, following the path laid out in Washington’s Farewell Address. A few issues remained to tidy up before that objective could be reached. A series of agreements with the British in the immediate wake of the war brought resolution to nagging issues relating to the demilitarization of the Great Lakes, fishing rights in Canadian waters, and boundary questions in the Pacific Northwest. Then, through a combination of diplomatic skill and aggressive military action by the now-celebrated General Andrew Jackson, the United States was able to acquire all of Florida from Spain in 1821. There could be no doubt: it had taken nearly a half-century, but the United States was at last moving into a position where it could exert control over its part of the world. These changed circumstances would be expressed as U.S. policy two years later as part of President Monroe’s last message to Congress in December 1823, in a statement that came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. The gist of the Doctrine was fairly simple: the western hemisphere was henceforth to be considered off limits to further European colonization, and any effort to the contrary, including European meddling or subversion in the newly independent former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America, would be regarded as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States” and “dangerous to our peace and safety.” The western hemisphere had been a battleground of the European powers for centuries; it was now time for that to come to an end, as the New World ascended to a status equal to, but independent of, the Old World. The statement also included a promise not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of the European powers; the United States would stay clear of European wars and would not meddle in European internal affairs, just as it expected Europe to stay out of American affairs. Responding in 1821 to a request for help from Greek revolutionaries rising up to fight the Ottoman Empire, John Quincy Adams proclaimed that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own…. Her glory is not dominion, but liberty.” The Monroe Doctrine, the drafting of which was Adams’s handiwork as Monroe’s secretary of state, was in one sense merely a codification of the American doctrine of neutrality toward the European powers. As such, it looked back to Washington’s Farewell Address. But in a practical political sense, it was rather daring, even presumptuous, akin to a poker-player’s bluff. Such a proclamation, after all, could have no standing in international law or treaty arrangements, so other nations were not required to respect it. And the United States lacked the capacity to enforce it on its own, had it been challenged to do so. Such a challenge would likely have exposed the Doctrine as sheer bluster, and sent the Americans scurrying to the arms of the British Navy for protection. But timing is everything in history, and the Doctrine was pronounced at a moment when the European powers had no desire to undertake any such challenge, so the principles it asserted were allowed to stand. Like Marbury v. Madison, the Monroe Doctrine established a vital and enduring principle at just the right moment, when it was least likely to be successfully challenged. The Monroe Doctrine would go on to become a cornerstone of American foreign policy, its influence lasting through the high tide of European colonialism and well into the twentieth century. In addition, it gave sharp definition to a distinctively American way of understanding the relationship of the Old World and the New World, asserting that the former’s political systems were “essentially different” from that of the latter. The position was not new. It had already been limned by Washington and Jefferson, and one can find hints of it even earlier, in the pre-national heritage of Winthrop’s Puritanism and, of course, in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, which asserted the American strand’s “separate and equal station.” Adams and Monroe had now merely given it a more codified status. In addition, it would presume an American dominance within the western hemisphere that also would continue to stand, even as it became a chronic point of friction with Latin American countries. Most of all, it expressed a sense of freedom that the country would finally be able to pursue its own destiny, develop and flex its own muscles, and embody more fully the fresh hope for renewal that had always been, since long before even Winthrop’s time, the defining aspect of that westward magnetic pull that animated the American enterprise, now free (at least for a time) from compromising and distracting Old World concerns. A strong sense of national identity was beginning to permeate every sphere of American life, from the surging economy to the rising sense of America as a distinct, if not yet fully realized, culture of democracy. The postwar economy was growing into a truly national economy. In the years immediately after the War of 1812, Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky proposed what became known as the American System as an instrument for fostering economic growth. Although Clay, like most Kentuckians, was a member of Jefferson’s Republican Party, his ideas unmistakably echoed Hamilton’s, calling for protective tariffs, the rechartering of the National Bank, and internal improvements, which mean what we today might call “infrastructure”: roads, canals, and other improvements designed to create an ever more efficient system of national transportation. The idea of federal support for internal improvements, while extremely popular in the west, was too controversial in the older eastern states and did not enjoy much success until the twentieth century. In 1817, President Madison vetoed a bill that would have established a fund for internal improvements, finding the idea to be attractive but unconstitutional. The federal and state governments provided indirect support to private concerns trying in various ways to improve transportation, but only the Old National Road, which ran from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, in what was then western Virginia, and eventually west to Vandalia, Illinois, was constructed by the U.S. government. (Today that same road is U.S. Route 40 and has been designated the Historic National Road.) So the building of turnpikes and other internal improvements would be chiefly the responsibility of states and private concerns for the foreseeable future. That did not slow things down appreciably, because there were many such projects being built, with networks of privately funded toll roads arising to connect the nation’s major cities. There was also a veritable boom in the construction of inland waterways such as New York’s 363-mile-long Erie Canal, completed in 1825, a remarkable engineering feat strongly supported by Governor De Witt Clinton, who predicted that such a canal would make New York City “the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations…. [T]he whole of Manhattan, covered with habitations and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city.” Rarely has a politician’s prophecy been more grandiose, and never more on target. The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to New York City, the economies of western farms with those of eastern port cities, and ignited a period of intense economic growth and fervent emulative canal building, often in the form of public–private partnerships, all over the country. The cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and other towns along the canal flourished, and New York rose to become “the Empire State.” As Governor Clinton predicted, New York City, the eastern terminus for most of the canal’s traffic, secured its emerging status as the nation’s largest city and greatest commercial center. Nor was that all; the first railroad lines were built in the 1820s and, by the 1830s, were beginning to give the canals a run for their money, transforming western towns like Chicago into major centers of commerce and population. That was a trend that would only continue and grow as the century rolled on. And in tandem with these improvements in transportation, a cluster of inventions and other innovations helped to spur economic growth. Some of these were products of the nation’s first years, whose potential was finally being realized in the freer and more energetic postwar environment. There was immigrant Samuel Slater’s development in the late eighteenth century of the factory system, which revolutionized textile manufacturing in New England; Eli Whitney’s invention in 1793 of the cotton gin, which made possible the development of cotton as a highly profitable commercial export commodity; John Fitch’s and Robert Fulton’s pioneering development of steamboat technologies and services; Oliver Evans’s mechanization of flour milling; and the list goes on. And the innovations were as much legal and cultural as they were technological. Changes in state laws fostered entrepreneurship. They made possible the raising of large amounts of capital by corporations through stock sales, an important development because the burgeoning industrial economy needed large amounts of capital, if it was to finance the construction and operation of expensive factories, such as the textile mills that were making New England a preeminent textile manufacturer, as well as the canals, roads, and railroads that would be the veins and arteries of the emerging national economy. The cumulative effect of all these developments, accompanied as they were by the country’s rapid population growth (from four million in 1790 to almost thirteen million in 1830, at a steady rate of around 35 percent) and the physical expansion of the American range of settlement, involved something more than the increase of the gross domestic product or some other purely economic index. It was causing a more subtle, more profound change in the national self- image. Jefferson had hoped for an America of independent and self- sufficient farmers, who would live in sturdy, dignified, and self-reliant separateness from one another. But the America coming into being was being knit together, bit by bit, piece by piece, with every road that was constructed, every canal that was dug, every new city that established itself, and every product that found its way into a growing national marketplace – including the specialized cash-crop farming that was directed toward that market rather than toward providing for the subsistence of a single household. It was becoming as much a land of growing economic interdependence as one of sturdy self- reliance. All these things helped make possible the coming together of a national spirit. But as the nation at long last turned its gaze inward, and westward, it soon saw, gazing back at it, the great problem it had failed to resolve in Philadelphia in 1787. The expansion of the nation inevitably raised the problem anew by forcing a decision about whether slavery would be permitted in the nation’s newly created states. Each decision would entail, in some measure, revalidating the original decision, an act that became steadily harder for some and more inescapable for others. But at least there had been an effort, ever since Vermont joined the union as a free state and Kentucky as a slave state, to keep the number of northern free states and southern slave states in balance. By 1819, there were eleven of each category, so that members in the Senate would be equal, and each section had the power to check the other. This was not a solution to the problem; it was at best a way of holding the problem at bay and keeping the growth of slavery within bounds. Then the territory of Missouri applied to be admitted as a state, and the problem was immediately elevated to crisis level. Thanks to the preponderance of land-seeking southern migrants to the Missouri Territory, who had brought their slaves with them, slavery was already well established in Missouri, numbering about 15 percent of the population, and there was no doubt that Missouri would seek to be admitted as a slave state. But doing so would disturb the balance of states. NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, LIONEL PINCUS AND PRINCESS FIRYAL MAP DIVISION The United States circa 1827 by New York mapmaker Amos Lay. What ensued were a series of fiery debates in Congress over the merits of Missouri’s case and whether restrictions on slavery could be imposed by Congress as a condition of its admission to the Union. Yet the debates also touched upon profound philosophical matters, becoming the most important and far-reaching debates about slavery since the time of the Constitution’s drafting and adoption. They illustrated the gap that was opening up between men like Senator Rufus King of Massachusetts, who spoke on behalf of the Declaration’s “law of nature” that “makes all men free,” and John Randolph of Virginia, who dismissed the Declaration of Independence as a “fanfaronade of abstractions.”  The philosophical differences could not be resolved then. But the immediate problem was solved by a compromise; the state of Maine, carved out of the northern part of Massachusetts, would be admitted as a free state, and slavery would be excluded from the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30′ line, which was Missouri’s southern boundary extended westward. Thus the senatorial balance would be maintained, and this sudden flashpoint would die down, for the time being, with the 36° 30′ line providing a rule by which the rest of the Louisiana Territory could be organized on the question. But a problem deferred is not a problem solved, and wise observers knew it. Nor was it possible to have the easy confidence of some of the Framers in Philadelphia, such as Sherman and Ellsworth, that slavery was an institution already on the path to extinction. Thomas Jefferson, writing to his friend John Holmes from his peaceful Monticello retirement, confessed that “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence.” He never spoke more darkly, or more prophetically. And he went on to express his sense of the difficulty of moving past the issue with a colorful image: “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” Over the course of the five presidential elections after the epochal election of 1800, the nation’s first two-party system had gradually disappeared, as the Federalist Party disintegrated and Jefferson’s Republican Party became utterly dominant: so much so that James Monroe would run for his second term as president in 1820 without facing any organized opposition. It was nicknamed the Era of Good Feelings, and certainly it was a good time for the triumphant Republicans and a relatively peaceful time for the nation. For a stretch of twenty-four years, or six elections, every president had been from Virginia, and each of Jefferson’s successors had served as secretary of state to the man who had preceded him. The process was so orderly as to resemble the workings of a mechanism. Such stability and party unity could not last forever, though, especially not in such a dynamic and ever-expanding country. Madison himself had explained why it could not last, in his insightful Federalist 10: the causes of faction were sowed in the hearts of men and in the divergent material interests that came with their diverse situations in life. The year 1824 would mark the point of departure in the direction of an entirely new kind of politics, catalyzed by a bitterly contested presidential election. The election would be fought out among four candidates, all of them Republicans: John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, William Crawford, and the political outsider, Andrew Jackson. The results were accordingly chaotic; Jackson seemed to have the most popular votes and votes in the Electoral College, but he did not have a majority of either. That meant that the House of Representatives would have to choose the president from among the top three candidates. Henry Clay had been eliminated as the low vote-getter, but he had great influence in the House and could use his influence to turn the vote in the direction of either Adams or Jackson (Crawford had to withdraw due to health problems). When Clay chose Adams, which made possible his narrow election, and then was subsequently selected by Adams to be his secretary of state, Jackson and his followers were outraged. “Corrupt bargain!” they cried. That accusation seemed to stick with Adams for the next four years of what must be deemed an unsuccessful presidency. Adams himself was a remarkable man, as befitted his status as the son of the second president, a man of aristocratic bearing, high moral probity, and superb intelligence who had been an outstanding secretary of state for James Monroe. Few men would seem to have been better equipped for the presidency. But he had the misfortune to rise to the office at a moment when his own party was fracturing, and he lacked the personality and the political acumen to adjust to the democratizing times. He would be easily and soundly defeated by Jackson in their 1828 rematch, by which time Jackson had rallied around himself a new political party, drawing on the boisterous political energies of the West and South and a growing spirit of egalitarian democracy in the land. He called the party the Democratic Republicans, but it would become known as the Democratic Party, the ancestor of today’s party of that same name.  It was an ugly campaign, in which those running Adams’s campaign mocked Jackson as an uncouth and ill-tempered brawler who was pitifully ignorant about the issues, and the Jacksonians returned the favor by depicting Adams as a haughty pseudo- aristocratic parasite who had been corrupted by his time in the courts of Europe and felt nothing but disdain for the common man. But Jackson had the advantage of being a certifiable military hero, whose rise to glory had coincided with the surge of American nationalism and whose appeal to the common man had coincided with the rising tide of an ever-expanding electorate, which was broadening year by year to include more and more eligible voters – not just landholders but workers, artisans, tenant farmers, and others who had previously been excluded. In a sense, the unseemliness of the campaign and the broadening of the electorate were related to one another. Politics would be different in the Age of the Common Man. Previous campaigns had always been waged between candidates drawn from the upper classes; there was a more decorous “politics of deference” operating, in which potential officeholders were always drawn from the “better sort,” those who were well-born, refined, and educated, and the voters to whom they had to appeal were drawn from a similarly limited spectrum of the citizenry. The broadening of the franchise meant that politicians needed to find a way to appeal directly to relatively new voters who had not been accustomed to being consulted that way in the political process. The results were bound to be visceral and messy, and popular campaigning was often as much a matter of popular entertainment as of serious discussion of issues, with parades, marching bands, and rallies featuring free food and drink. The worst thing a candidate could do would be to come off as aristocratic. The chaotic scene at Jackson’s inauguration on March 4, 1829, is legendary in this regard, with the crowds of his rowdy, unkempt admirers lining Pennsylvania Avenue and later thronging into the White House, tracking mud on the rugs and standing on the chairs to get a glimpse of their man. And to be sure, Jackson was unlike any major candidate ever seen before in American presidential history. He was a self-made, brawling, dueling, and tobacco-chewing frontiersman who had come from hardscrabble beginnings and had risen through the ranks of society without the benefit of a college education to become a wealthy, accomplished, and powerful man, a national hero, while never losing his common touch, or his rough manners, or his ability to project sympathy for those of lower station. John Quincy Adams disparaged him as a “barbarian,” but his many admirers begged to disagree. This combination of traits not only suggests the breadth of his political appeal but points to one of the chief ways that Jacksonian democracy differed from Jeffersonian democracy. If Jefferson had believed that education could raise the commonest man to the same station as the well-born, then Jackson believed that the common man was already where he needed to be and needed no raising – that his innate capacity for deciding questions of politics and economy on his own was sufficient, the hallmark of democracy. Indeed, Jackson can be said to be America’s first leader deserving of the title populist, meaning that opposition to (and resentment of) rule by privileged elite classes was one of the most important forces behind his political appeal. In some respects, one could argue that Jackson’s symbolic significance as the representation of a new Age of the Common Man turned out to be far greater than his actual importance as president. He came into office without great plans, and much of his achievement was negative, meaning that it consisted in preventing things from happening: by his frequent use of the veto power (he vetoed more bills than all six of his predecessors combined), his firm rejection of the idea of nullification (of which more in a moment), and his fierce opposition to the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. In many respects, his political instincts represented a throwback to the views of Jefferson regarding strict construction of the Constitution and limited government, and Jackson had a particularly strong animus toward the alliance of government and business, manifested in his near-maniacal hatred for the Bank. But he was inconsistent, sometimes favoring internal improvements like the National Road and sometimes opposing them, as in his veto of the Maysville Road bill (which just happened to involve a project entirely within Kentucky, the state of his hated rival Clay).  But Jackson brought several interesting ideas to the presidency. He rightly identified the president as the only individual in the entire American system of constitutional government who could be said to be the representative of all of the people, a fact that he took to mean that he also was meant to be the guardian and protector of the common man against the abusive power of the wealthy, powerful, and well connected. This was an important step in the further definition of the presidential office. He also insisted, consistent with his confidence in the untutored abilities of the common man, upon the principle of “rotation” in staffing his administration, which meant that the terms of officeholders would be strictly limited. Rotation in office would, he believed, ensure that the federal government did not develop a parasitic class of corrupt civil servants who were set apart from the people and could make hay out of their monopolistic control of special knowledge. His sentiments marked one of the earliest expressions of what would become the populist strain in American political culture. Jackson also played a key role in handling the eruption of a key constitutional issue in the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33, a conflict that has often been seen, rightly, as a prelude to the Civil War. The immediate controversy revolved around the federal use of protective tariffs, specifically the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832, which many Southerners opposed as unfair and injurious to their interests. But the underlying issue was whether the individual states had the right or the ability to set aside, or nullify, acts of the national government, if they deemed those acts to be unconstitutional. It marked a collision point between the enduring idea of state sovereignty and the idea of federal supremacy, both of which ideas the Constitution had sought to enshrine to the extent possible, but whose prerogatives were bound to come into conflict. The crisis opened up a split between Jackson and Vice President (later Senator) John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the latter becoming the most articulate defender of the concept of state nullification. The concept was not new; we have already seen it floated in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 by Jefferson and Madison, and it could easily be derived from the “compact” theory of the Constitution’s origins. But Calhoun developed the idea much further in his 1828 South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing that a state had the right to judge the extent of its own powers and the allocation of power between the state and the federal government. “The right of judging, in such cases,” he remarked, “is an essential attribute of sovereignty, of which the States cannot be divested without losing their sovereignty itself.” Hence, he concluded, the states must be deemed to have a “veto,” or a “right of interposition,” with respect to acts of the federal government that the state believes encroach on its rights. Otherwise, its sovereignty would be a sham. It was a powerful argument, but others disagreed. Senator Daniel Webster argued that the matter had been settled definitely by the supremacy clause of the Constitution (Article 6, clause 2), which stated, “This Constitution … shall be the supreme Law of the Land … any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding,” and that the Constitution made no provision for states to play a role in constitutional interpretation. In other words, he rejected the compact theory, seeing the Constitution as the product of “we the people,” rather than the states, and seeing the national union as perpetual, not contingent. Even the aging James Madison agreed with him, arguing that the arrangements Calhoun envisioned would produce nothing short of chaos. Jackson’s own position on the matter was more guarded but began to become visible at the Democratic Party dinner in Washington honoring the late Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, on April 13, 1830. It emerged not in a speech but in a dramatic succession of toasts. Given Jackson’s generally strong support for state’s rights, and Jefferson’s own earlier support for nullification, it seemed an opportune moment for the nullifiers to claim the higher ground and perhaps draw the current president in their direction. First with a raised glass was Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, who proposed, “The Union of the States, and the Sovereignty of the States!” Jackson rose to offer a stiff rebuke: “Our Federal Union: It must be preserved!” Then Calhoun would respond with his own subtle defiance: “The Union. Next to our liberty, the most dear!” Finally Jackson’s vice president, Martin Van Buren, would offer these conciliating words: “Mutual forbearance and reciprocal concession. Through their agency the Union was established. The patriotic spirit from which they emanated will forever sustain it.” Thus did these wary politicians maneuver, signal, and size one another up, in advance of the coming conflict. That conflict was not long in arriving, and when it did, this time over the 1832 Tariff, the result would be decisive. States’ rights was one thing, but talk of secession was quite another for Jackson; and such talk had turned Jackson against the nullifiers and led him to believe that their revolt must be unceremoniously crushed. When an Ordinance of Nullification was passed by South Carolina on November 26, 1832, seeking to nullify the two offensive tariffs and prevent their enforcement within its boundaries, Jackson responded on December 10, dismissing the doctrine of nullification as “incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.” It was clear that Jackson was fully prepared to use force to prevent the nullifiers from advancing their cause. So were the South Carolinians, and the confrontation could have led to violence had it not been for the legislative skills of Henry Clay, who managed to pass a renegotiated version of the offensive tariff. That led in turn to a repeal of the Ordinance, and all sides stepped back to claim a partial and face-saving victory. But nothing had been resolved. Jackson himself brooded in the aftermath that “the tariff was only a pretext,” with “disunion and southern confederacy the real object.” But at least that had been averted, for a time. Jackson also left an indelible mark on Indian policy, and there the mark was and is far more enduringly controversial. Jackson’s inclusive democratic spirit did not extend to America’s indigenous peoples, whom he regarded, as many western settlers did, with a mixture of fear and condescension, and whose claims to their homelands he flatly rejected. But he insisted that he did not hate them and sometimes adopted a paternalistic tone toward them, as if he were their father and they his children. He believed the best and most humane solution to the problem that these aboriginal inhabitants represented was to remove them from their homelands and resettle them in the lands west of the Mississippi River. And it was done. In 1830, the Indian Removal Act was signed into law, and by 1835, most eastern tribes had relocated to the West, some forty-six thousand individuals. Later, in 1838, after Jackson’s term of office had ended, the U.S. Army forced fifteen thousand Cherokees in Georgia to leave for the Oklahoma Territory, on a difficult and humiliating eight- hundred-mile trek along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Some four thousand died along the way. Few aspects of American history are more troubling than the story of how matters came to this dismal pass. Nor does it improve the picture to point out that the policy was a long time in coming and that the die had been cast well before Jackson was anywhere near the presidency. Removal was not Jackson’s idea; it was the product of a far more consistent and long-standing pattern of national sentiment. It was also in part a failure of imagination. From the very beginning of the new nation, leaders could not decide whether the American Indians should be treated officially as individuals or as distinct nations, and whether federal policy should be directed toward their assimilation or their displacement. It was never clear, in short, how the indigenous population either might be incorporated into the American experiment or humanely left out of it, and there can be no doubt that entrenched anti-Native racism played a key role in that indecisiveness. Yet what makes the story all the more exasperating is that there also were good intentions in the mix, which could be equally deadly in their effects. Washington and Jefferson both had pondered this issue and had concluded that coexistence was possible only if Indians became “civilized” by making wholesale adaptations to the European settlers’ culture, which meant adoption of their religion, language, and economic practices, including the ownership of private property. But it also was Jefferson who first proposed the idea of a land exchange, in which eastern tribes would give up their lands in exchange for western lands in the newly acquired Louisiana Territory. His idea was picked up by President Monroe, who, with the assistance of his war secretary Calhoun, sought to create a western Indian Territory and remove the eastern tribes there. President John Quincy Adams took a similar stand in favor of removal. So the table for removal had already been set by the time Jackson assumed the office. There were also powerful raw material motives in play, ones that hinted at the forces behind the impending sectional conflict. Removal would take place mainly in the South, where the hunger for Indian lands was driven by the relentless expansion of an economy built upon cotton, a crop whose intensive cultivation rapidly led to soil exhaustion and hence the need for constant territorial expansion. Still, the Indian Removal Act was intensely controversial, encountering significant opposition even in the South, notably from Tennessee Congressman Davy Crockett, and it passed only after bitter debate in Congress. Jackson was not alone in viewing the displacement of Indian tribal nations as inevitable, and he pointed to the American northeast, where the tribal nations had all but ceased to exist as genuine forms of governance and culture, as evidence of his view. He dismissed any other view as sentimental romanticism: “What good man,” he asked, “would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12 million happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” Removal was, in his view, an act of mercy, protecting a vulnerable people from complete obliteration. It should be noted, too, that Chief Justice John Marshall suffered a notable setback in the matter of the Cherokee removal from Georgia, which he opposed. In the case Worcester v. Georgia (1832), the Court ruled that the laws of Georgia had no force within Cherokee territory. Jackson, however, sided with Georgia and simply ignored the ruling, thereby rendering it impotent and futile. It was an act of presidential nullification, in a sense, and served as a powerful illustration of the limits of the Supreme Court’s power when an executive is determined to reject its dicta. A European traveler witnessed the effects of the Indian removal firsthand, as he happened by chance upon a group of Choctaws crossing the Mississippi River at Memphis in December 1831. That observer was the great French writer Alexis de Tocqueville (1805– 59). “One cannot imagine the frightful evils that accompany these forced migrations,” he remarked, and he went on to describe in compelling detail the frigid winter scene, the ground hardened with snow and enormous pieces of ice drifting down the river, as the Indian families gathered in silent and sorrowful resignation on the east bank of the river, proceeding without tears or complaints to cross over into what they knew to be an erasure of their past. It was, Tocqueville said, a “solemn spectacle that will never leave my memory.” Tocqueville, who would eventually become one of the most eminent European social and political thinkers of the nineteenth century, had come to America for other reasons. He was only twenty- six years old and as yet almost completely unknown when, accompanied by his friend and sidekick Gustave de Beaumont, he came to America intent upon “examining, in details and as scientifically as possible, all the mechanisms of the vast American society which everyone talks of and no one knows.” The result, his two-volume book Democracy in America (1835–40), is perhaps the richest and most enduring study of American society and culture ever written. If one were permitted to read only one book on the subject, Democracy in America would almost certainly be the best choice – a surprising statement perhaps, given the fact that nearly two centuries have passed since its initial publication. As the preceding depiction of the Choctaw removal illustrates, Tocqueville did not seek to exalt or excuse the moral defects of Jacksonian America. He called Jackson himself “a man of violent character and middling capacity.” He was an unusually penetrating foreign observer, not an American cheerleader. But his book also vividly captured the era’s ebullient and enterprising spirit and the energies that the democratic revolution in America was setting loose in the world. It is precisely because of its balance, its detachment, and its philosophical depth that Democracy continues to be almost uniquely valuable among books about America. Tocqueville saw the United States as a nation moving in the vanguard of history, a young and vigorous country endowed with an extraordinary degree of social equality among its inhabitants and with no feudal or aristocratic background to overcome. In America, he believed, one could see embodied, in exemplary or heightened form, the condition toward which all the rest of the world, including France, was tending. In America, the only example the world then afforded of an expansive and expanding republic, one could gaze upon “the image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions” – and having so gazed, could perhaps take away lessons that would allow leaders to deal more intelligently and effectively with the democratic changes coming to Europe. Although an aristocrat himself, he was firmly convinced that the movement toward greater equality represented an inescapable feature of the modern age, a fact to which all future social or political analysis must accommodate itself. There would be no going back. Indeed, one could say that the one great idea in Tocqueville’s writing was this huge sprawling historical spectacle, the gradual but inexorable leveling of human society on a universal scale, a movement that he identified with the will of God, so pervasive and so unstoppable did it seem to be. Tocqueville’s portrait of America was of a strikingly middle-class society: feverishly commercial and acquisitive, obsessively practical minded, jealously equality minded, and restlessly mobile, a constant beehive of enterprise and activity. It was also a surprisingly religious society, in which the spirit of liberty and the spirit of religion were understood to be complementary to one another, so that religious belief supported democratic practice – a very different state of affairs from what he had found at home in France. Tocqueville saw many things to admire in this energetic, bumptious democracy. But he also saw some things to fear. Chief among the dangers was its pronounced tendency toward individualism – a new word at that time. Tocqueville saw in America the peril that citizens might elect to withdraw from involvement in the larger public life and regard themselves as autonomous and isolated actors, with no higher goal than the pursuit of their own material well- being. He acknowledged that in a modern commercial democracy, this was a particularly strong possibility, because self-interest would inevitably come to be accepted as the chief engine of all human striving. But where, then, would the generous and selfless civic virtues needed for the sustaining of a decent society come from? How could the individualistic Americans of the 1830s prevent self- interestedness from overwhelming all considerations of the public good and undermining the sources of social cohesion? Why, he asked, in a chapter that reads as if it were written today, are prosperous Americans so restless in the midst of their prosperity? And why, he asks later, are these same individualistic Americans so vulnerable to accepting the “soft despotism” of the state? We may perhaps hear a faint echo in these questions of the Anti- Federalists’ worries, and Jefferson’s, about the fate of virtue in a commercial society. And even though nearly every outward feature of the Jacksonian-era world that Tocqueville described in his book has changed, and altered beyond recognition, the inward traits and tendencies he describes have remained remarkably consistent. The questions, too, remain as current as ever.