Sean Wilentz. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the Working Class, 1788-1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 2004.
The American Republic of 1788 was not, in Wilentz's telling, a class-conscious society. The "Artisan Republic" which had taken form by the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism was predicated on a unity of purpose and interest among a stable, self-regulating artisan class in which there was a harmony of interest between apprentice, journeyman, and master. By the end of the Civil War, the United States had a large, growing, and self-aware working class with decades of activism, cultural and social development, and independent institutional history to draw on. The complicated road from the "Artisan Republic" to working class consciousness played out across the country, but Wilentz argues that in the metropolitan venue of New York City, it did so in particularly acute and influential ways.
This is a roughly chronological account, focused on class formation and working class politics--politics being defined in the broadest sense. It is also over three decades old and certainly there is subsequent research which would complicate the narrative, but it is also a richly detailed and heavily sourced study of its kind. The core of this sprawling saga is the complicated ways in which republican language was used, referred to, and re-imagined to interpret and defend changes and innovations in nascent working-class organization and self-conception. Language of mutuality and republican disinterest was held onto and stretched to--and past--the breaking point. It was a long, convoluted struggle to get from one end of this conceptual journey to the other, and for much longer than might seem reasonable both workers and "capitalists" maintained fidelity to the notion of artisan republicanism. Capitalism, entrepreneurial innovation, and the rise of wage labor at the expense of the apprentice/master relationship eroded the foundations of those older notions, but the language and conceptual frames lingered.
Showing posts with label Jacksonian. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jacksonian. Show all posts
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
The Rhetoric of Conservatism
Bruce D. Dickson. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829-30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South. San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1982.
The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 was the culmination of decades of reformist agitation against the 1776 Constitution. By 1829, the largely Eastern conservative elite recognized that further resistance would only stoke ever-more radical backlash, and the reformers of the West got their opportunity.
That convention would largely disappoint those reformers, as conservatives and their moderate allies were able to defeat all but the most modest of reforms, and prevent the adoption of universal white male suffrage or white population apportionment. The first three chapters of this book detail how that happened.
The final three chapters, on the other hand, analyze the particular qualities of Virginia conservatism at this period, and the origins and nature of conservative rhetoric and its underlying ideology. At the time, Virginia conservatism was deeply anti-democratic, but not yet fully defined by the "positive good" defense of slavery which was just beginning to take shape in the 1830's. Although often buttressed by references to classic conservative arguments by Edmund Burke and others, their conservatism was heavily grounded in concrete experience and a suspicion of abstraction and idealism. Government should be predicated on what had worked and what already existed rather than idealized notions of what might improve society. And liberal notions of individual liberation were a threat to social harmony and mutual interests.
Slavery would eventually take a more prominent role in this conception, by way of concerns for the sanctity of property as a basis for political stability. At the same time, the increased focus on slavery as the basis for Virginia society led to a more racially-defined conception of citizenship; so that in the 1850's Virginia conservatives would end up ratifying the same universal white male suffrage they had resisted so successfully two decades prior.
The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 was the culmination of decades of reformist agitation against the 1776 Constitution. By 1829, the largely Eastern conservative elite recognized that further resistance would only stoke ever-more radical backlash, and the reformers of the West got their opportunity.
That convention would largely disappoint those reformers, as conservatives and their moderate allies were able to defeat all but the most modest of reforms, and prevent the adoption of universal white male suffrage or white population apportionment. The first three chapters of this book detail how that happened.
The final three chapters, on the other hand, analyze the particular qualities of Virginia conservatism at this period, and the origins and nature of conservative rhetoric and its underlying ideology. At the time, Virginia conservatism was deeply anti-democratic, but not yet fully defined by the "positive good" defense of slavery which was just beginning to take shape in the 1830's. Although often buttressed by references to classic conservative arguments by Edmund Burke and others, their conservatism was heavily grounded in concrete experience and a suspicion of abstraction and idealism. Government should be predicated on what had worked and what already existed rather than idealized notions of what might improve society. And liberal notions of individual liberation were a threat to social harmony and mutual interests.
Slavery would eventually take a more prominent role in this conception, by way of concerns for the sanctity of property as a basis for political stability. At the same time, the increased focus on slavery as the basis for Virginia society led to a more racially-defined conception of citizenship; so that in the 1850's Virginia conservatives would end up ratifying the same universal white male suffrage they had resisted so successfully two decades prior.
Sunday, July 17, 2016
The Market Revolution
Charles Sellers. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.
Oxford University Press, 1991.
Sellers's book was a major reevaluation of the period when first published a quarter-century ago; it's still an important survey of the period. Sellers covers a lot of ground--each chapter is somewhat thematic in approach, even as they very slowly move the chronology forward--but largely keeps focused on a single, broadly-defined arena. He argues that this era saw the negotiation of power between capitalism and democracy in the early phase the growth of the market economy unleashed in the wake of the conclusion of the War of 1812. Carries out in the fields of politics, religion, and social change, the overriding conflict involved the tension between the imperatives of the forces of the market versus the political fact of an increasingly empowered electorate which included many groups which were either leery of the market or sought to tame it or redirect it in accordance with their values and interests.
Sellers locates much of this tension in the conflict between two very different religious impulses: arminianism and antinomianism. The distinction between the two reflected two different moral economies (my phrase, not Sellers') which ultimately needed to accommodate each other in the new democratic capitalist orthodoxy--one which, at the conclusion of this period, still contained the fatal contradiction of slavery. The tension over slavery would be push the polity to the breaking point in the wake of James Polk's recklessly successful efforts to annex new lands for expansion while ignoring the niceties of sectional balance.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
The Artificial River
Carol Sheriff. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.
Hill and Wang, 1996.
Sheriff's study isn't another look at the role the Erie Canal played in the transportation or market revolutions, or in westward expansion. Instead, she studies the people who lived and worked on the canal itself. The time frame extends from the beginning of construction to the completion of the Enlargement project (during which the canal was made deeper and wider, and numerous "feeder" extension canals were added to the original route), which she notes almost exactly coincides with the years between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
While each of the six chapters has a different focus, the overall theme is the way in which the idea of "progress" evolved over the period even as its meaning and utility was challenged by different social groups and economic interests. The different meanings of "progress"--economic, social, cultural, and even religious--meant different things at different times to different people. Initial expectations that the canal would create a harmony of social and economic interests would be increasingly dashed even as the canal created the conditions which led to unprecedented economic growth and a rapid increase in market-oriented activity. The tension between republican ideology and the realities of liberal capitalism paralleled larger conflicts in antebellum society. Democrats and Whigs both contended with the rise of the new market economy and the ideology of improvement--neither party opposed it but rather argued over the ramifications of the fraying of older social mores and the increase in class competition (which, many middle-class Whigs believed, did not necessarily have to translate into class conflict).
In the end, the canal changed the world of upstate New York so fundamentally that most people in 1862 took those changes for granted; the "artificial river" now seemed "second nature" in a dual sense; it was not only an organic part of the social and economic world they lived in, but it seemed less artificial and more natural than it had a generation or more prior.
Hill and Wang, 1996.
Sheriff's study isn't another look at the role the Erie Canal played in the transportation or market revolutions, or in westward expansion. Instead, she studies the people who lived and worked on the canal itself. The time frame extends from the beginning of construction to the completion of the Enlargement project (during which the canal was made deeper and wider, and numerous "feeder" extension canals were added to the original route), which she notes almost exactly coincides with the years between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War.
While each of the six chapters has a different focus, the overall theme is the way in which the idea of "progress" evolved over the period even as its meaning and utility was challenged by different social groups and economic interests. The different meanings of "progress"--economic, social, cultural, and even religious--meant different things at different times to different people. Initial expectations that the canal would create a harmony of social and economic interests would be increasingly dashed even as the canal created the conditions which led to unprecedented economic growth and a rapid increase in market-oriented activity. The tension between republican ideology and the realities of liberal capitalism paralleled larger conflicts in antebellum society. Democrats and Whigs both contended with the rise of the new market economy and the ideology of improvement--neither party opposed it but rather argued over the ramifications of the fraying of older social mores and the increase in class competition (which, many middle-class Whigs believed, did not necessarily have to translate into class conflict).
In the end, the canal changed the world of upstate New York so fundamentally that most people in 1862 took those changes for granted; the "artificial river" now seemed "second nature" in a dual sense; it was not only an organic part of the social and economic world they lived in, but it seemed less artificial and more natural than it had a generation or more prior.
Thursday, December 24, 2015
Slave Country
Adam Rothman. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
After achieving independence, the United States acquired sovereignty over a vast area west of the Appalachians and the original colonies-turned-States. The spread of chattel slavery to the southern half of this domain--and beyond, after the acquisition of the Louisiana territory--was anything but preordained; the story of how this happened, specifically in the Deep South (defined here as the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) between the 1780's and 1820 is covered ably in this book.
As Rothman points out in the Introduction, the institution of slavery came with the new nation as a heritage of the colonial period, but that does not explain why it survived and in fact expanded in the first several decades of independence. The United States was a Republic, born of a revolution formerly committed to ideals of liberty and equality. The tension between the rhetoric of the Revolution on the one hand, and the reality of race-based slavery on the other, had troubled many Americans, and had led to the gradual decline of the institution in the North. Yet, within a few decades, the newly established states of the Deep South were firmly committed to plantation slavery as the foundation of their economies, and the source of much of their political and social elite.
None of this, again, was inevitable; in the Preface Rothman states "Slavery's expansion in the Deep South emerged from contingent global forces, concrete policies pursued by governments, and countless small choices made by thousands of individuals in diverse stations of life."(xi)
The original vision for how the lands of the West should be settled was articulated by Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a peaceful, agrarian settling of the vast American interior by good Republican--white--farm families. He also believed, or at least hoped, that somehow the spread of Americans westward across the North American continent would somehow diffuse slavery to the point where it would disappear as an institution and a moral problem. There were two problems with this vision; to begin with, it ignored powerful economic incentives which would encourage the continuation and expansion of slavery, and it failed to account for what would happen to slaves themselves once the institution somehow organically died off. Jefferson's vision had no place for black people. This fact would heavily mitigate any meaningful move toward widespread emancipation in the spreading "slave country".
Furthermore, the spread of settlement into these new lands created conflicts with neighboring colonial powers as well as Indian nations and existing inhabitants. The incorporation of Louisiana into the American polity was problematic, as the city of New Orleans in particular was both very cosmopolitan and had a very different social and racial caste system than the roughly binary white-vs.-black racial hierarchy that was forming in the increasingly democratic (white) Republic of Jeffersonian America. Conflict was inevitable; the Jeffersonian vision could not last contact with the complex realities on the ground.
What followed was a period marked by both demographic growth and economic expansion on one hand, and violence and discord on the other. Cotton and sugar boomed as commodities, and a flood of voracious new settlers--particularly the well-off who could use money and connections to acquire the best land, first--moved in to turn more and more of the region into productive plantation land, worked by an ever-increasing population of enslaved people. At the same time, Indian wars, slave resistance (including the largest single slave revolt in US history, in 1811), and the War of 1812 all contributed to the process of destabilizing the old order and violently clearing the way for the growth and spread of a new slave-based social and economic order.
By the end of the period, the Deep South had emerged as the heart of what was becoming the "Slave Power". There would be further conflict and war ahead, but when the book concludes, the creators of the Deep South could convince themselves that they were the bulwark of a new order which would, in fact, hold it's own for several decades.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
After achieving independence, the United States acquired sovereignty over a vast area west of the Appalachians and the original colonies-turned-States. The spread of chattel slavery to the southern half of this domain--and beyond, after the acquisition of the Louisiana territory--was anything but preordained; the story of how this happened, specifically in the Deep South (defined here as the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama) between the 1780's and 1820 is covered ably in this book.
As Rothman points out in the Introduction, the institution of slavery came with the new nation as a heritage of the colonial period, but that does not explain why it survived and in fact expanded in the first several decades of independence. The United States was a Republic, born of a revolution formerly committed to ideals of liberty and equality. The tension between the rhetoric of the Revolution on the one hand, and the reality of race-based slavery on the other, had troubled many Americans, and had led to the gradual decline of the institution in the North. Yet, within a few decades, the newly established states of the Deep South were firmly committed to plantation slavery as the foundation of their economies, and the source of much of their political and social elite.
None of this, again, was inevitable; in the Preface Rothman states "Slavery's expansion in the Deep South emerged from contingent global forces, concrete policies pursued by governments, and countless small choices made by thousands of individuals in diverse stations of life."(xi)
The original vision for how the lands of the West should be settled was articulated by Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned a peaceful, agrarian settling of the vast American interior by good Republican--white--farm families. He also believed, or at least hoped, that somehow the spread of Americans westward across the North American continent would somehow diffuse slavery to the point where it would disappear as an institution and a moral problem. There were two problems with this vision; to begin with, it ignored powerful economic incentives which would encourage the continuation and expansion of slavery, and it failed to account for what would happen to slaves themselves once the institution somehow organically died off. Jefferson's vision had no place for black people. This fact would heavily mitigate any meaningful move toward widespread emancipation in the spreading "slave country".
Furthermore, the spread of settlement into these new lands created conflicts with neighboring colonial powers as well as Indian nations and existing inhabitants. The incorporation of Louisiana into the American polity was problematic, as the city of New Orleans in particular was both very cosmopolitan and had a very different social and racial caste system than the roughly binary white-vs.-black racial hierarchy that was forming in the increasingly democratic (white) Republic of Jeffersonian America. Conflict was inevitable; the Jeffersonian vision could not last contact with the complex realities on the ground.
What followed was a period marked by both demographic growth and economic expansion on one hand, and violence and discord on the other. Cotton and sugar boomed as commodities, and a flood of voracious new settlers--particularly the well-off who could use money and connections to acquire the best land, first--moved in to turn more and more of the region into productive plantation land, worked by an ever-increasing population of enslaved people. At the same time, Indian wars, slave resistance (including the largest single slave revolt in US history, in 1811), and the War of 1812 all contributed to the process of destabilizing the old order and violently clearing the way for the growth and spread of a new slave-based social and economic order.
By the end of the period, the Deep South had emerged as the heart of what was becoming the "Slave Power". There would be further conflict and war ahead, but when the book concludes, the creators of the Deep South could convince themselves that they were the bulwark of a new order which would, in fact, hold it's own for several decades.
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