Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

Webster in Massachusetts and Chancellor Kent in New York viewed with alarm the prospect that freehold property should cease to be the foundation of government. Kent particularly warned the landed class that "one master capitalist with his one hundred apprentices, and journeymen, and agents, and dependents, will bear down at the polls an equal number of farmers of small estates in his vicinity, who cannot safely unite for their common defense." [Footnote: Carter and Stone, Reports of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention of 1821, 222.] It was the new counties of New York, particularly those of the western and northeastern frontier, which were the stronghold of the reform movement in that state. The abolition of the council of appointments and the council of revision by the New York convention contributed to the transfer of power to the people. But under the leadership of Van Buren a group of politicians, dubbed "The Albany Regency," controlled the political machinery as effectively as before. [Footnote: McMaster, United States, V., 373- 432; ibid., Rights of Man, 61; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy (Am. Nation, XV.), chap. iv.]

The campaign for the presidency of 1824 may be said to have begun as early as 1816. [Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 89.] Adams observed in 1818 that the government was assuming daily the character of cabal, "and preparation, not for the next Presidential election, but for the one after"; [Footnote: Ibid., IV., 193.] and by 1820, when the political sea appeared so placid, and parties had apparently dissolved, bitter factional fights between the friends of the rival candidates constituted the really significant indications of American politics. From the details of the personal struggles (usually less important to the student of party history) one must learn the tendency towards the reappearance of parties in this period, when idealists believed that all factions had been fused into one triumphant organization. In all of the great sections, candidates appeared, anxious to consolidate the support of their own section and to win a following in the nation. It is time that we should survey these men, for the personal traits of the aspirants for the presidency had a larger influence than ever before or since in the history of the country. Moreover, we are able to see in these candidates the significant features of the sections from which they came.

New England was reluctantly and slowly coming to the conclusion that John Quincy Adams was the only available northern candidate. Adams did not fully represent the characteristics of his section, for he neither sprang from the democracy of the interior of New England nor did he remain loyal to the Federalist ideas that controlled the commercial interests of the coast. Moreover, of all the statesmen whom the nation produced, he had had the largest opportunity to make a comparative study of government. As an eleven-year-old boy, he went with his father to Paris in 1778, and from then until 1817, when he became Monroe's secretary of state, nearly half his time was spent at European courts. He served in France, Holland, Sweden, Russia, Prussia, and England, and had been senator of the United States from Massachusetts.

Thus Adams entered on the middle period of his career, a man of learning and broad culture, rich in experience of national affairs, familiar with the centers of Old-World civilization and with methods of European administration. He had touched life too broadly, in too many countries, to be provincial in his policy. In the minds of a large and influential body of his fellow-citizens, the Federalists, he was an apostate, for in the days of the embargo he had warned Jefferson of the temper of his section, had resigned, and had been read out of the party. The unpopularity, as well as the fame, of his father, was the heritage of the son. Perhaps the most decisive indication of the weakening of sectional bias by his foreign training is afforded by his diplomatic policy. An expansionist by nature, he had been confirmed in the faith by his training in foreign courts. "If we are not taken for Romans we shall be taken for Jews," he exclaimed to one who questioned the wisdom of the bold utterances of his diplomatic correspondence.

In one important respect Adams was the personification of his section. He was a Puritan, and his whole career was deeply affected by the fact. A man of method and regularity, tireless in his work (for he rose before the dawn and worked till midnight), he never had a childhood and never tried to achieve self-forgetfulness. His diary, printed in twelve volumes, is a unique document for the study of the Puritan in politics. Not that it was an entirely unreserved expression of his soul, for he wrote with a consciousness that posterity would read the record, and its pages are a compound of apparently spontaneous revelation of his inmost thought and of silence upon subjects of which we would gladly know more. He had the Puritan's restraint, self-scrutiny, and self-condemnation. "I am," he writes, "a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners." Nor can this estimate be pronounced unjust. He was a lonely man, communing with his soul in his diary more than with a circle of admiring friends. It was not easy for men to love John Quincy Adams. The world may respect the man who regulates his course by a daily dead-reckoning, but it finds it easier to make friends with him who stumbles towards rectitude by the momentum of his own nature. Popularity, in any deep sense, was denied him. This deprivation he repaid by harsh, vindictive, and censorious judgments upon his contemporaries, and by indifference to popular prejudices. With the less lovely qualities of the Puritan aggravated by his own critical nature, Adams found himself in a struggle for the presidency against some of the most engaging personalities in American history. He must win over his enemies in New England and attach that section to his fortunes; he must find friends in the middle states, conciliate the south, and procure a following in the west, where Clay, the Hotspur of debate, with all the power of the speakership behind him, and Jackson, "Old Hickory," the hero of New Orleans, contested the field. And all the time he must satisfy his conscience, and reach his goal by the craft and strength of his intellect rather than by the arts of popular management. No statesman ever handled the problems of his public career with a keener understanding of the conditions of success.

The middle region was too much divided by the game of politics played by her multitude of minor leaders to unite upon a favorite son in this campaign; but De Witt Clinton, finding elements of strength in the prestige which his successful advocacy of the Erie Canal had brought to him throughout the region where internal improvements were popular, and relying upon his old connections with the Federalists, watched events with eager eye, waiting for an opportunity which never came. Although the south saw in Rufus King's advocacy of the exclusion of slavery from Missouri a deep design to win the presidency by an antislavery combination of the northern states, there was little ground for this belief. In truth, the middle region was merely the fighting-ground for leaders in the other sections.

In the south, Calhoun and Crawford were already contending for the mastery. Each of them represented fundamental tendencies in the section. Born in Virginia in 1772, Crawford had migrated with his father in early childhood to South Carolina, and soon after to Georgia. [Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," in Am. Hist. Assoc., Report 1901, II., 95; Cobb, Leisure Labors; Miller, Bench and Bar of Georgia; West, "Life and Times of William H. Crawford," in National Portrait Gallery, IV.; Adams, Life of Gallatin. 598.] Here he became the leader of the Virginia element against the interior democracy. But in his coarse strength and adaptability the burly Georgian showed the impress which frontier influences had given to his state. His career in national politics brought him strange alliances. This Georgia candidate had been no mere subject of the Virginia dynasty, for he supported John Adams in his resistance to France in 1798; challenged the administration of Jefferson by voting with the Federalists in the United States Senate against the embargo; and ridiculed the ambiguous message of Madison when the issue of peace or war with Great Britain was under consideration. A fearless supporter of the recharter of the national bank, he had championed the doctrine of implied powers and denied the right of a state to resist the laws of Congress except by changing its representation or appealing to the sword under the right of revolution.

Nevertheless, in the period of this volume, Crawford joined the ranks of the southerners who demanded a return to strict construction and insistence on state rights. In the congressional caucus of 1816, he obtained 54 votes for the presidency against 65 for Monroe. Had not the influence of Madison been thrown for the latter, it seems probable that Crawford would have obtained the nomination; but his strength in building up a following in Congress was much greater than his popularity with the people at large. Controlling the patronage of the treasury department, he enlarged his political influence. As the author of the four-years'-tenure-of- office act, in 1820, he has been vehemently criticized as a founder of the spoils system. But there are reasons for thinking that Crawford's advocacy of this measure was based upon considerations of efficiency at least as much as those of politics, [Footnote: Fish, Civil Service and Patronage, 66 et seq.] and the conduct of his department was marked by sagacity. The administration of such a man would probably have been characterized by an accommodating spirit which would have carried on the traditions of Monroe.

In the career of Calhoun are strikingly exhibited the changing characteristics of the south in this era. His grandfather was a Scotch-Irishman who came to Pennsylvania with the emigration of that people in the first half of the eighteenth century, and thence followed the stream of settlement that passed up the Great Valley and into South Carolina to the frontier, from which men like Daniel Boone crossed the mountains to the conquest of Kentucky and Tennessee. [Footnote: Cf. Howard, Preliminaries of the Revolution (Am. Nation, VIII.), chap. xiii.] The Calhoun family were frontier Indian fighters, but, instead of crossing the mountains as did Andrew Jackson, Calhoun remained to grow up with his section and to share its changes from a community essentially western to a cotton- planting and slave-holding region. This is the clew to his career.

In his speech in the House of Representatives in 1817, on internal improvements, Calhoun warned his colleagues against "a low, sordid, selfish, and sectional spirit," and declared that "in a country so extensive, and so various in its interests, what is necessary for the common good, may apparently be opposed to the interests of particular sections. It must be submitted to as the condition of our greatness." [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 14 Cong., 2 Sess., 854, 855.] This was the voice of the nationalistic west, as well as that of South Carolina in Calhoun's young manhood.