Rise of the New West, 1819-1829

by Frederick Jackson Turner

In view of his later career, it is significant that many of those who described him in these youthful years of his nationalistic policy found in him a noticeable tendency to rash speculation and novelty. "As a politician," said Senator Mills, of Massachusetts, about 1823, he is "too theorizing, speculative, and metaphysical,— magnificent in his views of the powers and capacities of the government, and of the virtue, intelligence, and wisdom of the PEOPLE. He is in favor of elevating, cherishing, and increasing all the institutions of the government, and of a vigorous and energetic administration of it. From his rapidity of thought, he is often wrong in his conclusions, and his theories are sometimes wild, extravagant, and impractical. He has always claimed to be, and is, of the Democratic party, but of a very different class from that of Crawford; more like Adams, and his schemes are sometimes denounced by his party as ultra-fanatical." [Footnote: Mass. Hist. Soc., Proceedings, XIX., 37 (1881-1882).]

Another contemporary, writing prior to 1824, declared: "He wants, I think, consistency and perseverance of mind, and seems incapable of long-continued and patient investigation. What he does not see at the first examination, he seldom takes pains to search for; but still the lightning glance of his mind, and the rapidity with which he analyzes, never fail to furnish him with all that may be necessary for his immediate purposes. In his legislative career, which, though short, was uncommonly luminous, his love of novelty, and his apparent solicitude to astonish were so great, that he has occasionally been known to go beyond even the dreams of political visionaries, and to propose schemes which were in their nature impracticable or injurious, and which he seemed to offer merely for the purpose of displaying the affluence of his mind, and the fertility of his ingenuity." [Footnote: Quoted by Hodgson, Letters from North Am., I., 81.] "Calhoun," said William Wirt, in 1824, "advised me the other day to study less and trust more to genius; and I believe the advice is sound. He has certainly practiced on his own precepts, and has become, justly, a distinguished man. It may do very well in politics, where a proposition has only to be compared with general principles with which the politician is familiar." [Footnote: Kennedy, William Wirt, II., 143; other views of Calhoun in MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chaps, v., ix.; Hart, Slavery and Abolition, chap. xix.; Garrison, Westward Extension (Am. Nation, XV., XVI., XVII.).]

At the beginning of the campaign, Calhoun was the confidant and friend of Adams, apparently considering the alternative of throwing his influence in the latter's favor, if it proved impossible to realize his own aspirations.

From beyond the Alleghenies came two candidates who personified the forces of their section. We can see the very essence of the west in Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson. Clay was a Kentuckian, with the characteristics of his state; but, in a larger sense, he represented the stream of migration which had occupied the Ohio Valley during the preceding half-century. This society was one which, in its composition, embraced elements of the middle region as well as of the south. It tended towards freedom, but had slaves in its midst, and had been accustomed, through experience, to adjust relations between slavery and free labor by a system of compromise. Economically, it was in need of internal improvements and the development of manufactures to afford a home market. It had the ideal of American expansion, and in earlier days vehemently demanded the control of the Mississippi and the expulsion of the Spaniard from the coasts of the Gulf. In the War of 1812 it sent its sons to destroy English influence about the Great Lakes and had been ambitious to conquer Canada.

It is an evidence of the rapidity with which the west stamped itself upon its colonists, that although Clay was born, and bred to the law, in Virginia, he soon became the mouth-piece of these western forces. In his personality, also, he reflected many of the traits of this region. Kentucky, ardent in its spirit, not ashamed of a strain of sporting blood, fond of the horse-race, partial to its whiskey, ready to "bluff" in politics as in poker, but sensitive to honor, was the true home of Henry Clay. To a Puritan like John Quincy Adams, Clay was, "in politics, as in private life, essentially a gamester."[Footnote: Adams, Memoirs, V., 59.] But if the Puritan mind did not approve of Henry Clay, multitudes of his fellow- countrymen in other sections did. There was a charm about him that fastened men to him. He was "Harry of the West," an impetuous, willful, high-spirited, daring, jealous, but, withal, a lovable man. He had the qualities of leadership; was ambitious, impulsive, often guided by his intuitions and his sensibilities, but, at the same time, an adroit and bold champion of constructive legislation. He knew, too, the time for compromise and for concession. Perhaps he knew it too well; for, although no statesman of this era possessed more courageous initiative and constructive power, his tact and his powers of management were such that his place in history is quite as much that of the "great compromiser" as it is that of the author of the "American system."

It is not too much to say that Clay made the speakership one of the important American institutions. He was the master of the House of Representatives, shaping its measures by the appointment of his committees and his parliamentary management.[Footnote: Follett, Speaker of the House, pp. 41-46.] By the period of our survey, with the power of this office behind him, Clay had fashioned a set of American political issues reflective of western and middle-state ideas, and had made himself a formidable rival in the presidential struggle. He had caught the self-confidence, the continental aspirations, the dash and impetuosity of the west. But he was also, as a writer of the time declared, "able to captivate high and low, l'homme du salon and the 'squatter' in the Western wilderness." He was a mediator between east and west, between north and south—the "great conciliator." [Footnote: Grund, Aristocracy in America, II., 213. For other views of Clay, cf. Babcock, Am. Nationality, chap. xii.; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chap. xi.; Garrison, Westward Extension, chap. iii. (Am. Nation, XIII., XV., XVII.).]

If Henry Clay was one of the favorites of the west, Andrew Jackson was the west itself. While Clay was able to voice, with statesman- like ability, the demand for economic legislation to promote her interests, and while he exercised an extraordinary fascination by his personal magnetism and his eloquence, he never became the hero of the great masses of the west; he appealed rather to the more intelligent—to the men of business and of property. Andrew Jackson was the very personification of the contentious, nationalistic democracy of the interior. He was born, in 1767, of Scotch-Irish parents, who had settled near the boundary-line between North and South Carolina, not far from the similar settlements from which, within a few years of Jackson's birth, Daniel Boone and Robertson went forth to be the founders of Kentucky and Tennessee. In 1788, with a caravan of emigrants, Jackson crossed the Alleghenies to Nashville, Tennessee, then an outpost of settlement still exposed to the incursions of Indians. During the first seven or eight years of his residence he was public prosecutor—an office that called for nerve and decision, rather than legal acumen, in that turbulent country.

The appearance of this frontiersman on the floor of Congress was an omen full of significance. He reached Philadelphia at the close of Washington's administration, having ridden on horseback nearly eight hundred miles to his destination. Gallatin (himself a western Pennsylvanian) afterwards graphically described Jackson, as he entered the halls of Congress, as "a tall, lank, uncouth-looking personage, with long locks of hair hanging over his face, and a cue down his back tied in an eel-skin; his dress singular, his manners and deportment those of a rough backwoodsman."[Footnote: Hildreth, United States, iv., 692.] Jefferson afterwards testified to Webster: "His passions are terrible. When I was President of the Senate, he was a Senator, and he could never speak, on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage."[Footnote: Webster, Writings (National ed.), XVII., 371.] At length the frontier, in the person of its leader, had found a place in the government. This six-foot backwoodsman, angular, lantern-jawed, and thin, with blue eyes that blazed on occasion; this choleric, impetuous, Scotch-Irish leader of men; this expert duelist and ready fighter; this embodiment of the contentious, vehement, personal west, was in politics to stay.[Footnote: For other appreciations, see Babcock, Am. Nationality, chap, xvii.; MacDonald, Jacksonian Democracy, chaps, ii., xviii.(Am. Nation, XIII., XV.).] In the War of 1812, by the defeat of the Indians of the Gulf plains, he made himself the conqueror of a new province for western settlement, and when he led his frontier riflemen to the victory of New Orleans he became the national hero, the self-made man, the incarnation of the popular ideal of democracy. The very rashness and arbitrariness which his Seminole campaign displayed appealed to the west, for he went to his object with the relentless directness of a frontiersman. This episode gave to Adams the opportunity to write his masterly state paper defending the actions of the general. But Henry Clay, seeing, perhaps, in the rising star of the frontier military hero a baneful omen to his own career, and hoping to break the administration forces by holding the government responsible for Jackson's actions, led an assault upon him in the Seminole debates on the floor of the House of Representatives.[Footnote: Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xvii.] Leaving Tennessee when he heard of the attack which was meditated against him, the general rushed (1819) to this new field of battle, and had the satisfaction of winning what he regarded as "the greatest victory he ever obtained"—a triumph on every count of Clay's indictment. This contest Jackson considered "the Touchstone of the election of the next president."[Footnote: N. Y. Publ. Library, Bulletin, IV., 160, 161; Parton, Jackson, II., chap. xl.] From this time the personality of the "Old Hero" was as weighty a factor in

American politics as the tariff or internal improvements. He had now outgrown the uncouthness of his earlier days and had become stately and dignified in his manner. Around this unique personality there began to gather all those democratic forces which we have noted as characteristic of the interior of the country, reinforced by the democracy of the cities, growing into self-consciousness and power. A new force was coming into American life. This fiery Tennesseean was becoming the political idol of a popular movement which swept across all sections, with but slight regard to their separate economic interests. The rude, strong, turbulent democracy of the west and of the country found in him its natural leader.

All these candidates and the dominant element in every section professed the doctrines of republicanism; but what were the orthodox tenets of republicanism at the end of the rule of the Virginia dynasty? To this question different candidates and different sections gave conflicting answers. Out of their differences there was already the beginning of a new division of parties.