But outside of Boston and its university suburb, there was little patience with a new religion or with a theology which did not teach the world the total depravity of man and the vengeance of an angry Deity consigning his wayward children to everlasting perdition. Southern gentlemen like Calhoun or Hayne might accept the mild and humane God of Channing, but not the farmers of the rural districts or the business men of the small towns.
If Boston cultivated philosophy and religious reform, New York was the seat of a literature that was read. Washington Irving, the author of the Sketch-Book and Tales of a Traveller, was just returning from a long and triumphant literary sojourn in Europe to make his home on the Hudson. James Fenimore Cooper was publishing his Leather Stocking Tales, which have made the hair on so many boys' heads stand on end. William Cullen Bryant was making the New York Evening Post the organ of American culture and setting the pace for the better element of the press. In Philadelphia, Carey and Lea were alternately publishing the writings of struggling literary lights and fiery pamphlets on the tariff and internal improvements. In 1832 John Pendleton Kennedy, of Maryland, published his Swallow Barn, a novel which portrayed the easy-going life of the Virginia planters; and in Richmond, William Wirt, disgusted with Western politics, rested on his laurels as the author of the British Spy and the Life of Patrick Henry. To match the North American Review the Charleston lovers of literature were publishing their excellent Southern Review. Even history was not without her muses. Reverend Jared Sparks was editing all the crudities of grammar and errors of spelling out of Washington's fourteen volumes of correspondence; George Ticknor, a young professor at Harvard, was beginning the work which was to culminate in his famous History of Spanish Literature; and George Bancroft was writing a History of the United States which was to win him international fame and ultimately to secure him a seat in the Cabinet of President Polk.
If literature and history were beginning to thrive in New England and the Middle States, painting and sculpture also had their devotees. Allston and Greenough had won laurels in Boston; Inman and Sully were making portraits in Philadelphia which well-to-do Middle States lawyers and Southern planters liked well enough to pay for in good banknotes; even in far-off Kentucky Joel T. Hart was making the busts of great American politicians on which his title to distinction was to rest. And Charleston, never outdone in ante-bellum times, encouraged a real genius in James de Veaux, the painter, so soon to fall a victim to tuberculosis. That was a promising religious, literary, and artistic life, which kept time to the looms of the industrial belt or idealized the nascent feudalism of the South. But we must turn to the fierce economic and political struggles about to be reopened in Washington—struggles in which Americans of that day as well as of this always take supreme interest.
The change in Massachusetts and Connecticut from a defiant particularism and an uncompromising free-trade policy, during the short years of 1815 to 1830, to a positive nationalism and emphatic protective program parallels exactly the change at the same time in South Carolina from nationalism and a protective tariff to a strict states-rights and an unbending free-trade system. If Calhoun turned sharp corners in those years, Webster proved equally agile. The whole life of the East was being reconstructed, and all classes were adapting themselves to the new organization. The small farmers, allies in 1804 of Thomas Jefferson and his up-country democracy, became ancillary to the industrial towns where they found markets for their products; and the new river and canal and railroad towns were but the recent creations of the new order. With the exception of a few remote counties and certain old-fashioned merchants, all New England and the Middle States ranged themselves around the dominant industrial masters and presented an almost solid front to the Southern and Western combination which had swept the country in 1828. There was no doubt that Adams, Webster, and Clay would renew the fight in time to make an issue in 1832.
And their case was by no means hopeless. In the electoral college of 1832 these Northeastern States would cast 131 of the total 286 votes. If the industrial forces could hold their communities together as the West had learned to do, and regain their former hold on Ohio, their candidate would again be successful. Losing the Presidency, they would still have, after the apportionment of 1831, a majority of 10 in the Federal House of Representatives, which would guarantee the protective policy against serious modification. And the moral support of the Supreme Court was not without value. Thus if the new President and the Senate be conceded, the popular branch of Congress and the national judiciary would make steady bulwarks.
If there were sections of New England, like Maine, or of the Middle States, like western Pennsylvania, whose people would not support the industrial program, there were dominant sections of the old South, like eastern Virginia and all South Carolina, where the leaders either feared or hated Jackson. Nor did all the West love the South. In the States which bordered the Ohio River most men demanded internal improvements at national expense, which all knew the South could not grant. With the ablest New England and Middle States leaders in the Senate and House, why might not the arrangement of 1825 be renewed? It was, then, with every expectation of victory in 1832 that the sanguine Clay came back to Congress in December, 1831; even John Quincy Adams, who now became a member of the House, was not without hope that the ill-selected Cabinet of Jackson would go to pieces and that a “restoration” would follow in due time. Washington was to be the scene of still another conflict of the sections that would threaten the very existence of the Union, not yet accustomed to the idea of a compact nationality.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The best sources for the growth of the various industries before 1830 are government documents. The Report on Manufactures, Executive Documents, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., 2 vols., is a rare and valuable work; and Executive Documents, 34th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 4, gives the statistics of manufactures down to 1850 by States. Darby and Dwight's New Gazetteer of the United States (1833), and J. L. Bishop's History of American Manufactures (1868), are useful if sometimes exasperating. Miss Katharine Coman's The Industrial History of the United States (1910) is the best account for general use. J. B. McMaster's History of the United States, vol. v (1900), and F. J. Turner's The Rise of the New West already cited (1906), are always serviceable. For a cross-section of the industrial revolution in New England, read C. F. Adams's Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (1903). Davis R. Dewey's Financial History of the United States (1903) is standard; and A. C. McLaughlin's The Court, the Constitution and Parties (1912), gives the best account of the beginnings of judicial supremacy, while W. G. Sumner's History of American Banking (1896) tells the story of the banks by sections. The American Commonwealth histories are serviceable for the individual States. For the biographies of leading statesmen, the American Statesmen and American Crises series are satisfying. Intellectual life is well treated in W. P. Trent's History of American Literature (1903), G. W. Sheldon's American Painters (1899), and Lorado Taft's History of American Sculpture (1903).