Expansion and Conflict

by William Edward Dodd

Nor was it different in Virginia. There the small counties of the east, with a minority of the white population, controlled both houses of the assembly, the governorship, the courts, and the majority of the State's representatives in Congress. This advantage, as in North Carolina, had been guaranteed by the constitution of 1776. The motive for this one-sided arrangement was the protection of slave property which, it must be said, paid the larger share of the taxes. In western Virginia, extending then to the Ohio River, there was a teeming population whose ablest leaders constantly resisted this system and demanded their rights. As elsewhere in the West the program was manhood suffrage, equal representation, and the popular election of important state officials.

After twenty-five years of agitation, a constitutional convention met in Richmond in the autumn of 1829. Reformers everywhere looked to this body in the hope that something might be done to “put slavery in a way to final extinction.” Madison, Monroe, Chief Justice Marshall, and John Randolph were members. All of these favored eastern Virginia and defended the privileged minority. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of Jefferson, Philip Doddridge, and Alexander Campbell represented the western section of the State and democracy. After months of debate which covered every subject in government, and especially slavery and its possible abolition, the convention decided, in the face of serious threats of secession on the part of the up country, to grant to the more populous section only a slight increase in the number of representatives. The power of property in government was once again confirmed, and so hopeless was the outlook that prominent anti-slavery men deserted their own cause and joined the other side during the next decades.

It was not an easy thing for John Randolph, and the other champions of the eastern Virginia oligarchy to commit their cause to the democratic party of the Mississippi Valley, whose leader was the “lawless” Jackson. Yet this is what they did. Nowhere outside of South Carolina was the influence of Calhoun more effective than in Virginia, and it must have been this which turned the balance in favor of “the General.”

From northern Virginia, even from eastern Maryland, to middle Georgia the case of democracy seemed doomed. John Randolph had denounced it as a monstrous “tyranny of King Numbers”; Judge Gaston, one of the purest and best men of North Carolina, declared that the cry, “let the people rule,” was fallacious, and asked with great concern, “What is then to become of our system of checks and balances?” While the radical spokesmen of the South Carolina aristocracy declared that they would never submit to that “dangerous principle of majority rule.”

The growth of the cotton industry between 1800 and 1830 had done much to retard the growth of democracy, so urgently advocated by Jefferson; while the interests of the cotton planters and the fears of the tobacco growers had served to “swing the leaders” of the aristocratic South into the Jackson columns. Though the price of raw cotton had declined from forty-four cents per pound in the former year to ten cents in the latter, the annual increase in the value of the total output between 1820 and 1830 was $1,000,000 and from 1830 to 1840 the value of this staple crop increased from $29,000,000 to $63,000,000, while all other items of the national export amounted only to $50,000,000 per year. Cotton was grown in a comparatively narrow belt of country extending from lower North Carolina to the Red River counties of Louisiana and Arkansas, with a total population in 1830 of little more than 1,500,000 people, of whom 500,000 were negro slaves. Yet their annual output was worth in 1830, $29,000,000 and in 1840, $63,000,000.

In the older South the tobacco crop was not appreciably greater in 1830 than it had been in 1800, though in the succeeding decade the value of the annual harvest rose from $5,000,000 to $9,000,000, and the manufacturing of tobacco became an important industry in many localities. Rice culture was at a standstill during these years, and sugar was only making a beginning; but the total of these staples, including cotton, reaches almost to two thirds of the national exports. The annual per capita income of the lower South ranged during the Jacksonian era from thirty to forty dollars, while that of the older Southern States like Virginia and Maryland was not half so great, and the average for the country as a whole fell much below that of the South. There was thus a marked contrast between the fortune of the average Middle States man and that of the cotton planters.

The result was an extraordinary movement southwestward, especially from the older South and Kentucky, where population was almost stationary during a period of twenty years. In Virginia good lands sold for less than the cost of the buildings on them. Jefferson's home, Monticello, including two hundred acres of land, sold at public auction in 1829 for $2500. Each autumn saw thousands of masters with their families and slaves take up the march over the up-country road through Danville, Virginia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, to Georgia and Alabama, or over the mountains to the valley of Virginia, whence they followed the great highland trough southwestward to the Tennessee and Tombigbee Valleys. The population of Alabama alone increased from 300,000 in 1830 to 600,000 ten years later. Unimproved lands in the cotton country sold at prices ranging from $2 to $100 per acre, and plantations spread rapidly over the better parts of the lower South. Men could afford to give away or abandon their homes in the old South in order to establish plantations in the Gulf States, for in ten years thrifty men became rich, as riches went in those days. The cotton country was a magnet which drew upon the Middle and Atlantic States for their best citizens during a period of twenty years.

While the Jackson leadership “captured” both the conservatives of Virginia and the Carolinas and the radicals of the Gulf region, the cause of democracy made great gains in the Middle States. Half of Maryland favored Jackson, and strangely enough the conservative half. Pennsylvania, the head and front of popular government since the days of Benjamin Franklin, gave every evidence of joining the standard of Jackson early in the contest. New York had held a constitutional convention in 1821 and opened the way for universal suffrage and the popular election of most state and county officers. So radical had been the sweep of reform that Chancellor Kent and other conservatives spent their energies in protest and prophecy of dire results to come. But it was probably the work of Van Buren, a conservative “boss” of New York, and of Samuel D. Ingham, a wealthy manufacturer of Pennsylvania and an ally of Calhoun, that made sure the votes of these great States; for men of the old Federalist party and extreme protectionists of both New York and Pennsylvania ranged themselves behind Jackson and his Western democracy.

If we turn now to the chances of Clay and Adams, we must look to a part of Maryland, to Delaware and New Jersey evenly divided, it seems, between the “forward and the backward-looking” men, and to New England. Connecticut abandoned her State Church in 1818 and extended the electoral franchise to all who enrolled in the militia. Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine were border States and distinctly Western in their ideals, though they were in no way inclined to desert the New England leader. Massachusetts, the great State of the East, held firmly to her conservative moorings. In the constitutional convention of 1820 the liberals had failed at every point. Webster and Story had defeated the proposition for abolishing the property qualification for membership in the State Senate; and the more radical plan for overthrowing the established Congregational Church, the bulwark of steady habits in Massachusetts, was similarly voted down. Webster, like Randolph, of Virginia, and Rhett, of South Carolina, urged that property should rule in every well-ordered community, and what Webster, Randolph, and Rhett urged, their respective States adopted. Even more reactionary was little Rhode Island, where privilege and inequality were as firmly intrenched as anywhere else in the country. The suffrage was limited to freeholders and representation was denied the majority of the people. The control of governor, legislature, and courts was in the hands of the minority. In 1821, 1822, and 1824 leaders of the majority endeavored to secure reforms, but without success.

From Augusta, Maine, to Baltimore stretched the long strip of country which could be relied on to vote for John Quincy Adams and to sustain conservative ideals in government. Western New York was also inclined to Adams, and Clay was confident that he could carry Ohio and Kentucky, the conservative communities of the West, for his ally. In the main the men who supported the Administration were those who feared the rough ways of plain men, the ideals of equality and popular initiative so dear to the American heart.