1CREATING THE DEMOCRACY, 1820–1848
No free country can exist without political parties.
—MARTIN VAN BUREN1
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
—WALT WHITMAN, DEMOCRAT
The rising politician from America’s largest state certainly knew how to make a first impression. In 1813, a few days past his thirtieth birthday, Martin Van Buren strolled to his seat in the New York state senate dressed, according to one witness, in “a green coat, buff breeches, and white topped boots.” Several years later, he walked into the U.S. Senate, to which he had recently been elected, wearing a coat the color of dark brown snuff, an orange tie, white trousers, and bright yellow gloves. Van Buren was a self-taught lawyer who had imbibed political talk while helping out at his father’s prosperous inn and tavern in the village of Kinderhook, New York, outside Albany. He routinely competed against gentlemen of greater wealth and status. To bear himself as their equal, even their sartorial superior, was essential to earning their respect. His choice of clothes signaled that he wanted, at the same time, to transform the political order and to rise within it.2
The tavern keeper’s son went on to have an illustrious political career, if not always a triumphant one. Following service in the New York state legislature and Congress, Van Buren became President Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state, then his vice president. In 1836, he was narrowly elected to the White House himself, only to lose four years later to William Henry Harrison—like Old Hickory, a former military hero. In 1844, John C. Calhoun, tribune of the planter slaveocracy, deftly prevented Van Buren from winning another presidential nomination. But the pol from Kinderhook got revenge of a sort in 1848 when he ran again for the nation’s top office as the candidate of a short-lived party that demanded an end to the expansion of slavery.
Midway through the next decade, Van Buren retreated across the ocean to a villa overlooking the Bay of Naples to write his memoirs. He boasted, rather awkwardly, that he was “one, who, without the aid of powerful family connexions, and with but few of the adventitious facilities for the acquisition of political power had been elevated by his Countrymen to a succession of official trusts, not exceeded, perhaps, either in number, in dignity or in responsibility by any that have ever been committed to the hands of one man.”3
Yet the self-made son of upstate New York never sought power for himself alone. The figure inside those gaudy costumes became one of the first and most successful party builders in American history. Van Buren’s ambition was to create and then consolidate the supremacy of an organization that would represent “the People” (a noun he often capitalized) in their never-ending battle with anyone who schemed to use the elected government to advance the selfish interests of a few.
How did Van Buren, together with several close friends and a swelling number of political allies, create the institution that became known as the Democratic Party? They started with an ideological vision, recruited a corps of talented leaders who knit together a coalition of regional and social diversity, and slowly constructed an organization that could publicize and defend itself—and mount a series of winning campaigns. The project began in the 1820s and did not fully mature until twenty years later. But it depended on an explicit embrace of competitive parties, which the founders of the republic had warned against. Parties were, wrote James Madison, Jefferson’s close ally, in 1787, in the Federalist Papers, “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”4
Van Buren and his fellow Democrats disagreed. “The spirit of party,” declared their Albany organ, was “the vigilant watchman over the conduct of those in power.” Mass parties, they argued, cultivated the habits of democracy. They encouraged the civic-minded to work constructively with their peers, sharpening collective appeals to voters and preventing any individual from forging a tyranny over his fellow citizens, such as existed in the monarchies and empires that spanned most of the globe. Van Buren allowed that “excesses frequently attend [parties] and produce many evils.” Yet if the mass of men stayed faithful to “the principles and objects” of their organization, they would advance the welfare of the republic far better than any tiny clique of the haughty and wellborn could ever do.5
In building this party of a new type, Van Buren did not mean to bestow legitimacy on any parties created by his opponents. He believed, as had Jefferson, that “aristocrats” would perpetually seek to thwart the desires of “democrats”; the opposition party was run by the same elitist cabal, whether it went under the name of Federalist, Whig, or Republican. “They glory,” he charged in 1840, “in the supposition … that the mass of the people are every where too fickle in their opinions, too little informed in public affairs + too unstable in their views for the enjoyment of self Government.” Not until after the Civil War, when the party of Lincoln reigned supreme, did Democrats begin to acknowledge that their rivals might enjoy an enduring popular base of their own.6
Like libertarians today, antebellum Democrats believed the federal state should refrain from intervening in most aspects of economic life—from chartering banks to financing public works to taxing income. But unlike twenty-first-century conservatives, they based their adherence to laissez-faire doctrine on a populist suspicion: an interventionist federal government would always benefit the rich and the well-connected. Economic growth was a splendid thing, so long as Washington insiders were not able to direct it to selfish ends. What one historian calls “the glorious absence of a powerful state” also appealed to many European-born newcomers who had fled monarchies that impressed them into armies, stripped taxes from the poor, and crushed them when they protested. It was also in sync with the emerging liberal doctrine across the Atlantic, where workers, shopkeepers, and intellectuals were demanding a role in governing nations ruled by landed gentry who repressed the speech and activism of the “popular classes.”7
Democrats appealed to voters who worried more about what a powerful national state could do to harm them than about how it might protect their liberties and further their economic welfare. They favored such measures as low tariffs, free immigration, and an end to prison for debtors, and sympathized with early labor unions against courts that blasted them as “criminal conspiracies” to restrain trade. The fear of statism, coupled with the creed of white supremacy, also led Northern Democrats to condemn abolitionists as dangerous meddlers with the rights of agrarian property-owners. Van Buren and his allies defended the practice of reserving public jobs for the party faithful (which their Whig opponents vehemently derided) as a way to ensure that governments would heed the wishes of ordinary people instead of those of their social superiors.
Not every Democrat agreed with each policy that flowed from this moralistic ideology, but it played a major role in binding together the coalition that surged into national power with Andrew Jackson and held on to it, with brief interruptions, until the last election before the Civil War. In the South, most big planters and yeomen farmers shared a mistrust of a central state that might take the side of well-placed Northerners in battles over the tariff and the expansion of slavery. They made common cause with artisans and shopkeepers in Eastern cities and on the Midwestern frontier who considered wealthy bankers and financiers to be “based … upon fraud and corruption,” as John S. Bagg, a Democratic newspaper editor from Detroit, put it. “Our government is based upon equal rights,” declared the journalist. Banks and the speculators they funded were “unequal in their practices; a bundle of … hypocrisy and incongruity, from their commencement to their death.”8
With these resentments—and ideals—Democrats brought together working-class radicals from Manhattan and Dixie planters whose ownership of hundreds of slaves and acres of land made them the richest Americans of the era. In Tammany Hall, they built the first urban political machine; by the 1830s, it was winning most local elections and ensuring that Van Buren’s party would be competitive in New York State. Democrats won votes from subsistence farmers and from merchants whose warehouses bulged with goods from Europe; most of the native-born Americans who worshipped at well-established Episcopalian churches were Democrats, but so were most Catholics, the majority of whom had been born abroad. For most of the 1840s, both Walt Whitman and Jefferson Davis were ardent Democrats; the budding young poet edited a party organ in Brooklyn and spoke at election rallies, while the future president of the Confederacy canvassed in Mississippi for the party’s presidential nominees and ran for a seat in the House of Representatives.
From the 1820s through the following decade, Van Buren played the pivotal role in constructing this organization of unlikely partners. It went by different names—the Jackson Party, the Republicans, the Democratic-Republicans. Not until 1840 did partisans settle on calling themselves simply Democrats or, with a grandiose touch, “the Democracy.”
But what they accomplished was unique in world history. The Democrats were the first political body to attract masses of voters, the first to hold nominating conventions on a regular basis, the first to organize a network of partisan newspapers, the first to establish a national committee and a congressional caucus, and the first not merely to acquiesce in the reality of competition among parties of the new type but also to celebrate it. With this potent apparatus, the Democrats dominated national politics during the antebellum era, winning all but two presidential elections from 1828 until 1856 and controlling both houses of Congress for nearly that entire span.
The only constituency that party officials and activists made no effort to attract was African Americans. Until the Civil War, Democrats in every region protected slavery where it already existed and sought to exclude free Blacks from participating in politics at all. Fear of racial competition drove most white workers to view abolitionists as a threat to their livelihood. Urban merchants and manufacturers did a fine business supplying Southern plantations with clothing, machinery, and luxury goods. And Democrats, like most Americans, took it for granted that only white people were worthy and capable of governing themselves. Thus, at its creation, the self-styled “party of the people” was a contradiction in terms, albeit a remarkably heterogeneous one. Van Buren himself had grown up in a household with six enslaved people and continued to hire Black men and women owned by others when he served as vice president and president.9
For a century, the Democrats would waver little from their racist convictions. Electorally, this turned out to be both a boon and a burden. Except during the Civil War, white Southerners were the most reliable and stable voting bloc in the nation; without their support, Democrats would have struggled to ever take the presidency or enough seats to control either house of Congress. The doctrine of racial supremacy also helped the party win over those white small farmers and wage earners who feared competition from Blacks, and later Chinese immigrants, too. On the one hand, Democrats vowed to fight for their interests against a wealthy elite that allegedly used dark-skinned hands to damage the prospects of paler ones. On the other hand, politicians who talked this way developed habits that stamped them as immoral and reactionary when slavery was abolished, and non-white Americans gradually exercised the power of their numbers at the polls and in the larger civic culture.
Van Buren and his allies were able to build their broad yet all-white party by taking advantage of a transformation of American society that was gathering speed during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Drawing from both native-born and immigrant streams, the nation’s population expanded by a remarkable 240 percent between 1820 and 1850; new states came into being across the continent—from Maine to Florida and from Missouri to Oregon and California. Those new Americans fueled a huge domestic market, which artisans, farmers, and entrepreneurs equipped with new technologies and rushed to exploit. Canals and railroad lines linked factory towns to food producers and made the efficient delivery of mail a commercial necessity. Steam presses increased the speed and lowered the price of printing, turning an increasingly literate public into regular readers of newspapers and magazines. Banks sprouted up in rural and metropolitan America alike to finance some new enterprises and, inevitably, to ruin others. Artisans formed trade unions in big cities and factory towns to wrest from their bosses a share of the profits and control on the job.
The United States remained a largely agrarian society through the remainder of the nineteenth century. But it was becoming one full of urban enterprises and national institutions stamped indelibly, as Whitman sang about the railroads, as “Type of the modern! emblem of motion and power! pulse of the continent!”10
The democratization of politics advanced in tandem with the modernization of daily life. By the 1840s, adult white men could vote in nearly every state, regardless of whether they owned property, which, in the cities, only a minority did. Several midwestern states flush with newcomers from Europe extended the franchise to immigrants who declared their intention to become citizens but had not completed the naturalization process. In many states and localities, elections of some sort were held at least once a year. There were many offices to be filled, from town coroner to president, and many citizens eager to earn a regular salary for serving, or at least vowing to serve, the public good.
The informal, deferential ritual of voting that Jefferson and his Federalist rivals had inherited from colonial days was gradually giving way to a more systematic and democratic one. Instead of gathering in a central square or at a crossroads and announcing one’s choices out loud or scrawling them out by hand, most American men began casting ballots printed and distributed by competing parties in a myriad of polling places located near where they worked or lived. When it came to choosing who would occupy the most important office in the land, ordinary men were no longer inclined to give their social superiors the benefit of the doubt. By 1832, every state but one (the planter fiefdom of South Carolina) was choosing presidential electors by popular vote instead of leaving that critical power to the state legislature. When Alexis de Tocqueville took his short but momentous tour of the country in the early 1830s, he marveled, with some exaggeration, that “it is difficult to say what place is taken up in the life of an inhabitant of the United States by his concern for politics. To take a hand in the regulation of society and to discuss it is his biggest concern and, so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows.”11
Bucktails Rising
The growth of political enthusiasm helped generate a bevy of operatives eager and able to stoke and channel it. A mass party grew first, and most robustly, in Van Buren’s home state. By 1820, one of every seven Americans was a New Yorker, a percentage that declined only gradually for the remainder of the century. No one knows who began calling New York “the Empire State,” but the term nicely captured the burgeoning variety of ethnicities, religious denominations, and economic pursuits there, as well as its geographic spread from the Atlantic Ocean north to the Canadian border and westward to the shores of Lake Erie. Thousands of immigrants were risking their health clearing land for the Erie Canal while native-born Americans and foreigners worked side by side setting type and stitching clothes in the workshops of Manhattan, hub of what was already the nation’s largest city. Many more raised wheat and pigs to feed both their own families and wage earners all over North America.
The battle for political power in the state mirrored its size and heterogeneity. The presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison turned their party into the dominant one in New York, as well as the nation. But success inevitably bred conflicts among ambitious Republican individuals and factions. The stakes of competition had grown from the era just after the War for Independence, when wealthy gentlemen divvied up the scattering of unpaid offices among themselves. By the early 1820s, New Yorkers elected or appointed some fifteen thousand officials—more than one for every hundred residents; debate about how best to advance the public welfare often turned into a personal matter.
After the War of 1812, Van Buren helped organize a group of young Republican politicians who challenged the sway of Governor DeWitt Clinton and his associates, many of whom owned sizable estates and had been groomed to run the affairs of state. The upstarts called themselves the Bucktails, a term borrowed from the deer-tail symbol of Tammany Hall in Manhattan. They published their own newspaper—The Albany Argus—and began to organize a faction of the party dedicated to advancing “the fairly expressed will of the majority” against “Federalists” (real or imagined) whom they accused of thwarting it. Every Bucktail swore to obey a code of discipline akin to that of a combat unit. “Tell them they are safe if they face the enemy,” Silas Wright, a close ally of Van Buren’s, wrote to a comrade during one crisis, “but that the first man we see step to the rear, we cut down … they must not falter or they perish.”12
A prime occasion to demonstrate that will and discipline soon presented itself. In 1819, a sharp national recession threw many small farmers and artisans into debt. In a cash-poor economy, repayment was often an arduous task, and a prison cell potentially awaited anyone who could not satisfy his creditors. The fact that most men who owned no property were still ineligible to vote added to their frustration.
In New York, the Bucktails leapt into the breach. A year before, Van Buren had led a successful drive to outlaw incarceration for debtors. Now, against Clinton’s wishes, Bucktail members of the state legislature demanded that a convention be held to amend the state constitution, which had undergone few changes since the revolutionary era. At the gathering held in the state assembly during the late summer and fall of 1821, Van Buren backed a proposal to broaden the franchise to any man who paid taxes, labored on the public roads, or had served in the militia. He argued for it in debate with erstwhile Federalists, the most formidable of whom was James Kent, an esteemed legal scholar and the former chief justice of the state supreme court. Kent warned that giving the vote to men without property who were crowding into metropolises like the one 145 miles to the south on the Hudson River would destroy the “plain and simple republics of farmers” who were the moral bedrock of the nation. Voicing a traditional fear of mass democracy, he cautioned that demagogues could use “inflammatory appeals” to whip up “the worst passions of the worst men.” But the respected jurist was waging a battle he had no chance to win: by the 1820s, the celebrators of mass democracy far outnumbered its detractors.13
Van Buren, whom the legislature had recently elected to the U.S. Senate, countered with a theory of political morality based on labor. It was unjust, he charged, to deny men on whose toil and taxes New York depended a role in choosing its leaders. The propertyless were “the bone, pith, and muscle of the population of the state” and posed no danger to the social order they sustained. Since a clear majority of the delegates sided with the Bucktails, Van Buren easily carried the day. By 1826, the state legislature did away with all restrictions on the suffrage rights of white male citizens. In just five years, the electorate had expanded by almost 300 percent.14
However, the Bucktails’ warm regard for the working man turned to solid ice at the color line. At the 1821 convention, they voted as a bloc to retain a property qualification for free Black men. James Kent and his allies objected. As erstwhile Federalists, they held true to the anti-racist traditions of their old party; in 1799, a Federalist legislature and governor had initiated the gradual abolition of slavery in the state; in gratitude, the few Black men in New York who enjoyed the limited franchise voted faithfully for the party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. But to Van Buren and his flock, African Americans were, by nature, dependent wretches, incapable of thinking or acting for themselves. They would, charged Erastus Root, an ardent Bucktail and a member of the state assembly, always be “following the train of those who ride in their coaches, and whose shoes and boots they had so often Blacked.” So the convention extended the franchise only to “men of color” who owned “a freehold estate” worth at least $250, debt-free. At the time, fewer than a hundred Black men could qualify. New York was hardly alone in restricting the vote by race. By the eve of the Civil War, only five New England states allowed African Americans to exercise the franchise.15
The outcome of this conflict about race and democracy bore a significance that stretched far beyond the decision reached inside Albany’s ornate old capitol. Elsewhere in the nation, politicians were emulating what the Bucktails had done. Every state that joined the union after that date passed a law that effectively barred nearly all Black men from voting.16
The creators of what would become the Democratic Party thus made clear that their Democracy would include and seek to represent only “the People” of the majority race. They routinely charged their partisan opponents of being “aristocrats” whose condescension toward white farmers and wage earners was a malign remnant of Old World feudalism. Unlike the Federalists and, later, most Whigs, Democrats would welcome immigrants from every European nation and religion. They would speed naturalization for Irish fleeing the Great Famine of the 1840s, dispense patronage jobs to poor Catholics and Jews, denounce the king of England and the tsar of Russia and the Ottoman caliph for keeping ethnic minorities in the cage of empire. But they either dismissed the brutal realities of slavery in their own country or argued that Blacks held in bondage by “the lords of the lash” were no worse off than were the factory hands exploited by “the lords of the loom.”
Few Bucktails or their like-minded counterparts in other Northern states had an economic stake of their own in preserving slavery. Those who survived until the 1860s did not mourn its demise. New York had passed its gradual emancipation law when Van Buren was seventeen, and the family freed the slaves it owned soon afterward.
However, the idea of liberty for African Americans posed a threat to his ambition of creating a party that could win a majority in every region. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had temporarily quieted sectional tensions; as they moved west, white Americans could choose to live in a slave state or a free one, prospering as they could. Officeholders who aspired “to interfere with the question of slavery” were thus jeopardizing the peace of the nation—and the future of a party that vowed to defend the common white man against his adversaries.
The Bucktails’ triumph at the 1821 convention emboldened them to turn their embryonic faction into an organization that critics quickly blasted with a metaphor that would long endure—a “complicated and corrupt” machine. Van Buren traveled down to Washington to begin his term in the Senate. But he departed confident that his associates in Albany were “overflowing with kindly feelings towards myself” and had “full and almost unquestioned possession of the State Government.” The politician whom journalists had taken to calling “the Little Magician” (although, at five foot six, he was just a little shorter than average height) had begun a process that would lead, within a decade, to the election of Andrew Jackson, the first president not raised in wealth and comfort.17
With Van Buren’s guidance, his allies, now dubbed the Albany Regency, came up with a strategy for holding power in the Empire State for years to come. They established offshoots in most of New York’s fifty-odd counties. They took care to dispense patronage jobs to men who understood the politics of their local communities. They appointed only strict loyalists to every judiciary post from the state supreme court to humble justices of the peace.
Naturally, the machine’s opponents charged it with scheming to eliminate all competition. Regency men countered, in their speeches and the pages of The Albany Argus, that modern parties were actually “among the firmest bulwarks of civil liberty” because they encouraged lively debate about the issues of the day and mobilized citizens to vote for candidates who shared their views. Internal discipline sharpened those debates, ensuring that once a position was taken, it would be followed. Partisan competition so enthralled them that they wagered large sums of money at election time to test their expertise, as well as to fatten their wallets. “Bet on Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, jointly if you can, or any two of them; don’t forget to bet all you can,” Van Buren wrote in 1828 to Alexander Hamilton, Jr., who, despite his paternity, was an ally.18
In one of the great ironies of political history, the Little Magician was conjuring up a party of a new type that vowed to restore the principles of a deceased one. The “old Republicans,” led by Jefferson and Madison, adhered to the doctrine of states’ rights and strict limits on federal power, as stipulated in the U.S. Constitution. Its leaders believed that a society of self-reliant yeoman farmers was morally superior to an urban one crowded with impoverished factory hands below and haughty financiers above. They feared a strong national state would always serve the interests of the rich and the well-connected; corruption would be ingrained in its bones.
Copyright © 2022 by Michael Kazin
