Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
stability was gone. The familiar domestic economy that functioned
primarily in terms of consumption rather than profit disintegrated
under the workings of a paper system and gave place to a speculative
economy.
It was this revolution that set apart the new West from the older
traditional America and made it the special repository of the new
middle-class spirit of progress. The change had been long preparing.
Writing from Boonesborough in January, 1776, the agent of the
Transylvania Land Company pointed out that the western country
“abounded with land mongers,” and that his company had already issued
nine hundred patents.[413] These adventurous spirits were only pioneers
pointing the way for later hordes that after 1815 pushed eagerly
onward. “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,”
commented a traveler in 1817 as he watched the long line of Conestoga
wagons moving towards Pittsburgh; and in the fall of the same year
Timothy Flint said of Saint Charles, Missouri, that “there was an
average of one hundred people every day coming to the town, or passing
to near-by points. Nearly all were poor and not one family in fifty had
a Bible” (Kirkpatrick, _Timothy Flint, etc._, p. 102). “This western
fever has seized old and young,” remarks a character in Cooper’s _Home
as Found_, “and it has carried off many active families from our parts
of the world.... Most of the counties adjoining our own have lost a
considerable portion of their population.” One reason for this vast
exodus from the East is suggested by a recent student who remarks:
“A considerable part of the significance of the frontier lies behind
the frontier. In one sense, the westward expansion of the American
people was a flight from the new industrialism” (Norman Ware, _The
Industrial Worker_, p. xx). To these adventurers from the East was
added an increasing immigration. During the period from the close of
the Revolution to the War of 1812, the annual immigration averaged no
more than four or five thousand. In the year 1817 it rose to 22,000,
and thereafter an augmenting stream poured into America and filtered
westward. They were natural prey to shrewd promoters, and in _Martin
Chuzzlewit_ Dickens has drawn a picture--not wholly caricature--of what
befell some of them. But whatever might be their individual fate, they
provided fuel to the fire that was consuming the old agrarianism and
clearing the ground for the western middle class.
II
With land as its staple commodity the West naturally interpreted
progress in terms of increasing land values; and these in turn were
dependent on better markets, better roads, and a freely flowing tide of
immigration. In a country of such vast distances internal improvements
were an everyday necessity. With every mile that a turnpike was driven
into the wilderness new opportunities were opened up. Monies paid for
wild land went into the Federal treasury; it was only just, according
to the western view, that such monies should return to the West in the
form of public improvements, for with such improvements tax values were
increased, prices of all commodities rose, and progress was furthered.
The Federal government could not fairly leave its offspring to shift
for themselves, but must consider itself _in loco parentis_ to the
rising commonwealths. It was a persuasive argument, appealing alike to
farmer and speculator, to town and country, but it played havoc with
the older Jeffersonianism. Jefferson thought always in terms of the
agrarian producer functioning in a stable economic world; speculation
was not in his philosophy; unearned increment was a crop he never
calculated on; and in sympathy with an older liberalism he would reduce
the state to the narrow rôle of policeman. But the new West, thinking
in terms of its immediate needs, desired a broad and benevolent
paternalism. It wanted the Federal government to butter its bread
regardless of the ultimate cost of the butter.
The complete embodiment of this spirit of paternalistic progress was
the master politician of the times, whose dramatic career, beginning
as a Jeffersonian and ending as a Hamiltonian, suggests the confusions
of a world in transition. Henry Clay was the hero of the new West, the
spokesman of the new ambitions. A man of great personal charm, engaging
manners, buoyant temperament, exuberant patriotism, and persuasive
tongue, he migrated in 1797 at the age of twenty-one from Richmond,
Virginia, to Lexington, Kentucky, then a booming county-seat town only
twenty-two years removed from the building of its first blockhouse. The
population of the state had more than doubled in seven years, and by
1797 it had risen above 180,000. Of this aggressive little world Clay
soon became the accredited representative at Washington. He had been
brought up under the old domestic economy and carefully tutored in the
Jeffersonian philosophy. For four years he had been private secretary
to George Wythe, a distinguished Virginian of the older generation,
a profound lawyer and teacher, a scholarly political thinker, a
humanitarian, and a confirmed agrarian. When Clay left Virginia he
carried with him the Jeffersonianism of Wythe; but he was wanting in
the trained intellect of his preceptor and his views were inadequately
grounded. His subsequent career revealed him as an impressionable
nature modifying his convictions with his environment. In Kentucky the
spirit of speculative expansion seized him and inoculated his mind with
the new gospel of progress. He early convinced himself that government
was not doing its full duty unless it helped its citizens to make
money, and he persistently pressed on Congress the need of federal aid
to develop the West. In 1812 he fell victim to the war psychology,
turned jingo, and substituted an ardent patriotism for sober reason.
Thereafter he became increasingly nationalistic, demanding a strong
army and navy, pleading for a loose construction of the constitution,
arguing for paternalism. His Jeffersonianism was quietly put away
like a garment out of style. Grossly ignorant of the schools of
economic thought, he was an opportunist who shifted from the older
domestic economy to the later capitalistic, without comprehending the
significance of the change. Unread in history and political theory,
he trusted his fluency to get him out of any inconsistencies he might
blunder into. In the course of his long career he found himself
at different times on both sides of every important question; yet
gravitating to the middle-class position, the exponent of exploitation
in the name of progress, spokesman of the commercial, financial and
manufacturing interests, a new-model Federalist passionately defending
the new money economy--a curious ending for one who began as a pupil of
George Wythe.
And yet not curious when one considers the ambitions of the world that
molded him. Clay was a born politician who rarely came to grips with
reality. Devoted to the principles of republican liberty as he found
them in the Constitution, he professed to believe that government
could be trusted to distribute favors with impartial hand. Personally
honest, he never realized how often he allowed himself to become the
unconscious tool of powerful economic interests. With his desire to
please everybody he was an easy prey for skillful lobbyists. He had
been at one time attorney for the Bank, yet he denied vehemently
that his defense of the institution had been influenced by such
connection. He had become a Hamiltonian without gaining Hamilton’s
clear understanding of the economic basis of politics. A brilliant
opportunist, he was guided by no fixed political principles but tacked
with the shifting winds. A brilliant romantic, he was the persuasive
prophet of an age that was dreaming of a prosperity that should gather
in certain favored reservoirs through the agency of subsidies and
taxes, and trickle thence through all the land to water the roots
of industry. It was fitting that such a man should be the father of
Whiggery, and fitting also that he should stand as the embodiment of
the spirit of compromise. One great lesson, at least, he had learned,
that greater men too often do not learn, the lesson that republican
government rests on good will and that such good will demands a
policy of give and take among rival interests. Compromise may be
displeasing to earnest souls, but it is implied in any workable system
of democratic rule.
Like Calhoun and Webster, Clay was a victim of changing times. If he
had lived a generation later, when the middle-class revolution had been
accomplished and the principle of capitalism was in undisputed control,
he would have achieved a far greater personal success. But capitalism
was not yet strong enough to uphold him against rival economies, and
he failed of his lifelong ambition to be President. He was broken by
the Jacksonian revolution, in spite of the fact that no other American
politician has been so loved by a hero-worshiping electorate--and it
should be added, has been so lovable.
Footnotes
[413] See James Hall, _Romance of American History_, Appendix.
Chapter II • Two Spokesmen of the West
I • Andrew Jackson • Agrarian Liberal
Clay’s pleasant dream of a paternalistic prosperity for America got
its first rude awakening from General Jackson and his motley following
of western equalitarians and eastern proletarians. Gentlemen were
suddenly reminded that the plain people had been overlooked in the
distribution of benefits. The waters of prosperity, it would seem, had
been trickling somewhat too scantily to them from the great reservoirs
where they were impounded; and as they saw the wealth pouring into
private ponds through governmental pipe lines, a natural human envy
took possession of them. In theory the pipe lines belonged to them,
and the impounded waters were to be used for common irrigation; but
in practice the mains seemed to conduct only to Lowell industrialists
and Philadelphia and New York capitalists, and the waters turned out
to be privately owned. As the recognition of this fact came home to
the producing mass it provided a rallying point for an anti-monopolist
movement and determined the great objective of the Jacksonian attack,
the assault on the Bank.
The driving force of the new Democracy was the same class-feeling
that had done service a generation before, the will to destroy the
aristocratic principle in government. This conscious class-feeling
had been strengthened by the spread of the dogma of equalitarianism
through the frontier, and this in turn had brought about an extension
of manhood suffrage which enfranchised a numerous body of voters who
turned against an aristocracy that had long resisted their demands for
the vote. The spirit of 1798 was rising afresh, and the re-alignment
assumed the form of a democratic-aristocratic struggle, which for
the moment obscured the more significant fact of an emerging middle
class. The battle seemed to lie between homespun and broadcloth for
control of government, and this serves to explain the odium that
quickly attached to Jacksonian Democracy in polite circles. In drawing
together mechanics and frontiersmen, the new party inevitably became
a lower-class instrument, offensive to gentlemen of the old school
of politics. The records of the times carry abundant evidence, often
amusing, of this aristocratic contempt. In the early forties a girl
of seventeen living on a Mississippi plantation, describing Jefferson
Davis--whose wife she afterwards became--was surprised at the contrast
between his politics and his manners. “Would you believe it,” she
wrote, “he is refined and cultivated, and yet he is a Democrat!”
(_Jefferson Davis, A Memoir by his Wife_, Vol. I, p. 192.)