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Chapter 4 o The Market Republic, 1829–1850 The Rise of Cities and the Jacksonian Party System Following the War of 1812, fundamental economic shifts began to occur. In time they greatly altered the role of government, particularly at the state level. Most of the changes arose out of the Industrial Revolution. Americans began to leave their farms and become wage earners. They became dependent upon state governments and political parties for protection from exploitation at the hands of employers, banks, and other powerful interests. As the need for legislative remedies increased the power of political parties , these institutions became increasingly susceptible to manipulation by the federal executive branch. An abundance of offices and contracts enabled presidents and their cohorts to buy the support of newspaper editors, convention delegates, and politicians in every town in America. The end result was the rise of an apparently decentralized party system that in fact enabled federal officials to manipulate political activity at even the local level. The change that elevated American political parties—urbanization— presented a difficult challenge for a country in which economic security was viewed as the foundation upon which republics are built. By creating an urban populace that was largely impoverished, the Industrial Revolution seemed to threaten the country’s future.This fear stemmed from the fact that Americans of the time were careful students of history and political science. They immersed themselves in what can be broadly described as the classical theory of republican government. Among the chief features of this theory was the idea that republics required “public virtue.” 1 John Adams considered 145 1. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 68. virtue “the only foundation of republics.” 2 Politicians often reminded their audiences that republics fell once their citizens became corrupted and public virtue destroyed. 3 On July 4, 1829, one speaker warned that “a profligate people cannot continue free.” 4 After vote frauds marred the 1844 presidential election, an observer could not resist pointing out the obvious meaning of rampant electoral corruption: “the decay of virtue and honor, the only safeguard of a republic.” 5 What was public virtue? Edward Gibbon believed that it arose out of “a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members.” 6 In a republican context, virtuous citizens were supposed to behave like disinterested jurors, voting in the best interests of their country instead of their own pecuniary interests. Americans derived their belief in the necessity of public virtue from history . They took special interest in the fortunes of the Roman Republic, and the last days of it in particular attracted their attention. 7 There was universal agreement about the root cause of Rome’s fall. As a Philadelphia newspaper proclaimed in 1786, “Every page of history of the great revolution of Rome shows some instances of the degeneracy of Roman virtue and of the impossibility of a nation’s continuing free after its virtue is gone.” 8 Americans took note of how the Roman Republic supposedly lost its virtue: urbanization . During the second century B.C., aristocratic families enriched by Rome’s overseas conquests purchased much of the land surrounding the capital city, forcing thousands of citizens to abandon their homesteads in the process. The dispossessed poured into the city of Rome. Poverty and hunger led them to sell the one asset they had left—their votes. While these farmers had once cast their ballots with only the interests of the Republic in mind, their votes were now determined by the wishes of those who paid for them.The situation was fatally exploited by Julius Caesar, who used grain and promises of land to bribe impoverished urban voters. Once in power, he tossed the republican government aside. 2. Quoted in Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 535. 3. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 423. 4. James T. Austin, An Oration Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1829, at the Celebration of American Independence, in the City of Boston (Boston: James Eastburn, 1829), 16. 5. Henry Clay, The Works of Henry Clay, ed. Calvin Colton, 7 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1904), 5:523. 6. Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London, 1776; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1993), 1:13. 7. Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 25–26. 8. Philadelphia Packet, August 8, 1786, quoted in Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 423. 146 the market republic...

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