The Nineteenth-Century Political Nation: A Tale of Two Syntheses

For more than a decade, the historiography of nineteenth-century American politics has been dominated by two competing schools of interpretation. Since the early 1960s, “new political historians” have pioneered a social-science approach to political history, applying behavioralist theory, statistical analysis of voting and legislative behavior, and other innovations to the study of politics. More recently, another group of historians, with intellectual roots in Marxism, progressive historiography, and the “new social history,” has offered a class-based analysis of nineteenth-century public life. Each of the books under review synthesizes the work of the past generation in one of these schools, creating a comprehensive, national narrative from the local, focused studies of previous scholars. Neither author is captive to his school of interpretation, however, and each uses his own and other scholars’ material to offer new insights into nineteenth-century politics.

Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution marks an ambitious effort to narrate and explain the triumph of capitalism in antebellum America. Unlike most historians of the “capitalist transition,” Sellers insists that politics lay at the center of that process, and narrates the political struggles that, he argues, largely determined the shape of America’s economic and social order. Drawing widely from the new social history, cultural history, recent social analyses of politics, and older studies of high politics, The Market Revolution serves as a capstone to efforts to revive, in far more sophisticated form, the Progressive historians’ belief that the fierce political struggles of the Jacksonian era were rooted in class conflict.

According to Sellers, capitalist development was the defining issue of Jacksonian politics. At the heart of the era’s political conflicts lay an overriding struggle between the market ethos of the capitalist seaboard and the cashcrop frontier and the “subsistence culture” of the rural majority. By 1815, Sellers argues, entrepreneurs and their representatives had won control of Jefferson’s Republican party — and, through that party, the federal government. These National Republicans pursued a program of state-sponsored capitalist development and national consolidation through a national bank, territorial expansion, internal improvements, and protective tariffs. This program sparked a political insurgency among farmers and urban mechanics, who found their way of life threatened by the market revolution and who remained dedicated to local autonomy and limited government. Impoverished by the country’s first capitalist depression in 1819, producers helped create powerful state movements that combined demands for curbs on banking and paper currency with calls for greater political power for ordinary citizens. Long before the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Sellers argues, anticapitalism and democracy were inextricably linked. The National Republican program also led to a defection among southern slave owners, who came to fear northern National Republicans’ hostility to slavery and saw in the national party’s extension of federal power a threat to human property.

These class-based insurgencies found their national leader in Andrew Jackson. Antibank farmers and mechanics throughout the nation flocked to the hero of New Orleans in 1824 and 1828, imbuing his candidacy with a popular, democratic, and anticapitalist ethos. “Ordinary Americans mustered democracy against the paper system and its aristocracy of enterprise.... [A] majority was claiming control over a government that had been mainly responsive to elites” (p. 200). By 1828, southern slave holders had also joined the Jackson army.

According to Sellers, Jackson’s victory at the head of a nationwide popular political insurgency created a moment of democratic promise unique in American history. In opposing internal improvements, in supporting Georgia farmers’ lust after Cherokee land, in fighting for limited government, and above all in warring against the Bank of the United States and the system of paper money it represented, Jackson forged into policy the resentments and aspirations of a subsistence-oriented, land-hungry, and patriarchal rural...