America in the Jacksonian Era: An Interview with David S. Reynolds

David S. Reynolds is distinguished professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York. A leading scholar of 19th-century America, he is the author of John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Knopf, 2005); Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Harvard University Press, 1989); and Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (Knopf, 1995). The latter won the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2008 HarperCollins published Reynolds's Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, an engaging narrative of America in a vibrant era. Among other things, he ranges over the religious upheaval of the 1830s, the literary renaissance, and the political conflicts that troubled the new nation. Throughout, as one reviewer put it, "Reynolds asks us to more carefully consider the brawling, chaotic, boisterous years from 1815 to 1848 as a fascinating age in its own right." Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens interviewed Reynolds in May 2009.

Randall Stephens: In your new book Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson you claim that the period between 1815 and 1848 is the richest in American history. Why?

David Reynolds: Because it was during this period that Americans tried to redefine themselves in the context of what the American Revolution had been fought for. The spirit of 1776—what did it really mean that all men are created equal? Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that phrase in the Declaration of Independence, was a slaveholder. He had hundreds of slaves. George Washington was a slaveholder. Twelve of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. So what did it mean that all men are created equal? During this period this question was asked sharply by a small but growing group of antislavery people. It began on the fringes with William Lloyd Garrison, but it came to include Abraham Lincoln. The energies fueled by this national discussion contributed to an explosion in cultural creativity; some of America's greatest writers, artists, and philosophers date from this period.

Stephens: Why was Thomas Jefferson so alarmed by the prospect of Andrew Jackson becoming president?

Reynolds: Thomas Jefferson was an intellectual aristocrat. He was a typical Enlightenment figure, an 18th-century rationalist. He was a serious reader, as were John Adams and John Quincy Adams. Jefferson regarded Andrew Jackson as unlearned, very much a man of the people. Jackson was reputed not to have read a book all the way through except for the Bible and The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel by Oliver Goldsmith.

Stephens: You draw such a contrast between Jackson and John Quincy Adams. The latter was not only very learned, but also had a broader vision of the role that civic virtue should play in the American republic.

Andrew Jackson

Reynolds: John Quincy Adams was a brilliant man. He knew seven languages, and even when he served as president in the 1820s he kept up his scholarly pursuits. If you read his letters, you see that he's fascinated by all kinds of things—Chinese history, Russian history, astronomy, science, horticulture. Jackson didn't have that. What Jackson had was a very dynamic magnetism about him. And also he had what we call street smarts.

Stephens: Did Jackson and other Democrats suspect that too much education made someone ill-equipped for political office?

Reynolds: Jackson and his followers espoused a kind of anti-intellectualism. Yet Jackson, even though he himself was not intellectual or scholarly, helped fund scientific institutions. And while the Whig Party trumpeted scientific, technological, and intellectual progress, Jackson actually funded technological improvement far more actively than did any of the Whig presidents before Millard Fillmore, who came along in 1850. Jackson was not an ignoramus; nor was he totally uninterested in science or progress. Also, he had native eloquence. True, his speeches had to be edited by others, but they could be incredibly powerful.

Stephens: It struck...