The Public and Its Possibilities: Triumphs and Tragedies in the American City

4. The Democratic Public in City and Nation: The Jacksonian City and the Limits of Antislavery

A s the cultural, physical, and legal infrastructure for a democratic public took shape in the first third of the nineteenth century, the republic’s largest cities produced an engaged, intelligent citizenry. City parks, civic spaces, and public meetings provided the places and occasions for political discussion and debate, while post offices, telegraph systems, and newspapers distributed it outward to every corner of the republic. Meanwhile the courts provided cities with considerable powers to plan for the public welfare and circumscribed the rights of private property. In the thirty years preceding the Civil War, the focus of the democratic public shifted from the city to slavery. Alerting citizens to the threat posed to the free labor republic, slavery’s opponents used the infrastructure of a democratic public to mobilize an antislavery majority in the small towns and rural areas of the North. But the antislavery movement never captured the cities. The same entrepreneurial and evangelical logic that condemned slavery for denying economic opportunity and religious salvation demanded the imposition of market discipline and middle-class morality on working people. As Whigs and evangelicals tried to suppress popular culture, a thirty years’ war between moral reformers and plebeian democrats raged in the cities. Tragically, working people saw in the antislavery movement not a version of their own free labor values , but an intrusive, elite effort to reform them. CHAPTER 4 The Democratic Public in City and Nation B The Jacksonian City and the Limits of Antislavery 72 • POPULAR CULTURE, POLITICAL CULTURE Constructing a Public Realm Although they spoke for “We the People of the United States,” the Founding Fathers gave little thought to creating a democratic public. But as the people refused to retire into silence, the Founding Fathers recognized the construction of a public realm as a logical and necessary response to the democratization of the republican ideal of citizenship. In order to shape the “principles, morals, and manners of our citizens to our republican forms of government,” Benjamin Rush wrote in 1787, we must develop the means to circulate “knowledge of every kind . . . through every part of the United States.”1 As an object of national policy, the construction of a public realm began with the Post Office Act of 1792. Creating a network of post offices that connected every part of the expanding republic, the law established the largest enterprise, public or private, in the country. By the 1830s, nearly nine thousand postmasters represented three-fourths of the federal civilian workforce, a staff almost half again as large as the federal army. Delivering nearly fourteen million letters a year over a 116,000 square mile territory, the postal service also circulated 16,000 newspapers a year for a modest fee and an average of 4,300 newspapers to every newspaper publisher in the country, free of charge.2 The postal system facilitated participation in public affairs. A public space where citizens came to learn about and discuss public affairs, the local post office served as an adjunct to campaigns and elections. Attached reading rooms made newspapers, government documents, and religious tracts widely available. Considered public resources, newspapers were “as free to all comers, as to the person to whom they rightfully belong.”The postal service also facilitated the emergence of political parties. The administration of President John Quincy Adams transformed the post office into a headquarters of a federal program of internal improvements , providing a foundation for the later Whig Party. The Jacksonian Democrats began as little more than a coterie of publicists circulating their newspapers through the mails. As Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency in 1829, he seized upon the republican principle of rotation in office to justify a purge of officeholders . Distributing thousands of postmasterships to their supporters, the Jacksonians secured the loyal cadre and political influence that created an organized party.3 New public spaces complemented the postal system and brought some coherence to the Jacksonian city. Massive immigration, rapid economic growth, and periodic recession, as well as physical expansion and the proliferation and specialization of interior spaces made the Jacksonian city less legible than the compact walking cities of the revolutionary era. A baffling array of strangers confronted one another in “the great metropolis,” a New Yorker observed, where “beggars and millionaires, shoulder-hitters and thinkers, burghers and scholars, fine women and fortune tellers, journalists and pawn brokers, gam- THE DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC IN CITY AND NATION • 73 blers and mechanics, here as...