The Man of Many Turns

I tend to be an Iliad man myself, but at the Claremont Institute website Classics professor Bruce S. Thorton makes the best possible case for the Odyssey: Clever, Enduring Odysseus:

Most important is Homer's insight that what is best and most admirable about human beings is to be found precisely in how we meet the challenges and risks of the hard natural world of pain and suffering. This is a notion intolerable to therapeutic moderns who believe that suffering and hardship are unfair anomalies to be corrected by progress, rather than the immutable limits that help to define us and create the conditions for our nobility and achievement. Odysseus accepted this paradox of human identity, which explains his rejection of Calypso's invitation to remain with her and stay young forever, an offer she spices up by emphasizing the hardship and suffering Odysseus must undergo before he can get home and win back his wife. Odysseus's response is a powerful assertion of the dignity of human life, of the value of living a life of meaning even at the cost of suffering and death:

"And if some god batters me far out on the wine-blue water,
I will endure it, keeping a stubborn spirit inside me,
for already I have suffered much and done much hard work
on the waves and in the fighting. So let this adventure follow."

Here is wisdom that we moderns, dazzled as we are by utopian dreams of a perfect world, need to relearn.

"You must educate them to keep them from our throats"

The educators among you should know that the drive for free public schools in the Northeast in the 1830s was motivated, according to Charles Sellers, by "bourgeois panic" that the ignorant and vicious working masses, armed with universal suffrage, would otherwise overwhelm decent society.

I have never encountered this idea before, but Sellers does indeed quote that icon of American education, Horace Mann, to great effect:

Mann warned that "if the ignorant and vicious get possession of the [political] apparatus, the intelligent and virtuous must take such shocks as the stupid or profligate experimenters may choose to administer." The school campaign, as parodied by Ralph Waldo Emerson, appealed to fear of a politicized majority -- "you must educate them to keep them from our throats."

With "unmitigated anxiety," Mann demanded that solid citizens support free schools as a "barrier against . . . those propensities . . . which our institutions foster." Thus, and only thus, "nobler faculties can be elevated into dominion and supremacy over the appetites and passions," he insisted, for "if this is ever done, must be mainly done during the docile and teachable years of childhood."

Tunguska Update

I've posted on Tunguska before, and explained that my intermittent interest goes back to college. Well, here's the return of another theory: a comet, or at least a piece thereof.

I'm stubborn. I'm still holding out for the mini black hole.

Andrew Jackson's Proclamation Regarding Nullification 5: "We are ONE PEOPLE"

Posts on Andrew Jackson’s Proclamation Regarding Nullification have been slow in coming because I have been having a hard time, frankly, trying to understand the core of the president’s reasoning.

In a way, this makes sense. Jackson’s Proclamation was an intensely political document, not a logical treatise. At the same, Old Hickory plainly believed that there was an underlying logic to the reasoning that led him to the conclusions he so vehemently expressed. With these precepts in mind, let me soldier on the best I can.

Perhaps the best place to start is here.

At one point in attacking secession Jackson set up what amounted to a straw man. Jackson asserted that the claimed right to secede was predicated upon the theory that the Constitution is a “compact between sovereign States who have preserved their whole sovereignty.” (Emphasis added.) From the nature of such a compact, as Jackson characterized the argument, it followed that “they [States] can break it when in their opinion it has been departed from by the other States.” Here is Jackson’s entire paragraph:

This right to secede is deduced from the nature of the Constitution, which they say is a compact between sovereign States who have preserved their whole sovereignty, and therefore are subject to no superior; that because they made the compact, they can break it when in their opinion it has been departed from by the other States. Fallacious as this course of reasoning is, it enlists State pride, and finds advocates in the honest prejudices of those who have not studied the nature of our government sufficiently to see the radical error on which it rests.

I term Jackson’s characterization a “straw man” because he created an argument that rested upon an assumption that virtually everyone would have rejected. Whether or not the states retained “sovereignty” in some or many respects, virtually no one contended that they “preserved their whole sovereignty.” From the beginning, the Federalists shouted from the rooftops that the theory underlying the Constitution involved divided sovereignty. Even if you contended that the States remained sovereign in many respects, clearly they had ceded sovereignty with respect to at least certain, specified matters to the federal government.

The question, then, from the perspective of the nullifiers, was not whether the States had preserved their "whole" sovereignty, but rather whether they had preserved so much of their sovereignty as reserved the right to nullify or secede.

Having set up this straw man, however, Jackson did not attack it on the limited ground that I suggested in the foregoing paragraph -- that the States did not reserve the right to nullify or secede. He went much further, adopting a Websterian position that shocked those who both opposed nullification (and secession) yet believed that the States retained substantial sovereignty and were wary of “consolidation.” “The people of the United States,” Jackson declared, rather than the states themselves, were the parties to the “compact”:

The people of the United States formed the Constitution, acting through the State legislatures [note that Jackson refers to "State legislatures" rather than to the conventions that ratified the Constitution], in making the compact, to meet and discuss its provisions, and acting in separate conventions when they ratified those provisions; but the terms used in its construction show it to be a government in which the people of all the States collectively are represented.

Even worse, the president proceeded to declare that Americans were “ONE PEOPLE”, and drove home the point by pointing to the election of national officers:

We are ONE PEOPLE in the choice of the President and Vice President. Here the States have no other agency than to direct the mode in which the vote shall be given. The candidates having the majority of all the votes are chosen. The electors of a majority of States may have given their votes for one candidate, and yet another may be chosen. The people, then, and not the States, are represented in the executive branch.

Similarly, Jackson maintained, the manner of electing members to the House of Representatives indicated that the People as a whole, not the States, had the most direct relationship with the federal government:

In the House of Representatives there is this difference, that the people of one State do not, as in the case of President and Vice President, all vote for all the members, each State electing only its own representatives. But this creates no material distinction. When chosen, they are all representatives of the United States, not representatives of the particular State from which they come. They are paid by the United States, not by the State; nor are they accountable to it for any act done in performance of their legislative functions; and however they may in practice, as it is their duty to do, consult and prefer the interests of their particular constituents when they come in conflict with any other partial or local interest, yet it is their first and highest duty, as representatives of the United States, to promote the general good.

President Jackson pointedly omitted discussion of the Senate. Senators were then elected by state legislatures, a fact that contradicted the argument.

Andrew Jackson's Proclamation Regarding Nullification 4: The Union is "coeval with our political existence"

Both Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln famously held that the Union was older than the Constitution. By way of a refresher, here they are:

Daniel Webster, February 16, 1833:

In 1789, and before this Constitution was adopted, the United States had already been in a union, more or less close, for fifteen years. At least as far back as the meeting of the first Congress, in 1774, they had been in some measure, and for some national purposes, united together. Before the Confederation of 1781, they had declared independence jointly, and had carried on the war jointly, both by sea and land; and this not as separate States, but as one people. When, therefore, they formed that Confederation, and adopted its articles as articles of perpetual union, they did not come together for the first time; and therefore they did not speak of the States as acceding to the Confederation, although it was a league, and nothing but a league, and rested on nothing but plighted faith for its performance. Yet, even then, the States were not strangers to each other; there was a bond of union already subsisting between them; they were associated, united States; and the object of the Confederation was to make a stronger and better bond of union. Their representatives deliberated together on these proposed Articles of Confederation, and, being authorized by their respective States, finally "ratified and confirmed" them. Inasmuch as they were already in union, they did not speak of acceding to the new Articles of Confederation, but of ratifying and confirming them; and this language was not used inadvertently, because, in the same instrument, accession is used in its proper sense, when applied to Canada, which was altogether a stranger to the existing union. "Canada," says the eleventh article, "acceding to this Confederation, and joining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into the Union."

Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861:

Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured, and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was "to form a more perfect Union."

I mention this because one of the more remarkable aspects of Andrew Jackson’s December 10, 1832 Proclamation Regarding Nullification is that he anticipated them both:

[The South Carolina nullification ordinance has] for its object the destruction of the Union – that Union, which, coeval with our political existence, led our fathers, without any other ties to unite them than those of patriotism and common cause, through the sanguinary struggle to a glorious independence – that sacred Union, hitherto inviolate, which, perfected by our happy Constitution, has brought us, by the favor of Heaven, to a state of prosperity at home, and high consideration abroad, rarely, if ever, equaled in the history of nations.

Two Additions to Brett's "Top 10 Civil War Blogs" List

At TOCWOC, Brett Schulte posted yesterday a list of Top Ten Civil War Blogs, in which he generously included this site. As anyone who’s been here before knows, categorizing this site as a “Civil War Blog” is a stretch. In Brett’s defense, the best I can say is – thanks!

Brett’s list and the one I would make are remarkably similar. Although I’d have to agonize over who I’d drop, my list would include two entries that didn’t make Brett’s:

First is TOCWOC itself. Brett understandably didn’t nominate his own blog, but I’m sure that it would be on almost anyone else’s short list and really needs no introduction or extended description from me. Brett and his cohorts produce everything from longer essays and book reviews to “short takes” on Civil War news. The variety of the topics and quality of the execution make it a daily stop.

The other omitted blog that is a favorite is Rene Tyree’s Wig-Wags. Readers of Rene’s blog will know that it is not devoted solely to the Civil War. Rene is currently studying military history and therefore diverts often to other conflicts and issues, but that’s what makes her blog enjoyable: you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Rene’s other great asset is that her enthusiasm really comes through. You can sense her delight when she begins a new course or dives into a book that offers a new perspective. I believe I also have Rene to thank for pointing out such useful adjuncts as Academic Earth, and her enthusiasm for the Kindle has piqued my interest (although I haven’t bitten yet). I check in at Wig-Wags regularly, and so should you.

Two Articles

Haven't read either of them yet, but here are two articles on SSRN that look interesting.

The first deals with Strader v. Graham, an 1851 Supreme Court case concerning slavery and slave freedom that the Supreme Court might, and perhaps should, have used to decide Dred Scott six years later. Here's the abstract:

In 1841, three Kentucky slaves in Louisville boarded a steamboat bound for Cincinnati. Within days, they had made their way to Detroit and then to permanent freedom in Canada. Their owner, a prominent central Kentucky businessman, soon tracked them down and tried to lure them back to bondage in the United States. When these efforts failed, he sued the steamboat owners for the value of the lost slaves in a Kentucky court.

After ten years of litigation, this case reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court’s decision in favor of the Kentucky slaveholder would prove to be an important precedent a few years later when the Court considered the freedom claim of another slave, Dred Scott, whose case would produce perhaps the most important decision ever handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The key issue in Dred Scott - how, if at all, a Negro slave could obtain his freedom by spending time on free soil - had also been considered by the Court in prior cases. This Article deals with one of these, Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82 (1851), the case brought by the Kentucky businessman whose slaves escaped on the defendants’ steamboat and the only Kentucky slave case ever to reach the Supreme Court.

This Article provides a detailed description of Strader, including its factual background, its reflection of Kentucky slave law in the first half of the nineteenth century, and its significance for Dred Scott and other subsequent slave-related matters. Part I provides an overview of Kentucky slave law as it evolved up to the time of the Strader litigation. Part II describes Strader’s factual background and the Kentucky court decisions it produced. Part III covers the Strader case in the U.S. Supreme Court. Part IV deals with post-Strader events, including a review of the Dred Scott case and the role that the Strader decision played in that litigation. Part V provides some concluding observations about how the Strader case reflected the role of slavery, law, and lawyers in antebellum Kentucky and what Strader and Dred Scott might teach us in the modern era.

The second article addresses one aspect of the so-called "incorporation" debate -- that is, did Section 1 of the 14th Amendment "incorporate" the Bill of Rights. The article looks at contemporaneous newspaper coverage to determine whether the reading public would have understood this to be an aim of Section 1:

For over sixty years scholars have debated whether Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporated” the Bill of Rights guarantees and thus made them enforceable against the states. Recently, the debate has turned to what the state legislators might have known when they ratified the amendment. In this paper, presented at the University of San Diego Law School on January 7, George Thomas discusses the body of evidence already available and then presents new evidence gathered from a search of newspaper archives for the period 1865 to 1869. He discovered one newspaper article that clearly makes the incorporation case and three others that offer lesser degrees of support for the proposition that educated men of the era were aware that Section 1 included the Bill of Rights. But 96% of the articles that discussed “privileges” and “immunities” gave no hint of a connection with the Bill of Rights.

Andrew Jackson's Proclamation Regarding Nullification 3: Was Jackson the Author?

Long ago, I published several posts that constituted a sort of prequel to a discussion of Andrew Jackson’s December 10, 1832 Proclamation Regarding Nullification. Those posts examined the president’s State of the Union message delivered to Congress six days earlier. Before launching into an examination of the Nullification Proclamation itself, I thought I would tackle a side issue: were the views expressed in the Proclamation really those of President Jackson?

No one has doubted that President Jackson passionately embraced the conclusion of the Proclamation – Nullification and its sibling secession were

incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which It was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.

Surprised, however, by the difference in tone between the State of the Union message and the Proclamation, some contemporaries believed that Jackson could not have authored or endorsed portions of the Proclamation laying out the theoretical underpinnings of those conclusions.

These speculations were fanned by the knowledge that the president’s brilliant Secretary of State, Edward Livingston -- a transplanted New Yorker who had moved to Louisiana – had participated in the creation of the Proclamation: indeed, the Proclamation bore his name, as well as the president’s, at the end. Somehow, the story went, Livingston had bamboozled the president, who was interested only in the bottom line conclusions, into signing off on a document that incorporated historical and constitutional ideas that the president did not really understand or endorse. In short (as Richard Ellis summarizes the argument), the president was “a bumbling old fool, manipulated by his advisors.”

This view “does not hold up under careful scrutiny.” The evidence “overwhelming indicates that . . . Old Hickory was very much his own man.”

James Parton’s Life of Andrew Jackson, first published in 1860, includes a vivid description of the creation of the Proclamation that belies the contention that Jackson was not in charge. Parton relates that, “on one of the last days of November [1832],” the president read a “pamphlet containing the proceedings of the South Carolina [Nullification] Convention.”

Jackson then retreated to his office and furiously wrote at least fifteen to twenty pages of what became the Proclamation:

He went to his office alone, and began to dash off page after page of the memorable Proclamation which was soon to electrify the country. He wrote with that great steel pen of his, and with such rapidity, that he was obliged to scatter the written pages all over the table to let them dry. A gentleman who came in when the President had written fifteen or twenty pages, observed that three of them were glistening with wet ink at the same moment. The warmth, the glow, the passion, the eloquence of that proclamation, were produced then and there by the President's own hand.

Parton implies that Jackson produced both portions of draft text and additional “notes and memoranda.” The entire mass of papers was then delivered to Livingston in order to “draw up” the final document “in proper form”:

To these pages were added many more of notes and memoranda which had been accumulating in the presidential hat for some weeks, and the whole collection was then placed in the hands of Mr. Livingston, the Secretary of State, who was requested to draw up the Proclamation in proper form.

Notwithstanding Livingston’s involvement, Parton produces contemporaneous eyewitness evidence showing that Jackson was the ultimate author of the Proclamation. The president carefully reviewed the draft that Livingston produced and rejected those portions “which did not represent his views.” Parton relates:

[Jackson associate and advisor] Major [William Berkeley] Lewis writes to me: "Mr. Livingston took the papers to his office, and, in the course of three or four days, brought the proclamation to the General, and left it for his examination. After reading it, he came into my room and remarked that Mr. Livingston had not correctly understood his notes – there were portions of the draft, he added, which were not in accordance with his views, and must be altered. He then sent his messenger for Mr. Livingston, and, when he came pointed out to him the passages which did not represent his views, and requested him to take it back with him and make the alterations he had suggested. This was done, and the second draft being satisfactory, he ordered it to be published.”

Major Lewis also told Parton that Jackson had specifically endorsed “that portion to which . . . the State-rights party would particularly object":

“I [Lewis] will add that, before the proclamation was sent to press to be published, I took the liberty of suggesting to the General whether it would not be best to leave out that portion to which, I was sure, the State-rights party would particularly object. He refused.

“‘Those are my views,’ said he with great decision of manner, ‘and I will not change them nor strike them out.’"

It's Gotta Be A Record!

According to Charles Sellers, James Hamilton, Jr. of South Carolina was "legendary for a perfect record of wounding without killing all his fourteen dueling opponents."

Martin Van Buren

Van Buren glides along as smoothly as oil and as silently as a cat.

Amos Kendall

Andrew Jackson, Champion of Internal Improvements and the American System

Andrew Jackson has come down to us as a fierce opponent of federal funding of internal improvements (epitomized by the Maysville Road veto) and of banks (exemplified by his campaign to kill the Monster Bank).

It is pretty well known, I think, that Jackson presented a much less clear message concerning these issues when he ran for president in 1824 and 1828. Some political insiders and men who knew Jackson well may have known of Jackson's views on these issues, but the electorate as a whole was far less certain.

I mention this because, in looking for a Jackson-related illustration for my last post, I ran across some Jackson election tickets from 1828 that dramatically demonstrate the point. Three are included here. As you will see, all at least imply support for commercial development, manufacturing and transportation. One specifically touts "internal improvement," and another (the most startling of all, in my view) identifies Jackson with the "American System" -- the term used by Henry Clay as early as 1824 (not 1829, as the Wikipedia entry incorrectly states) to describe his high-tariff, pro-Bank and pro-internal improvements program designed to protect domestic manufactures and spur industrial development.

Andrew Jackson's First Cabinet

Other than Martin Van Buren at the State Department, Andrew Jackson’s first cabinet is generally given very low marks. Its subsequent dissolution two years later in the aftermath of the Peggy Eaton Affair has further tarnished the cabinet's reputation, although by rights it is Jackson himself who should take most of the blame for that debacle.

While conceding that, with the exception of Van Buren, Jackson “chose obscure men he could dominate,” Charles Sellers gives the president more credit than most do for his selections, which were:

John H. Eaton, Tennessee, for the War Department

Samuel D. Ingham, Pennsylvania, for the Treasury Department

John Branch, North Carolina, for the Navy

John M. Berrien, Georgia, as Attorney General

William T. Barry, Kentucky, Postmaster General

First, Sellers argues, “this Cabinet manifested considerable canniness on the part of a President determined to be master of his own house.”

By appointing a New York Bucktail [Van Buren], a Pennsylvania New Schooler [Ingham; New Schoolers were pro-internal improvement democrats who had originally supported John C. Calhoun for president in 1824 but had converted to the Jackson cause early in 1824], two southerners [Branch and Berrien], and two westerners [Eaton and Barry], he recognized the factions and sections that had given him strongest support while denying predominance to any. Although Van Buren got the top spot, Jackson managed, by appointing obscure men of Radical antecedents from North Carolina and Georgia, to exclude not only the Little Magician’s South Carolina foes [allies of Calhoun] but also his potent radical allies in Virginia [the Richmond Junto, headed by editor Thomas Ritchie]. Never before had the Old Dominion been banished from the highest executive levels.

In addition, Sellers suggests, Jackson cleverly appointed men who were ideologically predisposed to carry out “some controversial policies not yet announced.”

The westerner Eaton was positioned in the War Department and the Georgian Berrien as Attorney General to execute a final solution of the Indian problem. Branch had denounced banks, and Barry had been chief justice of Kentucky’s antibank New Court. The most ingenious selection was Ingham, a paper manufacturer loyal to Pennsylvania protectionism but also a veteran Calhounite. Having resolved his conflicting loyalties by abstaining on the Tariff of Abominations, he was placed at the Treasury to compromise the most dangerous impending issue.

About the illustration:

A satire on dissension and political intrigue within Andrew Jackson's administration, surrounding the Spring 1831 resignations of several members of his Cabinet. In the center Jackson sits in a collapsing chair, labeled "The Hickory Chair is coming to pieces at last." Seated on the arm of his chair is a rat with the head of Postmaster General William T. Barry. On the floor before him is a pile of resignations with a broken clay pipe, and a brazier. He sweeps with a broom at a number of rats scurrying at his feet, and in the act knocks over the "Altar of Reform" toppling a winged ass also holding a broom. The rats have heads of (from left to right) Secretary of State Martin Van Buren, Secretary of War John H.Eaton, "D. I. O."(?), Navy Secretary John Branch, and Treasury Secretary Samuel D. Ingham. John Calhoun is a terrier which menaces the Van Buren rat. Van Buren, threatened by an eagle while attempting to climb the "Ladder of Political Preferment" whose rungs are labeled with the names of the states, says, "If I could only humbug that Eagle and climb up this ladder." Calhoun: "You don't get up if I can help it." Eaton: "I'm off to the Indians." Branch: "This from the greatest and best of men." Ingham: "Is this the reward of my Patriotic disinterestedness." In a doorway marked "Skool of Reform" appears a man in a visored cap and fur-trimmed coat saying, "There's Clay, and this is all Clays doings." Daniel Webster and Henry Clay (with raised arms) look in through a window. Webster: "That Terrier has nullified the whole Concern." Clay: "Famine! War! Pestilence!"

Andrew Jackson Becomes a Presidential Candidate: 1822

As Charles Sellers tells it, the idea that Andrew Jackson might seriously be considered as a candidate for the presidency was the result of a stunning miscalculation by pro-bank politicians in Tennessee.

Before the Panic of 1819, the Tennessee political landscape was dominated by territorial governor William Blount and, after Blount’s death in 1800, John Overton. These men “embraced the new entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the postwar [i.e., post-War of 1812] boom and controlled the state’s two banks.”

The Panic of 1819, however, caused widespread hardship and disruption in the state of Tennessee, which in turn “provoked a massive public outcry” against banks and the “moneyed aristocracy.” In 1821, a Radical faction opposed to the Blount/Overton group backed William Carroll for governor. “With voters ‘in a perfect ferment,’” Carroll, “who blamed the depression on the banks and wished he ‘had never seen one in the state,'” trounced his Blount/Overton opponent by a margin of 4–1.

Desperate to regain power, the Blount/Overton group searched for a solution – and thought they found it in Andrew Jackson. “Blount’s son-in-law Pleasant M. Miller suggested to Overton that only Andrew Jackson could defeat Carroll for reelection in 1823.”

It seemed like a good fit at the time. There were strong personal ties between Jackson and members of the Blount/Overton group (Jackson “and Overton had been close friends since first entering public life under Blount’s aegis back in territorial days”), and “the general had quarreled violently with several of the now triumphant Radicals.” In addition, Jackson detested the Radicals’ presidential candidate, William H. Crawford, whose congressional supporters had attacked Jackson’s invasion of Florida.

Apparently, Jackson rejected the suggestion that he run for governor in 1823. Overton then suggested to Miller that they could achieve their aims by nominating Jackson for president. “Miller immediately fell in with” Overton’s absurd counterproposal. The idea that Jackson could be a serious presidential contended was ludicrous. But it would serve the purpose of stirring up “a state of excitement” in “publick opinion” that would allow the Blount/Overton group to recapture the governorship and state legislative seats in upcoming elections.

And so Jackson’s name was floated for the presidency in early 1822:

Early in 1822, the Blount/Overton newspapers began puffing Jackson as a presidential candidate, and that summer the [Tennessee] legislature formally nominated him.” None of the Tennessee politicians who hatched Jackson’s nomination thought he could be a serious contender nationally, and most of them thought his candidacy could be dropped once this became evident and once it served its local purpose.

“The politicians,” Sellers notes, “were in for a shock.” The Tennessee nomination unleashed “a ‘contagion’ of popular enthusiasm for Jackson” that engulfed states from North Carolina to Pennsylvania.

In our next episode, the Overton group unsuccessfully tries to stuff the genie back in the bottle.

"The Whig Party is dead and buried"

Apparently somebody is trying to revive the Whig Party. I certainly agree we need a new party, but I doubt the Whigs are it. As a historical phenomenon, the Whigs are fascinating, and there is much to admire about them, as Daniel Walker Howe has argued. But, as Edward Stafford, a Republican newspaper editor from Jackson, Mississippi, noted in 1870, "The Whig Party died of too much respectability and not enough people." I'll go with Zebulon Vance's opinion, as described by Michael F. Holt at the close of his magnificent history of the Whigs:

[Zebulon Vance] was also realistic enough to know the task [of reviving the Whig Party] was impossible. When asked to do so in 1865, therefore, he replied with cold finality: "The [Whig] party is dead and buried and the tombstone placed over it and I don't care to spend the rest of my days mourning at its grave." To this brutally candid and totally accurate extinguisher, there was -- and is -- only one appropriate response. Amen!

"Doe Face" or "Dough Face"?

John Randolph of Roanoke famously coined the term dough face during the debates over the Missouri Crisis as a term of opprobrium for northern representatives who were willing to sacrifice their principles to cast votes in favor of measures favored by the south. Frustratingly, I can’t find a web-verifiable citation to the original quote. I suspect that it may have appeared in a newspaper report, rather than the Annals of Congress, but that's just a guess.

Citing a secondary source, Robert Pierce Forbes provides the quote and context as follows:

John Randolph . . . bitterly sneered that he had always known that the northern representatives who voted for the Compromise “would give way. They were scared at their own dough faces – yes, they were scared at their own dough faces! – We had them, and if we had wanted three more, we could have had them; yes, and if these had failed, we could have three more of these men, whose conscience, and morality, and religion, extend to ‘thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude.’”

To this day, historians remain uncertain where Randolph got the phrase. Prof. Forbes himself suggests that Randolph intended the phrase to be “doe face”, and that it was misunderstood and subsequently interpreted to be “dough face”:

It is apt that the wracked, erratic, half-mad Virginian should have coined the peculiar epithet, “doe face,” that became, in a curious mutation, “doughface,” the universal term of contempt for such “Northern men with Southern principles,” or rather, as Randolph implied, with no principles at all.

Prof. Forbes supports this contention by reference to a passage in Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is: The Testimony of a Thousand Voices (New York, 1839). There, Weld mysteriously states:

“Doe face,” which owes its paternity to John Randolph, age has mellowed into “dough face” – a cognomen quite as expressive and appropriate, if not as classical.

Weld also suggests that the “cognomen” “dough face” came to be rationalized as a reference to northern flour that was eagerly shipped to southern customers (emphasis added):

Our newspapers are full of these and similar daily occurrences among slaveholders, copied verbatim from their own accounts of them in their own papers, and all this we fully credit; no man is simpleton enough to cry out, “Oh, I can't believe that slaveholders do such things,” – and yet when we turn to the treatment which these men mete out to their slaves, and show that they are in the habitual practice of striking, kicking, knocking down and shooting them as well as each other – the look of blank incredulity that comes over northern dough-faces, is a study for a painter: and then the sentimental outcry, with eyes and hands uplifted, “Oh, indeed, I can't believe the slaveholders are so cruel to their slaves.” Most amiable and touching charity! Truly, of all Yankee notions and free state products, there is nothing like a “dough face” – the great northern staple for the southern market – “made to order,” in any quantity, and always on hand. “Dough faces!” Thanks to a slaveholder's contempt for the name, with its immortality of truth, infamy and scorn.

Weld does not explain why the original phrase as he understood it, “doe face,” was expressive. Presumably, he understood it to mean that the men were as timid as female deer in their accommodation of the south.

Other commentators have more or less thrown up their hands. Leonard L. Richards, for example, characterized Randolph as referring to “weak men, timid men, half-baked man,” suggesting he believed the word was “dough” rather than “doe.” But Richards then punted:

Not everyone understood Randolph’s reference, and no one dared to ask for an explanation. A few apparently thought the sardonic Virginia aristocrat had a female deer in mind and the word he used was doe. Others thought he was referring to a child’s game where children put dough on their faces, worked it into strange configurations, and then looked at their reflections.

Whatever Randolph had in mind, his words stuck.

Most others have opined that the original word was “dough” and then tried to explain why. Daniel Walker Howe has opted for the children’s game theory:

Randolph, mocking the northerners intimidated by the South, referred to a children’s game in which the players daubed their faces with dough and then looked in a mirror and scared themselves.”

This is also Sean Wilentz’s explanation:

[Randolph] was probably referring to a game where children placed wet dough on their faces and frightened themselves and their friends by looking in a mirror.

John Taylor of Caroline, Marxist

Yikes! I've heard Old Republican John Taylor of Caroline called many things, but I've never seen him characterized as a proto-Marxist . . . until now. Charles Sellers draws the unlikely comparison:

As Karl Marx would analyze capitalist exploitation of European industrial labor, the Virginian explained capitalist exploitation of American agricultural labor. Both men cherished human labor as the source of economic value. "Labour is in fact the great fund for human subsistence," said the Virginian; "-- a surplus of this subsistence is wealth." Labor's "degree of safety" was for him the "barometer of good government."

Also like Marx, the Virginian thought labor "the object which tyranny invariably attacks." The American Revolution had no sooner guaranteed the republic's labor against the ancient extortions of European aristocracies and priesthoods, he argued, then a new and even more oppressive "aristocracy of paper and patronage" arose. Taylor calculated that "this legal faction of capitalists" was extorting 40 percent of the proceeds of agricultural labor. [Me: Shades of George McDuffie's Forty-Bale theory!] Writing just as wage labor galvanized capitalist exploitation, he anticipated Marx in sensing that capital "will, in the case of mechanics, soon appropriate the whole of their labor to its use, beyond a bare subsistence."

The Market Revolution

I’ve begun reading Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. The Marxist terminology makes me a little nervous, and the book is extremely dense and, I think, assumes a general working knowledge of the period – probably not the place to start if you have no background. But that said, the book is superb. Sellers’s research is prodigious, his insights both startling and then, in retrospect, perfectly logical when you go back and follow his train of thought. He writes well enough, if a bit abstractly, that he keeps you riveted: a slow-motion page-turner.

As a brief excerpt, I offer the following, which features some statistics that are both surprising and depressing when you consider our modern-day monstrosity:

Excluding Congress and the military, the entire government establishment at Washington, from President to doorkeeper, numbered only 153 people at the beginning of Jefferson’s administration and would increase to only 352 by 1829. In 1815 the President paid out of his own pocket the single secretary who assisted him; the Attorney General had neither clerk nor office; the Supreme Court convened for two months a year in a Capitol Hill boarding house; and during the summer only the clerks and bureau chiefs remained in the muggy capital to keep the wheels of state slowly turning.

George McDuffie's Forty-Bale Theory

George McDuffie’s Forty-Bale Theory held that “a tariff that imposed duties averaging 40 percent robbed cotton planters of the value of 40 percent of their crop – forty bales out of every hundred.” Was he right?

The modern consensus seems to be that he was about twenty bales high.

Daniel Walker Howe: “A modern economist has calculated that a 40 percent tariff cost antebellum planters 20 percent of their real income from cotton – less that McDuffie claimed but still very significant.” Citing John A. James, "The Optimal Tariff in the Antebellum United States,” American Economic Review 71 (1981): 731.

John Majewski: “McDuffie’s famous ‘forty bale’ theory undoubtedly exaggerated the impact of the tariff, but his argument contained a kernel of truth. Economic historians have estimated that a tariff of 40 percent in 1859 would have reduced the real incomes of southern slaveholders by at least 20 percent.” Citing Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History: From Colonial Times to 1940, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 137-40.

About the illustration:

A gloomy view of the effects of the Polk administration's Tariff of 1846. The artist echoes Whig condemnation of the measure as adverse to American trade. A funeral cortege, composed of administration supporters, carries the coffin of "Free Trade" to a grave marked by a monument with the names of sixteen states. The names of Pennsylvania and New York, two states particularly resistant to the new tariff, appear in large letters. Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia are missing. Over the grave is a banner reading, "Here lies Free Trade! Be it understood / He would have liv'd much longer if he could." The pall-bearers are (left to right) Vice President George M. Dallas, James K. Polk, Secretary of State James Buchanan, and Secretary of War William L. Marcy, wearing his characteristic fifty-cent trouser patch (see "Executive Marcy and the Bambers," no.1838-5). Polk: "This is a dead weight and verry heavy Mr. Vice." Dallas replies: "I agree with every thing you say Mr. President. if you were to insist that the moon was made of green Cheese I would swear to it for a Consideration." Buchanan complains: "I say, army lower down your side a little, you are throwing all the weight on me." Buchanan, from Pennsylvania, drew considerable fire from his native state for his support of the new lower tariff. Marcy suggests: "Raise your side, state and then we'll throw the whole weight on our leaders." The mourners are administration supporters: editor Thomas Ritchie (here called "Mother Ritchie" and dressed as a woman), senators John C. Calhoun and George McDuffie, and congressmen Ambrose H. Sevier, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and Dixon Hall Lewis. Ritchie: "If he should be resucitated! What a paragraph it would make in my paper!! Nous Verrons." Calhoun: "Hung be the heavens with black!" McDuffie: "If the whigs should get in we must resort to Nullification!" Sevier: "this sticks in my gizzard!" Lewis (notoriously obese): "We must grin and bear it, though it makes me feel very heavy!" Rhett: "a plagu of this sighing! it wells one up most villainously!" In the lower margin is the narrative: "This unfortunate youth died of Home Consumption & was buried at Washington in Nov: 1846 [the date the tariff was passed]. He was carried to the grave by Polk, Dallas, Buchanan & Marcy. The chief Mourners were his Nurse Mother Ritchie, [. . .] the cenotaph is to be erected by the Whigs. 16 States have already contributed & others are coming in."

Ultisols and Alfisols

Ten days week ago, I posted an entry on John Majewski’s new book, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation, focusing on Prof. Majewski’s discussion of land use and agricultural practices in the antebellum south, and in particular the fact that southern farmers placed only about one-third of their land in cultivation at any given time, versus two-thirds on average in the north. I left you hanging concerning Prof. Majewski’s conclusions as to why southerners retained the practice of shifting cultivation, which accounted for this discrepancy. This post continues and concludes that review.

In the antebellum period, northerners regularly made note of and denigrated the effects of shifting cultivation in the south: the large tracts of unimproved and worn-out land, interspersed with occasional farmhouses and small settlements. With equal regularity they assumed that the desolate appearance of much of the rural south was somehow attributable to slavery, which rendered the inhabitants slovenly and lazy:

David Wilmot . . . frequently associated slavery with soil exhaustion. “Sterility follows its [slavery’s] path,” he declared in 1846. A decade later, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine noted that “their [southerners’] lands are being worn out and exhausted. . . . [T]hey have not the enterprise, skill or means to renovate them.”

The contrast between the tidy, prosperous farms of the north and (in the words of William Seward) the “old and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement” in the south provided a powerful argument to Free Soilers. “No wonder,” Prof.Majewski observes, “that many northerners wanted to stop slavery spreading to the western territories. Shifting cultivation, they believed, was sure to follow.”

Modern historians have to a large extent adopted this analysis. “Historians have frequently pointed to some combination of slavery, cheap western lands, and ingrained traditionalism.” The relative abundance of land and mobility of slave labor, so the argument goes, allowed southerners to work a given piece of land to exhaustion, and then move on.

Prof. Majewski rejects all such explanations. Shifting cultivation persisted, he argues, because southern soil and weather made crop rotation impracticable or impossible. It turns out that most of the south has soil classified as part of the ultisol soil order. “Ultisols generally lack key nutrients for plant growth and tend to be highly acidic. The acidity makes it difficult for plants to fully utilize whatever nutrients are present, which means that fertilizing the soil will not raise crop yields unless the acidity is first neutralized.”

Shifting cultivation was ideally suited to this soil because the ash produced by burning “provided a quick infusion of important nutrients, and its calcium content helped neutralize the acidic ultisol soils.” Northern farms, in contrast, generally consisted of alfisol soils, which contained “an abundance of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and other essential plant nutrients.” The rotation systems that northerners successfully used on alfisol soils simply did not translate to the ultisols of the south.

Other environmental facts – heat and rainfall patterns – also conspired against the south to make rotation impractical. “Important fodder crops such as hay and clover that supported continuous cultivation failed to thrive in the warm and humid southern climate.” Southern cattle tended to be stunted and produced less manure – another important element of the rotation system in the north – both because they had to be raised on less nutritious substitutes and because they fell prey to tick-spread disease.

Prof. Majewski appears to do an excellent job supporting his thesis that these environmental factors constituted the principal reason that southern farmed stuck with shifting cultivation. The core of his analysis involves the use of “multivariate regressions” to assess the impact of numerous variables, which are summarized as follows:

In summary, the regressions indicate that the environmental factors (soil types, typography, and climate) greatly influenced levels of improved land; they show a particularly strong association between alfisol soils and high levels of improved land. Ultisols and rugged topography (such as the mountains of Appalachia or the marshes of the coastal regions), on the other hand, led to low levels of improved land.

The book includes a 17-page “statistical appendix”, which I invite those more statistically literate than I to pick at for holes or discrepancies. What I found most interesting about the more detailed analysis there was the discussion concerning the relationship between slavery and shifting cultivation. It turns out, according to Prof. Majewski, that there is “a strongly positive” and “statistically significant” relationship between more slaves and higher levels of improved land.

Prof. Majewski cautions that “it is impossible to tell . . . whether slavery caused more land to be improved or whether slaveholders simply preferred to locate in areas with the best soils and the best access to transportation.” However the correlation does discredit the contrary claim, that slavery “caused” less land to be improved. “Slavery (or its absence) did not ‘cause’ shifting cultivation, strengthening the point that environmental factors plaed the most important role.”

Post-Civil War (and therefore post-slavery) evidence further buttresses this conclusion:

What makes the statistical results for 1860 even more compelling is that the same basic relationship holds for 1890 as well. Despite the greater availability of fertilizers, farmers in counties with poor soils cultivated far less land than farmers in areas with more favorable soils. The 1890 results cast further doubt that slavery and cheap western land caused shifting cultivation. Shifting cultivation, simply put, outlived both.

Prof. Majewski’s findings, if correct, point to a profound irony. Obviously, northerners came to adopt Free Soil ideology for a variety of reasons. But images of decrepit southern agriculture and agricultural lifestyles caused by slavery were a powerful weapon in the Free Soil arsenal, as some of the above quotes suggest. Was the assumption that slavery was the source of those images simply wrong? It would seem so.

Chez Cliff, Easter Weekend 2009

A group shot. Click to enlarge.