Market Culture, Labor, and the Transformation of Politics Flashcards
1
Q
The Age of Jackson - Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
A
- Schlesinger considered the distinguishing feature of the period the spread of democracy through class conflict spearheaded by the industrial workers
- Whigs were essentially Federalists in terms of their love for hierarchy and class distinction
- Jacksonians vs. Whigs is about radicalism vs. conservatism
- Quincy Adams was uninterested in solving problems if it hurt people of his own class
- Jacksonians were all about increasing the power of the people
2
Q
What Hath God Wrought - Daniel Walker Howe
A
- revolution in communications and technology had a significant impact in shaping American society
- Quincy Adams was more representative of democracy and liberty than Jackson
- capitalism was, overall, a force for positive good
- Jacksonian democracy was primarily about the extension of white supremacy across the North American continent
- Jacksonians vs Whigs is about individualism/expansionism vs. industry and technology
- Democrats feared internal improvements because they didn’t want to lose slavery
3
Q
The Market Revolution, 1815-1846 - Charles Sellers
A
- Sellers argued that market capitalism was an aggressive imposition upon a reluctant population
- Jackson represented the common folk, not the capitalist banks
- lawyers as the shocktroops of capitalism
- Marxist analysis
- National Republicans and Whigs were bourgeois capitalists. Capitalism is bad.
- Jackson and the Democrats success hinged on voter disdain for business elites and lawyers trying to steer the national agenda via Whigs like Clay
- growth of “the market” threatened slavery
- Jacksonian Democracy’s weakness as a bulwark to bourgeois capitalism was its tie to Southern slavery, which muddied the Democrat’s goals as party of the people by infecting their ideology with that of the elite capitalistic planter class spearheaded by Calhoun
- By 1840 Whigs and Democrats learned to “wrap entrepreneurial interest in democratic rhetoric”
- Party conflict transitioned from being based on class to being based on race and religion, thus allowing for more sectional based conflict in the future
- Reaction to Panic of 1819 in the form of “favoritism toward the perpetrators of the general misery provoked political uprisings in many western states.”
- Bankers vs. Debtors
4
Q
Old Republicans
A
Nathaniel Macon, John Randolph etc. politicians who were against National Republicans like James Madison who transitioned towards a more Federalist outlook after the War of 1812
5
Q
Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America - Harry Watson
A
- Both Jacksonian Democrats and National Republicans/Whigs were attempting to live up to the ideals of Jeffersonian Republicanism
- Jacksonians believed the Market Revolution was antithetical to republicanism; Adams and whigs the opposite
- Republicanism = liberty and power balanced by virtue
- the second party system was designed to allay sectional tensions e.g. Van Buren
- liberty/power dynamic defined 1828 election i.e. white man’s liberty vs potential for more than that
6
Q
Election of 1828
A
- 25% –> 56% of white males vote
- Jackson v. Adams
7
Q
American System
A
Henry Clay’s plan for internal improvements arranged from the topdown; the slaveholding south saw it as a threat
- composed of a protective tariff, national bank, roads and canals
8
Q
The Fourteenth Congress 1815-1817
A
A pseudo Federalist congress that, led by John C. Calhoun and the National Republicans that lobbied for internal improvements, signified especially by the Bonus Bill
- Voted out of congress for asking for a salary increase
9
Q
The Missouri Compromise of 1820
A
- Mediated by Henry Clay
- Admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state
- slavery banned north of the 36th parallel in the Louisiana Purchase
10
Q
Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854, Earle, Jonathan H.
A
- Schlesinger overstated radical Jacksonians’ protoliberalism, but Schlesinger critics distort Jacksonianism by claiming it’s defined by white supremacy and proslavery
- free soil Jacksonians forced political realignments between 1846 and 1854 that fueled the sectional crisis
- the genius of the republican party was in how it brought free-soil Dems, Liberty Party men, and Whigs under a single antislavery banner
- Free soilers weren’t uniquely racist because of how antislavery they were and because some believed in black’s basic humanity (lol)
- Break from Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: Foner’s free soil was connected to free labor and rise of capitalism, Earle’s free soilers often held “nothing but contempt for Whiggish free-labor views,”
- Though this raises the issue: how much of the divide between Earle and Foner arises from the latter being more concerned about the Free-Soil/Republican party as a whole, while Earle is more focused on the minority of Jacksonian free-soilers?
- Question whether it truly matters that a handful of Jacksonian democrats expressed anti-slavery sentiments when the party as a whole was pro-slavery…does the minority really allow us to make conclusions about the majority, as Earle suggests?
11
Q
Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (1978), Ellen Carol DuBois
A
- ends with creation of NWSA in 1869
- the woman suffrage movement was not a useless detour in women’s struggle for liberation
- suffragism was significant because it mobilized women and fostered collective activity
- without the suffrage movement there’d be no baseline or structure from which second wave feminism could branch off from
12
Q
The Rise of American Democracy - Sean Wilentz
A
- Quincy Adams wanted to impose his will on the people rather than heed the people’s will (if the people’s will is wrong, and if Adams’ plans would have actually led to more true democracy, were the Jackson Democrats really as amazing as Wilentz implies?)
Jackson wasn’t an Indian hater but a benevolent paternalist - Jacksonian Democracy wasn’t pro-slavery because it wasn’t trying to grow slavery as it’s primary goal. It’s primary goal was to enhance democracy for white men, though as a by-product Jacksonian’s anti-central planning and pro-land platform strengthened slavery in the South.
13
Q
Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert
A
- cotton was crucial to capitalist/economic development
- cotton bound the world together in a form of global trade
- Slavery enabled the stunning advances of industry, and the accompanying profit (slavery primed the system, then it moved on without it)
- cotton industry was supported by war capitalism in the form of plantation slavery in the south, but this came to compete with industrial capitalism being developed in the north, which contributed to sectional crisis leading to civil war
- industrial capitalism led to Imperialism, which was a new way outside of slavery to acquire cheap labor and maximize profit
14
Q
Scraping By - Seth Rockman
A
- Capitalism is not just “the market,” you need to see how it actually affected work and people’s lives on the ground (in Baltimore)
- Opportunity for some closes off opportunity for others
- Capitalism damaged the working classes, i.e. hirelings and slaves, binding them together in a state of misery
- Thanks to capitalism’s rise, slaves held equal or more value as fungible commodities (i.e. property) than they did as laborers
- “Legalized slavery and the ascendant ideology of market competition” ensured that white and black workers alike “shared circumstances of economic privation [i.e. lacking basic necessities].”
15
Q
Jackson as a “Bulwark”
A
- the Bulwark against slavery
- the Bulwark against sectionalism
- the Bulwark defending yeoman republicanism
- the Bulwark against the bourgeois elite
- the Bulwark against internal improvements, technological progress, and centralized government
