chmasone – U.S. to 1877

November 20, 2013

Wilentz Discusses the Inevitable Showdown

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In chapters 21 and 22, Wilentz discusses the inevitable fight over slavery between the pro-slavery southern Whigs, led by Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, and the adamant abolitionists, led by John Taylor, during the compromise of 1850. After the victory over Mexico in the recent war and the gain of the California, New Mexico, and Texas territories, the debate of whether these new states would host slavery or not dominated the American political system. Newly inaugurated President Taylor wanted to be his own man, and attempted to create his own party of Taylor Republicans with strong feelings over slavery and territorial expansion. While the figureheads of the pro-slavery movement Clay and John C. Calhoun were fed up with the apparent northern aggression. Summarizing Wilentz on page 343, President Taylor wasn’t scared by the threat of southern secession, and it seems Calhoun wasn’t afraid to act on his promise. This unfaltering resolve on both sides of the fight, further fueled by the failed compromise of 1850, propelled the country into the Civil War.

Even though many thought that Whig-candidate Zachary Taylor would be an indecisive president, they never thought he would turn on his party entirely. Himself a slave owner, Taylor thought that “the southern insistence on slaveholders’ rights was a divisive conceit that might destroy; the Union in the name of legalistic abstractions.” (Wilentz 342) While he may have participated in slavery, Taylor believed that the issue over slavery was exaggerated by the wealthy plantation owners in the south and believed their puerile fighting would destroy the fundamental unity of the country. In his steadfast determination to show the “ultra-Whigs” (338) they were going to tear apart the Union, Taylor also showed that he wouldn’t back down from a fight. Although commendable, his aggressive stance only elevated the situation and forced the Whigs to act on their promise to secede.

Although I have repeatedly talked about how much I enjoy Wilentz’s depiction of Calhoun in my previous blog posts, I think the way he discusses Calhoun on page 345 is by far the most entertaining. He portrays, “The dying John C. Calhoun sat at his desk, wrapped in flannels, his eyes blazing from behind pale and hollowed cheeks.” Almost depicted as the archetype of the devil, Calhoun is shown as the symbol of unyielding pro-slavery. As Wilentz writes, “Calhoun blamed “sectional discord on Congress’s long-standing and systematic promotion of national legislation favorable to the North.” (345) Calhoun concluded that the oppression would end only if the North ceased its aggression and as Sherwood mentioned, perhaps the “slavocrats” felt backed into a corner and felt obligated to stand strong. Calhoun gave an ultimatum to Taylor and the abolitionists, “were California admitted as a free state, either under Taylor’s plan or Clay’s, the southern states could no longer ‘remain honorably and safely in the Union.’”

In nearing the start of the Civil War however, the 1850 compromise or other concessions like the Fugitive Slave Law couldn’t stop the inevitable conflict. The death of Calhoun on March 31, as Wilentz says, didn’t solve anything either. Rather, “the spirit of Calhounism lived on, in an even more radical disunionist form, picked up by a new generation of unswervingly pro-slavery Deep South Democrats.” (349) In his blog, Sherwood questioned whether the stubborn, inflexible positions either side was the best way to resolve the problem of slavery and defuse the situation. I would answer that the country was headed towards this conflict regardless. Even attempts of diplomacy, such as the attempted compromise measures or the Fugitive Slave Law concession, all failed and only delayed the unavoidable conflict.

November 18, 2013

America’s Slavery Issues aren’t Black and White

David R. Roediger and John Ashworth discuss the implications and the debate over the term “White Slavery” and how it was used in mid-19th century America. This term, as Roediger says, sparked when the editor of The Plebeian, Levi Slamm, organized a protest referred to as the “coffin handbill protest” using pamphlets that harshly depicted white laborers as slaves to the industrialized wage system. (Roediger 347) However, while Roediger is focused on attempting to define the phrases “white slavery,” “wage slavery,” or “slavery of wages,” I believe Ashworth successfully shows that the issue of wage slavery was merely pinned onto the issue of, as Roediger calls it, chattel slavery and detracts from the abolitionist movement.

As Roediger put it on page 346, “The advantages of the phrase white slavery over wage slavery or slavery of wages lay in the former term’s vagueness and in its whiteness.” Using these words, he says, allowed radical democrats to “cast” abolitionists, free blacks, bankers, factory owners and prison labor, “as villains in a loose plot to enslave white workers.” The idea being democrats could unite their supporters under the term “white slavery,” and use it to attack the wage system. However, this is inherently flawed because the issues of black slavery and the wage system’s oppression are fundamentally different. Roediger admits this contradiction on page 347. He says, “The tendency to indict white slavery and to support Black slavery was especially strong [in New York].” At its core, a white slave abolitionist may very well attack the wage system but not necessarily oppose black slavery, and I think Roediger becomes too focused on defining the different terms and misses this larger picture. As Will pointed out in his blog post, the comparison of a white and a black slave, where the black man is protected, clothed, and fed by his slaver while the white man is alone and overburdened by his multiple “masters,” is a biased and rationalized excuse. Roediger admits in his conclusion, “Chattel slavery was, in this view, better than white slavery, a point fraught with proslavery paternalist implications and not lost on the southern editors who reprinted articles carrying such opinions.”

The problem with Roediger’s essay, as I said before, is that he is misguided in his argument. The coupling of wage slavery with black slavery was detrimental to the abolitionist movement and even to white slavery-abolitionists. For example, because of the comparison of white and black slaves, white workers tried to avoid being associated with African-Americans and bigoted slurs started appearing in the American language. Suddenly, workers who were not preforming well were called “white niggers,” and described as “working like a nigger.”(343) This shows, I think, how linking the wage system battle to slavery hurt the American society and the abolitionist movement in the long run; especially considering that these slurs were still used in America during the Jim-Crow years after the civil war.

In comparison, Ashworth does a better job at looking at the bigger picture. As he quotes Charles Sumner coining a phrase to refer to southern slavery as “labor without wages,” Ashworth shows us that some individuals were trying to point out the injustice in coupling both issues. Sumner was trying to illustrate to his readers that the slave system was more oppressive than the wage system and that the issues were not remotely on the same level. Ashworth asserts that Lincoln realized the underlying issues in both white and black slavery, and rather than trying to solve both together, “Lincoln emphasized social mobility.” (354) Lincoln believed that the “American greatness” could be attributed to the fact that “every man can make himself” in the U.S.

Ashworth describes Lincoln as someone who fought for “equal privileges in the race of life,” and not someone who would fight against the apparent wage slave oppression. Lincoln believed this labor system was part of what made America great; that it contributed to the “American dream” ideal. Ashworth concludes that Lincoln’s fundamental change in American Politics was based on the idea of social mobility, the freedom of each individual to make a life for himself, and the “relationship between the employer and employee.” According to Ashworth, this relationship is “now hailed as a quintessential characteristic of a “free” society. There it remains today.” (357) Rather than attempting to define and solve the wage crisis as Roediger tries to, Ashworth proves to us with Lincoln’s example that the issues were separate and should have been treated as such.

November 13, 2013

The Anti-Climactic Flip-Flop

Chris Masone
His 141
Blog Post

In our discussion in class on Tuesday, we raised the point that when President Harrison died in office a month after his inaugural address, both parties were seemingly in shock and, for a moment, the country experienced a brief constitutional crisis over presidential succession. Even more surprising, in the Whig moment of triumph after defeating incumbent Martin Van Buren, the party suddenly collapsed. To add insult to injury, Harrison’s vice president, John Tyler, suddenly turned against the Whigs and vetoed Clay’s bank bill along with other Whig-backed measures. The political climate, much to the joy of the Jacksonian Democrats, had abruptly flipped and now the Whigs were once again struggling to maintain power. Even though the Whig party was in shambles, the democrats had not yet fully recovered from Van Buren’s defeat. Rather, they may have been worse off than before due to new divisions over banking, internal improvements, and the complicated issues of slavery and interpreting the constitution. The Democratic Party was split into multiple sub-parties, like the Hunkers, the Locofocos, the Barnburners, the loyal Jacksonians, and most surprisingly the Democratic Calhounites.

Although I discussed briefly John C. Calhoun in my last blog post, I would like to revisit him because of his interesting career and his strong platform. Because he hated Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian Democracy Calhoun did not know which party to conform to. While the Whig party was anti-Jackson and pro-banking, Calhoun chose against running for president in 1824 under the Whig ticket. After the flip-flop after Harrison’s death, Calhoun switched sides and sided with the democrats. As Wilentz describes on page 279, “The most surprising development within the Democracy was a growing enthusiasm, among some of the most radical northeastern hard-money advocates, for, of all people, John C. Calhoun.” As Sarah put it, “specifically [Wilentz’s] vilification of John C. Calhoun,” is interesting to note because, “It is clear that Calhoun was not Wilentz’s ideal political representative.” Just from Wilentz’s diction, it is obvious that he was surprised at Calhoun’s sudden support from radical democrats. Wilentz’s bias against Calhoun from the last section bleeds into this chapter, as Sarah noted. I think that Wilentz’s, as I would put it, political favoritism shows as he clearly does not like the idea of Calhoun running for the Democrats after attacking previous democratic presidents like Jackson and Van Buren.

Wilentz’s bias makes it difficult to take an objective view of Calhoun in chapters 17 and 18. His account of Calhoun’s ideas and policies feels sardonic, for example on page 280, “Calhoun’s brilliant essential perception- that in modern societies, aggregations of whole interests and classes, and not individuals, had become the basic unites of politics- was offset by his favoring some interests over others.” In this quote, he seems to be patronizing the ideas in Calhoun’s summary view of politics, “Disquisition on Government.” Wilentz seems angry that the deepening divisions among the various sub-parties of the Democracy were complicating the chances of a clear democratic candidate for the next presidential election.

As a side note, Wilentz introduces the Dorr War in the same chapter. After discussing what happened with Thomas Dorr and Rhode Island’s government under the colonial charter of 1663, Wilentz concludes “the Dorr War was an exceptional case in the history of American democratization before the Civil War.” I believe the juxtaposition of the Dorr War with the fragmentation of the Democratic Party into sub-parties like the democratic Calhounites in this chapter could be an attack on the Whig Party. I believe that Wilentz attempts to argue that because of the Whig’s interference with Jacksonian Democracy, the Whigs were eventually responsible, or at least played a large role in, the civil war.

November 11, 2013

Jacksonian Democrats and Whig-Calhounites Play the Blame Game

Chris Masone
His 141 Blog

In chapters 14-16 of The Rise of American Democracy, Wilentz discusses the fight between the Whig-Calhounites and Jacksonian Democrats during the end of Jackson’s second term and into Martin Van Buren’s presidency. In his blog post, Will summarized this period well. Will said, “The Democrats efforts to attract nationwide appeal led to catastrophic contradictions, and the Whig’s hatred for Jackson provided only an ephemeral glue to hold together members with sharply different ideologies.” However, I believe Wilentz puts too much blame on the Whig Party and intentionally avoids criticizing Jacksonian Democrats.

While Jackson and his admirers fought “for the common man” against a corrupt closed-door aristocratic system running America, John C. Calhoun and the Whig party insisted Jackson had developed “a new class of selfish elected and appointed officials.” These politicians, the Whigs said, were the “true oppressors of the people.” (Wilentz 255) It feels as though Wilentz portrays the Whig party as the villain in this political mess, especially when discussing Martin Van Buren’s presidency and I don’t know if Wilentz is warranted in doing so.

Wilentz describes a sense of inherited guilt with Martin Van Buren. He leads us to believe that “Van Ruin’s” presidency was overshadowed by the problems inherent with the divide in Jacksonian Democracy in the southern stronghold. Rather than attributing guilt to Andrew Jackson or Martin Van Buren, Wilentz describes the panic of 1837 as an inevitable “long-feared financial crash” as a result of the “Whig-Calhounites’ Deposit Act” which stripped banks reserves. (239) This idea of inherited guilt attempts to relieve Van Buren of blame, even though the panic of 1837 happened directly under Van Buren’s leadership.

While there is merit in Wilentz’s argument that the financial meltdown of 1837 could have been directly caused by the Whig-Calhounites, I think the second collapse in October of 1839 can be attributed to Van Buren. Wilentz makes the point that the collapse helped Van Buren in the short term as it “reminded the public of his link with the hero of the Bank War, Andrew Jackson.” (243) Even with the country belly-up in a second bank collapse, Wilentz describes the effect as bolstering the “Jacksonians’ contentions” regarding a nationalized bank. Even though the country was suffering financially due to political fighting in Washington, Wilentz does not blame this on Van Buren. Rather, he attributes Van Buren’s eventual political fall to a split in southern politics instead of any fault in leadership.

However, as Will pointed out, the Jacksonian Democrats’ attempt to appease everyone actually hurt their overall position. Blame for this period of corrupt policies and confusion, illustrated by the financial crisis’ of 1837 and 1839, should be shared equally between the Whig-Calhounites and the Jacksonian Democrats rather than, as I think Wilentz portrays, the blame resting solely on the shoulders of the Whig Party.

September 23, 2013

The Great Awakening: Evangelical Revivalism

Chris Masone
History 141

In his recent blog post, Sherwood says “In the colonies, the advent of evangelical Christendom can be plausibly linked to heightened paranoia regarding witches on the grounds of their common “experimental” nature.” He argues there is a correlation between evangelical religious revival and the increasing number of witchcraft accusations specifically in fairly isolated New England colonies in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Although I will put this argument in a slightly different context, I absolutely agree with him.

Taylor describes in Chapter 15, that it was difficult for New England colonies to find priests in the 1700’s because the only way to become ordained was to sail to England and seek out a bishop. Costly and time-consuming, I assume that many priests either lacked the funding or didn’t want to risk the long journey. The lack of priests may have contributed to the decline in full church membership of colonists and also to the rise of rationalism and evangelicalism that Sherwood mentions.

With the Great Awakening, energetic ministers wanted to revive full memberships in their congregations by preaching emotional, soul-searching sermons. Their shock-and-awe mentality, mainly describing both the greatness of heaven and the perpetual agony of hell, targeted the colonists’ emotions and virtually forced them to abandon rational thought. This zealous phase was short-lived as Davis describes on page 346, with the waves of suicides of those colonists who were stuck in limbo between salvation in “new birth” and misery in unknowing their ultimate fates.

Davis juxtaposes perhaps the most shocking suicide of Joseph Hawley, uncle to the evangelical preacher Reverend Jonathan Edwards, with the fervent Anglican minister George Whitefield. Unfortunately, besides his own word Davis cites no evidence that Joseph Hawley committed suicide out of despair in his search for salvation, this evidence would have truly illustrated the damaging effects of evangelical hysterics on the colonists.

Davis seems to argue that George Whitefield was single-mindedly focused on his career and perhaps too fixated on his reputation rather than the message. Having befriended many influential figures such as Ben Franklin who helped spread his message through newspapers, Whitefield toured controversially across the east coast and seemed to have kindled evangelical revivalism very quickly, possibly with little regard to the consequences of widespread emotional preaching. Davis concludes that this revival “accelerated a religious dialectic that pulled seekers and their congregations between the spiritual hunger to transcend world and the social longing for respect in it.” (Davis 362)

I think that the emotional hysterics and zealousness of the Great Awakening and the controversy that surrounded it proves Sherwood’s point. The shocking amount of suicides during this time of Whitefield’s controversy and spiritual panic illustrates a direct causation of emotional instability (as seen in the witchcraft accusations that Sherwood argues) as a result from the rise of evangelical Christendom in the New English colonies.

September 18, 2013

Comparing the Colonies investments in Slavery

Even in his first sentence, Davis is determined to breakdown our misconceptions about slavery in Colonial America by pointing out slavery was more deeply entrenched in American lifestyle than the usual history books might lead us to believe. He wants us to be aware that slaves in North America were not just cotton pickers on Mississippi plantations in the 1850’s. This chapter focuses on the development of slavery, racism, and societal integration of Africans in Colonial America. I found that I could follow Inhuman Bondage better than American Colonies because of how Davis arranges his discussions. Although not truly chronological, Davis likes to go through the timeline of one colony and then give the timeline of another colony, and as a result allows us to compare the two and makes his arguments easier to find and understand.

As other classmates have pointed out, it was surprising to read that Virginia and Maryland contained over half of all the slaves in North America in 1775. Davis points out that with exception to South Carolina, English-started colonies were not planning on having a slavery society. In fact, when slavery first cropped up in Rhode Island, the locals banned the practice of enslaving for life, and instead forced owners to release their slaves after 10 years. This is also shown in Pennsylvania, when Quakers sent a petition to a local meeting in Germantown arguing that slavery broke divine law. A point that I think Davis might be making is that English colonialists were not the only perpetrators of slavery, as he points out the Dutch used slaves to settle New Amsterdam. At the end of Dutch rule, Davis says, “Black slaves would constitute about 20% of the population of New Amsterdam…” (Davis 127)

This is very similar to what Sylvia talks about in her post, that because the Dutch didn’t have the economic, religious, and other problems that were present in England, they needed black labor. Further on Davis says that a third of all labor preformed in New York City in the 18th century was done by blacks. However, he points out that more of the black population was free in New York, 75 out of the city’s 375 black population, than in southern colonies.

The last point I found very interesting in the chapter was the distinction that Davis makes about how societies develop into a slave society. He separates the northern “societies with slaves” and the southern “slave societies” as different because of the way slavery played into colonies’ economies. Where southern colonies had cash-crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, the northern colonies did not have a crop that depended on slave labor and thus were just societies who also had slaves. I think this is important as it eventually factors into which states were pro-slavery (the south) and those opposed (the north) in our civil war.

August 30, 2013

American Colonies: Introduction & Chapter 1 Reading

Alan Taylor notably discredits the conventional, childlike view of American History in the introduction of his bookAmerican Colonies. In his view, the popular cultural tale of white men escaping from an oppressive monarchy to a land of freedom and opportunity appeals, “because it offers an appealing simplification that contains important (but partial) truths.” (Taylor x) Thankfully, he offers a more detailed description of how Native Indians and Europeans interacted.

I was impressed that the author strove to include the history and background of the native people. Taylor forced me to think not only about the acclamation of the colonists as they came into the new world, but also of the changes this immigration had on the Indians and the environment of North America.

Along with the section in the first chapter on how the Paleo-Indians lived in small groups by following and hunting different herds, I was really interested in how these small tribes grew and evolved into a settlement-like agricultural community. His discussion on the development of horticulture, by the Indians, through crossbreeding maize with wild grass to “create hybrids” (Taylor 10-11) with all of these protective, beneficial qualities sheds light on the innovation and intelligence of the Indian people. It was uplifting to read that not all Europeans thought of the Indians as savage beasts to be tamed and dominated, and that some of them even regarded them “by nature admirably ingenious.” (Taylor 20)

I drew a parallel between the 12^th century powerhouse of Cahokia and our own modern world. In discussing Cahokia, Taylor says that as the growing population exhausted natural resources such as trees, animals, and crops, “the environmental strains became exacerbated into a severe crisis…” (Taylor 16) The doubts and rebellions caused by this overpopulation was a factor that led to the collapse of Cahokia. In modern times, we are obviously not dealing with the collapse of our civilization, but we are beginning to face similar problems with overpopulation and the drain on natural resources.