H-NET REVIEW: Birkner on Feller, _Jacksonian Promise_

H-NET REVIEW: Birkner on Feller, _Jacksonian Promise_
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 11:15:03 -0500


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Pol@ksuvm.ksu.edu (July 1996)

Daniel Feller, _The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815-1840_.
Baltimore, Md., and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1995. xiv + 227 pp. Bibliographical essay and index. $38.50
(cloth), ISBN 0-8018-5167-X; $13.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8018-5168-8.

Reviewed for H-Pol by Michael J. Birkner, Gettysburg College
< mbirkner@gettysburg.edu >

Consensus Again in Jacksonian America

Writing about the Jacksonian period is a little like going to a football
game in England: you don't have to get into a fight, but there are ample
opportunities to join the fray. One suspects that Daniel Feller was
genuinely torn when he began his task.
Should he wade into the still-bubbling argumentation about the market
revolution, or should he ignore it?

Except for a brief, dismissive reference in his Preface to Charles
Sellers's controversial magnum opus, _The Market Revolution_ (1991), Feller
steers clear of historiographical debates and provides readers with a
cogent and reliable survey of a seminal period in American political and
social development. Broader in scope than Harry Watson's trenchant
examination of Jacksonian politics, _Liberty and Power_ (1990), _The
Jacksonian Promise_ treats a wide range of Americans' activities during
this era. The mindset of reformers, the dynamism of the transportation
revolution, the implications of commercialization for law and for
individuals, the challenge of slavery in a society rhetorically fond of
equality, the culture of domesticity--all of these things are adumbrated
with economy and intelligence.

Feller throws cold water on the notion that Americans were seething with
anxiety or class grievances during the Jacksonian era. His Americans are
upbeat and often utopian in their aspirations. Having established a
democratic republic and, in the War of 1812, sustained their great
experiment, Americans felt the sky was the limit. They could change not
merely their environment but reform and refashion character. Witness the
Philadelphia and Auburn plans for penal reform, wherein prisoners would be
kept purposefully engaged, in silence, in the expectation that their
soul-searching would lead to changed values and behavior. Witness the rash
of utopian communities and the explosion of voluntary societies geared to
improving the lot of children, animals, poor people, or drunks, or to
preserving the American heritage, or to eliminating the curse of black
racial inferiority by colonizing free blacks to Africa. Fed by the
Arminian message of Lyman Beecher, Charles Grandison Finney, and their
compeers, the new evangelical movement promoted ambitious activism: the
world could be remade!

In fact, as Feller repeatedly demonstrates, reality checked utopian dreams.
Part of the problem was the unrealistic level of reformers' expectations.
Colonization might have worked had someone offered serious money to make it
work and had blacks been interested in the colonizing ventures. Neither
proved to be the case. Prisoners, meanwhile, proved more intractable and
recidivist than the rhetoric behind the Auburn Plan envisioned. New
Harmony broke down in squabbling. Brook Farm went bankrupt. Lowell,
Massachusetts, did not prove a workable model for bucolic industrialism.
Southern farmers persistently resisted prescriptions for scientific
cultivation of their homesteads. Abolitionists found themselves assailed
and even beaten for their views.

The case of the abolitionists, who suffered brutal abuse not only from
southern slaveowners but from many northerners as well, exemplifies the
gritty realities underlying the Jacksonian promise. Feller argues that
"the urge to improve produced unforeseen and difficult choices" (p. 159).
It was one thing to have a fine vision, another to get there. Americans,
in this telling, shared a common vision but had "unexpected differences"
with one another about how to achieve the promise inherent in their
culture. These differences were played out most contentiously in the
political arena.

It is in his treatment of politics that Feller's outlook on the era is most
clearly delineated. In a noteworthy retreat from an article he wrote for
the _Journal of the Early Republic_ several years ago, Feller dismisses
class and economic anxiety as important variables in understanding the rise
and functioning of the Jacksonian political system. Although neither
Louis Hartz nor John Diggins receives any mention in Feller's text or
bibliography, his analysis of Jacksonian politics follows their basic
premise that, in a Lockean political order, debates between politicians and
parties were never about fundamentals. The issue between John Quincy Adams
(and later the Whigs) and Andrew Jackson was not, as Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., Charles Sellers, Sean Wilentz, and others have portrayed it, about
restraining the grasping commercial and industrial elite and giving power
to the producers and common people. Rather, it was about alternative means
to the same end. Jackson, says Feller, favored the same kind of
development that Adams and the Whigs did. He simply and emphatically
rejected government as an agent in that development. It was this belief in
a more localist, free enterprise economic system that underlay Jackson's
war against the Bank of the United States specifically and the American
System generally.

Insofar as there was a Jacksonian revolution, in Feller's view, it entailed
a constellation of democratic rhetoric, support for a jurisprudence that
undermined corporate privileges (as in the _Charles River Bridge_ case),
and a few strong executive actions that made people, in Michael F. Holt's
phrase, "give a damn" about politics. This is a far cry from Sellers's
notion of a Jacksonian _Kulturkampf_ over the market revolution, and light
years from Michael Rogin's brilliant if eccentric argument that the Indian
question crystallized Jacksonian American values and exposed the rot at the
heart of American liberal democracy.

Surprisingly for a writer who is known for his witty and sometimes prickly
prose, Feller does not engage Sellers, Rogin, or any particular theory in
the body of this work. It seems evident that he is more impressed by
consensus than by conflict, and by the nation's dynamic forward movement
than by the salience of resentment, resistance, or fear of change. The
Richard Hofstadter who wrote _The American Political Tradition_ (1948), if
not necessarily the Hofstadter of the late 1960s, would be comfortable with
the argument Feller presents here. So would Richard P. McCormick, author of
many works on the Jacksonian period that dismiss the significance of
political rhetoric and partisan ideology.

Feller's depiction of an underlying consensus in society is probably
realistic, but I believe he is probably unwise to smooth the rough edges of
real conflict between competing interest groups and the parties that
represented them. Not everyone in Jacksonian America wanted to go in the
same direction, even by different routes. There was honest, widespread
anxiety about social and economic change, and there were legitimate reasons
for people to fear big corporations. Jackson articulated these concerns
both privately and publicly. Moreover, there is no question that many
voters and some political leaders who hopped on the Jacksonian bandwagon
were convinced that the differences between the parties mattered greatly.

Putting conflict in the background mutes Feller's palate in this survey
text. Much of the turbulence and noise of the Jacksonian era simply does
not figure into the narrative--nor do pungent quotes (with a few
exceptions) or anecdotes. Colorful figures like John Randolph of Roanoke
and Richard ("Rumpsey Dumpsey, He Killed Tecumseh") Johnson are mentioned
in passing and in one instance quoted, but there is no resonance of their
character here. Sam Houston is not mentioned at all, and the redoubtable
Thomas Hart Benton makes but one cameo appearance, during the public lands
debate of 1829-30. The Peggy Eaton affair, always good for comic relief,
is part of Feller's story, but there is no color or spice in his account of
the brouhaha over her virtue and its impact on Jackson's cabinet. Eaton
merely affords Feller the occasion to remind us that Jackson's
administration divided "before it fairly began" (p. 161).

Feller is entitled to write his own book his own way. His prose is
sure-handed, crisp, and occasionally sticks to the ribs, as when he notes,
referring to President Martin Van Buren's consistent emphasis on the need
for frugality and economy in the wake of the Panic of 1837, "it was one
thing to invite the people to thrive on their own, another to tell them to
suffer on their own" (p. 193). But anyone looking for the kind of thematic
bite characteristic of other volumes of "The American Moment" series will
be disappointed.

In the end, _The Jacksonian Promise_ delivers on its promise of a fresh and
authoritative take on life in the young republic before slavery became the
overarching focus of public discussion and contention. Students will
profit from it, and any reader will learn something . Scholars who want to
continue the fight over the market revolution will necessarily turn elsewhere.

Michael J. Birkner
< mbirkner@gettysburg.edu >
Gettysburg College

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