The Birth of Modern Politics
Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828
by Lynn Hudson Parsons
Oxford, 272 pp., $24.95
Americans today don’t have a very high opinion of politics. We like the idea of democracy, it is just politics that we are not so crazy about. Every campaign year brings more rending of garments in the media about the rise of “negative campaigning” and serious concerns over the “tone” of our politics. Bipartisanship is now viewed as the logical end of democracy.
The corollary to this distaste of politics is the idea that, in the not-too-distant past, there existed a time when politics was not as polarizing. In this telling, such a utopia was broken by the Lee Atwaters, Newt Gingriches, and Karl Roves of the world, who had the audacity to divide the electorate and highlight, in harsh tones, differences with their political opponents. This narrative is pretty much nonsense, and there is no better proof than how incessantly Barack Obama has alluded to ending our partisan divide, all the while pushing his own very partisan political agenda.
As Lynn Hudson Parsons shows in The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828, politics was pretty messy in the early 19th century, too. Parsons is not the first to call the 1828 presidential campaign the first modern campaign, but he gives a readable and balanced overview of not just the election, but also the politicians who helped create our contentious system of campaigning.
As everyone knows, the Founding Fathers distrusted factionalism and feared the rise of political parties. But the election of 1800 brought to a head the conflict between the Federalists and the emergent Jeffersonian Republicans. As the Federalist party collapsed, it appeared on the surface that factionalism was on the decline. But the contentious election of 1824—in which the House broke a deadlock in favor of John Quincy Adams despite Andrew Jackson’s having won more electoral votes—would foreshadow future political changes.
So how did the 1828 campaign give birth to modern politics? During the 1800 campaign, 11 of the 16 states had their presidential electors chosen by state legislatures, not the people directly. By 1828, that number was only two. Property qualifications for white men were either abolished or severely reduced. In response, voting participation dramatically increased. The common man was now able to take part directly in the political process in ways unknown a few decades earlier.
Of course, the irony is that such expansion of the franchise, and the surrounding rhetoric of expanding liberty to the common man, took place in the midst of slavery and the lack of women’s suffrage. This has caused some scholars to question whether there was much democracy in Jacksonian democracy. But Parsons notes that, despite the shortcomings of the American system, “the tectonic plates were shifting.” The republican spirit unleashed by the American Revolution continued to develop in the early 19th century, and the direction of American politics would continue toward greater freedoms and participation. This republican spirit made its way into the 1828 campaign, where can be found, Parsons writes,
The Jacksonians were especially good at understanding the importance of image. Their candidate was the military hero of the Battle of New Orleans, a Washington outsider, and a defender of the common man against an aristocratic elite. It was all very effective, much to Adams’s dismay.
What brought about these political divisions? Parsons equivocates a bit on whether it was socioeconomic status or ethnicity, but it is hard to read his book and not see a persistence of cultural divisions in American politics.
“The very name of Massachusetts is odious,” a Charleston newspaper noted in the 1820s. Thomas Jefferson, betraying more than a whiff of anti-Semitism, noted how New Englanders were marked “like the Jews, with such perversity of character, as to constitute from that circumstance the natural division of our parties.” (This was a century-and-a-half before the rise of Michael Dukakis and John Kerry and the epithet “Massachusetts liberal.”)
Andrew Jackson skillfully played on the cultural resentments of frontier settlers against Eastern elites. “To many on the southern frontier, including Jackson,” Parsons writes, “easterners tended to be effete, patronizing, and above all, unsympathetic, even hostile, to their needs.” I would be willing to bet that Sarah Palin shares Jackson’s sentiments. Jackson once gave a Fourth of July toast “to the rising greatness of the West—may it never be impeded by the jealousy of the East.” You can hear the same attitude in Barry Goldwater’s famous comment, when he mused whether “this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea.”
Slavery and sectionalism, broadly speaking, certainly played a part in the political divisions that Parsons outlines in the 1820s. People like Jackson increasingly resented the growing abolitionism of New Englanders. But there were also, as David Hackett Fischer shows in Albion’s Seed, cultural differences as well, between the Scots-Irish frontiersmen and the New England descendants of the Puritans. Easterners looked down on the rowdy Jacksonians, who in turn resented the elitism of their social betters.
These cultural differences were intertwined with important philosophical differences. Parsons notes that the presidency of John Quincy Adams, already shadowed by accusations that he won thanks to a corrupt bargain with Henry Clay, was severely damaged by his first Annual Message to Congress. In it, Adams told Congress that the “great object of civil government is the improvement of those who are parties to the social compact.” The message was filled with ambitious calls for government to build railroads, canals, a national university, a naval academy, a unified system of weights and measures, and a national observatory.
It was a call for an energetic national government that would have warmed the heart of David Brooks, but it angered many Jacksonians. In a repeat of the earlier debates between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, these men feared that a strong national government would weaken the republican spirit in America and only benefit Northern elites. “Adams’s urging Americans to imitate Europe in ‘the career of internal improvements,’ ” writes Parsons, “enabled his critics to accuse him once again of a sneaking admiration for the effete, corrupt, and ‘monarchical’ society of the Old World in which he had spent much of his adult life.” The echoes of this criticism of Adams can be heard in conservative arguments that liberal Democrats like Barack Obama are more enamored of European social welfare states than they are of American democracy and capitalism.
Unlike modern political campaigns, however, the one in 1828 was relatively short, and there really isn’t enough there for an entire book. So Parsons spends a good deal of time presenting biographical sketches of Adams and Jackson. If we are in the midst of a revival of interest in the Adams family, then we are also witnessing a steady erosion in the popularity of Jackson, the fiery Scots-Irishman as slaveholder, Indian-killer, land-speculator, duelist, and possible bigamist. No historian today would seriously attempt to argue for Jackson as a premature New Deal liberal, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. did in the 1940s.
Parsons presents himself as a partisan for neither figure, giving each his due. And he ends his book with an odd, yet thought-provoking, observation that Abraham Lincoln’s greatness was partly due to “his absorbing the best qualities” of Jackson and Adams. Whether one agrees with that or not, Parsons nicely captures the birth of modern politics, and reminds us that populist huzzahs, backroom deals, personal attacks, and divisive rhetoric are not some anomaly to American politics, but an integral part of it.
Vincent J. Cannato teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and is the author, most recently, of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.
