What Hath God Wrought (42 page)

As Van Buren’s letter foretold, the campaign saw the commencement of a novel acceptance of parties in American political life. And not surprisingly, given the commitment of Van Buren and most other Jacksonians to protecting slavery, the campaign also shaped up as highly sectional. For the only time in American history, the two sides presented the electorate with opposing sectional tickets. To run with him against the two southerners, Jackson and Calhoun, President Adams picked his Treasury secretary, Richard Rush of Pennsylvania, creating an all-northern team. In the South, Jackson’s popularity was enhanced by the feeling that only he could be relied upon to maintain white supremacy and expand the white empire, to evict the Indian tribes, to support and extend slavery.

In the North, the race was tight. Appeals to defend slavery would not work for Old Hickory, and the Adams-Clay economic development program enjoyed widespread support. Moreover, the populistic, egalitarian Antimasons were opposing Jackson. Without Van Buren’s brilliant strategy, his party organization, and his tariff abominations, it is hard to see how the all-southern ticket could have won, even given Jackson’s legend. Van Buren gave the effort his all, even sacrificing his Senate seat to run for governor of New York in 1828, so as to hold back the tide of Antimasonry in the state.

The election returns, as they gradually came in, gave Jackson the victory, 178 to 83 in the electoral college. His 56 percent of the popular vote set a record that was not surpassed until the twentieth century. His followers also won control of both houses of Congress, by a particularly impressive 138 to 74 in the House of Representatives. Jackson racked up awesome majorities across the South and West—except, ironically, in Louisiana, scene of his greatest battle. There his high-handed conduct was remembered, he was unpopular with the French Creoles, and the sugarcane planters needed a tariff. The Jacksonians, who believed in partisan politics wholeheartedly, not surprisingly had waged it more effectively than the Adamsites, some of whom engaged in it only grudgingly. Everywhere outside New England and New Jersey, Jackson benefited from more effective organization. In Georgia, where Indian Removal was the big issue, Adams got no popular votes at all. Calhoun’s record on Indian Removal did not satisfy Georgians either, so seven of the Georgia electors cast their vice-presidential votes for the South Carolina Radical William Smith, Calhoun’s longtime rival.

As in 1824, Adams carried his core constituency: New England, the Antimasonic and evangelical areas of New York state, the shores of the Great Lakes. He also won New Jersey, Delaware, and some of the congressional districts of Maryland. Under his leadership, New England had emerged from Federalist particularism and embraced Republican nationalism. The attack on his theology did not hurt Adams among Christians of the Universal Yankee Nation (as the New England zone of settlement was called). In the South, Adams showed pockets of strength in the towns and commercial areas like the Kentucky Bluegrass. But his running mate Rush failed to deliver Pennsylvania, and Clay failed to deliver any electoral votes in the Ohio Valley. The Tariff of Abominations had effectively counteracted the political appeal of the American System in those areas.

The popular vote tripled in size from 1824, partly because of states changing their method of choosing electors, but mostly because of heightened public interest and organized get-out-the-vote efforts. A two-way race captured the public imagination more clearly than a five-way race had done. Participation of eligible voters, 57.5 percent overall, was generally highest in states where the race was close, like New York and Ohio, and where good local transportation made it not too inconvenient to get to the polling place.
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Where state offices were more hotly contested than the presidency, turnout was higher in those races. Legal enfranchisement of new voters did not represent a significant factor in increasing the size of the turnout, although some states were in the process of removing the remaining property and religious tests for voting. The great majority of adult white males had long enjoyed the legal right to vote.
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Did Jackson’s victory constitute the coming of democracy to America? Certainly the Jackson political machine tried to persuade voters to see it that way. But continuities with an earlier time are evident: Jackson’s campaign slogans celebrated antique agrarian virtue and promised to restore Old Republicanism. His personal popularity rested to a large extent on military prowess, which of course is the oldest political appeal of all, and by no means democratic. If Jackson was the candidate of the “common man,” as he was so often described, it was specifically the common
white
man, and one not bothered by slavery or the abuses of Freemasonry. The Jacksonians cultivated an antielitist image. How far this corresponded with the reality of their support has not been easy for historians to document. Most voters in antebellum America, on both sides of the political divide, were farmers. The few industrial wage-earners who were male often voted for the American System, not Andrew Jackson, in the belief that a tariff protected their jobs. Adams did well among people living along commercial routes. Jackson did well in economically undeveloped regions, among non-English white ethnic groups, and among first-time voters (young men, immigrants, or the previously apathetic). But Jackson’s leading newspaper editor, the ardently proslavery Missourian Duff Green, knew how to exploit the communications revolution: He distributed his
United States Telegraph
through the mails using the franking privilege of Jackson congressmen. Jackson’s successful campaign owed as much to improvements in communications as to the democratization of the electorate.
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The vote displayed striking sectional characteristics. Jackson managed a bare majority in the free states (50.3%) while racking up 72.6 percent in the slave states. The South provided most of his electoral votes. Thanks to the peculiarities of the Electoral College (with the notorious three-fifths clause inflating the power of the slaveholding states), the 400,000 popular votes Jackson got in the North brought him only 73 electoral votes, while the 200,000 southerners who voted for him produced 105.
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There is no justification for claiming that the states Jackson carried were more democratic than the ones Adams carried; indeed, in some tangible ways state governments in the North, where Adams ran better, were the more democratic.
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To be sure, Jackson and his supporters had successfully encouraged and exploited broadening political participation. They had laid the groundwork for a new two-party system. But much of what they had done could as fairly be called demagogy as democracy. In the words of an antebellum newspaperman, the Adams campaign had “dealt with man
as he should be
,” while the Jackson campaign had “appealed to him
as he is.
”
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The election of 1828 proved a pivotal one; it marked the end of one kind of politics and the beginning of another. During the so-called Era of Good Feelings, presidential politics had been unstructured by party rivalry and had been driven less by issues than personal ambitions. In 1828, the incumbent, Adams, had boldly based his campaign on a national economic program. The challenger, Jackson, had run on a combination of personal popularity, organization, and the evocation of symbolism. The Jackson campaign, while claiming to be anti-politics, had in practice created a new and far more potent political machinery. Having won, Jackson did not feel content to bask in the glory of his record as a military hero vindicated by the electorate. He became an activist president. His administration would witness novel assertions of presidential power, rancorous debate over issues, and the rebirth of political parties. After 1828, the classical ideal of nonpartisan leadership, which Adams and Monroe had shared with Washington and countless political philosophers, was dead—killed in battle with Old Hickory as surely as General Pakenham.

There was another aspect of the outcome, less often noticed by historians but no less important. The National Republican improvement program of planned economic development would have encouraged a diversified economy in place of reliance on the export of slave-grown agricultural staples. Its strong central government would have held long-term potential for helping the peaceful resolution of the slavery problem, perhaps in connection with some kind of colonization program, while weaning portions of the South, especially in the border states, away from plantation agriculture toward mixed farming, industry, and commerce.
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Whatever such promise Adams’s program held had been frustrated, to a large extent by defenders of slavery who recognized in it a vision of America’s future incompatible with their own. Still, the Adams-Clay vision of government-sponsored national economic development, though temporarily checked, lived on. The second American party system, originating in the election of 1828, was strongly issue-oriented. It would be characterized by fierce debates over both economic policy and the enforcement of white supremacy.

Many people shared John Quincy Adams’s view of America as the country where God would bring His plans for humanity to fulfillment. But the blueprints for realizing this providential destiny could be far bolder and more presumptuous than Henry Clay’s American System. Some Americans actually hoped to cooperate in hastening the Second Coming of Christ, which would usher in the end of history. Almost all Americans regarded their country as an example and a harbinger of popular government to the rest of the world, and even non-church-members found millennial expectations an appropriate metaphor for this destiny. To appreciate the seriousness with which Americans of the early nineteenth century took the millennium, one must enter a world many readers will find alien and full of arcane lore. Millions of twenty-first-century Americans, however, still live in that world.

Traditional Judaism and Christianity both have much to say about the end of history. Chapters 20 and 21 of the New Testament book of Revelation speak of a thousand-year Kingdom of Christ on earth, after which all the dead will be resurrected, Satan defeated, a final judgment passed, and the world replaced by a new creation. The blessed thousand-year epoch has been named the millennium, and Christians identify it with the messianic age of peace and justice foretold by the Jewish prophets. Theologians have interpreted the prophecy in various ways, two of which—surprisingly enough—contributed to shaping events in the young American republic. One view of the millennium sees it as the climax and goal of human progress, with human effort contributing to the realization of God’s providential design. This is called
post
millennialism, because the Second Coming of Christ occurs at the end of the millennium. The other view sees the millennium as requiring God’s supernatural intervention to initiate it. The Second Coming of Christ must occur before the millennium; hence this interpretation is called
pre
millennialism. Where postmillennialists regard the millennium as part of history, premillennialists do not. While premillennialists (looking to divine intervention for deliverance) often feel alienated from their surrounding society and culture, American postmillennialists have typically celebrated theirs.

Both kinds of millennial expectations had flourished in America since the earliest European settlements. The colonial Puritans conceived their relationship to God on the model of ancient Israel’s covenant and their relationship to the nations of the world as that of “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people upon us.”
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Some of them also believed that they were living near the end of history and that their efforts to restore the purity of New Testament Christianity hastened the millennium. The Puritan diarist Samuel Sewell, for example, persuaded himself that the New Jerusalem, the capital of Christ’s millennial kingdom, would be located in the New World. The Puritan polymath Cotton Mather tried to predict the year of the Second Coming; he chose by turns 1697, 1716, and 1736. The greatest of American Puritan intellectuals, Jonathan Edwards, observing in 1742 the awakening of religion that he and other revivalists fostered, interpreted it as evidence that the millennial age approached and might well begin in America.
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The series of eighteenth-century wars against Catholic France and, even more, the Revolution itself, preached as a crusade from many a patriot pulpit, nurtured American Protestant millennial nationalism. Of the minister Samuel Hopkins, who carried Edwardsean piety into the Revolutionary cause and the abolition of slavery, a contemporary wrote: “The millennium was more than a belief to him; it had the freshness of visible things. He was at home in it.”
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The Second Great Awakening of religion, more widespread and diverse than the First, inflamed renewed outbursts of chiliasm, that is, belief that the millennium will occur soon.
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Postmillennialism in particular flourished, for material improvements, political democratization, and moral reform all provided encouraging signs that history was moving in the right direction, as did the spread of Christianity to the four corners of the globe. Americans seemed a “chosen people” not only because they enjoyed a covenanted relationship with the God of Israel but also because they were destined to prepare the way for the return of His Messiah and Son. William Sprague, a prominent spokesman for New England’s neo-Puritan tradition, declared: “We know—for God has told us—that there is a period of universal moral renovation approaching, and there is much in the aspect of Providence, which seems to indicate that our country is to have a prominent—may I not say—a principal instrumentality in the introduction of that period.”
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The postmillennial role that Sprague envisioned for America was underscored by countless evangelists. “The stated policy of heaven is to raise the world from its degraded condition,” declared the revivalist-reformer Lyman Beecher. Beecher had political and material, as well as moral and spiritual, elevation in mind; he saw the United States as the example to uplift the rest of the nations. Postmillennial expectations extended well beyond the New England heirs of the Puritans; the Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians in the middle states and the South overwhelmingly endorsed them too.
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The tolerant and humane evangelist Alexander Campbell led his disparate Christian movement into faith in postmillennial progress through his journal, the
Millennial Harbinger
. Charles Finney, however, exceeded all others in the urgency of his rhetoric. Once, in a burst of enthusiasm, Finney told his congregation that if evangelicals applied themselves fully to the works of mission and reform they could bring about the millennium within three years.
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John Quincy Adams invoked postmillennial aspirations in support of his political program. “Progressive improvement in the condition of man is apparently the purpose of a superintending Providence,” he declared. Adams saw himself as working for the establishment of the messianic age foretold by the second Isaiah (“the sublimest of prophets”). His First Message to Congress called a system of internal improvements “a sacred duty” imposed by God to elevate America in the scale of civilization. He recommended U.S. conversion to the metric system of weights and measures on the ground that it implemented “the trembling hope of the Christian” for the unity of humanity, the binding of Satan in chains, and the promised thousand years of peace. The political policies of his rivals, Adams complained, “led us back to the savage state” and away from the millennium.
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Postmillennialism provided the capstone to an intellectual structure integrating political liberalism and economic development with Protestant Christianity. One of the most powerful statements of this worldview was delivered in 1825 by Francis Wayland, Baptist clergyman, later president of Brown University and the country’s most widely read economist. Wayland began with the salient characteristic of his age, the increased awareness and self-confidence of the middle and lower classes throughout the Western world. The two engines driving this momentous transformation toward modernity, he explained, were Protestantism as a force for literacy and the mass production of cheap printed media enabling the common people to take advantage of their literacy. Improved transportation supplemented these effects by facilitating the flow of commerce and information across national boundaries and raising living standards. Without using those names, Wayland had described the transportation and communications revolutions.

Opposing these constructive developments, however, stood the autocratic regimes united in the Holy Alliance, together with the Roman Catholic Church, which had cast its lot with them in reliance upon intolerance and persecution for protection against modern ideas. If one looked at Europe alone, the division between the Catholic autocracies and the Protestant countries where political liberalism was on the rise seemed like a fine balance. Fortunately, the influence of the United States would tip that balance in favor of progress and Protestantism. The ideological conflict might even become a violent war, but if it did, Wayland predicted, the United States would end up leading a world coalition to save freedom and civilization.

To his prescient interpretation of the forces shaping his age, Wayland added a moral imperative. American citizens had the duty to promote the “means for elevating universally the intellectual and moral character of our people.” Of these means, the most obvious was education, but the most essential was knowledge of the Bible, for “man has never correctly understood nor successfully asserted his rights, until he has learned them from the Bible.” At the end, Wayland spelled out America’s postmillennial mission: “The dim shadows of unborn nations…implore this country to fulfill the destiny to which she has been summoned by an all-wise Providence, and save a sinking world from temporal misery and eternal death.” Millennial expectations by no means implied simply optimism. The scriptures foretold terrible suffering and catastrophes before God would finally bring good out of evil. Americans must work and pray hard to bring about the millennium. “Ye who love the Lord, keep not silence, and give him no rest, until he establish this his Jerusalem, and make her a praise in the whole earth.”
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A century later, the postmillennial liberalism so effectively summarized by Wayland would influence Woodrow Wilson.

A minority position in earlier generations, postmillennialism became the most widely held viewpoint on eschatology (the study of last things) among Protestants in antebellum America. It synthesized the faith in progress characteristic of the Enlightenment with biblical Christianity. Postmillennialists, as their most acute historian, James Moorhead, has pointed out, planted one foot firmly in the world of steam engines and telegraph while keeping the other in the cosmos of biblical prophecy.
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Theirs was a happy compromise, typical of the middle-class mainstream intellectual life of that period. Postmillennialism celebrated reformers, inventors, and Christian missionaries. Faith in progress toward the millennium synthesized readily with revival-based religion, holding out the promise that revivals could be made perpetual, without periodic declines in fervor. Psychologically, postmillennialism replicated on a cosmic scale the individual believer’s struggle to free himself from sin and embrace the Lord’s coming into his heart. Finally, postmillennialism legitimated American civil religion, that durable fusion of patriotism, nondenominational Protestantism, and belief in America’s responsibility to conduct an experiment in free government. Though postmillennialism may seem naive to our own chastened century, it flourished in a time and place, as Alfred North Whitehead observed, where even “wise men hoped.”
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II

In September 1814, the British army had massed overwhelming strength to drive south from Canada in its most serious invasion of the War of 1812. But after a naval battle at Plattsburgh on nearby Lake Champlain, their commander suddenly ordered the army to withdraw. General George Prevost’s astonished and angry superiors summoned him back to Britain to face a court-martial. On the American side, Captain William Miller could only attribute his country’s amazing salvation to divine intervention. This evidence of providence in history persuaded the young officer to turn his back on fashionable deism and join a Baptist church. On his farm after the war, Miller helped runaway slaves escape to Canada and studied the Bible every chance he got. Undeterred by his lack of training in biblical studies and ignorance of Hebrew and Greek, he applied a mixture of ingenuity and common sense to the task, dignified in Protestant tradition, of individual interpretation of scripture. Daniel 8:14 gave him his key to predicting the future: “Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed.” Miller read “days” to mean years and the cleansing of the sanctuary to mean the Second Coming of Christ to judge the world. His calculations convinced him that this Advent would occur sometime between March 1843 and April 1844.
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Although shy and lacking any natural charisma, Miller experienced a calling from God to share his breathtaking news with the world and began to preach it in 1831, when the pudgy farmer was almost fifty years old.

Miller’s message of premillennialism seemed to have nothing going for it save his naive earnestness, but it resonated with a powerful strand in Anglo-American culture. The popularity of postmillennialism proved quite compatible with consideration for premillennial proposals. Indeed, the respect accorded millennialism in general predisposed people to take premillennialism (also called millenarianism) seriously. Expectations of Christ’s imminent miraculous return by no means appealed solely to the unlettered. Prominent intellectuals like Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, and John Livingston, president of Rutgers, shared them. In 1827, a conference at Albury Park in England, attended by many leading clerics and respectable laymen, applied methods of calculation similar to Miller’s and concluded that the judgment day was close at hand.
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Miller reached a large audience once his publicity was taken over by Joshua Himes, a minister and social reformer who made use of the new means of communication to spread the millennial warning. Millions of pages of Millerite tracts were distributed; camp meetings in an enormous but portable tent attracted a total of half a million auditors in the three summers of 1842–44. Millerite preaching prominently featured laypeople; the movement especially encouraged women to speak in public. Many evangelical clergy gladly accorded Miller’s views a hearing because he shook people up and interested them in religion. The Millerites, like many other American millenarians, combined their “ideological archaism” with “organizational modernity.”
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When newspapers published elaborate refutations of Miller, as the
New York Tribune
did on March 2, 1843, it brought him still more attention. By then Miller and Himes had anywhere from twenty-five to fifty thousand Americans, mostly in New England and upstate New York, thoroughly convinced and a much larger number hedging their bets; Millerism also won converts in Britain. Sociological theory long held that persons attracted to millenarian causes would be the marginalized and despairing, looking for compensatory consolation. The historians who have studied William Miller’s Adventist movement, however, are unanimous in concluding that it was made up of average rural and small-town Americans, the solid middle class and respectable working class, a few blacks along with whites, generally coming from an evangelical background, usually Baptist or Methodist.
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