On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America

Jacksonian political history, once a battleground of academic controversy, has been a quiet field of late (see Fig. 1). The recent shift in interest toward social history in part accounts for the calm, a point to which I will return later. Just as important, however, Jacksonian political historians more or less killed off interest in the subject themselves by failing to move beyond their advances of the 1960s and by obscuring the question that had originally stirred so many of them to action: What were the relationships between class and politics in the early nineteenth-century United States? Now that the weaknesses of the new Jacksonian political history have been pointed out, it is proper to reflect on its rise and decline-and on why the social historians failed to construct their own interpretation of class and politics. It is also time to build on the social historians' reconceptualizations of class and social relations in nineteenth-century America, and offer a different approach to the social history of politics in the 1830s and 1840s. The great revision of Jacksonian politics began in earnest in the late 1940s, almost immediately after the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s celebratory, The Age of Jackson. Richard Hofstadter's savage and bitter discussion of Andrew Jackson's place in the genealogy of American liberal politics set the tone. Once Hofstadter had done in the prevailing Progressive and New Deal myths about The Man of the People, all of the old simplifications about class and politics began to fall. On close examination, the leading Jacksonians were shown to be not champions of deprived workers and small farmers, but cold-blooded political entrepreneurs, often men of great wealth or men eager to become wealthy, whose main purpose was to get power and keep it. Jackson himself, it turned out, was an inconsistent opportunist, a shady land speculator, a political fraud-and a strikebreaker to boot.' It was left to Lee Benson to assault the Progressives' very concept of Jacksonian democracy, especially their ideas that the Whigs were a conservative business party and that party conflicts were the direct expressions of clashing