American Experiment (58 page)

In later years some families traveled in far grander style, as transportation improved on the waterways. Certainly the most extraordinary trip west was via the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Nothing really could compare with awakening in one’s own canal barge on top of an Allegheny mountain. “The whole family was comfortably located in the cabin of their boat, which appeared to glide up the heights of the Alleghenies, unconscious of its being a fish out of water, whilst some of the family were preparing the coming meals and others were lying on their downy pillows,” the
Hollidaysburg Aurora
wrote enthusiastically of the first trip. Next day “our boat and crew left the sunny summit and smoothly glided down her iron way to Johnstown, astonishing the natives.” Another editor compared the mountaintop barge to Noah’s Ark on Ararat. Even without hyperbole the portage railroad, with its huge hoists with stationary engines, carefully inclined planes, and elaborately balanced ascending and descending cars carrying barges, soon became world-famous.

But for most travelers the lasting memory was passage along the Erie Canal: gliding along mile after mile, watching the boy driver ahead manage the horses and keep the towline taut and untangled, talking with lockkeepers and farmers as the great basins were filled and emptied, stopping off in canal shops, showboats, and floating saloons, matching wits with thimblerig experts, gypsy fortune tellers, peddlers of tempting goods,…hearing the double blast of the cow horn as a packet captain signaled that he was “coming through,”…chatting with the tobacco-chewing steersman as he kept his craft off-angle while avoiding rocks and abutments,…and enjoying a good meal prepared by a canalboat chef. And always the slowly passing scenery: the blue smoke in the morning rising from cottages and shanty boats, farmers pulling out stumps or sowing their cleared land with great sweeping movements of their arm, the “gentle slap of water against the boats, the riffle of towropes, the swish of wind in the water grass, the splash and murmur of widening circles when a muskrat slid into the canal, the warning horns of craft coming in from the feeders…the gentle tinkle of cowbells across open fields, the song of fiddle and jew’s-harp, riding the wind, punctuated by the measured plop-plop of oxen hoofs as they plodded westward,” in Madeline Sadler Waggoner’s words.
And always the excited talk with other passengers about the adventures and opportunities lying ahead “out west.”

Not all canal passengers traveled elegantly or comfortably. There was a kind of caste system among boats. The grandee of the Erie was the long and lean canal packet, carrying only passengers and hand luggage and offering good meals, “settles” on top of the cabin from which passengers could enjoy the canal scenery, and separate sleeping spaces for men and women. The emigrant’s boat, or line boat, took on families and their furniture and stoves and chickens, and provided sleeping space on the floor at best. Next down in the hierarchy came the freighter, whose owner might live on board with the horses he carried along the canal; the cabin boat, built by the migrants to carry their families west; the shanty boat, a one-room hovel on a flatboat, which housed thousands of canallers along the Erie and moved occasionally by hitching a ride on another craft; and, lowest in caste of all, the timber raft, a collection of piles of logs lashed together and topped by a shanty for the crew.

But sometimes all passengers were tumbled into one existence, when the steersman’s warning of “low bridge ahead,” or bad weather, drove the nabobs out of their “settles” and into the cabin below. Because of the narrow beam of canalboats, the cabin was usually a jumble of clothes, bags, blankets, food, clotheslines, and people. Passengers had to sleep on foot-wide berths that appeared to Charles Dickens to be “hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size.” Like most natives, the famous English visitor found he could get into his shelf, which was the bottom one, only by lying on the floor and rolling in. Dickens could cope with this, but not with the habits of his fellow passengers. “All night long, and every night, on this canal,” he complained, “there was a perfect storm and tempest of spitting.”

Spitting. This “filthy custom,” as Dickens called it, repelled other visitors from abroad as well. “It was a perfect shower of saliva all the time,” Fanny Kemble noted on
her
boat. Tobacco-chewing Americans seemed to spit everywhere—in carriages, boardinghouses, law courts, the Capitol, even on carpets in living rooms—but especially in the raw new towns of the West. Americans were slouchers too; they seemed to slouch sitting down. The “bearing and attitudes of the men” at the theater struck Mrs. Frances Trollope as “perfectly indescribable; the heels thrown higher than the head, the entire rear of the person presented to the audience, the whole length supported on the benches, are among the varieties that these exquisite posture-masters exhibit.” Her remarks on slouching became so famous that American theatergoers spotting an egregious sloucher in the pit would set up the cry, “A trollope! a trollope!”

Americans, especially frontier Americans, were vulgar: this was the report brought back from the inscrutable continent to the west by many of the scores of visiting Europeans. Americans were also materialistic, avaricious, selfish, boastful, rude, gluttonous, cruel, violent. Yet other travelers—sometimes the same travelers—returned with different observations about the American character, especially on the frontier: “Jonathan” was friendly, generous, helpful, natural, unspoiled, hospitable, affectionate. Americans, in short, were complicated and contradictory.

Frontier people had a way of destroying generalizations and shibboleths. Not only European observers but also eastern Americans traveling into the West came to conclusions only to have them invalidated. American frontier people were long painted as rugged individualists, but these individualists were also resolute collectivists, or at least cooperators, in joining with their spouses and children in clearing land and building homesteads, with their townspeople in cabin raisings, logrollings, law enforcing, with the authorities in laying roads, fighting Indians, erecting forts, financing schools. Western settlers, supposed to be materialistic, set up schools and churches, libraries and literary societies, almost as fast as they established saloons and stables. Western frontier people were, on the whole, more daring, more restless, more mobile, more “middle-income” (the rich had the money to go West but little motive, the poor had the motive but no money) than the rest of the population. They were also generally outsiders who, it was said, had “sought the West to escape a society in which distinctions of birth and possession had put them at a disadvantage.”

Their hallmark was diversity. They were diverse in their environments, for people were “settling in” behind a constantly moving frontier while hunters and trappers were advancing ahead of it. They were diverse in occupation: speculators, merchants, lawyers, farmers, riverboatmen, blacksmiths, flour millers, road builders, printers, distillers, teachers. They were self-contradictory, now friendly and now suspicious, generous and stingy, religious and blasphemous, nationalistic and parochial, hard-working and self-indulgent, rowdy and respectable. They were ambitious but lacking in lofty ambition, observers concluded. “They talked up liberty but restricted its practice.…They loved change but dreaded revolution.…They were avid readers but preferred newspaper gossip to literature. They were in a constant ‘election fever’ but cold to political principles. They had appetites but no passions.” They knew how to make money but not how to spend it. They were, in short, bundles of complexities, contrarieties, and possibilities.

Out of the frontier rose a man—a migrant, an outsider, a hard worker, but also a man on the make—who embraced its contradictions. Born poor
and fatherless in the Carolina uplands, Andrew Jackson rebelled from the start against schools, restrictions, and his mother’s plans for him to become a Presbyterian minister. Foul-mouthed, mean-tempered, and combative even as a child, he grew into a wild youth who led his companions in wrestling, foot-racing, drinking, card playing—and in carting off neighbors’ gates and outhouses. When provoked or thwarted, he choked with rage and could hardly speak. His mother, who had lost her husband four months before Andrew was born, suddenly left her last-born when he was fourteen in order to nurse American prisoners of war in far-off Charleston, and died there. This ultimate desertion left the boy more bellicose, restless, and mischievous than ever.

Yet there was always another side to Andrew Jackson. If he swore, he swore with style. If he bullied, he was the kind of bully who could win followers and even admirers. And if he was cruel and violent, it was the only way he knew how to cope with the wild frontier around him until it too could be mastered. He experienced that environment at a remarkably young age. A guerrilla at thirteen, he fought the British in bitter skirmishes; captured by the enemy, he was slashed across the head when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots and demanded to be treated as a prisoner of war. Thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp, he was robbed of his clothes and, ravaged by smallpox, he was freed in an exchange, only to lose his remaining brother to the pox.

Somehow the youth was steeled by these ordeals rather than broken. At eighteen he read law; a year later he was practicing as a licensed attorney; and a year after that he was the public prosecutor for western North Carolina. Then he moved west, finally settling in Nashville, where he continued to prosper: attorney general for the Moro district at twenty-four, delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention four years later, elected the first member of Congress from Tennessee at twenty-nine, United States senator at thirty, a judge in the Supreme Court of Tennessee a year later. During this meteoric rise, however, a wild outsider seemed to be struggling with the insider on the make. For years he and his after-work cronies acted the hooligans, stealing outhouses. He courted the vivacious Rachel Robards before she was divorced. He speculated recklessly in land, traded in slaves and cotton, brawled and quarreled incessantly, flirted with the Burr conspiracy, coolly and deliberately killed a man in a duel, fought others with cane, fists, and gun; maintained smoldering hatreds for Indians, Spanish, and Englishmen. He owned about eighty black men and women.

To old Republicans like Jefferson, Jackson was a dangerous man, a demagogue, utterly unfit to be President. Among those close to him, he
could be elaborately courteous to men, gentle and courtly to women, and generous to a fault—he was often in debt for signing shaky notes for friends. To plain Americans, Jackson became—after the Indian campaigns and New Orleans—the nation’s hero. If his views were hazy, his image was clear—a lean, ramrod figure topped by a seamed and wrinkled face, a hard-set lantern jaw, piercing eyes, under a corona of bristling white hair.

The simplest definition of politics is the conflict of outs versus ins. This is also the most simplistic definition, for the battle between those who hold office and those who seek it becomes enmeshed with ideological, policy, ethnic, geographical, religious, and other conflicts that may turn the contest into something more fundamental than a struggle to keep or seize power and pelf; some persons, indeed, reject office out of conviction. If ever a political contest was reduced to the simplest definition of politics, however, it was Jackson’s campaign against John Quincy Adams in 1828, when a coalition of “insiders” united around a few great national issues was assailed by a coalition of outsiders agreed on hardly any issues at all.

Since the election sharpened not merely major policy issues but personal and psychological ones, it turned into the ugliest presidential contest in a generation. However divided, the outsiders were agreed on the man they wanted—Andrew Jackson—and they were united by the conviction that they had been excluded from the citadels of the political and financial system, from the centers of social status and deference. They were Westerners and Southerners incensed against the East; growers and consumers angered by abominable tariffs; mechanics and small businessmen indignant over “monopoly”; farmers hostile to middlemen and speculators.

Listen to young Congressman James K. Polk inveigh against what had come to be known as Adams’ and Clay’s American System: “Since 1815 the action of the Government has been…essentially vicious; I repeat, sir, essentially vicious.” The American tripod was a “stool that stands upon three legs; first, high prices of the public lands…sell your lands high, prevent thereby the inducements to emigration, retain a population of paupers in the East, who may, of necessity, be driven into manufactories, to labor at low wages for their daily bread. The second branch of the system is high duties…first, to protect the manufacturer, by enabling him to sell his wares at higher prices, and next to produce an excess of revenue. The third branch of the system is internal improvements, which is the sponge which is to suck up the excess of revenue.”

All of which sounded like the poor man against the rich, the People
against the Elite, the rebels against the Establishment, until one looked at the Jacksonian leaders. They were—most of them—not mechanics or farmers or paupers but capitalists, planters, traders, landowners and speculators, slave owners, lawyers, journalists, and indeed men, like Jackson himself, who had already enjoyed the fruits of office as legislators and administrators. Still, they had acute feelings of political and psychological exclusion. And nothing had aroused both feelings as forcibly as Adams’ and Clay’s “deal” of January 1825—the deal that they were certain had kept Andrew Jackson out of the White House.

The campaign of 1828 began just after the “corrupt bargain” became known, when Jackson, fuming over the Judas of the West, resigned his Senate seat and started home. Neither time nor travel assuaged his feelings. He was weeping for his country’s experiment in liberty, he wrote a friend, when “the rights of the people” could be bartered for promises of office! By the time he reached his Hermitage home he was talking darkly of “usurpation of power” and the “great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people” against it. Soon men in Nashville and Virginia and Washington and New York were laying plans for 1828.