Seven Events That Made America America (38 page)

43
Chase, “Jacksonian Democracy and the Rise of the Nominating Convention,” 239, and his
Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789-1832
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Van Buren,
Autobiography
, 514; Cole,
Martin Van Buren and the American Political System
, 151.

44
Cole,
Martin Van Buren and the American Political System
, 151.

45
Ibid., 151.

46
Ibid.

47
Remini,
Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party
, 120.

48
Cole,
Martin Van Buren and the American Political System
, 177.

49
Richard B. Kielbowicz, “Newsgathering by Printers’ Exchanges Before the Telegraph,”
Journalism History
9 (Summer 1982): 42-48.

50
Thomas C. Leonard,
News for All: America’s Coming of Age with the Press
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 43.

51
Ibid., 15.

52
Allan R. Pred,
Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 32-34.

53
Robert V. Remini,
The Election of Andrew Jackson
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1963), 77.

54
Ibid., 49.

55
Gretchen Garst Eweing, “Duff Green, Independent Editor of a Party Press,”
Journalism Quarterly
54 (Winter 1977): 733-39 (quotation on 736).

56
Erik McKinley Eriksson, “President Jackson’s Propaganda Agencies,”
Pacific Historical Review
7 (January 1937): 47-57.

57
Green in the
United States Telegraph
, February 7, 1826, quoted in Culver H. Smith, “Propaganda Technique in the Jackson Campaign of 1828,”
East Tennessee Historical Society Publications
6 (1934): 53. See also Fletcher M. Green, “Duff Green, Militant Journalist of the Old School,”
American Historical Review
52 (January 1947): 247-64.

58
Thomas Ritchie to Martin Van Buren, March 27, 1829, quoted in John Spencer Bassett, ed.,
The Correspondence of Andrew Jackson
, 7 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1929), 4:17.

59
Culver H. Smith,
The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government’s Use of Newspapers, 1789-1875
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 131.

60
Richard B. Kielbowicz,
News in the Mail: The Press, Post Office, and Public Information
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1989).

61
Gerald J. Baldasty,
The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 7. Also see Hazel Dicken-Garcia,
Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Thomas C. Leonard,
The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and his
News for All
, previously cited; Charles E. Clark,
The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665-1740
(New York: Oxford, 1994); and Michael Warner,
The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

62
See Gerald J. Baldasty’s dissertation, for example: “The Political Press in the Second American Party System: The 1832 Election,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1978, 140-70. He performed a content analysis of five metropolitan newspapers and four nonmetropolitan newspapers, in which he found that in the city papers, political topics made up more than one-half of all stories, and in the nonmetropolitan publications, nearly 70 percent (Baldasty,
Commercialization of News
, Table 1.1, 23).

63
Richard D. Brown,
Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 280.

64
Smith,
Press, Politics and Patronage
, 131.

65
Washington, D.C.,
U.S. Telegraph
, October 7, 1828.

66
Louisville Public Advertiser
, July 9, 1828.

67
New York
Lyons Western Argus
, August 1, 1832.

68
Carolyn Steward Dyer, “Political Patronage of the Wisconsin Press, 1849-1861: New Perspectives on the Economics of Patronage,”
Journalism Monographs
109 (February 1989): 1-40; Milton Hamilton,
The Country Printer: New York State, 1785-1830
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1936),120; and Baldasty,
Commercialization of News
, 20.

69
Carl E. Prince, “The Federalist Party and the Creation of a Court Press, 1789-1801,”
Journalism Quarterly
53 (Summer 1976): 238-41; Michael Emery and Edwin Emery,
The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass Media
, 6th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988); and Frank Luther Mott,
American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 260 Years: 1690-1950
, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950).

70
David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,”
William and Mary Quarterly
, April 1999, 243-72.

71
Ibid., 247.

72
As Shane White pointed out, print remained an effective means of enforcing the slave system (
Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810
[Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991], 114-49).

73
Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways,” 269.

74
Donald Lewis Shaw, “At the Crossroads: Change and Continuity in American Press News, 1820-1860,”
Journalism History
8 (Summer 1981): 38-50, quotation on 41.

75
Ibid., 41.

76
See table 3 in ibid., 41-42.

77
Jeffrey A. Jenkins and Charles Stewart III, “The Gag Rule, Congressional Politics, and the Growth of Anti-Slavery Popular Politics,” unpublished paper, 2003,
http://th.myweb.uga.edu/gagrule.pdf
.

78
William Lee Miller,
Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress
(New York: Vintage Books, 1995); Stephen Holmes, “Gag Rules, or the Politics of Omission,” in Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds.,
Constitutionalism and Democracy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15-70.

79
See, for example, Larry Schweikart,
Banking in the American South from the Age of Jackson to Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), ch. 4 and passim, and my article “Jacksonian Ideology, Currency Control, and ‘Central Banking’: A Reappraisal,”
The Historian
51 (November 1988): 78-102.

80
Richard Bensel,
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

81
Ibid., x.

82
Alexander B. Callow,
The Tweed Ring
(London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

83
Burton T. Doyle and Homer H. Swaney,
Lives of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur
(Washington: R. H. Darby, 1881), 61.

84
Ari Hoogenboom,
Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961).

Epigraph: Mark R. Levin,
Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), 33.

1
Don E. Fehrenbacher,
Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) remains a classic. David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis 1848-1861
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1977).

2
Andrew C. Napolitano,
Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America
(Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2009).

3
A graduate student at Duke, Kelly Marie Kennington, has traced these laws in her dissertation, “River of Injustice: St. Louis’s Freedom Suits and the Changing Nature of Legal Slavery in Antebellum America,” Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 2009.

4
St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project, “Freedom Suits Case Files, 1814- 1860,”
http://stlcourtrecords.wustl.edu/about-freedom-suits-series.php
.

5
Napolitano,
Dred Scott’s Revenge
, 59.

6
Strader v. Graham
, 51 U.S. 82 (1850).

7
Napolitano,
Dred Scott’s Revenge
, 69.

8
Donald E. Fehrenbacher,
The Dred Scott Case
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

9
Harry V. Jaffa,
Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

10
James L. Huston,
Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) explains this dynamic better than anyone.

11
Allen C. Guelzo,
Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 210.

12
Fehrenbacher,
Slavery, Law, and Politics
, 230; Jeffrey R. Hummel,
Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men
(Chicago: Open Court, 1997), 113.

13
David M. Potter,
The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861
, ed. and completed by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976), 284.

14
Guelzo,
Abraham Lincoln, Redeemer President
, 211.

15
Fehrenbacher,
Slavery, Law, and Politics
, 230.

16
“House Divided Speech,” in Roy P. Basler, Marion Dolores Pratt, and Lloyd A. Dun-lap, eds.,
The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln
, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953-55), 2:461-69 (henceforth cited as
Collected Works
).

17
Robert W. Johannsen, ed.,
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 19.

18
Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Peoria,” October 16, 1854, in Basler,
Collected Works
, 2:263-64.

19
John C. Calhoun to Percy Walker, October 23, 1847, in Robert L. Meriwether, et al.,
The Papers of John C. Calhoun
, 25 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959- ), 24:617.

20
Huston,
Calculating the Value of the Union
, 146.

21
Jefferson Davis, Speech in the Senate, February 13-14, 1850, in Dunbar Rowland, ed.,
Jefferson Davis: Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches
, 10 vols. (Jackson: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1923), 1:279, 283.

22
Lemmon v. People
, 7 NY Super 681.

23
20 New York, 562 (Court of Appeals, 1860).

24
Fehrenbacher,
Slavery, Law, and Politics,
5.

25
Larry Schweikart,
48 Liberal Lies About American History
(New York: Sentinel, 2008), 119.

26
Lerone Bennett,
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream
(Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 2007), 147.

27
Jaffa,
Crisis of the House Divided
, 36.

28
Stephen B. Oates,
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Mentor, 1977), 138.

29
Jaffa,
Crisis of the House Divided
.

30
Potter,
Impending Crisis
, 301.

31
Fehrenbacher,
Slavery, Law, and Politics, 246
.

32
Ibid., 57.

33
David Grimstead,
American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War
(New York: Oxford, 1998), in a more detailed version of the classic argument that the Civil War was a collapse of the principles of “law and order,” notes that the rise in mob violence in the antebellum period was substantially related to slavery and anti-slavery. See also Phillip S. Paludan, “The American Civil War Considered as a Crisis in Law and Order,”
American Historical Review
77 (1972), 1013-34.

34
Fehrenbacher,
Slavery, Law, and Politics
, 99.

35
Grimstead,
American Mobbing
, 248.

36
Ibid., 249.

37
Oates,
With Malice Toward None
, 146.

38
Charles W. Calomiris and Gary Gorton, “The Origins of Banking Panics: Models, Facts, and Bank Regulation,” in R. Glenn Hubbard, ed.,
Financial Markets and Financial Crises
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 109-74.

39
Albert Fishlow,
American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).

40
Charles W. Calomiris and Larry Schweikart, “The Panic of 1857: Origins, Transmission, and Containment,”
Journal of Economic History
51 (December 1991): 807-34 (quotation on 810).

41
Jenny Wahl, “
Dred
, Panic, War: How a Slave Case Triggered Financial Crisis and Civil Disunion,”
Carleton College Economics Department Working Paper no. 2009-1
, located at
http://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/econ/workingpapers/
, 8.