What Hath God Wrought (125 page)

II

This book tells a story; it does not argue a thesis. For that reason, it does not end with a summary of an argument. The women’s rights convention of 1848 highlighted several important aspects of the larger story of America’s thirty-three years after 1815. It seems useful to point these out by way of conclusion.

In 1848, as in 1815, Americans still considered their country an example of democracy to the rest of the world, although that role had been embarrassed and compromised by aggressive war and the extension, rather than the contraction, of chattel slavery. The women’s rights movement appealed to this democratic pride. The most important forces that had made American democracy meaningful during the years since 1815 were three. First, the growth of the market economy, facilitated by dramatic improvements in transportation, broadening the consumer and vocational choices available to most people. Second, the awakened vigor of democratically organized Protestant churches and other voluntary associations. Third, the emergence of mass political parties offering rival programs for the electorate to choose. The impact of all three of these forces had been multiplied by new developments in communications. The women’s rights movement related to all three, but especially to the first two.

The struggle to win greater legal rights for women appeared when it did as an outgrowth of improvements in the economic, social, and cultural status of women in the United States. The weakening of paternal authority, the chance to earn money both within and outside the home, increased literacy, smaller family size, an expanded role for women in religious and reform activity, enhanced respect for female judgment in private life—all contributed. Many of these historical trends were themselves consequences of economic development, which transformed American life in qualitative as well as quantitative ways. Historians have often pointed out the evil consequences of industrialization—the pollution, the slums, the monotony of factory labor. We should not forget that economic development brought benefits as well, and not only in material ways. Improved transportation and communications, promoting economic diversification, widened people’s horizons, encouraged greater equality within family relationships, and fostered the kind of commitments to education and the rule of law exemplified by Abraham Lincoln. Accordingly, economic development did not undercut American democracy but broadened and enhanced it—which is reassuring for developing countries today.
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Perhaps, with aid from the federal government, economic development might also have helped alleviate the oppression of African Americans. If Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams had had their way, a program of economic modernization might have undercut the appeal of slavery in the upper South and border states.

At the close of 1848, political participation still lay in the future for women and most Americans not of the white race. White manhood democracy, on the other hand, had been firmly established in the United States—in some places after controversy over whether it should include non-property-owners, nontaxpayers, or noncitizens. As early as 1815, controversies over white male suffrage had mostly been resolved in favor of inclusion, if not always in the letter of the law then in the more important court of public opinion. Thereafter, when new states wrote their constitutions and old states rewrote theirs, they inscribed white manhood suffrage ever more firmly. Since white male democracy preceded industrialization in America, it preceded the development of a white proletariat and did not represent the kind of class conflict that it did in Europe. Only in the little state of Rhode Island had the issue provoked an insurrection, brief and almost bloodless. By 1848, only in Calhoun’s South Carolina and (ironically) Jefferson’s Virginia did state government remain dominated by a propertied aristocracy. In the eyes of the rest of the world, what made the United States interesting was its practical demonstration of democratic principles, with all their strengths and weaknesses. The women at Seneca Falls could take America’s commitment to democracy for granted—their task was to show that democracy should not be confined to males. This is why they based their claim on Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence.

The implications of both market capitalism and democratic principles unfolded gradually in the young American republic—sometimes simultaneously, as when the communications revolution facilitated both mass political parties and nationwide commercial networks. The major disputes, excitement, and violence of American history between 1815 and 1848 did not involve either a struggle to attain white male democracy or the imposition of a new “market revolution” on subsistence family farmers. Not the affirmation of democracy itself, that “all men are created equal,” but attempts to broaden the legal and political definition of “men” aroused serious controversy in the United States during these years. So clearly was voting defined as a right for white males that during the first half of the nineteenth century the suffrage was actually taken away from those few women and some of those few black men who had once been able to exercise it.
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If the emergence of women’s rights as a cause reflected in a general way the course of economic development and the evolution of democratic principles, in a more specific way it reflected the rise of the antislavery movement. Most of the early leaders of the women’s rights movement first embraced the cause of the slave and only later turned to the task of self-emancipation. The experience of gender discrimination within a movement dedicated to human liberty brought home to women like Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton the urgency of calling attention to their own human rights. When the World Anti-Slavery Convention meeting in London in 1840 refused to recognize the credentials of American women delegates, it sowed the seeds of the meeting at Seneca Falls in 1848. As Abigail Kelley graphically put it, in trying to break the chains of the slave, female abolitionists had discovered “
we
were manacled
ourselves
.”
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The need to choose whether abolitionism should embrace logical consistency and support freedom for women as well as blacks, or defer women’s rights in the hope of eradicating the worse form of oppression first, split the antislavery movement right down the middle.

Women’s rights and antislavery both illustrate the point that some of the most important debates of the period did not take place within the arena of politics. Much of this discussion occurred within the religious communities. America’s multitude of churches nurtured a variety of philosophies and value judgments, and carried on endless argument over them. In some cases, churches embraced a wider vision of democracy than political institutions did, allowing the voices of women and African Americans to be heard. Through churches, causes deliberately excluded from the halls of Congress—such as women’s rights and the abolition of slavery—could still make themselves felt.

The Seneca Falls convention and the publicity following it also illustrate the changes in transportation and communications, by canals and railroads, by cheap newspapers, the telegraph, and the post office. Because of these innovations, the agendas of antislavery and women’s rights could be transmitted, reinforced, and made consequential. Without these transformations, one can imagine a host of small communities arguing fruitlessly, or lapsing into lethargy, with little way of knowing what was going on in the outside world. Instead, news of discoveries like gold in California, revolutions all over Europe, new proposals such as the Wilmot Proviso, and even organizations that tried to remain secret such as the so-called Know-Nothings, rapidly provoked excitement. The mass production and distribution of information, which made possible the rise of mass political parties and nationwide philanthropic organizations, also facilitated causes like women’s rights. As the historian Daniel Feller has noted, “A newly functioning system of gathering and disseminating information made people aware of a larger world and gave them the power to change it.”
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This increased “power to change” encouraged controversy and contest. Equal rights for the two human sexes was but the newest subject over which Americans divided. The disputes that raged among the people of the young republic between 1815 and 1848 cannot be reduced to a single fundamental conflict (such as the working class against the capitalists). Rancorous competition between the major political parties reflected real disagreements over policy as well as mutual distrust between their constituencies. Sharp division of economic interest provoked fierce debates over tariff levels. Sometimes confrontations resulted from rivalries between constituted authorities, as did the nullification crisis and the Bank War. Constitutional and legal ambiguities combined with fierce ambitions to produce a culture of litigation. Racial, ethnic, and religious divisions spilled over from political debate into public violence.

The most bloody conflicts, however, derived from the domination and exploitation of the North American continent by the white people of the United States and their government. If a primary driving force can be identified in American history for this period, this was it. As its most ardent exponents, the Jacksonian Democrats, conceived it, this imperialist program included the preservation and extension of African American slavery as well as the expropriation of Native Americans and Mexicans. The remarkable changes in transportation and communications facilitated it. Determination to seize more land provoked harsh expulsions of populations, wars both large and small, and argument between pro- and anti-imperialists. Above all, westward expansion rendered inescapable the issue that would tear the country asunder a dozen years later: whether to expand slavery. Ironically, after the Civil War, westward expansion would benefit women’s rights. Hoping to encourage settlers, new territories and states in the Far West pioneered woman suffrage, beginning with Wyoming and Mormon Utah.

“America is the country of the Future,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared to a Mercantile Library Association in 1844. “It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations.”
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Emerson rejoiced in improved transportation and expanded trade, which he believed fostered political liberty, and most of all in Americans’ interest in social reforms; he called upon his audience to dream still more unconventionally. He was right, if characteristically too optimistic. Americans lived by hope for the future, but their conflicting hopes for their country and their own lives provoked dissension. Americans were continually proposing new ideas and then wrangling over them: mechanical inventions, communitarian experiments, religious sects, the reform of customs and institutions. New ideas about gender relations (which included Utah’s polygamy and Oneida’s “complex marriages”) seemed to contemporaries the most startling of these many “isms.”

Americans’ aggressive imperialism manifested their preoccupation with the future rather than the present. New homes, either in the growing cities or on the frontier, constituted part of the innovative quest in which so many participated. No significant group of Americans wished to shun what all agreed was the nation’s destiny to greatness. Even the critics of territorial expansion endorsed the growth of American population, productivity, and power; but they preferred to improve the quality of national life through education, economic development, and moral reform both individual and collective, rather than just expand geographically the kind of America that already existed, encumbered with the institution of slavery. The National Republicans and afterwards the Whigs, led by John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, proposed an alternative vision to that of the Jacksonian Democrats. Their vision of government-sponsored modernization offered America a different future. Eventually, the Whig vision prevailed, but only after Abraham Lincoln had vindicated it in the bloodiest of American wars.

The transformation of the United States between 1815 and 1848 resulted from a blend of two kinds of decisions: the many private decisions made by innumerable common people in their search for a better future, and the conscious decisions of their leaders in the course of making public policy. History is made both from the bottom up and from the top down, and historians must take account of both in telling their stories. The behavior of countless families gradually moving away from patriarchal authoritarianism affected the status of women at least as directly as legal reforms relating to property rights and voting. Profoundly conditioning social and cultural life was the force of religion: the multitude of competing sects, some old, some brand new, with their urgent, sometimes incompatible demands. Finally, the transformation of the United States did not occur in a vacuum. It took place within a continental and global context, and the actions of peoples near and far away impinged upon it: Native Americans, Mexicans, Canadians, Irish, Africans, Chinese, and British, to mention some examples.

The complex figure of Samuel Finley Breese Morse illustrates a number of the contradictions and tensions in American society during his lifetime. Coming from a background in New England clerical Federalism, he made the apparently surprising choice to affiliate with the Jacksonian Democratic Party. With the failure of his ambition to embody his intense patriotism in historical paintings, Morse turned his considerable energy and talent to the applied science of electromagnetic telegraphy. This facilitated, even more directly than his art could have done, the growth of American empire. The twin revolutions in transportation and communications integrated the continental expansion of the United States, and no feature of these revolutions was more spectacular than the electric telegraph. Morse’s technological innovation played an important part not only in the geographic expansion of the nation but also in its economic development, including the post–Civil War rise of big business.

In later years, people looked back upon Morse’s demonstration of 1844 as a pivotal moment in the shaping of their world. John Quincy Adams’s grandson Henry, in his retrospective autobiography published in 1918, identified the first telegraphic message between Baltimore and Washington as the time when “the old universe was thrown into the ash-heap and a new one created.”
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Even after the invention of the telephone, the telegrams of Morse’s Western Union Company remained a prominent feature of life through most of the twentieth century. At the height of its business in 1929, the company sent more than 200 million telegrams all over the world. Only the rise of electronic communication finally rendered the telegraph obsolete; Western Union transmitted its last telegram on January 27, 2006.
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