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Always eager to serve his country, Webster wrote to Jefferson in 1801 offering an exegesis of his inaugural address (on the ground that “surely every sentence of the philosophical Jefferson must carry with it meaning”). In his address, Jefferson had declared, “Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.” As for history, Webster had this answer: “If there ever was a government, which under the name of a republic or democracy, was generally guided by eminent wisdom, virtue and talents, it was a government of a mixed kind, in which an aristocratic branch existed independent of popular suffrage.” After all, Webster asked, “what do men gain by elective governments, if fools and knaves have the same chance to obtain the highest offices, as honest men?”
Jefferson, who considered Webster “a mere pedagogue, of very limited understanding,” never replied to his letter, and Webster added the slight to his list of grievances. The list was getting pretty long. As a Connecticut legislator from 1800 to 1807, Webster helped block bills eliminating the property qualification for voting. He himself had earned the right to vote, he was keen to point out, by writing his spelling books and dictionaries: “I am a farmer’s son and have collected all the small portion of property which I possess by untiring efforts and labors to promote the literary improvement of my fellow citizens.” And he would not have political decisions made for him by men who had no similar stake in the world. “If all men have an equal right of suffrage, those who have little and those who have no property, have the power of making regulations respecting the property of others,” he reasoned. “In truth, this principle of equal suffrage operates to produce extreme inequality of rights; a monstrous inversion of the natural order of society.” If voting-eligibility laws had to be changed, Webster had his own ideas about how to change them. “The people . . . would be more free and more happy,” he suggested, “if all were deprived of the right of suffrage until they were 45 years of age, and if no man was eligible to an important office until he is 50.”
By the end of the War of 1812, the Federalists had effectively lost any real influence over the American electorate. In the eighteen-twenties and thirties, a new kind of democracy emerged, as the nation expanded and more and poorer white men came to the polls and were elected to office. With the election of that scrappy frontiersman Andrew Jackson, in 1828, Jeffersonianism gave way to Jacksonianism: tied to party, arrayed against moneyed privilege, and advocating economic opportunity. By then, Webster had all but given up on the United States. Had he known what would become of the Republic, he would never have lifted a finger to fight the Revolution. Even George Washington, Webster thought, “would never have opposed the British government” if he could have anticipated the spoils system. Weary of his home state, Webster wished “to be forever delivered from the democracy of Connecticut.” He’d even be willing to make the great sacrifice of moving to Vermont, if that state could “be freed from our democracy,” adding, “As to the cold winters, I would, if necessary, become a troglodyte and live in a cave.”
What accounts for the rise of American democracy? The field of explanation—even the phrase itself—is littered with metaphors. “American democracy did not rise like the sun at its natural hour in history,” Wilentz wryly observes, dismissing the notion that democracy arrived, fully formed, in 1776 or 1787. To Noah Webster, democracy was a sickness, and the only question was “whether the United States are to suffer all the violence of the disease, or only its milder symptoms.” Other early observers of American democracy determined that it had been set in motion by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, like a child’s windup toy. Having heard that all men are born free and equal, all men and women, no matter what race, no matter how poor, will eventually seize that freedom. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, he concluded that American democracy was the unavoidable consequence of Americans’ equality. “The more I advanced in the study of American society,” he wrote, “the more I perceived that this equality of condition is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived.” As he saw it, a nation of men possessed of roughly equal estates and education, and lacking aristocratic titles, must necessarily become a nation of men possessed of roughly equal political rights. “To conceive of men remaining forever unequal upon a single point, yet equal on all others, is impossible; they must come in the end to be equal upon all,” he wrote.
Tocqueville’s interpretation was largely put aside by later historians, including Frederick Jackson Turner, who treated the subject in a 1903 essay in the Atlantic, “Contributions of the West to American Democracy.” Turner believed that democracy had everything to do with the land—“this vast shaggy continent of ours”—and offered his own metaphor for the rise of American democracy: “the wind of Democracy blew . . . from the West.” From Colonial days onward, Turner argued, blustery demands for fuller political participation—for local governance, more frequent elections, and broader suffrage—came, always, from frontier settlers chafing at the authority of Eastern élites. “A fool can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for him,” they told royal governors and, later, state legislators and, above all, the federal government. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may have been drafted on the shores of the Atlantic, Turner conceded, but they were tested in the foothills of the Alleghenies and beyond. “This, at least, is clear,” Turner insisted. “American democracy is fundamentally the outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the West.”
Turner’s thesis of frontier democracy influenced generations of American historians and decades of American popular culture and more or less dictated Casner and Gabriel’s story about the rise of American democracy. Like most good theories, it had a long life as an interpretation before historians began calling it a myth. But Turner’s thesis does not shape Wilentz’s. “In fact,” Wilentz contends, “the West borrowed heavily from eastern examples.”
In this, Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton and a contributing editor of The New Republic, follows the elegant work of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who, in “The Age of Jackson,” published in 1945, gently observed, “It has seemed that Jacksonian democracy, which has always appeared an obvious example of Western influence in American government, is not perhaps so pat a case as some have thought.” Schlesinger argued that the rise of American democracy during the age of Jackson was the result of class struggle in an industrializing economy. For Schlesinger, this was a struggle of ideas—most of all, of one idea, that political power can be divorced from property ownership. “It is in vain to talk of Aristocracy and Democracy,” a stonecutters unionist declared in 1835. “These terms are too variable and indeterminate to convey adequate ideas of the present opposing interests; the division is between the rich and the poor—the warfare is between them.” That war, as Schlesinger described it in a chapter called “Jacksonian Democracy as an Intellectual Movement,” was waged as much in politics and the courts as in American letters (perhaps most notably in the Democratic Review, a journal founded in 1837 “for the purpose of enlisting Literature, Religion, and Philosophy on the side of Democracy,” and whose contributors included Bryant, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whittier, Whitman, Poe, and Longfellow).
Wilentz’s initial foray into the story of democracy’s rise came with his first book, “Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850” (1984), in which he argued that urban workers and radicals constituted the truly democratic element in Jacksonianism. Wilentz was criticized for his depiction of manly artisans fighting the good fight (in my dog-eared copy, I found a note, passed to me by a classmate: “Do Wilentz’s workers have any vices other than the occasional stiff drink?”), but the book earned him considerable praise. Ironically, it also won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians.
“The Rise of American Democracy” is, to some degree, “Chants Democratic” writ large. It expands that story both geographically—following democracy’s growth among what Wilentz labels “city democrats” and “country democrats”—and chronologically; the book’s subtitle is “From Jefferson to Lincoln,” a choice that Wilentz is at pains to explain. “By singling out Jefferson and Lincoln, I certainly do not mean to say that presidents and other great men were solely responsible for the vicissitudes of American politics,” he writes. That Wilentz, the loving chronicler of nineteenth-century New York workingmen’s “shirtless democracy,” should become a champion of Presidential history, in any form, is remarkable. But he believes that social historians have lost their way. The problem with social history, he argues, is that it has “generally submerged the history of politics in the history of social change, reducing politics and democracy to by-products of various social forces.” What he’s done in “The Rise of American Democracy,” and done exceedingly well, is to trace the play between politicians and political ideas, on the one hand, and the people and popular movements, on the other. More metaphors, this time Wilentz’s mix: “Just as political leaders did not create American democracy out of thin air, so the masses of Americans did not simply force their way into the corridors of power.”
