Vol. 13 No. 2 (February 2003)

 

THE INVENTION OF PARTY POLITICS: FEDERALISM, POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY, AND CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN JACKSONIAN ILLINOIS by Gerald Leonard. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2002. 328 pp. Cloth ISBN 0-8078-2744-4, $45.00

 

Reviewed by Craig Hanyan, Emeritus, History, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Email: chanyan@spartan.ac.brocku.ca

 

The 2000 election reminded Americans that the Constitution-makers of 1787 contrived to hold the sovereign people at arm’s length. From the vantage of those founders, a partisan candidate backed by a majority of voters did not become president. The tyranny of an oppressive and secretive faction, centering on Al Gore as the front man, had been avoided. The founders contrived the Electoral College and the choice of senators by state legislatures to distance the monarchical “one” and the aristocratic “few” from the admissible “many” of majoritarian democracy, the very largely white male voters of the early republic. This “mixed” government buffered democracy to ensure liberty. Yet the Constitution also limited both the elite or “aristocratic” and the executive or “monarchical” power. Limited, those social and political elements could not become the seeds around which would crystallize the power of “faction” or party to conspire against the commonwealth. Additionally, the founders hoped that the diverse interests in the new federation would also impede the destructive force of party.

 

Assuming the continuing vitality of this eighteenth-century “anti-party” ethos, the following questions must be asked: how did the political parties of the Jacksonian era come into being, how did that ethos influence their nature, and how did it contribute to their failure to address the sectional differences that led to the DRED SCOTT decision in 1857? Gerald Leonard of the Boston University School of Law, working generally from a historian’s primary sources—most often newspapers and manuscripts—and from a wide array of historians’ writings, explores these questions. He focuses on developments in Illinois, carefully weighing political statements against political behavior. He concludes that “the only way to create an effective party in democratic America was to paint it as the defender of the Constitution against anticonstitutional attack and thus as the defender of traditional antipartisan values themselves (p.232).

 

Departing from the work of Richard Hofstadter (1969) and Michael L. Wallace (1968), Professor Leonard emphasizes that anti-partyism endured undiminished and therefore defined the approach of the “partyists.” These partyists, guided by New York State’s Martin Van Buren’s INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN AND COURSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES (1867) repeatedly cited here, fostered the Democratic party as the one self-consciously legitimate and permanent party that would continuously struggle to fulfill American government’s true purpose: the realization of the Jeffersonian vision of democracy rooted in and flourishing in local government. They intended party action to be ongoing constitution building that would block the subversive efforts of a moneyed elite to use the courts to consolidate control over Americans through an enhanced federal government. Subversion was happening. In MCCULLOCH v. MARYLAND (1819) the Supreme Court defended the Bank of the United States, an engine of power for a baleful, shadowy faction held together by special interests rather than visible party machinery. Anti-partyism fed the opposition of Van Burenite Democrats to this putative resurrection of Hamiltonian Federalism. Nevertheless, anti-partyism would consistently serve foes of Van Burenite partyism who pointed to the machinery, organization, and patronage objectives of the Democratic party as mechanisms for oppression. Anti-partyism thus became a two-way street that channeled the flow of opposing political traffic, both streams honking out condemnations of oppressive and conspiratorial power in the other lane.

 

Professor Leonard traces the development of that traffic in Illinois, which initially drew much of its population from the South and entered the Union in 1818 with a broad white male suffrage. Manuscript and newspaper evidence demonstrates that an “anti-party consensus … suffused Illinois political culture before the 1830s” (p.53). Factions continued from the territorial period but had not engendered machinery for nominations. Candidates for office often announced their availability or stood at the instance of their “friends.” Running, they addressed issues such as banking, county boundaries, internal improvements and land policy without regard to party. Granted, there was some potential for issues to generate organization. Scattered committees and nominating meetings sprang up in 1824, when the electorate rejected a state convention to consider a pro-slavery constitution. At that time, similar efforts on behalf of congressional or presidential candidates met condemnation as conspiracies against the will of the people.

 

Substantial change came after Van Buren belatedly adopted Andrew Jackson as the aegis under which he could make legitimate an ordered, disciplined, national Democratic party. Self-nomination continued to predominate for most Illinois candidates, but in 1828 partyists who had supported William Harris Crawford, the caucus-nominated 1824 presidential candidate of Van Buren, organized district conventions to put three Jackson electors before the voters. This was a first step toward the intended “alteration of constitutional practice” whereby “de facto direct election would be accomplished without recourse to the cumbersome procedures of Article V of the Constitution” (p.96): popular election of the president could be achieved without recourse to constitutional amendment. Backers of President John Quincy Adams, rather than be charged with factional manipulation of the popular will, instead felt out public opinion and informally offered three names in a newspaper. However, Jackson’s eventual victory disappointed many who had supported him earlier as the candidate whose party had been denied office by a “corrupt bargain” in 1825. Anti-party Jacksonians came to learn that victory meant Van Burenite power over federal offices and federally held public lands, intrusive power used to build Democratic strength within Illinois. Jackson remained popular but fear spread that a party centered on the president could throttle the free expression of public opinion and subvert state sovereignty. The “proscriptive party” was almost upon them.

 

During the early 1830s, Illinois elections at the local and congressional level tended to remain devoid of party organization: anti-party Jackson men ascribed the patronage policies of his administration to Van Buren. However, events favored departure from this pattern of dissent. In 1832, Illinois pro-Jackson partyists argued that the political crisis demanded a revival of district conventions and defended the national Democratic convention. Understanding that the partyists meant to back Van Buren for the vice presidency, anti-party Jacksonians responded by backing another candidate. Their movement faltered when elite, Washington anti-Jacksonians scuttled Van Buren’s nomination as minister to England. Partyists now held that democracy must organize or suffer at the hands of aristocratic cliques.

 

As the end of Jackson’s second term approached local nominating conventions, some with party labels, became more frequent in northern Illinois. The dialogue as to their nature and purpose developed more fully, encouraged by the address of the Baltimore convention that nominated Van Buren in May of 1835. From the partyists’ viewpoint, a hierarchy of delegate conventions reaching from the national to the county level, and vice versa, would serve to harmonize and forcibly bring to bear the will of the people, a continuing necessity given the threat of aristocratic factional subversion, which might throw a presidential election into the House of Representatives. To be effective, the true Democrat must therefore regard himself as bound by the choice of the majority of any “regular” convention. Given the Van Burenite use of patronage, their opponents saw submission to regularity as oppression by a few petty officeholders, obedient to power at the centeroppression that denied the independent judgment of the citizen in local meetings. The opposition was quick to condemn “the realities of the ‘primary assemblages’” (p.144).

 

In 1836, enthusiastic Democrats such as Stephen A. Douglas still found it impossible to impose a statewide hierarchy of conventions. Anti-party resistance, especially in southern Illinois, was too strong to countenance even local nominating conventions for congressmen. Hard times following the Panic of 1837 and the coming of the presidential election of 1840 greatly intensified political debate and eased the way toward more comprehensive organization. The Democrats and the emerging Whigs each affirmed their existence as the only constitutionally correct polity and defined their opponents as a subversive faction, the history of which spelled out its evil propensities: the Whigs were the heirs of Hamiltonian Federalism that had given the country the Alien and Sedition Acts as well as an aristocratic national bank; the Democrats abused Federal executive authority to cow free men, exercising “monarchical” power newly enhanced by the money of the Independent Treasury.

 

Outlining a model address for his party, Van Buren added an important international twist. He “argued … that everyone abroad recognized the American party division as a conflict between self-government and aristocracy … The fact that, to foreign eyes, this contest’s outcome ‘should ever be doubtful,’ then, was sufficient reason for the world to question the people’s capacity for self-government … and to sustain their commitment to the Constitution that gave them such responsibility” (p.180). It therefore became an international necessity for the organized polity of the Democratic party to thwart aristocratic corruption of the Constitution. With the intensity of the presidential election of 1840, “the dam broke” (p.210). In that contest the Whigs and Democrats of Illinois “had created something new under the sun: mass parties in control of politics and governance at every level (if not in every locality)” (p.228).

 

In his last chapter, Professor Leonard surveys party development in other states to explain party failure at the national level—failure that led the Supreme Court aggressively to address the problem of slavery in DRED SCOTT. He presents a case that, “as Illinois’s experience suggests, the origins of the Second Party System indicate that the parties’ substantive ideologies developed mostly after the organization of the parties, as a consequence of the parties’ electoral need to advertise intelligible programs of governance.” Fed by the anti-party tradition, this process “reduced the pre-existing social conflicts to elements of just two party ideologies” (p.235). The resulting “procedurally oriented constitutionalisms” made them ill-equipped to deal with the “constitutional question of federal power over slavery in the territories and the uncompromisableas it turned outsubstantive positions that so many Americans subsequently adopted on that issue” (p.245). The Whigs, fundamentally hostile to party organization and emphasizing the limits of political power over the individual, could not come to grips with this national problem. Even their commitment to the American System and the national bank proved feeble. Moreover, popular sovereignty, as a test of party obligation, proved too thin a tissue to paper over the growing sectional divisions in the Democratic party. This fragility gave the lie to its claim to be the one party to embody the will of the majority of Americans, a claim that had already been eroded by occasional Whig successes at the polls. King Andrew being absent, the Supreme Court stepped in to state a higher will. This averted “the specter of democratic majorities tempted to indulge in loose construction and centralization of power” (p.252), but it made the procedural theory of the Democratic party irrelevant.

 

THE INVENTION OF PARTY POLITICS is at odds with Michael F. Holt’s (1999) doubts about a continuing hostility to party and his greater emphasis on electoral importance of economic policy, although not totally with Holt’s conclusion that “the central fault line or cleavage in the electorate separated men with different degrees of experience in and different attitudes toward the market economy and the cultural values it spawned” (p.115). Professor Leonard’s emphasis on the appeal of attitudes toward power rather than on economic and social issues will make his book valuable reading in graduate courses dealing with the development of American parties during the early national years, and in courses stressing the relationship between politics and the development of constitutional law. His emphasis on anti-party ideology should be compared with concurrent eighteenth-century legacies, such as the perceived conspiratorial threats against the fused elements of liberty and equalitythreats that heated the dialogue over slavery and expansion, and have been dissected by Michael A. Morrison (1997). THE INVENTION OF PARTY POLITICS looks into the interplay between national and state politics over several years, and happily Professor Leonard has chosen to explore a state in which both Northern and Southern political cultures put down roots, thereby including something of the Southern anti-partyism that Christopher J. Olsen (2000) has found intense in the case of Mississippi. Regional differences did influence the enduring distrust of power that characterized the Jacksonian party system.

 

Collateral readings on other states and on sectional division would be useful. Professor Leonard closes his study with the political crises that preceded the Civil War; much earlier he had explored the history of Martin Van Buren as the molder of a great national party. Yet the significant sectional tensions of Van Buren’s formative years are left out. Shortly before Van Buren’s election to the New York State Senate, Congress dealt with the prohibition of the slave trade that was constitutionally possible in 1808. Donald Robinson (1979) recorded that “during consideration of the act of 1807, a distinctly Southern position began to emerge” (p.338). The national legislature, after sharp exchanges between Northern and Southern members, produced a toothless law that compared poorly with the British act of the same year. Five years later, the United States declared war on Great Britain, a measure supported far more vigorously by Southern legislators than legislators from the North. Additionally, 1812 was a presidential election year. Van Buren gave critical backing to De Witt Clinton of New York, who ran against fellow-Republican James Madison of Virginia, in an election that Noman K. Risjord (1985) judged “the most sectionally oriented … prior to 1860” (p.272). Then, too, there was the dispute over the admission of Missouri, which Professor Leonard touches on only in the context of DRED SCOTT, although it commenced three weeks before the Supreme Court handed down MCCULLOCH v. MARYLAND. In sum, the sectional political context of MCCULLOCH v. MARYLAND and Van Buren’s years of preparation might be enlarged.

 

Further, Professor Leonard tells us that the Albany Regency welcomed “organized opposition … because … the opponents …could be counted on to expose their aristocratic character by training their guns mainly on party organization itself, as Dewitt [sic] Clinton’s ‘People’s Men’ of the 1820s predictably did” (p.242). Granted, the People’s Men condemned Regency management, but Clinton, who supported Andrew Jackson against Van Buren’s presidential candidate—again, Crawford of Georgia—soundly defeated Van Buren’s gubernatorial candidate. Moreover, the People’s Men trounced the Van Burenites in the New York legislative elections of 1824. Why? The Van Burenites desperately wanted New York’s legislature to choose electors pledged to their Southern candidate. So, well served by elite ex-Federalist legislative leaders, the Van Burenites blocked the popular election of presidential electors. Voters were also offended by Van Burenite opposition to the popular election of justices of the peace. Both positions reflected Van Burenite determination to avert the kind of patronage defeat that they suffered at the hands of the Monroe administration when in early 1822 the postmaster’s office at Albany went to an opponent.

 

However, they should not have been surprised, given the way that Virginians played the presidential game as described by Richard P. McCormick (1982). That returns our attention to the nation and the Constitution. Leonard L. Richards (2000) has explored the great strength that the three-fifths clause of the Constitution provided the South within the federal government. By the stridently public presentation of their case and their tactics in 1823 and 1824, the Van Burenites made clear their intention to gain national power by carrot and stick, by endorsement of Southern leadership while organizing power in the most populous of Northern states as the foundation for wider party organization.  Van Burenite partyism may have been formulated to address, if not to amend, Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution.

 

 

REFERENCES

Hofstadter, Richard. 1969. THE IDEA OF A PARTY SYSTEM: THE RISE OF LEGITIMATE OPPOSITION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1780-1840. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

 

Holt, Michael F. 1999. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN WHIG PARTY: JACKSONIAN POLITICS AND THE ONSET OF THE CIVIL WAR. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

McCormick, Richard P. 1982. THE PRESIDENTIAL GAME: THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Morrison, Michael A. 1997. SLAVERY AND THE AMERICAN WEST: THE ECLIPSE OF MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE COMING OF THE CIVIL WAR.             Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.

 

Olsen, Christopher J. 2000. POLITICAL CULTURE AND SECESSION IN MISSISSIPPI: MASCULINITY, HONOR, AND THE ANTIPARTY TRADITION, 1830-1860. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Richards, Leonard L. 2000. THE SLAVE POWER: THE FREE NORTH AND SOUTHERN DOMINATION, 1780-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

 

Risjord, Norman K. 1985. “Election of 1812,” I, HISTORY OF AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS. New York : Chelsea House.

 

Robinson, Donald L. 1979. SLAVERY IN THE STRUCTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICS, 1765-1820. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company.

 

Van Buren, Martin. 1867.  INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN AND COURSE OF POLITICAL PARTIES IN THE UNITED STATES. New York: Hurd & Houghton.

 

Wallace, Michael L. 1968. “Changing Concepts of Party in the United States: New York, 1815-1828,” 74 AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 453.

 

CASE REFERENCES

DRED SCOTT v. SANDFORD, 19 Howard 393 (1857).

 

MCCULLOCH v. MARYLAND, 4 Wheaton 316 (1819).

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Copyright 2003 by the author, Craig Hanyan.