Scientific History
The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy : New York as a Test Case.
by Lee Benson.
Princeton University Press. 351 pp. $6.00.
Lee Benson is a sociological gadfly who for some years has been probing the soft and vulnerable places in the body of American historical writing. In earlier works he explored Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” Charles Beard’s interpretation of the United States Constitution, and the origins of the Civil War. With the same instinct for the jugular, he now tackles the extraordinary period, roughly from 1824 to 1848, which has come to be known (wrongly, Dr. Benson believes) as the Age of Jackson.
Benson’s contributions, both as to the method and matter, range far beyond the period immediately under consideration, and should sharpen the tools of any workman working in any period of American history.
First, as to method. Benson’s study is designed to test broad interpretative hypotheses by detailed scrutiny of the evidence for one locality, New York State. Surely if there is an equivalent in historical research to the natural science experiment, this is it. Lamentably, the bringing together of the very large and the very small is rarely attempted by historians. In default of such synthesis, history tends to be cosmic nonsense (the very large without the very small), meaningless antiquarianism (the very small without the very large), or (most commonly) a muddy journalistic compromise, whereby the same superficial tales are endlessly repeated. Dr. Benson cannot be too much commended for his imagination and daring in this regard.
Some of the other points about method are these: You cannot interpret the voting statistics of a particular election without taking into account the comparable statistics for previous and subsequent elections; you cannot deduce the character of a movement only from the character of its leadership, but must consider also the rank-and-file, who may be quite different; and in assessing the relationship between two variables (say, class standing and voting behavior) you must not neglect to survey also other variables which may in fact be responsible for the behavior in question. These concepts may appear obvious, yet in Dr. Benson’s hands they yield impressive results. For example, it is traditional to say that Henry Clay’s neglect of the abolitionist vote in western New York cost the Whigs the Presidential election of 1844. Benson’s demonstration that the abolitionist (Liberty party) vote in New York in 1844 was almost unchanged from its vote in 1843, must gravely weaken the old interpretation. Another widely accepted maxim, dating from the work of Dixon Ryan Fox just after World War I, holds that voters in the poorer wards of New York City leaned more to the Democratic party of Jackson than did the voters of the city’s wealthier wards. Here Benson suggests that, while the statistics themselves are correct, it is more likely that another variable, ethnic and religious (in this case Irish Catholic) affiliation, was the actual determinant of the working-class vote.
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Since much of the book consists of closely reasoned little essays in the interpretation of New York voting statistics, the hasty reader may miss the significance of all this for the understanding of “Jacksonian Democracy.” From the time of Turner most historians have conceived the rise of the Democratic party as a movement of common men (frontier farmers according to Turner, city workingmen according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), led by Andrew Jackson, and dedicated to egalitarian and humanitarian goals. This thesis has been forcefully attacked in many of its outlying fortifications: it has been shown that in Tennessee, Jackson was identified with business, creditor interests rather than with small debtor farmers; that the democratization of political procedures (wider suffrage, nomination by popular convention rather than by legislative caucus) had been accomplished before Jackson came on the scene; that the men around Jackson, humble as their origins may have been, were substantial entrepreneurs by 1828. Benson, in his close examination of a particular state, adds some telling blows to the assault. He argues that the Democratic party in New York was deeply involved with state banking interests and welcomed Jackson’s campaign against the Bank of the United States as a diversion of hostility from itself; that the Whig party in New York, growing out of the Antimasonic enthusiasm of the mid-1820’s, was anti-aristocratic in its rhetoric and often attracted substantial support from tenant farmers and urban workingmen; that New York’s leading Whigs, such as Weed, Seward, and Greeley, came from more poverty-stricken circumstances than their Democratic counterparts; and that the principal humanitarian legislation of the period, in such fields as the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the encouragement of public education, and opposition to slavery, was the work of Whigs not Democrats.
Obviously, the notion that Jacksonian Democracy was the completion of the democratic impulse of the American Revolution, or alternatively, the forerunner of Populism, must be very much weakened if Dr. Benson’s assertions are correct. At the very least, the popular banner which (we had supposed) was passed from Jefferson to Jackson, and from Jackson on to Lincoln, Bryan, and Debs, emerges very much tattered. At most, it begins to seem possible that the parade which we thought was on the march toward brotherhood and freedom was actually going the other way.
However, certain features of Benson’s argument suggest that we suspend judgment, even for the state of New York, until more work has been done. For one thing, as he himself makes perfectly explicit, Benson has been much affected by the recent trend toward regarding American history as an affair of “consensus” without fundamental conflict. Benson argues that this is the reason why people became Whigs or Democrats in the Jacksonian era, not (as had been supposed) because of the economic class they belonged to, but (as Benson argues) because of their affiliation with an ethnic or religious sub-culture. There being no “deep, sustained cleavages over political fundamentals,” a variety of non-economic factors, rather than one basic economic antagonism, determined voting behavior.
In the next breath Benson contradicts himself. For, he says, while there was no such thing as the Jacksonian Democracy scholars have imagined, there was indeed a widespread humanitarian and egalitarian movement not specially connected with the Democratic party. Benson proposes, therefore, that the period be called “the Age of Egalitarianism” rather than the “Age of Jackson.” And in casting about for an explanation of the popular movement, Benson, having apparently abandoned “economic determinism,” suddenly produces an economic cause: the “Transportation Revolution” caused by the introduction, in this same period, of the railroad, canal, and steamboat.
If voting behavior expressed relatively superficial, non-economic cleavages, and yet side by side with the political contest a profound popular movement, springing from economic causes, transformed the life of the nation—the conclusion would seem to be that election returns are poor indicators of important social changes, and that a scholar seeking to confront the essence of the 1830’s should look elsewhere than the polls for his material. Yet far from taking this step, Benson would have us conclude that “all American history is reflected in past and present voting behavior.”
In terms, then, of any over-all view of these seminal decades, the apostle of precision produces a considerable muddle. His careful and brilliant dissection of voting behavior yields a false concreteness, for deep changes were in process that were not at once reflected in politics. The throbbing aspiration which in these years produced Walden and abolitionism, which new-modeled every social institution from schools to prisons, was also a part of reality, and to omit it from one’s picture is to sacrifice real precision for spurious exactness. Viewed from this angle, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s effort, in The Age of Jackson, to give us an anthropological study-in-the-round of the spirit of an era, was perhaps not so unscientific after all. And granted that Jackson himself certainly reflected rather than created that spirit, and (like any politician) reflected it only dimly and in part, there may even have been such a thing as Jacksonian Democracy.
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