between equals but a symbol of servitude when the strong oppressed the weak.

Into such an era of hard feelings had the tangled economic interests of East, West, and South converted the "era of good feelings" which marked Monroe's all but unanimous reëlection to the presidency. The national government had been defied, its laws and treaties declared unconstitutional, and the very value of its existence called in question. "The hour is come, or is rapidly approaching," said a report of the Georgia legislature, "when the states from Virginia to Georgia, from Missouri to Louisiana, must confederate and, as one man, say to the Union, 'We will no longer submit our retained rights to the snivelling insinuations of bad men on the floor of Congress.""

The interests of the South were clearly divergent from those of the North and West on almost every important economic question of the day. She had no manufactures to profit by a tariff. The foreign market for her cotton was far more valuable than the home market. She had no need for improved highways and waterways to the West, for she had no merchandise to send over them. And, most serious of all, she looked with alarm on the rapidly growing power which a full Treasury and unrestricted immigration were bringing to the financial and industrial centers of the North, while her own ancestral estates were being sold for less than they had been worth in George Washington's day.

CHAPTER VII

"THE REIGN OF ANDREW JACKSON"

A more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.-JOHN ADAMS

THE NEW DEMOCRACY

Democracy is a relative term. A literal rule of the people is possible only in small communities like a New England town or a Swiss canton. In large political units, like state or nation, a pure democracy yields to a representative democracy. Instead of "government of the people by the people" there is government of the people by their chosen agents-with a great variety of qualifications for both the agents and the choosers. The fathers of the American republic were not concerned to strengthen democracy on these shores. They made no provision in the Constitution for enlarging the suffrage, accepting as qualified to vote for national representatives and presidential electors those whom the various states allowed to vote for "the most numerous branch" of their legislatures. And the suffrage in the various states, in turn, was quite generally the same as in the old colonial governments, which were anything but "democratic." It is estimated that in Washington's administration not more than one male adult in seven was a voter, while the actual direction of politics was in the hands of a small group of "the rich, the well born, and the able," who regarded any disposition of the people at large to interfere with their prerogative as a kind of ungrateful impertinence. Even Jefferson, who was looked on as a dangerous innovator for his devotion to the "French doctrine" of the rights of man, confined his "democracy" in practice to furthering the interests of the common people through the authorities already established instead

of overthrowing those authorities. He made no campaign for the extension of the suffrage or the principles of "direct government." In fact, the social soil of the old states, with their colonial traditions, was not favorable to the growth of a real democracy.

It was out of the West that the impetus came. In those pioneer communities beyond the mountains differences of social rank disappeared. Men were few and they all counted. Vigor, self-reliance, industry, not birth, privilege, or wealth, were the test of citizenship. The constitutions. which the new transmontane states framed as they followed one another rapidly into the Union were almost all completely democratic, providing for manhood suffrage, frequent elections, and popular control of the executive and the judiciary. The influence of the Western democracy on the Eastern states was continuous and strong. One by one the strongholds of privilege fell. The suffrage was widened, the election of many officials was taken from the assemblies or special councils1 and put into the hands of the people. Religious and property qualifications for officeholding were abolished; public education was encouraged. The process of democratization was slow at first, but came to a rapid culmination in the decade of the thirties, when Delaware (1831), Mississippi (1832), Georgia (1833-1835), and Tennessee (1834) all abolished their property qualifications for the suffrage. By 1840 Rhode Island was the only state left in the Union with the old colonial policy of exclusion still unmodified."

Second only to the influence of the Western states in establishing the new democracy was the growth of a prosperous wage-earning class in the manufacturing centers of the Eastern

1 For example, two small councils in the state of New York had controlled the executive and legislative departments until the year 1821. The Council of Appointments of five members named about 15,000 officials, and the Council of Revision had the power to veto laws.

2 Rhode Island kept its old colonial charter of 1662, which confined the suffrage to property-holders, until 1842, when, as the result of an armed rebellion led by Thomas Dorr in support of a "Peoples' constitution," the conservatives were forced to call a convention and frame a new, liberal constitution abolishing the property qualification.

and Middle States, which had been developing under the high tariffs since the War of 1812. This incipient proletariat was fruitful soil for the seeds of democracy. The workingmen, organized into unions, began to make their influence felt in politics. A Labor party held a national convention in Philadelphia in 1833 and presented demands for shorter hours, higher pay, and sanitary reforms in shops and factories. It petitioned state legislatures to pass laws in the interests of laborlien laws on buildings to protect mechanics from the loss of wages by the failure or fraud of contractors, relief and stay laws to keep debtors out of prison, school laws to give free education to their children, and anti-convict-labor laws to prevent the competition of prison-made goods with the products of free labor. The journeymen bakers of New York sent out a manifesto to the public in June, 1834, protesting against a labor program of eighteen to twenty hours a day at starvation wages, and publishing a "white list" of employers who had "nobly agreed to give the wages required." A pathetic appeal signed by "many operatives" in the cotton mills of Philadelphia represented the folly and injustice of employing children from six years of age, "confined to steady employment during the longest days of the year from daylight until dark, and growing up as ignorant as Arabs of the Desert." Delegates from over a dozen trades met in convention at Boston in March, 1834, to form a general trade union of mechanics "to settle dissentions between employers and employed" and "produce a friction of mind and . . . sparks of intellectual fire. . . which will electrify, enlighten and warm the whole body."

The political significance of this economic and social trend was very great. Here were new masses of voters to be organized and kept to party allegiance not so much through the persuasion of reason and principles as by the appeal to emotion and immediate material interests. The boss and his machine began to appear. Astute party managers flattered the ears of the groundlings. All the tricks of political advertisement, with shibboleths and popular catchwords, badges and banners, were pressed into service. Public offices came to be looked on not

as honorable positions of civic responsibility so much as rewards with which to pay political obligations. "Patronage” became the allotment of fodder from the public crib. A classic remark of William M. Marcy of New York in a debate in the Senate in 1832, "To the victors belong the spoils," has fastened upon his name the unenviable and undeserved reputation of being the author of the "spoils system." Marcy was only giving picturesque expression to an idea that had been long germinating. Some years earlier, Edward Everett of Massachusetts had said, "For an administration to bestow its patronage without distinction of party is to court its own destruction."

The man who was first to take advantage of these tendencies in our national politics, and with whose name the new democracy is indissolubly linked, was Andrew Jackson. He was the first president from the new West, the first to break through the "dynastic" succession of Secretaries of State, the first since George Washington who owed neither his selection nor his election to any agency of Congress. He came into the White House fresh from the hands of the "people," triumphant in a campaign whose chief rallying-cry had been, "Down with the aristocrats!" The oft-described scene of Jackson's inauguration on March 4, 1829, when the "great unwashed" throng of farmers and laborers, of Western frontiersmen and rough old Indian fighters, swarmed into the White House to grasp the hand of the "old hero" of New Orleans and fought in most unmannerly fashion for the sandwiches and orange punch, was looked on by dignified statesmen like Webster and Story as the opening of the reign of King Mob. But Andrew Jackson lacked neither dignity nor poise. He was even courtly, with the direct and ingenuous courtliness of the borderer. He was incorrupt'ible, intensely patriotic, devoted in his attachments-and in his antipathies. Trained by a long and hard schooling in military responsibility, he was rapid in decision, courageous in council, and vigorous in action. With the soldier's virtues he had the soldier's faults, exacting a servile obedience from his appointees, regarding dissent from his policies as insubordination, and carrying the zest of battle into the arena dedicated