Title: The Market Revolutionon: Jacksonian America - 1815-1846
Author: Charles Sellers
Year of Publication: 1991
Thesis:
Describes a major shift in the U.S. economy as transportation (roads, canals, railroads, steam power), communications (telegraph), and banking became much more available. For many families working in subsistence agriculture, this impeded on the structure of the home and brought a shift from working at home to working in factories; time governed by the clock and production vs. the growing season. Growing anxieties over these capitalistic developments led to Jackson's election as people saw him as a defender of common folk--land acquisition by genocide of Native Americans, an increase in yoemanry, and vetoing the National Bank's charter formed part of his legacy. However, he believes leaders have cashed in on a myth of democracy while "bourgeois hegemony" has never since sustained a serious challenge.
Time: 1815-1846
Geography: U.S. (https://www.loc.gov/maps/?fa=subject%3Aunited+states&dates=1815)
Organization:
1. Land and Market
- Jackson - defeats Packenham in New Orleans, leads to Treaty of Ghent.
- Describes the revoulution - settlers see land as opportunity to achieve wealth & respect. (4)
- Though, cheap land, high labor costs. (4)
- Subsistence farming to producing for market takes place in early 1800s. Transport is key to making this happen. (6)
- Does not fall short on describing genocide as genocide (7)
- Demonstrates how settlers adapt Native American ways of working with the land & the changes as well (plough animals, for example). Creates dependency on European products (9)
- Need for more labor because of these ways of subsistence led to need for more children, then more land (9)
- Patriarchy w/father as landholder
- Interesting discussion on childhood 10-11 see quote
- Land passes on through primogeniture (12)
- "When men gathered, they com- peted in displaying the elements of male honor—strength, courage, storytelling boast and wit, and such manly skills as riding and shooting—accompanied by con- siderable cursing, whiskey-drinking, and righting. Women, on the other hand, formed tight networks of neighbor and kin wives for friendship and mutual sup- port. These networks gave women their only escape from the male-dominated world of the household and their only opportunity to value themselves by other than male standards." (14)
- Market appears ancillary from a householder's perspective (15)
- Europe relying on exports to feed itself from 1755-1820 (15)
- Concerned with length of transport as a large factor in determining marketable surplus for subsistence families. (16)
- Migration strategy - selling land to buy cheaper land father west (17) <-- here is where you can see land speculation beginning to boom.
- "The American economy's takeoff was fueled by the unusually feverish enter- prise of its market sector. Colonial Americans pursued wealth more freely than Europeans because they were not overshadowed and hemmed in by aristocrats and postfeudal institutions. And they pursued wealth more avidly because it made them the American equivalents of aristocrats." (21)
- Market revolution makes life more precarious for African American men & women & (white) women as well (23)
- Nature of work also changes (pace increases, leisurely attitude no longer a part of it) (27)
- Whole families brought to work in factories (live & work there, deductions for rent, etc.) (28) <--this represents a huge shift in family dynamics & the nature of work women did (many are pushed out of the home) (29)
- Religion plays a large role in this, too - (see + Great Awakening pp. 29-31)
- Mr./Mrs./Miss becoming titles for working folk, too (32)
- "By threatening this yeoman republic, market elites stirred up a powerful democratic counterforce seeking a tighter control over government by ordinary voters. Thus the clashing perspectives of land and market focused early American pol- itics on three tightly linked questions:
1. How democratic—how responsive to popular majorities—would govern- ment be?
2. Would government power be extensive and concentrated at the federal level or limited and diffused among the states?
3. To what extent and in what ways would government promote economic growth?" (33)
"But Republicanism was compromised by contradictions between opportunity and equality, while rural egalitarianism itself was compromised by farmers' commitment to private property and the patriarchy it sustained. The potential dangers of unlimited property rights under market conditions were obscured by Americans' premarket experience with private property under a per- son/land ratio sustaining family security and equality. On these contradictions would turn the postwar generation's climactic struggle over American destiny." (33)
2. Ambiguous Republicanism
3. "Let us Conquer Space"
- Discussion of creation of national banks
- Transport system
4. The Crisis of 1819
- Jackson attacks Spanish Florida
- Salary Act of 1816 - yearly salary for Congress
- Monroe elected in 1816
- Essentially, economic crisis makes the case for yeoman enterprise vs. capitalistic
- Makes the case that slavery was an impediment to capitalist development (125-6)
"Slavery was becoming a profound contradiction for capitalism. Never have so many been enslaved as when the European market dragooned Africans into subduing the New World to commodity production. With abundant American acre- age offering independence and security to the landless, only the lash could compel enough disciplined exertion to meet capital's demands. Human enslavement ener- gized the market's global conquest." (126)
"Abolitionism did more for benevolent entrepreneurs than endow them with virtue. It was "a highly selective response to labor exploitation," as historian David Brion Davis argues. By making chattel slavery the uniquely immoral form of human exploitation, abolitionism undercut the mounting working-class com- plaints about wage slavery and beatifed the capitalist order. These abolitionists hated slavery not just for its inhumanity but also for impeding their vision of a capitalist society of free individuals whose labor could be freely exploited." (128) <-- Again, that capitalism is considered efficient and an enemy of slavery.
5. Hard Times, Hard Feelings, Hard Money
6. "A General Mass of Disaffection"
7. God and Mammon
8. Ethos vs. Eros
"The so-called middle class was constituted not by mode and relations of pro- duction but by ideology. Where nobilities and priesthoods left folk cultures little disturbed, capital feeding on human effort claimed hegemony over all classes. A numerous and dispersed bourgeoisie of small-scale enterprisers pushed both them- selves and their workers to staggering effort by mythologizing class as a moral cat- egory. Scorning both the handful of idle rich and the multitude of dissolute poor, they apotheosized a virtuous middle class of the effortful. The "business man"— originally a man conspicuously busy—became the archetype of a culture of busy- ness." (237)
- Middle class as an ideology - actually very very small (237,9)
"Within these marital bounds, libido expressed itself without conscious con- straint, an elemental force as compelling as hunger and as fructifying as the boun- tiful earth. Women were thought as lustful and as fulfilled by sexuality as men— or more so, in male fears and fantasies—and folk belief sustained against all expe- rience a conviction that conception could not occur without female orgasm. Unsegregated nudity, casually exposed genitalia, and the sounds and smells of coition were commonplace in crowded cabins." (241)
- Children not named until they had made it passed gauntlet of mortality (241)
- Attempts to reform women prostitutes into middle-class image & idea of sexual purity (244)
- Work became the cure for whatever was considered too much libido. (253)
- Section on development of mental institutions with a special focus on masturbation. (254-55)
- Male doctors begin to supplant women in childbirth with new tech & pushing midwives out of new tech methods (255) <--- really if you think about J. Marion Sims, this tech develops from slavery and subjugation of African American women. (256)
- Seems to be a good argument that sexuality is constrained by capitalism (259)
"Yet libidinal repression went far beyond demographic necessity and contracep- tive contrivance. Capital conscripting human labor to productive manipulation of inert matter declared war on the vitality of both human and external nature. To a bourgeoisie leveling the wilderness, fighting off alcohol, fleeing dirt, and draping its carnivorous animality in ceremonial table manners, sexuality epitomized the uncontrolled nature they had to subdue. Between the hammer of demographic necessity and the anvil of capitalist discipline, human libidowas wrought into anx- ious constraint. A middle-class society still fleeing its species-nature has yet to count the costs of this primitive accumulation of human energy." (259)
- Drinking becomes an issue (260)
- Much on addiction & mental illness (261-)
9. Politicians "Reapply Principles"
- Denmark Vesey - 1822 Rebellion sparks a culture of further repression in the slaveholding South.
- Jackson wins the election by appealing to farmers and along ethnic lines. (300)
10. Millennial Democracy
- Jackson wants to "drain the swamp" so to speak of patronage
- "Yet it is hard to imagine a President who could have mobilized greater political strength against nullification than Old Hickory. Understanding that a democratic Union was at stake, he linked democracy indissolubly with American nationalism. His democratic unionism held a fracturing republic together for another thirty years before drowning slavery in fratricidal blood." (331)
"Asserting premarket values against all respectable opinion, Jackson mustered democracy to defend patriarchal independence, equality, and therefore honor, against an activist capitalist state." (331)
11. Ambiguous Democracy
"Politicians of all parties have joined ever since in a politics of interests, repress- ing the Jacksonian spectre of class politics by trading instead on sectional, racial, ethnic, and religious conflict. Never again challenging bourgeois hegemony, the two-party democracy that emerged from the Bank War would endow American capitalism with unparalleled dynamism and legitimacy. Within little more than a generation, as Civil War snapped restraints on national developmentalism, the capitalist state would resume its interrupted leadership toward the bourgeois Mil- lennium." (363)
12. The Bourgeois Republic
- Rise of public schools to help train for new economic circumstances countered by religious schools and such (367)
13. The Great Contradiction [slavery]
"Slavery is the pivot of our industrialism today as much as machinery, credit, etc.," Karl Marx observed in the 18405. "Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you have no modern industry." But because industry also required free labor and juridical equality, he understood, "liberty and slavery constitute an antagonism." (396)
- Discusses how families of enslaved people are affected by this economy - this reads like a synthesis of texts on slavery pre-1990s.
-1836 - all discussions of slavery tabled immediately in Congress ("gag rule")
- "Abolitionism, although resisted by much of the bourgeoisie, muted class con- flict over wage slavery to become the vanguard of capitalist liberalism. Rising from the middle-class soil of Moderate Light, temperance, and Antimasonic Whiggery, it satisfied antinomian doubts as romanticism could not. Suffusing free-labor enter- prise with antislavery altruism, it would eventuallyendow the bourgeois state with hegemonic sanctity. Yet an antislavery altruism blinded to capitalist commodifi- cation of free labor and human relationships would be further compromised through politics by the racism capitalism fed." (405)
- Women abolitionists appeal for the franchise (406)
- Westward expansion & the issue of slave or free states
Bibliographical Essay
Notes
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Slesinger - The Age of Jackson (1945) - depicts this age as farmers against elite capitalists.
Keywords:
use-value communalism (early NE property concepts) (10)
proletarianization
Hamiltonian developmentalism (33)
True woman/True man (240s) - women as sexually pure; men having to compete in market for jobs, and they end up taking out their failures in rigid forms of control at home. (246) Men are then defined by the purity of women.
Self-making
Arminian - anti-Calvinist
Antinomian - faith alone is good enough for salvation
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
On gender & childhood:
"Daughters worked with mothers and boys with fathers at age-graded tasks. Probably it is going too far to say that childhood did not exist in the subsistence culture, that youngsters were in fact treated as the little adults portrayed by the self-trained folk limners who pro- duced the earliest American family portraits. But certainly children were expected to labor as much as strength, skill, and attention span admitted. Shaming and phys- ical punishment broke rebellious wills while enforcing prescribed behavior and labor." (11)
Notes:
Khan Academy on Jacksonian Era - https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/age-of-jackson/v/jacksonian-democracy-part-4
-> "Man of the people"
-> spoils system (removes competent folks & replaces with loyal folks)
-> Expands exec branch through veto (vetoes bank charter, then Panic of 1837) This increases presidential power & cuts down on Federal branches
-> White settling and removing Native Americans from their land.
John Green - Market Revolution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNftCCwAol0