CHAPTER 10 A Democratic Revolution, 1800–1844

Europeans who visited the United States in the 1830s mostly praised its republican society but not its political parties and politicians. “The gentlemen spit, talk of elections and the price of produce, and spit again,” Frances Trollope reported in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). In her view, American politics was the sport of self-serving party politicians who reeked of “whiskey and onions.” Other Europeans lamented the low intellectual level of American political debate. The “clap-trap of praise and pathos” from a Massachusetts politician “deeply disgusted” Harriet Martineau, while the shallow arguments advanced by the inept “farmers, shopkeepers, and country lawyers” who sat in the New York assembly astonished Basil Hall.

The negative verdict was nearly unanimous. “The most able men in the United States are very rarely placed at the head of affairs,” French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville concluded in Democracy in America (1835). The reason, said Tocqueville, lay in the character of democracy itself. Most citizens ignored important policy issues, jealously refused to elect their intellectual superiors, and listened in awe to “the clamor of a mountebank [a charismatic fraud] who knows the secret of stimulating their tastes.”

These Europeans were witnessing the American Democratic Revolution. Before 1815, men of ability had sat in the seats of government, and the prevailing ideology had been republicanism, or rule by “men of TALENTS and VIRTUE,” as a newspaper put it. like the new power-driven rule, so they wrote constitutions with Bills of Rights, bicameral legislatures, and independent judiciaries, and they censured overambitious men who campaigned for public office. But history took a different course. By the 1820s and 1830s, the watchwords were democracy and party politics, a system run by men who avidly sought office and rallied supporters through newspapers, broadsides, and great public processions. Politics became a sport — a competitive contest for the votes of ordinary men. “That the majority should govern was a fundamental maxim in all free governments,” declared Martin Van Buren, the most talented of the new breed of professional politicians. A republican-minded Virginian condemned Van Buren as “too great an intriguer,” but by encouraging ordinary Americans to burn with “election fever” and support party principles, he and other politicians redefined the meaning of democratic government and made it work.