The American Revolution weakened the elite-run society of the colonial era but did not overthrow it. Only two states — Pennsylvania and Vermont — gave the vote to all male taxpayers, and many families of low rank continued to defer to their social “betters.” Consequently, wealthy notables — northern landlords, slave-owning planters, and seaport merchants — dominated the political system in the new republic. And rightly so, said John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court: “Those who own the country are the most fit persons to participate in the government of it.” Jay and other notables managed local elections by building up an “interest”: lending money to small farmers, giving business to storekeepers, and treating their tenants to rum. An outlay of $20 for refreshments, remarked one poll watcher, “may produce about 100 votes.” This gentry-dominated system kept men who lacked wealth and powerful family connections from seeking office.

The Rise of Democracy To expand the suffrage, Maryland reformers in the 1810s invoked the equal-rights rhetoric of republicanism. They charged that property qualifications for voting were a “tyranny” because they endowed “one class of men with privileges which are denied to another.” To defuse such arguments and deter migration to the West, legislators in Maryland and other seaboard states grudgingly accepted a broader franchise and its democratic results. The new voters often rejected candidates who wore “top boots, breeches, and shoe buckles,” their hair in “powder and queues.” Instead, they elected men who dressed simply and endorsed popular rule.

Smallholding farmers and ambitious laborers in the Midwest and Southwest likewise challenged the old hierarchical order. In Ohio, a traveler reported, “no white man or woman will bear being called a servant.” The constitutions of the new states of Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), and Alabama (1819) prescribed a broad male franchise, and voters usually elected middling men to local and state offices. A well-to-do migrant in Illinois was surprised to learn that the man who plowed his fields “was a colonel of militia, and a member of the legislature.” Once in public office, men from modest backgrounds restricted imprisonment for debt, kept taxes low, and allowed farmers to claim squatters’ rights to unoccupied land.

By the mid-1820s, many state legislatures had given the vote to all white men or to all men who paid taxes or served in the militia. Only a few — North Carolina, Virginia, and Rhode Island — still required the possession of freehold property. Equally significant, between 1818 and 1821, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York wrote more democratic constitutions that reapportioned legislative districts on the basis of population and mandated the popular election (rather than the appointment) of judges and justices of the peace.

Democratic politics was contentious and, because it attracted ambitious men, often corrupt. Powerful entrepreneurs and speculators — both notables and self-made men — demanded government assistance and paid bribes to get it. Speculators won land grants by paying off the members of important committees, and bankers distributed shares of stock to key legislators. When the Seventh Ward Bank of New York City received a legislative charter in 1833, the bank’s officials set aside one-third of the 3,700 shares of stock for themselves and their friends and almost two-thirds for state legislators and bureaucrats, leaving just 40 shares for public sale (America Compared).

More political disputes broke out when religious reformers sought laws to enforce the cultural agenda of the Benevolent Empire. In Utica, New York, evangelical Presbyterians insisted upon a town ordinance restricting Sunday entertainment. In response, a member of the local Universalist church — a freethinking Protestant denomination — denounced the measure as coercive and called for “Religious Liberty.”

Parties Take Command The appearance of political parties encouraged such debates over government policy. Revolutionary-era Americans had condemned political “factions” as antirepublican, and the new state and national constitutions made no mention of political parties. However, as the power of notables waned in the 1820s, disciplined political parties appeared in a number of states. Usually they were run by professional politicians, often middle-class lawyers and journalists. One observer called the new parties political machines because, like the new power-driven textile looms, they efficiently wove together the interests of diverse social and economic groups.

Martin Van Buren of New York was the chief architect of the emerging system of party government. The ambitious son of a Jeffersonian tavern keeper, Van Buren grew up in the landlord-dominated society of the Hudson River Valley. To get training as a lawyer, he relied on the Van Ness clan, a powerful local gentry family. Then, determined not to become their dependent “tool,” Van Buren repudiated their tutelage and set out to create a political order based on party identity, not family connections. In justifying party governments, Van Buren rejected the traditional republican belief that political factions were dangerous and claimed that the opposite was true: “All men of sense know that political parties are inseparable from free government,” because they checked an elected official’s inherent “disposition to abuse power.”

Between 1817 and 1821 in New York, Van Buren turned his “Bucktail” supporters (who wore a deer’s tail on their hats) into the first statewide political machine. He purchased a newspaper, the Albany Argus, and used it to promote his policies and get out the vote. Patronage was an even more important tool. When Van Buren’s Bucktails won control of the New York legislature in 1821, they acquired the power to appoint some six thousand of their friends to positions in New York’s legal bureaucracy of judges, justices of the peace, sheriffs, deed commissioners, and coroners. Critics called this ruthless distribution of offices a spoils system, but Van Buren argued it was fair, operating “sometimes in favour of one party, and sometimes of another.” Party government was thoroughly republican, he added, because it reflected the preferences of a majority of the citizenry. To ensure the passage of the party’s legislative program, Van Buren insisted on disciplined voting as determined by a caucus, a meeting of party leaders. On one crucial occasion, the “Little Magician” — a nickname reflecting Van Buren’s short stature and political dexterity — honored seventeen New York legislators for sacrificing “individual preferences for the general good” of the party.