1819
New York state builds the first prison under the Auburn system
1826
Reformers found the American Society for the Promotion of
Temperance
1831
William Lloyd Garrison begins publication of the antislavery
Liberator ◆ New York Magdalen Society publishes its first annual
report
1833
Abolitionists found the American Anti-Slavery Society
1840
Working-class drinkers found the Washington Temperance Society
1848
First Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York
1851
Maine becomes the first of 17 states to enact statewide prohibition
1860
New York enacts the Married Women’s Property Act
education, and state-supported insane asylums and penitentiaries, Whigs used government to improve individual morality and discipline. Democrats argued that attempts to legislate morality were antirepublican and wrong. Questions of social reform provoked the angriest differences between Democrats and Whigs, particularly in the
North. Not all reform movements, however, strengthened the party system. When
some whiggish northerners insisted upon women’s rights and the immediate emanci-
pation of all slaves, they attacked the foundations of the white republic and the party system, opening important questions that the political parties wanted to ignore.
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESS
Whigs assumed that both markets and government were agents of progress. Demo-
crats, locally as well as nationally, preached that markets were good and govern-
ments were necessary, but that collaboration between the two produced corruption.
Markets and
Whigs praised the new market economy as more than a
Governments
means of producing national wealth. The market was, they
insisted, an engine of social and moral progress. Markets
created opportunities, and individuals who developed good work habits and
moral discipline would prosper. Thus the market would discourage laziness and
ignorance and encourage social harmony, good manners, and disciplined ambi-
tion. At the same time, it would fill American homes with comfortable furniture
and moral housewives. William H. Seward, the Whig governor of New York,
supported transportation projects because they broke down neighborhood isola-
tion and hastened the emergence of a market society, with “all the consequent
advantages of morality, piety, and knowledge.” The historian Henry Adams
(grandson of John Quincy Adams) recalled that his family had assumed a strong
connection between good roads and good morals. The market, in short, produced
moral progress.
The Politics of Progress
415
Whigs believed that Americans enjoyed a harmony of class interests and an
equality of opportunity that every virtuous person would recognize and that only
the resentful, the mean-spirited, and the unworthy would doubt. (Almost as much
as the Democrats, Whigs excluded racial minorities from the “Americans.”) To
poor farmers and city workers who believed that the Market Revolution under-
mined traditional forms of independence, Whigs promised social mobility within a
new system of interdependence, but only to deserving individuals. The New York
Herald wrote in 1836 that “The mechanic who attends quietly to his business—is
industrious and attentive—belongs to no club—never visits the porter-house—is
always at work or with his family—such a man gradually rises in society and
becomes an honor to himself, his friends, and to human nature.” Pointing to self-
made Whigs such as Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, Whigs promised
national prosperity in a world that rewarded virtue.
As they did nationally, Whigs at the state and local levels wanted government
to subsidize economic development and the moral improvement that would come
along with it. Government should build roads, establish public schools, and create and oversee a stable, reliable currency. It should also foster virtue. “The government,” remarked a New York City Whig in 1848, “is not merely a machine for
making wars and punishing felons, but is bound to do all that is within its power to promote the welfare of the People.” The American Review, a Whig periodical,
went further: “Forms of government are instituted for the protection and fostering of virtue, and are valuable only as they accomplish this.”
Democrats saw things differently. Few of them condemned market society,
but they argued forcefully against activist government, high taxes, and govern-
ment partnerships with private interests. Often sharing a view of human nature
that was (in contrast to Whig optimism) a grim combination of classical republi-
canism and gothic romance, Democrats saw government not as a tool of progress
but as a potential evil—a concentration of power in the hands of imperfect, self-
interested men. The only safe course was to limit its power. In 1837, the United
States Magazine and Democratic Review declared: “The best government is that
which governs least,” and went on to denounce the “natural imperfection, both
in wisdom and judgment and purity of purpose, of all human legislation, exposed
constantly to the pressure of partial interest; interests which, at the same time that they are essentially selfish and tyrannical, are ever vigilant, persevering, and subtle in all the arts of deception and corruption.” It was a lot like what Democrats saw in stage melodramas, read in cheap fiction, and heard in their conservative
churches.
Most of all, Democrats insisted that Whig governments would create privilege
and inequality. Corporate charters, banks, and subsidies to turnpike, canal, and
railroad companies, they said, benefited insiders and transformed republican gov-
ernment into an engine of corruption and inequality. Jackson himself had put it
simply:
It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by 416