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II. ANDREW JACKSON AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM

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Never can I forget the spectacle which presented itself on every side, nor the electrifying moment when the eager, expectant eyes of that vast and motley multitude caught sight of the tall and imposing form of their adored leader, as he came forth between the columns of the portico, the color of the whole mass changed, as if by miracle; all hats were off at once, and the dark tint which usually pervades a mixed map of men was turned, as by a magic wand, into the bright hue of ten thousand upturned and expectant human faces, radiant with sudden joy. The peal of shouting that arose rent the air, and seemed to shake the very ground.

~ Eyewitness account of Andrew Jackson’s First Inauguration

Lion in the White House
Andrew Jackson was a towering figure, not just metaphorically, but literally. No other American since George Washington had a similar stature, imposing figure, and adoration from the public than Andrew Jackson. In fact, it was probably more-so than Washington—who could never break the spell of anti-federalists that he was going to become something akin to a new king George. The “American Lion,” Jackson stood an imposing 6’1”. Scarred from refusing the clean a British officer’s boots back from the Revolution War, and although bitterly opposed to the National Bank and capitalist improvement projects launched by Adams and celebrated by Clay, Jackson had a common connection with Adams and Clay: he loathed the British. While Jackson’s nationalist populism preoccupied his ideology and thinking, considering himself a devotee of Jefferson, he shared with Adams and Clay a belief that North America should be American and freed from British oversight and hegemony.

Whereas Adams and Clay looked to building a strong national economy to rival and overtake Britain, Jackson looked west. He encouraged the “frontier spirit” that would beat the British to controlling the Pacific coast. He envisioned a strong, populist, and militant nation that would be able to weather any challenges the British might pose in seeking to retain control over North America. And Jackson himself certainly wouldn’t have minded a fight with Britain again if it would come to it; he had shocked the British at New Orleans in 1815 in one of Britain’s worst defeats in her military history after all—and was all too willing to do so again if necessary.

Jackson’s loathing of everything British, combined with and his strong base of support in the South and frontier—the emerging Midwest—also left an important mark on the culture of Midwestern politics: Anglophobia. The claimed Anglophilia of Adams, Clay, and Hamilton—as I’ve already asserted—is somewhat misleading. True, all three—as did the rest of the Federalists—seek to emulate the British economic system so as to build a strong and centralized American economy, their emulation of Britain was for anti-British ends ultimately. Only by emulating Britain, would America be able to throw off the chains of Britain in North America. It was very much akin to Thucydides account of how Athens still won the Peloponnesian War despite losing it politically—the Greeks had to become like Athens, so as to defeat Athens.[1] Greece had become the universal Athens, even as Athens, the city, lost politically. In the same long game strategy, America would have to become like Britain, in order to defeat Britain in North America.

This induced into American political culture two strands of political thought how to deal with Britain: one Anglophobic and militantly hostile, and therefore automatically friendly to any enemies of Britain (and generally Germanophile), the other tacitly Anglophile only in the sense that by emulating the British system America would eventually come to overtake it.*

The manner of Jackson’s popularity however, is often confusing, as was his tidal wave into the presidency. Many unwarranted comparisons to Jackson have been made—in part because many commentators cling to Jackson’s strong anti-National Bank position and connection with the American commoner as something of an early anti-elitist populist of sorts. Far from it. Jackson’s popularity among the common class was threefold: Jackson was a famous general who gained notoriety at the Battle of New Orleans, and likely inflated his heroic legend prior to that by emphasizing his anti-British patriotism in the otherwise minor incident of being struck by a British officer when he refused to clean his boot; secondly Jackson’s lineage from cabin to military governor and presidential candidate inspired hope to many Americans of the promise of progress—after all, all the previous presidents had been from the well-established American gentry of the colonial era; and most importantly—although hardly discussed, the economic prosperity of Monroe and Adams created an overflowing of wealth, while it was being concentrated in the hands of bankers and merchants, the rise of the American economy opened the promise that by enfranchisement and progressive equality (even if only among White Americans) the common people could share in the spoils of economic growth.

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A depiction of the wild scenes in front of the White House during the arrival of Andrew Jackson for his inaugural address. Jackson was among the most popular presidents in history and was universally reverred as one of America's best presidents until of late. Today, his legacy is now more strongly defended by "conservatives" than liberals, whereas in the past, the reverse was true. Jackson was seen as the progressive step forward in the expansion of democracy and equality (liberal reading) while being scorned as a simpleton and tyrant (conservative reading). Now, Jackson is viewed as a populist and anti-elitist commoner fighting for the working man (conservative reading) while destroying the lives of Native Americans and turning a blind eye to the plight of slaves and ignorning the early suffrage movement (liberal reading).

That is, Jackson’s populism was a quasi-distributist and democratic nationalism. In Jackson, the common people saw a warrior who would bring them onto the ship of economic success. Jackson was not a crusading Robin Hood like a later president, William Jennings Bryan, who railed against the banks, gold standard, and the elite moneyed interests of New York and Boston and sought to give to the poor and needy. Rather, Jackson was seen as the medium by which the poor and toiling laborers could enter the ship of prosperity and reap the rewards for themselves because of democratic expansion. By becoming enfranchised into the American system, Jackson supporters believed that the coffers of national wealth would be extended to them, rather than contained singularly in the hands of coastal elites.

This hope fueled a rise in Manifest Destiny, the belief that America was destined to rule over North America. Westward expansion, economic growth, and universal White male suffrage swept Jackson into the White House in a tidal wave of optimism and hope that the toiling masses too, could partake in success—not a wave of retribution and resentment by which Jackson would strike the heavy hand of vengeance over the perceived oppressors of the American underclass. The enthusiasm and wild love of Jackson was a natural cannonball ripe to explode. This cannot be understated. What drove Jacksonian democracy was the want to be part of the American system, not alienation from the system. It was the remnants of the Federalist elites, now the Whigs, who wanted to keep the plebeian vermin from entering the ship that they believed they had built.

Jackson was also commoner who reached the top of American society. Jackson was a strong proponent of democracy, something that the common American deeply believed in as the most virtuous of all governments that was also ordained and blessed by God. (Jackson was a devout Presbyterian.) This was unique, insofar that he also tapped into the Second Great Awakening. Methodist and Baptist revivalists who often called for the expansion of democracy as contingent upon Christian/Protestant revival. Jackson openly indulged in his public piety, much to the delight of his voting base. One could say, in a way then, he was also the first “Evangelical” president right as the Second Great Awakening and the Methodist and Baptist revivals of the south and frontier brought forth a new age of American Protestantism: personalist, democratic, and belief that political activity (since democracy was God’s chosen form of government) was a reflection of one’s piety. Whereas Jefferson, on his deathbed, foolishly proclaimed that all Americans would die Unitarian, Jackson was riding the new ecstatic wave of revivalism of the people who were his natural supporters: the rugged frontiersman, yeoman farmer, and laboring craftsman.

Furthermore, much is made of his spoils system. While Jackson considered government run by elites from inheritance a bad thing, and ultimately anti-democratic, Jackson surrounded himself with well-educated individuals who would impart to him advice on important matters that Jackson himself felt ill-equipped to deal with. In this sense, he nevertheless agreed with Hamilton that the educated, technocratic, and policy-minded elites were natural fits for governance—he just equally believed that there should be greater democratic inclusion and equality in this process; which he embodied, by pushing out the Old Guard and bringing in the New Guard so to speak.

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A depiction of the industrious and independent yeoman farmer. Yeoman farmers were the favored people of Jefferson and Jackson, both of whom believed the independent and hard-working spirit of the farmer installed in him strong democratic virtues and impeccable character. In stark contrast to them were the merchant bankers and financiers, who were loyal only to money and greed and therefore a threat to democracy and republican virtue in the eyes of Jefferson and Jackson.

The problem that Jackson suffered was the smug intellectualism of men like John Quincy Adams, and also Henry Clay, and the rest of the Whigs. The Whigs, not the Jacksonian Democrats, embodied Jeffersonian Democracy’s important tenet of public education and schooling. Jefferson believed that only an educated population could sustain democracy. The Whigs, likewise, were ardent champions of education. Jackson and the Democrats, by contrast, weren’t. Education tied people down, settled them, and moved them into the direction of finance and capitalism. The gritty agrarianism of frontier, and the laborite ethos of the “dignity of labor” drove Americans westward to expand from sea to sea; something Jackson embraced as inherent to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Like Augustine’s pilgrimage, the restless soul of the laborer, and the restless soul of the laborer alone, would bring forth the democratic kingdom of god on the North American continent. The Whigs, it should be said, also endorsed education as a tool of elitism—the best and brightest, the “natural aristocrats” of Hamilton’s vision, could better and more easily be identified in the education system which also privileged meritocratic advancement. Adams and other Whigs, therefore, looked down upon Jackson as an imbecile and intellectual midget. Jackson needed well-educated people around him, not because he understood that such people were the natural leaders of political communities, but Jackson was too inept himself to oversee the annals of government and political stewardship. Whether this was true is beyond the point, Adams and various other Whigs, like Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, believed it to be true.

The bitter smugness from Adams became so intense, that neither man reconciled with the other—even when on their deathbeds. Jackson was aware of the thoughts of Adams, Clay, and the Whigs toward him. He reciprocated his belief that their entitled inheritance kept them from understanding the aspirations of the common farmer and laborer, of which Jackson claimed to understand and embody in his politics and policies.

Jackson made use of the popular press too. Many newspaper were strong supporters of his presidency. He helped supporters start new newspapers that were sympathetic to him. Likewise, he championed political clubs and debate clubs as suffrage expanded under his presidency. Jackson, for as ignorant as his opponents claimed, was a thousand years ahead of them in establishing political infrastructure. While textbooks tell us that the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans and Hamiltonian Federalists were America’s first political parties, that too could be misleading if we think of party as having a centralized leadership, contingent smaller organizations dedicated to their political election, and local clubs that spread the party’s ideology. It was Jackson’s Democrats who first embodied all of this, a national organization, state organizations, local organizations, city and town clubs, debate halls, and voter registration drives. Jackson’s opponents merely coalesced in Congress in opposition to Jackson because of their hatred for the man, Jackson responded by laying the foundations of the first modern political party in response.

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A painting of General Andrew Jackson, now the seventh President of the United States. His legacy was immense and wide reaching. Many historians often call the period between 1828-1848 as the "Age of Jackson." The most important legacy of Jackson's presidency was the expansion of democratic suffrage (granted, only to White Americans) and the westward expansion of the United States. In representing the sharp break between the limited republic of the "Founding Fathers," some historians consider Andrew Jackson the true founding father of modern democratic America.


[1] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, I 71.3, VII 21.3-4; 36.2-4; 37.1; 40.2; 55.

*This historically happened in 1940, during Destroyers for Bases and Lend Lease, in which Roosevelt and the New Dealers stipulated American help only if Britain would dismantle her preferential trading network (Imperial Preference) with her colonies and transfer all Western Hemisphere military installations to America. One of the major efforts by Secretary of State Cordell Hull was pressuring Canada to abandon “Imperial Preference” and prefer trade with the United States between 1935-1940, both as means to combat the Depression but also fulfill this long desired American quest of expelling British influence from North America.


SUGGESTED READING

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It

Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House

Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and The Life of Andrew Jackson, vols. 1-3 and The Jacksonian Era

Arthur Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson
 
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Glad to see you back! Quick question; in the first part you mention: "Hamilton’s acceptance of immigration was from among these lines." But if anything, Hamilton's writings indicate a skepticism of immigration and a predilection for cautioned assimilation. These opinions prop up throughout his work, but "Examination of Jefferson’s Message to Congress of December 7, 1801" seems particularly indicative of his views on immigration.
 
Glad to see you back! Quick question; in the first part you mention: "Hamilton’s acceptance of immigration was from among these lines." But if anything, Hamilton's writings indicate a skepticism of immigration and a predilection for cautioned assimilation. These opinions prop up throughout his work, but "Examination of Jefferson’s Message to Congress of December 7, 1801" seems particularly indicative of his views on immigration.

It's great to see you @99KingHigh! Been a while. Hamilton's views of immigration vary wildly, in part, a reflection of his shifting views with regards to political fighting more than anything else.

I thought I had (explicitly) implied this by pushing against the starry-eyed view of Hamilton today as some sort of pro-immigrant Founding Father (can we not read into such portrayals as contemporary commentary on today's political issues?)(?) and that Hamilton's views were accepting of immigrants insofar that some immigrants were, intrinsically, among the "naturally talented" to which he gives two thumbs up. In part, he understood that some immigration was necessary to achieve his vision of an industrious America, but he may have been shortsighted in thinking that only people like him, industrious, entrepreneurial, etc., would be immigrating to America. That's the baseline for "acceptance of immigration was from among these lines" which followed from the explanation that he was only receptive to people who would be industrious and entrepreneurial to help build an industrial and capitalist America. However, by the late 1790s, with waves of new immigrants, particularly Irish-Catholic, the Federalists turned to wanting to preserve the established order "they had created"-- to which Hamilton is no exception; least of which immigration was also seen as a problem distracting Federalist politics from its primary mission: the building of industrial and capitalist metropolises. Of course, highlighting Hamilton as an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant "xenophobe" would hurt the new mythology building up around him.

As I've highlighted in all the preliminary posts, Hamilton and the Federalists were super nationalists. By that token they were never supporting the kind of immigration that we see today. But who cares right? If Hamilton had, at any point, even a small receptivity toward immigration, we should turn him into an open border prophet! :p :confused:

Of course, it was Thomas Jefferson--that despicable and racist man who is also the antagonist of the play! :p--who encouraged immigration to which Hamilton responded in turn as you've pointed out in which he cautioned immigration. Hamilton's views shifted tremendously here because Hamilton knew what Jefferson's immigration policy was aimed toward: inviting underclass proletariat yeoman farmers into the country; the exact people Hamilton and the Federalists wanted to keep out in favor of the industrious and entrepreneurial emigre. (Oh the irony in Democrats spurning Jefferson and building a new mythology around Hamilton! o_O)

Since this is an AAR, albeit the content is intentionally crafted to reflect historicity, I don't want to write 3-4 paragraphs elaborating Hamilton's views explicitly, others can do that if they have interest, in part, because I'm trying to move into the gameplay section (although we can't, or I can't, not provide background to what's going on heading into the start of the game, otherwise we're lost in limbo).

Should we be surprised that a wonderful musical, as musical, totally butchers history and Hamilton's actual views? How many reviews and even semi-intelligent publications have fallen for the Hamilton-huckster musical...
 
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I'm sure I have all of zero per-cent of the time to devote to this that it deserves, but if anything is going to drag me back to the forums then this is as good as it. :)

I'll be reading along, even if I do an appalling job of showing it.
 
See, you did end up improving my opinion of Jackson. At least until you actually write about his presidency. :p

I hadn't known he was that politically organized, but of course he would have to be. I also hadn't known about his ties to the second great awakening. It puts questions in my mind, but I think I'll be able to better ask them after the next update.
 
I'm sure I have all of zero per-cent of the time to devote to this that it deserves, but if anything is going to drag me back to the forums then this is as good as it. :)

I'll be reading along, even if I do an appalling job of showing it.

Well hello Densley! Nice to see you again. Well, with what (non)time you have, hopefully you'll find what you read enthralling! :p

See, you did end up improving my opinion of Jackson. At least until you actually write about his presidency. :p

I hadn't known he was that politically organized, but of course he would have to be. I also hadn't known about his ties to the second great awakening. It puts questions in my mind, but I think I'll be able to better ask them after the next update.

I don't think it's hard to not, not like certain aspects of Jackson's presidency. Well, except where you try to understand Jackson's perspective concerning Native American removal that everyone immediately takes as apologia; is it really when you're pointing out, however flawed--much like Jefferson's "hypocrisy" over slavery--one's perspective was? We'll get to that soon enough.

In the meantime, the Bank War is overrated, everyone knows that story. We'll of course have to include it, but look at the other side of the conflict! :cool:

Why wait, you can ask whenever! :p
 
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Oh, I was trying to write up the questions, but I couldn't quite clarify meaningful questions from my initial thoughts. Sometimes I have to stew over things for awhile.

And with the Indian Removal, I would guess it might make sense from his perspective, but the conflicting with the Supreme Court over that issue is also horrifying to me. But I do come at things with almost 200 more years of inertia in the governmental form, which influences my views a bit.
 
Oh, I was trying to write up the questions, but I couldn't quite clarify meaningful questions from my initial thoughts. Sometimes I have to stew over things for awhile.

And with the Indian Removal, I would guess it might make sense from his perspective, but the conflicting with the Supreme Court over that issue is also horrifying to me. But I do come at things with almost 200 more years of inertia in the governmental form, which influences my views a bit.

Ha! I understand now. I thought you might have been waiting for the next update if that would include extra stuff and might assuage your thoughts, but alas, as the writer--we're moving along as quickly as possible and just touching on some other stuff as "oh by the way" just because I'd feel guilty if I didn't include a little bit of everything. More substance will come when I decide it's proper with regard to in-game developments.

And yes, I think the trouble of looking back on politics is retrojecting our sensibilities to the past. Not that this isn't necessarily a bad thing to do, since, after all, their were abolitionists, suffragists, and Native-American advocates (even if in small(er) numbers then) but we shouldn't act as if morally better opinions were completely absent either. At the same time, too much retrojecting, imo, obscures a fuller picture; which I'm hoping I'm doing a fairly even-handed job--although I think someone trained in the esoteric reading will clearly see where my sympathies lay! After all, I'm not sure I'm going to hide my unadulterated love-affair with John Brown! :eek: (Plus Waldemar Matuška Czech version of "John Brown's Body" is so epic, not that Paul Robeson's version isn't.)

Its good to have you back in Vicky volk! Excellent, incisive stuff so far.

It's nice to see you Jape! Hope all is well with you. Always nice to know you're enjoying the material. :)

Plus I think you'll find humor in the next post. A good AAR can be humorous too, right?
 
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II. ANDREW JACKSON AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM



Fighting the National Bank or Fighting for Democracy?

One of the most episodic events that dominant the Jackson presidency was his war with the National Bank, which, as mentioned, was re-chartered by James Madison for another 20 years—thus, it was during Jackson’s presidency that the renewal would be up to be re-chartered (or rejected) by Jackson. For Jackson’s opponents, the Bank was a seminal institution of American economic progress and modernization. Clay, among its most ardent champions, assailed Jackson in Congress for “ruining all America” if he were to reject its re-chartering.

Admitted, the entire “bank war” is mythologized by American historians who have long been the defenders of the National Bank, eventually culminating the establishment of the Federal Reserve. The bank war was but a small moment—nevertheless very memorable and comedic—in the wider struggle for social equality and the expansion of democratic principles; of which the Bank was seen as an impediment to both: but so too were the confrontations over the meaning of the Constitution (Jacksonites favored reading the Constitution as promoting greater equality and democracy while the National Republicans turned Whigs read it as having “implied powers” mostly to allot for their economic agenda), westward expansion, the question of Texas, slavery, expanding (White) male suffrage, and the concept of Manifest Destiny. It was in this struggle that the Bank war situated itself.

Because the bank war itself is well known, Jackson “killed” the Bank while men like Nicholas Biddle, President of the Bank, and his allies Henry Clay and Daniel Webster strongly defended the Bank, that I discharge myself the unscrupulous dishonor of playing into this narrative trap of concentrating on the bank war to the detriment of the wider issue that the bank war was part of: the war over democracy and its meaning. As I’ve stated, the bank war was but one of many issues in the wider confrontation between the Jacksonites and anti-Jacksonite forces: in civil society, the media, and government.

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One of many depictions of Andrew Jackson fighting the National Bank during the so-called "Bank War." This depiction has deliberately reminiscent overtures to Jesus' expulsion of the money lenders and Samson's destruction of the Temple of Dagon. Religiously inspired imagery such as this, was common during the concurrent rise of the Second Great Awakening and Jacksonian Democracy. One of the ironies of American Protestantism's anti-idol/imagery theology is that such images were generally shunned in churches, but widely published and distributed in "secular" contexts, especially in political contexts.
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I would like to emphasize, with as much clarity as possible, that in the 1830s democracy and equality were two sides of the same coin—at least among the Jacksonites. Alexis Tocqueville, in his seminal work Democracy in America, noted on the zealous frenzy that the American farmer and laborer, the “poor” and “working class” by modern standards, were passionate supporters of democracy. Believing, as the Second Great Awakening preachers were conferring in their revivals, that democracy was God’s chosen form of democracy because democracy made all men equal, the Jacksonites undoubtedly were unable to separate the ideas of equality and democracy from one another. The expansion of democracy was understood as an expansion of equality. And to this, as some commentators noted, the Second Great Awakening wasn’t just a religious revival, it was also a political revival—in that those itinerant preachers who called for the individual to trust in Christ, also called upon them to vote at the ballot box for the equality of their fellow brethren.

The core of democratic nationalism in Jacksonian ideology was the “sovereignty of the people,” a very Americanized understanding of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “general will of the people.” Democracy was the means by which the people had control over all aspects of their lives, menial and material. The expansion of democracy was a reflection of the sovereignty of the people, and with it came greater degrees of economic and political equality, which is what all men desire.

It may be easy to chastise the Jacksonites then, for their exclusion of African-Americans, women, and Native Americans from democratic expansion. To this, all criticism is valid to a certain degree—only insofar that few people elsewhere shared this sentiment—but to highlight this, I think, underscores the very radical nature of the Jacksonian movement in of itself. Jackson targeted the Bank because in the Bank, the Bank served as a reflection of inequality—the Bank existed to serve the interest of merchants and financiers who hoarded the wealth gained by the assistance of the National Bank at the exclusion of others. Yet, the success of the Bank had a double effect that ultimately brought forth its demise.

As I’ve stated, Jackson’s popularity was because of a wave of populist optimism. The wealth being generated in the hands of a few was not a cause for reaction and hatred, but solicited a great desire among the yeomanry to be part of a system that could produce wealth. They, perhaps misguidedly, did not view the Bank as responsible for economic success—rather they viewed the Bank as unfairly skewing the economic growth of the United States into the hands of elites in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia rather than it being more freely dispersed throughout the nation. In the expansion of democracy, which Jackson embodied and represented, these yeoman farmers and laborers believed that by tearing down the Bank that capital would flow more equitably to the interior lands of the country.

It is from this mentality, that the other wars over democratic expansion were being waged. As one American historian noted, the Jacksonian era was dominated by the theme of social equality as inherent in the American Constitution—and it was therefore a Constitutional prerogative to expand democracy everywhere so as to expand social equality (even if only among White Americans).[1]

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A depiction of one of many "parties" that Jackson threw, or hosted, while president. It was not altogether uncommon for Jackson to invite commoners into the White House for tours and parties and feasts. This included events in which Jackson would host Washington's homeless and poor into the White House during holidays where they would take shelter and have food to eat. Opponents of Jackson castigated him as wild party boy who disrespected the serene office of the Presidency with such actions. His actions reflected, as stated, his overarching committment to the "sovereignty of the people" that was instrumetnal to his larger political thinking. This specific image shows the infamous "Big Block of Cheese" incident in which Jackson owned a 1400 lb. block of cheese in the White House, to which he invited many guests to attend and enjoy in its consumption. Rumor has it that the block of cheese was consumed in two hours by the attendees, which was freely open to all the public.

The rise of Manifest Destiny coincided with the rise of Jacksonian Democracy. The lands of the American west, even if occupied nominally by Mexico, were viewed as ripe land for the expansion of democracy. The principles of egalitarianism and democracy in the Western tradition are unmistakably linked to agrarianism. Laboring the land, not laboring in cities, produced not only virtue—but the realization of wealth sharing. The lands of the west, free from the rise of corrupt urban metropolises, was thus seen as natural territory that ought to be American since it would also lead to the expansion of democratic principles and equality. The enthusiasm for westward expansion, which culminated in the Texas War for Independence and American intervention on Texas’s behalf, can only be understood by the theme of democratic expansionism. The marriage of national destiny with the expansion of democracy created the spirit of democratic nationalism that linked the American underclasses together in a spirit of solidarity and bondage all the same.

The motivations for Manifest Destiny, the intervention in Texas, and the eventual Mexican War beginning in 1845, is inarguably related to the rise of democratic expansionist nationalism, but also the rigid Protestant religiosity that married God and democratic virtue, as I’ve already stated. In part, the westward movement was equally seen as the will of God to bring democracy to the western lands, both untainted and ruled over by Catholic Mexico. This included then, a strong anti-Catholicism that has always been presented in the United States—a result of the two-fold heritage of America being predominately settled by English, and also the non-conformist Protestant dissenters of a generally low-church and anti-ecclesiastical bent, of which “Papists” were the most visible expression of everything they considered wrong and illegitimate about Catholic pretensions of being called Christian.

Westward expansion would, not only allow for the increase of freedom and equality of the pioneers venturing west of the Mississippi, it would also liberate the bonded suffering from Papist-Mexican authority. Again, this culture of American nationalism deeply interlocked a belief, rightly or wrongly, that nationalism and democracy were ordained by God. And as a Godly people, Americans had a duty to propagate the expansion of the gospel of Protestantism, democracy, and equality to all people. (Catholicism was in the red on all three issues, and hardly viewed as "Christian" by most American Protestants, leading to a conflicted relationship between nativist Protestants and Catholics, both American-born but especially immigrant).

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Emanuel Luetze's famous painting, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes it Way" captured the enthusiastic pioneer spirit of Manifest Destiny, which which new levels of vigor and zeal during the "Age of Jackson." Jackson, for his part, strongly encouraged westward expansion as part of the expansion of democratic virtues and principles. What is often missed in depictions of Manifest Destiny is that some settlers, especially in Texas, were invited by Mexican officials and not individually embarking on westward adventure on their own accord.

On this note, since we’re on the topic of westward expansion, the Whigs had come to oppose it on three principal grounds. First, they understood westward expansion did entail an expansion of democracy and egalitarian fervor of which they would lose political capital from as a result. Thus, Whig opposition to westward expansion was exceedingly due to their opposition to the expansion of democracy. In fidelity to the writings of Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Franklin saying that America “was a republic, if you can keep it,” and Madison noting that democracy necessarily entailed an expansion of equality, the Whigs considered themselves defenders of the rightful old order against emotional passions clamoring for increased democratic deliberations which would—in theory—be detrimental to their main political prescriptions. Second, the Whigs economic program centered around the building up of education system and economic infrastructure in America’s coastal cities: Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston (South Carolina), etc. (Yes, the Whigs had a strong base of support in southern coastal cities.) Thus, westward expansion would put pressure on a future Whig administration to funnel funds away from the coasts and toward the interior of the country. Third, and most prescient, the Whigs condemned westward expansion as a ploy of expansionist plantation slaveholders to expand slavery.

The issue of slavery itself had always been present in America’s founding. There was a movement during the Constitutional Convention to abolish slavery. That debate was closed rather quickly. Debates then escalated over the nature of slavery, to which the Three-Fifths Compromise was established to maintain Southern support for the new constitution. Thomas Jefferson explicitly prohibited the expansion of slavery into the territories of the Northwest Ordinances between 1784 and 1787. As President, Jefferson banned the slave trade too. In 1820, Congress settled on the “Missouri Compromise,” whereby territories north of the 36°30′ parallel were agreed upon to prohibit slavery. Adams noted that the compromise would tear the union apart, as did Jefferson.

As such, the Whigs also calculated that the expansion of “popular democracy” would also be utilized by pro-slavery forces to override the Missouri Compromise and possibly extend slavery into territories north of the agreed upon border. While it would be egregious to suggest that expansionist democratic ideology inherently embodied this, it is equally understandable that pro-slavery forces would inevitably use this medium for their own ends. Of course, the Whigs would be proved correct in their assumption. And future histories would subsequently highlight this prescient prediction of the Whigs to maintain a virtuous Whig character. However, as I’ve hoped to highlight in the multifaceted reasons for Whig opposition to westward expansion, it was never singularly about the Whig hope to prevent the expansion of slavery. In fact, not only had the Whigs agreed to turn a blind eye to slavery, many New England Whigs—“Cotton Whigs”— in states like Massachusetts (tied to the Massachusetts Textile industry), defended slavery and opposed abolitionists. Also, small factions of northern Democrats, the “Barn Burners” being an anti-slavery faction within the Democratic Party, with its more radical members being outright abolitionists, also opposed slavery’s expansion in the 1840s and 1850s. Therefore, it would be historically disingenuous to maintain that there was universal Whig opposition to the expansion of slavery in their opposition to the notions of Manifest Destiny.

But for Jackson, his strong commitment to Manifest Destiny and westward expansion was viewed, just like his fight against the Bank, as a larger fight for the expansion of democracy and equality in America—of which independent episodes reflected this mass movement of feeling and optimism across the country. Likewise, the “strict” constitutionalism supposedly endorsed by Jackson is a fallacious and disingenuous argument. Jackson’s “strict constitutionalism” was premised on the notion that the Constitution called for social equality and democratic government—of which the Bank was an impediment against. In reality, Jackson’s “strict constitutionalism” was a strict perspectivism, and his perspective was that the Constitution called for government to “promote the general welfare” and increase the provisions of liberty and expansion of equality across the Union. All Constitutional theorists have a perspective concerning the Constitution, and they all believe that their perspective is clearly spelled out in its words or implications. This conflict over Constitutional perspective would lead to the rise of the infamous "Nullification Crisis" which threatened to tear apart the Union more-so than the Hartford Convention ever did.


[1] This is the theme of Sean Wilentz’s biography, Andrew Jackson (2005).


SUGGESTED READING

John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?

Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity

Paul Kahan, The Bank War

Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln

John C. Pinheiro, Missionaries of Republicanism: A Religious History of the Mexican-American War

Robert Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War

Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: Politics of Jacksonian America

Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson and The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
 
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When do we get to see the Federalists resurrected and High Federalism installed to the extreme? :p
 
How have I never heard of Jackson's big block cheese? :D

Excellent again volk your breakdown of what the bank war 'meant' and Whig opposition to expansion in particular.

Thanks Jape! Expanding and exploring perspectives are important, least of which--even in an AAR--readers can take away some goody historical knowledge for their own self-indulgence! :p

I couldn't pass on bringing up the cheese incident. It's funny, reading the newspaper accounts, on how they depict it. Typical. Pro-Jackson papers highlighted how it was a hit with the people, while anti-Jackson papers used the cheese incident to attack what they hated about him. One NH paper said that the incident embodied the fact Jackson's White House was filled with cheese eating "rodents" since 1829! :rolleyes: :D (And so many Americans complain about a biased media today. Well my dearies, the media in America was founded explicitly for political purposes, if anything it's actually gotten better; insofar that some networks at least try to pretend to balanced.)

When do we get to see the Federalists resurrected and High Federalism installed to the extreme? :p

Probably sometime after the Civil War ending in this timeline. :p
 
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II. ANDREW JACKSON AND THE RISE OF DEMOCRATIC NATIONALISM


Westward Expansion and the Road to Texas

The first term of Jackson’s presidency was marked by his ongoing fight for the expansion of democracy and the formation of an American identity that linked a rugged individualism with democratic expansionism with an explicitly militant character. The elitism of the Adams-Clay-Webster triumvirate that had formed in Congress in opposition to Jacksonian principles struck him as particularly insidious and puritanical. Indeed, Adams even openly embraced his Puritan heritage, proclaiming his politics as conscience as one of the great gifts of his Puritan lineage—to which Jackson scorned as quasi-tyrannical.

This reflection of culture, in of itself, also captures the heart of a divisionary split between Americans. The north, far from receding from its Puritan lineage in the nineteenth century as sometimes popularly imagined, was still deeply Puritan insofar that Reformed Protestantism was still the dominant intellectual culture of New England and of the New England elites. Unitarianism, insofar that had started to gain some notoriety in the northeast, was equally the child of the Puritan conscience well into the 1900s—after all, it was Jonathan Edwards, not Unitarian ministers, who married Enlightenment rationality and science with Reformed metaphysics and theology to inaugurate the “First Great Awakening”; which was more like the enthusiastic expansion of Enlightenment Protestantism than a return to “old time religion.” (In fact, the proponents of the Great Awakening were called “New Light” Calvinists and their opponents “Old Light.”)[1]

The Puritans, although democratic in a sense, also envisioned a deeply moralistic society that would enforce communitarian moralism tooth and nail; but through that moralism a just and equitable society would emerge—that “city upon a hill” as Winthrop put it onboard the Arabella. As hitherto stated, American New England—even in the middle nineteenth century—was still deeply Puritan and Calvinist contrary to popular opinion. Deism was never that extensive in American high culture, but where it was prevalent, it was most common among the Southern plantation class. The Second Great Awakening had brought a similar Puritan-esque spirit to the American South and West, but was predominately Methodist and Baptist in character, rather than Congregationalist. Free will, rather than deterministic. Thus, as some scholars have asserted—the newfangled religiosity of the south and west carried with it an inevitable conflict with the north due to the moral issue of slavery; which itself was constantly brought up over and over again by northern opponents to Jackson and succeeding Democrats from the South. For southerners, the “Puritan Demons” were nothing more than anti-democratic forces trying to enforce their moral codes upon the south.

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At left, Puritan father Richard Mather. At right, Puritan theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards. Contrary to popular thought, nineteenth century New England was still a bastion of Purtian and Calvinist piety and religiosity. As Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons explained, it was the Puritans--with their zeal for social reform and building a New Israel in "New England," that bequeethed to wider American culture and consciousness the ideal of eternal reform and pilgrimage, or "instrumental activism" as he called it. Mather once said, "Is not the road to Canaan through the Wilderness?" Likewise, Jonathan Edwards, of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" fame, is widely regarded as one of the greatest intellectuals America ever produced. His writings of history, science, philosophy, and theology show a man who was the very embodiment of Enlightenment thought. He synthesized Newtonian Physics with Reformed Theology to produce a theology of Progress--in a very Puritan context--that education, enlightenment, and science were all pointing the way to the New Zion to be established in America. This spirit of restless reform and social engineering is widely accepted as the intellectual foundations for both American liberalism and progressivism that came after it. And no where did this ideal run into problems than with its encounter with the Cavalier attitude and plantation system of the American South.

Despite northern opposition, Jackson—for his part—was generally successful in his fight for democratic expansion despite New England weariness and outright opposition. Suffrage had been expanded. Pioneers were pushing west. Discontent in Texas was brewing—an event that Mexican authorities considered a deliberate ploy by Jackson, in his insistence of American frontiersmen to enter Texas-Mexico, as a means to annex Mexican territory. The Bank had been defeated. And the American economy was benefitting both commoner and banker alike—much to the chagrin of the banking and merchant class.

But one of the more eventful crises of the Jackson presidency was the “nullification crisis.” The nullification crisis was in response to Southern states, principally South Carolina, who decried the new federal government tariffs as unconstitutional. South Carolina’s own John C. Calhoun, ironically the Vice President under Jackson, adamantly opposed what he saw as an intrusion into the affairs of southern economics—especially South, who would be hurt most.

Controversy over the nature of the “Tariff of Abominations” is a matter of intense debate. Most speculate that it was a means to a means end that went horribly astray, that is that Jackson himself was not a particular fan of tariffs but pushed it through to ensure growing support from pro-business forces in the Democratic Party, especially those forces found in Maryland (around Baltimore), Pennsylvania (around Philadelphia) and New York (around Albany and New York City). Jackson was forced into promoting a tariff to re-assure these Democrats that he wasn’t going to entirely ignore their political agenda as president. Thus, the tariff was set in motion, and a conflict between federalist unionism and localism was ready to brew.

The tariff represented a sharp split in American political coalitions. Whigs in the south and north enthusiastically endorsed it as a means to prevent southern cotton from freely falling into the hands of the British—whom they all sought to upend in North America. (It would be wrong to think that Jackson didn’t view the tariff as a means to weaken British economic control in North America either.) Jackson, in this episode—contrasted with his fight for expanding democracy in all of its other episodes—is seen as a political pragmatist rather than idealist, conceding to the pro-economic nationalist forces that were also part of the Democratic Party (mostly in the Mid-Atlantic states) and to northern Whigs. Slave-interest politics, epitomized by the likes of John C. Calhoun—his Vice President—fought back sharply in defense of the interests of the plantation owners and southern agrarian elites who would be negatively affected by the new tariff. The Union was on the verge of splitting.

Calhoun’s defense of the nullification is the true intellectual foundations for the doctrine of “states’ rights.” While more contemporary defenders of the idea looked to the 10th Amendment, the true origo of state’s rights as defying federal policy prescription comes from the Nullification Crisis and not the 10th Amendment as popularly conceived. The 10th Amendment, originally understood, was an amendment that allowed states to engage in their own policies that were not specifically outlined to the federal government in the Constitution. The argument that the 10th Amendment granted states’ rights in defiance to federal action was an adoption of anti-Civil rights groups in the 1950s and 1960s. The real doctrine of states’ rights as defiance to federal authority begins with nullification—itself an anti-Constitutional theory. (Indeed, Calhoun spent much of his rebuttal discussing natural philosophy, natural law, and the right to revolution to protect individual rights rather than make poetic appeals to the Constitution—although he did so to suit his purposes when necessary.)

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Congressman, Secretary of War, Vice President, Senator, and perennial statesman John C. Calhoun (South Carolina). Although Jackson's first term Vice President, he broke sharply with Jackson over the "Tariff of Abominations" and formulated his doctrine of "nullification" as a response. It is the doctrine of nullification, not 10th Amendment "States' Rights" that would later serve as the intellectual foundation for later "states' rights" movements in the United States. He entered the Senate the day after his resignation as Vice President in 1832. Calhoun was one of Jackson's fiercest critics within the Democratic Party.

Eventually, the issue was settled by Jackson sending federal troops into South Carolina and the Compromise Tariff of 1832, to which Henry Clay played a major role in this outcome, but this event highlighted the tenuous nature of the American Union—and the central issue of slavery—as it related to southern political interests. But Jackson’s view was one of nationalist unionism, “Our federal Union—it must be preserved,” he quipped. He also remarked, “Disunion by armed force is treason.” This undercurrent of unionism was nationalism, and one should not forget that, since the 1830s was still a decade in which national identity in the United States was still being formulated.

Apart from the Nullification Crisis, the infamous “Trail of Tears” episode was another moment in Jackson’s presidency. Except the episode of the “Trail of Tears” never occurred under Jackson’s presidency. It occurred after.

Jackson’s relation to the Trail of Tears was in his passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The act forced various southern Native American populations out from their ancestral homelands and into the Indian reserve established in the Oklahoma Territory. The Act was seen as a means for westward expansion and further democratization. Moreover, Jackson sincerely believed that the removal acts were humane and for the Native Americans’ advantage and benefit, but this seems to be a perfect example of benevolent paternalism that looks only from the perspective of the instigator rather than the victim. Westward expansion by pioneers, settlers, and frontiersmen had meant renewed conflict between the Native tribes and the American settlers. Whereas in the 18th century, Native Americans had the numbers and equivalent technology—and often the support of France or Britain—to fight back, by the 1830s the reversal was true. The Native American populations in the south were already decimated by the Indian Wars and westward expansion in of itself. By removing what populations remained away from the lands desired by pioneers and settlers, Jackson believed himself also saving these people from extinction.

One might ask why the Indians had to be removed in the first place? First, their lands were already shrinking from waves of westward expansion. As mentioned, westward expansion was seen as inseparable from the expansion of democracy. Second, Native Americans were never viewed as part of the American experiment, and therefore an obstacle to democratic expansion—just like similar views concerning Catholics who were “agents of Babylon” and “papists” who would overthrow the republic if given a chance. Third, pioneers and settlers were already migrating through the lands despite state laws trying to protect these regions. One might say Jackson saw no alternative, and as stated, Jackson’s own words bear out the belief that he thought that this was the only outcome that could also preserve the Native Americans from annihilation. Regardless, his actions precipitated another episode of human tragedy in the history of the Native American peoples and their struggles against the ever expanding American Leviathan.

Nevertheless, and regardless of what was underlying the debates, the forced removal of Native Americans began after Jackson left the White House. Initially, the hope was that the Native Americans would leave voluntarily. Some did. A majority stayed until forced out. The most famous removal being the Cherokee, over 4,000 died during the journey. The Cherokee remember the journey as “on the road which they cried out,” thus giving it the popular name “Trail of Tears.” While there is no way to wash over this unspeakable tragedy on human levels—then again, there are many such episodes of equivalent human tragedy in America’s history. As one of the soldiers who oversaw the forced removal said:

I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west....On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure.

Surely this is enough to break any person’s heart to have witnessed such an event, let alone participate in it and be partly responsible even while being torn with emotion as this soldier was.[2]

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A depiction of the Trail of Tears, the "exodus" of the Cherokee nation--without a happy, or triumphant, ending.

At the same time, Americans were moving in droves westward—and many were entering Texas. Texas, at this time belonging to Mexico, was a true cosmopolitan territory. Mexican Catholics, Native Americans, both Christian and non-Christian, and American Protestants, were all living in the vast country, but also side-by-side in some instances. But in this melting pot, also loomed the inevitability of tension: clashing ideologies, faiths, and three nations—two established, the other aspirant. Mexican territory north of the Rio Grande was already tenuous to begin with, and waves of American settlers made matters only worse.

The tide of Americans entering Texas worried Mexican officials, who feared that this was an expansionist ploy by Andrew Jackson to eventually come to the aid of Americans to seize Texas from Mexico. And this was certainly an understandable sentiment. Mexican authority was weak outside of a few centralized areas south of the Rio Grande River. The influx of Americans, as well as dissident Mexicans in Texas itself, was the proverbial powder keg waiting to explode. And, to justify Mexican fears, notable leaders of the eventual Texas Revolution, like Sam Houston, were friends of Andrew Jackson. Many settlers, who enthusiastically moved into Texas, did so under their commitments to Jacksonian democratic ideology. The entire west, from Atlantic to Pacific, should be American.

Jackson, having won reelection in 1832 soundly, would soon find himself embroiled over “the Texas Question” soon enough, and before he left the Presidency, for Texas would soon revolt in 1835 and war between the Lone Star republic and Mexico was close to America’s borders.


[1] In some circles of American Unitarian Universalism, Jonathan Edwards is revered both as a spiritual father and boogeyman, especially among Unitarianism in the greater Boston area (for obvious reasons). Many scholars of American religious history note that Unitarianism was the direct child of Puritanism, and later, progressivism too. This is also part of a larger arch of scholarship in “philosophy of religion” that views Calvinism as a driving force of secularization, the internalization of Calvinist principles to the establishing of an intensified devotion to social reform, simply devoid of explicit Calvinist (Christian) overtures but nevertheless, still fundamentally Calvinist at heart and lineage.

[2] This is from a letter written by Private John G. Burnett describing the account of the Trail of Tears, Dec. 11, 1890. (He wrote long after the fact, to his children, telling them of the sins he still felt for participating in the event.)


SUGGESTED READINGS

H.W. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times

Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny

John Ehle, The Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation

Richard Ellis: The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights, and Nullification Crisis

William Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina

David Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England

George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism

Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis

Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War
 
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Two updates while I didn't have time to read! And both giving a better understanding of why Jackson did the things he did. Which is a good thing, though I still dislike him.

I guess my earlier 'thoughts' were a vague disquiet. I've tended to assume 'Second Great Awakening = good" and "Andrew Jackson" = bad. Learning that the two were linked was confusing in ways I couldn't express. And then you explained more, and I have a more nuanced view of both. And no doubt your sources would do even more.
 
Two updates while I didn't have time to read! And both giving a better understanding of why Jackson did the things he did. Which is a good thing, though I still dislike him.

I guess my earlier 'thoughts' were a vague disquiet. I've tended to assume 'Second Great Awakening = good" and "Andrew Jackson" = bad. Learning that the two were linked was confusing in ways I couldn't express. And then you explained more, and I have a more nuanced view of both. And no doubt your sources would do even more.

Well this is good, then. :p This is meant to be more than AAR after all. And now that we're finally in 1836, we can move into the developments that I'm pushing for from my chair and screen. Naturally, just falling into 1836 without proper explanation is something that I can't do for a myriad of reasons. Plus, these preliminary posts, I hope, help set the foundation for what I'll be writing up going forward. Just because we're entering the game's version of 19th century history (of events) doesn't mean we should negate everything else that's going on.

It's still all a matter of perspectivism though. You'll probably move back to SGA = good when I have to explain the swelling tide of abolitionist sentiment in the north and "Midwest." Be still my romantic heart too, when the Civil War breaks out. It was the scions of the Puritans, as I've deftly implied at various stages, who so gallantly marched off to war singing "Mine Eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword...as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!" (When you read those words carefully, in both theological and political context, you understand that those words could only come from a Reformed Puritan culture in service to Isaiah's God of militant righteousness to destroy that immoral and peculiar institution. And yes, "let us die," not "let us live," makes all the difference to understanding the song in its totality. The children of the Puritans, with their determinist theology, were marching off to die, and they knew it, but embraced it like Isaiah) But yes, at the same time, as so many scholars have long noted, the SGA wasn't just a "religious" and "moral" revival. It was a political revival with sweeping ramifications, some good, some not so good.

The hope is, here, we're bringing those "perspective" lenses into a clash with one another.
 
Brilliant! What will the civil war bring? Ora I like to call it:
'Salty southerners fight northerners over some black guys right not to be treated like crap.'
 
It's still all a matter of perspectivism though. You'll probably move back to SGA = good when I have to explain the swelling tide of abolitionist sentiment in the north and "Midwest." Be still my romantic heart too, when the Civil War breaks out. It was the scions of the Puritans, as I've deftly implied at various stages, who so gallantly marched off to war singing "Mine Eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword...as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free!" (When you read those words carefully, in both theological and political context, you understand that those words could only come from a Reformed Puritan culture in service to Isaiah's God of militant righteousness to destroy that immoral and peculiar institution. And yes, "let us die," not "let us live," makes all the difference to understanding the song in its totality. The children of the Puritans, with their determinist theology, were marching off to die, and they knew it, but embraced it like Isaiah) But yes, at the same time, as so many scholars have long noted, the SGA wasn't just a "religious" and "moral" revival. It was a political revival with sweeping ramifications, some good, some not so good.

The hope is, here, we're bringing those "perspective" lenses into a clash with one another.

Yes, exactly. And it'll be quite the day if I ever truly think that the SGA was bad, as my faith tradition descends from it! It's just a more nuanced view now, with more nuance yet to come. And I'm really curious for you to get to John Brown. I'm such a fan while being a bit disturbed that I'm a fan. And there's just so many perspectives that you could have on on him for so many reasons.
 
Brilliant! What will the civil war bring? Ora I like to call it:
'Salty southerners fight northerners over some black guys right not to be treated like crap.'

We're still quite some time away from the Civil War firing. Although, it came a bit earlier than OTL. Will make the writing on politics a little bit more awkward but we'll manage. I'm looking forward to it, because I might also have taken deliberate actions on my part to make the war more "epic" since, well, curb stomping the Confederacy in a year ruins what is the most transformative event in American history. Can't have none of that now can we?

Yes, exactly. And it'll be quite the day if I ever truly think that the SGA was bad, as my faith tradition descends from it! It's just a more nuanced view now, with more nuance yet to come. And I'm really curious for you to get to John Brown. I'm such a fan while being a bit disturbed that I'm a fan. And there's just so many perspectives that you could have on on him for so many reasons.

I would have to guess United Methodist then, otherwise some tradition of independent Baptist. Although technically we can say both came before, just rose to extreme prominence as a result of.

John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave! I weep the sons of bondage whom he ventured out to save! Although he lost his live in the struggle to free the slaves, his soul goes marching on! He captured Harper's Ferry with his 19 men so few. He frightened ol' Virginny till she trembled through and through. They hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitorous crew. His truth goes marching on!

He's gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord! He's gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord! He's gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord! And his truth still marches on.

John Brown was John the Baptist for the Christ we are to see. Christ of all the bondsmen, shall the Liberator be! And soon throughout the Sunny South the slaves shall all be free. For his soul is marching on! ;)

Maybe it'll make you feel better than I have no qualms with loving John Brown! :cool:
 
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