History 11 Slideshare Lecture

1. Chapter 9 – A Democratic
Revolution

2. Democratization, Continued
I talked about the growth or spread of democracy in the last chapter’s Slideshare in the
context of the Bill of Rights and the Judiciary Act of 1789. Now let’s talk about the further
spread of democracy by way of another perspective, and that’s the expansion of the right to
vote in the early decades of the 19th century.
The delegates at the Constitutional Convention agreed that the right to vote must be
contingent on some sort of property qualification – in this way the “right” sort of people would
be able to shape the future of American society, and the “wrong” sort would have no, or little,
say in the matter. But they also left the determination of voting qualifications to the states, and
as the American experiment in republicanism moved forward through the 1830s, it became
increasingly clear that the various states had very different ideas about who should be given
the right to vote.
There was a brief moment when it seemed that women and African Americans might retain the
vote in some states based on ownership of property, but those more liberal sparks were
stamped out fairly quickly.
But as western territories were established, they either applied for entry into the Union with a
more generous approach to voting rights than their eastern brothers, or not long after
admission they amended their constitutions so as to enfranchise more male voters. But why
would this happen in the West, where there were smaller numbers of educated men who
might think and philosophize their way into more liberal positions regarding voting rights -- ?
The question actually answers itself.

3. In the absence of a class of men like Adams, Madison, and Jefferson, deeply read and broadly
educated, it was a different sort of man that provided leadership in the conversations and
debates on the big ideas of the day, and it was these same men that would be the delegates to
the conventions where new state constitutions would be written, and many of them would also
be territorial, and then state, legislators. These were “new money” men – important they might
be amongst their fellow westerners, but when they left the East to head West – they had little or
nothing to their name. So what was it about these men that gave them influence over their
fellows?
To answer that question, let’s look at it this way: the War for Independence ended in 1781, as
far as the fighting was concerned. Almost immediately, large numbers of land-and-opportunity-
hungry Americans began to move across the Appalachian Mountains into the West, opening up
and developing Kentucky territory (admitted into the Union in 1792), then Tennessee (1796)
and Ohio (1803), and in the years and decades following, Indiana, Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois,
and Mississippi. Once 60,000 people occupied a territory, a convention could be established
to write a state constitution. The leaders of these territories, the Adams and the Madisons, had
the status that they did NOT because of their family names, or the fact that their family had
been in the country for five generations, or anything like that – the social markers of the East
were of no use in the West. These men had earned their status through hard work and
personal courage, dependability and common sense in everyday matters. These were frontier
societies that were in the process of being built, and that had not even existed a decade, or
several decades earlier – the men who mattered there, and who mattered to other men, were
the men who had helped to clear the land and plant the crops; kill the wolves and bears; fight
the Indians and the elements; construct the bridges and the churches. Every man was equal in
the West, except for those men who were more equal because they had shown their talents and
abilities to their fellows every day and in every way imaginable. They had demonstrated their worth to
their fellows, and so were not only admired and envied by many,

4. they were held up as exemplars of
what any boy might aspire to be. The
ideal American of this day and age
was Andrew Jackson who, over the
course of a forty-odd year journey,
would rise from homeless war orphan
to land surveyor, lawyer, judge,
general, war hero, and President of
the United States – the original
American “rags to riches” story, and all
with no formal education. So you can
see how a man could kneel down and
say to his son, “Billy, if you do good in
school, study hard, and obey me and
your ma, and never tell a lie and
always do an honest day’s work for an
honest dollar – why, you could do just
like old Andy Jackson done! You
could be president, too!” That was the
spirit of the West – a deeply
democratic, egalitarian spirit that

5. made it clear that anyone could aspire to be anything, and that no man was better than any other man
in a place where everyone was equal. It didn’t matter at all if this one or that one had more land,
livestock, or money – in the West and, increasingly, throughout the United States, all men believed that
they could be that man – if only they wanted it badly enough, and worked for it hard enough.
So does it come
as any surprise
that it was in the
West that the first
taxpayer
qualification laws
for voting were
enacted, and that
not long after that
the first all-white
male voting rights
laws came into
being? And why --
primarily because
of this egalitarian
spirit of the West,
where all men (or at least the white ones) were created equal. And of course the Eastern states had to
follow suit – they really didn’t have a choice. To be sure, part of the reason their voting rights laws were
amended was due to the rising national spirit of egalitarianism, but they also did it out of sheer
economic necessity – with so much cheap land to be had, AND voting rights, too many of their younger
men and families were leaving for the better life in the West, and this created not just a labor drain, but
a taxpayer drain as well.

6. These maps are interesting in
the way they demonstrate the
growth of the democratiz- ation
and egalitarianism I’ve been
discussing. In the Election of
1824, where the vote was split
amongst four candidates, Andy
Jackson took 43% of the votes,
and basically split the votes of
Westerners
with Henry Clay, also of Kentucky.
But in 1828, with the contest running
between only he and John Quincy
Adams, he won with 56% of the votes.
(Also, take note of how much larger
some Western states already were in
terms of electoral votes, compared to
their older, more established cousin
states in the East.)

7. Henry Clay was a leading member of Congress and had been there for nearly twenty
years in 1824; John Quincy Adams wasn’t just the son of a former president and “founding
father;” he had graduated from Harvard University, been Secretary of State under James
Monroe, as well as Ambassador to various countries – what I’m saying here is that dude
was QUALIFIED to be president But Jackson won more of the popular vote than Adams
did in 1824, and in 1828, in Adams’ bid for reelection, Jackson CRUSHED him. And
why? Because he was the “man of the people,” just as Jefferson was in 1800 when he
CRUSHED his old pal John Adams. (A brief aside: Washington served two terms, and
Adams quite naturally assumed he would “get” two terms as well; after all, had he not
dedicated the last thirty-five years of his working life in service to the American people?
You bet he had, yessiree Bob!) Adams not only believed he would be reelected, he
believed he was owed a second term. But he had not really reckoned with the fact that
he was not in touch with the spirit of the people in 1800, and Jefferson was, and so – he
lost. And he was so angry – Adams was a famously temperamental guy – that he would
not communicate with Jefferson for the next thirteen years – cut off, 100%! Now, the big
question MUST be – did Jefferson get two terms? YES. Did Madison get two terms?
YES. Did Monroe get two terms? YES. Did John QUINCY Adams, following Monroe,
get two terms? NO. And did ANDREW JACKSON, who called himself a “Jeffersonian
democrat,” get TWO terms…YES! And do you think John Adams, who was still alive at
that point, was aggravated beyond belief when his son became the second president to
NOT be reelected – he, of course, being the first – you guessed it: YES.) But it is not
solely in the realm of votes and political campaigns that one can see the spirit of
egalitarianism growing in the early 1800s, but also in the area of… public education.

8. Around 1800 there was a stigma attached to education, and that stigma would remain in the
western frontier regions for some time – a basic knowledge of the so-called ‘Three Rs,’ or
‘readin,’ writin,’ and ‘rithmatic’ was considered to be good enough. But in the cities of the East
there was a growing labor consciousness/union movement. One of the planks of the later
WMP’s platform would be free state-sponsored public education. Lower class workers rightly
saw that if their children could get the same education (more or less), as those of the middle
class, then they would have the same opportunities (more or less) for success. Between the
1820s and 1840s, great strides would be made in bringing the idea of free public education to
fruition, with more success being had in some states than in others, largely as a result of the
efforts of the educational reformer Horace Mann.
One of the hot topics of debate was what sort of texts should (and should not) be used to teach
American children, with the Bible being rooted out of use in the schools of Massachusetts only
with great difficulty over a period of years. But the one text that was universally agreed upon
as a necessity, was Parson Weems’ A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of
General George Washington, a hagiography published in 1801 that further elaborated upon
“the Myth of Washington,” which had been constructed through stories and legends that had
grown up around the man ever since the French and Indian War in the 1750s. By the 1820s,
the popular belief in Washington as the sort of ideal American, an early American Superman or
Captain America, was a generally accepted truism; not for nothing did John Adams write to
Thomas Jefferson in the 1810s (& I’m paraphrasing, but this is the essence of what he said),
“Oh, I know how they will write the history of our times – there will only be two characters in the
grand story of the Revolution, and the tale will be told: ‘Dr. Franklin smote the earth with his
lightning rod, and from the fissure in the ground sprang forth General Washington, fully formed,
to save the Republic. The Great Inventor and the Great General – with the rest of us
consigned to oblivion’.”

9. Weems’ intention with this book
was that it might serve as a
more easily accessible and
(hopefully) popular version of
the more scholarly (and
accurate) biography that had
been announced as
forthcoming from the hand of
John Marshall (it was ultimately
published in several volumes
between 1804-07).
Weems only needed one volume to succeed at his task, which was,
again, to make Washington into an even more exemplary folk hero than
he already was, which task was accomplished through not just the
telling of the life of Washington, with plenty of gloss and glory
appropriately applied to his military career and presidency; Weems also
gussied everything up by turning rumors into facts, and even

10. inventing anecdotes so as to create instructive moral lessons that might be taught to children so they
could take inspiration from the great example of the ‘Father of Our Country.’ The best example of this is
the tale of how young George was given a hatchet as a gift and, all fired up (as every boy would be when
in possession of a sharpened instrument of destruction), he proceeded to chop down a cherry tree.
(Sometimes it’s portrayed as just a bit dinged.) When his father confronted him on it, the young paragon
replied, “I cannot tell a lie, father – I that chopped down the cherry tree.”
This became the heart of the Myth of Washington,
mainly because it was reprinted in the McGuffey’s
Readers, primers for schoolchildren from the 1850s
through the 1950s – the life and exploits of Washing- ton
thus became one of the primary sources of moral
instruction for American children, from about 1800
through the 1950s, in spite of most of Weems’ book
being cast into serious doubt, if not wholly

11. discredited, by Woodrow Wil-
son’s authoritative biography of
1896, and every other
biographer of Washington that
followed.
Another tale of the younger Washington that Weems
milked to its fullest was the one wherein he displayed
his freakish strength by throwing a silver dollar across
the Potomac River. Such was the potency of this tale
that in 1936 ‘The Big Train,’
Walter Johnson, star pitcher for
(wait for it!) the Washington
Senators, undertook to
replicate Washington’s feat.
This came about as a result of
a bet between Sol Bloom, a
member of the U.S. House of
Representatives and Johnson,
with wagers made on the
outcome, with all winnings to go
into a fund to buy Ferry Farm,
Washington’s boyhood home,
in order to have it restored and
turned into a museum. It was
agreed that the Big Train would
get three tries, and he made
the throw on the last two – the
distance being close to 300
feet. Bloom welshed on the bet
(yes, even then politicians were
often weasels), but that

12. didn’t change the fact that the Big Train
had made the throw – although we will
never know if Washington did. However
– there IS good reason to believe that
Washington threw a stone over the
Natural Bridge in Virginia at the age of 25
when he was surveying the area – and
that was ONLY 215 feet high (20
stories!), and would have had him
fighting gravity far more than simply
throwing a silver dollar across the
Potomac River…see next images.

13. The Natural Bridge by Frederick Edwin
Church, 1852, above. In the pic to the right,
see the person right under it, dead center of
the shot? (Hint: red arrow) Yeah, George
threw it from THERE. That, friends and
neighbors, is what you call MACHO.

14. And, of course, this has all proven
to be fruitful fodder for cartoon-
ists and otherwise, while even
Parson Weems has been
turned into an ironic folk
hero of sorts himself by
the underground
comix scene…

15. As I said previously – sometimes truth IS stranger
than fiction. And now for one final thing…

17. The painting on the previous slide is Grant Woods’ Parson Weems’ Fable (1939). In this
remarkable work, Woods may have meant for the Parson, at right, pulling back the cherry-
fringed curtain on one of America’s “founding myths,” to represent himself, the artist of the
piece, revealing the truth. Woods was a well-known satirist of sacred American traditions in
his work, and may have been aligning himself with Weems in this regard – both of them
were storytellers who dealt with the nation’s past. In the painting, Washington is not
George, the truthful little boy who confessed to his father (who looks angry), but the adult-
headed Washington, the rebel who defied the British Empire – it’s no coincidence that
Washington is holding the hatchet away from his father, as if to defy paternal authority. And
by using the known-to-every-American, dollar bill portrait of the first president by Gilbert
Stuart as the model for the head of Washington, he seems to be laughing up his sleeve at
the very foundations of the republic: the “Father of Our Country” as well as its capitalist
underpinnings.
In addition, at one and the same time Woods is paying homage not just to Weems, who
fooled the country into believing certain “truths” about Washington for the better part of two
centuries; but to the importance of truth, respect, and obedience to parental authority (even
as he mocks those same values): in the background a young African American boy helps
his mother to pick cherries (Are they meant to be slaves? Free?), creating a contrast
between their loving and respectful relationship, and the the anger and defiance of the
Washingtons, both father and son.
The storm clouds in the background also augur something dark – perhaps a beating by an
angry father?
* I am indebted to the University of Virginia, from whose website I gleaned most of the interpretation of this painting.