Changes that didn’t seem necessarily obvious one by one at the time added up to a fairly sharp dividing line in our national story.
Sometimes, big turning points in our history announce themselves loudly and clearly. But not all do. The period around 1830 marked a hard turn in American history without an obvious sharp break. Our own time could easily end up marking something similarly profound before we realize entirely what has happened.
On the page or at the time, the events of 1830 reveal no obvious tectonic shift, although a series of events between 1828 and 1832 (corresponding to Andrew Jackson’s election and first term as president) suggested to keen-eyed observers that something big was afoot — or more properly, several big somethings. Many of the changes were more in the nature of trends that were shifting all at once over an extended period, so that the pre- and post-1830 eras are just a useful shorthand for historians. But consider what changed:
Partisanship: The first parties, the Federalists and the Republicans (known as the Democrat-Republicans, the forerunners to today’s Democrats) were mostly loosely organized confederations, and the Federalists died out after the War of 1812 (which they opposed) ended in 1815. The one-party “Era of Good Feelings” during James Monroe’s presidency wasn’t fated to last, but Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford nominally contested the 1824 election within the tent of the Democrat-Republican party. By 1828, the Jackson and Adams factions were beginning to polarize into parties. In 1832, Jackson added to his Democratic ticket Martin Van Buren, who essentially invented modern parties in America; two years later, the Whigs organized as the anti-Jackson party, led by Adams and Clay. The two-party system was born. It would survive both the collapse of the Whigs (who fell and were replaced by the Republicans in 1854–1856) and the 1860 schism that almost destroyed the Democrats.
Democracy: The Jacksonians led the charge to eliminate property restrictions on voting (for white men) and also pressed to have presidential electors chosen by popular vote, especially after the 1824 election, when Jackson lost in an election decided in the House after apparently winning the popular vote. (I say apparently because New York didn’t tally its popular vote, so when the nation’s largest state was included, Adams may have won.) In the 1824 election, six of the 24 states tallied no popular vote, four had fewer than 5,000 voters, and only seven had more than 20,000 voters. The total recorded vote was 365,928 voters. In 1828, precisely 1,149,216 votes were counted — including 270,975 in New York alone — and only two states didn’t pick electors by popular vote. From 1832 on, only South Carolina didn’t choose them by popular vote. Universal white male suffrage has been the order of the day ever since, subsequently expanded by race, sex, and age.
Slavery and Abolitionism: Disputes between the free and slave states, alongside agitation over slavery, dated back to the 1770s, and they flared up in 1820 when the Missouri Compromise established a pattern of admitting new free and slave states in pairs to retain sectional balance. But pre-1830 abolitionism was less militant, more of an elite phenomenon, and less prominent in politics than many other issues were, while it was still possible to debate gradual abolition in the South, to speak of it as an unfortunate evil, and to gather (as Jefferson did in 1807) Southern votes to end the slave trade. But both sides hardened considerably in 1831–1832, with William Lloyd Garrison’s founding of The Liberator as a strident abolitionist newspaper and Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia leading to a sharp rise in Southern fear of slave insurrections and a corresponding backlash against abolitionism that led to a de facto ban on mailing abolitionist materials into the South. (This was all presaged by an 1829 anti-slavery pamphlet circulated by black abolitionist David Walker.) The South began what some historians term an “intellectual blockade” against criticism of slavery. Under the intellectual leadership of John C. Calhoun, there was a sharp rise in arguments for slavery as a “positive good.” Adams was elected to the House in 1831, beginning a long second act as a vocal critic of slavery.
At the same time, other forms of servitude that could ensnare white Americans were swiftly collapsing, leaving slavery isolated. Indentured servitude was abolished in numerous states in the 1820s, and federal law in 1833 abolished debtors’ prisons for federal court judgments (they had already been done away with in many states by then). Lines were being drawn.
Notably, all three of these trends — organized parties, expansion of the franchise, and militant abolitionism — took a turn in Britain at the same time, with the 1834 Tamworth Manifesto (the first party platform, for the Tories), the 1832 Great Reform Act, and the 1833 abolition of slavery in the British colonies.
Immigration: While America’s borders were largely open during the early years of the Republic, levels of immigration were comparatively low, especially from outside of England, Scotland, and Wales. The free white population of the country therefore remained strikingly homogenous by modern standards: overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Early Americans considered themselves a wildly diverse nation because of the variety of Protestant sects and regional cultures and because of the mere presence of Germans, Irish, Frenchmen, Catholics, and Jews; but the WASP majority was sufficiently great that Americans felt themselves more to be a single people. That started turning in the 1830s (Whig fear of immigrant voting after the abolition of property restrictions led, in that decade, to the first voter-registration laws). The Irish famine in 1846 and the failed revolutions in Germany in 1848 led to truly mass immigration, but the trend is usually pegged around 1830.
Transportation: The transportation revolution first announced itself with steamboats, debuted in 1807 by Robert Fulton. But in 1830, America got its first railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio. Over the next two decades, 9,000 miles of track were laid. In 1838, the first ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean just on steam power, turning a local river and port technology into accelerated ocean passage (which, in turn, accelerated immigration).
Media: As I’ve noted before, this era produced a communications revolution as well, and in particular, a revolution in newspapers:
With lower printing costs, the 1830s saw the dawn of the “penny press,” a steep drop from the previous cost of six cents for a daily newspaper. For the first time, this placed a daily source of written news in the hands of ordinary workingmen, ending an era when news could spread only through meetings in taverns where the literate few expounded what the papers said. Readership exploded. Manhattan alone, with 200,000 people, had 161 newspapers by 1828. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked from his 1831–1832 journeys that the number of newspapers in America “beggars belief” even on the frontier: “In the Michigan forests there is not a cabin so isolated, not a valley so wild, that it does not receive letters and newspapers at least once a week.” According to the American Antiquarian: “By the 1830s the United States had some 900 newspapers, about twice as many as Great Britain — and had more newspaper readers, too. The 1840 U.S. census counted . . . a total annual circulation of half a billion copies for a population of a little under 23.2 million people. . . . Indiana, for example, had only one newspaper in 1810 but seventy-three by 1840.” The 1850 census reported 254 daily newspapers in the United States, double the figure in 1840, and ten times the number in 1820.
Native American Lands: The 1831–1833 controversies over the “Trail of Tears,” the Indian Removal Act, and the Black Hawk War marked the elimination of independent tribes living east of the Mississippi. The east had been won. Henceforth, American clashes with Native Americans would take place in the West, far from the major population centers.
Generational change: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both, famously, died on the same day in 1826, the 50th anniversary of independence. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence, died in 1832. John Marshall, the Revolutionary War veteran appointed by Adams as chief justice, died in 1835. James Madison, the last living signer of the Constitution, died in 1836. Other than second-generation men such as John Quincy Adams, the living links to the Revolution and the Founding were mostly a dwindling band of widows such as Dolley Madison and Eliza Hamilton (who was the last to go, in 1854).
One could continue the story with turning points in manufacturing, education, and urbanization. There’s a reason why histories often mark the end of the “early Republic” around 1830. Changes that didn’t seem necessarily obvious one by one at the time added up to a fairly sharp dividing line in our national story.