
John Quincy Adams (a better man than Jackson!)
H302: “Jacksonian America” aka Democratization of America, 1807-1848
Meeting Times: Tuesday/Thursday, Lane 124, 9:30-10:45
Instructor: Professor Bradley J. Birzer
Office: Delp 403
Description
Probably no generation after the American founding had a more diverse range of powerful personalities—John Quincy Adams, John Randolph of Roanoke, John Marshall, John Taylor of Caroline, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Joseph Smith, Martin Van Buren, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry D. Thoreau to name only a few. These personalities, essentially the children of the Founders, had to deal with the needs, the demands, and the intentions of the Republic. Importantly, they had to live up to what their fathers had given them from 1761 through 1793; they had to reify the ideals of the Republic. An unenviable task, to be sure. During these critical years, Americans wrestled with the formation of entirely new religions (many blatantly esoteric and Gnostic; others quite heterodox); the fragmentation and infighting of Protestantism; democratization in all aspects of American life; expansion westward and the various encounters with (usually outright brutal toward) American Indians; slavery and every one of its associated and attendant evils; reforms from the moderate and necessary to the outrageous and fantastic in all aspects of culture and politics; the establishment of America as a viable power among the nations of the world; the creation of political parties; and the development of American letters. To most Americans, economic and technological “progress” would allow the republic to transcend and overcome the limitations of the past, while the rising spirit of democracy would implant itself in the American West and throughout the world, by example or, if need be, by force. “Progress” and “destiny” and “individualism” became key words in the American vocabulary. Tellingly, the term “individualism” had never even appeared in print prior to 1827. Truly, something very different from the vision of the American founders emerged, a whole new American character–restless, expansive, violent, and suspicious of community.
Assigned Readings
- Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (ISBN: 0195392434). See term list at the end of the syllabus
- Lee Cheek, ed., John C. Calhoun’s A Disquisition on Government (ISBN: 1587311852)
- Cooper, Last of the Mohicans (ISBN: 0451417860)
- Tocqueville, Democracy in America (ISBN: 0865978409), 2 vol. LF edition
- Turabian, A Manual for Writers, 8th ed (ISBN: 0226816389)
Grades
- Midterm 30%
- Semester Long Research Paper 35%
- Final 35%
Research Paper explained
- The paper should be an original, well-researched, eighteen to twenty-five page paper in manuscript form (doubled spaced, one-inch margins, with proper footnotes and a complete bibliography). It must be primary-source driven. Secondary sources should be used, but, not surprisingly, only That is, you should employ secondary sources as guides to the bibliographic and primary sources available and as indicators of the historiographical controversies surrounding your topic. The Mossey Library has excellent resources and some of the finest librarians—Linda Moore—I have ever met. Make sure to take advantage of her expertise.
- Mossey databases and resources you will find especially useful for this research project: the Western Americana collection (Yale’s entire collection on microfilm); Harper’s Online; JSTOR; America: History and Life; the New York Times; the London Times; and Nineteenth-Century Masterfile.
- For the form and structure of the final paper, footnotes, and bibliography, you must use Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers (8th). The one exception to this: don’t use a title page.
- Further and VITAL N.B. This paper is a one-semester paper and worth a little over 1/3 of your grade. That is, I’m assigning it on day one of the course, and I expect you to begin it—at least the thinking about and research stage—immediately.
- Topics include any aspect of any American person, event, or idea, 1815-1848. You DO NOT need to clear your topic with me before you choose it. You should begin choosing a topic immediately. I would start with a cursory read through DWH and, especially, through his excellent bibliographic essay.
Schedule
Week 1: August 31-September 2
Week 2: September 5-9
Week 3: September 12-16
Week 4: September 26-30
Week 5: October 3-7*
Week 6: October 10-12
Fall Break: October 13-16
Week 7: October 17-21
Midterm: October 20 (must have read LAST OF THE MOHICANS and DISQUISITION)
Parents: October 22
Week 8: October 24-28
Week 9: October 31-November 4*
Week 10: November 7-11
Week 11: November 14-18
Week 12: November 21-22*
Week 13: November 28-December 2
Week 14: December 5-9 (Must have read DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA)
Final exam: December 16, 8-10am.
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, term chaser!
Pp. 1-202
Samuel Morse
Telegraphy
“communications revolution”
Ned Packenham
Thomas Mullins
Battle of New Orleans, 1815
Jedediah Morse
Vaqueros
“Middle Ground”
“little ice age”
Republican ideology
Husbandry
“agency”
Fur trade
Santa Fe Trail
Jedediah Smith
Sojourner Truth
Planter paternalism
Slave patrol
Dolley Madison
Battle of Baltimore, 1814
Old Republicans
Hartford Convention
Treaty of Ghent
Creek War
Second Treaty of Greenville
Algiers War
Madisonian Platform
Second Bank of the U.S.
14th Congress
John Randolph
Old Republicans/Tertium Quids
Tariff of 1816
National Road
Compensation Act
Bonus Bill
James Monroe
Monroe’s cabinet
Anglo-American Convention of 1818
First Seminole War
St. Mark’s
Transcontinental Treaty of Washington, 1819
Monroe Doctrine
Erie Canal
John Marshall
Joseph Story
preemption
Old Southwest
Second Middle Passage
Francis Cabot Lowell
Lowell, Mass.
Great Migration
Butternuts
John Chapman
Panic of 1819
Langdon Cheeves
Missouri Compromise
Rufus King
Denmark Vesey
Disestablishment
Temperance [American]
The Beecher Family
Charles G. Finney
“Burned-over District”
Oberlin College
“Christian perfection”
Circuit rider
Peter Cartwright
Baptists
“Second Great Awakening”
Evangelical United Front
Robert Baird
Elias Hicks
“Catholic revivalism”
John Hughes
Pp. 203-420
William H. Crawford
John C. Calhoun
John Quincy Adams
Henry Clay
Andrew Jackson
The Letters of Wyoming
National Road
Turnpike
Erie Canal
“Empire State”
United States Post Office
Sabbitarians
Washington Irving
James Fenimore Cooper
Timothy Flint
DeWitt Clinton
“Bucktails”
Chesapeake and Ohio
John McLean
American Colonization Society
Liberia
Freemasonry
Antimasons
“American System”
National Republicans
Tariff of Abominations
Democrat
“corrupt bargain”
Millennium (postm; prem)
Francis Wayland
American civil religion
William Miller
“The Great Disappointment”
Robert Owen
Associationist
Shakers
George Rapp
Amana Society
Martin Stephan
CFW Walther
Elizabeth Seton
Prophet Matthias
John Humphrey Noyes
Harriet Martineau
Frances Wright
Joseph Smith, Jr.
The Book of Mormon
Kirtland
Mormon War of 1838
Nauvoo
Mount Benedict
Nat Turner
“Age of Jackson”
“kitchen cabinet”
John Henry Eaton/Peggy Eaton
Indian Removal
Cherokee Nation
Sequoyuah
ABCFM
Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia
“domestic dependent nation”
Maysville Veto Message
Pocket veto
Sovereignty
Robert Y. Hayne
Daniel Webster
Nicholas Biddle
Second Bank of the U.S.
Wildcat Banking
Martin Van Buren
Pet Banks
Great Triumvirate
Whig
Second Party System
Tariff of Abominations
Nullification proclamation
Force Bill
Pp. 410-524
John Ross
Treaty of New Echota
Black Hawk’s War
Keokuk
David Walker
William Lloyd Garrison
American Anti-Slavery Society
Amos Kendall
Mobocracy
Elijah Lovejoy
Code duello
Roger Taney
Robert Owen
American Bible Society
Alexander Campbell
Horace Mann
Edward Everett
Disestablishment
Yale Report of 1828
The Book of Nature
Joseph Henry
Miasma
Slyvester Graham
William Morton
Theodore Dwight Weld
James H. Thornwell
Martin Van Buren
Richard M. Johnson
William Henry Harrison
Amos Kendall
Deposit-Distribution Act
Specie Circular of 1836
Pet banks
Free banking
Doughface
William Leggett
Gag rule
Indian Removal
William Mackenzie
Cinque
Amistad
Pp. 525-
“Five Points”
Eli Whitney
Cyrus McCormick
John Deere
“manufactories”
Working Men’s political parties
Francis Wright
Thomas Skidmore
Locofocos
Lowell Female Reform Association
Stephen Van Rensselaer II
Anti-rent movement
Treatise on Domestic Economy
Maysville Veto
“legal person”/corporation
B&O Railroad
America’s economic “take-off”
William Henry Harrison
Log cabin/Hard Cider
Horace Greeley
Land Act of 1841
Bankruptcy Act of 1841
“Illinois System”
Dorr Rebellion
Dorothea Dix
Pp. 613-
William Ellery Channing
Laura Bridgman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalists
Margaret Fuller
Henry David Thoreau
Brook Farm
Henry Wadworth Longfellow
Edgar Allen Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Frederick Douglass
Lewis Tappan
Theodore Dwight Weld
Liberty Party
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
Erasmo Seguin
Stephen Austin
Mexican Constitution of 1824
Filibuster
Santa Anna
Texian Revolution
William Travis
David Crockett
James Fannin
San Jacinto
Lone Star Republic
Webster-Ashburton Treaty
Robert Walker
James K. Polk
James G. Birney
Samuel F.B. Morse
Texas Annexation
ABCFM
Rendezvous
Hudson’s Bay Company
“Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”
Joseph Smith
Mormonism
Nauvoo
Brigham Young
Zachary Taylor
George Wilkins Kendall
Winfield Scott
St. Patrick’s Battalion
John C. Fremont
Thomas Larkin
Stephen Watts Kearny
“No Territory” Walker Tariff
Polk-Santa Anna Conspiracy
Cotton Whigs
Conscience Whigs
Revolutions of 1848
“All Mexico”
Nicholas Trist
Gold Rush
Irish Potato Famine
Nativism
Lewis Cass
Free Soil
Declaration of Sentiments