Liberty and power in the old Northwest: Michigan, 1850-1867.

Abstract

This study examines how mid-nineteenth century Americans employed Jacksonian political culture to confront the sweeping changes and innumerable dislocations wrought by the market revolution and the Civil War. I build upon a body of historical literature that traces the origins of this political culture, with its intensely competitive two-party system, to the tensions produced by the emergence of a market economy in the United States, a process that came to an end, most historians incorrectly imply, by about 1840. In fact, Michigan, and many of the western states, did not experience the full effect of the emerging socio-economic order until the 1850s. Because historians have largely missed this point, they have also ignored the critical role of this transformation in causing and shaping the political turmoil of the 1850s-political turmoil that resulted in civil war. Jacksonian political culture, with its intrinsic ambivalence about the market, clearly resonated with mid-century Michiganians. Faced with ongoing change and conditioned to fear it by the Panic of 1837, Michiganians in 1850, expressed their ambivalence towards the emerging order--an ambivalence that bordered on outright hostility--both politically, by creating a new state constitution, and personally, by physically confronting the most obvious symbol of that change, the railroad. Unable to stap the forward march of the cash nexus, state residents abandoned traditional partisan loyalties and flocked to new political movements which gave expression to their uncertainties. Out of this political cauldron emerged the Republican party. By advocating a general railroad law for Michigan and, more famously, through their affirmation of the principle of free soil, Republicans effectively submerged the socio-economic tensions that drove Jacksonian political culture. This strategy allowed the party to dominate Michigan in the immediate antebellum and civil war years. After the repudiation of Presidential Reconstruction and the Republican electoral landslide of 1866, however, the free-soil issue retreated into the shadows. When it did, the unbridled devotion to economic change exhibited by Michigan's post-bellum Republican leadership exposed a thriving, and still deeply divided, Jacksonian political culture and in the process, threatened the Republicans' political hegemony in the state.