A Question of Union
As America’s population grew and people moved west, the driving forces in politics were domestic
issues and personal rivalry, complicated by conflicts between federal power and the rights of
individual states. The War with Mexico increased political divisions along sectional lines.
AN IMPERFECT UNIONnational appeal into a vision of a strong
executive that defended the people
against abuse by both local and state
governments and private interests.
In this he was opposed by the Whig
Party, dominated by a redoubtable trio,
the “Great Triumvirate,” comprising
Senators John C. Calhoun of South
Carolina, Henry
Clay of Kentucky,
and Daniel Webster
of Massachusetts.
The Whigs firmly
asserted the
supremacy of
Congress over the president. Jackson
easily won a second term in 1832,
growing in his conviction that the
president represented the popular will.
His belief was displayed in a series of
crises, triggered by the inconsistent
ways that the sections of theT
he nature and practice of American
politics changed fundamentally in
the decades following 1820. The
Federal Constitution and state laws
originally restricted voting and office-
holding to those who met property andBEFORE
When slave-owning Missouri petitioned
for statehood in 1819, the more
populous North dominated the House
of Representatives. In the Senate, 11 free
states to 11 slave states kept the balance.THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE
Missouri’s petition provoked mixed responses. A
debate in the Senate about the future of
slavery saw the first attempt to block admission
of a new slave state. To restore calm, Henry Clay
of Kentucky arranged a series of measures known
as the Missouri Compromise. In 1820, Missouri
entered the Union as a slave state and Maine as a
free one. Slavery was barred from the Louisiana
Purchase north of Missouri’s southern border.END OF AN ERA
The departure of James Monroe from the White
House in 1825 marked the passing of the
Revolutionary generation. Virginians and
slaveholders had held the presidency for 32
of the United States’ first 36 years, due to the 3/5
clause that overrepresented Southern whites.NEWSPAPER EDITOR AND REFORMER 1811–72In 1831, Horace Greeley moved from New
Hampshire to New York City where he
founded the news and literary journal, the
New Yorker. He went on to edit the Whig
Party’s campaign paper, The Log Cabin,
before setting up the New York Tribune in- For the next 30 years he advocated
an eclectic array of political and social
causes and used his paper to oppose the
“slave power” that ruled the nation. An early
convert to the Republican Party, he
offered his printing presses to the party
to mass-produce campaign material.
After the Civil War, Greeley tried to
challenge President Ulysses S. Grant
in the 1872 campaign. Ridiculed
and soundly defeated, he died
soon after the election.
HORACE GREELEY
John C. Calhoun
One of the “Great Triumvirate,” Calhoun was a
brilliant defender of Southern slaveholding interests.
Unusually, he served as vice president under two
presidents: John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.residency requirements. By the 1830s,
however, most states had rewritten
their laws to expand suffrage and
office-holding to nearly all white
male citizens. Fewer people shared
the Founders’ ideals of political service
by the best educated and wealthy.
Politics became a profession, as men
sought office,
wealth, and status
by service to a
political party. The
Democratic Party,
in particular,
pioneered a system
of party discipline that dispensed jobs
at the local, state, and national level.The Jacksonian age
One man who mastered the new politics
of personality and orchestrated
campaigns was Andrew Jackson of
Tennessee. Voters admired his record as
the victor of New Orleans—the last
major battle of the War of 1812—and as
an Indian fighter. Jackson’s rise to wealth
and influence from rural poverty made
him a symbol of the “age of the common
man.” As a contestant in a bitterly
contested presidential election in 1824,
he narrowly lost to John Quincy Adams.
But his turn for the White House came
after the 1828 election, which he won
on the Democratic ticket.
Like many frontier men, Jackson
resented the dominance of the East. He
was the first president to translate hisAndrew Jackson’s supporters came from
every state for his inaugural celebration in
1829, horrifying many by surging into the
White House and climbing onto tables until
bowls of punch were carried onto the lawn.