DIVERGING TENDENCIES IN NEW YORK DEMOCRACY IN THE PERIOD OF THE LOCOFOCOS1 DIFFERING Conceptions of democracy were expressed in two speeches which were made in the Congress of the United States in 1836 by Democratic members of the delegation from New York. The one was by Mr. Ely Moore, Tammany representative of the labor element in the city of New York. The occasion of his speech arose in a debate over a “preparedness" measure for governmental manufacture of munitions, in the course of which Mr. Thompson of South Carolina asserted that working-men of the North might "rob by lawless insurrection, or by the equally terrible process of the ballot box". Moore, replying, observed that Thompson's assertion was based finally upon the theory of government by a minority. He deprecated raising the caste question, yet thought that raising it might "serve to establish more distinctly, and more permanently, the landmarks which distinguish the two great political parties of this country-the democracy and the aristocracy". "The line which separates the friends and enemies of equal rights", he continued, "is broad and distinct", and these classes are "utterly and eternally incompatible and antagonistical ". The people [whom he identified with the laboring classes] are neither so unwise nor so unreasonable as to either expect or desire a perfect equality of wealth. . . . The people, the democracy, contend for no measure that does not hold out to individual enterprise proper motives for exertion. All they ask is that the great principle upon which the Government is founded, the principle of equal rights, should be faithfully observed and carried out, to the exclusion of all exclusive privileges. 1 This article is collated from a more extensive study, now in manuscript, on the history of the Locofoco party. The latter had its inception a number of years ago in a seminar of Professor Frederick J. Turner, who has continued to evince helpful interest. 2 Moore, a native of New Jersey and a printer by trade, had been the first president of the New York General Trades' Union and also of the National Trades' Union. Biographical Congressional Directory, p. 701; Commons et al., Documentary History of American Industrial Society (1910), V. 204. He was impressive in person and had oratorical power. John Quincy Adams in a vivid, though not wholly favorable description, styles him "the prince of working-men ". Memoirs, IX. 405. See also "Glances at Congress ", Democratic Review (1837), I. 68-81. He defended also the formation of labor unions (a cause of alarm to many people) as "counterpoises against capital, whenever it shall attempt to exert an unlawful or undue influence". This speech made an unusual impression, especially upon members from the South.* Another set of interests appears in the speech of Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge, which was delivered in the Senate on June 17, 1836. In explaining a variance with his colleague, Silas Wright, concerning a Bill to Regulate the Deposits of the Public Money, Mr. Tallmadge took occasion to set forth his views upon current conceptions of capitalism as embodied in the phrase, "the credit system"; though he did not specify precisely what was meant by the phrase. Prosperity, he first asserted, was the criterion of the system. He then proceeded to a justification of it as vitally related to liberty-but to a defined liberty: The credit system [he declared] is the distinguishing feature between despotism and liberty; it is the offspring of free institutions; it is found to exist, and its influence is felt, in proportion to the freedom enjoyed by any people. By freedom I do not mean unregulated, unrestrained, natural liberty, but that freedom which is founded on just and equitable laws, where the rights of personal security, of private property, and religious toleration, are guaranteed to every individual; where there is a general diffusion of knowledge and the existence of public and private morality.5 3 Reg. of Debates in Congress, 24 Cong., 1 sess., pp. 3428-3439. 4"A thundering Jack Cade or Wat Tyler speech ", J. Q. Adams, op. cit. "The whole House was excited at the novelty and boldness of his democratic doctrines, not less [than] at the extraordinary manner in which he had turned aside from the current of debate, and struck fearlessly forward into a field to which few orators had before ventured to lead the attention of that body. I overheard some gentlemen from the south say, that they thought they heard the high priest of revolution singing his war song." Democratic Review, I. 74-76. The last sentence gains significance in the light of the great change in political theory which was at this time taking place in the South; see W. E. Dodd, "The Social Philosophy of the Old South", American Journal of Sociology, XXIII. 735-746. 5 Cong. Globe, 24 Cong., 1 sess., app., pp. 469-470. The relations between Tallmadge and Wright ceased to be amicable in the following winter. The latter confidentially wrote to Flagg that Tallmadge on the basis of growing differences in political matters had both affronted him publicly and had sought advantage in underhanded ways. Wright to Flagg, January 9, 1837, Flagg Correspondence, New York Public Library. In February the re-election of Wright as senator was openly or secretly opposed at Albany by individuals who sympathized with Tallmadge's views. William L. Marcy to Gen. Prosper M. Wetmore, July 20, 1837, Marcy Papers, vol. XXVIII., Library of Congress. Wright, it will be recalled, was one of the leading members of the Regency. His re-election, according to Greeley, was acceptable to the Locofocos. The New Yorker, February 11, 1837, p. 332. AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXIV.-27. Moore and Tallmadge were representative of two groups within the Democratic-Republican party of New York which were revealing divergent tendencies. While both groups had affiliations over the state and their antagonisms finally forced the prevailing agrarian Democracy of the state to a choice of sides, yet it was in the city that they most spontaneously developed. They reflected in fact new conditions of urbanization and industrialism which were obtaining in the rapidly growing city at the mouth of the Hudson, where massing of population, a new capitalistic domination of industry, and the emergence of a proletariat were raising imperative questions as to modes of artificial subsistence, methods of gratifying the aspirations and meeting the responsibilities of entrepreneurs, and measures of defense on the part of working-men. These problems were rendered the more pressing because of the crude and inordinate expansion of credit which was a marked feature of the finance of the period, and they were manifested concretely in conflicts over currency and banking. Abstract discussion, moreover, proceeded further to inquire into the nature of democratic society, and deep-lying antagonisms relative to the control of government were being generated. New York City, therefore, was becoming an important centre for the initiation and promulgation of political opinion. For a decade prior to 1837 the formulation of a body of radical belief had been going on. The incitements of manhood suffrage, economic pressure upon fixed-income classes, preachments of agitators and social theorists, and the general democratic movement of the age were factors in the process of declaring afresh the principles of idealistic democracy and of applying these in concrete statements to new conditions. Working-men in particular had been in constant ferment. Burdened by rapid rise in the cost of living, remote from refuge in the public lands, and under pressure from the new "merchant-capitalism", they had plunged in 1828-1830 into a short-lived, but intense, political movement and were now in the middle thirties devoting themselves to the organization of labor unions. The working-men's activities had direct bearings upon were 6 The population in 1835 according to a special census was 269,873. There cotton factories, 11 iron works, 9 tanneries, and 19 breweries and distilleries. New York Times, November 2, 1835. Organized trades alone in 1834 had in New York and Brooklyn a membership of 11,500 working-men. Doc. Hist. of Amer. Industrial Soc., VI. 191. There were in the former city 43,091 voters in 1835. J. J. Lalor, Cyclopedia of Political Science, III. 853. This massing of voters, unequalled elsewhere in the United States, was politically potential. 7 J. R. Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States, I. 231-284, 335-469. two groups which at this time represented political radicalism in the city. These were a progressive minority within Tammany and the Locofoco party.s A large portion of the progressives refused to leave the regular organization when the Locofoco mutiny occurred in the fall of 1835, and this element repeatedly showed its influence in the Young Men's General Committee of Tammany. Prominent among the progressives were Ely Moore, mentioned above, the first representative of labor in the Congress of the United States; Churchill C. Cambreleng, veteran congressman and "chancellor" of Van Buren;10 and William Leggett, associate editor of the Evening Post, later, editor of the Plain Dealer. William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the Post, was judiciously sympathetic with the progressive movement and gave it consistent support, and this journal was its recognized organ. Leggett, however, was the chief inspirer of the movement. He was a prophet of idealistic democracy, who, inter alia, believed in extending women's rights, advocated freedom of speech for abolitionists, and championed passionately the doctrines of liberty and equality. During an absence of Bryant in Europe in 1835, Leggett was in charge of the Post, and his editorials were eagerly read and had a powerful influence. A writer in the Democratic Review in 1840 asserted that they tended to divide the party which in 1835 bore the name of Democratic into two camps: in the one were the Democrats who were interested in banking, the timid, and "the friends of whatever is established"; in the other were the Demo 8 The precise connection between Loco focoism and the labor movement is difficult to determine. That there was agreement in body of doctrine is evident, and it is likewise apparent that a number of labor union men were earnest Locofoco partizans. But, on the other hand, the fact that there were in the state certainly upwards of eleven thousand union men, while the Loco foco vote never equalled half that number, shows that a majority of the labor men did not support the party. A comparison of leaders is even more decisive. A somewhat careful enumeration of the persons mentioned by the Locofoco secretary, Byrdsall, as connected with the movement totals 145 names. This list includes all of the leaders and important men, and also most of the ward committeemen. Now, of the 145 only twenty-three are found in the searching index to the Documentary History of American Industrial Society, and not more than half of these are of more than incidental importance. In fact, only three of the leaders in the labor union movement were clearly important in the Loco foco party; these were Commerford, Slamm, and Townsend. Notice actions of the committee, post, pp. 407 and 412. 10 Thus the Times (July 3, 1837), phrased its estimate of Cambreleng's relation to Van Buren. Cambreleng served in every Congress from the seventeenth to the twenty-fifth, inclusive. In the latter he was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. For a sketch of him see the Democratic Rev. (1839), VI. 144-158. crats of stricter notions, the friends of reform, and the mass of the young men "." There was an incisiveness in this young editor's thought, a penetrating quality to his utterances which aroused and urged on his disciples and brought upon him vehement hatred of opponents. Even so cool-headed a statesman as Marcy called him crack-brained and knavish, the Peter the Hermit of a new crusade;12 and the banking element was furious when he advocated that the Democratic party should advance beyond its warfare upon the United States bank to attack the special privileges of the state banks. On the other hand, Leggett's friends and followers gave to him an almost adoring admiration-a feeling reflected, on his death in 1839, in the well-known tribute which Bryant wrote, . when the death-frost came to lie, On Leggett's warm and mighty heart. A more measured estimate of his character, which was made by Bryant after the lapse of many years, may be taken as fairly accurate : He was fond of study, and delighted to trace principles to their remotest consequences, whither he was always ready to follow them. The quality of courage existed in him almost to excess, and he took a sort of pleasure in bearding public opinion. He wrote with surprising fluency, and often with eloquence, took broad views of the questions that came before him, and possessed the faculty of rapidly arranging the arguments which occurred to him, in clear order, and stating them persuasively.13 Though the more militant portion of the radicals acknowledged the inspiration which they received from Leggett, they nevertheless refused to heed his counsel to seek betterment of conditions from within the party, and turned resolutely to the formation of a thorough-going party of reform. The Equal Rights or Locofoco party which this faction organized, though it proved insignificant in number of adherents and in duration of existence, nevertheless has a distinct place in American political history. More uncompro misingly, perhaps, than any other of our third-party movements of protest, this represented the humanitarian view of democracy. The dominating and ever-present idea in the creed of the Locofocos was 11 Democratic Rev., VI. 23. 12 Marcy to Wetmore, July 12, 1837, and January 16, 1837. Marcy Papers, vol. III. 13" Reminiscences of the Evening Post", in John Bigelow's William Cullen Bryant (1890), app., p. 327. For an appreciative biographical notice of Leggett, see the Democratic Rev., VI. 17-28. |