When We Were Fifty
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
When We Were Fifty America's Jubilee By Andrew Burstein Knopf. 350 pp. $28.95. Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Professor of history, San Francisco State University Andrew Burstein observes that...
...From such descriptions of unbridled temper and cold calculation, Burstein leaps to a generalization: The romantically muddled Americans of 1826 wished for moral progress on the scale of the revolutionary generation but, though sure of their superiority to other nations, were uncertain about guiding the future of their own country...
...The third, Andrew Jackson, had secured a plurality but not a majority of the electoral votes, throwing the decision into the House (as it had been in 1800), where Clay's support netted Adams the victory—and Clay the post of Secretary of State...
...Anyone unacquainted with them and interested in past politics will enjoy reading this book...
...Then it was on to Yorktown and Monticello, where he and Jefferson wept with joy at their reunion...
...Both men rendezvoused with James Madison at a banquet in Charlottesville...
...He stopped there again on his way south to the battle sites at Trenton and Princeton...
...Although Burstein pays some attention to the lives of both ordinary and literary Americans in the 1820s, his real interest is political life in the capital...
...No one, for instance, would attempt to explain the outcome of the 2000 election solely in terms of the political maneuverings of Florida's Governor Jeb Bush or even the Supreme Court, meaningful as they were...
...The Founding Fathers and their sons (very few daughters appear here) could be as petulant, nasty and vindictive as their present-day political heirs...
...The limits of his sort of old-fashioned political history lie in ignoring demographic, economic and even moral developments that are more basic than political expression, which lies somewhere between gossip and reality...
...And the Constitution they created and rallied round provided no perfect instrument for electing a President...
...Even John Quincy Adams, who after his defeat in a second presidential contest bravely returned to Washington as a Congressman fighting for liberty against the slavocracy, found no panacea...
...The stage is set with the arrival of the Marquis de Lafayette, who landed inNew York in August 1824 and toured the country for the next 13 months, visiting virtually everyone who appears in America s Jubilee...
...I was fortunate enough to listen to the eminent 19th-century historian Roy Nichols amuse his students with these tales in the late 1950s at the University of Pennsylvania...
...John Randolph of Virginia, recently elected Senator, hated both John and John Quincy Adams, not to mention Henry Clay's attempts to compromise slavery out of existence (mainly through a sponsored countermigration to Africa...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Professor of history, San Francisco State University Andrew Burstein observes that he has not written America's Jubilee exclusively for historians...
...Similarly in the 1820s...
...But in his modest political history of the years leading up to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Declaration of Independence—July 4,1826, the day both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died—Burstein tells the stories well...
...We would want to explore the issues of class and race, as indeed the NAACP is now trying to do, to determine why the ballots of poor African-Americans were not registered in Florida (and elsewhere...
...Before the inauguration (then held in March) Lafayette was again southward bound, all the way to New Orleans...
...To follow the trail of the Marquis de Lafayette, to examine cursorily the places he visited and the people he met, is to neglect major economic trends (the emerging industrial revolution, for starters), and demographic shifts (the movement westward, urban growth, the decline in family size), and moral issues (the extraordinary reform crusades, for example...
...This may be true...
...Yet if it is true that the second generation aspired to far more than it achieved, Burstein has not proved it to be so...
...Like most citizens of the early republic, though, the reader will not necessarily know what is really happening...
...In Boston he greeted the widow of John Hancock and called upon John Adams, cheered on by crowds as he had been in New York...
...This grew out of the events of the late election...
...Randolph's hardly-veiled reference to the corrupt bargain between "the puritan [Adams] and the black-leg [Clay]" after the election of 1824 led Clay, offended by the label of cheating gambler, to challenge Randolph to a duel...
...He moved on to New York for July 4, marked the official end of his long trip in Washington, and made a final visit to Jefferson, Madison and Monroe...
...National unity with its underlying ideology of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness foundered on the rocks of sectional division and slavery despite the leadership of Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, et al...
...Meanwhile Andrew Jackson, who had killed a lawyer in an 1806 duel and retained his opponent's bullet in his chest for the remainder of his life, awaited the election of 1828 by consciously building his political alliances...
...The virtue of this book is in its narrative, its placing the willing reader in the past...
...Two aspects of the ongoing battle are sure to engage the contemporary reader...
...He traveled first to the commencement at Harvard College...
...To look exclusively at the Republican and Democratic platforms or the personalities of George W. Bush and Al Gore would also be to miss important parts of the picture...
...John Quincy Adams reminded him of the generational divide between the revolutionaries and their offspring: "You have been received with rapture, by the survivors of your comrades in arms: You have been hailed as a long-absent parent by their children...
...he had received an honorary degree in 1784, his second and most recent visit to these shores...
...Randolph fired in the air, and Clay missed his target...
...After much tedious discussion, we leave the matter as we found it...
...He continued through Cincinnati and Pittsburgh back to Boston and the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill and an oration by Daniel Webster...
...Louis and ultimately to Nashville, where he dined with Jackson, then pushed on to Lexington to visit Clay's wife, Lucretia...
...Not every book needs to be so comprehensive a tome, and America's Jubilee makes no such pretense until its high-flying conclusion, which is simply not to be taken seriously...
...In December, the Marquis returned to Washington for a meeting with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams (they had first met in Paris in 1785) and Speaker of the House Henry Clay, two of the three politicians most involved in the as-yetundecided election of 1824...
...I would go a step further and say it is not written primarily for historians, since there is hardly a story in it they have not heard before...
...Congressman Daniel Webster wrote, whether in disgust or satisfaction is hard to tell, in the spring of 1825: "Another long topic has been a plan for amending the Constitution, in the manner of electing the President...
...From there he headed up the Mississippi to St...
...Far better to focus on personal animosities than constitutional issues...
...In the nation's capital he was received by President James Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, who accompanied Lafayette to Mount Vernon...
...Lafayette's surviving comrades in arms had engaged each other in glorious battles, and the children carried on the partisan warfare...
Vol. 84 • January 2001 • No. 1
