The Art of Democracy. Jim Cullen

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      Cover of the sheet music for “long Time Ago,” a minstrel song popularized by T.D. Rice, the premier minstrel of the Jacksonian era who prided himself on his “authentic” portrayals of slave life.

      “ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL.”

      Rarely have five words had more revolutionary impact on a society than these did in the United States, and rarely have five words embodied more omission, ambiguity, and outright hypocrisy. This presumably “self-evident” assertion from the Declaration of Independence was intended to be a definitive statement—a “truth”—but it ultimately raised far more questions than it answered. In the secular context in which it was written, what does it mean to say that all men are created equal? Does it mean that everyone is born with equal capacities, intellectual and otherwise? That is patently untrue. Does it mean that all begin equal before the law, whatever material advantages may otherwise be inherited or accrued? It now seems amazing that such a statement could have been made in a world that included black slaves and conquered Indians, people whose “inalienable” rights were constantly violated and whose pursuit of happiness was systematically denied. And even if we exclude nonwhite peoples from the Declaration’s purview, where do women fit in a society where all men are created equal?

      None of these questions was of decisive importance to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, or Benjamin Franklin in 1776. For them and others, the Declaration of Independence was a revolutionary manifesto designed to lay the philosophical foundations for political autonomy from Great Britain. Yet even these people were compelled to take up such overlooked issues in the years following the Revolutionary War. Adams’s wife Abigail admonished him to “remember the ladies” while drafting the Declaration of Independence with Franklin and Jefferson, and Jefferson’s ambivalent writings on race in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) ranged from a sunny optimism that an enlightened harmony between the races was possible to a belief that African Americans were inherently inferior human beings. His recognition of the evils of slavery—which he unsuccessfully proposed abolishing on a number of occasions, including an early draft of the Declaration—also led him to “tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”¹

      To greater or lesser degrees, many of the Founding Fathers realized that the Revolution had unleashed powerfully egalitarian tendencies, and a number of steps, including the repression of the Shays’ and Whiskey rebellions, as well as the drafting and ratification of the Constitution itself, were measures designed to check the radical possibilities inherent in the Declaration of Independence. Adams himself went to even greater lengths to suppress any challenges to governmental authority by signing the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which provided for the deportation of foreign refugees and the imprisonment of anyone convicted of writing, printing, or uttering comments deemed to be false, scandalous, or malicious to the government. The acts were revoked by Jefferson when he assumed the presidency in 1801.

      Given the legacy of discrimination that has marked U.S. life in the centuries since the Alien and Sedition Acts, it would be easy to conclude that such attacks on the principle of equality have largely been successful. Nonetheless, monumental political achievements, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, women’s suffrage, and the revocation of legal segregation, all drew intellectual sustenance from the Declaration of Independence, and it would be difficult to imagine such victories without it. At the same time, the intense resistance to these developments, and the amount of time it took to secure them, remind us that “progress” rarely moves in a straight line. Nor can it be considered inevitable.

      Long before the fuller social or economic dimensions of the Declaration of Independence were on the national agenda, however, the promises it offered loomed large on the cultural horizon. Certainly, many of the inequities common in other areas of U.S. life could be found here, as well as a viciousness toward those on society’s margins. Women were second-class citizens even in the artistic realm, Native Americans were subjects rather than objects of cultural discourse, and African Americans tended to influence popular culture rather than participate directly in it. Still, even in the nineteenth century there were signs that these inequities were not monolithic. The most racist artists were often fascinated by black forms, and often drew on their expressive power. By the end of the century, African Americans were literally and figuratively beginning to take the stage on their own terms, a process that will be traced in Chapter 3.

      This chapter is bound by Andrew Jackson’s rise in U.S. politics in the 1820s and the end of the Civil War. At the beginning of this period, popular culture was a fairly tentative phenomenon, but a series of transformations that affected U.S. society as a whole led to its emergence as a recognizable social force. By the end of the period, popular culture had become remarkable in its dazzling diversity.

      The first societal transformation was demographic. As we have seen, one element in the development of popular culture in the eighteenth century was the steady rise in literacy among the white population, which created a large market for reading materials. The expansion of that market was greatly amplified by the burgeoning of the population, which grew from 3.9 to 9.6 million between 1790 and 1820, and to 17 million by 1840, by which time the United States had the largest reading audience ever created. The nation had about 200 newspapers in 1800, 375 in 1810, and 1,200 by 1835. And between 1820 and 1829, 128 novels were published—five times the number published between 1810 and 1820, and almost forty more than in the entire period from 1770 to 1820.²

      The distribution of these materials was facilitated by dramatic improvements in the nation’s transportation system. The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the beginnings of a national railway system a decade later created a vast infrastructure that laid the foundation for a national market. Philadelphia, and later New York, displaced Boston as the publishing capital, providing an intellectual and economic nexus for cultural products that could now reach people across the continent. Meanwhile, a series of interior cities (Cincinnati, St. Louis, and eventually Chicago in the West; Charleston, New Orleans, and eventually Atlanta in the South) served as regional cultural centers and points of connection with the rest of the country.

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