Luận án Tiến sĩ về Richard M. Johnson và Sự trỗi dậy của Dân chủ Miền Tây, 1780-1850

THE KENTUCKY COLONEL: RICHARD M. JOHNSON AND THE RISE OF WESTERN DEMOCRACY, 1780-1850 by MILES SMITH Bachelor of Arts, 2006 College of Charleston Charleston, South Carolina Master of Arts, 2008 College of Charleston The Citadel Charleston, South Carolina Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May, 2013 ii Table of Contents Introduction and Historiography…1 I. Kentucke Childhood…30 II. Foray into Politics…51 III.

“The Soldier’s Wealth is HONOR”…97 IV. Frontiers in Politics and Religion…162 VI. The Cause of Democracy…210 VII. Vice President…247 VIII.

Into the West…300 Bibliography…324 1 Introduction & Historiography Set along the Missouri River fifty miles northwest of Kansas City, Atchinson, Kansas’ 15,000 residents worked for railroads, farmed, worked in small factories, and managed artisan shops. The presence of the river and the railroad caused rapid growth in Atchinson. A center of violent Democratic proslavery agrarianism in the late 1850s, Atchison transformed into a business center with the arrival of the railroads after the Civil War. Great names in industry such as John Murray Forbes and Benjamin Pierce Cheney owned the railroads that departed west from town.

Burgeoning industry in the 1880s made Atchinson a prosperous town in many ways representative of the many boomtowns sprinkled across the American West. Large enough to support five or six newspapers, the city sported two Republican organs and two for the Democrats. The Daily Globe and another paper purported independence. Atchison’s citizens, no matter their politics, lived in a bustling time.

The Atchinson Merchants and Manufacturers Bureau, confident of the city’s future as a major transportation depot for Americans traveling, published adulatory reports extolling the city’s business climate. Potter, The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 200-216; Eleanor L. Turk, "The Germans of Atchison, 1854-1859: Development of an Ethnic Community." Kansas History 2 (Autumn 1979): 146–156; Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern 2 Capitalist Republicans replaced slave-running Democrats in Atchison, but residents loved an American hero, no matter the party. So on Tuesday, May 8, 1887, the Atchinson Daily Globe ran an article certain to interest its readers.

The paper labeled the feature “A FORGOTTEN HERO.” Curious subscribers read that the forgotten hero, a Col. Johnson of the state of Kentucky, died nearly forty years earlier but lived a heroic and worthy life. Johnson, the paper informed its readers, killed Tecumseh, rose to the Vice Presidency under Martin Van Buren, and figured prominently in the rise of Kentucky and the “great northwest territory.” The paper lamented that “few readers in this swiftly moving age have paused retrospectively long enough to value his services or wonder at his feet.” Kansans, situated at the eastern edge of what nineteenth century Americans called the Far West, appreciated Johnson as an example of an American who confronted the same issues that contemporary westerners encountered. He fought Indians, most famously claiming to have killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames.

He supported laborers and gained enormous popularity among urban workers when he championed eradicating imprisonment for debt. To a Kansan in 1887, Johnson looked very much like a forerunner to Gilded Age Populists. But few westerners or even Johnson’s own Kentuckians knew anything at all about Johnson. Americans interested in the spread of American democracy and society into the West assumed that Jefferson and America (New York and London: W.

Norton and Co. Vandegrift, The Advantages of Atchison, Kansas as a Commercial and Manufacturing Centre (Atchison, KS: Haskell Print Co., 1887); The Atchison Daily Globe, (Atchison, KS) Tuesday, May 03, 1887. [Type text] 3 Jackson carried the standard. The Daily Globe, keenly aware of Atchison’s understandable ignorance of who exactly Johnson was, used the feature to remind the readers that Johnson exemplified what America became as much as, if not more than, the usual democratic American heroes.

2 In the mid-nineteenth century no two political figures represented the culmination of western democracy more than Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Hezekiah Niles, editor of the popular Niles Weekly Register, specifically stated that Jackson “followed the course” of Thomas Jefferson in his political life. Therein lay a very substantive difference between himself and Jefferson or Jackson. Richard Johnson imbibed the ideology of the Kentucky frontier in the 1780s and 1790s.

And no man impacted that generation of Kentucky settlers more than Thomas Jefferson. Known in his own day as a democrat, Jefferson lived the life and lifestyle of a Virginia aristocrat. Johnson, born into relative affluence for the Kentucky frontier, maintained frontier habits. Jefferson valued patrician manners and preferred to keep the company of cultivated intellects.

Johnson kept a tavern. Both men genuinely empathized with poor farmers; to Jefferson’s credit, he interacted with them socially, especially in his capacity as a neighboring farmer. 3 The Atchison Daily Globe, (Atchison, KS) Tuesday, May 03, 1887; Charles Postel, 2 The Populist Vision (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009). 3 Niles Register, June 20, 1835; Robert G.

Gunderson, "Rumpsey, Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson Shot Tecumseh," Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Society 14 (October, 1956), 302; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (New York: Little, Brown Co. [Type text] 4 Critics accurately questioned Jefferson’s democratic credentials and did so quite often while he hobnobbed with French aristocrats, he shot back that he usually courted associations with “gardeners, vignerons, coopers, farmers, etc.” Yet Jefferson’s actions told a different story. He virulently despised Patrick Henry, his predecessor as governor. Henry warned of tendencies toward aristocracy among Virginia’s elites.

Although both Henry and Jefferson enjoyed wealth and station, Henry lived frugally, paid down his debts, and publicly derided the opulence that Jefferson and his Monticello estate ostentatiously represented. Still, Jefferson’s association with the long Whig political tradition in Britain left him with distaste not only for monarchy but for empowered government in general. 4 Chronically in debt, Jefferson looked toward and longed for a place nearly untouched by civilization. Therein lay his fascination with the American West.

But despite this longing, Jefferson never embraced the reality of democracy. He lived in his giant unfinished mansion, kept a massive wine cellar, and drove up debts throughout his life. He never reconciled his life to his politics. While certainly an ideological partisan of democratization in American politics, Jefferson remained, in the words of historian Fawn Brodie, an unconscious aristocrat.

Jefferson never trusted the people, despite his political rhetoric. Jefferson’s views and actions on race also lacked democratic backbone. Cunningham, In Pursuit of Reason: the Life of Thomas Jefferson 4 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 108; Michael Kranish, Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 91. [Type text] 5 never acknowledged his Hemmings relations.

He lacked what Brodie called the “bulldog courage” Johnson exemplified when he publicly recognized his two daughters by Julia Chinn. Unlike Jefferson, Johnson’s base beliefs mandated equality even at personal cost. Jefferson feared losing his aristocratic station in life. He never compromised that for anything more than the political aesthetic of democratic progress.

For Johnson, the culture of democracy demanded that his daughters be given same rights as any other attractive child of a prosperous farmer. 5 The only other political figure that influenced Johnson as much as Jefferson did was Andrew Jackson. The American backcountry produced both men; Jackson in South Carolina and Johnson in Kentucky. Jackson also saw himself as a disciple and follower of Jefferson, who reportedly thought he was dangerous.

Jackson believed in the people, and he believed they chose him to be their anointed mouthpiece. Jackson signified the supremacy of white manhood democracy. The movement’s popularity lay not just in the emphasis on democratic innovation but in the idealized co-joining of the concepts of democracy and progress. Democracy bred progress.

Farmers in Kentucky and Tennessee, the nation’s 1830s political frontier, experienced the challenges and benefits of egalitarian politics. Likewise the idea of the West, democracy, and progress also became intertwined. Democracy convinced farmers and settlers that they might rule ably themselves. As the frontier moved West throughout the first half of the nineteenth Joseph J.

Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: 5 Vintage, 1998), 162; Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (W. Norton and Co. [Type text] 6 century, Americans set up territorial governments, an indication in their minds of progress. So the small farmer, democracy, the frontier West, and progress all interwove during the era supposedly defined by Jackson.

Those ideas created the defining narrative for the nineteenth century American nation. 6 Jackson articulated democracy and the West for political purposes, but he replicated the lifestyle of the great southern planters he so despised and emulated their culture. Born into Carolina’s rough-hewn backcountry society, Jackson enjoyed neither gentility nor education in his adolescence and early adulthood. He consciously worked to learn and later affect the manners of southern gentry.

Desire for wealth and affluence consumed Jackson’s ambitions. He used politics and ideology to further his ambitions, both material and political. But Jackson never claimed nor acted the part of an ideologue. Property and status propelled Jackson’s political existence.

Democracy became a part of Jackson’s mantra because it was the mantra of Tennessee’s elites, whom Jackson desperately hoped to ingratiate himself with. His actual politics and style of governance actually corresponded more closely to Napoleon Bonaparte’s (whom Jackson respected). He presumed to speak for laborers, mechanics, and small farmers. Their “overwhelming numbers” represented the “bone and sinew” of the country.

More importantly, Jackson claimed that the small farmer and working classes owned “the H. Brands, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 6 97; Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York: Random House, 2008), 3; John Ashworth, Agrarians and Aristocrats: Party Ideology in the United States, 1836-1846 (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1983), 9. [Type text] 7 great mass” of The United States’ national wealth. Jackson claimed that the era’s wealth was “distributed in moderate amounts among the millions of free men who possess it.” 7 Jackson no doubt sincerely hoped that United States might one day become more egalitarian.

Planter elites however, not small farmers and laboring Americans, defined the policies of the Jacksonians and their successor, the Democratic Party. Throughout his administration Jackson balked at implementing the type of reforms urban workers clamored for. Urban workers only embraced the Democratic program after Jackson’s veto of the Bank of the United States. Despite urban workers’ wide support of the Bank veto, the major beneficiaries of Jackson’s veto.

Southern aristocrats’ language stemmed from an agrarian order. Bankers, capitalists, and financiers who made their fortunes on the movement of capital seemed thoroughly un-republican to southerners educated revering Cincinnatus and other classical republicans. John Taylor of Caroline, a Virginia planter and partisan of rigid republicanism during the Early Republic, argued that “the power of despotism or aristocracy” inevitably controlled banks and their interests. Monarchies and aristocracies created banks.

8 7 Andrew Jackson to Willie Blount, May 29, 1823 in Harold D. Hoth, and George Hoeman eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson: Volume V, 1821-1824 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press), 278-279; Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Random House, 1999), 25; Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 79. 8 Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1969), 31; Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 21; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 328; John Taylor of Caroline, [Type text] 8 Attacking banks became a major tenant of Jeffersonian and subsequently Jacksonian orthodoxy. Jackson and the Democratic Party attempted stop the increased power of capitalists in American society.