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The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846

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Charles Sellers sets an ambitious goal for himself. Using a multidisciplinary approach, he revisits an already well researched and controversial period in American history to formulate his hypothesis. He argues that the economic boom, which followed the war of 1812, began a cycle of transformation that lasted a generation, the outcome of which determined the capitalist market system that effects our daily lives even to this day. To buttress his argument Sellers uses a great many monographs on a variety of subjects, the most critical of which he outlines in a selective bibliographic essay.

Sellers theorizes that it was a market revolution that established the "capitalist hegemony over economy, politics and culture." (5) While the constitution is the framework of American government and the foundation of its laws, in the early eighteenth century people's attitudes and the events they triggered transformed the nation politically, economically, socially, and culturally. Egalitarians opposed a more intrusive government that market elites saw necessary to promote capitalism.

There have been outspoken men with powerful ideas in America's history and the period under discussion is no exception. Disagreement prodded a divided country toward its ultimate destiny. There was no grand design; contemporaneously there existed no perfect road map to the future. The clashing perspectives of land and market focused early American politics on three tightly linked questions: 1) How democratic - how responsive to popular majorities - would government be? 2) Would government power be extensive and concentrated at the federal level or limited and diffused among states? 3) To what extent and in what ways would government promote economic growth?

In the brief span of a generation, these questions were answered between the end of war in 1815 and Democrat Pennsylvanian David Wilmot's antislavery amendment in the House, which inflamed differences over slavery. Suppressed anger encouraged new coalitions to form which, Sellers maintains, made the Civil War inevitable. The "great contradiction," as he refers to the Civil War, was caused by the failure of a compromise between the irreconcilability of slavery and liberal capitalism.

Sellers' treatise is a thoughtful synthesis explaining what happened and why. In the political economy "public policy was an indispensable generator of market revolution." (435) Change began when Andrew Jackson defeated the British in New Orleans and the economic boom, which followed the War of 1812, pitted subsistence farmers against enterprising New York traders. According to Sellers abundant land and geography created a class struggle. As citizens moved inland they could subsist but impenetrable geographic barriers fostered familial and neighborly relationships. In contrast, along the coast, grain and other commodities could be grown or manufactured for trade with England. There commerce led to economic interdependence and the rising importance and influence of port cities. The significance of these developments was personified in the opposing philosophies of Jeffersonian Republicanism's whose desire for a more limited government conflicted with Hamilton's "developmental capitalist state." (33)

Sellers argues Republicanism was an ambiguous ideology. Under the four Republican administrations of Jefferson and Madison, people were affected less by federal power; state and local governments exerted considerably more influence. Both Jefferson and Madison each opposed the Hamiltonians. But "the crucial difference between the two friends was also the crucial ambiguity at the heart of republicanism. Jefferson was anxious about the corrupting effect of the market on American farm families, while Madison saw farmers as incipient small entrepreneurs who were to be fulfilled by the market." (39)

To tap interior resources, entrepreneurs influenced state governments to consider transportation needs. Federal money was not available so, in the case of New York, under Governor De Witt Clinton, a Republican legislature financed the Erie Canal. This success spurred other transportation projects in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. "By the 1840s, as a consequence, a northeastern sectional economy was integrating the port/hinterland economies and reaching out to create a national market." (45) Ironically it was Republican-controlled state governments that first provided the financing for transportation improvements which made the market revolution possible.

According to Sellers, lawyers, judges, and courts led the way in formulating state policy. The epitome of judicial interpretation was the case of Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824, in which Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall, writing for a unanimous court, adopted Daniel Webster's argument that the Constitution under the commerce clause trumped state regulation in matters of commerce. This broad construction of the constitution angered Jefferson, then aged eighty-two, who riled at the aggrandizement of Federal power.

During this time of change and transformation, people turned to religion for comfort. Through religion people sought their own peace in a troubling time. Sellers notes "their pessimistic piety belies our historical mythology of capitalist transformation as human fulfillment." (202) However the prospect of conversions on a large scale through a national market, convinced religious leaders of the benefits from a capitalist market. Sellers writes that "a prophetic irony made these spiritual missives [referring to publications of Moderate Light organizations] the first standardized, mass-produced commodities to be distributed and promoted for the entire national market." (215)

A new reality emerged within a larger market. Widening inequality of income and consumption between elites and common folks contributed to a peripatetic migration of working people. As one result, the birth rate declined, but this proved to be a normal reaction to the transition from a rural agrarian society that other industrializing countries also experienced. Children used to be an asset but, in a society undergoing transformation, additional children were a liability.

In America there was a difference however: "only in the United States...did the demographic transition spread through a mainly rural people before a sharp mortality decline and before large-scale industrialization/urbanization. Only here was it so clearly associated with the rising price of land." (240) People involved in the frets of life were caught up in a Kulturkampf for change that "telescoped the land-scarcity stage of fertility decline into a generation or two before merging imperceptibly into the industrial/urban stage." (240)

Slavery was the touchstone of the Republic. "The capitalist market took off for global conquest by first propagating and then repudiating slavery." (396) Significant of this switch is the reversal of John C. Calhoun, a prominent politician from South Carolina. He changed his view in support of slavery to preserve his Southern base. There fearful South Carolinians had passed a quarantine law which jailed free black seamen while in one of their ports. The nullification crisis that ensued challenged federal supremacy over state law. Coupled with anti-tariff sentiment "the old South of Confederate rebellion crystallized politically in the 1820s as farmers accommodated to slavery and planters accommodated to antidevelopmental, anti-tax democracy." (280)

But, if slavery was the touchstone of the Republic, the keystone of the market revolution was politics. This is logical because his thesis argues for a class based political struggle between market oriented elites and a majority rural constituency. Candidates and parties had to appeal to larger coalitions to win elections. If a coalition became too large however, marginal groups became susceptible to defection to the opposing party. The evolution of the two party system and class politics, coupled with the controversy between credit and specie, led to an unlikely candidate for President, Andrew Jackson.

Voter interest from "class politics and party competition pushed white male turnout in presidential elections from one-fourth in 1824 to over half in 1828-1936 and four-fifths in 1840." (349) Old Hickory's dramatic electoral victory was helped by a partisan press and the doubling of voter turnout, which demonstrated the power of the majority. Nevertheless there remained limits which had a lingering affect on politics. "As anti-Jacksonians mastered the new techniques of popular appeal, this second party system moved toward two-party parity, adjusted to the demographic tides of urbanization and immigration, and survived in considerable measure even the upheaval of civil war and reconstruction." (297)

The Bank War controversy, according to Sellers, was crucial. Jackson could not attack state banks because of constitutional limits, only the national bank. "Society's most profoundly political decisions were being made out of public view, by a private, profit-making corporation that was answerable only to a paper aristocracy of stockholders and banking interest, and to no public authority. This class control of economic life...was the inevitable issue in the political showdown over the market revolution." (322) While Jackson won the Bank war, ironically, Sellers argues, as prosperity returned, credit again flowed freely in support of the market. "Market revolution, essentially completed in economy, culture, and polity, gave way to industrial revolution." (359)

The question of capitalism's compatibility with democracy remained unanswered until the problem of slavery could be resolved. Unfortunately this did not occur without another war. As stated earlier, the issue erupted over Wilmot's antislavery amendment in 1848 which inflamed irreconcilable sectional differences. A coalition, formed of slave owning planters and non-slave owning white farmers, defied the will of the majority. The advocates for the principals of freedom and democracy could not relinquish their adherence to human bondage.

In summary, Sellers explains how America adopted the capitalist market system by a political process based on class conflict, the outcome of which influenced the formation of an economic and social order that is perpetuated to this very day. One could say it was democracy at work, imperfect as it was.

Did capitalism and democracy grow up together as natural outgrowths of each other over the course of American History? Or, were they antagonistic of each other? Did some Americans view the growth of capitalism as an impediment to the growth of democracy? The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, by Charles Sellers offers a strikingly new frame in which readers can think about these questions. His book is a survey of the United States during the Antebellum Era, or U.S. History before the Civil War. It deals with the story of how market capitalism developed and rooted itself into the political, social, and economic fabric of American society during that period. In his analysis Sellers highlights an important aspect in American social and political history, he examines how the small farmers and those who made up the rural majority viewed freedom. They sought to preserve the independence and equality of a self-sufficient, self-governing citizenry; they wanted government weak cheap and close to home. This was their ideal America, a yeoman republic where all American where independent, self-sufficient workers not controlled by aristocratic governments or by entrepreneurial elites (Sellers, 1991, pg. 32). Conversely, the antagonists in this story were those who pushed the encroachment of market capitalism into American society they created middle class mythology of democratic capitalism. They maintained democracy and capitalism where equal parts of each other and muffled the contradiction between capitalism and democracy in a mythology of consensual democratic enterprise. They were unabashed champions of enterprise and the bourgeois/middle class ethic (Sellers, 1991, 363).

While The Market Revolution focuses on the story on economic transformation and the class conflict that erupted during Antebellum America on a national level, there are many works that take its story and focus it on a state level perspective. The Paradox of Progress: Economic Change, Individual Enterprise and Political Culture in Michigan, 1837-1878 (2003), by Martin J. Hershock is a book heavily influenced by Seller's theories and ideas. It explores Michigan's transition from a predominantly farming economy to the development of a political and social culture that favored market capitalism. Exploring how this transition was brought on by the forces of state government and business, and how the changes disrupted party politics during that period and leading to the formation of the Republican Party. Indicating that the initial goals of Republicans were to protect small farmers and stop the onslaught on capitalism's infusion into the state economy. And, for those who want to move on from the Civil War Ear there is The Populist Moment (1978), by Lawrence Goodwyn. This book continues the story of The Market Revolution, examining the conflicts of democracy, market capitalism and the farming classes during the Gilded Age. Showing how the farming class in the American South and West took direct political action by forming the American Populist Party to fight for the rights of workers and farmers that were being trampled by the collusion of big business and big government.

Overall I would recommend this book because I feel it would give any reader a new view on United States history. Specifically, examining how Americans from a different era viewed what freedom and democracy meant to the lives of ordinary. It seems there's a general consensus in the current culture that United States is a free nation because of capitalism; in terms of the material wealth and social mobility capitalism creates. But, The Market Revolution offers a much different perspective and shows that Americans long ago felt that they were free because they worked for themselves and lived in communities where values where concerned with equality and meeting the needs of everyone. Unfortunately, as much as I feel this book should read by everyone, I could only recommend it to someone who at least as taken an upper level undergraduate course in history. The book is really best read by someone with a minimum understanding of historiography of the Jacksonian Era as well as a familiarity with the social, economic, and political issues of that time.

Solid all-around work on the social and economic forces that changed the United States from an Old World society, where privilege and rank were foremost, to a budding modern commercial civilization where individualism is prized and pluralistic republican principles predominate. A good read for anyone interested in the first half of the 19th century.

In this book, Sellers relates capitalism to historic trends within the United States. Although at time a bit heavy-handed, Sellers makes some important points. One weakness with the Market Revolution is sometimes the line between exchange economies and commercialism is crossed. As Steven Hahn warns, there is a distinct difference. In the eagerness to relate history and economy, Sellers blurs this line. Overall, this is an interesting and valuable book that provides enlightening insights into economic trends within the US.

This is one of the most important works on U.S. history before 1865 out there. BUT, it is very long and very tough reading. Put simply, if you are not extremely interested in economic history, you'll quit reading this book after 50 pages, so don't waste your money. The book contains important ideas, but they are not clearly conveyed. I recommend this book for grad. students in history (who probably will be forced to read it), but that's about it.

I've really a mixed opinion about this book. The author is very knowledgable about the period and seems to ascertain convincingly the motivations of most of the political players and factions of the times. Yet he insists on spinning some Marxist theological framework for the history that only sometimes adds insight. I'll grant that Marx had some interesting and fruitful insights into capitalism but in Sellers' hands, the Marxism just muddles the story.

He is also politically correct to a fault, throwing in also sorts of contemporary fads into the story when they often are glaringly NOT part of the narrative as seen by the people of the day. He is, after all, professor emeritus at UC Berkeley.

Worst, when the faults collide, one gets undecipherable writing like this from page 396:

"Yet only by enlisting free-soil Negrophobia would the northern bourgeoisie finally sanctify in fratricidal blood a racist bourgeois republic." Gee, wasn't freeing the slaves a NOBLE thing? Maybe it was REALLY a bad thing since the Republican Party was founded to do just that.

In spite of my many complaints, I read the book cover to cover and came away much more knowledgable and understanding of this important period in the formation of America. Thanks to my daughter-in-law Larisa for the thoughtful gift. If you have a good BS filter, I recommend this book.

Market revolution fills the need for a signifiant economic history on the development of American capitalism.

look, its not really that book about the transition to capitalism in America you wanted to read, its boring schlock about congressional political trivia in the National Era. Go read Dobbs, and when you get to be senior faculty fire this man. 500 pages too long