Confederate "Heritage" Month 2009, April 9: Jacksonian democracy and slavery in Virginia

John Randolph of Virginia

Christopher Curtis writing in "Reconsidering Suffrage Reform in the 1829-1830 Virginia Constitutional Convention" Journal of Southern History Feb 2008 describes a portion of the Jacksonian democratic movement as it applied especially to Virginia.

In a passage that captures well the reality that Jacksonian democracy was both very progressive in expanding liberty and the possibilities of political activity and at the same time drastically limited in comparison to the official standards that would prevail just 40 years later, Curtis writes:

The political realignments anticipating the emergence of Jacksonian democracy have been well documented by political historians of the era. Changes in electoral processes, voter mobilization, and the emergence of nationally recognized candidates with ideologically oriented platforms were reflected in a twin commitment to mass political parties and white manhood suffrage. These realignments thus created the essential mechanisms for establishing modem representative democracy, in which political rights were vested in individual personhood. Political language also played a key role in this democratic development, transforming the image of democracy itself from a form of government that many of the Founders considered seditious into the seemingly natural fulfillment of the principles of the American Revolution. Virginia experienced many aspects of this political transformation, especially the development of the party system, in ways similar to those in other states. In some areas, however, Virginia's experience diverged sharply from national trends in democratic development. Two instances are particularly notable in this respect. First, the process of democratization in Virginia, as in the remainder of the South, was colored distinctively by the presence of slavery. And second, Virginia lagged behind other states in abandoning property qualifications and in adopting white manhood suffrage. Nevertheless, by midcentury the core principle of modem democracy - that political rights and representation were vested in individual persons - was realized in Virginia. Paradoxically, however, this vision of democratic citizenship reached fruition simultaneously with an increasingly ardent commitment to the preservation of slavery.

... Although historians can speak authentically of a national phenomenon called Jacksonian democracy, the particular incidents that motivated this political change necessarily varied from state to state. At least until the Civil War, democratic development in America was an affair from the bottom up.

Curtis in that passage points out the contradictions of Southern slave society, the expansion of democracy for whites coinciding with an increased support for slavery.

I did a big double-take, though, on his comment about democracy being transformed "from a form of government that many of the Founders considered seditious"! A few reactionaries like Alexander Hamilton who supported the Constitution did regard the whole notion of democracy with suspicion. Other reactionaries opposed it. But the notion that the Founders viewed the Constitutional government as a "republic" and specifically not a "democracy" - a notion which has been a particular favorite of the John Birch Society - is just goofy, to use the technical term for it. At the Constitutional convention, the delegates used the terms "republic" and "democracy" interchangeably. They knew that the government they were proposing was not going to be a city-state like classical Athens or a Swiss canton. And they saw the needs for safeguards to protect against what we now call the "tyranny of the majority". But his formulation implying that some significant portion of those early leaders we know as the Founders thought democracy was "seditious" is seriously off-base.

Curtis also describes the way in which the four years of reform in Viginia beginning with the state constitutional convention of 1829 through Governor John Randolph's unsuccessful attempt to abolish slavery in the state in 1832 integrated slave ownership more deeply in Virginia's political ideology of republican government, a deeply contradictory development that was a part of the trends that led eventually to the Civil War. In that process, the "freedom" to own black slaves came to be considered at least for many people and certainly for the slaveowners, a basic part of the "democratic" rights of white men. So when white Southerners talked about defending their "freedom", many of them understood that as meaning in significant part the ability or future prospects of owning other human beings as slaves.

For four years, beginning with the constitutional convention in October 1829, Virginians engaged in a series of public debates that examined fundamental questions of property ownership, law, and republican government. In addition to revising the state constitution, these debates grappled with key political issues that included the appropriate structure of an independent judiciary, the funding of internal improvement projects, the nature of federal relations, and most famously, in the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner insurrection, the future of slavery. A principal consequence of these debates was the reconceptualization of republican political ideals; the traditional common-law concept of freehold citizenship (based on landowning) was replaced by a more democratic belief that diverse forms of property ownership also possessed political value. Most significantly, property rights in slaves became a key ingredient of Virginia's republican political ideology. In this manner, the Virginia debates reflected a sea change in republican political thought whereby the ownership of slaves replaced the ownership of land as the fundamental property relation signifying the virtues of self-government. This transformation in republican ideology represented a necessary precondition for the subsequent development of democracy in a modem slave-owning society.

This was the last major internal attempt in any of the future Confederate states to abolish slavery at the state level. Virginia as part of the Upper South and some other states like Kentucky did still have some open debate over the future of slavery. But in most of the slave states, even a serious discussion of phasing out the "peculiar institution" was effectively forbidden. Over time, the Southern "Slave Power" (as its opponents called the political block dominated by slaveowners) became more and more hysterically afraid of open discussion of slavery. Even when it was occurring in the free states.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2009, jacksonian democracy, slavery