The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914Various
History
The Washington Historical Quarterly, Volume V, 1914
Various
Northwest, Pacific -- History -- Periodicals
When the backwoodsmen crossed the Alleghanies they put between
themselves and the Atlantic Coast a barrier which seemed to separate
them from a region already too much like the Europe they had left,
and as they followed the courses of the rivers that flowed to the
Mississippi, they called themselves "Men of the Western Waters," and
their new home in the Mississippi Valley was the "Western World." Here,
by the thirties, Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith
of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his
own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But
while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal
to leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the
uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were
frontier fighter or president, and it even rebuked and limited its own
legislative representatives and recalled its senators when they ran
counter to their chosen executive. Jacksonian Democracy was essentially
rural. It was based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling
of the frontier, in which classes and inequalities of fortune played
little part. But it did not demand equality of condition, for there
was abundance of natural resources and the belief that the self made
man had a right to his success in the free competition which western
life afforded, was as prominent in their thought as was the love of
democracy. On the other hand, they viewed governmental restraints
with suspicion as a limitation on their right to work out their own
individuality.
For the banking institutions and capitalists of the East they had an
instinctive antipathy. Already they feared that the "money power" as
Jackson called it, was planning to make hewers of wood and drawers of
water of the common people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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