READING: Harriett Martineau Observes the Court of President Andrew Jackson in Washington DC in the Early 1830s
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Power, paradox, & prejudice in President Jackson’s Washington, DC, as its social-political theatre was seen through Harriet Martineau’s British eyes…
What happens when a sharp-minded British abolitionist lands in the unfinished, bustling capital of the United States? Harriet Martineau’s Retrospect of Western Travel is universally regarded as one of the most perceptive, and has always been one of the most influential, accounts of the United States in the pre-1860 pre-Civil War era. Published in 1838 after her extensive travels through the United States and Canada from 1834 to 1836, Martineau’s work is both a travelogue and a social analysis, blending vivid description with sharp, often critical, commentary on American society, politics, and culture.
As a pioneering British social theorist and advocate for abolition, women’s rights, and utilitarian reform, Martineau brought to her American journey a keen eye for the contradictions and aspirations of the young republic. This reading is only of the part of the book recording her time in Washington, D.C.—a small part of the book as a whole. This part of the book offers a front-row seat to the paradoxes of Jacksonian Washington, as ideals of democracy clash with the realities of power, privilege, and exclusion. Her observations—by turns admiring, skeptical, and deeply critical—reveal a city and a nation wrestling with its own identity.
Martineau’s time in Washington, D.C. occupies a central place in her book’s narrative. She found herself at the heart of American political life, a city that was, in her words, “the headquarters of the national government, and the focus of all the interests, hopes, and fears of the Union.” Washington in the 1830s was physically unfinished, socially stratified, and politically charged. What most struck Martineau about Washington was the way in which the city’s social and political life reflected the broader tensions of American democracy. She observed the rituals and performances of power with a mixture of fascination and skepticism, particularly attentive to the openness of American political institutions—how, in theory, any white man could approach his representatives or even the president himself—yet equally attuned to the exclusions and hypocrisies. This reading from Retrospect of Western Travel is a meditation on the then-promises and perils of American democracy as seen from its political center.
Martineau, Harriet. 1838. Retrospect of Western Travel. 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley. <https://archive.org/details/retrospectofwest01martuoft> <https://archive.org/details/retrospectofwest02martuoft>.
Notable Quotes from Martineau:
I have always looked back upon the five weeks at Washington as one of the most profitable, but by far the least agreeable, of my.residences,.in the United States. In Philadelphia I had found perpetual difficulty in remembering that I was in a foreign country. The pronunciation of a few words by our host and hostess, the dinner table, and the inquiries of visitors were almost all that occurred to remind me that I was not in a brother’s house. At Washington it was very different. The city itself is unlike any other that ever was seen, straggling out hither and thither…
Then there was the society, singularly compounded from the largest variety of elements: foreign ambassadors, the American government, members of Congress, from Clay and Webster down to Davy Crockett, Benton from Missouri, and Cuthbert, with the freshest Irish brogue, from Georgia; flippant young belles, “pious” wives dutifully attending their husbands, and groaningmover the frivolities of the place; grave judges, saucy travellers, pert newspaper reporters, melancholy Indian chiefs, and timid New England ladies, trembling on the verge of the vortex; all this was wholly unlike anything that is to be seen in any other city in the world; for all these are mixed up together in daily intercourse, like the higher circle of a little village, and there is nothing else. You have this or nothing; you pass your days among these people, or you spend them alone…
It is at first extremely interesting to hear Mr. Calhoun talk; and there is a neverfailing evidence of power in all he says and does which commands intellectual reverence; but the admiration is too soon turned into regret, into absolute melancholy. It is impossible to resist the conviction that all this force can be at best but useless, and is but too likely to be very mischievous. His mind has long lost all power of ¢ communicating with any other. I know no man who lives in such utter intellectual solitude. He meets men, and harangues them by the fireside as in the Senate; he is wrought like a piece of machinery, set a-going vehemently by a weight, and stops while you answer; he either passes by what you say, or twists it into a suitability with what is in his head, and begins to lecture again. Of course, a mind like this can have little influence in the Senate, except by virtue, perpetually wearing out, of what it did in its less eccentric days; but its influence at home is to be dreaded. There is no hope that an intellect so cast in narrow theories will accommodate itself to varying circumstances; and there is every danger that it will break up all that it can, in order to remould the materials in its own way. Mr. Calhoun is as full as ever of his nullification doctrines; and those who know the force that is in him, and his utter incapacity of modification by other minds (after having gone through as remarkable a revolution of political opinion as perhaps any man ever experienced), will no more expect repose and self-retention from him than from a volcano in full force…
At dinner the president was quite disposed for conversation. Indeed, he did nothing but talk. His health is poor, and his diet of the sparest. We both talked freely of the governments of England and France; I, novice in American politics as I was, entirely forgetting that the great French question was pending, and that the president and the King of the French were then bandying very hard words. I was most struck and surprised with the president’s complaints of the American Senate, in which there was at that time a small majority against the administration. He told me that I must not judge of the body by what I saw it then, and that after the 4th of March I should behold a Senate more worthy of the country…. The ground of his complaint was, that the senators had sacrificed their dignity by disregarding the wishes of their constituents. The other side of the question is, that the dignity of the Senate is best consulted by its members following their own convictions, declining instructions for the term for which they are elected. It is a serious difficulty, originating in the very construction of the body, and not to be settled by dispute…
General Jackson is extremely tall and thin, with a slight stoop, betokening more weakness than naturally belongs to his years. He has a profusion of stiff gray hair, which gives to his appearance whatever there is of formidable in it. His countenance bears commonly an expression of melancholy gravity; though, when roused, the fire of passion flashes from his eyes, and his whole person looks then formidable enough. His mode of speech is slow and quiet, and his phraseology sufficiently betokens that his time has not been passed among books…
I was fortunate enough once to catch.a glimpse of the invisible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America. He is supposed to be the Moving Spring of the whole administration; the thinker, planner, and doer; but it is all in the dark. Documents are issued of an excellence which prevents their being attributed to persons who take the responsibility of them; a correspondence is kept up all over the country for which no one seems to be answerable; work is done, of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about them with a superstitious wonder; and the invisible Amos Kendall has the credit of it all. President Jackson’s Letters to his Cabinet are said to be Kendall’s; the Report on Sunday Mails is attributed to Kendall: the letters sent from Washington to appear in remote country newspapers, whence they are collected and published in the Globe as demonstrations of public opinion, are pronounced to be written by Kendall. Every mysterious paragraph in opposition newspapers relates to Kendall; and it is some relief to the timid that his having now the office of postmaster-general affords opportunity for open attacks upon this twilight personage; who is proved, by the faults in the postoffice administration, not to be able to do quite everything well. But he is undoubtedly a great genius. He unites with his “great talent for silence” a splendid audacity…
There was no knowing, when Webster sauntered in[to the Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol], threw himself down, and leaned back against the table, his dreamy eyes seeming to see nothing about him, whether he would by-and-by take up his hat and go away, or whether he would rouse himself suddenly, and stand up to address the judges. For the generality there was no knowing; and to us, who were forewarned, it was amusing to see how the court would fill after the entrance of Webster, and empty when he had gone back to the Senate Chamber. The chief interest to me in Webster’s pleading, and also in his speaking in the Senate, was from seeing one so dreamy and nonchalant roused into strong excitement. It seemed like having a curtain lifted up through which it was impossible to pry; like hearing autobiographical secrets. Webster is a lover of ease and pleasure, and has an air of the most unaffected indolence and careless self-sufficiency. It is something to see him moved with anxiety and the toil of intellectual conflict; to see his lips tremble, his nostrils expand, the perspiration start upon his brow; to hear his voice vary with emotion, and to watch the expression of laborious thought while he pauses, for minutes together, to consider his notes, and decide upon the arrangement of his argument. These are the moments when it becomes clear that this pleasure-loving man works for his honours and his gains…. No one will suppose that this is said in disparagement of Mr. Webster. It is only saying that he owes to his own industry what he must otherwise owe to miracle…
Mr. Webster owes his rise to the institutions under which he lives; institutions which open the race.to the swift-and.the battle to the strong; but there is little in him that is congenial with them. He is aristocratic in his tastes and habits, and but little republican simplicity is to be recognized in him…. When he is [in earnest].. his power is majestic, irresistible; but his ambition for office, and for the good opinion of those who surround him, is seen too often in alternation with his love of ease and luxury to allow of his being confided in as he is admired. If it had been otherwise, if his moral had-equalled his intellectual supremacy, if his aims had been as single as his reason is unclouded, he would long ago have carried all before him, and been the virtual-monarch of the United States, But to have expected this would have been unreasonable. The very best men of any society are rarely or never to be found among its eminent statesmen; and it is not fair to look for them in offices which, in the present condition of human affairs, would yield to such no other choice than of speedy failure or protracted martyrdom…
Mr. Clay is sometimes spoken of as a “disappointed statesman,” and he would probably not object to call himself so; for it makes no part of his idea of dignity to pretend to be satisfied when he is sorry, or delighted with what he would fain have prevented; but he suffers only the genuine force of disappointment, without the personal mortification and loss of dignity which are commonly supposed to be included in it…. He is in possession of more than an equivalent for what he has lost, not only in the disciplined moderation of his temper, but in the imperishable reality of great deeds done…. The fact that Mr. Clay’s political opinions are not in accordance with those now held by the great body of the people is no disgrace to him or them, while the dignity of his former services, supported by his present patience and quietness, places him far above compassion, and every feeling but respect and admiration…
The one act of Mr. Clay’s public life for which he must be held to require pardon from posterity, is that by which he secured the continuance of slavery in Missouri, and, in consequence, its establishment in Arkansas and Florida; the one an admitted state, the other a territory destined to be so. Mr. Clay is not an advocate of slavery, though, instead of being a friend to abolition, he is a dupe to colonization. When he held the destinies of American slavery in his hand, he had, unhappily, more regard for precedent in human arrangements than for the spirit of the.divine laws in the light of which such arrangements should be ever regarded. He acted to avert the conflict which cannot be averted, It has still to take place; it is now taking re under less favourable circumstances; and his measure of expediency is already meeting with the retribution which ever follows upon the subordination of a higher principle to a lower…
The finest speech I heard from Mr. Clay in the Senate was on the sad subject of the injuries of the Indians. He exposed the facts of the treatment of the Cherokees by Georgia. He told how the lands i in Georgia, guaranteed by solemn treaties to the Cherokees, | had been surveyed. and partitioned off to white citizens of the state; that, though there is a nominal right of appeal awarded to the complainants, this is a mere mockery, as an acknowledgment of the right of Georgia to divide the lands is made a necessary preliminary to the exercise of the right; in other words, the Indians must lay down their claims on the threshold of the courts which they enter for the purpose of enforcing these claims! The object of Mr. Clay’s plea was to have the Supreme Court open to the Cherokees, their case being, he contended, contemplated by the Constitution. A minor proposition was that Congress should assist, with territory and appliances, a body of Cherokees who desired to emigrate beyond the Mississippi…. As many as could crowd into the gallery leaned over the balustrade; and the lower circle was thronged with ladies and gentlemen, in the centre of whom stood a group of Cherokee chiefs, listening immoveably. I never saw so deep a moral 1 impression produced by a speech. The best testimony to this was the general disgust excited by the empty and abusive reply of the senator from Georgia, who, by the way, might be judged from his accent to have been about three months from the Green Island. This gentleman’s speech, however, showed us one good thing, that Mr. Clay is as excellent in reply as in proposition; prompt, earnest, temperate, and graceful. The chief characteristic of his eloquence is its earnestness…
My chief interest was watching Mr. Adams, of whose speaking, however, I can give no account. The circumstance of this gentleman being now a member of the representative body after having been president, fixes the attention of all Europeans upon him with as much admiration as interest. He is one of the. most remarkable men in America. He is an embodiment of the pure simple morals which are assumed to prevail in the thriving young republic. His term of office was marked by nothing so much as by the subordination of glory to goodness, of showy objects to moral ones. The eccentricity of thought and action in Mr. Adams, of which his admirers bitterly or sorrowfully complain, and which renders him an impracticable member of a party, arises from the same honest simplicity which crowns his virtues, mingled with a faulty taste and an imperfect temper…. Between one day and another, some new idea of justice and impartiality may strike his brain, and send him to the house warm with invective against his party and sympathy with their foes. He rises, and speaks out all his new mind, to the perplexity of the whole assembly, every man of whom bends to hear every syllable he says; perplexity which gives way to dismay on the one hand and triumph on the other. The triumphant party begins to coax and honour him; but, before the process is well begun, he is off again, finding that he had gone too far; and the probability is, that he finishes by placing himself between two fires…
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