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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2011
It is not surprising that an era that saw the creation of much of the America that we know—its mass political parties, sustained capitalist growth, individualistic creed, modern labor, feminist and moral reform movements, and formalized racism—witnessed intense moral controversy. The Jacksonian period posed in its starkest form what Edmund S. Morgan has called the central “paradox” of American history—the “marriage” of slavery and freedom, each of them expanding by leaps and bounds, each doing so increasingly within its own sphere. This was a time when many Americans were seized, as never before, with an intensely self-seeking and accumulating spirit. It was also a period when Americans' collective national mission, suffused with benevolent dreams of “righteous liberty and opportunity that would surpass all worldly limits,” was frequently invoked, sometimes in support of the claims of interest and law, and other times in ways that challenged authority justified purely in terms of selfish interest, positivistic application of the law, or coercive force. All this is to say that in the epoch from the end of the War of 1812 to the eve of the Civil War, moral dispute among different groups of Americans—parties and factions, classes, races and the national minorities, vested and emerging interests, masters and slaves, men and women—was often ferocious.
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