In the 1830s, the era of “Jacksonian Democracy,” illiberalism inspired recurring bouts of white terrorism. Andrew Jackson made his name, Hahn reminds us, not just through the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 but with brutal assaults on the Seminole and Creek Nations, on fugitive slaves, and with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The 1830s witnessed ferocious assaults on Native Americans, Black Americans, Roman Catholics, and Mormons. This period, Hahn writes, saw “a political culture that thrived on sidearms, street gangs, truncheons, and fists as well as rallies, conventions, and grassroots mobilizations.”
Hahn also emphasizes the intensity of the anti-abolitionist movement: Violence against abolitionist gatherings broke out in big cities like New York and Philadelphia as well as smaller towns such as Concord, New Hampshire. In October 1835, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was violently heaved with a rope through the streets of Boston by an angry pro-slavery mob. Opponents of freeing slaves burned down the abolitionist meeting site at Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in May 1838. These events, Hahn argues, were more than vigilante outbursts. “Although some of the rioters came from the lower reaches of the social order, looking to vent their hostilities and dissatisfactions, the leadership came chiefly from the ranks of merchants, bankers, lawyers, and public officials,” many from established, influential families. The “idea of ‘mobs’ and ‘riots,’” Hahn points out, “obscures what was really the persistence of older forms of political expression.”
The atmosphere of illiberal violence even “suffused the halls of legislative power.” Even though Ohio and Illinois outlawed slavery in 1802 and 1848, “Black Laws” curtailed the ability of freed Black men to vote and otherwise participate in civic life. And, building on the work of the historian Joanne Freeman, Hahn recounts how physical altercations became a regular part of democratic and legislative politics at the state and local level. The speaker of the Arkansas House stabbed a colleague to death following a verbal insult in 1837. In 1838, a Maryland congressman named William Graves killed Maine Representative Jonathan Cilley in a rifle duel near the Anacostia bridge in Washington, following accusations of bribery. And, most famously, in 1856 South Carolina’s Preston Brooks pummeled Massachusetts’s Charles Sumner into a bloody pulp on the floor of the United States Senate chamber.
