Page 260 - American Stories, A History of the United States

stuMP sPeeCHes Political
candidates of the Jacksonian era traveled 10.1
from town to town giving stump
speeches. The political gatherings at
which they spoke provided entertainment
and were an excellent source of political 10.2
news. This painting, Stump Speaking
(1853/1854), is by George Caleb Bingham,
one of the most prolific democratic genre
painters.
10.3

10.4

“Popular sovereignty” expressed itself less dramatically in the visual arts, but its
influence was still felt. Beginning in the 1830s, painters turned from portraying great
events and famous people to depicting everyday life. Democratic genre painters such as
William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham captured the lives of plain folk with
skill and understanding. Mount, who painted lively rural scenes, expressed the credo
of the democratic artist: “Paint pictures that will take with the public—never paint for
the few but the many.” Bingham was noted for his graphic images of Americans voting,
carrying goods on riverboats, and engaging in other everyday activities.
Exponents of a higher culture and a more refined sensibility sought to enlighten
or uplift the new public. The “Brahmin poets” of New England—Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—offered lofty senti-
ments and moral messages to a receptive middle class. Ralph Waldo Emerson carried
his philosophy of spiritual self-reliance to lyceums and lecture halls across the country.
Great novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville experimented with
popular romantic genres. But Hawthorne and Melville failed to gain a large reader-
ship. Their ironic and pessimistic view of life clashed with the optimism of the age. For
later generations of American critics, however, the works of Melville and Hawthorne Quick Check
became centerpieces of the American literary “renaissance” of the mid-nineteenth cen- How did American culture reflect
tury. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) are now a growing spirit of “popular
regarded as masterworks of fiction. sovereignty”?

Democratic Political institutions
The supremacy of democracy was most obvious in the new politics of universal white
manhood suffrage and mass political parties. By the 1820s, most states had removed
the last barriers to voting for all white males. This change was not as radical or contro-
versial as it would be later in nineteenth-century Europe; so many Americans owned
land that most voters were still men of property.
The proportion of public officials who were elected rather than appointed also
increased. “The people” increasingly chose judges, as well as legislators and executive
officers. A new style of politicking developed. Politicians had to get out and campaign,
demonstrating in their speeches on the stump that they could mirror voters’ fears and
concerns. Electoral politics became more festive and dramatic.
227