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The Locofocos: Urban “Agrarians”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Carl N. Degler
Carl N. Degler
Affiliation:
Vassar College
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Extract

Most students of Jacksonian America are familiar with the Locofocos of New York through the interesting and informative history of the party which its secretary, Fitzwilliam Byrdsall, published in 1842. But Byrdsall himself was primarily interested in the antimonopoly features of his party's program, and therefore his history all but ignores the even more significant monetary policy of the Locofocos. At the present time in historical writing, it is fashionable to emphasize the role played by the Jacksonian movement as a whole in liberating the expanding American economy from the fetters of a dying mercantilistic approach to business enterprise. There is much to be said for such an interpretation. But the Jacksonians faced toward many meccas, and one of the most articulate and widely known groups which rallied around the Jackson standard—the Locofocos—cannot be trimmed to this pattern.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 1956 , pp. 322 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1956

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References

1 Byrdsall, F., History of the Loco-Foco, or Equal Rights Party (New York: Clement and Packard, 1842).Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Redlich, Fritz, Molding of American Banking (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1951)Google Scholar, Part I, Chaps, vi and vii; Hofstadter, Richard, American Political Tradition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), Chap. iii.Google Scholar

3 Commons, John R. et al. ., History of Labour in the United States (New York: Macmillan Company, 1926), I, 427–29.Google Scholar

4 The Mode of Protecting Domestic Industry, consistently with the desires Both of the South and the North, by operating on the Currency (New York: McElrath and Bangs, 1833).Google Scholar As will appear later, Roosevelt ultimately succeeded in making these views a part of official Locofoco doctrine.

5 Dorfman, Joseph in his Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York: Viking Press, 1946), p. 652Google Scholar, has Roosevelt serving in the 1835 session. This is incorrect and results from confusion between Clinton Roosevelt, who served only in the 1837 legislature, and James J. Roosevelt, who was a member of the 1835 legislature. As a consequence, Dorfman's summary of Roosevelt's activities in the session is in error.

6 Journal of the Assembly of the State of New York, Sixtieth Session, 1837, p. 41Google Scholar; Byrdsall, History of the Loco-Foco… Party, pp. 114–15.

7 See Journal, Sixtieth Session, 1837, pp. 405–6, 734, 736, 754–55, 910–11, 912–13, 916, 919, 949, 955, for instances of such negative votes. One feature of the chartering of the bridge companies, for instance, which undoubtedly aroused opposition from Roosevelt and Townsend was the granting of monopoly privileges for one mile on either side of the bridge. Both men supported the incorporation of the Lenox Basin and Chenango Canal Turnpike Company, which involved no exclusive privilege provision and also provided that at the termination of the corporation the road was to revert to the public. Chap. 244, Laws of the Assembly of the State of New York, passed at the Sixtieth Session.

8 See Journal, Sixtieth Session, 1837, pp. 503, 538, 602, 810, 811Google Scholar, for instances of Townsend's solitary dissents from the Assembly on fire insurance companies’ incorporations.

9 See especially Hofstadter, Richard, “William Leggett, Spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy,” Political Science Quarterly, LVIII (December 1943), 581–94Google Scholar, and the Collection of Political Writings of Leggett, edited by his friend Theodore Sedgwick and published in 1840. Writers who stress the laissez-faire and even antilabor attitudes of Leggett when he opposed trade unions as characteristic of the Locofocos ignore the party's Report and Constitution… of the Democratic Party of 1836, in which the Locofocos specifically recognized unions as necessary for the protection of workingmen.

10 Gouge, William, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking (Philadelphia, 1833), Part I, p. 45.Google Scholar

11 This was orthodox Democratic doctrine rather than extreme Locofocism. As early as 1834 Governor Marcy had called attention to the large number of banks being chartered by the legislature and counseled restraint in view of the times. Lincoln, Charles Z., ed., Messages from the Governors (Albany, 1909), III, 476.Google Scholar

12 Journal, Sixtieth Session, 1837, pp. 80–81.Google Scholar

13 New York. Times, January 30, 1837.Google Scholar

14 The report can be found in Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, 1837, No. 302. Cited hereafter as Report.Google Scholar

15 Roosevelt's ideas as put forth in this report are very close to Gouge's and represent a much more detailed analysis and condemnation of the banking system than those put forth earlier in his pamphlet of 1833. Miller, Harry E., Banking Theories in the United States Before 1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. 8Google Scholar, observes that the new doctrines regarding banking prevalent in the early nineteenth century “stressed the fluctuations in the value of the monetary standards and bore fruit in discussion of the business cycle.”

16 Report, pp. 14–15. This had been the main thesis of Roosevelt's pamphlet of 1833. The doctrine regarding the tariff was rather widely accepted by the Locofocos. See Democrat, May 4, 1836, for resolution passed at a Locofoco meeting accepting the principle; Union (the Trades’ Union's newspaper), June 8, 1836, for labor's acceptance; and New York, Evening Post, August 18, 1836, for an article, “By a Loco Foco,” setting forth the doctrine as a tenet of Locofocism.

17 Report, p. 22.

18 ibid., pp. 27–28.

19 Townsend was in full accord with Roosevelt, for he moved that five times the usual number of copies of the report be printed. Journal, Sixtieth Session, 1837, p. 975.

20 Byrdsall, History of the Loco-Foco… Party, pp. 39–40.

21 Gouge, History of Paper Money and Banking, p. 102.

22 Fox, Dixon R., The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York. (New York: Columbia University, 1919), pp. 409–49.Google Scholar

23 Statistics of wealth and election percentages computed from Edwin Williams, The New York Annual Register… for 1836 and 1837. The statistics of personal wealth are also published in Gordon, Thomas F., Gazetteer of the State of New York. (Philadelphia, 1836).Google Scholar The total for personal estate in Williams is the same as that given in the 1836 Comptroller's “Annual Report,” Table K, Document No. 5, Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York, 1836.

24 The exceptionally high percentage for the Locofocos in the Tenth Ward is partially attributable to the fact that Alexander Ming, Jr., the indefatigable politician of the Locofocos, lived there.

25 Trimble, William, “Diverging Tendencies in New York Democracy in the Period of the Loco-Focos,” American Historical Review, XXIV (April 1919), 399 n.Google Scholar

26 For example, in June 1836, when a large mass meeting was held in City Hall Park to protest a court decision heavily fining eleven tailors for striking against wage cuts, Locofoco leaders like Ming, Byrdsall, James Stratton, and William Boggs were elected to the Committee of Correspondence set up by the meeting. (New York Evening Post, June 14, 1836, and New York Times, June 14, 1836.) Out of that committee came the suggestion for a state convention to form a new party. Of the 26 delegates elected from New York City to that convention, 15 were active members of the Locofoco movement prior to the meeting in the Park and 4 more became active Locofocos after the convention. List appears in the New York Evening Post, August 19, 1836. The constitution which the convention adopted clearly recognized—and only a year after the Geneva Shoemakers’ case—the right of union organization as a legitimate workingmen's demand.

27 Trimble, “Diverging Tendencies in New York Democracy…,” p. 401.

28 The labor unions of the period, of course, often included employers in their ranks.

29 Quoted in Redlich, Molding of American Banking, p. 164. Other authorities like Catterall, R., Second Bank of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), p. 184Google Scholar, and Madeleine, M. Grace, Monetary and Banking Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Philadelphia, 1943), pp. 41–43Google Scholar, have accepted Jackson's position as an attack on the whole banking system and not just one directed against Biddle. In this connection it is important to call attention to the fact that in America, as Professor Redlich has observed, banking had note-issuing as its major form of credit extension (Molding of American Banking, pp. 10–13). Hence an attack on banks was an attack on paper money.

30 Schlesinger, A. M. Jr., Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), p. 128.Google ScholarMyers, Margaret in New York. Money Market (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931), I, 16Google Scholar, called the prohibition a “logical outgrowth of his [Jackson's] growing hostility to the use of bank credit.…”

31 Earlier in 1836, Senator Thomas Benton, aroused by the host of new state banks, introduced a resolution making only specie acceptable for public-land purchases, but it failed of passage. Sumner, W. G., Andrew Jackson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), p. 393.Google Scholar

32 Jackson's so-called Farewell Address—to be found in Richardson, J. D., ed., Messages and Papers of the Presidents (n. p., 1909), HI, 304–6Google Scholar—contained a strong and forthright statement of the hard-money views he had adopted by 1837.

33 See Leggett's Writings, I, 43, 226–27 f°r editorials exposing the employers’ practice of buying depreciated currency with which to pay their workmen. As late as 1850 payment of workers with such devalued money was a labor grievance, for in that year the Printers’ Union cited it as an evil of the trade. New York Evening Post, May 23, 1850.

34 Hammond, Bray, “Long and Short Term Credit in Early American Banking,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, XLIX (November 1934), 82.Google Scholar See also Miller, Banking Theories…, pp. 18–19. Goodrich, Carter in “National Planning of Internal Improvements,” Political Science Quarterly, LXIII (March 1948)Google Scholar, points out that during the early nineteenth century the shortage of private capital required government to advance subsidies in order to open lines of transportation.

35 Hammond, Bray, “Jackson, Biddle, and the Bank of the United States,” The Journal of Economic History, VII (May 1947), 20.Google Scholar

36 Smith, W. B., Economic Aspects of the Second Bank, of the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 263.Google Scholar

37 For two examples of animosity toward the Locofocos because of their dangerous character, see the article signed “Vigilance” in New York. Times, September 14, 1837, and the quotation from Madisonians, (the right-wing Democratic newspaper) in New York Evening Post, September 29, 1837. Trimble, William, “The Social Philosophy of the Locofoco Democracy,” American Journal of Sociology, XXVI (May 1921), 711–12Google Scholar, gives further examples.

38 Quoted in New York Evening Post, September 7, 1837.

39 Hammond, Bray, “Banking in the Early West: Monopoly, Prohibition, and Laissez-Faire,” The Journal of Economic History, VIII (May 1948), 1–25.Google Scholar

40 Cf. Hugins, Walter, “Ely Moore: the Case History of a Jacksonian Labor Leader,” Political Science Quarterly, LXV (March 1950), 105–25Google Scholar, who writes: “America's chief heritage from Jacksonian Democracy was not a growth of a militant labor movement, but the economic exploitation of a continent” (p. 125). One may agree with the first conclusion, but the second ignores the Locofocos, a group hardly nurturing capitalist expansion.