Democracy in Print: The Literature of Persuasion in Jacksonian America, 1815--1840

435 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.My analysis is organized chronologically, treating the literature of a series of events, each of which had an impact on the others to follow. After a general discussion of political culture in the early 19th century, I begin with an analysis of the literature emanating from the War of 1812, the key event in shaping both the political reputation of the leading politicians, and the attitudes of the electorate that determined who supported whom. The next two chapters treat the presidential elections of 1824 and 1828, the latter marking the turning point in the emergence of a new democratic political culture. Then I discuss the foremost controversy of the Jackson administration, the President's war on the Bank of the United States, followed by a discussion of the election of 1832, which centered on the bank question. Next comes a chapter on the use of political satire, both literary and pictorial, of which the Whigs maintained a virtual monopoly during this period. Their cultivation of the arts of ridicule were then employed in the final dramatic event of the era, the "Log Cabin Campaign" of 1840, the subject of my last chapter.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD