WISCONSIN-A CONSTITUTION OF DEMOCRACY2

The political revolution of 1828 opened a period of twelve years in which the Mississippi Valley, speaking through the Jacksonian organization, controlled the destinies of the United States. The movement saw itself as a revolt of the people against autocracy and aristocracy; it was in fact an uprising of the frontier against the older communities. In the long run, as in every such revolt, it reached conclusions which it sought to perpetuate in the form of constitutional law. Its democratic aspirations were mingled, almost beyond disentanglement, with the zeal of a new community for easy wealth, and with the resentment of a debtor frontier against the agencies of capital and law. But it left upon American constitutional law an impress that lasted for two generations.

The constitutional contributions of Jacksonian democracy are not to be measured by changes in the constitution of the United States. That document had received its basic interpretation before the deaths of James Madison and John Marshall, in the middle thirties. Although many Democrats and many southerners professed themselves to believe that the supreme court and the federal government were overriding the state and the citizen, Jacksonian democracy had little quarrel with the theory of nationalism. The frontier was the home of the Democrats; it had been the field of the activities of the nation. It accepted the legal doctrines of nationalism in the forties and fifties, and confined its own constitutional development to a readjustment of its local institutions. The propositions for amendment to the federal constitution were most numerous in matters of detail cov

'Originally published in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review II, 3-24, with the title "A Constitution of Democracy-Wisconsin, 1847."

ering the appointment, removal, and pay of public servants, and none on these or other topics was ratified between 1804 and 1865.3

In the state constitutions of the Mississippi Valley between the panics of 1837 and 1857 are to be found the evidences of the reactions of Jacksonian democracy on government. Before 1837 the party was too young, and life was too rosy in its promise, for introspection and amendment. After 1857 a new party readjustment had come to the nation, and the old issues were transformed. But between these panics, and connected with them, is a period of interpretation and theory, in which the "ultraism of the age" was seeking to perpetuate itself in the Mississippi Valley, and indeed throughout the nation. Every state from Kentucky north made its attempt at constitutional revision. Wisconsin, still a territory, made a constitution in 1846, and another, under which it became a state, in 1847. Iowa, likewise a territory, also rejected its first constitution of 1844. to accept its second, of 1846. Missouri had made a new fundamental law in 1845, but rejected it at the polls. Illinois adopted a new constitution which it framed in 1847, as did Kentucky in 1849, Michigan in 1850, and Ohio and Indiana in 1850–51.

Not only were the constitutions of the Mississippi Valley revised to meet the experiences of the new democracy, but the revisions wore well. Says McMaster: "That the financial, the industrial, the economic conditions through which the people were passing, that their changed ideas of the duties of the state, their juster conception of the social and political rights of man, their struggles for a better life, should find expression in their constitutions of government, as well as in the statute books was inevitable.""5 Confidence in the people was basic in these constitutions. "The major

'H. V. Ames, Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States (American Historical Association, Annual Report, 1896), 20, 325, 366. 4 Charleston [S. C.] Courier, August 18, 1845.

J. B. McMaster, History of the People of the United States (New York, 1884-1913), 7, 162.

ity of the people always do right, they cannot be deceived," wrote one of the Democrats, exultant in his election to a minor office.6

The states were establishing in this period, throughout the Union, a durable type of local government. Of the eight new constitutions adopted between 1829 and 1838, the average life was thirty-two years. There were twenty constitutions adopted in the United States between 1838 and 1859; of these six had an average life of only eighteen and twothirds years because of the changes occasioned by the Civil War; and four were renewed in an average of twenty-seven and one-half years from other causes. The remaining ten constitutions of this period outlasted the century, and eight of them were yet in force in 1915: Rhode Island, 1842; New Jersey, 1844; Wisconsin, 1847; Indiana, 1851;7 Iowa, 1857; Minnesota, 1857; Oregon, 1857; and Kansas, 1859. Two, Michigan, 1850, and Ohio, 1851, lasted more than half a century before they were replaced. All the upper Mississippi Valley states framed constitutions and expressed in permament form the democratic ideals of the Democratic party.

The most permanent of these western Jacksonian constitutions was that of Wisconsin, under which the territory became a state in 1848. In 1914 it was still in force, and in that year a decisive expression of opinion was given by the people against any considerable modification of it." It shows in its provisions the forces that were at large in the second quarter of the nineteenth century in the Democratic party and Democratic society. It is longer than constitutions of earlier periods, longer even than the average of its own period, and illustrates the prevailing tendency to write

J. G. Davis, Rockville, Indiana, April 3, 1833, to G. Cornelius, Pittsburg, Kentucky; manuscript letter in the possession of J. G. D. Mack.

'J. A. Woodburn, "Constitution Making in Indiana," in Indiana Magazine of History, 10:237-255 (September, 1914).

Emlin McClain, "The Constitutional Convention and the Issues Before It," in B. F. Shambaugh, Fiftieth Anniversary of the Constitution of Iowa (1907), 164.

Ten "progressive" amendments were defeated by heavy popular majorities, in November, 1914.

distrust of the legislative, executive, and judiciary into fundamental law.10

The settlement of the Northwest, where the head of the Great Lakes approaches the upper Mississippi Valley, made little progress before the panic of 1837. Only the beginnings of occupation of Iowa and Wisconsin had been made before that time. With cheap land easily obtainable in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri, under the land law of 1820, or from states that had received it as a gift from the United States, there was small temptation for the pioneer to push beyond these states. The land soaked up the emigrants until its best sections were saturated; then and then only the wave followed the easiest routes on, into remoter fields. Before 1837 the skeleton of government had been created northwest of Illinois, but only the skeleton.

The prospective admission of Michigan in 1836 led Congress to reorganize the territory between that state and the Missouri River as the territory of Wisconsin. Already a few settlers had come through the lakes to the Chicago-Milwaukee shore, or up the Mississippi to the Black Hawk purchase and the lead mines around Galena, Dubuque, and Mineral Point. In 1838 Wisconsin territory was divided, Iowa being created in its trans-Mississippi section, and the population on both sides of the river began to grow rapidly. Iowa was nearer to settled regions than Wisconsin, and once development began, Iowa grew more homogeneously than its parent. By 1846 Iowa was ready for admission, with a population of 96,000,11 drawn largely from Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, and the Ohio Valley. Wisconsin was ready two years later, with a larger but less homogeneous population. Its western counties resembled the social ad

10 Of thirteen constitutions adopted 1776-1780, the average length is 9.9 pages of Thorpe; thirteen adopted 1781-1810 average 12.7 pages; nine `adopted 1811-1821 average 15.2 pages; twenty-two adopted 1822-1852 average 19.5 pages.

"The Census Returns of the Different Counties of the State of Iowa, 1859, insert, 3.

mixture of Iowa. Its Michigan shore had received a preponderance from New York and Ohio, Canada and New England. Even in 1846 its eastern and western regions had not coalesced, and between Madison and Lake Mills the traveler along the territorial road found a wide zone-a social vacuum -of open lands.12 In both states, however, the Democratic ideas of the Mississippi Valley prevailed, and can be measured by the evidence of the new constitutions.

Both Iowa and Wisconsin drew much of their population from regions that had passed through the acute frontier stage about 1820, had aided the Jacksonian campaigns of 1824 and 1828, and had suffered economic distress in the panic of 1837. This distress had started many settlers towards the Northwest. "The great rage even here in this part of Ohio," wrote a New York emigrant in 1837, "is to sell and go West! The country here scarcely looks like new country as here are very few log huts to be seen and thickly settled as Long Island."'13 Predisposed to democracy they were governed by Democrats, since Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, and Polk appointed most of the territorial officials, who in turn organized the territorial parties. Even the few Whigs who ruled among them were Democratic, and the appointees of a frontier hero, William Henry Harrison.

The first Iowa constitutional convention met in 1844, with the Democrats in control of more than two-thirds of its delegates. It provided for Democratic publicity by admitting editors to "seats within the bar of this House," chose a president who realized that Iowa was "in the midst of an important revolution,'" and listened complacently while one of its delegates approved the doctrine of the Rhode Island clergyman who had prayed in a public meeting for "the election of Polk and Dallas, and the triumph of Demo

12 Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, September 14, 1846.

"G. M. Smith, Carthage, Ohio, February 22, 1837, to E. A. Smith, Hempstead, Long Island; manuscript letter in the possession of J. G. D. Mack. "B. F. Shambaugh, History of the Constitutions of Iowa (Des Moines, 1902), 176-178.