Jackson had conventionally been seen as a champion of the frontier his presidency as the eruption of the backwoods west into national power. The day for the multitude has now dawned.” 2 The merchants and the lawyers, that is, the moneyed interest broke up feudalism. It is now for the yeomanry and the mechanics to march at the head of civilization. “The feud between the capitalist and laborer, the house of Have and the house of Want,” Bancroft had written, “is as old as social union….

How had it come about that, eight years before Marx and Engels produced The Communist Manifesto, a Jacksonian Democrat in far-off America expressed such “Marxist” views in such “Marxist” language? Brownson, moreover, had received his government job from the historian George Bancroft, who, as collector of the port of Boston, was Van Buren’s man in Massachusetts, and Bancroft evidently thought along similar lines. Reading “The Laboring Classes” a century later, I was struck by Brownson’s drastic class analysis. “Our business is to emancipate the proletaries, as the past has emancipated the slaves.” 1 The arrangement permitted him to continue editing a magazine and when Jackson’s friend and successor President Martin Van Buren ran for reelection in the picturesque “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” contest of 1840, Brownson created considerable embarrassment for his fellow Democrats by writing an inflammatory essay entitled “The Laboring Classes.” After describing the exploitation of the workers, Brownson raised the specter of “that most dreaded of all wars, the war of the poor against the rich, a war which, however long it may be delayed, will come, and come with all its horrors.” To avert that war, he said, the age must recognize its historic responsibility. In 1838 Brownson’s services in the Jacksonian cause had been rewarded by his appointment as inspector of a government hospital. Brownson was a man of many careers-preacher, editor, Transcendentalist fellow traveler, Jacksonian reformer, Catholic convert-and an episode in his Jacksonian phase struck me as of curious interest.

Seeking a subject for an honors essay as an undergraduate at Harvard College in the autumn of 1937, I chose the formidable nineteenth-century American intellectual Orestes A.

My involvement with the age of Jackson began more than half a century ago.

The age of arthur