Stephen Campbell

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Antebellum U.S. Political Economy

Graduate Student
B.A., University of California Davis (2005); M.A., California State University Sacramento (2007)

Office: HSSB 3212 Winter 2010 Hours: Tuesday 9:30-11:30
Email: swcampbell@umail.ucsb.edu
Advisor: John Majewski
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My dissertation integrates the study of newspaper editors, executive department patronage, and partisan attitudes during the Second Party System of American politics. It aims to show that money issues – corporate donations, bank loans, printing contracts, and subsidies to federal agencies – significantly shaped Andrew Jackson’s conflict with the Second Bank of the United States (BUS). In an era when newspaper enterprises struggled to maintain profitability and an increasingly literate public demanded free access to reading material, bank loans and public printing contracts provided crucial financial support to antebellum newspapers, which in turn, fueled political activism. Both Democrats and Whigs attempted to sway public opinion in the Bank war, but Democrats more enthusiastically embraced the idea of a mass political party. These findings will ideally complicate the prevailing historiographical assumption that Jacksonians favored a “negative state.” Despite their professed anti-statist position on a number of issues, Jackson loyalists took advantage of federal patronage from executive departments to construct the Democratic Party. Whigs believed that the national government should promote economic development and they often relied on corporate donations for party growth. Unlike conflicts over the First Bank of the United States, which primarily involved elite politicians, the Bank war of the 1830s contained a distinctly modern flavor. Recent transportation and communication innovations mobilized mass political participation in the form of meetings, rallies, protests, petitions, and much more. The democratization of voting requirements enabled ordinary white men to participate in political discussion for the first time. Due to unprecedented levels of bank loans, wide-scale use of executive department patronage, and lucrative printing contracts, the Bank war was one of the nation’s first modern political campaigns.