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Sure to be welcomed by scholars of the Jacksonian era and others interested in nineteenth-century American history, John L. O'Sullivan and His Times presents an indepth examination of O'Sullivan's ideas as they were expressed in the Democratic Review and other newspapers and literary magazines he edited. O'Sullivan was a crusader whose efforts to end capital punishment came within a hair's breadth of ending the practice of hanging convicts in New York. As an editor, he called down the wrath of the people on speculators and promoters of privilege and monopoly and eloquently praised the virtues of majority rule and the citizens' right to control and transform their government. He was a political operative who supported the radical wing of the Democratic party, battled nativists, and plotted strategy with a young Samuel J. Tilden, and was a promoter of a fresh American literature who significantly aided Nathaniel Hawthorne's career and familiarized his readers with the works of Whitman, Poe, Whittier, and Thoreau.
Through extensive research of primary materials -- including contemporary correspondence and journals of public figures such as Martin Van Buren, William Marcy, Benjamin F. Butler, Samuel Tilden, and James K. Polk -- author Robert D. Sampson explores the many facets of this enigmatic figure, a man described by Hawthorne as "one of the truest and best men in the world."
| Preface and Acknowledgments | ||
| Prologue: A Relic Passes | ||
| 1 | Inheriting a Romantic Legacy | 1 |
| 2 | Founding the Democratic Review | 15 |
| 3 | Battling Banks and the Panic | 27 |
| 4 | Friends and Offended Democrats | 48 |
| 5 | Defining Democracy | 73 |
| 6 | Pursuing Reform | 89 |
| 7 | Defending Democracy | 112 |
| 8 | The Democratic Review and the Politics of Rededication | 140 |
| 9 | The Pinnacle | 163 |
| 10 | The Fall | 194 |
| 11 | Journey to Obscurity | 208 |
| Epilogue: The "most indistinct ghost of them all" | 239 | |
| Notes | 245 | |
| Bibliography | 279 | |
| Index | 295 |
Overview