The United States in 1840

By 1840, little more than half a century after declaring independence, the United States had been transformed. Its population of just over 17 million people was more than four times what it had been when the census was first taken in 1790. Indeed, it had grown over 30% just since 1830. A rising tide of Irish and German immigrants was making more established groups nervous even as they provided necessary labor.

Thanks to the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the acquisition of Florida (1819), the nation had more than doubled in size since its founding—and it was on the verge of growing again, as newly-independent Texas lobbied for statehood and adherents of what would soon be called “Manifest Destiny” cast covetous eyes on the Southwest and Far West, then held by Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest, under British control.

New and faster means of communication and transportation were beginning to tie the disparate parts of the country together: Canals and steamboats shrank distances, and the railroad was beginning to shrink them even more. Samuel F.B. Morse was experimenting with his telegraph, arguably the most important innovation in communication since Gutenberg’s movable type.

All of this new “infrastructure” accelerated the advance of the Industrial Revolution, which had found an early spark in the establishment of Slater Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793. By 1840, Rhode Island was at the center of that revolution.

Politically, the changes on the national scene were at least as dramatic as the economic and social ones. Although the suffrage was generally limited to white men, property requirements for the suffrage had been sharply reduced and often eliminated entirely. The right to vote was enjoyed more widely than in any other country.

The 1840 presidential election, often considered the first modern one, featured two fully developed political parties and a campaign unlike any before it. To attract voters to the polls, the new Whig Party mimicked the strategy followed by the Democrats (particularly Andrew Jackson’s chief strategist, and the 1840 Democratic nominee, Martin Van Buren). They nominated a war hero (William Henry Harrison), supposedly (but not really) born in a log cabin; gave him a nickname (“Old Tippecanoe”) like Jackson’s (“Old Hickory”); came up with a snappy slogan (“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too,”); and used attention-getting stunts to bring out the voters. Among other things, they made huge balls, about ten feet tall, and rolled them from town to town, urging supporters to “keep the ball rolling” while guzzling jugs of hard cider. It worked: 80% of eligible voters cast ballots, and Harrison received 234 electoral votes to Van Buren’s 60. Unfortunately, exactly one month after being sworn in, Harrison died, probably of pneumonia. John Tyler (“Tyler Too”), a Virginian placed on the ticket to provide sectional balance, became president—a fact that soon proved relevant to Rhode Islanders.