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The 1820s-40s-commonly referred to as the Jacksonian era, as they were dominated by the presidency of Andrew Jackson-constitute a landmark in the history of the early republic, given the specific chronological relationship those decades entertained with the founding period of the United States. What chronicler John O'Sullivan called in 1839 the "Great Nation of Futurity" was in fact a young nation born only sixty-three years earlier, which therefore had no other choice but to develop a complex attitude to its present progress given its founding ideals. A sign of this was the way in which an ambivalent language of past and progress became an inherent part of political discourse, which took on conflicting meanings depending on who used it.
Indeed, with the advent of universal white manhood suffrage in all but three states by the mid-182Os, there was a sense of definite political progress, which was summed up in the recurrent celebration of democracy as the best political system, understood as an improvement over the more deferential and elitist system of the late eighteenth century of the Founding Fathers. Antebellum United States was thus the exemplary "nation of progress," as Jacksonian democracy could not mean anything else than the actual realization of the (political) equality which had remained only a project in the Declaration of Independence. The historical progress celebrated by the Enlightenment took on a scientific turn and what was rationally to be hoped for became historically inevitable: "we must onward towards the realization of our mission" (Hobsbawm 289).
Yet while the Jacksonians seemed entirely turned towards the further realization of their nation's progress, they found themselves faced, roughly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, with a fundamental heritage to deal with, that of the nation's initial project which they constantly turned back to in order to find some kind of legitimacy. What did the future and the rejection of the past mean when the only past of the new nation was precisely its founding moment, which could not be rejected in any way?1
Furthermore, what was the nature of the progress that was constantly being referred to, for the political progress embodied in the widening of suffrage had not led in all cases to equivalent socio-economic improvement? And what role should the...