Young America movement

It advocated free trade, social reform, expansion westward and southward into the territories, and support for republican, anti-aristocratic movements abroad.

In that sense, the movement can be considered mostly urban and middle class, but with a strong emphasis on socio-political reform for all Americans, especially given the burgeoning European immigrant population (particularly Irish Catholics) in New York in the 1840s.

Led by Stephen Douglas, James K. Polk and Franklin Pierce, and New York financier August Belmont, this faction broke with the agrarian and strict constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology, regulation, reform, and internationalism.

[2] In economic policy Young America saw the necessity of a modern infrastructure of railroads, canals, telegraphs, turnpikes, and harbors; they endorsed the "Market Revolution" and promoted capitalism.

Young America claimed that modernization would perpetuate the agrarian vision of Jeffersonian Democracy by allowing yeomen farmers to sell their products and therefore to prosper.

They supported the Independent Treasury (the Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States), not as a scheme to quash the special privilege of the Whiggish moneyed elite, but as a device to spread prosperity to all Americans.

[3] The movement's decline by 1856 was due to unsuccessful challenges to "old fogy" leaders like James Buchanan, to Douglas' failure to win the presidential nomination in 1852, to an inability to deal with the slavery issue, and to rising isolationism and disenchantment with reform in America.

[4] When O'Sullivan coined the term "Manifest Destiny" in an 1845 article for the Democratic Review, he did not necessarily intend for American democracy to expand across the continent by force.

Liking not at all its borrowed sound, we are yet (there is no better way to name it,) the Young America of the people: a new generation; and it is for us now to inquire, what we may have it in our power to accomplish, and on what objects the world may reasonably ask that we should fix our regards.

As a result, Horace Greeley's New York Tribune began to replace the Democratic Review as the central outlet for Young America's ever-evolving politics.

[16]Eventually, former members of the radical Locofoco faction in the Democratic Party recognized the potential for reorganizing New York City's labor system around principles such as the common good.