To what extent did Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 initiate a new era in American politics?
What was Jackson’s attitude toward federal involvement in the economy?
How did Jackson respond to the nullification controversy?
What happened to the Indians living east of the Mississippi River by 1840?
Why did a new party system of Democrats and Whigs emerge?
N his extraordinary novel Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville celebrated the “democratic dignity” of ordinary men. After all, he wrote, it was the “great democratic God” who picked “up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a warhorse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!” Jackson did indeed take the nation by storm. His distinctive personality and invincible popularity initiated a new era in American politics and social development. No political figure was so widely loved nor more deeply hated.
As a self-made soldier, politician, and slave-owning land speculator from the backcountry, he symbolized the changing social scene and the emergence of the “common man” in political life. The nation he prepared to govern was vastly different from that led by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In 1828 the United States boasted twenty-four states and nearly 13 million people, many of them recent arrivals from Germany and Ireland. The national population was growing at a phenomenal rate, doubling every twenty-three years. A surge in foreign demand for southern cotton and other American goods, along with substantial British investment in an array of
New American enterprises, helped fuel an economic boom and a transportation revolution. That President-elect Jackson rode to his inauguration in a horse-drawn carriage and left Washington eight years later on a train symbolized the dramatic changes occurring in the pace and tone of American life.
The Jacksonians sought to expand economic opportunity and political participation. Yet to call the Jacksonian era the “age of the common man,” as many historians have done over the years, is misleading. While political participation increased, most of the common people remained common people. The period never produced true economic and social equality. Power and privilege, for the most part, remained in the hands of an “uncommon” elite of powerful men. Jacksonians in power often proved to be as opportunistic and manipulative as the patricians they displaced. And they never embraced the principle of economic equality. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government,” Andrew Jackson observed. “Equality of talents, or education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions.” He and other Jacksonians wanted every American to have an equal chance to compete in the marketplace and in the political arena, but they never sanctioned equality of results. In the afterglow of Jackson’s electoral victory in 1828, few observers troubled with such distinctions. It was time to celebrate the “commoner’s” ascension to the presidency.
Setting the Stage
Born in 1767 along the border between the two Carolinas, Andrew Jackson was the first president not to come from a prominent colonial family. His parents were typical of the poor, land-hungry Scots-Irish immigrants who streamed into the Carolinas in the second half of the eighteenth century. Jackson’s father was killed in a farm accident just before Andrew was born. His widowed mother scratched out a meager living as a housekeeper. The extended Jackson clan engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British during the Revolution. One of Andrew’s brothers was killed in the fighting, and Andrew, along with his other brother were captured and abused. Andrew was gashed and scarred by a British officer’s saber. Thereafter, Jackson carried with him an enduring rage against the British and a hair-trigger temper and brawling personality. After the Revolution Jackson learned enough about the law to become an attorney in backwoods Tennessee. He dabbled enough in farming and land speculation to grow wealthy while fighting Indians as a militia officer.
Jackson could not have been more different from the aloof aristocrat and former Harvard professor John Quincy Adams. “I was born for a storm,” the fearless Jackson boasted; “a calm does not suit me.” Tall and lean, the rough-hewn Jackson looked gaunt and domineering. His ashen skin, chiseled features, penetrating eyes, jutting chin, and iron-gray hair accentuated his steely personality. A British visitor said he had a “gamecock look.” The pugnacious Jackson engaged in numerous personal quarrels, several of which culminated in duels. During a duel with a man reputed to be the best shot in Tennessee, Jackson nevertheless let his opponent fire first. For his gallantry the future president received a bullet wedged next to his heart. He nevertheless straightened himself, patiently took aim, and killed his foe. “I should have hit him,” Jackson claimed, “if he had shot me through the brain.” He assaulted another opponent with a cane, another with his fists. Two bullets remained lodged in his body most of his life.
Now, as the nation’s seventh president, Jackson was determined to change the structure and tone of the federal government. He appealed to the hard-pressed farming and working people who were ripe for political rebellion. Senator Daniel Webster scoffed at the huge, unruly crowd attending Jackson’s inauguration: “Persons have come 500 miles to see Genl. Jackson; & they really seem to think that the Country is rescued from some dreadful danger.” At the post-inaugural party at the White House, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story noted he had never seen such “a mixture” of people. “The reign of KING MOB seemed triumphant.” The partying crowd was finally lured out of the White House when the liquor was carried out onto the lawn. “His passions are terrible,” said Thomas Jefferson, who deemed the volatile Jackson “dangerous” and “unfit” for the presidency.
Jackson did view himself as a savior of sorts, as a crusading president determined to protect “the poor and humble” people from the “tyranny of wealth and power” exercised by the “monied aristocracy.” He was willing to assault the “rich and the powerful” in an effort to create the egalitarian republic envisioned by Thomas Jefferson. National politics, he had decided, had fallen under the sway of wealthy bankers and corrupt public officials preoccupied with promoting their self-interest at the expense of the public good. Jackson vowed to eliminate such corrupting elitism. Yet ironies abounded as the brash new president assumed leadership of a self-consciously democratic revival. An ardent Jeffersonian whom Jefferson himself distrusted, the slave-owning Jackson wanted to lower taxes, reduce government spending, shrink the federal bureaucracy, pay off the federal debt (a “national curse”), and destroy the Second Bank of the United States. His first
All Creation Going to the White House
In this depiction of Jackson’s inauguration as president, satirist Robert Cruikshank draws a visual parallel to Noah’s Ark, suggesting that people of all walks of life were now welcome in the White House.
Presidential priority was to remove the “ill-fated race” of Indians from all of the states so that white Americans could exploit their lands. Yet he wanted to do all of those things while bolstering states’ rights and diminishing federal power. In pursuing these conflicting goals, Jackson acted quickly—and decisively.
APPOINTMENTS AND RIVALRIES Andrew Jackson believed that politicians should serve a term in government, then return to the status of private citizen, for officials who stayed in office too long grew corrupt. So he vowed to replace federal officials with his own supporters. Opponents called the wholesale removal of federal employees the “spoils system.” During his first year in office, however, Jackson replaced only about 9 percent of the appointed officials in the federal government and during his entire term replaced fewer than 20 percent.
Jackson’s administration was from the outset divided between the partisans of Secretary of State Martin Van Buren and those of Vice President John C. Calhoun. Much of the political history of the next few years would turn upon the rivalry of these two statesmen as each jockeyed to become successor. Jackson, new to political administration, leaned heavily upon Van Buren for advice. Van Buren had perhaps more skill at backroom politics than Calhoun and certainly more freedom to maneuver because his home base of New York was more secure politically than Calhoun’s base in South Carolina. But Calhoun, a Yale graduate of towering intellect and fiery determination, could not be taken lightly. As vice president, Calhoun was determined to defend southern interests, especially the preservation of slavery, against the worrisome advance of northern industrialism and abolitionism.
THE EATON AFFAIR In his battle with Calhoun over political power, Van Buren had luck on his side. Fate handed him a trump card: the succulent scandal known as the Peggy Eaton affair. John Eaton was a close friend of Jackson who had managed his 1824 presidential campaign. Three months before he became Jackson’s secretary of war, Eaton married his mistress, who was scarcely a virtuous woman in the eyes of the proper ladies of Washington. The daughter of an Irish tavern owner, Margaret (Peggy) O’Neale was a vivacious widow whose husband had supposedly committed suicide upon learning of her affair with the then-senator Eaton of Tennesee. Floride Calhoun, the vice president’s wife, especially objected to Peggy Eaton’s lowly origins and unsavory past. She pointedly snubbed her, and the cabinet wives followed suit.
Peggy’s plight reminded Jackson of the mean-spirited gossip that had pursued his own wife, Rachel, and he pronounced Peggy Eaton “chaste as a virgin.” His cabinet members, however, were unable to cure their wives of what Van Buren dubbed “the Eaton Malaria.” Mrs. Eaton finally gave in to the chill and in 1831 withdrew from the social scene in Washington. Her husband resigned from the cabinet. The outraged Jackson linked his nemesis, John C. Calhoun, to what he called the “wicked machinations” by Floride Calhoun against Peggy Eaton. The president concluded that Calhoun was one of the “basest and most dangerous men living—a man, devoid of principle, and would sacrifice his friend, his country, and forsake his god, for selfish personal ambition.”
Jackson decided that the only way to restore harmony in his cabinet was to disband it and start over. Critics claimed that Jackson did not have the skill to lead the nation. One newspaper announced that the ship of state “is sinking and the rats are flying! The hull is too leaky to mend, and the hero of two wars and a half has not the skill to keep it afloat.”
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS
King Andrew the First
Opponents considered Jackson’s veto of the Maysville Road bill an abuse of power. This cartoon shows “King Andrew” trampling on the Constitution, internal improvements, and the Bank of the United States.
While Washington social life weathered the gossip-filled winter of 1829-1830, Van Buren delivered some additional blows to Calhoun. It was easy to persuade Jackson to oppose congressional efforts to use federal monies to fund transportation improvements, programs with which Calhoun had long been identified. In 1830 the Maysville Road bill, passed by Congress, offered Jackson a chance for a dual thrust at rivals Calhoun and Henry Clay. The bill authorized the government to buy stock in a sixty-mile-long road to be built from Maysville,
Kentucky, to Clay’s hometown of Lexington. Because the proposed road would be entirely within the state of Kentucky, Jackson vetoed the bill, calling it unconstitutional, and his decisive action garnered widespread acclaim.
That the veto allowed him to take a swipe at Clay, his likely opponent in the 1832 presidential race, made it especially satisfying for the president. Clay was stunned. “We are all shocked and mortified by the rejection of the Maysville road,” he wrote a friend. But Clay had no luck convincing Congress to override the veto.
Nullification
The veto of the Maysville Road bill illustrated Jackson’s forceful personality. He eventually would veto twelve congressional bills, more than all of the previous presidents combined. Congress would censure him and critics would condemn him as a tyrant, but Jackson was determined to strengthen the executive branch to and to stick to his principles. His commitment to assertive nationalism was nowhere more evident than in the nullification crisis centered in South Carolina.
John C. Calhoun
During the Civil War, the Confederate government printed, but never issued, a one-cent postage stamp bearing this likeness of Calhoun.
Calhoun’s theory There is a fine irony to Vice President John C. Calhoun’s plight in the Jackson administration, for the South Carolinian was now midway between his early phase as a war-hawk nationalist and his later phase as a states’ rights sectionalist. Conditions in his home state caused the change in his stance. Throughout the 1820s, South Carolina suffered from prolonged agricultural depression. The state lost almost seventy thousand residents to emigration during the 1820s; it would lose nearly twice that number in the 1830s, with many of them moving to Texas. Most South Carolinians blamed the protective tariff for raising the price of manufactured goods imported from Europe. Not only were tariff rates increasing, but so too was the number of products subject to tariffs. Insofar as tariffs discouraged the sale of foreign goods in the United States, they reduced the ability of the British and French to buy southern cotton because of the loss of export income. This situation worsened already existing problems of low cotton prices and thousands of acres of farmland exhausted from perennial overplanting.
The unexpected passage of the Tariff of 1828, called the “tariff of abominations” by its critics because it pushed rates up to almost 50 percent of the value of imported goods, left Calhoun no choice but to join those in opposition or give up his base of political support in his home state. Calhoun’s South Carolina Exposition and Protest, written in opposition to the new tariff, proposed the concept of nullification as a means of avoiding secession. Calhoun asserted that an aggrieved state could convene a special state convention that could declare a federal law null and void within the state’s borders because it violated the Constitution. One of two outcomes would then be possible: the federal government would have to abandon the law, or it would have to propose a constitutional amendment removing all doubt as to its validity. The immediate issue was the constitutionality of a tariff designed mainly to protect northern manufacturers from foreign competition.
THE WEBSTER-HAYNE DEBATE After Jackson assumed the presidency in early 1829, neither he nor Congress saw fit to reduce the tariff duties. There the issue stood until 1830, when the great Webster-Hayne debate in Congress sharpened the lines between states’ rights and the Union and provoked a national crisis. During a debate over the status of government-owned western land, Senator Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina argued that the government endangered the Union by imposing any policy that would cause a hardship on one section of the nation to the benefit of another. Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts then rose to defend the East. Blessed with a thunderous voice and a theatrical flair, Webster was the nation’s foremost orator and lawyer. He denied that the East had ever shown a restrictive policy toward the West. Webster then lured Hayne into defending states’ rights and upholding the doctrine of nullification instead of pursuing a coalition with the West.
Hayne took the bait. The Union constituted a compact of the states, he argued, and the federal government, which was their “agent,” could not be the judge of its own powers, else its powers would be unlimited. Rather, the states must judge when their agent—the federal government—had overstepped the bounds of its constitutional authority. The right of state
Daniel Webster
The eloquent Massachusetts senator stands to rebut the argument for nullification in the Webster-Hayne debate.
Interposition was “as full and complete as it was before the Constitution was formed.”
In rebutting the idea that a state could thwart a federal law, Webster professed a nationalistic view of the Constitution. From the beginning, he asserted, the American Revolution had been fought by a united nation rather than by separate colonies. True sovereignty resided in the people as a whole, for whom both federal and state governments acted as agents in their respective spheres. If a single state could nullify a law of the national government, Webster insisted, then the Union would be a “rope of sand,” a practical absurdity. A state could neither nullify a federal law nor secede from the Union. South Carolina’s defiance of federal sovereignty, he charged, “is nothing more than resistance by force— it is disunion by force—it is secession by force—it is Civil War.”
The impassioned speech made Webster a hero among National Republicans and a household name throughout the United States. Webster’s closing statement became an American classic, committed to memory by young orators: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” In the practical world of coalition politics, Webster had the better argument, for the Union and majority rule meant more to westerners, including President Jackson, than the abstractions of state sovereignty and nullification. Whatever one might argue about the origins of the Union, its evolution would validate Webster’s position: the states could not act separately from the national government.
THE RIFT WITH CALHOUN The nation now awaited President Jackson’s reaction to the debate over nullification. Like Vice President John C. Calhoun, he was a slaveholder, and he might have been expected to sympathize with South Carolina, his native state. But he did not. On April 13, 1830, the Democratic party hosted the annual Jefferson Day dinner to honor the birthday of the former president. When his turn came to propose a toast, Jackson raised his glass, glared at Calhoun, and announced: “Our Union—It must be preserved!” Calhoun tried to parry Jackson’s criticism with a toast to “the Union, next to our liberty most dear! May we all remember that it can only be preserved by respecting the rights of the States and distributing equally the benefit and the burden of the Union!” But Jackson had set off a bombshell that exploded the plans of the states’ righters.
A month later, Jackson drove the final nail into the coffin of Calhoun’s presidential ambitions. On May 12, 1830, the president saw for the first time documents detailing how in 1818 Calhoun, serving as secretary of war in the Monroe administration, had urged that General Jackson be disciplined for his unauthorized invasion of Spanish-held Florida. A tense correspondence between Jackson and Calhoun followed, ending with a curt note from Jackson cutting it off. “Understanding you now,” Jackson wrote two weeks later, “no further communication with you on this subject is necessary.”
The Rats Leaving a Falling House
During his first term, Jackson was beset by dissension within his administration. Here “public confidence in the stability of this administration” is toppling.
The acidic rift between the two proud men prompted Jackson to take a dramatic step: he removed all Calhoun partisans from the cabinet. Before the end of the summer of 1831, the president had for the second time a new cabinet, one entirely loyal to him. He named Martin Van Buren, who had resigned from his post as secretary of state, minister (ambassador) to England, and Van Buren departed for London. Van Buren’s friends now urged Jackson to
Repudiate his previous intention of serving only one term. They believed it might be hard to win the 1832 nomination for the New Yorker, who had been charged with intrigues against Calhoun, and the still-popular Carolinian might yet gain the presidency.
Jackson relented and in the fall of 1831 announced his readiness for one more term, with the idea of bringing Van Buren back from London in time to win the presidency in 1836. But in 1832, when the Senate reconvened, Van Buren’s enemies opposed his London appointment and gave Calhoun, as vice president, a vengeful chance to reject the nomination with a tiebreaking vote. “It will kill him, sir, kill him dead,” Calhoun told Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Benton disagreed: “You have broken a minister, and elected a Vice-President.” So, it turned out, he had. Calhoun’s peevish vote against Van Buren evoked popular sympathy for the New Yorker, who returned from London and would soon be nominated to succeed Calhoun as vice president.
Now that his presidential hopes were blasted, Calhoun openly opposed Jackson by assuming public leadership of the South Carolina nullification-ists. Jackson sought to defuse the crisis by asking Congress in 1829 to reduce tariffs on goods “which cannot come in competition with our own products.” Late in the spring of 1830, Congress lowered tariff duties on consumer products—tea, coffee, salt, and molasses. The lower tariff and the Maysville veto, coming at about the same time, mollified a few South Carolinians, but nullifiers dismissed Jackson’s actions as “nothing but sugar plums to pacify children.” By the end of 1831, Jackson was calling for further tariff reductions to take the wind out of the nullificationists’ sails. The Tariff of 1832, pushed through by former president John Quincy Adams (now serving in Congress), reduced duties on many items, but tariffs on cloth and iron remained high.
THE SOUTH CAROLINA ORDINANCE South Carolina, a state dominated by slaveholding planters and consumed by “Carolina fever,” as an observer called the mania for nullification, seethed with resentment toward Jackson—and the federal government. One hotheaded South Carolina Congressman called the Union a “foul monster.” He and other white South Carolinians, living in the only state where slaves were a majority of the population, feared that the federal authority to impose tariffs might eventually be used to end slavery. John C. Calhoun declared that the “peculiar domestic institutions of the southern states [slavery]” were at stake. In November 1832 a South Carolina state convention overwhelmingly adopted an ordinance of nullification that repudiated the federal tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 (declaring them “null, void, and no law”) and forbade federal agents in Charleston to collect the federal tariff revenue after February 1, 1833. The reassembled state legislature then provided that any citizen whose property was seized by federal authorities for failure to pay the duty could get a state court order to recover twice its value. The legislature chose Robert Hayne as governor and elected Calhoun to succeed him as senator. Calhoun promptly resigned as vice president in order to defend nullification on the Senate floor. New South Carolina governor Hayne called for a volunteer state militia force of ten thousand men to protect the state from federal intervention.
Jackson’s firm response In the nullification crisis, South Carolina found itself standing alone: other southern states expressed sympathy, but none endorsed nullification. President Jackson’s response to South Carolina was measured but not rash—at least not in public. He promised to confront the crisis with “firmness and forbearance” but angrily promised “woe to those nullifiers who shed the first blood.” Like James Madison, he viewed nullification as an act of treason. In private he was furious about South Carolina’s defiance. He threatened to hang Calhoun and all other traitors. In his annual message, on December 4, 1832, Jackson appealed to the people of South Carolina not to follow false leaders: “The laws of the United States must be executed. . . . Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you. . . . Their object is disunion. . . . Disunion by armed force is treason.”
CLAY’s compromise Jackson then sent federal soldiers and a warship to Charleston, South Carolina to uphold national authority. The South Carolina nullifiers mobilized the state militia. In 1833 the president requested from Congress a “force bill” authorizing him to use the army to compel compliance with federal law in South Carolina. The nullifiers postponed enforcement of their ordinances in anticipation of a compromise. Passage of the compromise bill depended upon the support of the shrewd Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who finally yielded to those urging him to save the day. On February 12, 1833, he circulated a plan to reduce the tariff gradually until 1842. It was less than South Carolina preferred, but it got the nullifiers out of the dilemma they had created.
On March 1, 1833, Congress passed the compromise tariff and the force bill, and the next day Jackson signed both. The South Carolina convention then met and rescinded its nullification of the tariff acts. In a face-saving gesture, the delegates nullified the force bill, for which Jackson no longer had any need. Both sides were able to claim victory. Jackson had upheld the supremacy of the Union and South Carolina had secured a reduction of the federal tariff. A sulking Calhoun, worn out by the controversy, returned to his plantation. “The struggle, so far from being over,” he ominously wrote, “is not more than fairly commenced.”
Jackson’s Indian Policy
If Jackson’s firm stance against nullification constituted his finest hour, his forcible removal of Indians from their ancestral lands in the South was one of his lowest moments. Andrew Jackson hated Indians. He viewed them as barbarians who were better off out of the way. Jackson believed that a “just, humane, liberal policy toward Indians” dictated moving all of them onto territory west of the Mississippi River, to the Great American Desert, which white settlers would never covet since it was believed to be fit mainly for lizards and rattlesnakes. State laws in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi had already abolished tribal units and stripped them of their powers, rejected ancestral Indian land claims, and denied Indians the right to vote or bring suit or testify in court.
INDIAN REMOVAL In response to a request by Jackson, Congress in 1830 narrowly approved the Indian Removal Act. It authorized the president to give Indians federal land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the land they occupied in the East and the South. By 1835 some forty-six thousand Indians were relocated at government expense. The policy was enacted with remarkable speed, but even that was too slow for state authorities in the South and Southwest. Unlike in the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region, where the flow of white settlement had constantly pushed Indians westward before it, settlement in the Old Southwest moved across Kentucky and Tennessee and down the Mississippi, surrounding the Creeks, Choctaws, Chicka-saws, Seminoles, and Cherokees. These “civilized tribes” had over the years taken on many of the features of white society. The Cherokees, for example, had developed a constitution and a written language and owned African American slaves.
Most of the northern tribes were too weak to resist the offers of federal commissioners who, if necessary, used bribery and alcohol to woo the chiefs. On the whole, there was remarkably little resistance. But in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, an armed clash erupted in 1832, which came to be known as the Black Hawk War. The Illinois militia mobilized to expel the Sauk and Fox tribes, chased them into the Wisconsin Territory, and massacred women and children as they tried to escape across the Mississippi.
In the South, two Indian nations, the Seminoles and the Cherokees, put up a stubborn resistance to the federal removal policy. The Seminoles of Florida fought a protracted guerrilla war in the Everglades from 1835 to 1842. But their resistance waned after 1837, when their leader, Osceola, was seized by treachery under a flag of truce, imprisoned, and left to die at Fort Moultrie near Charleston Harbor. After 1842 only a few hundred Seminoles remained, hiding out in the swamps. Most of the rest had been banished to the West.
THE TRAIL OF TEARS Some 21,500 Cherokees had, by the end of the eighteenth century, fallen back into the mountains of northern Georgia and western North Carolina, settling on land guaranteed to them in 1791 by a treaty with the U. S. government. But when Georgia ceded its western lands to the federal government in 1802, it did so on the ambiguous condition that
The United States extinguish all Indian titles within the state “as early as the same can be obtained on reasonable terms.” In 1827 the Cherokees, relying upon their established treaty rights, adopted a constitution in which they declared that they were not subject to the laws or control of any other state or nation. In 1828, shortly after Jackson’s election, Georgia announced that after June 1, 1830, the authority of state law would extend to the Cherokees living within the boundaries of the state.
Of all the so-called Civilized Tribes, the Cherokees had come closest to adopting the prevailing customs of white America. They had developed farms, schools, stores, newspapers, and churches—and they owned 2,100 African American slaves. But the discovery of gold in north Georgia in 1829 whetted the whites’ appetite for Cherokee land and brought bands of trespassing prospectors. The Cherokees sought relief in the Supreme Court, but in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Court lacked jurisdiction because the Cherokees were a “domestic dependent nation” rather than a foreign state in the meaning of the Constitution. Marshall added, however, that the Cherokees had “an unquestionable right” to their lands “until title should be extinguished by voluntary cession to the United States.” In 1830 a Georgia law had required whites in the Cherokee territory to obtain licenses authorizing their residence there and to take an oath of allegiance to the state. Two New England missionaries among the Indians refused to abide by the law and were sentenced to four years at hard labor. On appeal their case reached the Supreme Court as Worcester v. Georgia (1832). The Marshall court held that the Cherokee Nation was “a distinct political community” within which Georgia law had no force. The Georgia law was therefore unconstitutional.
The Trail of Tears
Thousands of Cherokee Indians died on a nightmarish march from Georgia to Oklahoma after being forced from their native lands.
President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the Court’s decision, claiming that he had no authority to intervene in Georgia. In fact, Jackson regarded any treaties with Indians as an “unenforceable” absurdity. Under the circumstances there was nothing for the Cherokees to do but give in and sign a treaty, which they did in 1835. They gave up their land in the Southeast (about 100 million acres) in exchange for tracts in the “Indian Territory,” some 32 million acres west of Arkansas. By 1838, seventeen thousand Cherokees had departed westward on the “Trail of Tears,” following other tribes on an eight-hundred-mile journey. Four thousand of the refugees died on the Trail of Tears. A few held out in the mountains and acquired title to federal land in North Carolina; thenceforth they were the “Eastern Band” of Cherokees.
The Bank Controversy
The overriding national issue in the presidential campaign of 1832 was neither Jackson’s Indian policy nor South Carolina’s obsession with the tariff. It was the question of renewing the charter of the Bank of the United States, which Congress had first established in 1791.
The bank’s opponents Andrew Jackson’s stance against the national bank was as unrelenting as his prejudice against Indians. The national bank, based in Philadelphia and with branches in major cities across the country, also served as the depository for all federal funds but also issued currency and made loans. From the start this combination of private and public functions caused problems for the Bank of the United States (B. U.S.) As the government’s revenues soared, the bank became the most powerful lending institution in the country, a central bank, in effect, whose huge size enabled it to determine the amount of credit available for the nation. The charter of the first B. U.S. expired in 1811 and was renewed in 1816 as the Second Bank of the United States.
While providing the infant American economy with a stable currency, the national bank was controversial from the start. Local banks and state governments—especially in the South and West—feared the scope and power of the “monopolistic” national bank. Southerners and westerners claimed that the small group of national bank directors manipulated the nation’s financial system to the advantage of the North and themselves.
Andrew Jackson had absorbed the western hostility toward the B. U.S. after the panic of 1819. “Every one that knows me,” he told a friend, knows “that I have always been opposed to the U. States Bank, nay all banks.” He believed that “hard” money—gold and silver coins—was the only legitimate medium of exchange. He remained skeptical of all forms of paper currency (hence the irony of his picture now being on twenty-dollar bills), and he was convinced that the central bank was unconstitutional—no matter what Chief Justice John Marshall had said in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819).
Under the astute management of the brilliant but haughty Nicholas Biddle, the Second Bank of the United States had prospered and grown. With twenty-nine branches and a third of the nation’s bank deposits, it had facilitated business expansion and supplied a stable currency by forcing the 464 state banks to keep enough gold or silver in their vaults to back their paper currency. Arrayed against the bank were powerful enemies with conflicting interests: some of the state and local banks that had been forced to reduce their volume of paper money, groups of debtors who suffered from the reduction (deflation) in the money supply, and businessmen and speculators on the make, who wanted more money in circulation to facilitate their entrepreneurial ventures.
Like Jackson, many westerners and workingmen believed that the bank was a “Monster,” a financial monopoly controlled by a wealthy few. “I think it right to be perfectly frank with you,” Jackson told Biddle in 1829. “I do not dislike your Bank any more than [I dislike] all banks.” Jackson characterized bankers as “vipers and thieves.” He was perhaps right in his instinct that the national bank lodged too much power in private hands, but he was mistaken in his understanding of the bank’s policies. By issuing paper money of its own, the bank provided a stable, uniform currency for the expanding economy as well as a mechanism to control the pace of economic growth.
THE RECHARTER EFFORT In 1829, in his first annual message, President Jackson questioned the national bank’s constitutionality and asserted (whatever the evidence to the contrary) that it had failed to maintain a sound currency. The Second Bank of the United States’ twenty-year charter would run through 1836, but Nicholas Biddle could not afford the uncertainty of waiting until then for a renewal. Leaders of the National Republicans, especially Henry Clay and Daniel Webster (who was legal counsel to the B. U.S. as well as a senator), told Biddle that he needed to act quickly, before the presidential election of 1836. Friends of the bank held a majority in Congress, and Jackson would risk loss of support in the election if he vetoed its renewal. But Biddle and his allies failed to grasp both Jackson’s tenacity and the depth of public suspicion of the bank. In the end, Biddle, Clay, and the National Republicans handed Jackson a popular issue on the
Rechartering the Bank
President Andrew Jackson battling the “Hydra-headed” Bank of the United States.
Eve of the election. “The Bank,” Jackson told Martin Van Buren in May 1832, “is trying to kill me. But I will kill it.”
Early in the summer of 1832, both houses of Congress passed the bank recharter bill by a comfortable margin. On July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill, sending it back to Congress with a blistering denunciation of the bank’s monopoly powers that benefited the rich and powerful at the expense of the people. Jackson called the B. U.S. a “hydra-headed monster of corruption” that was “dangerous to our liberties.” An effort to overrule Jackson’s veto failed in the Senate, thus setting the stage for a nationwide financial crisis and a dramatic presidential campaign.
Contentious Politics
CAMPAIGN INNOVATIONS In 1832, for the first time in a presidential election, a third party entered the field. The Anti-Masonic party grew out of popular hostility toward the Masonic fraternal order, a private social organization that originated in Great Britain early in the eighteenth century. By the start of the American Revolution, there were a hundred Masonic “lodges” scattered across the United States with about a thousand members, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. By 1830 the number had grown to two thousand lodges and one hundred thousand Masons, including Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.
The Masonic movement generated little opposition until one of its members from western New York, fifty-two-year-old William Morgan, disappeared in 1826. Morgan had threatened to reveal the secret rituals of the Masonic order. Masons, some of them local officials, had burned down Morgan’s shop and arrested him. Soon thereafter, someone paid for his release and spirited Morgan away. His body was never found. Between 1826 and 1831, the state of New York launched over twenty investigations into Morgan’s disappearance (and presumed murder) and conducted a dozen trials but never gained a conviction. Each legal effort aroused more public indignation because most of the judges, lawyers, and jurors were Masons.
Fears and suspicions of the Masonic order as a tyrannical secret organization intent on subverting democracy gave rise to the grassroots political movement known as the Anti-Masonic party. More than a hundred AntiMasonic newspapers emerged across the nation. Their common purpose was to stamp out an organization that was contaminating the “heart of the republic.” Former president John Quincy Adams said that disbanding the “Masonic institution” was the most important issue facing “us and our posterity.” Opposition to a fraternal organization was hardly the foundation upon which to build a lasting political party, but the Anti-Masonic party had three important firsts to its credit: in addition to being the first third party, it was the first party to hold a national nominating convention and the first to announce a platform, both of which it accomplished in 1831 when 116 delegates from thirteen states gathered in Baltimore to nominate William Wirt of Maryland for president. The former attorney general in President Monroe’s administration, he was one of the nation’s leading lawyers. Wirt had decided that Masonry was undermining the “fundamental principles” of American democracy.
The Democrats and the National Republicans followed the example of the Anti-Masonic Party by holding national conventions of their own. In December 1831 the delegates of the National Republican party assembled in Baltimore to nominate Henry Clay, the charming, yet imperious legislative genius from Kentucky whose arrogance was matched only by his burning ambition to be president. Jackson endorsed the idea of a nominating convention for the Democratic party to demonstrate popular support tor its candidates. To that purpose the convention, also meeting at Baltimore, first adopted the two-thirds rule for nomination (which prevailed until 1936, when it became a simple majority) and then named Martin Van Buren as Jackson’s running mate. The Democrats, unlike the other two parties, adopted no formal platform at their first convention and relied to a substantial degree upon hoopla and the popularity of the president to carry their cause.
The outcome was an overwhelming endorsement of Jackson in the Electoral College, with 219 votes to 49 for Clay, and a less overwhelming but solid victory in the popular vote, 688,000 to 530,000. William Wirt carried only Vermont, winning seven electoral votes. Wayward South Carolina, preparing for nullification and unable to stomach either Jackson or Clay, delivered its 11 votes to Governor John Floyd of Virginia.
THE REMOVAL OF GOVERNMENT DEPOSITS Andrew Jackson interpreted his lopsided reelection as a mandate to close the B. U.S. He asked Congress to investigate the safety of government deposits in the bank. After a committee had checked on the bank’s operations, the Calhoun and Clay forces in the House of Representatives passed a resolution affirming that government deposits were safe and could be continued. The resolution passed on March 2, 1833, by chance the same day that Jackson signed the compromise tariff and the force bill. With the nullification issue out of the way, Jackson was free to wage war on the bank. He now resolved to remove all government deposits from the national bank.
When Secretary of the Treasury Louis McLane balked, Jackson fired him. In the reshuffling, Attorney General Roger B. Taney moved to the Treasury Department, where he complied with the presidential wishes, which corresponded to his own views. Taney continued to draw on government accounts with Biddle’s bank but deposited all new federal receipts in state banks. By the end of 1833, twenty-three state banks—“pet banks,” as they came to be called—had the benefit of federal deposits. Transferring the government’s deposits was a highly questionable action under the law, and the Senate voted to censure Jackson for it. Biddle refused to surrender. He ordered the B. U.S. to curtail loans throughout the nation and demand the redemption of state banknotes in gold or silver as quickly as possible. He sought to bring the economy to a halt, create a sharp depression, and reveal to the nation the importance of maintaining the bank.
Biddle’s contraction policy, however, unwittingly unleashed a speculative binge encouraged by the deposit of government funds in the pet banks. With the restraint of Biddle’s bank removed, the state banks unleashed their wildcat tendencies. Hundreds of new state banks emerged, printing banknotes with abandon for the purpose of lending money to speculators. Sales of public lands rose from 4 million acres in 1834 to 15 million in 1835 and 20 million in 1836. At the same time, the states plunged heavily into debt to finance the building of roads and canals, inspired by the success of New York’s Erie Canal. By 1837 total state indebtedness had soared to $170 million. The supreme irony of Jackson’s war on the bank was that it sparked the speculative mania that he most feared.
FISCAL MEASURES The surge of unstable paper money reached its peak in 1836, when events combined suddenly to deflate it. Most important among these were the Distribution Act and the Specie Circular. Distribution of the government’s surplus funds to the states had long been a pet project of Henry Clay’s. One of its purposes was to eliminate the federal surplus, thus removing one argument for cutting the tariff. Much of the federal surplus, however, resulted from the “land-office business” in western property sales and was therefore in the form of banknotes that had been issued to speculators. Many westerners thought that the solution to the surplus was simply to lower the price of land; southerners preferred to lower the tariff—but such action would now upset the delicate compromise achieved with the Tariff of 1833. For a time the annual surpluses could be applied to paying off the government debt, but the debt, reduced to $7 million by 1832, was entirely paid off by 1835.
Still, the federal surplus continued to mount. Clay again proposed distributing the funds to the states, but Jackson had constitutional scruples about the process. Finally a compromise was worked out whereby the government would distribute most of the surplus as loans to the states. To satisfy Jackson’s concerns, the funds were technically loans, but in reality the government never asked to be repaid. Distribution of the surplus was to be in proportion to each state’s representation in the two houses of Congress and was to be paid out in quarterly installments beginning in 1837.
The Specie Circular, issued by the secretary of the Treasury at Jackson’s order, applied the president’s hard-money conviction to the sale of public lands. According to his order, the government would accept only gold or silver coins in payment for land. Since few settlers had gold or silver coins, however, they were now left all the more at the mercy of speculators when they tried to purchase land. Both the Distribution Act and the Specie Circular put many state banks in a plight. The distribution of the surplus to the state governments resulted in federal funds’ being withdrawn from the state banks. In turn, the state banks had to require many borrowers to pay back their loans immediately in order to be able to transfer the federal funds to the state governments. This situation caused greater disarray in the already chaotic state banking community. At the same time the new requirement that only hard money be accepted for federal land purchases put an added strain on the supplies of gold and silver.
BOOM AND BUST But the boom-and-bust cycle of the 1830s had causes larger even than Andrew Jackson, causes that were beyond his control. The soaring inflation of the mid-1830s was rooted not so much in a feverish expansion of banknotes, as it seemed at the time, but in an increase of gold and silver payments from England, France, and especially Mexico for investment and for the purchase of American cotton and other products. At the same time, British credits enabled Americans to buy British goods without having to export gold or silver. Meanwhile, the flow of hard coins to China, where silver had been much prized, decreased. Now the Chinese took in payment for their goods British credits, which they could in turn use to cover rapidly increasing imports of opium from British India.
Van Buren and the New Party System
THE WHIG COALITION As the economy showed signs of strain, the Jacksonian Democrats reaped a political bonanza. Jackson had slain the dual monsters of nullification and the bank, and the people loved him for it. The hard times following the contraction of the economy turned Americans against Biddle and the B. U.S. but not against Jackson, the professed friend of “the people” and foe of the “selfish” interests of financiers and speculators. But in 1834, Jackson’s opponents began to pull together a new coalition of diverse elements, united chiefly by their hostility to his authoritarian style. The imperious demeanor of the feisty champion of democracy had given rise to the nickname “King Andrew I.” Jackson’s followers therefore were deemed Tories, supporters of the “tyrannical” king, and his opponents became Whigs, a name that linked them to the Patriots of the American Revolution.
The diverse coalition making up the Whigs clustered around the National Republican party of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster. Into the combination came remnants of the Anti-Masonic and Democratic parties, who for one reason or another were alienated by Jackson’s stand on the national bank or states’ rights. Of the forty-one Democrats in Congress who had voted to recharter the bank, twenty-eight had joined the Whigs by 1836, including Congressman David Crockett from Tennessee, the mythical hunter and gregarious storyteller. Crockett was a national folk hero who during an 1835 speech in Philadelphia lamented the terrible economic calamity resulting from the policies of Jackson, his former commander during the War of 1812. Crockett called Jackson an “old man. . . whose popularity, like the lightning from heaven, blasts and withers all that comes within its influence.” For the next twenty years the Whigs and the Democrats would be the two major political parties.
The core Whigs were the supporters of Henry Clay and his economic nationalism. They favored federal support for constructing internal improvements—roads, bridges, canals—to foster economic growth. And they supported a national bank and high tariffs. In the South the Whigs enjoyed the support of the urban banking and commercial interests. In the West, farmers who valued government-funded internal improvements joined the Whig ranks. Unlike the Democrats, who attracted Catholics from Germany and Ireland, Whigs tended to be native-born or British-American evangelical Protestants—Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—who were active in promoting social reforms such as abolition and temperance.
THE ELECTION OF 1836 In 1835, eighteen months before the election, the Democrats held their second national convention, nominating Jackson’s handpicked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren. The Whig coalition, united chiefly in its opposition to Jackson, held no convention but adopted a strategy of multiple candidacies, hoping to throw the election into the House of Representatives.
Martin Van Buren
Van Buren earned the nickname the “Little Magician.”
The result was a free-for-all reminiscent of 1824, except that this time one candidate stood apart from the rest: it was Martin Van Buren against the field. The Whigs put up three favorite sons: Daniel Webster, named by the Massachusetts legislature; Hugh Lawson White, chosen by anti-Jackson Democrats in the Tennessee legislature; and William Henry Harrison of Indiana, nominated by a predominantly Anti-Masonic convention in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the South the Whigs made heavy inroads on the Democratic vote by arguing that Van
Buren would be soft on anti-slavery advocates and that the South could trust only a southerner—that is, Hugh White—as president. In the popular vote, Van Buren outdistanced the entire Whig field, with 765,000 votes to 740,000 for the Whigs, most of which were cast for Harrison. Van Buren won 170 electoral votes; Harrison, 73; White, 26; and Webster, 14.
Martin Van Buren, the eighth president, was the first of Dutch ancestry. Although trained as an attorney, he had been for most of his adult life a professional politician, so skilled in the arts of organization and manipulation that he came to be known as the Little Magician. Elected governor of New York in 1828, he quickly resigned to join Jackson’s cabinet and became vice president in 1833.
THE PANIC OF 1837 Van Buren inherited a terrifying financial panic. An already precarious economy was tipped over by a depression in England, which resulted in a drop in the price of American cotton and caused English banks and investors to cut back their American commitments and refuse extensions of loans. This was a particularly hard blow because much of America’s economic expansion depended upon European—and mainly English—i nvestment capital. On top of everything else, in 1836 there had been a failure of the wheat crop, the export of which in good years helped offset the drain of payments abroad. States curtailed ambitious plans for roads and canals and in many cases felt impelled to repudiate their debts. In the crunch forty percent of the wildcat state banks succumbed. In April 1837, some 250 businesses failed in New York City alone.
The working class, as always, was particularly hard hit during the economic slump and largely had to fend for itself. By the fall of 1837, a third of the workforce was jobless, and those still fortunate enough to have jobs saw their wages cut by 30 to 50 percent within two years. At the same time, prices for food and clothing soared. As the winter of 1837 approached, a journalist reported that in New York City two hundred thousand people were “in utter and hopeless distress with no means of surviving the winter but those provided by charity.” There was no government aid; churches and charitable societies were the major sources of support for the indigent.
Van Buren did not believe that he or the government had any responsibility to rescue hard-pressed farmers or businessmen or to provide relief for the jobless and homeless. He did feel obliged to keep the government itself in a healthy financial situation, however. To that end he called a special session of Congress in 1837, which quickly voted to postpone indefinitely the distribution of the surplus because of a probable upcoming deficit and approved an issue of Treasury notes (currency) to cover immediate expenses.
AN INDEPENDENT TREASURY Van Buren believed that the government should cease risking its deposits in shaky state banks and set up an independent Treasury. Under this plan, the government would keep its funds in its own vaults and do business entirely in hard money. The Independent Treasury Act elicited opposition from a combination of Whigs and conservative Democrats who feared deflation, and it took Van Buren several years of maneuvering to get what he wanted. Calhoun signaled a return to the Democratic fold, after several years of flirting with the Whigs, when he endorsed the Treasury act. Van Buren gained western support by backing a more liberal policy regarding federal land sales. Congress finally passed the Independent Treasury Act on July 4, 1840. Although it lasted little more than a year (the Whigs repealed it in 1841), it would be restored in 1846.
The drawn-out struggle over the Treasury was only one of several squabbles that preoccupied politicians during the Van Buren years. A flood of petitions for Congress to abolish slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia ignited a fiery debate, especially in the House of Representatives. Fairly or not, the administration became the target of growing discontent. The president won renomination easily enough but could not get the Democratic convention to agree on his vice-presidential choice, which was left up to the Democratic electors.
THE “log cabin AND HARD CIDER” CAMPAIGN Because of the scope and depth of the economic depression, the Whigs fully expected to win the 1840 presidential election. They got an early start on their campaign when they met at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on December 4, 1839, to choose a candidate. Henry Clay, the Kentucky legislator who had been the presidential nominee in 1832 and then the most consistent foe of Andrew Jackson during the 1830s, expected 1840 to be his year. But several party leaders thought otherwise. Although Clay led on the first ballot, the convention sought a Whiggish Jackson, as it were, a military hero who could enter the race with few known political convictions or enemies. The delegates finally turned to William Henry Harrison, an Ohio soldier and politician from a prominent Virginia family. Harrison’s credentials were impressive: victor at the Battle of Tippecanoe against the Shawnees in 1811, former governor of the Indiana Territory, briefly congressman and senator from Ohio, more briefly minister to Colombia. Another advantage of Harrison’s was that the Anti-Masons liked him. To rally their states’ rights wing, the Whigs chose for vice president John Tyler of Virginia.
The Whigs had no platform, but they fastened on a catchy campaign slogan, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” And they soon had a rousing campaign
Theme, which a Democratic newspaper unwittingly supplied when the Baltimore Republican declared that General Harrison, at sixty-seven the oldest man yet to seek the presidency, was the kind of man who would spend his retirement “days in a log cabin [sipping apple cider] on the banks of the Ohio [River].” The Whigs seized upon the cider and log cabin symbols to depict Harrison as a simple man sprung from the people in contrast to Martin Van Buren’s wealthy, aristocratic lifestyle. Actually, Harrison sprang from one of the first families of Virginia and lived in a large farmhouse.
The Whig “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” campaign featured portable log cabins rolling through the streets along with barrels of cider. All the devices of hoopla were mobilized: placards, emblems, campaign buttons, floats, effigies, great rallies, and a campaign newspaper, the Log Cabin. The Whig party had not only learned its lessons well, but it had also improved upon its teachers in the art of campaigning. “Van! Van! Is a Used-Up Man!” went one campaign refrain, and down went Van Buren by the thumping margin of 234 votes to 60 in the Electoral College. In the popular vote it was closer: 1,275,000 for Harrison; 1,128,000 for Van Buren. The Whigs had successfully distracted Americans from the major issues facing the United states by focusing on the personal qualities of Harrison and promising a vague return to prosperity. There was no consensus about how such prosperity was to be generated. It was simply time for a change.
Assessing the Jackson Years
The Whigs may have won in 1840, but the Jacksonian Democrats had permanently altered American politics during the 1830s. People had become much more involved in the political process. By 1840 both national political parties were organized down to the precinct level, and the proportion of white men who voted in the presidential election had tripled, from 27 percent in 1824 to nearly 80 percent in 1840. That much is beyond dispute, but the phenomenon of Andrew Jackson, the heroic symbol for an age, continues to spark historical debate.
A supreme irony of the times was that the age of the so-called common man, the age of Jacksonian democracy, seems actually to have been an era of growing economic and social inequality. During the years before the Civil War, the American legend of young men rising from rags to riches was a durable and consoling myth. Speaking to the Senate in 1832, Kentucky’s Henry Clay claimed that almost all the successful factory owners he knew were “enterprising self-made men, who have whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.” While men of moderate means could sometimes turn an inheritance into a fortune by good management and prudent speculation, those who started out poor and uneducated seldom made it to the top. In 1828 the top 1 percent of New York’s families (worth $34,000 or more) held 40 percent of the wealth, and the top 4 percent held 76 percent. Similar circumstances prevailed in Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities.
But despite growing social distinctions, it seems likely that the white population of America, at least, was better off than the general run of Europeans. New frontiers, both geographic and technological, raised the level of material well-being for all. And religious as well as political freedoms continued to attract people eager for liberty in a new land. For all of the exaggerated rhetoric about the second quarter of the nineteenth century witnessing the triumph of the “common man,” there seems little question that Andrew Jackson and his supporters promoted an ideal of republican virtue, of returning America to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal that the federal government would play as limited a role as possible. In the Jacksonian view, the alliance of government and business was always an invitation to special favors and an eternal source of corruption. The national bank was the epitome of such evil. The right policy for government, at the national level in particular, was to refrain from granting special privileges and to let free competition in the marketplace regulate the economy.
World History
