Jacksonion Democracy

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  The Growth and Collapse of One American Nation: The Early Republic 1790 - 1861

  The Early Republic 1790-1861

  • Donald J Fraser, Dotti Albertine(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Fraser & Associates

    (Publisher)

  4

  As for Andrew Jackson, his view of ethnic and racial differences was typical for the times that he lived in. “Inequalities that others deemed artificial—especially between blacks and whites, Indians and settlers, men and women—appeared to Jackson, as they did to most American contemporaries, perfectly natural,” Wilentz writes. Still, he lacked the subtly of Jefferson, who knew that slavery was wrong and attempted to implement an enlightened, if paternalistic, policy toward the Indians. Particularly on Indian policy, Jackson’s “campaign for Indian removal tied the movements for economic development, territorial expansion, racial discrimination, white democracy, and the spread of slavery together,” historian Harry Watson argues. Like Jefferson, Jackson stood against the privilege of the elites and feared the return of aristocratic politics. He believed it was his duty to protect “the independent rights of our nation,” and the legacy of the revolution, an inherently Jeffersonian perspective. Unlike his main opponent in both 1824 and 1828, John Quincy Adams, Jackson would never see that slavery was wrong.5

  Two Fateful Elections

  The method for selecting the president was gradually evolving, and the elections of 1824 and 1828 saw some major changes. Initially, electoral college candidates were selected by state legislatures. By 1824, eighteen of the twenty-four states assigned presidential electors by popular vote, and fourteen of these used a winner-take-all approach where the top vote getter received all that state’s electoral votes. Still, the total number of people that voted in the presidential election of 1824 was quite small, with a total of 350,000 ballots cast. By way of comparison, in 1828 there were almost 1.2 million votes recorded. The method for selecting a presidential candidate was also undergoing change. Since 1796, the Republican Party had selected its presidential candidate by a caucus of its congressional members, referred to as King Caucus. But this system collapsed in 1824 and would eventually be replaced by a somewhat more democratic convention in which party members and officeholders together selected the presidential candidate.6

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  A Companion to the Era of Andrew Jackson

  • Sean Patrick Adams, Sean Patrick Adams(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (1961), argued that ethno-cultural and religious allegiances were comparatively more important in determining support for or against Jackson than issues of class, economics or political democracy, while Edward Pessen alleged that the Jackson party “for all its flattery of the common man effectively insulated him from the sources of power and decision making” (Pessen, 1978: 154).

  The debate in the academy between so-called Progressive and Revisionist interpretations of the Jackson party shows no sign of abating. Sellers and Wilentz’s admiring accounts of Jacksonian Democracy are balanced in the recent literature by the work of two Cornell historians, Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, who claim that the high voter-turnout and mass meetings and conventions of the so-called “Golden Age of Participatory Democracy” masked a reality of public indifference if not hostility towards politics.

  What follows is an attempt to consider the evidence both for and against the claim that the Jackson party constituted a democratizing force in American politics, with a particular focus on Jackson’s first campaign for the presidency, in 1824. By dismantling the congressional caucus system, which had been used by the Republican Party between 1800 and 1820 to nominate presidential candidates, and replacing it with more participatory political practices such as the public meeting and the delegate convention, the Jackson party rendered the political process more subject to popular influence and control. The Jackson party’s dethroning of “King Caucus” and its adoption of alternative modes of political organization in 1824, I contend, constituted an important episode in the democratization of American politics and society. In what follows, however, attention will be drawn to two considerations that together qualify Jackson’s party’s claim to being a democratizing force. First of all, both opposition to caucuses and the use of public meetings and delegate conventions pre-dated by some years Jackson’s first presidential campaign. If pride of place goes to the Jackson party for democratizing political practices in antebellum America, and I believe it does, the contributions during the period from 1800 to 1820 of pioneers in challenging the caucus system and promoting the use of delegate conventions nevertheless deserve recognition. The political machinery successfully employed by the Jackson party in 1824 and subsequent elections did not spring into existence abruptly and fully-formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. A second qualification of the Jackson’s party’s claim to being a “democratizing” force in the 1820s arises from listening to the concerns many of Jackson’s contemporaries expressed that the new methods of political organization touted by the Jackson party were frequently more democratic and participatory in appearance only . I do not believe that these concerns validate the Revisionist interpretation of Jacksonian democracy as so much hucksterism, but they do serve as a useful reminder of the importance of distinguishing between the forms and the substance

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  A History of American Political Theories

  • Charles Merriam(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER V THE JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY T HE radical movement which was destined to break down the power of the landed aristocracy, level the old barriers of exclusiveness, and open the way for government of a more popular character, took the form of Jacksonian Democracy. Its leaders made few contributions to democratic political theory, but they broadened the application of principles already familiar. By expanding the electorate, a revolution was made in the basis of the democracy, and radical changes in the superstructure were equally conspicuous. To the more important features in this movement, attention will now be directed. 1 Two great forces were back of the Jacksonian democracy. These were, in the first place, the frontier conditions and ideas in the West and South; and, in the second place, the growth of cities and an industrial class. By 1830 nine new states had been added to the original thirteen, and by 1850 there had been sixteen admitted, of which only two, Maine and Vermont, were not on the Western frontier. In these new states the conditions, economic and social, were highly favorable to the development of the democratic spirit. Frontier life tended to produce self-reliance, independence, and individuality. It developed a sense of equality on the part of the members of the community. There was no great wealth, no highly polished society, no leisure class, and no historic tradition; the conditions were accordingly unfavorable to aristocratic theory or practice. To the hardy pioneers, the idea of a jure divino king, an hereditary nobility, or a specially privileged class was ridiculous in the extreme; while religious or property qualifications, permanent or long tenure of office, and similar restrictions were altogether unacceptable. They firmly believed in the sovereignty of the people, and, furthermore, in the necessity of giving to the mass of the population, as far as possible, the direction of public affairs

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  Ambition in America

  Political Power and the Collapse of Citizenship

  • Jeffrey A. Becker(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  3

  The Ambition of Popular Control

  Jacksonian Democracy and American Populism

  The thing to remember about the historic connection between nineteenth-century populism and modern politics is that populism can be understood as an attempt to create popular democracy, an attempt to enrich the popular democratic input into the American system of governance.

  —Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise:The Populist Moment in America

  We still rest our faith on some kind of populism, an inner sense of the rightness of individual choice over scientific knowledge and community self-control over even a benevolent management by the state. Politics, by which we mean our right to run government, not simply to comment on it, is still our only protection against tyranny.

  —Barry Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945

  Jacksonian democracy and the Populism that ended at the national political level with William Jennings Bryan’s candidacy for U.S. president mark two periods in American political history that exposed a growing divergence between the oligarchic political forms of association established under the Constitution and the plebiscitary ambitions of mass populations. As American political power became increasingly consolidated and centralized under the Constitution, Jacksonian democrats believed the values that defined their way of life were under attack. And after the Civil War, when the railroads and corporate trusts turned public policy to private ends, the Populist movement revived the belief that people collectively controlling their destiny was the rightful inheritance of the common person, rather than the province of an economic elite. In their own ways, the Jacksonians and the Populists each saw plebiscitary political ambitions thwarted by the growth and expansion of industrial capitalism—and fought against the idea that the people needed someone to command them, someone to bow down to, someone to relieve them of the burdens and responsibilities of democratic government.

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  Democracy, Participation and Contestation

  • Emmanuelle Avril, Johann Neem(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  Contested definitions of democracy

  Passage contains an image

  1

  Rethinking 1828

  The emergence of competing democracies in the United States Reeve Huston    

  Nobody had ever seen anything like it. By ten in the morning on March 4, 1829, the streets were jammed with fancy carriages and farmers’ carts, “filled with women and children, some in finery and some in rags.” They had all come to see Andrew Jackson be sworn in as the new President of the United States. After the new president swore his oath and gave his speech, a long procession of “country men, farmers, gentlemen, […] boys, women and children, black and white” followed him to the White House and descended upon the presidential reception. The crowd smashed several thousand dollars’ worth of glass and china in the rush to get at the refreshments. Jackson was nearly crushed as the crowd pressed in on him to shake his hand. Men and boys in muddy boots entered through windows and climbed on the furniture to get a peek at the new president (Wilentz, 2010).

  This scene has become what Sean Wilentz calls a “set piece of American political lore.” For all the disputes among historians about the character of Jacksonian-era politics, all agree that something new was happening. Some historians spy in the smashed china and muddied furniture evidence of an emerging golden age of American democracy, one that ushered in unprecedented popular participation in politics. Others exhibit varying levels of skepticism, from Ronald Formisano’s (1983) careful and ambivalent analysis of how democratic the so-called Second Party System was, to Edward Pessen’s (1978, 1984) dismissal of Jacksonian democracy as an elite sham. Whether sham or not, all agree that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 marked the beginning of a new era of partisan democracy (Leonard, 2002; Schlesinger, 1945; Sellers, 1994; Silbey, 1991; Watson, 1981, 1990; Wilentz, 2010).

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  Interpreting American History: The Age of Andrew Jackson

  • Brian D. McKnight, James S. Humphreys(Authors)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • The Kent State University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The Shape of Democracy”

  Historical Interpretations of Jacksonian Democracy

  MARK R. CHEATHEM

  Alexis de Tocqueville, that renowned observer of American society during the 1830s, wrote that when he visited the United States, “I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclination, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom.” For decades, students and scholars agreed with Tocqueville, looking to the Jacksonian period to find the origins of modern conceptions of equality and democracy. In recent years, however, the study of Jacksonian America has fallen victim to the period’s failure to realize fully the nation’s promise of those political and social ideals. But as one historian has noted, “that very standard by which historians judge and often condemn Jacksonian America is itself a legacy of Jacksonian America.” Examining the development of the United States in the years between its second war for independence from Great Britain and the Civil War seems a worthy endeavor for many reasons, not the least of which are pursuing Tocqueville’s goal of understanding “the shape of democracy” and ascertaining how Americans of the Jacksonian period established a legacy by which they could be judged.1

  THE PATRICIAN (OR WHIG ) SCHOOL —1850S –1890S

  The first scholarly study of the Jacksonian period appeared as the nation entered the Civil War. James Parton’s three-volume Life of Andrew Jackson offered a comprehensive assessment of Jackson’s personal and private life. He was, Parton wrote, “a man whose ignorance, whose good intentions, and whose passions combined to render him, of all conceivable human beings, the most unfit for the office.” Parton also found Jackson full of contradictions: he was at once “a democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.” Parton’s paradoxical assessment of the seventh president, as one historian noted in 1958, “could almost stand today as the conclusion to a review of Jacksonian historiography.”2

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  Old Southwest to Old South

  Mississippi, 1798-1840

  • Mike Bunn, Clay Williams(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Mississippi

    (Publisher)

  12.4. Title page of Mississippi’s 1832 state constitution, which granted voting rights to all white men in Mississippi. (Courtesy of Mississippi Department of Archives and History)

  To the great majority of Mississippi’s voting public in the 1830s, notions of personal freedom and the proper distribution of power had little to do with such protections afforded minority groups within the state. Instead, they lay bound up in the concept of government that became personified by one of the most influential leaders in American history—Andrew Jackson. The very presence of Jackson and the redistribution of power he came to represent during the close of Mississippi’s frontier era proved pivotal not only in individual elections but in knitting the very fabric of Mississippi’s antebellum political party infrastructure. Dating to the appointment of aloof Federalist Winthrop Sargent as the first territorial governor in 1798 and the “Revolution of 1800,” which swept Democratic-Republican Jeffersonian allies into power throughout the territory, the state’s chaotic politics had always featured factionalism in some form. While some of this political rivalry aligned with national party organizations, to the extent that it did it was usually in favor or in opposition to the current presidential administration. Parties, in the modern sense of the word, simply did not exist in the Magnolia State until the rise of Jackson on the national scene. “Pluralistic and localistic” in the words of one leading scholar of politics in frontier Mississippi, the state’s politics reflected an “intrastate localism” with weak and shifting allegiances before the Jackson–John Quincy Adams presidential contest brought about a coalescing of factions that operated as true parties.17

  In many ways Mississippi stood at the epicenter of the political phenomenon known as Jacksonian Democracy. The movement empowered the “common man” and consequently broadened public participation in politics. Among its main tenets it advocated limited federal government and a full-throated endorsement of the concept of Manifest Destiny, construed in the South to mean in immediate terms the removal of any native groups who stood in the way of the expansion of slavery and the Cotton Kingdom. While popular to some degree nationally, it had special appeal in the South during Mississippi’s formative statehood years, and it swept all that came before it in the region. It gave shape and direction to a wide variety of political questions and helped the region find a collective sectional voice under which it could unite in arguing for its interests.

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  Unto a Good Land

  A History of the American People, Volume 1: To 1900

  • David Edwin Harrell, Edwin S. Gaustad, John B. Boles, Sally Foreman Griffith(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  Obviously Jackson was no learned gentleman in the mold of Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, but instead a son of the rough-and-ready frontier. The era named after him, it is now widely believed, was a time of increasingly democratic politics, in part inspired by his efforts and personality. Yet Jackson the man and the Age of Jackson are both paradoxical: Jackson was a wealthy slaveholding planter and an autocratic leader who bristled at opposition. Certainly no one called him Andy to his face. His election was more the result of democratizing tendencies in American politics than a cause of it. Still, by sheer force of personality and by being a lightning rod for political controversy, he so dominated the two decades after 1824 that the label “Age of Jackson” accurately stamps the period. Even Henry Clay, no friend of Jackson, wrote at the end of his administration that the president had “swept over the Government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado.” The mythic Jackson seemed to overwhelm the real man, and that partly explains his influence on the times. Powerful cultural and economic forces helped reshape national politics, intensifying partisan identification, increasing voter turnout, and infusing politics with a new moral urgency. During these years we can in retrospect see bubbling beneath the surface of events the issues, tensions, and fears that would erupt to cause intense sectional controversy and — three decades later — a long and bitter Civil War.

  THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS

  The federal Constitution and the first state constitutions had acknowledged that in some profound way the people were sovereign. The people’s voice, expressed through the vote, was, however, rather muffled. Nowhere, of course, could women or slaves vote in 1789; in most states the few free blacks were also barred, and nearly every state imposed property or tax-paying requirements even on free white male voters. In every state wealthy merchants and (in the South) slaveholders dominated both politics and office holding. Kinship ties, personal relationships, and financial influence weighed heavily on how men voted, especially given the practice in nearly every state of what was called viva voce

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  Citizens Divided

  • Robert C. Post(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  126 With the growth in national population, moreover, the electorate could not possibly possess firsthand experience of the individual quality of particular candidates. On what basis, then, could the electorate select representatives with whom they could sustain a “due connection”? How could representative integrity be maintained?

  Second, how could even the most trustworthy representatives retain the confidence of the people, if their ability to affect government action was constrained by the separation of powers? If representatives needed to make government responsive to popular opinion in order to maintain a suitable “communion of interests and sympathy of sentiments” with their constituents, and if government responsiveness was paralyzed by the mechanical checks and balances so lovingly fashioned by the Framers, how could the connection between representation and self-government be sustained?

  The invention of the second American party system proved a solution to both these challenges.127 The Jacksonian era witnessed an upwelling of organized and disciplined political parties, replete with partisan rivalry and “party warfare.”128 “The Jacksonians … created the first mass democratic national political party in modern history.”129

  Elections were the crucial events for this new democracy, toward which all organizing efforts led. But elections were only the culmination of a continual effort to draw together the faithful. In place of the discarded nominating caucuses, the Jacksonians substituted a national network of committees, reaching up from the ward and township level to the quadrennial national convention, each a place where, at least in principle, the popular will would be determined and ratified. The political ferment continued almost year-round, with local committees calling regular meetings to approve local nominations, pass public resolutions, and mount elaborate processions.130

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  AP® U.S. History All Access Book + Online + Mobile

  • Gregory Feldmeth, Christine Custred, Christine Custred(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Research & Education Association

    (Publisher)

  The 1840 election saw the largest voter turnout in the nation’s history up to that point. The campaign was dramatic. The Whigs stressed the depression and the opulent lifestyle of the incumbent in contrast to the simple “log cabin” origins of their candidate.

  Harrison won a narrow popular victory but swept 80 percent of the electoral vote. Unfortunately for the Whigs, President Harrison died only a month after the inauguration, having served the shortest term in presidential history.

  The Significance of Jacksonian Politics

  The Party System

  The Age of Jackson was the beginning of the modern party system. Popular politics, based on emotional appeal, became the accepted style. The practice of meeting in mass conventions to nominate national candidates for office was established during the Jackson years.

  The Strong Executive

  Jackson, more than any president before him, used his office to dominate his party and the government to such an extent that his critics called him “King Andrew.” The Changing Emphasis Toward States’ Rights

  Andrew Jackson supported the authority of the states against the national government, but he drew the line at the concept of nullification. He advocated a strong union made up of sovereign states, and this created some dissonance in his political thinking.

  The Supreme Court reflected this shift in thinking in its decision on the Charles River Bridge case in 1837, delivered by Jackson’s new Chief Justice, Roger Taney. He ruled that a state could abrogate a grant of monopoly if that original grant had ceased to be in the best interests of the community. This was clearly a reversal of the Dartmouth College principle of the sanctity of contracts, in a case where the general welfare was perceived as being involved.

  Party Philosophies The Democrats opposed big government and the requirements of modernization: urbanization and industrialization. Their support came from the working classes, small merchants, and small farmers.

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