User:DuceMoosolini/Jacksonian Era

1837 cartoon of Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party "jackass".

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The Jacksonian Era is the name given to the period of United States history between roughly 1824 to the American Civil War. It emerged from and ended the Era of Good Feelings because Andrew Jackson and his supporters felt that he had been cheated out of the presidency in the 1824 election by a "corrupt bargain" between John Quincy Adams and the House of Representatives. After this, Jackson and his supporters created the Democratic Party to stand against what would later become the Whig Party.

This period in history is named after Jackson because his Democratic Party and his political strategies became dominant during this time. On the good side, Jackson successfully pushed for greater democratization in the United States, with lower-class white men gaining franchise and public participation in government being emphasized. On the bad side, the United States greatly expanded its aggression towards Native Americans, adopted Manifest Destiny, and experienced a rapidly escalating conflict between the North and the South over the issue of slavery. Everyone knows how that ended. Expansion of democracy was also, needless to say, limited to men of European descent while women, African-Americans, and Native Americans were marginalized.

Andrew Jackson

See the main article on this topic: Andrew Jackson

1824 US presidential election

Prior to this election, and from about 1792, political parties chose their presidential nominees by holding closed caucuses. This means that members of the public had no input whatsoever in who their party chose for the presidency. During the Era of Good Feelings, after the breakdown of the Federalist Party, being nominated by the Democratic-Republican Party was effectively a guarantee of the presidency. Thus, the whole country had its president chosen by a single locked room with a bunch of old rich dudes in it. This is why opponents of this system called it "King Caucus."

In 1824, however, the King Caucus system had become so unpopular that most of the Democratic-Republican Party's leaders refused to participate anymore. At this time, the two most powerful figures in the party were John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Despite that, the Democratic-Republican caucus surprised everyone by nominating a guy named William Crawford, a relative nobody. Both Adams and Jackson were pissed about this, and they jumped in to the race anyways with the backing of their supporters in the party.

In the end, Jackson won the popular vote with about 151,000 ballots, with Adams in second at 113,000. Jackson also won a majority of votes in the Electoral College, with 99 to Adams' 84. However, there had been other candidates in the election, William Crawford and Speaker of the House Henry Clay. With the election field so cluttered, Jackson failed to pass the number of electoral votes he needed to become president despite winning a majority. At that point, as mandated by the US Constitution, the election went to the House of Representatives. Shenanigans ensued.

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  How the Electoral College voted in 1824.

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  How the House voted in 1824. Note that Clay's states all voted for Adams.

The facts were these. The House ended up electing John Quincy Adams as the new president despite the fact that Jackson had won both the popular and electoral vote. Representatives from the states that had voted for Speaker of the House Henry Clay supported Adams. Adams then, after becoming president, made Henry Clay his Secretary of State. It was likely, and considered certain by Jackson and his supporters, that Clay had handed the election to Adams in exchange for a nice cushy government job. Jackson and his supporters called this the "corrupt bargain," and spent the next four years attacking the Adams administration as illegitimate.

1828 US presidential election

1828 Electoral College.

John Quincy Adams had a relatively unremarkable presidency despite his ambitious goals, largely because Jackson and his Democratic allies successfully hamstrung his political power with their allegations of election fraud. Jackson, of course, was eager for a rematch.

This election quite likely pioneered much of modern United States politics. For the first time, both parties held popular conventions across most of the states to nominate their candidate. For the first time, both parties campaigned directly towards the American people by holding rallies, parades, speeches, and other public events to sway public opinion in favor of their candidate. Perhaps most importantly, both sides also used the kind of mud-slinging tactics that would become depressingly common in the future. Jackson's supporters accused Adams of misappropriating public funds for gambling while Adam's supporters accused Jackson of murder and called Jackson's wife an adulteress for having divorced her previous husband before marrying Jackson. Public mockery possibly contributed to Mrs. Jackson's early death, and Andrew Jackson held a grudge over that for the rest of his life.

Jackson also benefited from Adams' passage of a deeply unpopular tariff against imported goods from Europe; Southerners relied on free trade to keep their cotton exports stable and thus denounced it as the "Tariff of Abominations." Southern interests were pitted against the North, as the North had a manufacturing-based economy and thus needed the tariffs to compete with more cheaply-produced European goods. This was one of the first major signs that the South's interests and the North's interests would become irreconcilable.

As a result of the tariff, Jackson swept the Southern states while Adams held on to New England. This time around, Jackson smashed Adams in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, easily winning the number of electoral votes he needed to become president.

Jacksonian democracy

Thomas Nast cartoon lampooning Andrew Jackson and the spoils system.

See the main article on this topic: Democracy

“”The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society. They viewed a central government as the enemy of individual liberty and they believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special-interest groups and created corporate monopolies that favored the rich.

—Mary Beth Norton, American historian.

Andrew Jackson's supporters named themselves the Democratic Party largely because they considered themselves the champions of American democracy. In a way, they sort of were. Thanks to Jackson's populist instincts, political campaigns shifted their targets from politicians to the people. Jackson's presidency and politics also furthered the national trend of states discarding their property, wealth, and taxpaying requirements for voting. The Democrats also built local support networks primarily for the purpose of increasing voter turnout during elections, with the result that participation by adult white men in the 1840 election reached 80%. Also, perhaps surprisingly to a modern eye, the Democrats were unyielding supporters of the principle of separation of church and state, which eventually earned them the loyalty of religious minorities, especially Catholics and recent European immigrants.

While that sounds pretty good, there were also some horrible downsides to the dominance of Democratic Party ideals. Jackson's supporters created the so-called "patronage" or "spoils" system, by which they would give their political backers jobs in the government. Democrats reasoned that the spoils system was good because it would encourage participation in politics and ensure a rapid turnover for civil servants. It was just too bad that the spoils system actually encouraged corruption and incompetence, as political offices were thus handed out based on who someone knew rather than what someone knew.

Additionally, Democrats in this era held a great contempt for basically anyone who wasn't a white man. Free blacks actually lost voting rights in several states during the Jacksonian Era. Democratic Party emphasis on the needs of the poor whites meant that they also pushed for imperialist expansionism against other countries as well as Native Americans in order to get those white farmers more land on which to grow. The Democrats also generally supported laissez-faire economic policies based on their strict constructionist view of the Constitution as well as their distrust of government interventionism.

The Whig Party eventually formed as the Democrat's opposition. As Mary Beth Norton explains,

“”Whigs favored economic expansion through an activist government, Democrats through limited central government. Whigs supported corporate charters, a national bank, and paper currency; Democrats were opposed to all three. Whigs also favored more humanitarian reforms than did Democrats, including public schools, abolition of capital punishment, prison and asylum reform and temperance. Whigs were more optimistic than Democrats, generally speaking, and more enterprising.

—Norton in A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, Volume I.

Indian Removal Act

Paths of the Trail of Tears.

See the main article on this topic: Amerindian genocides

“”I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west.... The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure.

—Private John G. Burnett, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry.

As president, Andrew Jackson was able to focus on one of his most eager projects: Indian removal. Jackson had a long, violent history with Native Americans. During the War of 1812, he led the US army that smashed Creek forces at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and then forced them into signing a treaty to cede a big chunk of what is now Alabama to the United States. Jackson's troops then invaded Spanish Florida in pursuit of the Seminoles as part of the American Indian Wars.

As a Tennessee Southerner, Jackson was keen on expanding into Native American lands. In 1830, just a year after taking office, Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through both houses of Congress and eagerly signed it. The law gave the president the power to unilaterally force Native Americans off their lands east of the Mississippi River. The US government then set aside modern-day Oklahoma as the so-called "Indian Territory" to serve as their new home. Many tribes in the north went peacefully, but the so-called "Five Civilized Tribes" (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Creek) refused the offer. Jackson sent in the military and forced the roughly 100,000 indigenous people out of their homes and put them on a brutal forced march westward in which about 15,000 people died. This is now referred to as the "Trail of Tears." The Seminoles in Florida resisted most successfully, and the Second Seminole War dragged on until about 1858.

In 1832 Supreme Court held in the Worcester v. Georgia case that the states did not have the right to enforce regulations on Native American land. President Jackson refused to enforce the ruling, thus undermining the US' system of federal checks and balances. In the end, tens of millions of acres of formerly Native American lands were open to white planters and the institution of slavery.

Nat Turner's slave rebellion

Nat Turner confronts a white militiaman.

August 1831 brought the only effective and sustained slave rebellion on US soil. Born a slave on a prosperous Virginia plantation, Nat Turner learned to read from one of the planter's sons and quickly absorbed religious teachings and scripture. Over the course of his life, Turner became a radical Christian fundamentalist and a charismatic preacher. He and seven followers rose up against the plantation's staff, killing the planter and his family, then rampaged around the Virginia countryside. He rallied about 75 people to his cause and killed about 60 white people. Eventually, white militiamen suppressed the revolution, but Turner himself managed to evade capture for an impressive six weeks.

The rebellion, or "Old Nat's War" as Southerners called it, had massive ramifications. White militias launched a frenzied retaliation against basically any black person in that part of Virginia, murdering around 120 slaves and free blacks. Paranoia over the slave rebellion spread, and whites started attacking blacks without cause all across the South. Militia as far away as North Carolina reportedly killed 40 blacks in a day, stealing their belongings.

Additionally, many Southern states passed laws either outlawing or tightening the existing laws against educating blacks or teaching them to read. In various places, all blacks, whether free or not, were forbidden from holding religious gatherings. Perhaps most importantly, however, Nat Turner's uprising completely debunked the longstanding Southern myth that blacks were somehow content under slavery.

Nullification Crisis

Panorama of a cotton field in Georgia with slaves working.

After the election of Andrew Jackson, the South temporarily set aside its anger over the Tariff of Abominations, expecting that the Jackson administration would repeal it. Jackson proceeded to do nothing about the tariff, instead choosing to devote his energies to Indian removal. By 1830, the issue came to a head once more. Vice President John C. Calhoun, a politician from South Carolina, put forward the state's rights argument that individual states had the right to declare federal laws as null and void within their boundaries. Although sympathetic to the ideas of his fellow Democrats, Jackson still firmly upheld the principle that the Union must stay together and that the federal government's laws must stay supreme.

As the relationship between Jackson and Calhoun deteriorated, the Democrats chose to replace Calhoun with Martin Van Buren as Jackson's running mate in the 1832 presidential election. Jackson handily won the election, and Calhoun won a seat in the US Senate so that he could more effectively defend the principle of nullification. Despite Congress' attempt to appease the South by passing a softer tariff in 1832, South Carolina's state legislature went ahead and passed the Ordinance of Nullification. This stated that South Carolina would not allow the tariff to be applied within its borders and that any attempt by the government to compel them would result in South Carolina's secession from the Union. Although he was previously sympathetic, the threat of secession immediately pissed Jackson off and turned him fully against South Carolina. Jackson threatened a civil war over the issue and convinced Congress to reaffirm his legal authority to attack South Carolina to enforce federal laws. In the end, both sides backed down. Congress lowered the tariffs, and South Carolina repealed its Ordinance of Nullification. Both sides claimed political victory, but the South was now very concerned about their political power relative to the federal government.