6. THE SHAPING OF A NATION
THE JACKSONIAN "DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION"
| CONTENTS
 The new Jacksonian Democrats
 Financing democracy
 The Webster-Hayne debate over
slavery in the western territories
(1830)
 The Indian removal (1830s)
 The Van Buren presidency (1837-
1841) ... and the economic
Panic
of 1837
The textual material on this webpage is drawn directly from my work
America – The Covenant Nation © 2021, Volume One, pages 220-230.
|
A Timeline of Major Events during this period
| 1820s |
1829 War hero Andrew Jackson becomes President ... instituting a very "populist" version of democracy for the country
|
| 1830s |
The restless spirit of growth and movement is noticeable among Americans everywhere
1830s Cheap land creates a land-hungry spirit (much to the continuing distress of the harassed Indians) and much questionable or shady land trading
Marshall fails to block
Jackson's "Indian removal" program ... which then runs through the
entire 1830s, forcing
all Indian tribes East of the Mississippi River to move to new "Indian
territory" (principally Oklahoma) in the West
1830 Daniel Webster and Robert Hayne debate the future of slavery in the fast-developing American West
1836 Congress tries to put a "gag rule" on the rising and increasingly bitter debate over slavery
1837 The Great Financial Crisis of 1837
Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge severely restricts monopolistic practices
|
THE
NEW JACKSONIAN DEMOCRATS |
Andrew
Jackson – 7th President of the U.S. (1829-1837)
By Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl
(1824)
The White House
|
The new Jacksonian Democrats. One of the unintended and unwanted
achievements of the one-term Adams presidency was the creation of a new
and very strong political force, the Democratic Party, whose sole
purpose – besides supporting Jackson in every way possible – was to
block Adams in every way possible.
Instrumental in getting this new political force
organized was Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker who personally had an
intense dislike of the remnants of the upper-class Whig elite of the
American Northeast who held to the older notion that politics (and
economics) should be directed by society's better elements: lawyers,
bankers, manufacturers, shippers, etc. Jackson's (and Van Buren's)
Democrats represented the other side of the social scene: the common
man, the day laborer, the Western woodsman, the trapper, the river
boatman, but especially the farmer, the backbone of American society.
Where the Southern aristocrat fell in this newly
rising social order was complex. The Jeffersonian aristocrats were
themselves moved aside by this new political arrangement. The older
Jeffersonian Republicans nonetheless would identify with the new
Democratic Party, because of its Southern/Western orientation. But the
days when the Southern aristocrats would preside over the
Southern/Western political caucus were over. Mostly they continued to
exercise whatever influence they could from behind the scenes. Out
front, leading the political caucus were the brash, unrefined,
champions of the people.
|
|
The
1828 election
This election was vulgar in tone, with candidates – or
their supporters, anyway – hurling coarse insults against each other.1
But the results regardless were a major landslide victory for the
Westerner, Andrew Jackson (Tennessee) and his running mate, the
Southerner John C. Calhoun (South Carolina).
So, Adams was out. Like his father, Adams quietly
slipped away from Washington without attending the inauguration of the
new president.
Andrew Jackson (supported by Van Buren) was
projected as a man of the people, in contrast to Adams who was
portrayed as a New England elitist, a social snob. On both counts this
was a major exaggeration. Adams was colorless in personality, but in
his own way was as interested in the welfare of the American people as
Jackson.
Jackson played to the crowds. Indeed, on
inauguration day, throngs of very ordinary people attempted to gather
to see and hear their hero being sworn in as president, and then join
him at the White House for a major reception. Even in through the
windows the crowds came, muddy boots and all, stepping on the
furniture, knocking over tables, smashing china. Jackson slipped
away
from the adoring crowd and quietly had dinner with close associates.
Jacksonian democracy was all a grand show, but one for which Jackson
himself had no personal interest. He would let Van Buren take care of
the political image-making. As for Jackson, he had other things
he
would rather be doing!
1In
the case of Jackson, it was slander about the legality of his marriage
to his wife Rachel, so vicious that it may have been the reason Rachel
died of a heart attack in December 1828, shortly after Jackson's
presidential victory, but before he was sworn into office. Jackson,
understandably, remained forever bitter about this incident.
|
Martin Van Buren – Jacksonian
advisor and future US president (1837-1841)
The White House
Van
Buren understood the process of winning elections in this day of rising
"democracy" better than the older elite-led political parties (both the
old Jeffersonian Democrats and the newer – and rather Whiggish Republicans.
|
Jackson's running mate and thus Vice President John C. Calhoun
Jackson taking the Oath of Office (1829)
The Reception at the White House after the inauguration
But the masses got a bit rowdy inside in greeting their "democratic" hero ... who was not enthralled by this hero worship (and quietly slipped away from the reception!)
| So,
the age of elite-led politics was over. The noblemen (Washington, Adams
Sr., Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Adams, Jr.) who formerly had
quietly assumed the presidency in order to serve the nation, would now
be replaced by the politically ambitious, who knew how to work the
political imagery necessary for getting elected to public office. In
this Van Buren, on behalf of Jackson, was a genius. He understood what
it took to appeal to the common voter. He understood the press and its
ability to create reality. He knew how to line up voters and get them
to the polls, especially in the newly emerging democratic age of the
general electorate.
With the advent of full democracy (at least with respect to the House
of Representatives), there was a much lower voter turn-out
percentage-wise than in the days when voting rights were tied closely
to property ownership. Voting then was viewed as a responsibility, and
the turn-out proportionately vastly greater, even though the total
numbers were also vastly lower. Now it would take all kinds of
political cleverness to get sufficient voter turnout to get a candidate
elected in a very competitive election.
Paying for rounds of whiskey or beer for those who came out to vote for
a candidate was probably the most obvious technique employed.
This term derives from the manner in which Andrew
Jackson treated his electoral success in 1828. For a successful
political candidate, the greatest form of spoils was the numerous
offices to which he could appoint his supporters. Thus with a
candidate's electoral success came long lines of job-seekers, each
hoping to get an appointment to a public job. In those days there was
no professional civil service, selected through special qualifying
exams for various government jobs. Instead jobs were filled on the
basis of personal support of a candidate, regardless of whether a
person was qualified or not. Such a payoff for electoral support was
simply what everyone under the new democracy expected from the
political system. That's how democracy was expected to work.
2From
the statement coined by New York Senator Marcy, "To the victor belong
the spoils," following Andrew Jackson's election to the U.S. presidency
in 1828.
Jackson was quite open about using Presidential power for personal political purposes ...
including all political offices to be filled
"To the victor belong the spoils" subtitled: "In memoriam – Our civil service
as it was"
(pretending to be a quote of Jackson)
Cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly, 28 April, 1877
|
A great warrior and political charismatic Jackson
was indeed. But a presidential administrator obligated to help keep the
vast American economy healthy, Jackson was not. As a result, the young
nation would face a series of crises that would challenge the heart of
its economy – and its politics.
A part of the problem had already taken root in the last year (1828) of
the Adams presidency over the question of tariffs. Tariffs on imported
goods were understood to serve a dual purpose: to protect the American
producers from cheaper goods coming from India (cotton) and machinery
(England), and to pay for all the infrastructure projects reaching into
the expanding American West, such as roads and canals. The tariffs
themselves were disruptive of American political interests, as
protection of one industry, such as the higher price of Southern
cotton, came at a great cost to another industry, such as the New
England textile mills that needed cheap cotton to compete with cheaper
English textiles. Thus when a bill was introduced in Congress in 1824
to raise a whole range of duties on imports, it was met with mixed
emotions, and took four years to finally pass. When it did, it plunged
America into a new crisis, political as well as economic.
A grand strategy of Calhoun, who introduced the bill, was to call for
an increase in the tariff so high that (he presumed) his own bill would
naturally be killed. He and the fellow Jacksonians were actually
opponents of the increase, seeing no great benefits to themselves in
this legislation. But the New Englanders, including even Van Buren,
were not shocked into opposition as Calhoun had hoped, so the bill
advanced slowly, almost imperceptibly, until in 1828 the Tariff of
Abominations was passed (over finally Calhoun's own strong
opposition!).
With Jackson and Calhoun swept into power in the 1828 elections, the
two running mates would find themselves slowly splitting in their
political philosophies, in no small part due to the new tariff. Jackson
turned out to be a major supporter of the tariff, for it afforded him
the monies needed to pay for roads and canals of special interest to
his political supporters in one state or another. True, most roads were
private or state funded. But the truly big projects, such as the
national road west into Ohio could be funded only by a larger single
source, namely the national government. And Jackson enjoyed being in
the position to oversee just such development, especially when he could
use his power to exclude similar projects in the states of his
political opponents!
Calhoun, however, saw the expanding powers of the national government
increasing the potential of granting it greatly increased authority to
take action in other areas, such as in the question of slavery. As a
politically sensitive Southerner, Calhoun was well aware of the growing
swell of anti-slavery sentiment growing in the North and was fearful
that the rapidly increasing Northern population would eventually give
Congress sufficient votes to ban the practice of slavery altogether. As
a result, Calhoun, once a strong nationalist, now became an
increasingly strong voice in support of states' rights, meaning that
the states, not the national government, should have sole right to
determine their position on the slavery issue. This would throw
President Jackson, a strong nationalist, into increasing opposition to
his vice president, Calhoun. Thus with the new round of presidential
elections coming up in 1832, Jackson replaced Calhoun with his loyal
supporter Van Buren as his new running mate.
Western land sales
The other chief means of raising federal revenue
besides tariffs was the sale of Western land. New Englanders wanted the
land sales to slow down because it drained off workers needed in the
New England factories. Southerners however were big supporters of the
opening of Western land for sale, in part because, with slavery, the
South was not really the land of opportunity for its slowly rising
White population and because cotton production tended to deplete the
energy of the soil. Therefore new lands were needed to be opened up for
cotton production. Thus whereas the North proposed increasing the price
of Western land (presumably to increase federal income), the South
proposed the opposite: to lower the price of land, and if no buyers
could be found, to simply give the land away. Thus along with tariffs,
the issue of land sales deepened the North versus South (and West)
split. |
THE WEBSTER-HAYNE DEBATE OVER SLAVERY
IN THE WESTERN TERRITORIES (1830) |
|
The Webster-Hayne debate (1830)
And here too in the land sale debate, the
issue of slavery would insert itself. The opening of Western lands
would always bring forward the question of whether this new territory
was to allow slavery or not. Thus the great debate between the
Northerner Daniel Webster and the Southerner Robert Hayne about Western
land sales quickly turned itself into a question about the future of
slavery. But it also even got down to the question of the future of the
country as a united people.
Hayne raised the specter of a South being forced to change its
lifestyle by an imperialist North and countered with the old
Jefferson-Madison nullification doctrine, that the Union was simply an
agreement among sovereign states and that the states themselves had the
final say on what went on politically within the Union. The implication
was that if the states did not agree with political developments, they
had even the right to secede, to end that relationship and go off on
their own (as the New Englanders themselves had considered doing during
the days of the War of 1812).
Webster countered that the very freedom enjoyed by the nation, a nation
created by the people themselves and not just the states, was a result
of the tremendous strength of the Union, and that to lose that unity
was to lose the freedom that Americans enjoyed.
It was now easy to see that the new nation was headed for major trouble
over this very strong cultural split which ran through its very heart,
multifaceted in character, combining the issues of federal revenues,
Western expansion, economic lifestyles (feudal vs. industrial), and
ultimately slavery, forging itself into a sharp sword which was cutting
the country in half. Slavery especially stood at the heart of the
division, for the idea of a White man holding a Black man in
subjugation as property was understood to be vital to the very life of the South – and at the same time
understood by the North as a gross sin likely bringing the wrath of God
down on a people allowing such an abomination to occur within its
society.
The 1836 Gag Rule
There seemed to be no way to bridge this widening
cultural gap. Eventually, however, Congress came up with the supposedly
ingenious idea (proposed by Representative Henry Pinckney of South
Carolina) that the way to avoid the slavery issue from causing an
irreparable split in the country was to get congressmen to agree simply
to avoid the subject, not ever to bring it up in discussion. The
explanation was that it was a state issue anyway and Congress had no
constitutional right to interfere in the matter.
Whereas this may have helped smooth the problem over in the short term
(but most politicians trend only think in the short-term anyway, or at
least only as far forward as their next election) avoiding the subject
ultimately meant that it would become even harder to resolve in the
future.
Jackson and the 2nd Bank of the United States
(BUS) Jackson was coming up for reelection in 1832, opposed in the
electoral campaign by his old adversary Clay. In the midst of the
campaign the BUS got dragged front and center into the Jackson-Clay
battle. The question was not most importantly one of economics, such as
the issue of coin versus paper money (which was a favorite subject of
dispute among American politicians), as much as it was one of political
patronage. The BUS was coming up for a renewal of its charter in 1838,
though its supporters proposed an early renewal just to get things
squared away sooner. But the fact that it was Clay and his supporters
who made the proposal automatically infected the idea in the eyes of
Jackson.
Jackson was not opposed to the BUS in principle,
but wanted to reshape national banking in such a way that gave him the
right to preside over the personnel and policies of such a bank. A
national bank was a huge source of patronage, and Jackson disliked the
idea that the BUS seemed to be the instrument of the up-East business
class. He especially disliked it when Clay threw his support to the
renewal of the BUS charter because it meant securing Clay's BUS
patronage rights if the charter were renewed, and the loss of Jackson's
patronage rights if his own idea of a national bank were thus set
aside. Consequently, Jackson decided to fight the BUS with all of his
typical Jacksonian ferocity.
|
Daniel Webster
Robert Hayne
Supposedly the matter was settled by the 1836 "gag order" forbidding the matter to be brought up in Congress
|
The election of 1832
Thus the BUS became a major issue in the election
of 1832. Jackson used all of his folksy language to depict the BUS as
the tool of the up-East elite, succeeding in connecting his opponent
Clay in the minds of the common folks with greedy elite trying to take the country
away from the people. The strategy worked, and Jackson was reelected by
a large popular majority and an even larger majority in the electoral
college. Thus Jackson would be president for another four years, with
Van Buren as his new vice president.
And Jackson would withdraw all government deposits and suspend all
future business with the BUS in 1833, depositing government funds
instead in a number of state and local banks, termed by his opponents
as Jackson's "pet banks." He would block the renewal of the BUS's
charter in 1836, and ultimately leave it struggling as something of a
private bank (which finally closed in 1841), leaving the U.S.
government without a strong financial instrument to combat economic
crises, a major one which exploded in 1837 and lasted until revival
finally began to occur in 1842/1843.
|
THE
INDIAN REMOVAL (1830s) |
The Indian removal – 1830s
Wikipedia
|
The Indian Removal (1830s)
Although Jackson had great respect for the
American Indians as warriors, he nonetheless had no particular
compassion for them as they faced the pressures of an ever-expanding
Anglo population. And Jackson, ever-sensitive to his image as champion
of the common (White) man, knew what his supporters' sentiments were
with respect to the Indian: they wanted them removed as far away as
possible from their own world. And in general, that meant moving the
Indians beyond the Mississippi River.
This process had been urged since early in the
Republic, had been going on slowly under various presidents, but had
stalled during John Quincy Adams' presidency. Jackson's supporters in
the Deep South (Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi) wanted the process
resumed. If the federal government was not going to take action, then
the states would – as part of the principle of states' rights
Particularly interested in such removal was the
government of the state of Georgia, which eyed the Cherokee lands with
envy. The fact that the Cherokee were Christians, literate, settled as
farmers and peaceful, came as no defense in their effort to hold on to
their ancestral lands. Also, the discovery of gold on Cherokee land
made the situation for the Cherokee even much worse. The government of
Georgia wanted the Indians gone, and signed a treaty with some
compliant Cherokee chiefs authorizing the purchase of Cherokee land,
coupled with the promise of land in the Oklahoma Indian territory as
additional compensation. But thousands of Cherokees refused to accept
the treaty.
Meanwhile Jackson got into the act, in part to
bring the federal government rather than the states as the ruling voice
in this issue. He pushed through Congress the Indian Removal Act of
1830 requiring the Indian tribes of the South to move west of the
Mississippi River, principally to the designated Indian territories of
present-day Oklahoma. The bill had originally implied that the removal
would be voluntary. But by the time the bill was finalized the
voluntary part had been lost along the way.
Cherokee attempts to fight the legality of Indian
removal finally reached John Marshall's Supreme Court, which on the one
hand had determined in 1831 (The Cherokee Nation v. Georgia) that the
Cherokee had no right to be treated as a sovereign nation, but on the
other hand in 1832 (Worcester v. Georgia) that the state of Georgia
had no right to engage in a treaty (forced or voluntary) with the
Cherokee because that right existed only for Congress to exercise. Thus
the official Georgia deal to remove the Cherokee was unconstitutional.
Presumably the removal was now blocked. Or was it?
Jackson supposedly replied to Marshall's decision:
"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
Certainly Jackson had no intentions of getting in the way of the
removal and he knew therefore that the removal was inevitably going to
go forward, the Supreme Court notwithstanding.
The Indians resisted as best they could. In
Illinois the Sauk and Fox Indians, led by Chief Black Hawk, revolted
against the order and had to be put down violently by the Illinois
militia (including in its ranks Captain Abraham Lincoln).3
But one by one the Choctaw (1831), Seminole (1832),4 Creek (1834), and
Chickasaw (1837) were forced to move. Finally the Cherokee were also
forced to join the exodus when in 1838 General Winfield Scott and an
American army confronted the Cherokee with the fact that it was now
time to move.
Thus in a process of removing one Indian tribe
after another in the period 1831 to 1838, 46,000 Indians were relocated
in order to open the way for Anglo-American settlement in their
traditional lands. All Indian tribes in the Southeast were forced to
make the long trek to the Oklahoma Indian Territory without adequate
support in food or shelter along the way. The worst suffering occurred
among some 13,000 Cherokee, who in 1838 were first herded into camps in
Tennessee and then force-marched westward through a freezing, snowy
winter by General Scott's soldiers. Cold, disease, and starvation took
a huge toll in their numbers. Thus many died along this Trail of Tears,
possibly as many as a third of all Indians involved.
3The
Sauk and Fox had previously moved West across the Mississippi, but
found themselves under attack by the Sioux Indians, and had moved back
to Illinois, trying to avoid extinction.
4But
the Seminole were the most resistant of the Indian tribes to the
removal, engaging in savage war against the Whites from 1835 to 1842,
during which many took to hiding in the Florida swamps. Ultimately
three thousand were killed and the rest finally forced to move.
The Cherokee "Trail of Tears" (1838-1839)
THE
VAN BUREN PRESIDENCY (1837-1841)... AND THE ECONOMIC PANIC OF 1837 |
|
The Van Buren presidency (1837-1841)
As Jackson's chief political supporter, as
secretary of state and as vice president it was inevitable that the
Jacksonian Democrats would look to Van Buren to take the lead as
Jackson completed his second and final term as president in early 1837.
Van Buren won the 1836 election easily over his Whig5 opponents, who
had mistakenly hoped that by dividing their candidacies they would
throw the election into the House of Representatives where they
commanded a strong majority. But little else about his presidency would
be so easy.
5The
Whig Party was formed in 1834 out of the regional and social interests
of what had once been the heart of the Federalist Party: Up-East
banking and manufacturing interests. Whigs also tended to oppose
Westward expansion, in part out of the dislike of seeing slavery extend
itself Westward, and in part out of a desire to slow down the movement
of needed industrial laborers from the East to the Western frontier.
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Martin Van Buren
William Henry Harrison
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The 1837 Economic Panic, and Depression (into the early 1840s)
Van Buren would be saddled with a huge economic
crisis that was not really his fault (the roots of it reached back into
Jackson's presidency), which nonetheless he would be personally blamed
for, and which guaranteed that his presidency would be short-lived
(only one term).
The wild speculation in Western land, the
decentralization of the banking system with Jackson's shutdown of the
BUS, the extensive printing of paper money (as opposed to specie in the
form of silver or gold coinage), and an overly optimistic consumer
society (an economic bubble) all contributed to the crisis. But the
brewing crisis itself was set off by events far away in England when
the Bank of England, detecting an economic downturn in Great Britain
(poor wheat harvests and the need to spend specie to purchase food from
abroad), undertook policies to tighten up the money supply, sending
shock waves throughout the rest of the world dependent on British
finance as the international standard. This included importantly a
number of American banks in the East, who were forced to follow the
British lead in tightening their lending policies, sending out ripples,
then waves, of financial fear into the previously overly optimistic
economy.
Also the land speculation bubble was quick to
burst when in 1836 Jackson issued an executive order demanding that
Western land payments be made in gold and silver specie rather than
paper money, coinage which most people did not have. Prior to this,
land speculators had been buying up huge amounts of land employing only
a rather seemingly inexhaustible supply of paper money issued by the
numerous state and local banks on which the value of the dollar
depended now that the BUS had been shut down.
Hard money advocates urged Jackson to take action,
to bring real wealth into all this land speculation. And thus the 1836
Specie Circular was
issued as one of Jackson's last acts as president, adding to the panic
which broke out early in the next year (February-March of 1837) as Van
Buren took office. Now speculators were holding land that could not be
financed except by specie, at a time when those holding gold and silver
specie were afraid to let go of it, hoarding it and taking it out of
circulation – which merely depressed the economy further.
But it was not only land speculators that got hurt
but the American banks themselves that got crushed in the panic. During
the bubble, banks had been issuing those same paper dollars for
mortgages and personal loans, careless in connecting those dollars to
the real value of gold and silver coinage held in their vaults as
reserve. As panic set in, people conducted runs on their banks,
demanding the exchange of their paper money for gold or silver specie,
which the banks simply did not have. At this point banks had only one
of two options: to call in for full payment loans and mortgages
extended to their customers (but who had the money to suddenly pay off
their loans in full?) or to simply close their doors. Within a short
time nearly half of America's banks, especially the small ones, indeed
closed their doors.
Thus people held onto their money for fear that
spending it might leave them penniless. But this only worsened the
contraction. Prices on commodities fell as producers attempted to lure
forth nervous consumers. All of this ultimately acted together to sink
the American economy in a spiral downward of economic contractions
affecting virtually every sector of the U.S. economy.
The first and worst to get hit was the cotton
export business of the American South, which had to lower cotton prices
by as much as 25 percent in order to hold on to industrial customers
both at home and abroad. This immediately threw the cotton-dependent
South into deep recession. But wheat prices were close behind in the
collapse, hurting the Western farmer almost as badly.
In the industrial East, workers were let go as
businesses floundered, to a point where in many cities almost a third
of the workers found themselves unemployed.
State governments also hung on the edge of bankruptcy, having relied on
the Jacksonian banks to hold their reserves, supply them with loans,
and provide a tax base (on bank profits) which allowed the states not
to have to tax their voters. It had all worked very nicely in the days
of the bubble. But when the bubble burst, states across the country
found themselves in deep trouble, not able to finance even the
slenderest of their operations.
To top it off, Van Buren gave orders that the
federal government would no longer distribute funds to the states
(which had been part of Jackson's policy of building state support at
the cost of the national government). His goal was at least to keep the
national government solvent. But this only made the economic
contraction all the worse.
It was thus unsurprising when in 1840 Van Buren faced a disillusioned
electorate and went down in dismal defeat in his bid for reelection,
234 electoral votes for his Whig opponent Harrison and only 60 votes
for Van Buren.
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Go on to the next section: Jacksonian Culture
 Miles
H. Hodges
| | |
