Jacksonian Democracy

Jacksonian Democracy ? (1824-1840)

Beginning with the disputed presidential election of 1824, political dominance by the Revolutionary generation came to an end. The American people passed the torch to a generation of Americans who either experienced the Revolution as children or were born in the first years of independence. Moreover, the elitist republic of the Revolutionary generation was about to be supplanted by a new kind of polity -- the Jacksonian democracy, in which ordinary Americans (that is, ordinary white male Americans) would shoulder their way into political and economic power despite protests by social and political elites.

Even before Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published his path breaking The Age of Jackson in 1945, but especially in the years after the Second World War, the Jacksonian era has been a favorite in textbooks as a proving-ground for historical interpretations. Historians have clashed repeatedly over such issues as: Was Andrew Jackson a democratic hero or a would-be tyrant? Were the Jacksonians backward-looking agrarians protesting against industrialization and centralization? Or were they defenders of demo democracy against entrenched special interests? Was Jacksonian democracy true democracy, or was it a democracy for white Protestant men only?

For example, even though state constitutional reforms of the 1820s and 1830s repealed property qualifications for voting and holding office, they imposed racial qualifications that disenfranchised African-Americans and preserved bars to women suffrage. Some states also experimented with laws abolishing or cutting back the old common-law doctrine of coverture, under which a married woman's legal identity and property merged with that of her husband; the successes of such states as New York in enacting Ma Married Women's Property Acts in 1848 and later years only made more glaring the continuing refusal to deny women the vote and other political privileges and responsibilities.

The summary response to these questions is that, while the pendulum has swung decisively away from uncritical celebration of Andrew Jackson, his supporters, and his heirs, they are by no means the demonized villains that National Republicans such as John Quincy Adams thought them to be. Whatever historical consensus exists concedes some of the traditional Jacksonian virtues, such as resistance to concentrated economic power and social elites, but tempers those concessions by recognizing the Jacksonians' propensities for racist and ethnic bigotry, distrust of urban society and culture, and irresponsible economic policies.

Just as the nature of Jacksonian Democracy has been fertile ground for historical chair-throwing, so, too, the issues bound up in the question "Who opposed the Jacksonians?" have prompted vigorous historical disagreement: Were the Whigs -- the new party led by the great rivals, Senators Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts -- spokesmen for the monied, commercial, and manufacturing interests as opposed to the great body of the people? Or were they advocates of a strong, prosperous, united, democratic nation willing to use the power of the national government to achieve these desirable goals? Again, the emerging historical consensus seeks to achieve an even-handed synthesis of the best work of the Whigs' historical partisans and de tractors, acknowledging both the public-spiritedness and public benefits of many elements of the Whig program and the economic and political self-interest that drove many Whig politicians, even the most eminent, and their supporters.

Other, more recent historians have asked an equally natural and important set of questions grouped around the inquiry, "If the Jacksonian Democrats were the winners, who were the losers?" Were the losers merely the "malefactors of great wealth"? While no consensus has emerged on this point, many of the best new historians of the Jacksonian period identify as losers:

African-Americans, North and South, who became the victims of rampant racism and discrimination, both by law and in day-to-day life.
Indians, both friendly and hostile. (The most notable victims in this category were, of course, the Cherokee people, who vainly attempted to demonstrate their civilization, their willingness to abide by the rule of law, and their entitlement to rights under law. But the government of Georgia, with the connivance of the Jackson administration, exiled them from their ancestral lands and drove them along the "Trail of Tears" to new "homelands" in Oklahoma.)
Workingmen who found themselves victims of rapacious industrialists and promoters, and then of the severe economic slump of 1837, caused or sanctioned by Jacksonian economic policies?

Sectional tensions, and disputes between national and state sovereignty, continued and threatened to get worse in the Jacksonian era. In 1832-1833, South Carolina's defiance of the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations" revived and rubbed raw the bruised sentiments of disunion. As a complement to the exacerbation of sectional tensions and the growth of disunionist sentiment, in this period disunion in the South acquired intellectual champions, the foremost of whom was Senator (and, from 1825 through 1832, Vice President) John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. President Jackson's uncompromising opposition to Southern arguments for nullification and threats of secession -- the one phase of his Presidency that has won him admiration from historians of all camps (except "Old South" apologists) -- further complicated the question whether the Jacksonians favored state sovereignty at the expense of national power, both for Jacksonians and their adversaries and for later students of the movement.

The Jacksonian years and the decades that followed were as significant for nonpolitical developments as for the Jacksonian political upheavals discussed above.

Successive waves of immigration from Ireland, Germany, and Central Europe (in particular, the Austro-Hungarian Empire) inundated the United States, enriching the ethnic, religious, and social diversity of the American people -- yet encouraging nativism, anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, and anti-immigrant hysteria.
This period also produced the first stirrings of American imaginative literature, philosophy, and art of high quality, stimulated by (yet at the same time reacting to or even against) national pride and confidence. The twenty years or so beginning with the election of Andrew Jackson were the first stage of what historians have called the "American Renaissance," and the first flowering of a distinctively American culture.

(1) In this period, writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne began to draw on the American past and present, rather than European models and traditions, as inspiration for a mature, truly American imaginative literature.

(2) Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau pioneered the crafting of one of the first truly American schools of philosophy -- transcendentalism, which emphasized the individual's direct personal experience of the world and his or her ability to transcend the limitations of ordinary existence.

(3) American artists (such as the "Hudson River School" led by artists like Thomas Cole) demonstrated

(a) that they could learn from and absorb the best that the arts of Europe had to offer,

(b) that they could find artistic inspiration in the natural and artificial wonders of the New World, and

(4) This period fostered a renaissance of American scientific and technological advances -- improvement and widespread use of steam power, the invention and development of railroads, the growth of American industrial power and mass production, and so forth. Technological innovation and ingenuity -- which had been American characteristics since the days of Benjamin Franklin -- were now firmly ensconced as vital components of American culture.

(5) American experiments in creating and expanding public schools, colleges, and universities bloomed in this period, making the "increase and diffusion of knowledge" a quintessential American phenomenon. (The phrase is from the will of James Smithson, the British scientist who bequeathed his estate to the United States and thus provided the nucleus of what became the Smithsonian Institution.)

In the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, a wide array of reform movements -- abolitionism, temperance and prohibition, women's rights, labor unions, urban sanitation, utopian communities, religious revivalism -- took root across the land, prompting historians such as Henry Steele Commager to dub this period "the Era of Reform." This rash of reform movements was in part an expression of national pride -- specifically, to meet the challenge of making the United States as much of a beacon to the world as its leaders hoped it would be -- and in part a reaction by reformers against the smug complacency of many Americans who believed that the new nation already was a "new Jerusalem."