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Andrew Jackson & the origins of the Democratic Party
POLITICAL LIFE in America has reached a historical turning point. The two-party system is in deep crisis. Media efforts to drum up enthusiasm for the campaigns of the Democrats and Republicans cannot conceal widespread political disaffection and alienation. The Democratic Party under Bill Clinton has shifted so far to the right as to repudiate its links to the social reform policies of the past. The working class is posed with the need to adopt a new political orientation. 
These conditions make an examination of the history of the Democratic Party timely and relevant. To grasp the most essential features of any political party or tendency, one must study its origins and evolution. Only in this way can one understand its class nature. This is crucial, for a political party is not a haphazard gathering of individuals; it is rather the concentrated expression of definite social interests. 
In the American two-party system the Democrats have played a unique and indispensable role. Ever since its foundation, the Democratic Party, while acting firmly in defense of the established order, has attempted--and largely succeeded--in winning the support of working people by claiming to be the party of the common man. 
The central figure in the emergence of the Democratic Party as a national political force was Andrew Jackson, its first president (1829-1837). The name of the party evolved from a shortening of "Democratic-Republican," the name of the old party of Thomas Jefferson. Most history books present Jackson's election in 1828 as the coming to power of a representative of the working masses. But to those who believe that the Democratic Party of today is a workers' party, or at least embodies progressive and genuinely democratic traditions, it may come as a surprise to learn that this party originated as a political vehicle of the Southern slave owners. 
Jackson's role and significance remain matters of controversy among modern historians. The differing opinions are bound up with present-day social and political issues. One of the best known interpretations is that of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In his book The Age of Jackson, published in the mid-1940s, Schlesinger portrayed Jackson as an enlightened leader, intimately in tune with the needs of the masses. 
In writing The Age of Jackson, Schlesinger, a leading representative of Cold War liberalism, hoped to boost the populist pedigree of the Democratic Party. Throughout the book Schlesinger made scarcely- veiled comparisons between Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like many other biographers of Jackson, Schlesinger attempted to avoid as much as possible the question of slavery, not even dealing with the relation of slavery to Jacksonianism until well into his book. He presented the opposition of the Democratic Party to the Abolitionist movement as a justifiable compromise dictated by political necessity. He wrote: "The outcry against slavery, they [the Democrats] felt, distracted attention from the vital economic questions of Bank and currency, while at the same time it menaced the Southern alliance so necessary for the success of the reform program." 
Harry Frankel, in an essay entitled "Three Conceptions of Jacksonianism," published in the March 1947 edition of the Fourth International, the journal of the world Trotskyist movement at that time, disputed Schlesinger's claim that Jackson's support for slavery was a subordinate issue that did not tarnish the reformist credentials of his administration. 
"The Abolition question, as a matter of fact, is the touchstone of Jacksonianism. It seems difficult to understand how a national movement committed to forthright democratic agitation could have avoided the issue of slavery, or even stood altogether on the reactionary side. Difficult to comprehend, that is, if one does not grasp the fact of slaveholder hegemony in the Democratic Party. It is amazing how many different types of reformers made up the Northern wing of the Democratic Party. It was a reform association with one law: you must leave the issue of human slavery strictly alone!" 
How was a pro-slavery party able to present itself as a movement for democratic reform? The answer to this question requires an examination of class relations in early nineteenth century America. 
Expanded voting rights
The first two decades of the nineteenth century saw the extension of the right to vote in the US to almost the entire adult white male population. By 1824 significant voting restrictions still existed in only four states. One of the most important reforms was a change in the way presidential electors were chosen. Until the 1820s in many states the legislature, not the voters, picked the electors. By 1828 selection by the legislature had been abolished in every state except South Carolina. 
The presidential elections of 1828 marked a watershed in US politics. The popular vote for president surpassed the one million mark for the first time, more than three times the 1824 total. This reflected both an increase in the number of eligible voters and a higher participation rate. A record 54.3 percent of those eligible actually voted, nearly double the percentage turnout of 1824. Under these conditions the Southern slaveholders and Northern commercial and manufacturing interests could no longer rule in the old way. In the early years of US politics, with the right to vote severely restricted by property requirements and other stipulations, debate had tended to be frank and candid. With the extension of the right of suffrage, however, the property owning classes tended increasingly to conceal their real aims from the masses by means of political campaigns which stressed personalities rather than program. 
The Democratic Party, as shaped by Jackson, sought to combine the democratic ideals espoused by Jefferson with the defense of slavery. Born in South Carolina in 1767, Andrew Jackson rose from poverty to become a military hero and a wealthy planter. His rugged personality and successful generalship earned him the nickname "Old Hickory." He achieved national fame during the War of 1812 by defeating the Creek Indians at the battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama and routing the British at the battle of New Orleans. His lavish plantation, the Hermitage near Nashville, Tennessee, epitomized the aristocratic lifestyle of the slaveowners. 
Antagonisms sharpen
Jackson's election in 1828 coincided with the sharpening of the conflict between the emerging capitalism of the North and the slave economy of the South. Following the War of 1812 the slave system had expanded rapidly into the newly opened Southwest, eliminating the possibility of its containment and gradual elimination. The spread of slavery west of the Mississippi River and the resulting creation of new slave states threatened to give the planters an unbreakable hold on political power. For this reason the North forced a showdown over the admission of Missouri in 1820. In the resulting compromise Northern politicians agreed to sanction slavery in Missouri in exchange for a provision barring slavery in the remaining area of the Louisiana Purchase above latitude 36'30, approximately the present Arkansas-Missouri border. 
The Missouri compromise inaugurated a period of growing tensions between Northern and Southern interests. The election of John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts in 1824 angered the South. Quincy Adams, like his father John Adams, the second president of the United States, supported active government intervention in favor of commercial and manufacturing interests. The younger Adams defeated Andrew Jackson in a bitterly contested election that was decided in the House of Representatives, as none of the candidates received the constitutionally required majority of electoral votes. 
Adams's policies provoked an uproar in the South, particularly his support in 1828 for the so-called Tariff of Abominations, a protectionist measure promoted by Northern manufacturers. The debate over repeal of the tariff prompted South Carolina to threaten secession from the Union. Only a compromise engineered by Jackson in 1832 defused the crisis. 
After Jackson's election in 1828 his rivals coalesced into an opposition party which came to be known as the Whigs, after the British opponents of the Tory Party. Its leaders, Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, advocated a policy of national economic development favorable to industry and commerce, but generally opposed radical measures that would antagonize the South. Many of those who would later unite to form the Republican Party, including Abraham Lincoln, began their political careers as Whigs. 
Early class struggles
While slavery expanded, the opening of western lands led to the growth of the class of small farmers. In the Northern factories, meanwhile, an industrial working class was being born. The conflict of these four classes--the slaveowners, the capitalists, the workers and the small farmers--found reflection in the early political struggles of the United States. 
Far from being the egalitarian society touted by writers such as Alexis De Tocqueville, from its beginning the American republic was a land riven by social conflict. According to an article in World Policy Journal entitled "Reflections on Inequality" (Winter 1995/96), the richest four percent of New York City residents in 1828 owned 63 percent of all the wealth in that metropolis. By 1845 the wealthiest four percent of New Yorkers owned 81 percent of the wealth. Similar social stratification existed on the eve of the Civil War in Boston, Philadelphia and the major cities of the South and Midwest. 
In the countryside and small towns of the East, according to the essay, "the richest 10 percent of the population probably owned almost 90 percent of the wealth." As for the West, one pair of historians studying the settlement of Michigan have written that the distribution of wealth, "scarcely support[ed] the typical American image of the frontier as the land of promise for the poor, ambitious young man." 
The slaveowners, the small farmers and the working class were, for different and opposed reasons, in conflict with the Northern merchants and industrialists. The slaveowners feared the growing power of the capitalists which threatened their political domination and ultimately their economic system. The small farmers saw the Eastern merchants and bankers as bloodsuckers who charged high interest rates and paid low prices for their crops. The demand of the farmers for cheap land was opposed by many industrial capitalists, who did not want to see their workers lured away from the factories. 
The success of Northern commerce and industry created a large class of wage workers, who shared little in the general prosperity. The workers toiled for long hours and meager wages in the capitalist sweatshops. According to one estimate, by the 1820s one-fifth of all factory workers in Pennsylvania were children under 12. Revolts against these oppressive conditions broke out in several states. 
In 1827, 600 Philadelphia carpenters struck to demand the 10-hour day. Participating in this movement was William Heighton, a British-born shoemaker who founded the Mechanics Free Press and helped inspire and organize a citywide labor federation and an independent Workingman's Party. A similar party made a strong showing in the 1829 New York City elections, polling 6,000 votes against 11,000 for the ruling Tammany machine. 
Between 1833 and 1836 scores of strikes broke out in the Northeast. In one of the largest struggles, 20,000 workers in Philadelphia participated in a citywide general strike to demand the 10-hour day. 
The fact that the workers, small farmers and slaveowners shared a common opposition to the industrial bourgeoisie did not signify a genuine identity of interests. However it provided the Southern plantation owners with the opportunity to present themselves as champions of the working class and small farmers. 
The Van Buren strategy
New York's Senator Martin Van Buren first suggested the possibility of an alliance between the slaveowners and disaffected layers of the population in the North. The Van Burenites were typical of what would become the Northern wing of the Democratic Party. The New York senator was a leader of the notoriously corrupt Tammany Hall political machine in New York. With the help of this machine the planter aristocracy found a means to broaden its political base. 
In a letter to his supporters in 1826 Van Buren outlined his proposal for combining democracy and slavery, calling for a political party based on an alliance "between the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North." Congressman John Randolph of Virginia summed up the slaveowners' strategy in blunter terms: "Northern gentlemen think to govern us by our black slaves," he said, "but let me tell them, we intend to govern them by their white slaves." 
Van Buren represented those Northern merchant capitalists who had close ties to the slaveocracy. Indeed, the birth of capitalism in New England had been bound up with the development of slavery through the infamous "triangular trade." Yankee ships carried rum to Africa to be traded for slaves. This human cargo was taken to the West Indies and in turn sold, at a tidy profit, for tobacco and molasses which were then transported back to New England. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 the Northeast continued its ties to the slave economy of the South. New York City in particular became an important center of the cotton trade and remained so up until the Civil War. 
To further his political aims, Van Buren pioneered certain electoral techniques which have since become staples of American politics. He proposed, for example, that a party nominating convention select the presidential nominee, in place of the past practice of the congressional delegation choosing the candidate. Van Buren argued that by launching the presidential campaign with a public convention, with all its attendant hoopla, Jackson's candidacy would appear to be the product of an outpouring of popular support. 
The defense of slavery
The coalition Van Buren helped to engineer brought Jackson to power in 1828 and again in 1832. An examination of the policies of these two administrations makes clear that Jackson in general sought to carry out the strategy outlined by Van Buren and Randolph. 
The bedrock of his presidency was the defense of slavery. Jackson spearheaded the attempt to squelch the antislavery movement which stirred to life in the 1830s, inspired in part by the campaign in Britain to abolish slavery in the West Indian colonies. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison began publication of the first abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, in Boston. That same year Nat Turner led a slave uprising in Southampton County, Virginia in which over 50 whites were killed. 
Jackson intervened to bar the distribution of abolitionist literature through the mail. He also demanded that the names of Southerners receiving this "inflammatory mail" be made public. The abolitionists themselves, Jackson declared, "should atone with their lives." His supporters in Congress forced through an aptly named "gag rule," barring even the consideration of antislavery petitions. 
Within the Democratic Party criticism of slavery was forbidden. When William Leggett, a journalist in the Democratic Party Tammany machine in New York City, came out in opposition to Jackson's attempt to prohibit the mailing of abolitionist literature, he was tossed out of the party. 
In New York State Van Buren helped push through legislation severely restricting the rights of free blacks. According to a contemporary report, only 75 of New York's 15,000 free blacks were eligible to vote in 1835. In other Northern states Jackson Democrats were the leading advocates of so-called "black laws" curtailing civil rights. 
The bank war
Jackson's political crusade against the Second Bank of the United States, the central bank established by Congress in 1816 to promote a stable system of currency and credit, was consistent with his defense of slavery and his attempt to channel behind the slaveocracy the popular sentiment that existed against the Northern industrialists. A strong banking system and plentiful credit would speed economic development--at the expense of the slave-owners--by providing the large concentrations of capital needed to fund road building and encourage trade and industry. Jackson succeeded in shutting down the bank over the bitter opposition of Northern capitalists. 
In their opposition to "the Money Power," as Jackson called the bank, the political representatives of the slaveowners appealed to the anger of workers and small farmers over the gap between the egalitarian promise of the American Revolution and social reality. Claiming to be fighting on the side of the people against the "manufacturing monopolies," skillful Jackson demagogues called on the oppressed to support a crusade for "hard money." William M. Gouge, a Philadelphia intellectual, wrote A Short History of Banking and Paper Money. Addressed specifically to workers and farmers, the book denounced these instruments of capitalist expansion as "the principal cause of social evil." 
Democrats were capable of writing scathing critiques of capitalism, in order to justify chattel slavery. "In the North you are running into anarchy," wrote John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. "The capitalist owns the instruments of labor, and he seeks to draw out of labor all the profits, leaving the laborer to shift for himself in age and disease." 
Genocide against Native Americans
The claim that the election of Jackson represented a triumph of democratic enlightenment is further refuted by his administration's policy toward Native Americans. Within days of his inauguration in 1828, Jackson publicly pledged to drive the Native Americans from their ancestral lands in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi in order to open these areas to the cotton planters. 
Four tribes numbering 60,000 people occupied territories granted them under federal treaty in the Southeast--the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws. They practiced modern agriculture and had their own laws and governments. The Cherokees were the most advanced, creating their own alphabet and adopting a constitution based on the constitution of the United States. 
When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Jackson's Indian removal policy was unconstitutional, the president ignored it. "John Marshall has made his decision," Jackson said, referring to the chief justice, "now let him enforce it." 
The Cherokees held out the longest, but in 1838 they were driven from their land by General Winfield Scott in what became known as the Trail of Tears. By one estimate 4,000 out of 15,000 Cherokees died in the course of their removal to Oklahoma. 
Jackson's reforms
It is within a definite context--the Jacksonians' defense of slavery and their need to preserve the coalition which had brought them to power--that one must consider the reforms introduced by Jackson's two administrations. He introduced the first labor reforms: establishing a 10-hour day for federal shipyard workers, calling for the abolition of imprisonment for debt and supporting mechanics' lien laws, which addressed the abuse--widespread at that time--of businesses claiming bankruptcy in order to pocket workers' back wages. 
The slaveocracy did not mind supporting such measures as they had no impact on its income and enabled it to expand its Northern base of support by drawing in pragmatic-minded reformers. Among those co-opted into the Democratic fold were Robert Dale Owen (son of British socialist Robert Owen), utopian socialist Albert Brisbane and Fanny Wright, an early advocate of public education and women's equality. 
Many early labor leaders went on to become officials in the Democratic Party. In 1833 the Workingman's candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, Samuel Clesson Allen, withdrew from the race and called on workers to vote for the Democrats. Union leader Ely Moore became a Democratic congressman. Like many of the early labor leaders he was thoroughly infected with white chauvinism. Moore denounced the abolitionists for conspiring to free the slaves "to compete with the northern white man in the labor market." The assimilation of the workingmen's parties by the Democrats began a pattern that would be repeated many times in the course of the next century and a half. 
Contrary to the claims of modern historians such as Schlesinger, working people in the North could gain nothing of lasting value by associating themselves with the bestial system of chattel slavery. In the final analysis, an alliance with the slaveowners could only weaken the working class by dividing it from its natural allies, the slaves, and further subordinating it to its own exploiters and their political representatives. The workers, through the false and opportunist policies of their leaders, were caught up in a bloc with the worst enemies of social progress. This situation was not rectified until the Civil War. 
If Schlesinger and other bourgeois historians in our own day continue to heap praise on Jackson, they do so out of definite contemporary considerations--above all, their opposition to the working class establishing its political independence from the bourgeoisie and its parties. 
A break with the Democrats
In the peculiar origins of the Democratic Party--as an alliance of liberal reformers and slaveowners- -one can see, in embryonic form, how this party would serve in the future as a means of channeling popular discontent. Throughout its history the Democratic Party has brought together the most varied and opposed interests under the political dominance of the ruling class, from the absorption of the Populist Party in 1896 to the 1930s alliance of Roosevelt New Dealers, labor leaders and Jim Crow segregationists. 
Ultimately, the ability of the Democratic Party to serve as a political lightning rod for opposition to the established order depended on the vast reserves of wealth of US capitalism. The hegemonic position of the American bourgeoisie after World War II contributed in particular to the creation of a labor bureaucracy unmatched in its venality and subservience to big business. The primary political function of the trade union bureaucracy has been to keep the working class tied politically to the Democratic Party. 
The right-wing character of the Clinton administration is the result of a protracted historical process. The crisis of American and international capitalism has undermined liberal reformism, shattering the political consensus within the ruling class which existed from the 1930s to the early 1970s for policies of social reform. There is today no substantive difference between the policies of the Democrats and the Republicans. They are united in carrying out the demands of big business for the destruction of the social reforms of the past and the ever more brutal exploitation of the working class. 
The outcome of the great struggles to come depends in no small measure on the ability of the most advanced workers to grasp the role of the Democratic Party and carry out, on the basis of a socialist program, a decisive political break with this organization. 
IWB
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