What is Jacksonian Democracy?
Jacksonian democracy is the name historians give to the political movement around Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, and to the wider era from the late 1820s to the 1840s. Its supporters spoke for the common man, meaning above all farmers, workers and settlers, against what they saw as a privileged elite of bankers, merchants and established families. They wanted wider voting rights, more elected offices, a limited federal government and an end to special charters and monopolies. The movement built the modern Democratic Party. Its democratic expansion applied mainly to white men, and it was closely tied to the forced removal of Native American nations and the protection of slavery.
Core beliefs
- Political power should rest with the majority of ordinary voters rather than a trained elite.
- Government should be limited and should not grant special privileges to banks or corporations.
- Paper money and a national bank concentrate economic power and should be opposed.
- Public offices should rotate so that no permanent class of officials forms.
- The president is the direct representative of the whole people.
- The nation should expand westward across the continent.
History
Andrew Jackson, a general famous for the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, won the most popular votes in the 1824 election but lost when the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams. His supporters, organized by Martin Van Buren and others, won the presidency for him in 1828. In office Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the forced relocation of the Cherokee and other nations, including the deaths on the Trail of Tears. He vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 and later removed federal deposits from it. During the Nullification Crisis of 1832 to 1833 he threatened force against South Carolina's attempt to void federal tariffs. Van Buren succeeded him in 1837, shortly before a severe financial panic. James K. Polk, a Jackson ally, later oversaw the annexation of Texas and the war with Mexico from 1846 to 1848.
Variants
Within the movement, urban working-class Democrats, sometimes called Locofocos, pressed hard for hard money and against all chartered monopolies. Southern Jacksonians stressed states' rights and the defense of slavery, while western supporters focused on cheap land and expansion. Historians have also debated the movement itself: Arthur Schlesinger Jr. presented it in 1945 as a forerunner of later reform liberalism, while later scholars stressed its racial exclusions. In foreign policy writing, the term Jacksonian is also used for a populist tradition that values national honor and military strength.
Criticisms
Whig opponents argued that Jackson acted like a monarch, ignored Congress and used patronage to reward loyalists, a practice later called the spoils system. Economic critics argue that destroying the national bank contributed to financial instability. Many historians emphasize that the movement expanded democracy for white men while some states removed voting rights from free Black men, and that Indian removal caused great suffering and loss of life. Abolitionists criticized the movement for defending slavery.
In practice
During the Jacksonian era, most states dropped property requirements for voting by white men, and presidential electors came to be chosen by popular vote in almost every state. National party conventions and mass campaigns became normal. The Second Bank of the United States lost its federal charter in 1836. The removal of Native American nations west of the Mississippi was largely carried out by the end of the 1830s.