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CANVASSING FOR A VOTE (1853). This lithograph of a painting by George Caleb Bingham depicts a politician (in top hat) speaking with potential voters outside a hotel in Arrow Rock, Missouri. The men represent different social classes and ages. Women and blacks were barred from voting, but political rights expanded substantially in the 1830s and 1840s among white males.

(Source: Yale University Art Gallery)

One of the most striking political trends of the early nineteenth century was the change in the method of choosing presidential electors for the electoral college. In 1800, the Page 205legislatures had chosen the presidential electors (and thus determined those electors’ votes for president) in ten states; the electors were chosen by the people in only six states. By 1828, electors were chosen by popular vote in every state but South Carolina, which meant that state electors in the college would cast their votes for president and vice president in accordance with the popular vote (as is common practice today). In short, these changes gave common voters a greater say in who won elections. In the presidential election of 1824, fewer than 27 percent of adult white males had voted. Only four years later, the figure was 58 percent; and in 1840, 80 percent.

Tocqueville and Democracy in America

The rapid growth of the electorate—and the emergence of political parties—was among the most striking events of the early nineteenth century. As the right to vote spread widely in these years, it came to be the mark of freedom and democracy. One of the most important commentaries on this extraordinary moment in American life was a book by the French aristocrat  Alexis de Tocqueville . He spent two years in the United States in the 1830s watching the dramatic political changes in the age of Andrew Jackson. The French government had requested that he make a study of American prisons, which were thought to be more humane and effective institutions than those in Europe. But Tocqueville quickly went far beyond the study of imprisonment and wrote a classic study of American life, titled Democracy in America. Tocqueville examined not just the politics of the United States, but also the daily lives of many groups of Americans and their cultures, their associations, and their visions of democracy. In France in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the fruits of democracy were largely restricted to landowners and aristocrats. But Tocqueville recognized that traditional aristocracies were rapidly fading in America and that new elites could rise and fall no matter what their backgrounds.

Tocqueville also realized that the rising democracy of America had many limits. Democracy was a powerful, visible force in the lives of most white men. Few women could vote, although some shared the democratic ethos through their families. For many other Americans, democracy was a distant hope. Tocqueville wrote of the limits of equality and democracy:

he first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them.

Tocqueville’s book helped define the character of American democracy for readers in France and other European nations. Only later did it become widely read and studied in the United States as a remarkable portrait of the emerging democracy of the United States.

The Legitimization of Party

The high level of voter participation was only partly the result of an expanded electorate. It resulted as well from growing interest in politics, a strengthening of party organization, and increasing party loyalty. Although party competition had been part of American politics almost from the beginning, acceptance of the idea of party had not. For more than thirty years, most Americans who had opinions about the nature of government considered parties evils to be avoided and thought the nation should seek a broad consensus without permanent factional lines. But in the 1820s and 1830s, those assumptions gave way to a new view that permanent, institutionalized parties were a desirable part of the political process, that they were indeed essential to democracy.

Page 207The elevation of party occurred first at the state level, most prominently in New York. There, after the War of 1812, Martin Van Buren led a dissident political faction (known as the “Bucktails”) that challenged the established political elite led by the aristocratic governor, DeWitt Clinton. The Bucktails argued that Clinton’s closed circle made genuine democracy impossible. They advocated institutionalized political parties in its place, based on the support of a broad public constituency. A party would need a permanent opposition, they insisted, because competition would force it to remain sensitive to the will of the people. Parties would check and balance one another in much the same way as the different branches of government did.

By the late 1820s, this new idea of party had spread beyond New York. The election of Jackson in 1828, the result of a popular movement that stood apart from the usual political elites, seemed further to legitimize it. In the 1830s, finally, a fully formed two-party system began to operate at the national level. The anti-Jackson forces began to call themselves  Whigs . Jackson’s followers, once again, called themselves Democrats, thus giving a permanent name to what is now the nation’s oldest political party.

President of the Common People

Andrew Jackson had been born to recent Irish immigrants in 1767. From modest beginnings he went on to study law, then served as a representative, senator, and judge. By the early nineteenth century, he was prospering as a planter and merchant in Tennessee, serving in the militia, and earning notoriety for his armed campaigns against Native Americans in the Southeast and the British in New Orleans. Soon more than a hundred slaves labored at his plantation and home, the Hermitage.

Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Jackson was no democratic philosopher. The Democratic Party, much less than the old Jeffersonian Republicans, embraced no clear or uniform ideological position. But Jackson himself did embrace a distinct and simple theory of democracy. Government, he said, should offer “equal protection and equal benefits” to all its white male citizens and favor no one region or class over another, with a major exception—people of color could expect no protection from the administration. Jackson would ultimately expel Native Americans from the Southeast and try (unsuccessfully) to ban antislavery literature from the mails. Rather, Jackson’s brand of popular politics meant launching an assault on what he considered the citadels of the eastern aristocracy and extending opportunities to the rising classes of the West and the South. (For historians’ changing assessments of Jackson, see “ Debating the Past: Jacksonian Democracy .”)

 DEBATING THE PAST

Jacksonian Democracy

To many Americans in the 1820s and 1830s, Andrew Jackson was a champion of democracy, a symbol of the spirit of antielitism and egalitarianism that was sweeping American life. Historians, however, have disagreed sharply not only in their assessments of Jackson himself but in their portrayal of American society in his era.

The “progressive” historians of the early twentieth century tended to see Jacksonian politics as a forebear of their own battles against economic privilege and political corruption. Frederick Jackson Turner encouraged scholars to see Jacksonianism as a protest by the frontier against the conservative aristocracy of the East. Jackson represented those who wanted to make government responsive to the will of the people rather than to the power of special interests. The culmination of this progressive interpretation of Jacksonianism was Arthur M. Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson (1945). Less interested in the regional basis of Jacksonianism than the disciples of Turner had been, Schlesinger argued that Jacksonian democracy was an effort “to control the power of the capitalist groups, mainly Eastern, for the benefit of non-capitalist groups, farmers and laboring men, East, West, and South.” He portrayed Jacksonianism as an early version of modern reform efforts to “restrain the power of the business community.”

Richard Hofstadter, in an influential 1948 essay, sharply disagreed. Jackson, he argued, was the spokesman of rising entrepreneurs—aspiring businessmen who saw the road to opportunity blocked by the monopolistic power of eastern aristocrats. The Jacksonian leaders were less sympathetic to the aspirations of those below them than they were to the destruction of obstacles to their own success. Bray Hammond, writing in 1957, argued similarly that the Jacksonian cause was “one of enterpriser against capitalist.” Other historians saw Jacksonianism less as a democratic reform movement than as a nostalgic effort to restore a lost past. Marvin Meyers’s The Jacksonian Persuasion (1957) argued that Jackson and his followers looked with misgivings on the new industrial society emerging around them and yearned instead for a restoration of the agrarian, republican virtues of an earlier time.

In the 1960s, historians began taking less interest in Jackson and his supporters and more in the social and cultural bases of American politics in the time of Jackson. Lee Benson’s The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (1961) used quantitative techniques to demonstrate the role of religion and ethnicity in shaping party divisions. Edward Pessen’s Jacksonian America (1969) portrayed America in the Jacksonian era as an increasingly stratified society. This inclination to look more closely at society than at formal “Jacksonianism” continued into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Sean Wilentz, in Chants Democratic (1984) and in The Rise of American Democracy (2005), examined the rise of powerful movements among ordinary citizens who were attracted less to Jackson himself than to the notion of popular democracy.

Gradually, this attention to the nature of society has led to reassessments of Jackson himself and the nature of his regime. In Fathers and Children (1975), Michael Rogin portrays Jackson as a leader determined to secure the supremacy of white men in the United States. Alexander Saxton, in The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990), makes the related argument that “Jacksonian Democracy” was explicitly a white man’s democracy that rested on the subjugation of slaves, women, and Native Americans. But the portrayal of Jackson as a champion of the common people has not vanished from scholarship entirely. The most renowned postwar biographer of Jackson, Robert V. Remini, argued that despite the flaws in his democratic vision, he was a genuine “man of the people.” The journalist Jon Meacham reaches a similar conclusion in his Pulitzer Prize–winning American Lion (2009).

UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE

1. What was Jacksonian democracy? Was it a reform movement against conservative special interests? Was it a regional movement designed to shift power to the West? Or was it a class-based movement to elevate workers and farmers?

2. Jackson was known as a “man of the people.” Which people were attracted to him?

Page 208Jackson’s first target was the entrenched officeholders in the federal government, whom he bitterly denounced. Offices, he said, belonged to the people, not to a self-serving bureaucracy. Equally important, a large turnover in the bureaucracy would allow him to reward his own supporters with offices. One of Jackson’s allies, William L. Marcy of New York, once explained, “To the victors belong the spoils.” Patronage, the process of giving out jobs as political rewards, became known as the  spoils system . Although Jackson removed no more than one-fifth of existing federal officeholders, his embrace of the spoils system helped cement its place in party politics.

Jackson’s supporters also worked to transform the process by which presidential candidates were selected. In 1832, the president’s followers staged a national convention to renominate him. Through the convention, its founders believed, power in the party would arise directly from the people rather than from such elite political institutions as the congressional caucus.

“OUR FEDERAL UNION”

Jackson’s commitment to extending power beyond entrenched elites led him to want to reduce the functions of the federal government. A concentration of power in Washington would, he believed, restrict opportunity to people with political connections. But Jackson was also strongly committed to the preservation of the Union. Thus, at the same time as he was promoting an economic program to reduce the power of the national government, he was asserting the supremacy of the Union in the face of a potent challenge. For no sooner had he entered office than his own vice president— John C. Calhoun —began to champion a controversial constitutional theory: nullification.

Calhoun and Nullification

Once an outspoken protectionist, Calhoun had strongly supported the tariff of 1816. But by the late 1820s, he had come to believe that the tariff was responsible for the stagnation of South Carolina’s economy, though the exhaustion of the state’s farmland was the real reason for the decline. Some exasperated Carolinians were ready to consider a drastic remedy: secession.

With his future political hopes resting on how he met this challenge in his home state, Calhoun developed the theory of  nullification . Drawing from the ideas of Madison and Jefferson and citing the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, Calhoun argued that since the federal government was a creation of the states, the states—not the courts or Congress—were the final arbiters of the constitutionality of federal laws. If a state concluded that Congress had passed an unconstitutional law, then it could hold a special convention and declare the federal law null and void within the state. The nullification doctrine—and the idea of using it to nullify the 1828 tariff—quickly attracted broad support in South Carolina. But it did nothing to help Calhoun’s standing within the new Jackson administration, in part because he had a powerful rival in  Martin Van Buren .

The Rise of Van Buren

Van Buren had served briefly as governor of New York before becoming Jackson’s secretary of state in 1829. He soon established himself as a member both of the official cabinet and of the president’s unofficial circle of political allies, known as the “Kitchen Cabinet.” AndPage 209 Van Buren’s influence with the president grew stronger still as a result of a quarrel over etiquette that drove a wedge between Jackson and Calhoun.

Peggy O’Neale was the daughter of a Washington tavernkeeper with whom both Andrew Jackson and his friend John H. Eaton had taken lodgings while serving as senators from Tennessee. O’Neale was married, but rumors circulated in Washington in the mid-1820s that she and Senator Eaton were having an affair. O’Neale’s husband died in 1828, and she and Eaton were soon married. A few weeks later, Jackson named Eaton secretary of war and thus made the new Mrs. Eaton a cabinet wife. The rest of the administration wives, led by Mrs. Calhoun, refused to receive her. Jackson, who blamed slanderous gossip for the death of his own wife, was furious, and demanded that the members of the cabinet accept her into their social world. Calhoun, under pressure from his wife, refused. Van Buren, a widower, befriended the Eatons and thus ingratiated himself with Jackson. By 1831, Jackson had tapped Van Buren as his preferred successor in the White House, apparently ending Calhoun’s dreams of the presidency.

The Webster–Hayne Debate

In January 1830, in the midst of a routine debate over federal policy toward western lands, a senator from Connecticut suggested that all land sales and surveys be temporarily discontinued. Robert Y. Hayne, a young senator from South Carolina, charged that slowing down the growth of the West was simply a way for the East to retain its political and economic power. Hayne and other southerners believed the South and West might join an alliance to check the strength of the East; that slavery would only thrive with new western lands opened up to the institution; and most crucially, that states, not the federal government, should control local matters like the sale of land and thereby nullify federal laws attempting such control.

Daniel Webster , now a senator from Massachusetts, attacked Hayne (and through him Calhoun) for what he considered an attack on the integrity of the Union and the power of the federal government. Southern states, Webster charged, were putting crass economic and political advantages ahead of the survival of a strong nation unified by common respect for federal law. Hayne responded with a defense of nullification. Webster then spent two full afternoons delivering what became known as his “Second Reply to Hayne.” He concluded with the ringing appeal: “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!” The exchange over federal versus state power became known as the  Webster-Hayne debate .

Both sides waited to hear what President Jackson thought of the argument. That became clear at the annual Democratic Party banquet in honor of Thomas Jefferson. After dinner, guests delivered a series of toasts. The president arrived with a written text in which he had underscored certain words: “Our Federal Union—It must be preserved.” While he spoke, he looked directly at Calhoun. The diminutive Van Buren, who stood on his chair to see better, thought he saw Calhoun’s hand shake and a trickle of wine run down his glass as he responded to the president’s toast with his own: “The Union, next to our liberty most dear.”

The Nullification Crisis

In 1832, the controversy over nullification finally produced a crisis when South Carolinians responded angrily to a congressional tariff bill that offered them no relief from the 1828 tariff of abominations. Almost immediately, the legislature summoned a state convention, Page 210which voted to nullify the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 and to forbid the collection of duties within the state. At the same time, South Carolina elected Hayne to serve as governor and Calhoun to replace Hayne as senator.

Jackson insisted that nullification was treason. He strengthened the federal forts in South Carolina and ordered a warship to Charleston. When Congress convened early in 1833, Jackson proposed a force bill authorizing the president to use the military to see that acts of Congress were obeyed. Violence seemed a real possibility.

Calhoun faced a predicament as he took his place in the Senate. Not a single state had come to South Carolina’s defense. But the timely intervention of Henry Clay, also newly elected to the Senate, averted a crisis. Clay devised a compromise by which the tariff would be lowered gradually so that by 1842 it would reach approximately the same level as in 1816. The compromise and the force bill were passed on the same day, March 1, 1833. Jackson signed them both. In South Carolina, the convention reassembled and repealed its nullification of the tariffs. But unwilling to allow Congress to have the last word, the convention nullified the force act—a purely symbolic act, since the tariff had already been amended. Calhoun and his followers claimed a victory for nullification, which had, they insisted, forced the revision of the tariff. But the episode taught Calhoun and his allies that no state could defy the federal government alone.

THE REMOVAL OF THE INDIANS

There had never been any doubt about Andrew Jackson’s attitude toward the Indian tribes whose lands were now encircled by the eastern states and territories of the United States. He wanted them to move west. Since his early military expeditions in Florida, Jackson had harbored a deep hostility toward the Indians. In this he was little different from most white Americans.

White Attitudes toward the Tribes

In the eighteenth century, many whites had shared Thomas Jefferson’s view of the Indians as “noble savages,” with an inherent dignity that made civilization possible among them if they would only mimic white social, cultural, political, and economic practices. Yet by the first decades of the nineteenth century, many whites were coming to view Native Americans simply as “savages” who should be removed from all the lands east of the Mississippi. White westerners also favored removal to put an end to violence and competition in the western areas of white settlement. Most of all, they wanted valuable land that the tribes still possessed.

Events in the Northwest added urgency to the issue of removal. In Illinois, an alliance of Sauk (or Sac) and Fox Indians under Black Hawk fought white settlers in 1831–1832 in an effort to overturn what Black Hawk considered an illegal cession of tribal lands to the United States. The  Black Hawk War  was notable for its viciousness. White forces attacked the Indians even when they attempted to surrender, pursued them as they retreated, and slaughtered many of them. The brutal war only reinforced the determination of whites to remove all the tribes to the West.