History 147 OB Chapter 2

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Lecture 3, 1820s Politics and Jacksonian America in the 1830s

Contents I. The Panic of 1819 ..................................................................................................................................2

II. Sectional Crisis: The Missouri Compromise .........................................................................................3

III. A Growing Federal Government .......................................................................................................5

IV. Jackson’s Presidency .......................................................................................................................10

V. Sectional Crisis: Nullification ..............................................................................................................14

VI. The Bank War ..................................................................................................................................19

VII. Indian Removal ................................................................................................................................21

Important Terms and People (in order of appearance): Panic of 1819; Speculators; James Tallmadge; Thomas Cobb; Missouri Compromise; Monroe Doctrine; Gibbons v. Ogden; Presidential Election of 1824; Caucus System; William Crawford; John Quincy Adams; Henry Clay; Andrew Jackson; Corrupt Bargain; Presidential Election of 1828; National Republicans; Democratic Republicans; Era of the Common Man; Mass Politics; Democrats; Whigs; National Convention; John Calhoun; Tariff of Abominations; Nullification; Robert Hayne; Daniel Webster; states' rights versus the power of the federal government; 1832 Tariff; Force Bill; "soft money" faction; "hard money" faction; Presidential Election of 1832; Nicholas Biddle; Recharter Bill; Indian Removal; Blackhawk War of 1831 and 1832; the "Five Civilized Tribes"; Indian Removal Act; Cherokee; Seminole; Worcester v. Georgia; Trail of Tears; the Seminole War; Reservations Instructions for reading this lecture: This lecture is broken into the chronologic or thematic sections shown above in the Table of Contents. I have done this to make it easier to follow the information being presented. Please also note the list of Important Terms and People that show up directly below the Table of Contents; this list provides a guide for terms and people you should be familiar with once you have completed reading the lecture. There may be instances in which you desire more information regarding an important term or person; I have hyperlinked useful websites throughout this lecture to important terms or people that you can follow up on and read if you would like more information (these hyperlinks show up in bright blue and when you click on them, they should direct you to the appropriate website). Additionally, there are images throughout with captions, to help you better visualize the information you are reading, as well as film clips that you can watch via YouTube (these hyperlinks to YouTube show up in maroon and when you click on them, they should direct you to the clip on YouTube).

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Today we’re going to talk about a period that’s been termed the Jacksonian period, which

spanned the presidency of Andrew Jackson, from 1829-1839. In this discussion, we’ll talk a

little about politics in the period from 1819 up until Jackson’s election to the presidency 10 years

later, focusing on domestic issues like a major sectional crisis that took place in 1819, as well as

the growth and solidification of the power of the federal government during the 1820s. We’ll

then take a look, specifically, at the presidency of Andrew Jackson, to get an idea of what was

going on politically, how slavery was being dealt with, the growing regional rift and westward

expansion and Indian Removal. But first, I’d like to pick up where we left off last time, with the

Era of Good Feelings and the divergent economic Panic of 1819.

I. The Panic of 1819 We left off last time looking at the Era of Good Feelings—that time during James

Monroe’s presidency where bipartisanship, economic growth and national pride seemed

boundless. But when the economic Panic of 1819 occurred, all of these positive developments

took a back seat. What happened to cause the Panic of 1819? Well, the first factor was that in

the period immediately after the end of the War of 1812, there was high demand for American

farm goods, and thus farmers were getting paid high prices for their products. These bigger

paychecks led to a land boom in the Western United States. But it wasn’t really farmers out

there buying land. Instead it was speculators, people who hoped to buy land cheap and then

turn around and sell it to a potential farmer for a higher price. And much to their pleasure, land

prices soared. Both settlers and speculators had easy access to credit from the government and

from state banks and they used this easy credit to purchase expensive land. But in 1819, the

national bank began tightening this credit and calling in payments on the loans they had allowed.

If a debtor couldn’t pay the banks back, the banks would seize his land. The government also

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collected state bank notes and demanded they be paid off in cash by the banks, who often

couldn’t come up with it, causing those state banks to fail. The bank failures put people into a

panic, and a financial depression carried on for the next six years, during which time the price of

manufactured goods and agricultural produce plummeted.

Manufacturers and farmers convinced the government to pass relief acts and protective

tariffs to help them out and the government came through. Though these relief acts and

protective tariffs were welcome actions in 1819, the protective tariffs would become a hot button

issue in the 1820s, which we’ll talk about a little later in this lecture.

II. Sectional Crisis: The Missouri Compromise To make matters worse, the Panic of 1819 was closely followed by a huge sectional crisis

that almost caused the southern states to break away from the northern ones. The issue was over

a part of the Louisiana Purchase territory—the Missouri territory—whose residents applied for

statehood in 1818 as a slave state. The major problem their application posed was this: as

Missouri began their application for statehood, Congress had a nice, comfortable balance

between slave and free states: there were eleven of each. But when Missouri applied for

statehood in 1818-19, with a system of slavery well in place, that balance was threatened.

Many Northern politicians were worried about admitting a state to the Union as a slave

state, fearing that if slave states had more power than free states, they might use that

Congressional power to undermine the free states or increase the power of the slave states. In

response to this fear, Representative James Tallmadge of New York proposed that an

amendment be added on to the Missouri statehood bill which said that no further slaves would be

allowed in Missouri and that Missouri would gradually emancipate their slaves. In other words,

Tallmadge (and the many Northerners who supported his amendment), only wanted to accept

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Missouri as a slave state if Missouri quickly ceased being a slave state! How do you think this

concept made Southerners/Slave states feel?

This proposal outraged southerners so much that some began to claim, like Thomas

Cobb of Georgia, “If you persist, the Union will be dissolved.” The debate over Missouri—

really, the debate over the balance of power between free and slave states—was growing heated

to the point of threatening the sanctity of the Union. Luckily, however, a compromise was put

together, in which:

1. Maine was carved out of Massachusetts as a separate state; 2. both Maine and Missouri would be approved as states on the same bill; 3. Maine would enter the Union as a free state; and 4. Missouri would enter as a slave state. This was enough to calm the fears of both Northern and Southern Congressmen regarding

the Missouri issue. But the Missouri statehood application had brought up a much larger

question: should slavery be allowed in the vast Louisiana Purchase territory, should it be limited

in any way, or should it be forbidden altogether? As I’m sure you can imagine, people had very

different opinions on this question and in an effort to answer the question once and for all,

another provision was added to the Missouri/Maine statehood bill. This additional provision

5. prohibited the introduction of slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of the southern border of Missouri (the 36/30 parallel, also known as the Mason-Dixon line).

In other words, the Missouri Compromise not only brought Maine and Missouri into the Union,

it also declared that the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase territory would not see the spread

of slavery while the southern half was open to the expansion of slavery. Though the Missouri

Compromise would keep the growing divide between the North and the South at bay for a little

longer, the tensions between the two would continue to be exacerbated at every turn, and we’ll

be talking about this increasingly in the next few lectures.

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Figure 1: The Missouri Compromise1

III. A Growing Federal Government As the Missouri Compromise was being hammered out, the federal government began

solidifying and strengthening its power. The first demonstration of this came in the international

arena. During the 18-teens, a number of Spanish colonies (many of which were in the western

hemisphere—namely South and Central America, and the Caribbean) revolted against Spanish

rule, beginning a long war between Spain’s colonies and Spain. The United States chose, for a

short time, to remain neutral on paper, though they almost immediately began trading with the

rebellious groups.

In 1822, the Monroe government decided to formally recognize the colonial rebellions as

legitimate by ending the policy of neutrality and establishing diplomatic relations with five of the

insurgent countries, what would become Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The

United States jumped out on a limb here; they were among the first countries to recognize these

1 From http://www.mhschool.com/ss/ca/eng/images/img_g5u7_quiz_missou_comp.jpg

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rebellious countries. The United States was clearly siding against Spain and its right to have a

colonial presence in the western hemisphere.

And in 1823, the US went a step farther in this regard, announcing a policy that would

come to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, which declared: “The American continents…are

henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”2

Figure 2: A Political Cartoon about the Monroe Doctrine3

The United States, though it didn’t challenge or threaten any still-existing European colonies in

the western hemisphere, vowed that any European country that tried to establish a colony

anywhere in the Americas would have to deal with the wrath of the United States. Any ideas on

why the US took this step? The Monroe Doctrine was important in that it formally established

a growing sense of American nationalism, of pride in the country, and saw the first steps of the

2 Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People (McGraw Hill: New York, 1996), 237. 3 From http://geopolicraticus.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/monroe-doctrine.jpg

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United States into the world of real power. By getting involved in Latin America, in opposition

to European countries, the US was setting itself apart and clearly trying to establish ultimate

control over the Western Hemisphere. The federal government demonstrated strong control and

a good deal of centralized power in the international arena with the Monroe Doctrine.

Likewise, the Supreme Court had made a number of decisions in the 1820s that further

strengthened the power of the federal government. Perhaps the most poignant example of this

came via the court case Gibbons v. Ogden—a case about interstate commerce—that declared

that laws passed by the federal government were superior to state laws. This was a major

shifting of course; prior to the 1820s, and based on a tradition that went back to the Articles of

Confederation and the Constitution, states maintained all of the powers that weren’t specifically

designated to the federal government. But after Gibbons v. Ogden, new laws passed by the

federal government were suddenly superior to those passed by states!

Finally, the federal government became stronger in the 18-teens when the Federalist

Party failed to put up a candidate to run for president, ending, albeit briefly, the two-party

system. The dominance of the Republican Party signaled that the “people” had much less power

than before and that those in power, those who controlled the government, held most of the

cards.

But by the 1820s, as the federal government’s powers became stronger and more

absolute, many Americans and American politicians began to comment on and challenge these

developments. The major change came during the presidential election of 1824, in which the

caucus system—a system by which the two major parties, the Federalists and Republicans, had

always nominated their presidential candidate—was overthrown (the way the caucus system

worked was the most powerful men in the Federalist Party would decide who they wanted the

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Federalist presidential candidate to be; the most powerful men in the Republican Party would

decide who they wanted the Republican presidential candidate to be. Then the electoral college,

supposedly influenced by popular will, selected one of those two men to be president. If you

think about it, this doesn’t really provide for much power to the people—it simply lets the

already-powerful decide who will get to run and forces popular will to decide between the two).

As I said a few paragraphs ago, however, the two-party system had essentially ended in

1816 when the Federalist Party failed to put up a candidate for president—negating even the

modest democratic ideals that had been exercised with the caucus, which had at least left voters

with two choices for president. What the Federalists’ failure meant was that in the 1824

presidential election, only the Republican Party nominated a presidential candidate, William H.

Crawford, who, it looked, was going to run unopposed.

But as a response to the frightening consolidation of power in the hands of the

Republican Party and the consolidation of power in the hands of the federal government, state

legislatures and mass meetings ignored the traditional

caucus nominating process and instead began a whole

new process wherein they nominated their own

candidates to run for the presidency. As a result of

these grassroots meetings and state legislative

sessions, three additional candidates were added to the

presidential ballot of 18244: Secretary of State John

Quincy Adams, Speaker of the House Henry Clay,

4 From http://www.teachersparadise.com/ency/en/media/f/f9/electoralcollege1824_large.png

Figure 3: Votes in the 1824 Election

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and military hero Andrew Jackson (technically, these three guys were not really running for

either the Republican or the Federalist parties; interestingly, after the Republican candidate,

William Crawford, lost the election of 1824, the Republican Party of old virtually ceased to

exist).

In the election, Jackson received a plurality, but not a majority, of both the popular and

electoral vote, but because he did not have a majority, he did not automatically become

president. Instead, the final decision on who the next president would be lay with Congress, who

was expected to choose the winner from the top three candidates. Henry Clay had received the

lowest number of votes, so he was out of the running, but he was a very influential guy with the

House, since he was the Speaker of the House. With this position of influence and power, it’s no

surprise that the three other men tried to get him on their side. Clay quickly dismissed Crawford,

the Republican candidate, because Crawford had been debilitated by a crippling disease. So the

decision was really between Jackson and Adams.

Jackson was the more charismatic, but he was also Clay’s biggest political opponent.

Adams, on the other hand, wasn’t that well-liked, either by the populous or by Clay, but Clay

found Adams to be less threatening, and threw his support to Adams’ camp. The House,

unsurprisingly, chose John Quincy Adams as the victor, and Adams, in thanks, gave Clay the

position of Secretary of State, in what has been termed the “Corrupt Bargain” (people believed

that the only reason Clay gave Adams the presidency was because Adams had promised Clay the

coveted Secretary of State job) Though these kinds of dealings were not terribly unusual, the

“Corrupt Bargain” got a very bad name publicly and proved costly to both Clay and Adams’

political careers. In particular, the cost would be seen in the presidential election of 1828.

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In the presidential election of 1828, John Quincy Adams’ party, now calling themselves

the National Republicans, was challenged by the still-popular Andrew Jackson’s Democratic

Republicans; this time, however, Jackson won a decisive victory.

IV. Jackson’s Presidency Like the politics of the 1820s, the politics of the 1830s would prove to be extremely

important in the shaping of the nation and in the shaping of the growing controversy between the

North and the South. Jackson entered the White House in March, 1829, with support from

thousands of Americans from all over the country, including many farmers, workers and other

“humble” sorts. These people were hopeful that Jackson would usher in the era of the common

man in this period, they hoped the Democratic Republicans truly did intend on behaving in a

Figure 4: The Common Man Celebrates Jackson's Presidency5

5 From http://memory.loc.gov/pnp/cph/3a00000/3a05000/3a05500/3a05553v.jpg

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

democratic fashion and offer more power to the people (and less to the federal government than

had been seen in previous presidencies). Others feared this possibility; they looked to Jackson’s

humble followers as potential problems, as too ignorant and unworldly to really participate in the

American political world. The outcome of Jackson’s two terms as president was a little of both

ideologies—the common man certainly saw a new entrance into politics while the common man

did not see all of his hopes for democracy realized.

One of the major ways in which the common man saw some new power had to do with

the advent of mass politics in the late 1820s and 1830s. What do I mean by mass politics?

Well, until the 1820s, most Americans had been unable to vote because many states had

restricted voting to property owners or taxpayers, or both. But in the early 1820s, this began to

change, as new, western states joined the Union and adopted laws that were more favorable to

those men who didn’t own property or pay taxes. As a result of this liberalization (and to keep

people and tax dollars from moving west for a vote!) many other, older states actually got on

board with this and changed their own voting rules. Though voting remained difficult in areas

like Rhode Island—where the Old Guard held too much power and did not want to let

commoners have the vote—or in the South, where election laws continued to favor planters and

politicians, the overall number of voters increased even more rapidly than the population

increased in the 1820s. This demonstrated that more people were getting out to vote, people who

had never been able to exercise this right before. In the election of 1828, the election that put

Jackson into the presidency, 58% of all males voted and that number only increased through the

1830s.

Accompanying this rise in voting was the acceptance of the party system. Though

political parties had obviously existed prior to the 1820s, with the Federalists and Republicans,

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many people did not like the idea of political parties. Many Americans thought they were

dangerous because they promoted factions and promoted national disunity. But in the 1820s,

Americans began to change their ideas about political parties. A new view was established that

saw stable, permanent and regular parties as a good thing, as part of the political process, and as

a necessity in terms of ensuring democracy. Proponents of political parties argued that the

opposition that parties created was healthy and forced politicians to be sensitive to the issues

surrounding their constituents (obviously, a voice for the “common man”). Likewise, they

argued that political parties would serve as a check and balance on one another, causing the

American government to truly run as it was intended. By the 1830s, a fully operational and

permanent two-party system was put into place. This first two-party system of the 1830s pitted

the followers of Jackson, who had now shortened their name from Democratic Republicans to

the Democrats, against the anti-Jackson forces (many of whom were old National Republicans),

who called themselves the Whigs.

So what did Jackson’s party, what did the Democrats, believe in, how did they define the

term they had grabbed on to for their name, Democracy? Well, the party itself, in the early

years, hadn’t really established a solid answer to what their ideology was, but for Jackson,

democracy was a system in which government should work to ensure equality, in terms of

protection and benefits, to all white male citizens, favoring no one region or class over another.

This was pretty revolutionary stuff—Jackson was rejecting the Eastern aristocracy, the powerful

elite of the nation, and suggesting that all (white) men, regardless of whether they owned

property, regardless of whether they paid taxes, regardless of where they lived, should be able to

vote and to have abundant opportunity.

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And Jackson’s theory went beyond being just a bunch of words. Jackson actively worked

to make his definition of democracy a reality, first targeting officeholders in the federal

government. Many of these officeholders had been in their position for years, placed there as a

favor by that Eastern aristocracy, by the powerful elite. Jackson felt that federal offices should,

instead, enjoy rapid turnover since the offices essentially belonged to the people—the American

citizens—and not to the officeholders themselves. Jackson also saw that getting these

entrenched officeholders out of their position would give him a good deal of power because he

could put his political patrons in office, he could thank those who supported him with federal

positions. Though Jackson really created a system where supporters of the president in power

were able to get federal office positions, his idea that the entrenched officeholders, the elite

officeholders, should be removed made it seem like he was the president of the common man.

Another area in which Jackson came to be seen as the president of the common man was

in his reform of the caucus system. Jackson didn’t like the old caucus system that we talked

about earlier, wherein the powerful parties in Congress elected the presidential candidate.

Instead, Jackson created the national convention, which his party staged to reelect him to the

presidential ticket in 1832. This national convention was seen as a way for the people to have

direct power in electing each party’s presidential nominee (in other words, people had a choice

about who they nominated for president from a particular party and then, once those votes had

been counted and the winners promoted to the presidential candidates, people had a choice about

who they encouraged the Electoral College to vote for for president). But like Jackson’s plan

with the federal officeholders, the reform was really more in theory than in reality. The national

convention, though it had good intentions, was easily and often corrupted, and just became a

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different way for the politically powerful to nominate who they wanted under the guise of

working in the interests of the common man.

Jackson was faced with other issues than those dealing with the common man fairly

quickly into his presidency. I’d like to spend the rest of this lecture talking about three of the

most notable issues that Jackson dealt with—the issue of nullification and federal versus states’

rights; Jackson’s war over the National Bank (the Bank of the United States); and, finally, Indian

Removal.

V. Sectional Crisis: Nullification The issue of nullification hit Jackson very early on in his presidency and it came from a

surprising place—his own Vice President, John Calhoun. As Jackson’s running mate, Calhoun

was in a good position to succeed Jackson as president, but the powerful issue of the tariff (and

subsequent threats of nullification) led Calhoun in a completely different direction. The tariff

issue amounted to this: During the Panic of 1819, as you know, everyone demanded high

protective tariffs (a taxation on imported goods). But though a protectionist tariff had been

championed by southern states in the 18-teens, by the late 1820s, people in South Carolina—

Calhoun’s home state—began to blame the tariff for economic stagnation in their state. The

tariff wasn’t really to blame—South Carolina’s economic stagnation was instead a result of

exhausted soil, of exhausted farmland, that couldn’t compete with the new, fertile lands of the

Southwest. But Carolinians didn’t want to blame themselves, so they made the tariff the bad

guy, calling it the “tariff of abominations” in 1828.

Some South Carolinians so desperately wanted to see the tariff removed that they began

grumbling about seceding from the Union in order to get their economy back on track. Calhoun

realized that this issue, coming from his home state, and his response, would mean important

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things for his political future. In response to the tariff crisis, Calhoun came up with what he

thought was a viable solution; he put forth the theory of nullification, in which he claimed that

since the federal government had actually been created by the states, and not by the courts

or by Congress, a state could make the final decision about the constitutionality of a federal

law. So, his idea essentially meant that if a state—say South Carolina—thought that Congress

had passed an unconstitutional law—say the protective tariff—then the state could hold a special

state convention in which the state could declare the federal law null and void within the state.

South Carolinians loved this idea and many quickly jumped on board.

Now you’re probably thinking that Calhoun’s idea was pretty crazy given the Gibbons v.

Ogden Supreme Court decision and the growing power of the federal government that had been

taking place in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century. Well, Calhoun probably didn’t

think, in these early years, that the nullification theory was that great either; in fact, he hoped it

would never be put to the test. He hoped that the federal government would lower the tariff

rates, and the whole thing could be forgotten,.

But by early 1830, the tariff issue and, more importantly, the theory of nullification

reached a boiling point, beginning with what had appeared to be an unproblematic and seemingly

unconnected debate over the federal policy towards public lands in the west. What happened

was that during this 1830 debate, a northern Senator suggested that land sales in the west be put

on hold for a while. In response, a western Senator declared that Northern senators only cared

about the economic needs and success of the North and that the North was often willing to taking

action—like halting land sales in the west—that would bolster Northern economy while

potentially hurting the Western economy (the western senator believed that the North wanted to

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stop western land sales so that the only people farming and producing in the north were living in

the northeast—westward expansion created competition for northeast markets).

At first, these two men were simply having an argument over the North’s intentions

regarding the West; but the controversy grew when a South Carolina Senator, Robert Hayne,

jumped on board with the western senator. Hayne allied with the west, not because he cared that

much about land in the west, but because he and other Southerners saw this as a way to get the

Western states on their side about lowering the tariff (it was a sort of “you scratch the southern

back regarding the tariff, the south will scratch the western back regarding the sale of western

lands” situation). Hayne dramatically argued that the Northeast had a tyrannical rule over the

South and the West and suggested that the South and West might come together to overthrow

that tyranny.

This dramatic, and technically treasonous, claim caused a number of Northerners to speak

out; the charge was led by a senator from Massachusetts, Daniel Webster. Webster thought that

Hayne, and by extension, John Calhoun, were challenging the primacy, power and safety of the

Union (as governed and protected by the federal government) and he effectively moved the issue

from being about the tariff or about western lands, to an argument about states’ rights versus

the power of the federal government. The battle lines had been drawn.

In a debate between Hayne and Webster, Daniel Webster (a proponent of the belief that

the federal government’s rights were superior to the rights of the states) concluded, “Liberty and

Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable!” Calhoun and his followers (states rights

advocates) were interested to see what President Jackson did with all of this, to see if national

battle lines had truly been drawn. And at a Democratic party banquet, Jackson gave Calhoun and

his followers their answer by echoing Webster’s pro-federal government’s-rights conclusion.

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President Jackson toasted the table with the words “Our Federal Union—It must be preserved”

while looking directly at Calhoun. Calhoun returned the president’s pro-federal government

toast with his own: “The Union—next to our liberty most dear,” putting forth the states’ rights

argument in its simplest terms.6

The federal battle lines had been drawn and it didn’t take long for an issue to make it onto

the scene that would further pit the states’ rights advocates against those who favored a stronger

federal government. This issue came about in 1832 over the dreaded tariff problem and the idea

Figure 5: A Northern Cartoon Lambasts the South for their Anti-Tariff Stance7

of nullification. South Carolinians were extremely upset when an 1832 tariff bill was passed by

Congress that offered them no relief from the 1828 “tariff of abominations” that had already

6 From http://bartelby.org/77/1919.html 7 From http://www.mightyware.com/protectionismcivilwar.bhs

©Copyright Devon Hansen Atchison

made them want to secede. Calhoun persuaded his state not to take any drastic measures and,

instead, he suggested that they turn to nullification. A state convention was quickly called and

the tariffs of both 1828 and 1832 were declared null and void by the South Carolina convention.

As I’m sure you can imagine, President Jackson was not pleased with this development at

all. He called the nullification idea treasonous and called those who believed it was valid traitors

to the country, to the Union. He responded to this treason by strengthening federal forts in South

Carolina and by placing a warship in the Charleston port. In 1833, Jackson’s followers in

Congress also passed a Force Bill, which gave the president the authority to use the military to

make sure acts of Congress were obeyed. Jackson was clearly demonstrating to South Carolina

that if they went forward with either nullification or, worse, secession, he would not hesitate to

use force to get them back in line.

South Carolina was faced with a diffi cult decision, then; it was clear that the federal

government was stronger than they were, so if they decided to fight the federal government,

South Carolina knew they were in for a trouncing. But they didn’t want to give in to the

government’s demands either. Luckily, Henry Clay came up with a compromise that gradually

lowered the tariff, which appeased South Carolina to some degree. But, South Carolina didn’t

want to let Congress have the last word, so in an act of defiance, they nullified that

Congressional Force Bill. It didn’t really matter since the Force Bill had to do with the tariffs

that had been lowered, but this nullification signaled that the troubling times were far from over.

The nullification crisis also taught South Carolina that, alone, they were too weak to take on the

federal government; next time they needed allies (this is foreshadowing information that will

come in handy as we approach the Civil War!).

VI. The Bank War The nullification crisis caused Jackson to put more power into the hands of the federal

government and remove it from the states’ hands, but remember, Jackson was the president of

the common man. He worried about giving the federal government—or the elite institutions that

were closely connected with the federal government—too much power and so he simultaneously

sought to weaken other forms of governmental power. This became most pronounced during the

war Jackson waged against the Bank of the United States. Jackson thought the national bank

was a symbol of those elite institutions that he so hated, he thought it benefited Eastern elites and

got in the way of unfettered, everyman capitalism.

He was joined in his opposition of the Bank of the United States by two very different

groups. The first group, the “soft money” faction, argued that the national bank hurt state banks

from issuing notes more freely. The second group, the “hard money” faction, argued that bank

notes should never be issued, since it was difficult to prove they were supported by gold—the

real hard money. The “hard money” faction thought all banks, including state banks and the

national bank (all banks that issued paper notes) should be eliminated. Though these two groups

had big differences, Jackson used both of their support and claimed that he would not renew the

charter of the Bank of the United States when it expired in four years, in 1836. As a result of this

claim, the charter of the Bank of the United States became the issue of the presidential election

of 1832.

In the run-up to this election, the head of the Bank of the United States—Nicholas

Biddle—obviously didn’t want to see the bank die, so he enlisted the support of Jackson’s

biggest political opponents: Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. They urged Biddle to apply to

Congress for a recharter of the National Bank that year, in 1832, four years before it was set to

expire. Congress, who liked the National Bank, passed the recharter bill, but Jackson vetoed it

and the bank supporters in Congress didn’t have enough power to override his veto.

So, in the 1832 presidential election, Henry Clay decided to run against Jackson for

President and the National Bank, as I said, was the big platform issue. Andrew Jackson won the

election handily and because of his victory, he felt he had even more authority to destroy the

bank. So while he waited for the charter to expire in 1836, he wanted to weaken it. He pulled all

of the federal funds out of the bank and put them into state banks. The head of the bank,

Nicholas Biddle (a pretty remarkable guy, by the way, who entered the University of

Pennsylvania at age 10 and then went on to graduate from Princeton at 15 as Valedictorian),

responded by calling in all loans and raising the interest rates, explaining that since the

government had pulled their money out of the national bank, the Bank’s resources were spread

Figure 6: Jackson is Celebrated for Destroying the "Demonic" Bank of the United States8

8 From http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2008-01/KingAndrewandtheBank.html

too thin. He knew that calling in loans and raising the interest rate would cause a recession, but

he hoped Congress would want to avoid this and recharter the Bank.

Indeed, that recession did happen in 1833 and 1834, BUT Jackson actually used this to

his advantage, to end the Bank’s hopes of getting rechartered. Jackson explained to the

American people and to Congress, that the Bank of the United States had caused the recession

and should be destroyed. Unfortunately, the destruction of the Bank of the United States, a bank

that had served, generally, to stabilize the national economy, would lead to years of national

financial instability, a problem that would plague the economy for years to come (it wasn’t until

1862, when the Union was in the midst of the Civil War, that the bank would be rechartered).

VII. Indian Removal The third major issue that Jackson dealt with during his presidency, and the one he is

most vilified for, was Indian Removal. The American population grew dramatically in the first

thirty years of the 1800s. Now, what happens when the population grows in America? What do

people want more of? Land, of course! As people searched for more land, they pushed out to

more western areas, where the territory seemed ripe for expansion. As you well know by now,

westward migration did not ever mean good things for the Indian populations of North America,

and the migration of the 1820s and 1830s was certainly no different. In fact, the 1830s probably

saw the strongest anti-Native American sentiment that the country had ever seen. This was due

largely to a change in opinion about the Indians in this period.

Prior to the 1830s, many people believed that Indians, though uncivilized, were dignified

and, so, civilization was certainly possible for them if they were just taught how to embrace

white ways properly. But as people migrated to western areas in the early nineteenth centuries,

they stopped viewing Indians as a group that could be assimilated into white society; instead they

saw Indians as “savages” who were uncivilized and would always remain so. People moving

west used this belief to justify removing tribal groups from the lands they began moving to.

But there were also other reasons why settlers desired removing tribal groups. For one,

Indians were not happy about being removed from their land and they fought back, sometimes

extremely violently, in an effort to maintain their land and way of life. Additionally, white

settlers really wanted to get the prime land that tribes still owned and removal was obviously the

easiest way to do that.

But how did white settlers go about removing the Indians from desired lands, from

western lands? Well, they pressured the government to help them get the Indians off pretty

much all land that whites lived on or wanted to live on, and the federal government—no stranger

to pushing Indians farther and farther west—proved to be of real assistance. For example,

federal troops and the Illinois state militia were successful in driving out the last stronghold of

Native Americans in the Old Northwest region, those western lands that had been expanded into

years before, by fighting the Black Hawk War of 1831 and 1832. In this series of battles, white

militias brutally attacked the Indians, even those who were attempting to retreat or surrender (a

Figure 7: The Black Hawk War9

9 From http://www.historycentral.com/Ant/Blachhawk.jpg

distinct violation of what was then considered appropriate military action).10 But the Old

Northwest and the Indians who lived there weren’t the biggest concern of white, westward-

expanding settlers or the government; these groups were, instead, more worried about the Indians

who remained in the South. In the regions of present-day Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and

Florida lived the “Five Civilized Tribes”: the Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw and

Creek. They were known as the “Five Civilized Tribes” because they had heeded earlier calls

(like the one President Thomas Jefferson had made) for natives to assimilate and adopt white

farming practices if they wanted to keep their land. The fact that they were farmers meant that

they were more tied to their land than nomadic tribes of the Northwest were. This also meant that

since they had followed earlier governmental calls to become more like white farmers, they were

supposed to be able to keep their land.

But, not surprisingly, as land began to run out in the South, Indian land became highly

desired. The federal government first tried, in the 1820s, to negotiate treaties with the “Five

Civilized Tribes” to get them off of Southern land and onto Western land in Oklahoma. The

negotiation process took longer than many southern whites wanted, however, so President

Jackson passed the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which set aside government funds for negotiating

treaties with the tribes and for settling the tribes in the west, assuming that this additional money

would speed the process along. But white settlers, ever the impatient bunch, had already taken

matters into their own hands to speed the removal of Indians from southern land. They pressured

local and state governments, rather than wait for the federal government, to negotiate treaties

with Indian groups, and were able to succeed in getting some tribes to sign over their land for

small payments.

10 Brinkley, 252.

There were tribes that didn’t take too kindly to being essentially forced off of their lands

by state governments, in particular the Cherokee and the Seminole. These Native groups were

extremely upset about the prospect of leaving fertile land for unknown and uninhabited desert

land; they were worried that the federal government would never stop taking land from them;

and they were concerned about living in close quarters with ancient rivals.

Accordingly, groups like the Cherokee brought a number of claims against the

government regarding removal. In 1832, the Cherokee brought the case of Worcester v. Georgia

to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court actually granted the Cherokee a victory, declaring

that states had no right to negotiate for tribal land. The Supreme Court said that only the federal

government could do so and the Supreme Court declared that the federal government had to

respect that tribes were sovereign nations, much like states were. Unfortunately, President

Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the decision made by the Supreme Court and did little to

protect the Cherokee from whites encroaching on their land or from states trying to negotiate

treaties with them.

The final blow to the Cherokee came just a few short years later. The federal government

had succeeded in negotiating their own treaty with a minority group within the Cherokee tribe;

that treaty ceded the tribe’s land to the state of Georgia for $5 million and a reservation west of

the Mississippi River. Because the treaty had been negotiated with a minority group of

Cherokeee, most of the 17,000 Cherokee refused to abide by the treaty and declared that they

would not move west. Accordingly, President Jackson sent an army under General Winfield

Scott to forcibly transfer these recalcitrant natives to Oklahoma and the Dakotas.

Beginning in the winter of 1838, then, most of the Cherokee resisters began a long,

forced journey to Oklahoma—a journey that was so difficult and so deadly that it was named the

Trail of Tears. Between 1830 and 1838, each of those Five Civilized Tribes from the South

were forced to walk similar Trails of Tears to new homes in present-day Oklahoma. The Indian

Territory that was set aside in Oklahoma was seen as perhaps the most undesirable piece of land

Figure 8: The Trail of Tears11

in the nation; many believed the region to be unfit for living.

Like the Cherokee, the Seminole Indians also put forth a viable resistance effort against

being removed to Oklahoma. The Seminole had signed treaties in 1832 and 1833, under

pressure from the government, ceding their land in Florida and agreeing to move to Oklahoma

within three years. And most did make the move within that period of time, but there was a

fairly large minority group that did not want to leave their lands. These rebels started an uprising

in 1835 and their war, the Seminole War, lasted until 1842, when the American government

11 From http://pendulumopinions.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/trail-of-tears.jpg

finally gave up on fighting. But it was a small victory for the Seminole—most had either been

killed or forced westward during the fighting.

So by the end of the 1830s, most Native tribes who had lived east of the Mississippi, in

both the Northern and Southern regions, had been removed to the West. They had signed over

more than 100 million acres of their land east of the Mississippi to the federal government and in

return received about $68 million and land in the far less attractive Midwest. The Indian Land

they were granted was divided into a series of reservations, separating different tribes from one

another and the reservations were surrounded by military forts to keep the Indians in and, for the

most part, to keep whites out. This relocation process was horrible for natives who were forced

off the land they knew so well—where they were able to hunt and grow whatever food they

needed—and forced to relocate to a desert wasteland.

The first thirty years of the nineteenth century was a dramatic and country-changing time:

the federal government grew, the nation spread further west, the common man gained a voice,

and sectional crises began to heat up. What shape would Americans lives take in the period after

Jackson, in the 1840s and 1850s? How would life differ for those in the North from those in the

South or those in the West? To those stories and more, we’ll be turning in the coming lectures.