Chapter 9 - Jacksonian Era
Jackson, one of the most powerful presidents of the nineteenth century, was born in 1767 to modest parents
In 1796 he became a U.S. congressman. In 1797, he went on to become a U.S. senator but resigned within a year.
In 1798, he was appointed a judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court, a position he held until 1804.
Gradually, Jackson prospered as a planter and merchant.
He also bought slaves to help his growing plantation.
In 1804, he acquired an elegant home, the Hermitage, a large plantation in Davidson County, near Nashville.
In time, he had one of the largest plantations in the state with up to 300 slaves.
Jackson joined the Tennessee militia in 1801 and in the next year was elected major general
He developed the reputation for being as “tough as old hickory” and thus earned the nickname “Old Hickory.”
Jackson left the war with many people calling for him to run for president of the United States
Until the 1820s, relatively few Americans had been permitted to vote.
Most states restricted the franchise to white males who were property owners or taxpayers or both, effectively barring an enormous number of the less affluent from the voting rolls.
But beginning even before Jackson’s election, the rules governing voting began to expand
James Kent insisted that a taxpaying requirement for suffrage was not enough and that, at least in the election of state senators, the property qualification should survive.
But reformers, citing the Declaration of Independence, maintained that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not property, were the main concerns of society and government.
The property qualification was abolished.
Despite the persisting limitations, however, the number of voters increased far more rapidly than did the population as a whole
In the presidential election of 1824, less than 27 percent of adult white males had voted. In the election of 1828, the figure rose to 58 percent, and in 1840 to 80 percent.
The rapid growth of the electorate—and the emergence of political parties—were 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 a 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 him to make a study of American prisons, which were thought to be more humane and effective institutions than prisons in Europe.
But Tocqueville quickly went far beyond the study of prisons 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
Tocqueville’s book helped spread the idea of American democracy into 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 high level of voter participation was only partly the result of an expanded electorate.
It was also the result of a growing interest in politics and a strengthening of party organization and, perhaps equally important, party loyalty
The election of Jackson in 1828, the result of a popular movement that seemed to stand apart from the usual political elites, seemed further to legitimize the idea of the party as a popular, democratic institution.
“Parties of some sort must exist,” said a New York newspaper. “‘Tis in the nature and genius of our government.”
The anti-Jackson forces began to call themselves Whigs.
Jackson’s followers called themselves Democrats (no longer Democratic-Republicans), thus giving a permanent name to what is now the nation’s oldest political party.
Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Jackson was no democratic philosopher.
The Democratic Party, much less than Jefferson’s Republicans, embraced no clear or uniform ideological position.
But Jackson himself did embrace a distinct if simple, theory of democracy.
It should offer “equal protection and equal benefits” to all its white male citizens and favor no region or class over another.
In the end, Jackson removed a total of no more than one-fifth of the federal officeholders during his eight years in office, many of them less for partisan reasons than because they had misused government funds or engaged in other corruption
“spoils system,” a system already well entrenched in a number of state governments, the Jackson administration helped make the right of elected officials to appoint their own followers to the public office an established feature of American politics.
The “spoils” system and the political convention did serve to limit the power of two entrenched elites—permanent officeholders and the exclusive party caucus.
Yet neither really transferred power to the people.
Calhoun was forty-six years old in 1828, with a distinguished past and an apparently promising future
But by the late 1820s, many South Carolinians had come to believe that the “tariff of abominations” was responsible for the stagnation of the state’s economy—even though the stagnation was largely a result of the exhaustion of South Carolina’s farmland, which could no longer compete effectively with the newly opened fertile lands of the Southwest.
Some exasperated Carolinians were ready to consider a drastic remedy—secession.
Calhoun’s future political hopes rested on how he met this challenge in his home state.
He did so by developing a theory that he believed offered a moderate alternative to secession: the theory of nullification.
Drawing from the ideas of Madison and Jefferson and their Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–1799 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 administration, in part because he had a powerful rival in Martin Van Buren
Van Buren was about the same age as Calhoun and equally ambitious.
He had won election to the governorship of New York in 1828 and then resigned in 1829 when Jackson appointed him secretary of state.
Alone among the figures in the Jackson administration, Van Buren 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”
Jackson had chosen Van Buren to succeed him in the White House, apparently ending Calhoun’s dreams of the presidency.
In January 1830, as the controversy over nullification grew more intense, a great debate occurred in the U.S. Senate over another sectional controversy
In 1832, finally, the controversy over nullification produced a crisis.
A congressional tariff bill was passed that offered South Carolinians no relief from the 1828 “tariff of abominations.”
Almost immediately, the legislature summoned a state convention, which 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 (who resigned as vice president) to replace Hayne as a senator.
Jackson insisted that nullification was treason and that those implementing it were traitors.
He strengthened the federal forts in South Carolina and ordered a warship and several revenue ships 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 support.
Even South Carolina itself was divided and could not hope to prevail in a showdown with the federal government
In South Carolina, the convention reassembled and repealed its nullification of the tariffs.
Calhoun and his followers claimed a victory for nullification, which had, they insisted, forced the revision of the tariff.
But the episode made clear that no state could defy the federal government alone.
In the eighteenth century, many white Americans had considered the Indians “noble savages,” peoples without real civilization but with an inherent dignity that made civilization possible among them.
Such whites were coming to view Native Americans simply as “savages,” not only uncivilized but uncivilizable.
Whites, they believed, should not be expected to live in close proximity to the tribes.
In the Old Northwest, the long process of expelling the woodland Indians culminated in the last battle in 1831–1832,
An earlier treaty had ceded tribal lands in Illinois to the United States; but Black Hawk and his followers refused to recognize the legality of the agreement, which a rival tribal faction had signed.
White settlers in the region feared that the resettlement was the beginning of a substantial invasion, and they assembled the Illinois state militia and federal troops to repel the “invaders.”
The Black Hawk War, as it became known, was notable chiefly for the viciousness of the white military efforts.
White leaders in western Illinois vowed to exterminate the “bandit collection of Indians” and attacked them even when Black Hawk attempted to surrender.
The Sauks and Foxes, defeated and starving, retreated across the Mississippi into Iowa.
United States troops captured Black Hawk himself and sent him on a tour of the East, where Andrew Jackson was one of many curious whites who arranged to meet him.
In western Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida lived what was known as the “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—most of whom had established settled agricultural societies with successful economies.
The Cherokees in Georgia had formed a particularly stable and sophisticated culture, with their own written language and a formal constitution (adopted in 1827) that created an independent Cherokee Nation.
They were more closely tied to their lands than many of the nomadic tribes to the north.
Even some whites argued that the Cherokees, unlike other tribes, should be allowed to retain their eastern lands, since they had become such a “civilized” society and had, under pressure from missionaries and government agents, given up many of their traditional ways.
Cherokee men had once been chiefly hunters and had left farming mainly to women.
By now the men had given up most of their hunting and (like most white men) took over the farming themselves; Cherokee women, also like their white counterparts, restricted themselves largely to domestic tasks.
The federal government worked steadily to negotiate treaties with the southern Indians that would remove them to the West and open their lands for white settlement.
But the negotiating process did not proceed fast enough to satisfy the region’s whites
Most tribes were too weak to resist, and they ceded their lands in return for token payments. Some, however, balked.
The Court’s decisions in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia in 1831 and 1832 (see p. 224) seemed at least partially to vindicate the tribe
In 1835, the federal government extracted a treaty from a minority faction of the Cherokees, none of them a chosen representative of the Cherokee Nation.
The treaty ceded the tribe’s land to Georgia in return for $5 million and a reservation west of the Mississippi.
The great majority of the 17,000 Cherokees did not recognize the treaty as legitimate and refused to leave their homes.
But Jackson would not be thwarted.
He sent an army of 7,000 under General Winfield Scott to round them up and drive them westward at bayonet point.
About 1,000 Cherokees fled across the state line to North Carolina, where the federal government eventually provided a small reservation for them in the Smoky Mountains, which survives today
But most of the rest made the long, forced trek to “Indian Territory” (which later became Oklahoma) beginning in the winter of 1838.
Along the way, a Kentuckian observed: “Even aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop in the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to their backs, sometimes on frozen ground and sometimes on muddy streets, with no covering for their feet.”
Thousands, perhaps an eighth or more of the emigrés, perished before or soon after reaching their unwanted destination.
In the harsh new reservations in which they were now forced to live, the survivors never forgot the hard journey.
They called their route “The Trail Where They Cried,” the Trail of Tears.
Jackson claimed that the “remnant of that ill-fated race” was now “beyond the reach of injury or oppression,” apparently trying to convince himself or others that he had supported removal as a way to protect the tribes.
The Cherokees were not alone in experiencing the hardships of the Trail of Tears. Between 1830 and 1838, virtually all the “Five Civilized Tribes” were expelled from the southern states and forced to relocate to the new Indian Territory
Only the Seminoles in Florida managed to resist the pressures to relocate, and even their success was limited.
Like other tribes, the Seminoles had agreed under pressure to a settlement (the 1832–1833 treaties of Payne’s Landing), by which they ceded their lands to the government and agreed to move to Indian Territory within three years.
Most did move west, but a substantial minority, under the leadership of the chieftain Osceola, refused to leave and staged an uprising beginning in 1835 to defend their lands.
By the end of the 1830s, almost all the important Indian societies east of the Mississippi had been removed to the West.
The tribes had ceded over 100 million acres of eastern land to the federal government; they had received in return about $68 million and 32 million acres in the far less hospitable lands west of the Mississippi between the Missouri and Red Rivers.
There they lived, divided by tribe into a series of carefully defined reservations, in a territory surrounded by a string of United States forts to keep them in (and to keep most whites out), in a region whose climate and topography bore little relation to anything they had known before.
Eventually, even this forlorn enclave would face incursions from white civilization
The Bank of the United States in the 1830s was a mighty institution, and it is not surprising that it would attract Jackson’s wrath.
By law, the Bank was the only place that the federal government could deposit its own funds; the government, in turn, owned one-fi fth of the Bank’s stock.
The Bank did a tremendous business in general banking. It provided credit to growing enterprises; it issued banknotes, which served as a dependable medium of exchange throughout the country; and it exercised a restraining effect on the less well-managed state banks.
Nicholas Biddle, who served as president of the Bank from 1823 on, had done much to put the institution on a sound and prosperous basis.
Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson was determined to destroy it.
Opposition to the Bank came from two very different groups: the “soft-money” faction and the “hard-money” faction.
Advocates of soft money—people who wanted more currency in circulation and believed that issuing bank notes unsupported by gold and silver was the best way to circulate more currency—consisted largely of state bankers and their allies.
The soft-money advocates were believers in rapid economic growth and speculation; the hard-money forces embraced older ideas of “public virtue” and looked with suspicion on expansion and speculation.
Jackson supported the hard-money position.
Many years before, he had been involved in some grandiose land and commercial speculations based on paper credit.
His business had failed in the Panic of 1797, and he had fallen deeply into debt.
After that, he was suspicious of all banks and all paper currency.
But as president, he was also sensitive to the complaints of his many soft-money supporters in the West and the South.
He made it clear that he would not favor renewing the charter of the Bank of the United States, which was due to expire in 1836.
Clay ran for president that year as the unanimous choice of the National Republicans, who held a nominating convention in Baltimore late in 1831.
But the Bank War failed to provide him with the winning issue for which he had hoped. Jackson, with Van Buren as his running mate, overwhelmingly defeated Clay with 55 percent of the popular vote and 219 electoral votes.
These results were a defeat not only for Clay but also for Biddle.
Jackson was now more determined than ever to destroy the “monster” Bank as quickly as possible.
He could not legally abolish the institution before the expiration of its charter.
Instead, he tried to weaken it.
He decided to remove the government’s deposits from the Bank
As financial conditions worsened in the winter of 1833– 1834, supporters of the Bank blamed Jackson’s policies for the recession
In the aftermath of the Bank War, Jackson moved against the most powerful institution of economic nationalism of all: the Supreme Court.
In 1835, when John Marshall died, the president appointed as the new chief justice his trusted ally Roger B. Taney.
The two parties were different from one another in their philosophies, in their constituencies, and in the character of their leaders.
But they became increasingly alike in the way they approached the process of electing their followers to office.
Democrats in the 1830s envisioned a future of steadily expanding economic and political opportunities for white males.
The role of government should be limited, they believed, but it should include efforts to remove obstacles to opportunity and to avoid creating new ones.
That meant defending the Union, which Jacksonians believed was essential to the dynamic economic growth they favored.
It also meant attacking centers of corrupt privilege.
As Jackson himself said in his farewell address, the society of America should be one in which “the planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer, all know that their success depends on their own industry and economy,”
Among the most radical members of the party—the so-called Locofocos, mainly workingmen and small businessmen and professionals in the Northeast—the sentiment was strong for a vigorous, perhaps even violent assault on monopoly and privilege far in advance of anything Jackson himself ever contemplated.
The political philosophy that became known as Whiggery was very different. It favored expanding the power of the federal government, encouraging industrial and commercial development, and knitting the country together into a consolidated economic system.
Whigs embraced material progress enthusiastically; but unlike the Democrats, they were cautious about westward expansion, fearful that rapid territorial growth would produce instability.
Their vision of America was of a nation embracing the industrial future and rising to world greatness as a commercial and manufacturing power
Thus, while Democrats were inclined to oppose legislation establishing banks, corporations, and other modernizing institutions, Whigs generally favored such measures.
The Whigs were strongest among the more substantial merchants and manufacturers of the Northeast; the wealthier planters of the South and the ambitious farmers and a rising commercial class of the West— usual migrants from the Northeast—who advocated internal improvements, expanding trade, and rapid economic progress.
The Democrats drew more support from smaller merchants and the workingmen of the Northeast; from southern planters suspicious of industrial growth; and from westerners—usually with southern roots
Whigs tended to be wealthier than Democrats, to have more aristocratic backgrounds, and to be more commercially ambitious.
But Whig and Democratic politicians alike were more interested in winning elections than in maintaining philosophical purity.
The Whig Party was more successful at defining its positions and attracting a constituency than it was in uniting behind a national leader.
No single person was ever able to command the loyalties of the party in the way Andrew Jackson did the Democrats
The Democrats were united behind Andrew Jackson’s personal choice for president, Martin Van Buren.
The Whigs could not agree on a single candidate.
Instead, they ran several candidates, hoping to profit from the regional strength of each.
Andrew Jackson retired from public life in 1837, beloved by most Americans.
Martin Van Buren was very different from his predecessor and far less fortunate.
He was never able to match Jackson’s personal popularity, and his administration encountered economic difficulties that devastated the Democrats and helped the Whigs.
Prices were rising, money was plentiful, and credit was easy as banks increased their loans and notes with little regard to their reserves of cash
In 1836, Congress passed a “distribution” act requiring the federal government to pay its surplus funds to the states each year in four quarterly installments as interest-free, unsecured loans.
No one expected the “loans” to be repaid.
The states spent the money quickly, mainly to encourage the construction of highways, railroads, and canals.
The distribution of the surplus thus gave further stimulus to the economic boom.
Congress did nothing to check the speculative fever, with which many congressmen themselves were badly infected.
Hundreds of banks and businesses failed.
Unemployment grew.
Bread riots broke out in some of the larger cities.
Prices fell, especially the price of land.
Many railroads and canal projects failed.
Several of the debt-burdened state governments ceased to pay interest on their bonds, and a few repudiated their debts, at least temporarily.
It was the worst depression in American history to that point, and it lasted for five years.
It was a political catastrophe for Van Buren and the Democrats.
Both parties bore some responsibility for the panic.
But the depression was only partly a result of American policies.
England and western Europe were facing panics of their own, which caused European (and especially English) investors to withdraw funds from America, putting an added strain on American banks.
A succession of crop failures on American farms reduced the purchasing power of farmers and required increased imports of food, which sent more money out of the country.
But whatever its actual causes, the Panic of 1837 occurred during a Democratic administration, and the Democrats paid the political price for it.
The Van Buren administration, which strongly opposed government intervention in the economy, did little to fight the depression.
Some of the steps it took—borrowing money to pay government debts and accepting only species for payment of taxes—may have made things worse.
Van Buren did succeed in establishing a ten-hour workday on all federal projects, by presidential order, but he had only a few legislative achievements.
The most important and controversial of them was the creation of a new financial system to replace the Bank of the United States.
Under Van Buren’s plan, known as the “independent treasury” or “subtreasury” system, the government would place its funds in an independent treasury at Washington and in sub treasuries in other cities.
No private banks would have the government’s money or name to use as a basis for speculation; the government and the banks would be “divorced.”
As the campaign of 1840 approached, the Whigs realized that they would have to settle on one candidate for president this time if they were to have any hope of winning.
The 1840 campaign was the first in which the newly popular “penny press” carried news of the candidates to a large audience of workers and tradespeople
Both parties used the same techniques of mass voter appeal, the same evocation of simple, rustic values.
They accused Van Buren of being an aloof aristocrat who used cologne, drank champagne, and ate from gold plates.
Jackson, one of the most powerful presidents of the nineteenth century, was born in 1767 to modest parents
In 1796 he became a U.S. congressman. In 1797, he went on to become a U.S. senator but resigned within a year.
In 1798, he was appointed a judge of the Tennessee Supreme Court, a position he held until 1804.
Gradually, Jackson prospered as a planter and merchant.
He also bought slaves to help his growing plantation.
In 1804, he acquired an elegant home, the Hermitage, a large plantation in Davidson County, near Nashville.
In time, he had one of the largest plantations in the state with up to 300 slaves.
Jackson joined the Tennessee militia in 1801 and in the next year was elected major general
He developed the reputation for being as “tough as old hickory” and thus earned the nickname “Old Hickory.”
Jackson left the war with many people calling for him to run for president of the United States
Until the 1820s, relatively few Americans had been permitted to vote.
Most states restricted the franchise to white males who were property owners or taxpayers or both, effectively barring an enormous number of the less affluent from the voting rolls.
But beginning even before Jackson’s election, the rules governing voting began to expand
James Kent insisted that a taxpaying requirement for suffrage was not enough and that, at least in the election of state senators, the property qualification should survive.
But reformers, citing the Declaration of Independence, maintained that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not property, were the main concerns of society and government.
The property qualification was abolished.
Despite the persisting limitations, however, the number of voters increased far more rapidly than did the population as a whole
In the presidential election of 1824, less than 27 percent of adult white males had voted. In the election of 1828, the figure rose to 58 percent, and in 1840 to 80 percent.
The rapid growth of the electorate—and the emergence of political parties—were 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 a 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 him to make a study of American prisons, which were thought to be more humane and effective institutions than prisons in Europe.
But Tocqueville quickly went far beyond the study of prisons 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
Tocqueville’s book helped spread the idea of American democracy into 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 high level of voter participation was only partly the result of an expanded electorate.
It was also the result of a growing interest in politics and a strengthening of party organization and, perhaps equally important, party loyalty
The election of Jackson in 1828, the result of a popular movement that seemed to stand apart from the usual political elites, seemed further to legitimize the idea of the party as a popular, democratic institution.
“Parties of some sort must exist,” said a New York newspaper. “‘Tis in the nature and genius of our government.”
The anti-Jackson forces began to call themselves Whigs.
Jackson’s followers called themselves Democrats (no longer Democratic-Republicans), thus giving a permanent name to what is now the nation’s oldest political party.
Unlike Thomas Jefferson, Jackson was no democratic philosopher.
The Democratic Party, much less than Jefferson’s Republicans, embraced no clear or uniform ideological position.
But Jackson himself did embrace a distinct if simple, theory of democracy.
It should offer “equal protection and equal benefits” to all its white male citizens and favor no region or class over another.
In the end, Jackson removed a total of no more than one-fifth of the federal officeholders during his eight years in office, many of them less for partisan reasons than because they had misused government funds or engaged in other corruption
“spoils system,” a system already well entrenched in a number of state governments, the Jackson administration helped make the right of elected officials to appoint their own followers to the public office an established feature of American politics.
The “spoils” system and the political convention did serve to limit the power of two entrenched elites—permanent officeholders and the exclusive party caucus.
Yet neither really transferred power to the people.
Calhoun was forty-six years old in 1828, with a distinguished past and an apparently promising future
But by the late 1820s, many South Carolinians had come to believe that the “tariff of abominations” was responsible for the stagnation of the state’s economy—even though the stagnation was largely a result of the exhaustion of South Carolina’s farmland, which could no longer compete effectively with the newly opened fertile lands of the Southwest.
Some exasperated Carolinians were ready to consider a drastic remedy—secession.
Calhoun’s future political hopes rested on how he met this challenge in his home state.
He did so by developing a theory that he believed offered a moderate alternative to secession: the theory of nullification.
Drawing from the ideas of Madison and Jefferson and their Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798–1799 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 administration, in part because he had a powerful rival in Martin Van Buren
Van Buren was about the same age as Calhoun and equally ambitious.
He had won election to the governorship of New York in 1828 and then resigned in 1829 when Jackson appointed him secretary of state.
Alone among the figures in the Jackson administration, Van Buren 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”
Jackson had chosen Van Buren to succeed him in the White House, apparently ending Calhoun’s dreams of the presidency.
In January 1830, as the controversy over nullification grew more intense, a great debate occurred in the U.S. Senate over another sectional controversy
In 1832, finally, the controversy over nullification produced a crisis.
A congressional tariff bill was passed that offered South Carolinians no relief from the 1828 “tariff of abominations.”
Almost immediately, the legislature summoned a state convention, which 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 (who resigned as vice president) to replace Hayne as a senator.
Jackson insisted that nullification was treason and that those implementing it were traitors.
He strengthened the federal forts in South Carolina and ordered a warship and several revenue ships 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 support.
Even South Carolina itself was divided and could not hope to prevail in a showdown with the federal government
In South Carolina, the convention reassembled and repealed its nullification of the tariffs.
Calhoun and his followers claimed a victory for nullification, which had, they insisted, forced the revision of the tariff.
But the episode made clear that no state could defy the federal government alone.
In the eighteenth century, many white Americans had considered the Indians “noble savages,” peoples without real civilization but with an inherent dignity that made civilization possible among them.
Such whites were coming to view Native Americans simply as “savages,” not only uncivilized but uncivilizable.
Whites, they believed, should not be expected to live in close proximity to the tribes.
In the Old Northwest, the long process of expelling the woodland Indians culminated in the last battle in 1831–1832,
An earlier treaty had ceded tribal lands in Illinois to the United States; but Black Hawk and his followers refused to recognize the legality of the agreement, which a rival tribal faction had signed.
White settlers in the region feared that the resettlement was the beginning of a substantial invasion, and they assembled the Illinois state militia and federal troops to repel the “invaders.”
The Black Hawk War, as it became known, was notable chiefly for the viciousness of the white military efforts.
White leaders in western Illinois vowed to exterminate the “bandit collection of Indians” and attacked them even when Black Hawk attempted to surrender.
The Sauks and Foxes, defeated and starving, retreated across the Mississippi into Iowa.
United States troops captured Black Hawk himself and sent him on a tour of the East, where Andrew Jackson was one of many curious whites who arranged to meet him.
In western Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida lived what was known as the “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—most of whom had established settled agricultural societies with successful economies.
The Cherokees in Georgia had formed a particularly stable and sophisticated culture, with their own written language and a formal constitution (adopted in 1827) that created an independent Cherokee Nation.
They were more closely tied to their lands than many of the nomadic tribes to the north.
Even some whites argued that the Cherokees, unlike other tribes, should be allowed to retain their eastern lands, since they had become such a “civilized” society and had, under pressure from missionaries and government agents, given up many of their traditional ways.
Cherokee men had once been chiefly hunters and had left farming mainly to women.
By now the men had given up most of their hunting and (like most white men) took over the farming themselves; Cherokee women, also like their white counterparts, restricted themselves largely to domestic tasks.
The federal government worked steadily to negotiate treaties with the southern Indians that would remove them to the West and open their lands for white settlement.
But the negotiating process did not proceed fast enough to satisfy the region’s whites
Most tribes were too weak to resist, and they ceded their lands in return for token payments. Some, however, balked.
The Court’s decisions in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia in 1831 and 1832 (see p. 224) seemed at least partially to vindicate the tribe
In 1835, the federal government extracted a treaty from a minority faction of the Cherokees, none of them a chosen representative of the Cherokee Nation.
The treaty ceded the tribe’s land to Georgia in return for $5 million and a reservation west of the Mississippi.
The great majority of the 17,000 Cherokees did not recognize the treaty as legitimate and refused to leave their homes.
But Jackson would not be thwarted.
He sent an army of 7,000 under General Winfield Scott to round them up and drive them westward at bayonet point.
About 1,000 Cherokees fled across the state line to North Carolina, where the federal government eventually provided a small reservation for them in the Smoky Mountains, which survives today
But most of the rest made the long, forced trek to “Indian Territory” (which later became Oklahoma) beginning in the winter of 1838.
Along the way, a Kentuckian observed: “Even aged females, apparently nearly ready to drop in the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to their backs, sometimes on frozen ground and sometimes on muddy streets, with no covering for their feet.”
Thousands, perhaps an eighth or more of the emigrés, perished before or soon after reaching their unwanted destination.
In the harsh new reservations in which they were now forced to live, the survivors never forgot the hard journey.
They called their route “The Trail Where They Cried,” the Trail of Tears.
Jackson claimed that the “remnant of that ill-fated race” was now “beyond the reach of injury or oppression,” apparently trying to convince himself or others that he had supported removal as a way to protect the tribes.
The Cherokees were not alone in experiencing the hardships of the Trail of Tears. Between 1830 and 1838, virtually all the “Five Civilized Tribes” were expelled from the southern states and forced to relocate to the new Indian Territory
Only the Seminoles in Florida managed to resist the pressures to relocate, and even their success was limited.
Like other tribes, the Seminoles had agreed under pressure to a settlement (the 1832–1833 treaties of Payne’s Landing), by which they ceded their lands to the government and agreed to move to Indian Territory within three years.
Most did move west, but a substantial minority, under the leadership of the chieftain Osceola, refused to leave and staged an uprising beginning in 1835 to defend their lands.
By the end of the 1830s, almost all the important Indian societies east of the Mississippi had been removed to the West.
The tribes had ceded over 100 million acres of eastern land to the federal government; they had received in return about $68 million and 32 million acres in the far less hospitable lands west of the Mississippi between the Missouri and Red Rivers.
There they lived, divided by tribe into a series of carefully defined reservations, in a territory surrounded by a string of United States forts to keep them in (and to keep most whites out), in a region whose climate and topography bore little relation to anything they had known before.
Eventually, even this forlorn enclave would face incursions from white civilization
The Bank of the United States in the 1830s was a mighty institution, and it is not surprising that it would attract Jackson’s wrath.
By law, the Bank was the only place that the federal government could deposit its own funds; the government, in turn, owned one-fi fth of the Bank’s stock.
The Bank did a tremendous business in general banking. It provided credit to growing enterprises; it issued banknotes, which served as a dependable medium of exchange throughout the country; and it exercised a restraining effect on the less well-managed state banks.
Nicholas Biddle, who served as president of the Bank from 1823 on, had done much to put the institution on a sound and prosperous basis.
Nevertheless, Andrew Jackson was determined to destroy it.
Opposition to the Bank came from two very different groups: the “soft-money” faction and the “hard-money” faction.
Advocates of soft money—people who wanted more currency in circulation and believed that issuing bank notes unsupported by gold and silver was the best way to circulate more currency—consisted largely of state bankers and their allies.
The soft-money advocates were believers in rapid economic growth and speculation; the hard-money forces embraced older ideas of “public virtue” and looked with suspicion on expansion and speculation.
Jackson supported the hard-money position.
Many years before, he had been involved in some grandiose land and commercial speculations based on paper credit.
His business had failed in the Panic of 1797, and he had fallen deeply into debt.
After that, he was suspicious of all banks and all paper currency.
But as president, he was also sensitive to the complaints of his many soft-money supporters in the West and the South.
He made it clear that he would not favor renewing the charter of the Bank of the United States, which was due to expire in 1836.
Clay ran for president that year as the unanimous choice of the National Republicans, who held a nominating convention in Baltimore late in 1831.
But the Bank War failed to provide him with the winning issue for which he had hoped. Jackson, with Van Buren as his running mate, overwhelmingly defeated Clay with 55 percent of the popular vote and 219 electoral votes.
These results were a defeat not only for Clay but also for Biddle.
Jackson was now more determined than ever to destroy the “monster” Bank as quickly as possible.
He could not legally abolish the institution before the expiration of its charter.
Instead, he tried to weaken it.
He decided to remove the government’s deposits from the Bank
As financial conditions worsened in the winter of 1833– 1834, supporters of the Bank blamed Jackson’s policies for the recession
In the aftermath of the Bank War, Jackson moved against the most powerful institution of economic nationalism of all: the Supreme Court.
In 1835, when John Marshall died, the president appointed as the new chief justice his trusted ally Roger B. Taney.
The two parties were different from one another in their philosophies, in their constituencies, and in the character of their leaders.
But they became increasingly alike in the way they approached the process of electing their followers to office.
Democrats in the 1830s envisioned a future of steadily expanding economic and political opportunities for white males.
The role of government should be limited, they believed, but it should include efforts to remove obstacles to opportunity and to avoid creating new ones.
That meant defending the Union, which Jacksonians believed was essential to the dynamic economic growth they favored.
It also meant attacking centers of corrupt privilege.
As Jackson himself said in his farewell address, the society of America should be one in which “the planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer, all know that their success depends on their own industry and economy,”
Among the most radical members of the party—the so-called Locofocos, mainly workingmen and small businessmen and professionals in the Northeast—the sentiment was strong for a vigorous, perhaps even violent assault on monopoly and privilege far in advance of anything Jackson himself ever contemplated.
The political philosophy that became known as Whiggery was very different. It favored expanding the power of the federal government, encouraging industrial and commercial development, and knitting the country together into a consolidated economic system.
Whigs embraced material progress enthusiastically; but unlike the Democrats, they were cautious about westward expansion, fearful that rapid territorial growth would produce instability.
Their vision of America was of a nation embracing the industrial future and rising to world greatness as a commercial and manufacturing power
Thus, while Democrats were inclined to oppose legislation establishing banks, corporations, and other modernizing institutions, Whigs generally favored such measures.
The Whigs were strongest among the more substantial merchants and manufacturers of the Northeast; the wealthier planters of the South and the ambitious farmers and a rising commercial class of the West— usual migrants from the Northeast—who advocated internal improvements, expanding trade, and rapid economic progress.
The Democrats drew more support from smaller merchants and the workingmen of the Northeast; from southern planters suspicious of industrial growth; and from westerners—usually with southern roots
Whigs tended to be wealthier than Democrats, to have more aristocratic backgrounds, and to be more commercially ambitious.
But Whig and Democratic politicians alike were more interested in winning elections than in maintaining philosophical purity.
The Whig Party was more successful at defining its positions and attracting a constituency than it was in uniting behind a national leader.
No single person was ever able to command the loyalties of the party in the way Andrew Jackson did the Democrats
The Democrats were united behind Andrew Jackson’s personal choice for president, Martin Van Buren.
The Whigs could not agree on a single candidate.
Instead, they ran several candidates, hoping to profit from the regional strength of each.
Andrew Jackson retired from public life in 1837, beloved by most Americans.
Martin Van Buren was very different from his predecessor and far less fortunate.
He was never able to match Jackson’s personal popularity, and his administration encountered economic difficulties that devastated the Democrats and helped the Whigs.
Prices were rising, money was plentiful, and credit was easy as banks increased their loans and notes with little regard to their reserves of cash
In 1836, Congress passed a “distribution” act requiring the federal government to pay its surplus funds to the states each year in four quarterly installments as interest-free, unsecured loans.
No one expected the “loans” to be repaid.
The states spent the money quickly, mainly to encourage the construction of highways, railroads, and canals.
The distribution of the surplus thus gave further stimulus to the economic boom.
Congress did nothing to check the speculative fever, with which many congressmen themselves were badly infected.
Hundreds of banks and businesses failed.
Unemployment grew.
Bread riots broke out in some of the larger cities.
Prices fell, especially the price of land.
Many railroads and canal projects failed.
Several of the debt-burdened state governments ceased to pay interest on their bonds, and a few repudiated their debts, at least temporarily.
It was the worst depression in American history to that point, and it lasted for five years.
It was a political catastrophe for Van Buren and the Democrats.
Both parties bore some responsibility for the panic.
But the depression was only partly a result of American policies.
England and western Europe were facing panics of their own, which caused European (and especially English) investors to withdraw funds from America, putting an added strain on American banks.
A succession of crop failures on American farms reduced the purchasing power of farmers and required increased imports of food, which sent more money out of the country.
But whatever its actual causes, the Panic of 1837 occurred during a Democratic administration, and the Democrats paid the political price for it.
The Van Buren administration, which strongly opposed government intervention in the economy, did little to fight the depression.
Some of the steps it took—borrowing money to pay government debts and accepting only species for payment of taxes—may have made things worse.
Van Buren did succeed in establishing a ten-hour workday on all federal projects, by presidential order, but he had only a few legislative achievements.
The most important and controversial of them was the creation of a new financial system to replace the Bank of the United States.
Under Van Buren’s plan, known as the “independent treasury” or “subtreasury” system, the government would place its funds in an independent treasury at Washington and in sub treasuries in other cities.
No private banks would have the government’s money or name to use as a basis for speculation; the government and the banks would be “divorced.”
As the campaign of 1840 approached, the Whigs realized that they would have to settle on one candidate for president this time if they were to have any hope of winning.
The 1840 campaign was the first in which the newly popular “penny press” carried news of the candidates to a large audience of workers and tradespeople
Both parties used the same techniques of mass voter appeal, the same evocation of simple, rustic values.
They accused Van Buren of being an aloof aristocrat who used cologne, drank champagne, and ate from gold plates.
