Chapter 12: The Rise of Jacksonian Democracy

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

Today we're jumping into a really turbulent time in early American history, roughly 1824 to 1840.

American politics just completely transformed, it seems, going from, well, elite chats to mass democracy almost overnight.

Yeah, it's a huge shift.

We're leaving behind that period they call the era of good feelings, which is maybe more of an illusion anyway, and entering like 16 years of really bitter political fighting.

It's quite the rupture.

It really is.

And the whole idea of political conflict changes.

The founders, they were scared of it, saw it as failure.

But in this period, it starts to get celebrated almost as necessary for the republic.

This is where we see the beginnings of strong competitive parties, the Democrats and the Whigs.

And the numbers really tell the story, don't they?

We've got this statistic.

In 1824, only about a quarter of eligible voters actually voted, just one in four.

Fast forward 16 years to 1840, and that number, it's sky -raying bits to 78%.

Wow, 78%.

That's incredible mobilization.

It really shows the masses flooding into the political arena.

Exactly.

The whole center of political gravity starts shifting, you know, away from the East Coast elites and more towards the, well, the common man ideal anyway.

So our mission today is to track how this huge, messy shift happened.

And it really kicks off with one particular election that just shattered the old way of doing things.

Right, the election of 1824 and the so -called corrupt bargain.

OK, let's unpack that.

You had four main guys running and, confusingly, they all called themselves Republicans.

John Quincy Adams from Massachusetts.

Henry Clay from Kentucky.

William H.

Crawford from Georgia.

And the war hero Andrew Jackson from Tennessee.

Big names.

So what happened?

The vote comes in.

And it's messy.

Jackson actually gets the most popular votes and the most electoral votes, too, but crucially, not a majority.

So the 12th Amendment kicks in.

Precisely.

The election goes to the House of Representatives.

Now, Clay, he came in fourth, so he's out of the running for president himself, but he's the Speaker of the House.

So he holds a lot of power in deciding who does win.

And Clay apparently couldn't stand Jackson.

Called him a military chieftain, thought he was totally unfit.

Right.

And Clay was a big nationalist, pushing his American system agenda.

Adams, well, Adams kind of shared that vision more than Jackson did.

So Clay throws his support behind Adams.

And Adams wins the vote in the House, becomes president.

OK.

But then what?

Well, almost immediately, Adams appoints Clay as his Secretary of State.

Which everyone knew was the main stepping stone to the presidency back then.

Exactly.

So Jackson's supporters just explode.

They start screaming corrupt bargain that a deal was struck.

Was there proof?

No definitive proof of like a secret handshake deal.

But the perception was enough.

It just poisoned Adams's entire presidency from day one, even though he was known for being incredibly honest, almost painfully so.

And Adams himself, he wasn't really cut out for this new style of politics, was he?

Not at all.

He was described as aloof, austere, a thinker, not a gladhander.

He didn't have those back slapping skills the new democracy seemed to demand.

He sounds like the opposite of a campaigner.

Totally.

And he was politically clumsy in this new environment.

He refused to play the patronage game, you know, firing opponents and hiring supporters.

He only removed 12 people his whole term,

which actually annoyed his own potential allies.

While at the same time pushing for these huge, expensive national projects.

Yeah, roads, canals, a national university, even an astronomical observatory.

Things that sound impressive, maybe, but were really unpopular then, especially in the South.

They saw it as federal overreach.

And feared it might eventually lead to meddling with slavery.

Yeah, it was always the underlying fear.

Yes.

OK, so this tension builds.

And by 1828, the old Republican Party officially splits.

Right.

You get the national Republicans backing Adams and the Democratic Republicans lining up behind Jackson.

And that 1828 campaign, it got nasty,

really nasty mudslinging.

What kind of stuff are we talking about?

Oh, Jackson's people called Adams an aristocrat, said he lived like a king.

Adams's side went even lower, attacking Jackson's wife, Rachel, calling her an adulteress because of a complicated earlier marriage situation.

And even attacking Jackson's mother's reputation.

Vicious stuff.

Wow.

So who wins this slugfest?

Jackson.

Old Hickory, the hero of New Orleans.

He wins big, especially in the West and South.

It really showed that political power was shifting westward across the Appalachian Mountains.

But wasn't Jackson himself pretty wealthy, a plantation owner, a slave owner?

How did he pull off this common man image against Adams?

It was brilliant political packaging, really.

The image was key and his inauguration kind of symbolized it all.

The famous inaugural brawl.

That's the one.

The White House doors were thrown open and just mobs of people poured in.

Apparently they climbed on furniture with muddy boots, broke China.

It was chaos.

Jackson himself had to be sort of rescued out a side door.

I heard they use bowls of punch on the lawn to lure the crowd outside.

Yeah, sounds about right.

It was this potent symbol of the masses taking over, even if it was a bit destructive.

A perfect metaphor for Jackson's style, maybe.

Perhaps.

And once he's in, Jackson really formalizes this idea of rewarding his supporters.

We get the spoils system.

To the victor belong the spoils, that famous line.

That's it.

Jackson actually defended it, saying, you know, rotation in office was democratic.

It prevented a permanent, maybe aristocratic bureaucracy from forming.

But what did it mean in practice?

Well, it meant jobs went to loyal party members, not necessarily the most qualified.

It basically institutionalized party loyalty as the main qualification for government work.

And predictably, it led to corruption pretty quickly.

Like that Samuel Swartrout guy.

Exactly.

Collector of Customs in New York, appointed by Jackson.

Turns out he stole over a million dollars, a massive sum back then, and fled to Europe.

Showed the downside of the system right away.

So this focus on party loyalty and presidential power, it sets up another big fight, doesn't it?

This time over tariffs and states' rights.

Yes, the nullification crisis.

Jackson inherits this tariff passed in 1828, the Tariff of Abominations.

Ironically, his own supporters had pushed parts of it to make Adams look bad.

But then it actually passed.

A political hot potato, as you said.

Definitely.

And the South hated it.

They imported a lot of goods, didn't have much manufacturing.

So they felt it discriminated against them, benefited the northern industrialists.

But you mentioned there was a deeper issue.

Absolutely.

The tariff was kind of the surface problem.

The real anxiety, especially in South Carolina, was about federal power and slavery.

They'd seen the Denmark -Vezi slave conspiracy scare in 1822.

Abolitionist talk was growing.

So if the federal government can impose a tariff they hate.

Then maybe down the line, it could interfere with slavery itself.

That was the existential fear.

And this is where Jackson's own vice president, John C.

Calhoun, comes in.

Calhoun secretly writes the South Carolina Exposition in 1828.

And in it, he lays out the doctrine of nullification.

That a state has the right to declare a federal law null and void within its own borders if it thinks the law is unconstitutional.

Basically, states get to ignore laws they don't like.

That sounds like a direct challenge to the whole idea of a federal union.

It absolutely was.

And South Carolina decided to act on it.

In 1832, they held a convention, declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void in their state.

Yeah.

People wore palmetto ribbons to show support.

And they threatened to secede, to leave the union if Washington tried to collect the tariff duties by force.

They did.

It was a direct confrontation.

How did Jackson react?

He was a Southerner, a slave owner himself.

But he was also fiercely committed to preserving the union.

He was furious.

Privately, he threatened to go down there, hang the nullifiers, including Calhoun, maybe.

Publicly, he issued a strong proclamation against nullification and started reinforcing federal forts in South Carolina.

Sent ships that looked like it could lead to civil war.

So how was it resolved?

Enter Henry Clay again.

The great compromiser.

He broke us a deal.

The compromise tariff of 1833, which would gradually reduce the tariff rates over eight years.

A way for South Carolina to back down without losing face completely?

Sort of.

But Congress also passed the force bill, which opponents called the bloody bill.

It explicitly authorized the president to use the Army and Navy to collect customs duties if necessary.

So a carrot and a stick.

Exactly.

South Carolina repealed its nullification of the tariff they got, the lower rates they wanted eventually.

But in a final symbolic gesture, they nullified the force bill.

So the immediate crisis passed.

But the underlying issue of states' rights versus federal power.

Was definitely not resolved.

Just kicked down the road.

While Jackson's fighting to uphold federal authority against South Carolina, he's doing almost the opposite when it comes to Native American tribes, isn't he?

Especially defying the Supreme Court.

It's a stark contrast.

Historically, the US government had sort of recognized tribes as separate nations.

Making treaties for land, though, let's be honest, those treaties were broken constantly.

But many tribes, especially the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, the five civilized tribes had actively tried to assimilate.

They adopted settled agriculture, some even owned slaves.

The Cherokees developed a written language thanks to Sequoia.

They had a constitution, a newspaper.

They're trying to live like their white neighbors, essentially.

Yes.

But it didn't save them.

Especially when gold was discovered on Cherokee land in Georgia.

Gold changes everything.

Always seems to.

Georgia wanted the land, wanted the Cherokees out.

The Cherokees actually sued?

Took their case all the way to the Supreme Court.

And surprisingly, under Chief Justice John Marshall,

the court upheld the tribes rights, said Georgia's laws didn't apply to them.

A legal victory for the Cherokees.

So what did Jackson do?

This is where Jackson's view of presidential power really comes through.

He reportedly said, John Marshall has made his decision.

Now let him enforce it.

Wow.

Basically saying the court has no army.

I won't back them up.

Exactly.

He refused to enforce the ruling.

And instead, he pushed Congress to pass the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

Which did what?

It authorized the president to negotiate treaties to remove all tribes living east of the Mississippi River to lands west of the river.

It wasn't supposed to be forced removal, but in practice.

It became forced removal.

Overwhelmingly, over the next decade, over 100 ,000 Native Americans were uprooted.

The most infamous example, of course, is the Trail of Tears.

For the Cherokees?

Yes, in 1838 and 1839.

About 15 ,000 Cherokees were forcibly marched westward, mostly during the winter.

Conditions were horrific, freezing cold, lack of food.

Estimates are that around 4 ,000 people died on that journey.

Just a terrible tragedy, directly resulting from that policy and Jackson's defiance at the court.

And it wasn't just the Cherokees.

There was the Blackhawk War in 1832 in Illinois and Wisconsin, trying to resist removal.

And a long, bitter Seminole War down in Florida that lasted into the 1840s.

Removal was brutal policy.

So Jackson used presidential power to face down South Carolina and then used it again to defy the Supreme Court on Indian removal.

His next big target seems to have been a bank.

The Bank of the United States, the BUS.

It was sort of like a central bank, but it was privately owned, though the government deposited its funds there.

What did it do?

It provided stability, controlled much of the nation's gold and silver, issued reliable paper currency.

But Jackson and many of his supporters in the West saw it as a moneyed monster,

an elitist institution run by the wealthy Nicholas Biddle, they called him, Tsar Nicholas I,

that wasn't accountable to the people.

OK, so there's tension there.

How does it blow up?

Well, the bank's charter wasn't due to expire until 1836, but Henry Clay and Daniel Webster decided to push for its re -charter early in 1832, right before the presidential election.

Why?

What was the strategy?

They thought they could trap Jackson.

If he signed the re -charter bill, he'd alienate his Western supporters who hated the bank.

If he vetoed it, he'd lose support from the wealthy Easterners who relied on it.

They thought it was a win -win for them.

But Jackson didn't blink.

Not at all.

He vetoed the bill.

And his veto message was powerful.

He didn't just say it was bad policy.

He declared the bank unconstitutional.

Wait, didn't the Supreme Court already rule it was constitutional back in McCullough v.

Maryland?

Yes, they did.

But Jackson basically argued that the president had as much right to interpret the Constitution as the court did.

He vetoed it because he believed it was harmful and unconstitutional.

This was a massive expansion of presidential power, claiming the right to veto based on policy preference, not just constitutional issues.

OK, so he wins re -election in 1832, writing this anti -bank sentiment.

What happens to the bank then?

Its charters still had years left.

Yeah, Jackson decides to kill it faster.

He starts removing federal deposits out of the BUS and putting them into various state banks.

Banks that were friendly to him?

You got it.

They quickly got nicknamed pet banks.

What did losing the federal deposits in the BUS's oversight due to the economy?

It unleashed chaos, basically, without the central banks control.

These pet banks and even more reckless wildcat banks started printing tons of paper money with little gold or silver to back it up.

Sounds like a recipe for inflation and speculation.

Exactly.

There was a huge speculative boom, especially in Western lands fueled by this easy credit.

Jackson himself got worried by the frenzy.

So what did he do?

He tried to cool things down with the specie circular in 1836.

It required that all public lands had to be bought with specie hard money, meaning gold or silver coin.

No more paper money accepted for federal land.

So flood the country with paper, then suddenly demand hard cash.

Yeah, it slammed the brakes on the speculation hard.

And it contributed significantly to a major financial crash the following year, the Panic of 1837.

All this forceful action from Jackson, it must have created enemies.

Oh, definitely.

Opposition started to coalesce.

They eventually took the name Whigs.

Whigs like the old British party that opposed the king.

Precisely.

They were basically calling Jackson King Andrew the Serd, accusing him of acting like a monarch.

Who were these Whigs?

What did they stand for?

It was a real mix.

You had supporters of Clay's American system, people who wanted tariffs internal improvements funded by the government.

You had southern states writers who were mad about the nullification crisis response, northern industrialists, even anti Masonic groups and evangelical Protestants joined in a diverse bunch.

So not exactly unified on everything, but united against Jackson.

That was the main glue.

But they did tend to favor a more active federal government than the Democrats.

They supported things like banks, canals, roads, but also reforms like prisons and public schools.

They generally welcome the market economy.

So Jackson's term ends.

Does he manage to get his chosen successor elected?

He does.

His vice president, Martin Van Buren, won the election of 1836.

The Whigs tried a weird strategy of running several regional favorite sons, hoping to split the vote and throw the election into the House like in 1824.

But it didn't work this time.

No, Van Buren won outright.

But poor Van Buren basically inherited the economic mess Jackson had helped create.

The panic of 1837 hits right after he takes office.

Bad timing.

It was a severe depression.

Businesses failed.

Banks collapsed.

Unemployment soared.

The causes were complex.

The land speculation,

Jackson's bank policies and the specie circular, even issues with British banks calling in loans.

How did Van Buren respond?

Did he try the Whig approach of government intervention?

No, he stuck to the Jacksonian script.

Keep the government out of the economy.

He rejected calls for tariffs or expanding credit.

His big solution was the divorce bill.

Divorce bill.

Yeah.

Creating an independent treasury.

The idea was to completely separate or divorce the government from banking.

Federal money would be locked up in vaults, not put in private banks.

It protected government funds, maybe, but did nothing to help the struggling economy or banks.

While all this economic turmoil is happening, another issue is bubbling up Texas.

Right.

Americans, led by Stephen F.

Austin, had started settling in Mexican Texas back in the 1820s.

Mexico allowed it, but under conditions.

Settlers had to become Mexican citizens and officially Catholic.

Conditions that were mostly ignored.

Largely ignored.

Yeah.

And huge numbers of Americans poured in famous names like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston.

By 1835, there were like 30 ,000 Americans there.

What caused the friction with the Mexican government?

Several things.

Slavery was a big one.

Mexico had abolished slavery in 1830 and tried to stop more slaves coming into Texas, which angered the American settlers, many of whom were Southerners bringing slaves.

There were also issues over immigration rules and local rights.

Then the Mexican dictator, Santana, cracked down, wiping out local autonomy.

And the Tebsons revolt.

In 1836, they declare independence, raise the Lone Star flag.

This leads to the famous battle cry.

Remember the Alamo?

Yes.

Santana besieges the Alamo mission in San Antonio and kills almost all the Texan defenders, maybe 200 men.

Shortly after he executes another 400 or so Texan volunteers captured at Goliad.

Brutal acts.

But the Texans get revenge.

They do.

Under Sam Houston, they surprise Santana's army at the Battle of San Jacinto.

They capture Santana himself and force him to sign treaties recognizing Texas's independence with the Rio Grande as the border.

Though Santana later repudiated those treaties.

So Texas is independent.

Does it join the U .S.

right away?

No.

That became a huge political issue.

Jackson actually recognized the Republic of Texas just before leaving office in 1837.

But he and later Van Buren resisted annexation, making Texas a state.

Why didn't many Americans want Texas?

Yes, especially Southerners.

But anti -slavery groups in the north were fiercely opposed.

They saw Texas as this giant territory that would inevitably be carved up into multiple slave states, tipping the balance of power in Congress.

They called it a Slovakocracy conspiracy.

So like nullification,

the Texas issue gets punted down the road, too.

Exactly.

Too explosive for the time being.

Which brings us to the election of 1840, kind of the culmination of this whole populist shift.

Van Buren is running for reelection as a Democrat.

Right.

Saddled with the ongoing economic depression.

The Whigs, this time, unite behind one candidate,

William Henry Harrison,

an old military hero himself, famous for the Battle of Tippecanoe years earlier.

And this campaign becomes famous for its style, right?

Log cabins and hard cider.

Totally.

It was pure political theater.

It started when a Democratic newspaper editor tried to mock Harrison, saying he was just some old farmer who'd be happy with a pension, a log cabin and a barrel of hard cider.

And the Whigs just ran with it.

They loved it.

They turned those symbols completely around.

They portrayed Harrison, who was actually from a wealthy Virginia family and lived in a mansion, as the simple man of the people, the farmer of North Bend.

Log cabins became their symbol.

They handed out hard cider at rallies.

And who did they paint Van Buren as?

As the opposite.

An out of cut aristocrat living in luxury in the White House, supposedly eating fancy French food off gold plates.

Totally playing up the class contrast, even though it wasn't really accurate for either candidate.

Did it work?

It worked spectacularly.

Harrison won easily.

The campaign hoopla, the slogans, the songs, it showed that mass politics, appealing to the common man image, was now the way to win elections.

You had to have that common touch or at least pretend to.

So looking back at this whole period, 1824 to 1840,

what are the big takeaways?

I think there are two huge legacies.

First, this is really when mass democracy with high voter turnout and strong competing parties gets locked into place.

You have the Democrats favoring states rights and limited government and the Whigs wanting a more active government, promoting economic development and reform.

And importantly, both parties managed to pull support from all sections and classes, which helped for a time to keep the lid on the slavery issue.

And the second legacy, the massive expansion of presidential power.

Jackson really redefined the presidency using the veto aggressively to find the Supreme Court acting as the direct representative of the people against Congress or the court.

Later, presidents would build on that foundation.

Yeah, it's striking how some issues like nullification were sort of resolved through compromise, even if temporarily.

While others like the fate of Native Americans and especially Texas and slavery were just pushed aside, setting the stage for future conflict.

Absolutely.

And it makes you think about what Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he visited America during this time.

He was amazed by the energy of American democracy and equality, but also worried.

Worried about what?

About the potential tyranny of the majority or maybe an excessive individualism that could weaken society.

Seeing how voter turnout exploded back then compared to maybe lower rates today, it makes you wonder,

did this mass democracy live up to its promise?

Or did it contain some of those dangers Tocqueville sensed?

How do we balance equality and participation today?

That's definitely something to chew on.

A fascinating period of transformation.

Thanks for joining us for this deep dive into the Jacksonian era.

Glad to be here.

We'll catch you next time.