Summarize the Age of Jackson and his war with the Bank and their importance including the party machine, Democrats and Whigs, public and private freedom, South Carolina and Nullification, Calhoun’s political theory, the Nullification crisis, Indian removal, the Supreme Court and the Indians, Biddle’s bank, pet banks, the economy, and the panic of 1837. Although winning the most electoral and popular votes during the presidential election of 1824, Andrew Jackson lost the race to John Quincy Adams. The election of 1824 laid the ground work for a new system of political parties. In 1828, Van Buren, established the political apparatus of the Democratic Party, complete with local and state party units overseen by a national committee and network of local newspapers devoted to the party and to the election of Andrew Jackson. During the election, Jackson’s supporters made few campaign promises, relying on their candidate’s popularity and the working of party machinery to get the vote out. Nearly 57 percent of the eligible electorate cast ballots, more than double the percentage four years earlier. Jackson won a resounding victory, carrying the entire South and West, along with Pennsylvania. His election was the first to demonstrate how the advent if universal white male voting organized by national political parties, had transformed American politics.
Andrew Jackson had little formal education and was a man of many contradictions. He held a vision of democracy that excluded any roles for Indians and African-Americans. Jackson believed that the states, not Washington, DC should be the focal point of governmental activity. By the time of Jackson’s presidency, politics had become more than a series of political contests-it was a form of mass entertainment, a part of Americans’ daily lives. Party machines, headed by professional politicians, reached into every neighborhood, especially in cities. The party machines provided benefits like jobs to constituents and ensured that voters went to the polls on Election Day. Jackson declared that Government posts should be open to the public, not reserved for a privileged class of permanent bureaucrats. Large national conventions where state leaders gathered to hammer out a platform now chose national candidates.
Jacksonian politics revolved around issues spawned by the market revolution and the continuing tension between national and sectional loyalties. Democrats tended to be alarmed by the widening gap between social classes. They believed the government should adopt a hands-off attitude toward the economy and not award special favors to entrenched economic interests. The Democratic Party attracted aspiring entrepreneurs who resented government aid to established businessmen, as well as large numbers of farmers and city workingmen suspicious of new corporate enterprises. Whigs united behind the American System, believing that via a protective tariff, a national bank, and aid to internal improvements, the federal government could guide economic development. Most established businessmen and bankers supported their program of government-promoted economic growth, as did farmers in regions near rivers, canals, and the Great Lakes, who benefited from economic changes or hoped to do so. Many slaveholders supported the Democrats, believing states’ rights to be slavery’s first line of defense, but southern planters generally voted Whig.
The party battles of the Jacksonian era reflected the clash between “public” and “private” definitions of American freedom and their relationship to governmental power, a persistent tension in the nation’s history. The Democrats believed liberty to be a set of private rights best secured by local governments and endangered by powerful national authority. During Jackson’s presidency, Democrats reduced expenditures, lowered the tariff, killed the national bank and refused pleas for federal aid to internal improvements. As a result of Jackson paying off the national debt in 1935, states replaced the federal government as the country’s main economic actors, planning systems of canals and roads and chartering banks and other corporations. Democrats considered individual morality a private matter not a public concern. The Whigs insisted that liberty and power reinforced each other. They believed that an activist national government could enhance the realm of freedom. The government should create the conditions for balanced and regulated economic development promoting a prosperity in which all classes and regions would share. Whigs rejected the premise that the government must not interfere in private life. Many evangelical Protestants supported the Whigs, convinced that via public education, the building of schools and asylums, temperance legislation, and the like, democratic governments could inculcate the “principles of morality.”
It has been said that Andrew Jackson left office with many more principles then he came in with. Elected as a military hero backed by an efficient party machine, he was forced to define his stance on public issues. The tariff of 1828, which raised taxes on imported manufactured goods made of wool as well raw materials such as iron, had aroused considerable opposition in the South. To the South Carolinians it was the “tariff of abominations,” insisting that the tariff on imported manufactured goods raised the prices paid by southern consumers to benefit the North. The legislature threatened to “nullify” the tariff of 1828 within their state. South Carolina had the largest slave population and was controlled by a tightly knit group of large planters. Behind their economic complaints against the tariff lay the conviction that the federal government must be weakened lest it one day take action against slavery. John C. Calhoun emerged as the leading theorist of nullification. As the South began to fall behind the rest of the country in population, Calhoun had evolved from the nationalist of 1812 into a powerful defender of southern sectionalism. In 1828, Calhoun was elected vice president, remaining behind the scenes, secretly drafting the Exposition and Protest in which South Carolina legislature justified nullification. Calhoun insisted that the national government had been created by an agreement, or compact among sovereign states, each of which retained the right to prevent the enforcement within its borders of acts of Congress that exceeded the powers specifically spelled out in the constitution. By 1831, Calhoun had publicly emerged as the leading theorist of states’ rights. Nullification was not a purely sectional issue. South Carolina stood alone during the crisis, and several states passed resolution condemning their actions. Jackson understood the nullification to be nothing less than disunion. The issue came to a head in 1832, when a new tariff was enacted. Despite a reduction in tariff rates, South Carolina declared the tax on imported goods null and void in the state after the following February. Jackson persuaded Congress to enact a Force Bill authorizing him to use the army and the navy to collect customs duties. South Carolina rescinded the ordinance of nullification after Henry Clay and Calhoun engineered the passage of a new tariff in 1833. This decision forced Calhoun to abandon the Democratic Party for the Whigs, where, with Clay and Webster he became part of a formidable trio of political leaders.
The nullification crisis underscored Jackson’s commitment to the sovereignty of the nation. His exclusion of Indians from the era’s assertive democratic nationalism led to the final act in the centuries-long conflict between white Americans and Indians east of the Mississippi River. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, provided funds for uprooting the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole). The law marked a repudiation of the Jeffersonian idea that “civilized Indians could be assimilated into the American population. The tribes made great efforts to become everything republican citizens should be, establishing schools, adopting written laws and a constitution modeled on that of the United States and becoming successful farmers, many of whom owned slaves. Jackson still referred to them as “savages” and supported Georgia’s effort to seize Cherokee land and nullify the tribe’s laws. The Cherokee leaders went to court to protect their rights guaranteed in treaties with the federal government. Their appeals forced the Supreme Court to clarify the unique status of American Indians. In 1823, in a crucial case involving Indians (Johnson v. M’Intosh) the Court proclaimed that Indians were not in fact owners of their land, but merely had a “right of occupancy.” Chief Justice John Marshall claimed that from the early colonial era, Indians had lived as nomads and hunters, and farmers. Entirely inaccurate as history, the decision struck a serious blow against Indian efforts to retain their land. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), Marshall described Indians as “wards” of the federal government. The justices could not, therefore, block Georgia’s effort to extend its jurisdiction over the tribe. In 1832, in Worcester v. Georgia, the court changed its mind, holding that Indian nations were a distinct people with the right to maintain a separate political identity. They must be dealt with by the federal government, not the states, and Georgia’s actions violated the Cherokee’s treaties with Washington. With legal appeals exhausted, one fraction of the tribe agreed to cede their lands, but the majority, led by John Ross, who had been elected “principal chief” under the constitution, adopted a policy of passive resistance. Federal soldiers forcibly removed 18000 Cherokee men, women and children into stockades and forced them to move west. At least one-quarter perished during the winter of 1838-1839 on the Trail of Tears, as the removal route from Georgia to the area of present-day Oklahoma came to be called. Removal of the Indians powerfully reinforced the racial definition of American nationhood and freedom. By 1840, in the eyes of most whites east of the Mississippi River they were simply a curiosity, a relic of an earlier period of American History.
The central political struggle of the Age of Jackson was the president’s war on the Bank of the United States. The bank symbolized the hopes and fears inspired by the market revolution. The expansion of banking helped to finance the nation’s economic development. Many Americans distrusted bankers as “nonproducers” who contributed nothing to the nation’s wealth but profited from the labor of others. The bank was headed by Nicholas Biddle of Pennsylvania, who during the 1820s had effectively used the institution’s power to curb the overusing of money by local banks and to create a stable currency throughout the nation. In 1832, he told a congressional committee that his Bank had the ability to “destroy” any state bank. Many called it the Monster Bank, an illegitimate union of political authority and entrenched economic privilege. The institutions charter would not expire until 1836, Biddle’s persuaded congress to approve a bill extending it for another twenty years. Jackson authorized the removal of funds from its vaults and their deposits in select local banks. Without government deposits the Bank of the United States lost its ability to regulate the activities of states banks.