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Jacksonian democracy, also known as Jacksonianism, was a 19th-century political ideology in the United States that restructured a number of federal institutions. Originating with the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson and his supporters, it became the nation's dominant political worldview for a generation. The term itself was in active use by the 1830s.The Providence (Rhode Island) Patriot 25 Aug 1839 stated: "The state of things in Kentucky ... is quite as favorable to the cause of Jacksonian democracy." cited in "Jacksonian democracy", Oxford English Dictionary (2019)
This era, called the Jacksonian Era or Second Party System by historians and political scientists, lasted roughly from Jackson's 1828 presidential election until the practice of slavery became the dominant issue with the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854 and the political repercussions of the American Civil War dramatically reshaped American politics. It emerged when the long-dominant Democratic-Republican Party became factionalized around the 1824 presidential election. Jackson's supporters began to form the modern Democratic Party. His political rivals John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay created the National Republican Party, which would afterward combine with other anti-Jackson political groups to form the Whig Party.
Broadly speaking, the era was characterized by a Democracy spirit. It built upon Jackson's equal political policy, subsequent to ending what he termed a monopoly of government by . Even before the Jacksonian era began, suffrage had been extended to a majority of white male adult citizens, a result which the Jacksonians celebrated.Engerman, pp. 15, 36. "These figures suggest that by 1820 more than half of adult white males were casting votes, except in those states that still retained property requirements or substantial tax requirements for the franchise – Virginia, Rhode Island (the two states that maintained property restrictions through 1840), and New York as well as Louisiana." Jacksonian democracy also promoted the strength of the presidency and the executive branch at the expense of Congress, while also seeking to broaden the public's participation in government. The Jacksonians demanded elected, not appointed, judges and rewrote many state constitutions to reflect the new values. In national terms, they favored geographical expansionism, justifying it in terms of manifest destiny.
Jackson's expansion of democracy was exclusively limited to White Americans men, as well as voting rights in the nation were extended to adult white males only, and "it is a myth that most obstacles to the suffrage were removed only after the emergence of Andrew Jackson and his party. Well before Jackson's election most states had lifted most restrictions on the suffrage or white male citizens or taxpayers." There was also little to no improvement, and in many cases a reduction of the rights of non-white U.S citizens, during the extensive period of Jacksonian democracy, spanning from 1829 to 1860.
William S. Belko, in 2015, summarized "the core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy" as:
Historian and social critic Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. argued in 1945 that Jacksonian democracy was built on the following:Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945)
The fact that any man was now legally allowed to vote did not necessarily mean he routinely voted. He had to be pulled to the polls, which became the most important role of the local parties. They systematically sought out potential voters and brought them to the polls. Voter turnout soared during the 1830s, reaching about 80% of adult white male population in the 1840 presidential election.William G. Shade, "The Second Party System". in Paul Kleppner, et al. Evolution of American Electoral Systems (1983) pp 77-111 Tax-paying qualifications remained in only five states by 1860—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware and North Carolina.Engerman, p. 35. Table 1
One innovative strategy for increasing voter participation and input was developed outside the Jacksonian camp. Prior to the presidential election of 1832, the Anti-Masonic Party conducted the nation's first presidential nominating convention. Held in Baltimore, Maryland, September 26–28, 1831, it transformed the process by which political parties select their presidential and vice-presidential candidates.William Preston Vaughn, The Anti-Masonic Party in the United States: 1826–1843 (2009)
More former Democratic-Republicans supported Jackson, while others such as Henry Clay opposed him. More former Federalists, such as Daniel Webster, opposed Jackson, although some like James Buchanan supported him. In 1828, John Quincy Adams pulled together a network of factions called the National Republicans, but he was defeated by Jackson. By the late 1830s, the Jacksonian Democrats and the Whigs—a fusion of the National Republicans and other anti-Jackson parties—politically battled it out nationally and in every state.Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (1992).
Because of Jackson's inherent tendency to tribalism, it was almost inevitable that he became a central figure in the expansion of the political party system in the United States. He was not only was the nexus of the Democrats but played the central role of antagonist in the establishment of the Anti-Jacksonians, the Anti-Masons, and the Whigs. The Whigs were organized circa 1834, at which time "discontent with Jackson's policies and personal activities in relation to Tennessee politics had been steadily increasing, not only among certain outstanding men, but among the people of the state generally." In 1835, when Jackson revealed through a quickly-published private letter to "Indian fighter and war chaplain to chieftan Jackson" James Gwin that he wanted Martin Van Buren to succeed him as president, a Louisville newspaper explained that this signal fire had been lit in response to a Nashville newspaper editorial. The Nashville paper had made a well-intentioned inquiry: would Jackson not prefer to see his old Tennessee acquaintance Hugh Lawson White in the White House? "The poor Editor had unwittingly violated the first principles of Jackson-ism, to wit; unflinching adherence to the party candidate for office." And the party was, certainly while he lived, an extension of Jackson's inconsistent personal preferences and interests; Thomas P. Abernethy wrote in 1927, "No historian has ever accused Jackson, the great Democrat, of having had a political philosophy. It is hard to see that he even had any political principles. He was a man of action, and the man of action is likely to be an opportunist." Thus, Jacksonianism began without any given roster of principles other than Jackson's lifelong mission to extend "white supremacy across the North American continent." Jackson promoted political equality for white men, but his vision of social egalitarianism beyond that core constituency was essentially nonexistent; anyone who suggested otherwise was despised as a conniving schemer who was disrupting the natural social order for personal advantage and, surely, financial gain. The removal of Indians from their ancestral lands, so they could be more profitably replaced by Whites and their Black slaves in what became the Cotton Kingdom, "fixed the character of his political party" such that during the Second Party System "voting on Indian affairs proved to be the most consistent predictor of partisan affiliation." According to political historian Joshua A. Lynn, "Democrats painted the political landscape as a Boschian triptych in which fiendish abolitionists, nativists, and temperance crusaders flayed men of their autonomy, manhood, and whiteness." Per Lynn, the core principles of Jacksonism were white supremacy, the perpetuation of slavery, the ethnic cleansing of unceded Indigenous land claims within the territory of the United States, and mass politics, all guided by the worldview that "white men surrendered their sovereignty in proportion to its exercise by people of color." Thus, argue some historians, the color line was the core value of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, in that whether the voters were "urban workingmen, southern planters and yeomen, or frontier settlers" they were unified by a "racial essentialism" that established whiteness as the basis for a voting bloc that might otherwise share few common interests. There has been a school of thought that conflates the Jacksonian Democratic Party with the progressive mode and the later 19th and 20th American labor movements, but historian Edward Pessen argued that Jackson's claim to the allegiances of working men should not be mistaken for an alliance between Jacksonian Age capital-D Democrats and the working class, stating that "Andrew Jackson was no special friend to labor and...working men whether organized or unorganized were in their turn no champions of the Democracy." Thus, Jackson's great innovation was to popularize a cultural norm wherein by "superintending inequality at home...patriarchs mingled in public as equals." As historian William Freehling put it, Jackson's beliefs "took white men's egalitarian government to its (racial) limits and far beyond the (class) limits of the Founding Fathers' aristocratic republicanism...But his constricted definition...excluded almost all of American social inequality from governmental assault. His limited banking reforms left Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders untouched. His racial agenda sanctioned governmental consolidation of reds' and blacks' natural inferiority...This monument to American individualism had slaughtered the Bank, crushed the nullifiers, and impeded the secessionists. But that unacknowledged monster, his unimpeded racist capitalism, would haunt egalitarians for generations."
For his part, Jackson was acutely cognizant of the pro-slavery bent of his followers and saw that as a seat of power for the party. In 1840 he wrote to his nephew and political protégé Andrew Donelson about a campaign event in Madison County, Tennessee: "We had a large meeting to day. Polk and Felix Grundy both spoke, to an attentive audience, and all things look well in this District. I have no fears of the result; the abolition question begins to draw the attention, I may say, the serious attention of the people here." When conceiving of a "start date" for the Jacksonian Era of American history, way back in 1874 Samuel Eliot suggested that 1831 was a key year. By 1831 Jackson had consolidated power (he would run again and win a second term in 1832), but Eliot suggested that the year of the Nat Turner slave rebellion and the launch of The Liberator abolitionist newspaper was the beginning of irreversible bifurcation of the body politic into pro-slavery hotheads and anti-racist radicals, and a consequent, perhaps-inevitable civil war. Certainly by the 1850s, the Democrats had become "the party of unswerving white supremacy," although the party leadership never came to any consensus on how to apply that racist philosophy to practical issues of governance. As late as the 1950s an uneasy lack of clarity about the definition and goals of Jacksonianism led one political historian to admit that 100 years after the fact, they could only tell with certainty what it was not: "...it is not suggested that any plausible editorial selection could identify Jacksonian Democracy with the rise of abolitionism; or (in an exclusive sense) with the temperance movement, school reform, religious enthusiasm or theological liberalism; or (in any sense) with Utopian community building. Yet the variety of meanings which can command some documentary support is too wide for easy assimilation in a coherent interpretation of Jacksonian Democracy. Here there is, I think, a fair field for the critical examination of the major contending theses and, of greater importance, for a fresh reading of the most obvious Jacksonian sources."
The new party was pulled together by Martin Van Buren in 1828 as Jackson crusaded on claims of corruption by President John Quincy Adams. The new party (which did not get the name Democrats until 1834) swept to a landslide. As Mary Beth Norton explains regarding 1828:
The platforms, speeches and editorials were founded upon a broad consensus among Democrats. As Norton et al. explain:
Jackson vetoed more legislation than all previous presidents combined. The long-term effect was to create the modern, strong presidency.John Yoo, "Andrew Jackson and Presidential Power." Charleston Law Review 2 (2007): 521+ online . Jackson and his supporters also opposed progressive reformation as a movement. Progressive reformers eager to turn their programs into legislation called for a more active government. However, Democrats tended to oppose programs like educational reform and the establishment of a public education system. For instance, they believed that public schools restricted individual liberty by interfering with parental responsibility and undermined freedom of religion by replacing church schools.
According to Francis Paul Prucha in 1969, Jackson looked at the Indian question in terms of military and legal policy, not as a problem due to their race. In 1813, Jackson adopted and treated as his own son Lyncoya Jackson, who had been orphaned by Jackson's orders to John Coffee at the Battle of Tallusahatchee during the Creek War—seeing in him a fellow orphan that was "so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him". Lyncoya was one of three indigenous members of Andrew Jackson's household. Lyncoya's biography was used as a defense against charges that Jackson's Indian policies were inhumane as early as 1815,* continuing and accelerating through the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections. Lyncoya died of tuberculosis during the course of the 1828 campaign, allowing his obituary to serve as a platform for such messages.
In legal terms, when it became a matter of state sovereignty versus tribal sovereignty he went with the states and forced the Indians to fresh lands with no white rivals in what became known as the Trail of Tears.
Among the leading followers was Stephen A. Douglas, senator from Illinois, who was the key player in the passage of the Compromise of 1850, and was a leading contender for the 1852 Democratic presidential nomination. According to his biographer Robert W. Johanssen:
Jacksonian policies included ending the bank of the United States, expanding westward and Indian removal American Indians from the Southeast. Jackson was denounced as a tyrant by opponents on both ends of the political spectrum such as Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. This led to the rise of the Whig Party.
Jackson created a spoils system to clear out elected officials in government of an opposing party and replace them with his supporters as a reward for their electioneering. With Congress controlled by his enemies, Jackson relied heavily on the power of the veto to block their moves.
One of the most important of these was the Maysville Road veto in 1830. A part of Clay's American System, the bill would have allowed for federal funding of a project to construct a road linking Lexington and the Ohio River, the entirety of which would be in the state of Kentucky, Clay's home state. His primary objection was based on the local nature of the project. He argued it was not the federal government's job to fund projects of such a local nature and/or those lacking a connection to the nation as a whole. The debates in Congress reflected two competing visions of federalism. The Jacksonians saw the union strictly as the cooperative aggregation of the individual states, while the Whigs saw the entire nation as a distinct entity.
Carl Lane argues "securing national debt freedom was a core element of Jacksonian democracy". Paying off the national debt was a high priority which would make a reality of the Jeffersonian vision of America truly free from rich bankers, self-sufficient in world affairs, virtuous at home, and administered by a small government not prone to financial corruption or payoffs.
What became of Jacksonian Democracy, according to Sean Wilentz was diffusion. Many ex-Jacksonians turned their crusade against the Money Power into one against the Slave Power and became Republicans. He points to the struggle over the Wilmot Proviso of 1846, the Free Soil Party revolt of 1848, and the mass defections from the Democrats in 1854 over the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Other Jacksonian leaders such as Chief Justice Roger B. Taney endorsed slaveholding rights through the 1857 Dred Scott ruling. Southern Jacksonians overwhelmingly endorsed secession in 1861, apart from a few opponents led by Andrew Johnson. In the North, Jacksonians Martin Van Buren, Stephen A. Douglas and the fiercely opposed secession, while Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and the Copperheads did not.Sean Wilentz, "Politics, Irony, and the Rise of American Democracy." Journal of The Historical Society 6.4 (2006): 537-553, at p. 538, summarizing his book The rise of American democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2006).
Van Buren was defeated in 1840 by Whig William Henry Harrison in a landslide. Harrison died just 30 days into his term and his Vice President John Tyler quickly reached accommodation with the Jacksonians. Tyler was then succeeded by James K. Polk, a Jacksonian who won the election of 1844 with Jackson's endorsement. Polk was so closely aligned with Jackson he was sometimes called "Young Hickory." Franklin Pierce had been a supporter of Jackson as well. James Buchanan served in Jackson's administration as Minister to Russia and as Polk's Secretary of State, but he did not pursue Jacksonian policies. Finally, Andrew Johnson, who had been a strong supporter of Jackson, became president following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, but by then Jacksonian democracy had been pushed off the stage of American politics.
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