CHAPTER XXI

JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY (1829-1841)

Andrew Jackson, the leader of the new democracy.-Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) has a secure place in history as the leader of a new type of democracy. Let us see how his training prepared him to be such a leader. He was born of Scotch-Irish stock in the frontier settlement of Waxhaw, on the dividing line between North and South Carolina. He went to a log-cabin school where he was taught only reading, writing, arithmetic, and a little geography and grammar. He never learned enough spelling or grammar to be able to write correct sentences. It has been said that even in an age of bad spellers he was remarkable for the number of different ways in which he could spell the same word on the same page.

After studying a little law, he joined a party of immigrants large enough to ward off Indian attack and went to Nashville, Tennessee, then a frontier town of perhaps two hundred inhabitants. He was appointed prosecuting attorney of a large district surrounding Nashville, and he tried to keep a frontier society in order. On his frequent trips he took his rifle for protection against the Indians, who in that district in so-called peaceful times were killing, on an average, one person every ten days. He swam his horse across streams, slept in the forest, attended court in remote places, and tried to see that justice. was done. In the capacity of prosecutor, and later as a frontier judge, he learned to know all sorts of men and to be afraid of no one. He was six feet tall, and muscular. When a sheriff reported that a strong blacksmith would not submit to arrest, Jackson promptly went after the offender, brought him into court, and sentenced him. Jackson fought duels and earned the respect of the frontier by acts of bravery. In one of his many fights he

received a bullet in his shoulder, which caused him much pain in later years. Anæsthetics had not then been discovered, but Jackson finally called a surgeon and gripped a cane while the bullet was cut out.

How Jackson became widely known.—As major general of the militia of western Tennessee, Jackson learned how to control large bodies of men. A Baptist clergyman, writing from a North Carolina town to one of Jackson's former teachers at Waxhaw, tells how President Madison's courier sped with the news that gave Jackson the chance to become nationally and internationally known. "I have to inform you," says the clergyman's letter, "that just now the President's express rider, Bill Phillips, has tore through this little place without stopping. He

"THE UNION MUST

AND

SHALL BE PRESERVED.

STATUE OF ANDREW JACKSON IN NEW ORLEANS

came and went in a cloud of dust, his horse's tail and his own long hair streaming alike in the wind as they flew by. But as he passed the tavern stand where some were gathered, he swung his leather wallet by its straps above his head and shouted: 'Here's the Stuff! Wake up! War! War with England!! War!!!'" William Phillips, riding at the rate of ninety-five miles a day, galloped into Nashville nine days after leaving Washington. Major General Jackson assembled his militia and was angry because he could not strike a blow at once. Sometimes he had to use one half of his army to keep the other half from disbanding.

The Creek Indians helped England by taking Fort Mims in Alabama and butchering more than 400 settlers (1813). Jackson

started after the Creeks and almost exterminated them the next year in a battle at Horseshoe Bend, on the Tallapoosa River. This battle made Jackson famous in the South. His victory at New Orleans (p. 265) the next year made him known throughout the nation. His fame even crossed the Atlantic and caused Napoleon to study Jackson's generalship in that battle.

In 1824, Jackson received the highest number of electoral votes among four candidates for President, but as no one had a majority of the vote, the President was elected by the House of Representatives, which chose John Quincy Adams (p. 272). In 1828 Jackson easily defeated Adams for reëlection and became the seventh President of the United States. Jackson served for two terms (1829-1837). Let us try to learn about the democratic movement which he represented.

Jacksonian democracy.—Jacksonian democracy meant the rule of the plain common people. All the former Presidents were eastern men who had belonged to the educated upper class. Jackson had been trained only in the rough school of the frontier. Jacksonian democracy insisted on the worth of the common man and on his ability to share in the government. This feeling was strongest on the frontier, where every one tilled the soil and felt himself the equal of everybody else. When Jackson was judge, he sometimes waited on customers who came to a store kept by his wife's relatives. These customers liked to tell how Judge Jackson gave them generous pounds of tea and long yards of calico.

Jacksonian democracy liked to do things without ceremony. Common men were pleased with the way in which Jackson rushed into the Spanish territory of Florida without waiting for orders (p. 274), thus escaping long diplomatic conferences when action was needed at once. They admired the quickness with which he destroyed a Spanish fort that served as a base for Indian and negro raids into the United States, and they liked his frontier method of promptly executing two British subjects who had been accused of suggesting these raids. Diplomacy had failed to

get from France payment for our vessels destroyed by her during the Napoleonic War. After Jackson became President, he urged Congress to take the frontier short cut and seize enough French vessels to pay our claims. The French said that such an act would mean war, but they paid the claim. Jackson's rough-andready ways made him the hero of the great mass of the people.

Political equality.-Jacksonian democracy also meant political equality. According to the theory of the Declaration of Independence, all men were politically equal, but in fact they were not. In the thirteen original states, at the time of the ratification of the Constitution (1788), no one could vote unless he paid taxes or had a certain amount of property. The growth of the West made Jacksonian democracy possible. When Jackson was elected, there were seven states between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi, and two states west of the Mississippi. With but one exception (Mississippi) all the states that entered the Union after the War of 1812 and before the election of Jackson (Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri) made constitutions that allowed all white male citizens over 21 years old to vote. The democratic spirit of the West spread until no state required a voter to own property after 1845. A few states still demanded a poll (head) tax for voting.

Difference of opinion about the new democracy.-Some believed that the rule of all the people would at once secure good government. Crowds came to see Jackson inaugurated. Although there were no railroads, some traveled five hundred miles to witness the event. "People really seem to think," wrote a New England eyewitness of the inauguration, “that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger."

Others thought that the ignorance and rashness of a frontier fighter, untrained in government, would wreck the nation. A judge of the Supreme Court of the United States wrote: "The reign of King Mob seemed triumphant." The crowd dashed to the inauguration reception at the White House, where some stood on chairs, trying to see Jackson. To lessen the rush for

eatables inside the White House, generous bowls of punch were taken to the lawn. The followers of John Quincy Adams and of Henry Clay shook their heads sadly over what they called the rule of the rabble and the unwashed.

The spoils system. The spoils system means the use of government offices as spoils, or plunder, to reward men who help the victorious party win. Under this system, fitness for the office does not determine the selection of the office holder. The worst blot on the Jackson administration was the introduction of the spoils system into the national government. Before this time some states had used this system, which proved to be an easy way of paying political workers at the public expense; but Jackson was the first President to adopt it for the national government.

Men were now discharged for no other reason than that some one who had voted for Jackson wanted a job. One man who took the place of a competent official stole the government's money. From the beginning of Washington's administration to that of Jackson's, a period of forty years, seventy-four men had been removed from office. In one year Jackson turned out nearly two thousand government employees, many of them postmasters.

Thirty-five years before, James Madison had said that wholesale discharges of good officials for political reasons would be cause for impeaching a President. The majority now approved what Jackson did. One reason for the change of mind was that the new democracy of the West not only believed that one man was as good as another, but also seemed to think that anybody could do anything as well as anybody else.

The question of the preservation of the Union. After the War of 1812, most men put the nation first and planned for its greatness as a whole. But some influential men put the welfare of their state and section before that of the nation. Instead of "the nation first," their thought was "the state first."

As a result of this difference of opinion, the year 1830 witnessed the most famous duel of debate ever fought out in Congress.