- [Professor] So we've been talking about
Jacksonian democracy,
and when we last left off,
Andrew Jackson had defeated John Quincy Adams
in the election of 1828,
largely by claiming that
Quincy Adams had won the previous election
through a corrupt bargain.
So Jackson played upon the sympathies of the public
by claiming that he was the common man
or the representation of the common man.
He took advantage of the growing number
of white male voters
who could participate in elections.
And particularly the growing numbers of frontier settlers,
who not only wanted to vote for the first president
to be born in the west,
also supported Jackson because
he was known for his anti-Native American sentiment
and his promise to remove Native Americans
from lands that whites wanted to settle
east of the Mississippi.
So in the first video in this series,
I mentioned that most scholars point to this moment
of Jackson's election in 1828
as the beginning of modern democracy.
So let's investigate some of those claims
a little bit further.
So what was it about Jackson's election and presidency
that began the modern American political system?
Well, for one thing Jackson was the very first
democratic president,
as in the first president to be a modern-day democrat.
And this is the same democratic party
that we still have today.
And Jackson really mobilized this sentiment
of the party of the common man.
And in his idea that meant
the common white man,
that he was not one of these
eastern elites, banking elites,
who made their fortunes by nickel-and-diming other people.
He was a backwoods frontiersman,
a war hero,
someone who had pulled himself up by his bootstrap.
So he was, I guess, one of the earliest self-made men.
And it was clear from the get-go that the age of Jackson
was going to be a completely different
kind of political culture than had existed previously
because at his inauguration
he had a giant inaugural celebration,
he opened up the White House to anybody.
The rabble came in and they trashed the place,
and the older aristocratic class of Washington politicians
thought that this was more or less
the end of the republic as they knew it.
This was going to be the era of mob rule.
But, you know, the wheels didn't come off democracy.
And one thing that Jackson really did was
he rewarded his supporters.
He rewarded the people who had voted Democrat,
who saw themselves as part of the Democratic Party
with government positions.
And this is called the spoils system,
along the lines of to the victor, go the spoils.
So to reward the democratic machine
that had put him in office,
he kicked out earlier office-holders
and rewarded the Democrats with offices.
That was very common in this time period
for people to be,
who are known as office seekers,
to kinda hang out in Washington, D.C.
trying to get the president to appoint you
postmaster of some random place
so that you could draw a government salary.
Now, earlier presidents would have thought something like
rewarding an office seeker quite vulgar.
John Quincy Adams, for example,
refused to replace anyone who was actually doing a good job
in their government post
with someone who was one of his supporters.
So you can debate whether or not
this is actually a good thing,
to kick out people who are good at their job
in favor of people who have supported you
during the campaign.
But what it does is it keeps people in the party.
So it makes sure that even if the party loses,
they know that they have put in their labor
for the Democratic Party
and later for the Whig and Republican Party.
And so they're going to keep working
to put their candidate in office
so that they can reap some rewards.
So this is one way in which
Jackson kind of solidifies party politics
so that you stop just being a Jackson partisan,
a Jefferson partisan,
someone who follows a political candidate.
And remember that earlier political candidates kind of
stood as men of virtue, right?
Now, the virtue is shifting from the men themselves
to the party that they represent.
And this party system was cemented by 1832
when Jackson was reelected,
when they held a national nominating convention,
it sounds very familiar to us today,
and put out an official party platform.
So what else did Jackson do that was really influential?
Ironically, for someone billing himself as a
man of the people,
Jackson worked really hard to expand the power
of the Executive Branch.
So he wanted the presidency
to be as powerful, if not more powerful,
than the Judicial Branch
or the Legislative Branch of the United States,
more powerful than the Supreme Court or Congress.
And there were two major instances
where he shows his interest in becoming
the most powerful part of the American government.
One of these was and what's known as the Bank War
when Jackson attempted to
kill the bank of the United States,
and he succeeded,
because he thought that the national bank was corrupt,
that it benefited the elite,
that it deserved more oversight from the federal government,
some of which was true.
And when congress tried to recharter the national bank,
he vetoed the charter.
Basically saying that he felt that his vote
was more important than the vote of Congress.
And for this, a group of people who started to coalesce
around their hatred for Jackson
started calling him King Andrew the First
because Jackson used the power of the veto all the time,
because he was trying to, in some ways,
reduce the power of the federal government,
which was one of the key tenants of the Democratic Party,
but at the same time kind of increase his own power
because he used his veto in many cases
to further his own agenda.
And as much as the national bank
was not a great institution,
it did help to keep the United States' economy
more or less humming along.
And once Jackson killed it,
there was a major economic depression called
the Panic of 1837,
which we can lay pretty much squarely at Jackson's feet.
We can see this political cartoon here has him
trampling on the constitution
as he pushes his own agenda forward.
And it's through their hatred of Jackson that
a new group comes together, the Whig Party,
which will provide the second half
of the two-party system that comes to the fore
in this time period.
So this is Andrew Jackson arguing that
the president has more power than Congress.
There's the second example of Andrew Jackson
trying to argue that he had
more power than the Supreme Court,
which comes comes in the Trail of Tears.
So Andrew Jackson represented the interests
of white settlers
who really saw Native Americans as
no more than an obstacle
to their continuous push westward,
the availability of land,
which they saw really as the
cornerstone of American prosperity.
And I can't do justice to the entire Trail of Tears here.
We have an article about that
and there'll be more to come in the future.
But suffice it to say that the American Indians,
who were living in Georgia particularly
and who were known as the Five Civilized Tribes
because they had adopted many of the ways of the Europeans
including Christianity and in some cases slavery,
the Supreme Court ruled
that they were entitled to be treated as a sovereign nation.
So when Georgia is trying to remove Native Americans
from their lands in Georgia,
the chief justice of the Supreme Court,
John Marshall,
rules in their favor.
And Andrew Jackson was quoted as saying,
"John Marshall has made his decision.
"Now let him enforce it."
So even though the Supreme Court defended
the status of the Native Americans living in Georgia
east of the Mississippi in general,
Andrew Jackson and the state of Georgia
went ahead with forcing the Five Civilized Tribes
to move westward to Oklahoma
during which at least 3,000 people died.
So Andrew Jackson serves a second term
and finishes out his presidency in 1836.
He considered running for a third term,
decided against it.
Instead, his crony Martin Van Buren,
who's basically Andrew Jackson Jr.,
serves as president for one term.
But due to the Panic of 1837,
Martin Van Buren, like poor Herbert Hoover later,
is forced to deal with an economic depression.
And you know that people are never happy
with the incumbent president
when there's an economic decline.
So in the election of 1840,
the Whigs,
the opposition party to Andrew Jackson,
run William Henry Harrison as their candidate.
And he is mostly famous for
being a fellow who died in office after only 40 days.
But what's interesting
about William Henry Harrison's campaign
is that the Whigs have learned their lesson
about the political climate of the Jacksonian age.
They marketed William Henry Harrison
as having been born in a log cabin,
a war hero,
he was a man of the people,
just a common guy who had
pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
Now, none of this was true.
William Henry Harrison was from Virginia,
he was from a very wealthy family,
he had been college educated.
He was no more rough and tumble than
John Quincy Adams had been.
But the Whigs had learned a valuable lesson
about what American political culture was like
in the age of mass democracy.
And from this point forward,
it's clear that Americans don't like their politicians
too highfalutin
and woe betide any candidate who wasn't born in a log cabin,
the modern American political system had begun.