2. -An ambiguous, controversial concept,
Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest
sense refers simply to the ascendancy of
Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party
after 1828.
-More loosely, it alludes to the entire
range of democratic reforms that
proceeded alongside the Jacksonians’
triumph—from expanding the suffrage to
restructuring federal institutions.
-Whatever one’s views, most Historians
agree that Jacksonian Democracy was an
authentic democratic movement,
dedicated to powerful, at times radical,
egalitarian ideals—but mainly for white
men.
3. -When the Democratic-Republican Party of the Jeffersonians became factionalized
in the 1820s, Jackson's supporters began to form the modern Democratic Party.
They fought the rival Adams and Anti-Jacksonian factions, which soon emerged as
the Whigs.
1.Democratic Party- The Democratic party was a proponent for farmers
across the country, urban workers, and new immigrants.
2. Whigs- In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress
over the Presidency and favored a program of modernization, banking
and economic protectionism to stimulate manufacturing.
-More broadly, the term refers to the era of the Second Party System (mid-
1830s–1854) characterized by a democratic spirit. It can be contrasted with the
characteristics of Jeffersonian democracy.
-Jackson's equal political policy became known as "Jacksonian Democracy",
subsequent to ending what he termed a "monopoly" of government by elites.
4. -Jacksonian Democracy was built on the following general
principles:
1. Expanded Suffrage
2. Manifest Destiny
3. The Whigs
4. Patronage
5. Strict Constructionism
6. Laissez-faire Economics
7. Banking
5. More directly, it arose out of the profound social and economic changes of the
early nineteenth century.
-Recent historians have analyzed these changes in terms of a market
revolution.
The American economy was not transformed by an "industrial revolution"
during these years.
While important new technologies were introduced in a few industries, most of
the period's economic growth was not linked to new machinery.
The term refers to the dramatic expansion of the market through the construction
of roads and canals.
The term acknowledges the fact that increasing numbers of people produced
for the "market," rather than for personal consumption, and made decisions
about what to produce, what to charge, and where to sell on the basis of "the
market."
Origin of Jacksonian Democracy
6. -But with distant and more lucrative markets now
accessible, more and more people broke free from
these traditional patterns of exchange and entered
into a new set of calculations.
-Freedom from traditional economic relationships
also meant freedom from traditional approaches to
one's livelihood. Producers that had formerly aimed
just at providing reasonable comfort for themselves
and their families now thought in terms of
maximizing their yields.
-The market revolution, therefore, changed more
than just where people sold their goods; it
transformed the approach and the goals people
applied to their work.
Market Revolution
7. -Not everyone benefited equally from the
market revolution, least of all those nonwhites
for whom it was an unmitigated disaster.
Jacksonianism, however, would grow directly
from the tensions it generated within white
society.
-Mortgaged farmers and an emerging
proletariat in the Northeast, non-slaveholders in
the South, tenants and would-be yeomen in the
West—all had reasons to think that the spread of
commerce and capitalism would bring not
boundless opportunities but new forms of
dependence.
-By the 1820s, these tensions fed into a many-
sided crisis of political faith.
8. -Increasingly after the War of 1812, government
policy seemed to, favor the kinds of centralized,
broad constructionist, top-down forms of economic
development that many thought would aid men of
established means while deepening inequalities
among whites.
-Numerous events during and after this era
confirmed a growing impression that power was
steadily flowing into the hands of a small, self-
confident minority.
-Above all, Jackson, with his own hardscrabble
origins, epitomized contempt for the old
republican elitism, with its hierarchical deference
and its wariness of popular democracy.
9. -The Jacksonians’ basic policy thrust, both in Washington and in the states, was to rid
government of class biases and dismantle the top-down, credit-driven engines of the
market revolution.
-The war on the Second Bank of the United States and subsequent hard-money initiatives
set the tone—an unyielding effort to remove the hands of a few wealthy, unelected private
bankers from the levers of the nation’s economy.
-Around these policies, Jacksonian leaders built a democratic ideology aimed primarily at
voters who felt injured by or cut off from the market revolution.
-Updating the more democratic pieces of the republican legacy, they posited that no republic
could long survive without a citizenry of economically independent men.
Jackson’s policys
10. -According to the Jacksonians, all of human
history had involved a struggle between the few and
the many, instigated by a greedy minority of wealth
and privilege that hoped to exploit the vast majority.
-The people’s best weapons were equal rights
and limited government—ensuring that the already
wealthy and favored classes would not enrich
themselves further by commandeering, enlarging,
and then plundering public institutions.
-Reactionary southern planters, centered in
South Carolina, worried that the Jacksonians’
egalitarianism might endanger their own
prerogatives—and perhaps the institution of
slavery—if southern nonslaveholders carried them
too far.
11. -Yet less than a decade later, sectional contests linked to slavery promised to drown out
that debate and fracture both major parties.
-The Jacksonian mainstream, so insistent on the equality of white men, took racism for
granted.
- North and South, the democratic reforms achieved by plebeian whites—especially those
respecting voting and representation—came at the direct expense of free blacks.
-Although informed by constitutional principles and genuine paternalist concern, the
Jacksonian rationale for territorial expansion assumed that Indians (and, in some areas,
Hispanics) were lesser peoples.
-More important, they believed that the mounting antislavery agitation would distract
attention from the artificial inequalities among white men and upset the party’s delicate
intersectional alliances.
Slavery
12. -Through the 1830s and 1840s, the mainstream Jacksonian leadership fought to
keep the United States a democracy free from the slavery question.
-Jacksonian pro-expansionism—what one friendly periodical, the Democratic
Review boosted as “manifest destiny”—only intensified sectional rifts.
-Slaveholders, quite naturally, thought they were entitled to see as much new
territory as legally possible opened up to slavery.
-The presidential candidacy of Martin Van Buren on the Free-Soil ticket in
1848—a protest against growing southern power within the Democracy—amply
symbolized northern Democratic alienation.
- Southern slaveholder Democrats, for their part, began to wonder if anything
short of positive federal protection for slavery would spell doom for their
class—and the white man’s republic.
