1820-1860

Jacksonian Democracy

-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.

-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.

-Jacksonian Democracy was built on the following general principles:1. Expanded Suffrage2. Manifest Destiny3. The Whigs 4. Patronage5. Strict Constructionism6. Laissez-faire Economics7. Banking

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

-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

-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.

-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. 

-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

-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.

-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

-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.