the 2008 Presidential Election Has Often Been Referred to as Apush Review
Of all presidential reputations, Andrew Jackson's is perhaps the most difficult to summarize or explicate. Nigh Americans recognize his name, though most probably know him (in the words of a famous vocal) as the general who "fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans" in 1815 rather than as a two-term president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. Thirteen polls of historians and political scientists taken between 1948 and 2009 have ranked Jackson e'er in or virtually the top 10 presidents, among the "great" or "virtually nifty." His face adorns our currency, keeping select visitor with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and the first secretarial assistant of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Jackson is the just president, and for that matter the simply American, whose name graces a whole menses in our history. While other presidents belong to eras, Jackson's era belongs to him. In textbooks and in common parlance, we call Washington's time the Revolutionary and founding eras, not the Historic period of Washington. Lincoln belongs in the Civil War era, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the Progressive era, Franklin Roosevelt in the era of the Great Low, the New Bargain, and World War 2. But the interval roughly from the 1820s through 1840s, between the aftermath of the State of war of 1812 and the coming of the Ceremonious State of war, has frequently been known every bit the Jacksonian Era, or the Historic period of Jackson.
Nevertheless the reason for Jackson's claim on an era is not readily apparent. Washington was the Begetter of his country. Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt were war leaders who also (not wholly coincidentally) presided over dramatic changes in regime. Only as well winning a famous battle in the War of 1812 years earlier his presidency—and at that, a battle that had no effect on the state of war's result, since a treaty ending it had just been signed—just exactly what did Andrew Jackson do to deserve his eminence? He led the country through no wars. No foreign policy milestones like Thomas Jefferson'southward Louisiana Purchase or the "Doctrines" of James Monroe or Harry Truman highlighted Jackson'south presidency. He crafted no path-breaking legislative program like Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Bully Social club. Indeed Jackson's sole major legislative victory in eight years was an 1830 law to "remove" the eastern Indian tribes across the Mississippi, something more than often seen today as travesty rather than triumph. That measure bated, the salient features of Jackson'due south relations with Congress were his famous vetoes, killing a string of road and culvert subsidies and the Bank of the United States, and Jackson'south official censure by the The states Senate in 1834, the but time that has yet happened. On its face, this does non look like the record of a "top 10" president.
An exception might be claimed for Jackson's handling of the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833. Most southern states in Jackson's day vehemently opposed the "protective tariff," an import taxation that provided nigh of the government's revenue and also aided American manufacturers by raising the cost of competing strange (mainly British) goods. In 1832 the state of S Carolina declared the tariff police unconstitutional and therefore null and void. In bold this correct, independent of the Supreme Court or anybody else, to guess what the Us Constitution meant and what federal laws had to be obeyed, S Carolina threatened the very viability of the federal union. Although he was himself a southerner, no neat friend of the tariff, and a South Carolina native, Jackson boldly faced downward the nullifiers. He kickoff confronted nullification'south mastermind (and his ain vice president), John C. Calhoun, with a ringing public declaration: "Our Federal Marriage—It must be preserved." He then responded officially to South Carolina'due south action with a baking presidential proclamation, in which he warned that nullification would inexorably lead to secession (formal withdrawal of a state from the United States), and secession meant ceremonious war. "Be non deceived by names. Disunion past armed force is treason. Are you really ready to incur its guilt?" Mortality was averted when Congress passed a compromise tariff that South Carolina accustomed and Jackson approved. Although he played no direct office in its passage, Jackson took much credit for the compromise, and even many political opponents conceded it to him.
For his own generation and several to come up, Jackson'due south defiance of nullification earned him a identify in the patriotic pantheon higher up the contentions of party politics, at least in the optics of those who approved the result. In the secession crisis 30 years later on, Republicans—including Abraham Lincoln, an anti-Jackson partisan from his outset entry into politics—hastened to invoke his case and quote his words. In 1860 James Parton, Jackson'due south get-go scholarly biographer, managed to praise Jackson'southward unionism while providing a negative overall cess of his character.
Still, though non wholly forgotten, Jackson's reputation as defender of the Union has faded distinctly in the twentieth century and hardly explains historians' interest in him today. Secession is a expressionless effect, and commitment to an indivisible and permanent American nationhood is now so commonplace as to seem hardly worth remarking.
Rather, Jackson'southward continuing prominence, and the source of continuing controversy, lies in something much less concrete: his place every bit an emblem of American democracy. He is remembered less for specific accomplishments as president than for his persona or epitome, his role as America's first presidential Representative Homo. That image has deep roots. In 1831–1832, midway through Jackson's presidency, a French aristocrat named Alexis de Tocqueville toured the state. Returning dwelling house, he published Commonwealth in America, still the most penetrating analysis of American society ever penned. De Tocqueville organized his exposition (which in many respects was not at all flattering) around two themes. One was "the general equality of status among the people." The other was democracy, which gave tone to everything in American life: "the people reign in the American political globe as the Deity does in the universe." De Tocqueville saw republic, for good or ill, as the future of Europe and the world. "I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there the image of commonwealth itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what nosotros have to fear or to hope from its progress."
America, and so, was democracy embodied—and Andrew Jackson was its exemplar. Born poor, half-educated, self-risen, he was the first president from outside the colonial gentry, the first westerner, the showtime with a nickname ("Erstwhile Hickory"), the first to exist elected in a grand popular referendum—all in all, the start living proof that in America, anyone with enough gumption could grow upward to be president. He furnished the plebeian template of humble origins, untutored wisdom, and instinctive leadership from which would bound "Onetime Tippecanoe" William Henry Harrison, "Honest Abe" Lincoln, and a 1000 would-be imitators down to the nowadays day.
The epitome of Jackson as a quintessential product of American republic has stuck. Notwithstanding always complicating it has been the coaction betwixt the personal and the political. If Jackson is a potent democratic symbol, he is also a conflicted and polarizing i. In his own lifetime he was adulated and despised far across any other American. To an amazing degree, historians today still feel visceral personal reactions to him, and praise or damn accordingly.
Jackson'due south outsized, larger-than-life character and career accept always offered plenty to wonder at and to argue about. His lifelong political antagonist Henry Clay in one case likened him, not implausibly, to a tropical tornado. Jackson'south rough-and-tumble borderland youth and pre-presidential (mainly war machine) career showed instances of heroic achievement and about superhuman fortitude. Mixed in with these were episodes of insubordination, usurpation, uncontrolled atmosphere, wanton violence, and scandal. Jackson vanquished enemies in battle everywhere and won a truly astonishing victory at New Orleans. He likewise fought duels and street brawls, defied superiors, shot captives and subordinates, launched a foreign invasion against orders, and (disputably) stole another man's wife. As president he was, depending on whom one asked, either our greatest popular tribune or the closest we have come to an American Caesar.
An adept manipulator of his own image, Jackson played a willing hand in fusing the political and the personal. First as a candidate and then equally president, he reordered the political mural around his own popularity. Swept into part on a wave of 18-carat grassroots enthusiasm, Jackson labored successfully through 8 years equally president to reshape his personal following into an effective political appliance—the Democratic Party, our outset mass political political party, which organized nether his guidance. Significantly, the political party's original proper name was the American Democracy, implying that it was not a political party at all just the political embodiment of the people themselves. Democrats labeled their opponents, first National Republicans and so Whigs, as the "aristocracy." But the initial examination of membership in the Democracy was less an adherence to a political philosophy than fealty to Andrew Jackson himself.
A generation after Jackson's presidency, biographer James Parton found his reputation a mass of contradictions: he was dictator or democrat, ignoramus or genius, Satan or saint. Those conundrums endure, and the facts, or arguments, behind them would make full a book.
There are a few focal points upon which Jackson's modern reputation has turned for improve or for worse. One is his attack on corporate privilege and on the concentrated political influence of wealth. In his famous Banking company Veto of 1832, Jackson juxtaposed "the rich and powerful" confronting "the humble members of order—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers," and lamented that the old "too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes." No president before and few since accept spoken and then bluntly of economical antagonisms between Americans. Jackson went on, in his Good day Accost in 1837, to warn of an insidious "coin ability," fabricated up of banks and corporations, that would steal ordinary citizens' liberties away from them. (It said something of Jackson's sense of his own importance that he presumed to deliver a Farewell Address, an example set by Washington that no previous successor had dared to follow.)
Jackson'south Bank Veto was and then riveting, and so provocative, that in the ensuing presidential election both sides distributed it as a campaign document. Foes of bankers, corporations, Wall Street, and "the rich" have turned to information technology e'er since. Populists and other agrarian insurgents in the nineteenth century, and New Bargain Democrats in the twentieth, claimed it equally their birthright. Writing in the wake of the Keen Low and the New Deal, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. fabricated the Banking company Veto the centerpiece of The Age of Jackson (1945), the foundational work of modern Jacksonian scholarship.
In the late twentieth century, Jackson's strictures attracted some historians who were articulating a class-based analysis of American history, and who used them to interpret Jackson equally a foe not only of capitalist abuses and excesses, but of commercialism itself. To other recent scholars, though, the Bank Veto has seemed merely demagogic, while to most people outside the university the whole Jacksonian struggle over cyberbanking grew to announced baffling and arcane, divorced from our present concerns. All of that has suddenly inverse. Since the fiscal plummet of 2008, Jackson's warnings seem not merely urgently relevant merely eerily prescient. They are again often quoted, and his reputation has enjoyed, at to the lowest degree for the moment, a sharp uptick.
The other framing issue for Jackson's recent reputation—ane that Schlesinger did not fifty-fifty mention, only which has come up since to pervade and even dominate his image—is Indian removal. The symbolic freighting of this subject tin can hardly be overstated. Just as Jackson—child of the frontier, self-fabricated man, homespun war machine genius, and plain-spoken tribune of the people—has sometimes served to represent everything worth jubilant in American democracy, Indian removal has come to signify republic's savage and even genocidal underside. It opens a door behind which one finds Jackson the archetypal Indian-hater, the slave owner, the overbearing male person patriarch, and the frontiersman not every bit heroic pioneer but as imperialist, expropriator, and killer.
To Schlesinger (who was no racist) and to others who have seen Jackson'southward essential importance in his championship of the common man, the "niggling guy," against corporate domination, Indian removal appeared to be an aside, at worst a regrettable failing, but to many today it shows Jackson and his white human being's democracy at their core. There is no doubt that removing the American Indians, particularly those in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, was centrally important to Jackson. Together with purging the federal bureaucracy of his political opponents and instituting what he called "rotation in function" (and what his enemies dubbed the "spoils system"), it stood at the caput of his initial presidential agenda. Jackson's motives and methods in pursuing Indian removal were securely controversial at the time and remain then today. He claimed to be interim only on impulses of duty and philanthropy. American Indians could non, without violating the essential rights of sovereign states, remain where they were; their own self-preservation required quarantine from pernicious white influences; and the terms offered for their evacuation were reasonable and even generous. Critics, so and since, take branded these as artful rationalizations to cover real motives of greed, racism, and land-lust.
Connecting direct to our widely shared misgivings virtually the man cost of Euro-American expansion and the debasing racial and cultural attitudes that sustained it, the contempo debate over Jackson's Indian policy has gone mainly one way. A handful of defenders or apologists—nearly notably Jackson biographer Robert Five. Remini—have dared to cadet the tide, but for most scholars the question is not whether Jackson acted badly, but whether he acted so desperately every bit to exclude because anything else he might have washed as palliation or alibi. Both inside and outside the university, at to the lowest degree until the sudden resuscitation of Jackson as anti-corporate champion, the arch-oppressor of Indians had become Jackson's prevalent prototype. Far more American schoolchildren tin can name the Cherokee Trail of Tears (which really happened in Martin Van Buren's presidency, though in result of Jackson's policy) than the Banking concern Veto, the Nullification Proclamation, or perhaps even the Battle of New Orleans.
No simple conclusion offers itself. Jackson'south reputation, like the man himself, defies piece of cake summary. The one thing that seems certain is that Americans will continue to argue about him.
Daniel Feller is Betty Lynn Hendrickson Professor of History and editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the writer of The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840 (1995).
Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essay/andrew-jackson%27s-shifting-legacy?period=4