The Jacksonian era was the period in American political history dominated by the influence of the seventh president, General Andrew Jackson (1767–1846), who served two terms between 1825 and 1837. An exuberantly egalitarian political culture for white men, divisive political reactions to economic change, the development of a mass-based two-party electoral system, and the growing importance of the slavery issue in national politics all marked the period. Jackson and his associates pushed American politics from an older republican tradition in the direction of democracy but saw their work as restoration rather than innovation.
From the end of the eighteenth century, a series of linked economic and technological changes, sometimes referred to as the Market Revolution, framed the social and economic context of the Jacksonian era. Faster and cheaper forms of transportation, including turnpike roads, steamboats, canals, and ultimately railroads, spread from the Northeast across the country, hastening passenger travel and cutting freight costs. This made it much more feasible to make goods in one place while selling them in another. Once-isolated farmers increased their production of staples like wheat, corn, and pork for the world market, while entrepreneurs replaced traditional artisanal manufactures with new means for making and distributing cheap consumer goods like shoes, hats, and clothing. The invention of the cotton gin (1793) opened the way for large-scale cotton production in the southern interior, fed the movement of planters and slaves to the Southwest, and furnished raw material to a generation of newly mechanized textile factories in Britain and New England.
A rapid increase in the number and size of chartered banks facilitated this active commerce. The first American bank opened in 1782 (Robert Morris’s Bank of North America), and the numbers of banks grew to 28 in 1800 and 729 by 1837. Often operating on slender capital reserves, these banks provided credit-hungry borrowers with loans in the form of paper notes that served as the medium of exchange for an increasingly monetized economy. Eager to foster economic development, state governments frequently protected banks and internal improvement companies with the privilege of corporate charters. The largest and most privileged corporation of all was the second Bank of the United States, chartered for 30 years in 1816, with a capital of 
35 million, a monopoly of the banking business of the federal government, and the size and strength to discipline the note issue of the state banks.
Americans reacted to commercial growth with a mixture of optimism and anxiety. Farmers who profited from the sale of commodities welcomed the changes, unless the purchase of new lands and new equipment for market production put them perilously in debt and subjected them to market swings. Customers certainly welcomed cheaper consumer goods, but new forms of inequality, including new class structures and new gender roles, also accompanied the new economy. Cultural tension was reflected in the so-called Second Great Awakening, a wave of religious revivals that offered reformed ways of life to converts who suffered from social and spiritual upheaval from frontiers to big cities.
State decisions to relax property requirements and other restrictions on white men’s right to vote amplified political reactions to economic, social, and cultural change. The new voters did not cast their ballots consistently along class lines, and many did not vote at all initially, but the broadened franchise created a mass electorate that skilled political operatives would soon learn to mobilize. Roused by compelling rhetoric and public spectacles, the new voters would form the mass membership for Jacksonian-era political parties.
Andrew Jackson’s dramatic personal story greatly contributed to his popular appeal and sharply contrasted with the privileged upbringings of earlier presidents. He was born under modest circumstances in a backcountry settlement on the border of the two Carolinas. Jackson’s father died before his birth, so his mother raised her three sons with relatives. The future president received some schooling in the neighborhood but never attended college.
During the war for independence, 13-year-old Andrew Jackson was captured as an American messenger when the British invaded the Carolina back-country in 1780. He received lifelong scars when he refused to clean his captor’s boots and the furious officer slashed him with a saber. Jackson also survived an attack of smallpox he contracted in captivity, but war took the lives of his mother and two brothers, leaving the youth seemingly marked by providence as the only member of his immediate family to survive the American Revolution. He would become the last U.S. president to have served in that conflict.
With iron determination, Jackson managed to overcome his difficult adolescence by reading law, moving to Nashville, Tennessee, and rapidly rising in his profession. There he married Rachel Donelson Robards, leading to a later scandal when enemies revealed that the couple had married before the bride was divorced from her first husband. Jackson also succeeded in land speculation, won a duel, and joined the region’s nascent planter elite. Entering politics, he briefly served in the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the Tennessee Supreme Court, but he preferred his work as major general of the state militia.
Military distinction brought the frontier general to national attention. During the War of 1812, Jackson’s troops honored his toughness with the nickname “Old Hickory,” as he crushed an uprising of the Creek Indians, occupied Spanish Florida in pursuit of the survivors, executed their British advisors, and repelled the British invasion of New Orleans. At war’s end, Jackson pursued warring Seminoles into Florida again, which provoked international outrage but also pressured Spain to sell the vulnerable province to the United States in 1819. After cementing U.S. rule as first territorial governor of Florida, Jackson retired to the Hermitage, his plantation outside Nashville.
Jackson’s rise coincided with serious national stress. In 1819 a postwar boom collapsed in a disastrous “panic,” or depression. Collapsing prices for land and crops bankrupted countless farmers and speculators who had borrowed heavily to purchase public lands. Banks, especially the Bank of the United States, roused widespread resentment when they pressed their borrowers relentlessly but refused to honor their obligations to pay specie (gold or silver) for their notes. The federal government could not act in the crisis but plunged into bitter sectional controversy when northern congressmen tried to limit the growth of slavery as a condition for the admission of Missouri to the union. Temporarily eased by the Missouri Compromise, the slavery dispute threatened serious long-term disruption and frightened the aging Thomas Jefferson “like a fire-bell in the night.”
Seeming to ignore these dangers, national leaders intrigued instead to succeed retiring President James Monroe in the election of 1824. Four major candidates emerged, three of them from Monroe’s own cabinet: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. A fourth, Speaker of the House Henry Clay of Kentucky, supposedly led the administration’s friends in Congress.
The triumphant Tennesseean seemed to offer a stark contrast to these bickering and self-interested insiders. While government insiders scoffed at his inexperience, lack of polish, and pugnacious, highhanded temperament, Jackson appealed to ordinary voters, especially in the West and South, as the embodiment of bold action and old-fashioned republican virtue.
Nominated by the Tennessee legislature, Jackson led in both the popular and electoral vote without gaining a majority, so the House of Representatives had to choose between Jackson, Adams, and Crawford, the three highest vote-getters. Jackson believed that his plurality, plus state legislative instructions in his favor, gave him the moral right to win. Instead, Henry Clay threw his support to Adams and gave him the victory. Soon afterward, Adams made Clay his secretary of state, rousing furious charges by Jacksonians of a “corrupt bargain” to defeat the “will of the people.” Determined on vindication, Jackson and his supporters launched an immediate and ultimately successful campaign to gain the White House in 1828, putting claims for majority rule and the moral superiority of “the people” over “aristocrats” at the ideological core of his movement.
As president, Jackson repeatedly invoked the republican principles of the Revolution, but he actually turned American political culture toward democracy by identifying the people themselves, not an enlightened elite, as the greatest source of public virtue. Seeing his movement as the majority’s legitimate voice, however, Jackson rarely saw a difference between the people’s welfare and the good of his own party. His first major initiative, for example, was to replace long-established federal officeholders with his own supporters, insisting that the incumbents were often incompetent or corrupt, but also arguing that holdovers from previous administrations were out of step with the people’s will. Jacksonians strongly defended this so-called spoils system, but advocates of an independent civil service struggled against it for most of the nineteenth century.
Jackson also took office determined to remove the eastern Indian tribes to lands beyond the Missisippi. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the president to exchange lands in modern Oklahoma for tribal lands within existing states. Occupying extensive tracts in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles were quite unwilling to move. The Cherokees were promised partial protection in two Supreme Court decisions, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia, but the decisions proved unenforceable. All the major eastern tribes, with as many as 100,000 members, were eventually deported by a combination of bribery, fraud, intimidation, and coercion. Corruption and neglect led to the death of about one Indian in four along the so-called Trail of Tears.
When South Carolina, worried about the viability of its slave-based economy, followed John C. Calhoun’s proposal to nullify the federal tariff in 1832, Jackson threatened military action to restore federal supremacy, arguing that the state’s actions were an intolerable rejection of majority rule. In 1835 South Carolinians defied federal law again when a mob seized and burned a shipment of abolitionist tracts from the Charleston post office. Supporting the mob’s goals but opposing its methods, Jackson called for federal legislation to exclude “incendiary” materials from the U.S. mail. The proposal foundered, so the administration tolerated informal mail censorship by local vigilance committees.
Andrew Jackson’s war against the Bank of the United States (BUS) was the central political struggle of his presidency. Partly inspired by the eighteenth-century British radicals who underpinned the republican tradition and also denounced privileged corporations like the Bank of England and the South Sea Company, Jackson distrusted all banks. He especially distrusted the Bank of the United States for allegedly using its immense powers and legal privileges for private gain at public expense. Drawing energy from Americans’ ambivalent feelings about the new economy that banks had abetted, the Bank War revived the two-party system and defined American politics for the decade following Jackson’s presidency.
When Congress granted the bank a new charter in the summer of 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill with a ringing denunciation of wealthy men who misused government “to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.” Supporters denounced the veto as ignorant madness, but the message was wildly popular among voters who shared Jackson’s misgivings about unrestrained private power, and Jackson was resoundingly reelected with a larger majority than before. Soon after, Jackson went further and pulled the government’s funds from the bank, an arguably illegal move that crippled it both politically and financially. In a related policy, Jackson favored state control of internal improvements and vetoed the use of federal funds for local transportation projects.
Deposit removal galvanized the president’s opponents, who argued that his high-handed actions defied Congress and threatened a dictatorship. Denouncing Jackson as “King Andrew I,” they organized themselves as the Whig Party, adopting the name from the British opponents of centralized royal power. Led by congressional magnates like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the Whigs became a formidable political force after Jackson left office and another powerful panic swept the United States in 1837. Jacksonians responded by reviving Jeffersonian party lines, shortening the older name “Democratic-Republicans” to “Democratic Party,” and portraying the Whigs as resurrected Federalists. Each party solidified its identity and its organization by blaming its opponents for the panic of 1837, creating a competitive political structure that scholars have called the Second American Party System, to distinguish it from the First Party System of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans.
Both parties became national institutions that contested elections at the federal and local level in every state except South Carolina, which remained aloof from both. Democrats generally embraced party organization with vigor and finesse; Whigs retained more antipartisan principles and weaker gifts for organization. A Washington newspaper spelled out doctrine for each party—The Globe for the Democrats and The National Intelligencer for the Whigs—while a host of state-level prints adapted the message to local conditions. Each party also embraced an ascending network of local, district, state, and national party conventions to convey opinions and decisions between bottom and top, to adopt platforms, and to nominate candidates for public office.
For presidential elections, each party organized a national campaign committee to distribute pamphlets and special campaign newspapers to corresponding networks of state, county, and local committees. Successful office seekers rewarded followers with government patronage and enforced party discipline by threatening to revoke it if crossed. Historians Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin have questioned voters’ genuine emotional involvement in Jacksonian elections, but most scholars note that voting turnout rates often approached and sometimes exceeded 80 percent, and conclude that colorful spectacles and lively debates between rival candidates successfully drew the connections between party doctrines and local concerns.
In their platforms, Democrats typically denounced federal measures to promote the new economy, including the national bank, high tariffs, and public funding for internal improvements, and all restraints on the liberty of common white men, including moral reforms favored by revivalists, like Sunday blue laws and restrictions on the sale of alcohol. After the panic of 1837, many Democrats shared Jackson’s own desire to prohibit paper money banking altogether and return the country to an all-metallic currency. Party rhetoric denounced class privilege and stressed the equality of all white men, sometimes underscored with a fierce antiblack racism. Whigs were more likely to champion personal and public improvement over unrestrained liberty, and favored banks, internal improvements, the rights of corporations, evangelical moral reforms, and philanthropic causes like public schools and benevolent institutions. Though business conservatism often sent the largest southern planters into Whig ranks, Whigs across the nation were somewhat more tolerant of black rights and antislavery opinions than their rivals. Some Whigs and Democrats were found within all social classes, but voting studies have found that leading urban businessmen were more likely to be Whigs, while working-class wards usually leaned to the Democrats, and Whig counties were more closely linked to the market economy than their Democratic counterparts.
The Democratic Party and the Whig Party did not monopolize contemporary Americans’ political reactions to the challenges of their era. An Anti-Masonic Party channeled popular resentment in northeastern states before absorption by the Whigs. Trade union movements and workingmen’s parties briefly flared in large cities, before succumbing to hard times and Democratic blandishments after the panic of 1837. Women entered public life through allegedly nonpartisan religious and reform movements and also found supportive partisan roles, especially among Whigs. Rebuffed by mainstream politicians, radical black and white abolitionists agitated outside party structures, though some eventually embraced politics through the Liberty Party and its successors. The example of Jacksonian politics proved irresistibly attractive, even to those it rigorously excluded.
Jackson’s immediate successors competed within the political and ideological framework established during his presidency. In 1836 Vice President Martin Van Buren succeeded Jackson in the presidency but struggled unsuccessfully with the panic of 1837 and its aftermath. In 1840, the Whigs created a storm of popular enthusiasm for William Henry Harrison of Indiana, their own popular frontier general. Soon after being inaugurated, Harrison died and his vice president, John Tyler of Virginia, alienated both parties and proved that party support had become essential to a functional presidency. By 1844, however, the opportunity for western expansion through the acquisition of Texas and Oregon had eclipsed older issues. Martin Van Buren lost the Democratic nomination to James K. Polk of Tennessee when he fumbled the territorial issue. As president, Polk echoed Jacksonian themes in his veto of the Rivers and Harbors Bill, but the Mexican War dominated his term, and the territorial expansion of slavery preoccupied his successors.
Polk’s election sent American politics in new and dangerous directions. In 1845 the annexation of Texas led to war with Mexico, conquest of the Far West, and a steadily intensifying national quarrel over the future of slavery there. That controversy would eventually destroy the Whig Party and other specific features of the Jacksonian political system, but subsequent generations of Americans would find the strong presidency, the rhetoric of democracy, and the institutions of party politics that Jacksonians had introduced to be indispensable to public life.
See also banking policy; Democratic Party, 1828–60; economy and politics to 1860; Republican Party to 1896; Whig Party.
FURTHER READING. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century, 2000; Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War, 1999; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, 2008; John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States, 2001; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845, 1984; Idem, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821, 1977; Idem, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832, 1981; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880, 1990; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846, 1991; William G. Shade, “Political Pluralism and Party Development: The Creation of the Modern Party System, 1815–1852,” in The Evolution of American Political Systems, edited by Paul Kleppner, 77–112, 1981; Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, 2nd revised ed., 2006; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, 2005.
HARRY L. WATSON
See Supreme Court.