Abstract

Abstract:

The history of Jacksonian Democracy reveals no simple tales of white liberty and black slavery, American citizenship and Indian dispossession, or mob rule versus the rule of law. It is a complex story about white male independence dependent on relationships of racial paternalism and the gendered hierarchy of the household, the age of the common man that could anticipate both the political economy of robber barons and the modern regulatory state, and a political worldview that would spawn anti-abolitionist riots as well as overlapping critiques of black and wage slavery. Its legacy for our times is similarly complicated.

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