The Age of Andrew Jackson

Chapter One: “The Shape of Democracy”

Chapter One “The Shape of Democracy” Historical Interpretations of Jacksonian Democracy Mark R. Cheathem Alexis de Tocqueville, that renowned observer of American society during the 1830s, wrote that when he visited the United States, “I saw in America more than America; it was the shape of democracy itself which I sought, its inclination, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom.” For decades, students and scholars agreed with Tocqueville, looking to the Jacksonian period to find the origins of modern conceptions of equality and democracy. In recent years, however, the study of Jacksonian America has fallen victim to the period’s failure to realize fully the nation’s promise of those political and social ideals. But as one historian has noted, “that very standard by which historians judge and often condemn Jacksonian America is itself a legacy of Jacksonian America.” Examining the development of the United States in the years between its second war for independence from Great Britain and the Civil War seems a worthy endeavor for many reasons, not the least of which are pursuing Tocqueville’s goal of understanding “the shape of democracy” and ascertaining how Americans of the Jacksonian period established a legacy by which they could be judged.1 1 mark r. cheathem 2 The Patrician (or Whig) School—1850s–1890s The first scholarly study of the Jacksonian period appeared as the nation entered the Civil War. James Parton’s three-volume Life of Andrew Jackson offered a comprehensive assessment of Jackson’s personal and private life. He was, Parton wrote, “a man whose ignorance , whose good intentions, and whose passions combined to render him, of all conceivable human beings, the most unfit for the office.” Parton also found Jackson full of contradictions: he was at once “a democratic autocrat. An urbane savage. An atrocious saint.” Parton’s paradoxical assessment of the seventh president , as one historian noted in 1958, “could almost stand today as the conclusion to a review of Jacksonian historiography.”2 Other historians of the mid-to-late nineteenth century also found Jackson lacking. William Graham Sumner called him “a ‘barbarian’ who ‘acted from spite, pique, instinct, prejudice or emotion.’” Hermann E. Von Holst labeled Jackson an “‘arrogant general’ whose ‘mind was as untrained as his passions were unbridled .’” Not only did these scholars find Jackson’s personality and intellect wanting, but they also decried his democratization of American politics. “‘Since Jackson,’ von Holst argued, ‘the people have begun to exchange the leadership of a small number of statesmen and politicians of a higher order for the rule of an ever increasing crowd of politicians of high and low degree, down even to the pothouse politician and the common thief, in the protecting mantle of demagogism.’” Moisei Ostrogorski lamented that Jacksonian democracy “‘excluded men of sterling worth and high principles from public life.’”3 The venom with which these scholars denounced Jackson and his effect on American politics appear less surprising when one recognizes their socioeconomic background. They all were part of the patrician class, the well-off and well-educated East Coast elite that had provided the early leadership for the United States. It was their segment of society that had found itself on the losing end of the Jacksonian political revolution, as Old Hickory’s alliance implemented the infamous “spoils system” that supposedly threw Historical Interpretations of Jacksonian Democracy 3 the patrician class out of office, replacing them with the “common man.” Despite agreeing with some of Jackson’s policies, such as his opposition to the Second Bank of the United States and the South Carolina nullifiers, the patrician school of historians’ acerbic criticisms stood out as an indictment of Jacksonian democracy.4 The Progressive (or Agrarian-Democratic) School—1890s–1940s The 1890s witnessed a shift in the scholarly interpretation of Jacksonian democracy; the work of Frederick Jackson Turner was seminal in this transition. Turner saw Jackson as the logical outcome of the democratizing influence of the American frontier: “Out of this frontier democratic society where the freedom and abundance of land in the great Valley opened a refuge to the oppressed in all regions , came the Jacksonian democracy which governed the nation after the downfall of the party of John Quincy Adams.” In contrast to the patrician historians, Turner was convinced that “Jacksonian Democracy . . . [was] strong in the faith of the intrinsic...