In 1999, historian
Robert V. Remini stated that Jacksonian Democracy involved the belief that the people are sovereign, that their will is absolute and that the
majority rules. William S. Belko, in 2015, summarized "the core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy" as: Historian and social critic
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. argued in 1945 that Jacksonian democracy was built on the following: •
Expanded suffrage – The Jacksonians believed that voting rights should be extended to all white men. By the end of the 1820s, attitudes and state laws had shifted in favor of
universal white male suffrage and by 1856 all requirements to own property and nearly all requirements to pay taxes had been dropped. •
Manifest destiny – This was the belief that Americans had a destiny to settle the
American West and to expand control from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and that the West should be settled by
yeoman farmers. However, the
Free Soil movement, originally an offshoot of Jacksonianism, argued for limitations on slavery in the new areas to enable the
poor white man to flourish — they split with the main party briefly in 1848 when nominated former President
Martin Van Buren . The
Whigs generally opposed Manifest Destiny and expansion, saying the nation should build up its cities. •
Patronage – Also known as the
spoils system, patronage was the policy of placing political supporters into appointed offices. Many Jacksonians held the view that rotating political appointees in and out of office was not only the right, but also the duty of winners in political contests. Patronage was theorized to be good because it would encourage political participation by the common man and because it would make a politician more accountable for poor government service by his appointees. Jacksonians also held that long tenure in the civil service was corrupting, so civil servants should be rotated out of office at regular intervals. However, patronage often led to the hiring of incompetent and sometimes corrupt officials due to the emphasis on party loyalty above any other qualifications. •
Strict constructionism – Like the
Jeffersonians who strongly believed in the
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Jacksonians initially favored a federal government of limited powers. Jackson said that he would guard against "all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty". However, he was not a
states' rights extremist—indeed, the
nullification crisis would find Jackson fighting against what he perceived as state encroachments on the proper sphere of federal influence. This position was one basis for the Jacksonians' opposition to the
Second Bank of the United States. As the Jacksonians consolidated power, they more often advocated expanding federal power, presidential power in particular. •
Laissez-faire – Complementing a strict construction of the Constitution, the Jacksonians generally favored a hands-off approach to the economy as opposed to the Whig program sponsoring modernization, railroads, banking, and economic growth. The chief spokesman amongst
laissez-faire advocates was
William Leggett of the
Locofocos in New York City. Jackson "placed most of the American economy off limits to government regulation. Only paper money bankers faced whatever (slim) interference his bias against governmental regulation allowed. No inequality of wages, prices, profits, inheritanceof the basic structure of American capitalismhad to fear Jackson's egalitarian scorn." The Whigs, who strongly supported the Bank, were led by
Henry Clay,
Daniel Webster, and
Nicholas Biddle, the bank chairman. Jackson himself was opposed to all banks because he believed they were devices to cheat common people
—he and many followers believed that only gold and silver should be used to back currency, rather than the integrity of a bank.
Election by the "common man" 's depicts democracy in action in Missouri , showing an "all-male polling place where voting would go on for two or three days to allow farmers to come in to the county seat" to cast their non-secret ballots. According to the
Saint Louis Art Museum, Bingham's painting uses figures ranging from a newly naturalized citizen to a grizzled veteran to a couple of local drunks to demonstrate "the democratic ideal must be embraced even though uninformed votes could prevail." An important movement in the period from 1800 to 1830the era immediately before the election of Jacksonwas the gradual expansion of the right to vote from only property owning men to include all white men over 21. Older states with property restrictions dropped them, namely all but
Rhode Island,
Virginia, and
North Carolina by the mid-1820s. No new states had property qualifications although three had adopted tax-paying qualifications—
Ohio,
Louisiana, and
Mississippi, of which only in Louisiana were these significant and long lasting. The process was peaceful and widely supported, except in the state of Rhode Island. In Rhode Island, the
Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s demonstrated that the demand for equal suffrage was broad and strong, although the subsequent reform included a significant property requirement for any resident born outside of the United States. However, free black men lost voting rights in several states during this period. The fact that any man was now legally allowed to vote did not necessarily mean he routinely voted. He had to be pulled to the polls, which became the most important role of the local parties. They systematically sought out potential voters and brought them to the polls. Voter turnout soared during the 1830s, reaching about 80% of adult white male population in the
1840 presidential election. Tax-paying qualifications remained in only five states by 1860—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware and North Carolina. One innovative strategy for increasing voter participation and input was developed outside the Jacksonian camp. Prior to the
presidential election of 1832, the
Anti-Masonic Party conducted the nation's first
presidential nominating convention. Held in Baltimore, Maryland, September 26–28, 1831, it transformed the process by which political parties select their presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
Factions The period from 1824 to 1832 was politically chaotic. The
Federalist Party and the
First Party System were dead and with no effective opposition, the old
Democratic-Republican Party withered away. Every state had numerous political factions, but they did not cross state lines. Political coalitions formed and dissolved and politicians moved in and out of alliances. More former Democratic-Republicans supported Jackson, while others such as
Henry Clay opposed him. More former Federalists, such as
Daniel Webster, opposed Jackson, although some like
James Buchanan supported him. In 1828,
John Quincy Adams pulled together a network of factions called the
National Republicans, but he was defeated by Jackson. By the late 1830s, the Jacksonian Democrats and the
Whigs—a fusion of the National Republicans and other anti-Jackson parties—politically battled it out nationally and in every state.
Red, white, and black: Race and power in the formation of Jacksonian-era political alliances Democrat newspaper title-band in 1829. According to historian
Daniel Walker Howe in
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, Jacksonianism began with allegiance to Jackson the man. As one history put it, "While the Whigs denied it, their party really had its origin in Tennessee in opposition to Jackson." Jackson was an intensely partisan individual, in the most personal sense: his world was divided into friends to be enriched, and enemies to be extinguished. According to
John Williams by way of
John Floyd, "he [Jackson] never determined on the ruin of any man that he did not succeed." When
Davy Crockett famously said "Since you have chosen a man with a timber toe to succeed me, you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas," it was because Jackson had successfully sought his electoral defeat and backed his peg-legged opponent
Adam Huntsman, using electioneering techniques, alleged Crockett, that were dishonorable if not explicitly corrupt. Crockett was targetedin his words "hunted down like a wild varmint"in part because he declined to endorse
Jackson's inebriate nephew for a government job, and in part because he was the only Representative from Tennessee who voted against Indian Removal. Because of Jackson's inherent tendency to
tribalism, it was almost inevitable that he became a central figure in the expansion of the
political party system in the United States. He was not only the nexus of the Democrats but played the central role of antagonist in the establishment of the
Anti-Jacksonians, the
Anti-Masons, and the
Whigs. The Whigs were organized circa 1834, at which time "discontent with Jackson's policies and personal activities in relation to Tennessee politics had been steadily increasing, not only among certain outstanding men, but among the people of the state generally." In 1835, when Jackson revealed through a quickly-published private letter to "Indian fighter and war chaplain to chieftan Jackson"
James Gwin that he wanted Martin Van Buren to succeed him as president, a Louisville newspaper explained that this signal fire had been lit in response to a Nashville newspaper editorial. The Nashville paper had made a well-intentioned inquiry: would Jackson not prefer to see his old Tennessee acquaintance
Hugh Lawson White in the White House? "The poor Editor had unwittingly violated the first principles of Jackson-ism, to wit;
unflinching adherence to the party candidate for office." And the party was, certainly while he lived, an extension of Jackson's inconsistent personal preferences and interests;
Thomas P. Abernethy wrote in 1927, "No historian has ever accused Jackson, the great
Democrat, of having had a political philosophy. It is hard to see that he even had any political principles. He was a man of action, and the man of action is likely to be an opportunist." Thus, Jacksonianism began without any given roster of principles other than Jackson's lifelong mission to extend "white supremacy across the North American continent." Jackson promoted political equality for white men, but his vision of
social egalitarianism beyond that core constituency was essentially nonexistent; anyone who suggested otherwise was despised as a conniving schemer who was disrupting the natural social order for personal advantage and, surely, financial gain. ; behind him the
allegorical Columbia has her foot on the neck of a dead man. The removal of Indians from their ancestral lands, so they could be more profitably replaced by Whites and their Black slaves in what became the Cotton Kingdom, "fixed the character of his political party" such that during the
Second Party System "voting on Indian affairs proved to be the most consistent predictor of partisan affiliation." According to political historian Joshua A. Lynn, "Democrats painted the political landscape as a
Boschian triptych in which fiendish
abolitionists,
nativists, and
temperance crusaders flayed men of their autonomy, manhood, and whiteness." Per Lynn, the core principles of Jacksonism were
white supremacy, the
perpetuation of slavery, the ethnic cleansing of unceded Indigenous land claims within the territory of the United States, and mass politics, all guided by the worldview that "white men surrendered their sovereignty in proportion to its exercise by people of color." Thus, argue some historians, the color line was
the core value of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, in that whether the voters were "urban workingmen, southern planters and yeomen, or frontier settlers" they were unified by a "racial essentialism" that established whiteness as the basis for a voting bloc that might otherwise share few common interests. There has been a
school of thought that conflated the Jacksonian Democratic Party with the progressive mode and the later 19th and 20th American labor movements, but historian
Edward Pessen argued that Jackson's claim to the allegiances of working men should not be mistaken for an alliance between Jacksonian Age capital-D Democrats and the working class, stating that "Andrew Jackson was no special friend to labor and...working men whether organized or unorganized were in their turn no champions of the Democracy." Thus, Jackson's great innovation was to popularize a cultural norm wherein by "superintending inequality at home...patriarchs mingled in public as equals." As historian
William Freehling put it, Jackson's beliefs "took white men's egalitarian government to its (racial) limits and far beyond the (class) limits of the
Founding Fathers' aristocratic republicanism...But his constricted definition...excluded almost all of American social inequality from governmental assault. His limited banking reforms left Northern manufacturers and Southern slaveholders untouched. His racial agenda sanctioned governmental consolidation of reds' and blacks' natural inferiority...This monument to American individualism had slaughtered the Bank, crushed the nullifiers, and impeded the secessionists. But that unacknowledged monster, his unimpeded racist capitalism, would haunt egalitarians for generations." When conceiving of a "start date" for the Jacksonian Era of American history, way back in 1874
Samuel Eliot suggested that 1831 was a key year. By 1831 Jackson had consolidated power (he would run again and win a second term in 1832), but Eliot suggested that the year of the
Nat Turner slave rebellion and the launch of
The Liberator abolitionist newspaper was the beginning of irreversible bifurcation of the body politic into pro-slavery hotheads and anti-racist radicals, and a consequent, perhaps-inevitable civil war. Certainly by the 1850s, the Democrats had become "the party of unswerving white supremacy," although the party leadership never came to any consensus on how to apply that racist philosophy to practical issues of governance. As late as the 1950s an uneasy lack of clarity about the definition and goals of Jacksonianism led one political historian to admit that 100 years after the fact, they could only tell with certainty what it was
not: "...it is not suggested that any plausible editorial selection could identify Jacksonian Democracy with the rise of abolitionism; or (in an exclusive sense) with the temperance movement, school reform, religious enthusiasm or theological liberalism; or (in any sense) with Utopian community building. Yet the variety of meanings which can command some documentary support is too wide for easy assimilation in a coherent interpretation of Jacksonian Democracy. Here there is, I think, a fair field for the critical examination of the major contending theses and, of greater importance, for a fresh reading of the most obvious Jacksonian sources." ==Founding of the Democratic Party==