Jackson’s campaign strategy was smearing Adams’s image, reciprocally embellishing his own, and fluidly adapting his image to the varying constituencies throughout his national tour. Jackson pilloried Adams as an aristocrat favoring special interests, the “Judas of the West” who had obtained office through a “corrupt bargain.” “A series of demagogic charges about Adams’s alleged monarchist, aristocratic, and bureaucratic prejudices served the Jackson managers for issues” (Hofstadter 71). Shrewdly drawing attention as the due alternative, Jackson compounded to his image of heroism a new semblance of economic humility. By his early adulthood, Jackson had in actuality “[consolidated] his position among the budding aristocrats, the owners of slaves and horses, the holders of offices and titles” (Hofstadter 60). When visiting the South, however, he appeared as a genteel aristocrat and provided entertainment at the Hermitage. Among businessmen and capitalists, Jackson wore formal business attire; among workers in the North, coarse clothes and denim. His pragmatically adaptive image curried favor among disparate classes and sectional interests.
Jackson likewise secured his support from the recently enfranchised class of yeomen and common workers. In The Passions of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Burstein writes, “Ever since the ‘corrupt’ election of 1824, Jackson had strongly supported the direct election of the president. This way, he contended, the people would be heard” (Burstein 183). Jackson saturated his speeches with an emotional vocabulary appealing to the core values of the said “mass of disaffection”: He promised to “do right and fear not” and denoted his political enemies as “conspirators” and “vile calumniators” behind “hidden intrigues” (Burstein 224). “Jackson acted out his impulses in speech and on paper just as he did in his more visible command performances” (Burstein 224). Jackson’s campaign for the election of 1828 was founded on a platform of impulsive emotions and personal vindication. With his opposition in Adams publicly degraded, his image promoted as an icon of the common man yet secured among aristocrats, and his rhetoric strewn with a jargon that identified with the common constituency, Jackson won the election with 178 electoral votes to Adams’s 83 votes.
Once incumbent, Jackson instituted the “leading principle in the Republican creed” (Hofstadter 66) of rotation in office in the form of his spoils system. In theory, system would permit as many citizens as possible to hold office at least briefly. In practice, the system was ineffectual and beneficial solely for Jackson’s supporters. Jackson only removed 20% of the incumbents and left with his system the subordination of merit for partisan support. Secretary of State Martin Van Buren led the Albany Regency, the Jacksonian political machine founded on the spoils system, and diffused the spoils system on the national scale. Jackson’s six-member cabinet was largely mediocre, and he came to rely on his extra-official Kitchen Cabinet of about thirteen unofficial advisors. Jackson ultimately traded competency in office for his self-empowerment, despite the idealism in which he cloaked the principle. The consequences of Jackson’s spoils system demonstrate a discontinuity between his theory and his practice as a soi-disant hero of the common man, a pattern established early in his presidential tenure.
Jackson further belied his ideological support for states’ rights with his militaristic response to South Carolina’s nullification of the Tariff of Abominations. In 1828, Congress had increased the tariff on dutiable goods to 45%. The tariff found support in the Northeast, where New England factory owners benefited from its protection from foreign competition. The South fervently opposed it, however, for its negative effects on southern consumers and exporters alike and on the demand for cotton in England. Southerners called it the “Tariff of Abominations,” and by the compact theory of states’ rights as reworked in John C. Calhoun’s South Carolina Exposition and Protest of 1828, South Carolina defended the nullification of the tariff. Jackson took personal offense to this general political declaration when he wrote to Calhoun:
He allowed that he had always considered Calhoun a virtuous man… But now it was clear that Calhoun had been living a lie after “endeavoring to destroy” Jackson’s reputation… “I had a right to believe that you were my sincere friend…and until now, never expected to have occasion to say to you, in the language of Caesar, Et tu Brute.” (Burstein 192)
Jackson attempted to mollify the disaffected South by lowering the duties to 35% with the Tariff of 1832. South Carolina legislature nullified the tariff nonetheless and threatened to secede from the Union if forced to collect the duties. Jackson furiously dispatched small military and naval reinforcements to South Carolina, only to be supported by Congress’s passage of the Force Bill, the “Bloody Bill” as South Carolinians called it, which authorized the president to use the army and navy if necessary to collect federal tariffs. In the nullification crisis of 1832, Jackson diverged from his original support of states’ rights: “Our Union: It must be preserved!” Feeling both his executive authority and the order of the nation under threat, Jackson resorted to force in support of ideology he had not before supported. Jackson later invoked the principle of states’ rights to justify the Indian Removal Act and his veto of the BUS’s new charter.
According to Hofstadter, “an event of 1796 that had a disastrous effect on [Jackson’s] fortunes may have sown in him the seeds of that keen dislike of the Eastern money power and ‘paper system’ which had flowered during his presidency” (68). Jackson had sold several thousand acres of land to the wealthy speculator David Allison, who later defaulted on his notes, leaving Jackson in debt for nineteen years. This nascent resentment would find its fulfillment in 1832 with the issue of the BUS. “As a fiscal agency [the BUS] was comparable in magnitude to the government itself” (Hofstadter 76). The president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, boasted: “I have been for years in the daily exercise of more personal authority than any President habitually enjoys” (Hofstadter 77). When Biddle decided in the summer of 1832 to ask Congress to recharter the bank before the election, Jackson declared to Van Buren: “The bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!” The issue had “instantly become personal” (Hofstadter 78) to Jackson.
With the assistance of Amos Kendall, Andrew Donelson, Roger Taney, and Levi Woodbury, Jackson composed the veto message that he sent to Congress with the vetoed recharter bill. In the message Jackson attacked its constitutionality and lamented, “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Burstein writes of Jackson’s perception of the bank: “[Americans’] enemy was whatever stood in the way of their living well – or, whatever they were convinced preyed on them, tyrantlike. This was the tone Jackson adopted…when he was poised to attack the banking system” (184). Hofstadter and Burstein reveal the subjectivity in Jackson’s motives for vetoing the recharter of the BUS: Emotionally fueled by a personal history of failure and threatened by Biddle’s attempt to maintain his overbearing influence, Jackson himself bent the “acts of government” to his misperceptions and personal bias with moralistic rhetoric as his defense. After dissolving the bank in his second term of presidency, the panic of 1837 directly ensued.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has said, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” An era may be objectively understood only after its end; similarly, America and its president are most objectively understood by a foreigner left unclouded by nationalistic fervor. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French traveler, arrived in America in 1831 during Jackson’s presidency. The art of party creation was among the critical observations he made in during his nine-month stay and wrote in Democracy in America:
A political aspirant in the United States begins by discerning his own interest, and discovering those other interests which may be collected around, and amalgamated with it. He then contrives to find out some doctrine or principle which may suit the purposes of this new association, and which he adopts in order to bring forward his party and its popularity. (89)
Tocqueville understood the common American yeomen as people easily “intoxicated by passion, or carried away by the impetuosity of their ideas” (125). He divided political interests into dichotomy of democratic and aristocratic interests: those who wish to extend the sovereignty of the people and those who wish to restrict it. In American Institutions and Their Influence, Tocqueville portrays Jackson as a typical “political aspirant” contriving to mask his self-interest with popular doctrines. “Jackson…was placed in the lofty station he occupies, by the people which are most opposed to the central government. It is by perpetually flattering these passions, that he maintains his station and his popularity. General Jackson is the slave of the majority” (540). Hofstadter likewise asserts that Jackson was a product of democracy rather than its producer: “He swung to the democratic camp when the democratic camp swung to him” (71).
It is, however, biased to conclude that Jackson was in inexorable pursuit of his own power. His impetuosity and his tendency to effusively reduce political and economic issues to a level of personal offense commonly played into his decisions as president. Regarding the issue of the national bank, Hofstadter demonstrates that “to the frontier duelist the issue had instantly become personal” (78). Burstein weakens the simple argument that Jackson was purely manipulative: Jackson “possessed a strong intuitive sense that [he was] needed to prevent corruption” (224). The self-important Jackson shared the irrational passions of the common man and used his support to serve not only his interests but these shared passions.
As Jefferson had furthered his power by pragmatically adopting the ideology of the Federalists to defeat their influence, Jackson furthered his by adopting popular ideology to appeal to the common constituency. The results of his spoils system, his veto of the BUS’s recharter, and his response to the nullification crisis prove that he often acted in self-interest; his popular appeals, however, did not result from calculation and craft. Impetuous and thoroughly convinced of a virtue in his decisions, he failed to exert his power objectively. The actuality and consequences of Jackson’s policies refute the abstraction of Jackson as a symbol of the common frontiersman. In theory, Jackson was a common man; in practice, a common scoundrel.
Works Cited
Burstein, Andrew. The Passions of Andrew Jackson. Knopf Publishing Group, 2003.
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition. NY: Random House, Inc., 1973.
Knowledgerush.com. “American Institutions and Their Influence by Alexis de Tocqueville.” American Institutions And Their Influence by Alexis de Tocqueville - A complete eBook in pages (540 / 597). 22 March 2004. <http://www.knowledgerush.com/paginated_txt/etext05/7amin10/7amin10_s1_p540_pages.htmlages.html>.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. NY: Signet Classic, 2001.