[March 15th
marks the 250th anniversary of Andrew
Jackson’s birth. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five sides to this controversial,
influential figure and president,
leading up to a special weekend post on Jackson and Trump!]
On what’s
accurate about a central image of Jackson’s legacy, and what too often gets
left out.
It can be
difficult to remember, given the similarly humble origins of subsequent
presidents from Abraham
Lincoln and James
Garfield to Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, but upon his election
to the presidency in 1828 Andrew Jackson represented a sea-change in
presidential identity from all of his six predecessors. The first five of those
had been Founding Fathers, members of the period’s most famous community of
Americans and all prominent and successful men by any measure; the sixth, John
Quincy Adams, was the son of one of those five. While Jackson had achieved
substantial fame as a military leader over the decade and a half prior to his
election, he was known at least as fully—and with just as much accuracy—for his
humble beginnings. Born to a widowed single mother with two older sons (his father
passed away three weeks before Andrew’s birth) in the Scots-Irish Appalachian community of
Waxhaws, an area so isolated that the border between North and South
Carolina had not yet been surveyed there (making the site of Jackson’s
birth particularly uncertain to this day), Jackson lost his mother
when he was only fourteen, one of many such tragedies and challenges that faced
the young man in those formative years. Whatever Jackson did or didn’t do as
president, the election of a man with such a background to the office certainly
did signal a democratic alternative to the precedent his predecessors as
president had begun to set.
The longstanding
phrase and concept of “Jacksonian
democracy” didn’t just, and indeed didn’t much at all, apply to Jackson’s
birthplace, family, and childhood, however. Instead, the phrase refers to an
even more significant national sea-change, an emphasis on extending both the vote specifically and the
very concept of who had a voice and place and role in American government and
civic life to all European white men (still a narrow category, to be sure, on
which more in a moment). The move toward universal white male suffrage had
already begun by the time of Jackson’s election—and indeed contributed directly
to
that result, as well as the extremely close prior
election of 1824—but Jackson certainly extended, deepened, and broadened
those democratizing efforts. He did so most strikingly with a famous symbolic
gesture toward the end of his second and final presidential term: featuring a giant
block of cheese in the White House and hosting a reception where more than
10,000 visitors were allowed to enter and share in that bounty of dairy. But he
also and more influentially pursued a number of policies that sought to deepen
this extension of democracy to “the
common man,” from his opposition to the national bank (on which more in a
subsequent post) to his controversial creation of a “spoils
system” to allow each presidential administration to replace government
officials with new ones of their choosing (obviously problematic in many ways,
but certainly a way to break any hold elite families or legacies might have had
on government offices).
So Jackson
wasn’t just a symbolic representation of a more democratic side to the American
political system, he was certainly also an advocate for it and its extension.
Given that he was also a slaveowner (at his Nashville plantation The Hermitage he owned more than
100 slaves),
it’s of course not surprising that he did not see that process of
democratization as extending to African Americans (enslaved or free). Given
that he had risen to prominence as an “Indian fighter” in a series of bloody
Southeastern wars, it’s similarly unsurprising that Native Americans were
not included in Jackson’s conception of the common man. But the fact that those
discriminations and limitations within Jacksonian democracy are not surprising
should not, in any way, lessen an emphasis on just how much they—and other
parallel limitations, such as the absolute exclusion of women from this
extension of suffrage and democracy—circumscribed whatever meaningful effects
and successes these policies and philosophies achieved. That is, it’s tempting
to simply set aside these discriminations and exclusions as part and parcel of
the period, and to focus on Jacksonian democracy on what we might call its own
terms. But of course, a term like “democracy” has been—coupled with other
complementary ones like “freedom” and “liberty”—at the center of American
self-images and theories of government from the framing on down to the present
day. And since each of those terms can mean and have meant many different
things in each era, it’s vital that we remember and analyze where and how those
meanings were constructed, and what and who were and weren’t included in them
in each and every case.
Next JacksonStudying
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Jackson histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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