Jacksonian Democracy Jacksonian (Democracy, Society, etc.) is a term used to describe reform during the time of Andrew Jackson’s Presidency. Specifically Jefferson and Jackson are the two presidents who are very similar in their political views. These two presidents have stemmed off of each other’s ideals as leaders. Both Jefferson and An ambiguous, controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest sense refers simply to the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party after More loosely, it
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An ambiguous, controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest sense refers simply to the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party after Jacksonian Democracy was an authentic democratic movement, dedicated to powerful, at times radical, egalitarian ideals—but mainly for white men. Socially and intellectually, the Jacksonian movement represented not the insurgency of a specific class or region but a diverse, sometimes testy national coalition. Its origins stretch back to the democratic stirrings of the American Revolution, the Antifederalists of the s and s, and the Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans.
More directly, it arose out of the profound social and economic changes of the early nineteenth century. Recent historians have analyzed these changes in terms of a market revolution. In the Northeast and Old Northwest, rapid transportation improvements and immigration hastened the collapse of an older yeoman and artisan economy and its replacement by cash-crop agriculture and capitalist manufacturing. In the South, the cotton boom revived a flagging plantation slave economy, which spread to occupy the best lands of the region. In the West, the seizure of lands from Native Americans and mixed-blood Hispanics opened up fresh areas for white settlement and cultivation—and for speculation. Not everyone benefited equally from jacksonian democracy essay market revolution, least of all those nonwhites for whom it was an unmitigated disaster.
Jacksonianism, however, would grow directly from the tensions it generated within white society. Mortgaged farmers and an emerging proletariat in the Northeast, nonslaveholders in the South, tenants and would-be yeomen in the West—all had reasons to think that the spread of commerce and capitalism would bring not boundless opportunities but new forms of dependence. And in all sections of the country, jacksonian democracy essay, jacksonian democracy essay of the rising entrepreneurs of the market revolution suspected that older elites would block their way and shape economic development to suit themselves.
By the s, these tensions fed into a many-sided crisis of political faith. To the frustration of both self-made men and plebeians, certain eighteenth-century elitist republican assumptions remained strong, especially in jacksonian democracy essay seaboard states, mandating that government be left to a natural aristocracy of virtuous, propertied gentlemen. Simultaneously, some of the looming shapes of nineteenth-century capitalism—chartered corporations, commercial banks, jacksonian democracy essay other private institutions—presaged the consolidation of a new kind of moneyed aristocracy.
And increasingly after the War ofgovernment policy seemed to combine the worst of both old and new, favoring the kinds of centralized, broad constructionist, top-down forms of economic development that many thought would aid men of jacksonian democracy essay means while deepening inequalities among whites. Proposed cures for this sickness included more democracy and a redirection of economic policy. In the older states, reformers fought to lower or abolish property requirements jacksonian democracy essay voting and officeholding, and to equalize representation.
A new generation of politicians broke with the old republican animus against mass political parties. Urban workers formed labor movements and demanded political reforms. Westerners clamored for more and cheaper land and for relief from creditors, speculators, jacksonian democracy essay, and bankers above all, the hated Second Bank of the United States. Only after taking power did the Jacksonian Democracy refine its politics and ideology. Out of that self-definition came a fundamental shift in the terms of national political debate.
Under the Jacksonians, government-sponsored internal improvements generally fell into disfavor, on the grounds that they were unnecessary expansions of centralized power, beneficial mainly to men with connections. The Jacksonians defended rotation in office as a solvent to entrenched elitism, jacksonian democracy essay. Around these policies, Jacksonian leaders built a democratic ideology aimed primarily at voters who felt injured by or cut off from the market revolution. Updating the more democratic pieces of the republican legacy, they posited that no republic jacksonian democracy essay long survive without a citizenry of economically independent men.
Unfortunately, they claimed, that state of republican independence was exceedingly fragile, jacksonian democracy essay. According to the Jacksonians, all of human history had involved a struggle between the few and the many, instigated by a greedy minority of wealth and privilege that hoped to exploit the vast majority. More broadly, the Jacksonians proclaimed a political culture predicated on white male equality, contrasting themselves with other self-styled reform movements. Nativism, for example, struck them as a hateful manifestation of elitist puritanism. Sabbatarians, jacksonian democracy essay, temperance advocates, and other would-be moral uplifters, they insisted, should not impose righteousness on others. Beyond position-taking, the Jacksonians propounded a social vision in which any white man would have the chance to secure his economic independence, would be free to live as he saw fit, under a system of laws and representative government utterly cleansed of privilege, jacksonian democracy essay.
As Jacksonian leaders developed these arguments, they roused a noisy opposition—some of it coming from elements of the coalition that originally elected Jackson president. The oppositionist core, jacksonian democracy essay, however, came from a cross-class coalition, strongest in rapidly commercializing areas that viewed the market revolution as the embodiment of civilized progress. Far from pitting the few against the many, jacksonian democracy essay, oppositionists argued, jacksonian democracy essay, carefully guided economic growth would provide more for everyone. Government encouragement—in the form of tariffs, internal improvements, a strong national bank, and aid to a wide range of benevolent institutions—was essential to that growth.
Powerfully influenced by the evangelical Second Great Awakening, core oppositionists saw in moral reform not a threat to individual independence but an idealistic cooperative effort to relieve human degradation and further expand the store of national wealth. Eager to build up the country as it already existed, they were cool to territorial expansion. The Jacksonians, with their spurious class rhetoric, menaced that natural harmony of interests between rich and poor which, jacksonian democracy essay, if only left alone, would eventually bring widespread prosperity. Byboth the Jacksonian Jacksonian democracy essay and its opposite now organized as the Whig party had built formidable national followings and had turned politics nto a debate over the market revolution itself.
Yet less than a decade later, sectional contests linked to slavery promised to drown out that debate and fracture both major parties, jacksonian democracy essay. The Jacksonian mainstream, so insistent on the equality of white men, took racism for granted. North and South, the democratic reforms achieved by plebeian whites—especially those respecting voting and representation—came at the direct expense of free blacks. Although informed by constitutional principles and genuine paternalist concern, the Jacksonian rationale for territorial expansion assumed that Jacksonian democracy essay and, in some areas, Hispanics were lesser peoples. As for slavery, the Jacksonians were determined, jacksonian democracy essay, on both practical and ideological grounds, to keep the issue out of national affairs.
Few mainstream Jacksonians had moral qualms about black enslavement or any desire to meddle with it where it existed. Through the s and s, the mainstream Jacksonian leadership, correctly confident that their views matched those of the white majority, fought to keep the United States a democracy free from the slavery question—condemning abolitionists as fomenters of rebellion, curtailing abolitionist mail campaigns, enforcing the congressional gag rule that squelched debate on abolitionist petitions, while fending jacksonian democracy essay the more extremist proslavery southerners. In all of this fighting, however, jacksonian democracy essay Jacksonians also began to run afoul of their professions about white egalitarianism.
Slaveholders, quite naturally, thought they were entitled to see as much new territory as legally possible opened up to slavery. But that prospect appalled northern hites who had hoped to settle in lily white areas, untroubled by that peculiar institution whose presence they believed would degrade the status of white free labor. It would take until the s before these contradictions fully unraveled the Jacksonian coalition. But as early as the mids, during the debates over Texas annexation, the Mexican War, and the Wilmot Proviso, sectional cleavages had grown ominous. The presidential candidacy of Martin Van Buren on the Free-Soil ticket in —a protest against jacksonian democracy essay southern power within the Democracy—amply symbolized northern Democratic alienation.
In the middle remained a battered Jacksonian mainstream, ever hopeful that by raising the old issues, avoiding slavery, and resorting to the language of popular sovereignty, the party and the nation might be jacksonian democracy essay together. Led by men like Stephen A. Douglas, these mainstream compromisers held sway into the mids, but at the cost of constant appeasement of southern concerns, jacksonian democracy essay exacerbating sectional turmoil. Jacksonian Democracy was buried at Fort Sumter, but it had died many years earlier. Having tapped into the disaffection of the s and s and molded it into an effective national party, they advanced the democratization of American politics.
By denouncing the moneyed aristocracy and proclaiming the common man, they also helped politicize American life, broadening electoral participation to include an overwhelming majority of the electorate. Once the slavery issue entered the concerns of even a small portion of the electorate, it proved impossible to remove without trampling on some of the very egalitarian principles the Jacksonians were pledged to uphold. None of this, however, should be a source of self-satisfaction to modern Americans. Although the Jacksonian Democracy died in the s, it left a powerful legacy, entwining egalitarian aspirations and class justice with the presumptions of white supremacy.
Over the decades after the Civil War, jacksonian democracy essay legacy remained a bulwark of a new Democratic party, allying debt-ridden farmers and immigrant workers with the Solid South. And at the close of the twentieth century, the tragic mix of egalitarianism and racial prejudice so central to the Jacksonian Democracy still infected American politics, poisoning some of its best impulses with some of its worst. McCormick,Journal of the Early Republic,Vol. Darling,The American Historical Review,Vol. Mashaw,The Yale Law Journal,Vol. America and Its People: A Mosaic in the Making. Democracy: — New York: Facts On File, Inc. American History Online. Facts On File, Inc. This essay was written by a fellow student. You may use it as a guide or sample for writing your own paper, but remember to cite it correctly.
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11/07/ · The entity of Jacksonian democracy was based on deep social contradictions that existed in American society of the 19th century. The main problem of American society of that An ambiguous, controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest sense refers simply to the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party after More loosely, it 15/02/ · Andrew Jackson had believed that economic opportunity was important to have individual liberty, Jackson’ veto message, July 10, ) had believed that if we have a
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