Jacksonian democracy
[10] Jacksonian democracy also promoted the strength of the presidency and the executive branch at the expense of Congress, while also seeking to broaden the public's participation in government.
[12] In its earliest usage, the phrase "Jacksonian democracy" had a narrower meaning referring to the Democratic Party, particularly as led by Andrew Jackson, who was president of the United States from 1829 to 1837.
[15] In the 1945 book The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. influentially reinterpreted "Jacksonian Democracy" as a phenomenon of labor struggle against business power rather than of frontier regional influence.
[16] Historian Robert V. Remini, in 1999, stated that Jacksonian Democracy involved the belief that the people are sovereign, that their will is absolute and that the majority rules.
[17] William S. Belko, in 2015, summarized "the core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy" as: equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual.
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.
[40] According to historian Daniel Walker Howe in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 the origins of Jacksonianism were allegiance to Jackson the man.
"[45] The color line was the core value of Jacksonian democracy, 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.
[45] Jacksonian democracy's great innovation was to create a cultural norm wherein by "superintending inequality at home...patriarchs mingled in public as equals.
[48] The new party was pulled together by Martin Van Buren in 1828 as Jackson crusaded on claims of corruption by President John Quincy Adams.
Through a lavishly financed coalition of state parties, political leaders, and newspaper editors, a popular movement had elected the president.
As Norton et al. explain: The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society.
They sought to restore the independence of the individual—the artisan and the ordinary farmer—by ending federal support of banks and corporations and restricting the use of paper currency.
According to Francis Paul Prucha in 1969, Jackson looked at the Indian question in terms of military and legal policy, not as a problem due to their race.
Lyncoya's biography was used as a defense against charges that Jackson's Indian policies were inhumane as early as 1815,[54]: 141 continuing and accelerating through the 1824 and 1828 presidential elections.
[56] Jacksonian policies included ending the bank of the United States, expanding westward and removing American Indians from the Southeast.
Jackson created a spoils system to clear out elected officials in government of an opposing party and replace them with his supporters as a reward for their electioneering.
Paying off the national debt was a high priority which would make a reality of the Jeffersonian vision of America truly free from rich bankers, self-sufficient in world affairs, virtuous at home, and administered by a small government not prone to financial corruption or payoffs.
In the North, Jacksonians Martin Van Buren, Stephen A. Douglas and the War Democrats fiercely opposed secession, while Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and the Copperheads did not.
[58] In addition to Jackson, his second Vice President and one of the key organizational leaders of the Jacksonian Democratic Party, Martin Van Buren, handily won the election of 1836.
James Buchanan served in Jackson's administration as Minister to Russia and as Polk's Secretary of State, but he did not pursue Jacksonian policies.
Finally, Andrew Johnson, who had been a strong supporter of Jackson, became president following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, but by then Jacksonian democracy had been pushed off the stage of American politics.
