A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents. 22 volumes. New York: Bureau of National Literature, Inc., 1897. Volumes III and IV. (Hereinafter designated as MPP.)
Bradley J. Birzer: In Defense of Andrew Jackson. Washington: Regnery History, 2018. (Hereinafter designated as B.)
Marvin Meyers: The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. (Hereinafter designated as MM.)
Gerard N. Magliocca: Andrew Jackson and the Constitution: The Rise and Fall of Generational Regimes. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. (Hereinafter designated as GM.)
Note on the three histories
Bradley J. Birzer writes a succinct, readable account of Jackson’s life and character. Although its title suggests a polemic, the essay proves an exemplary specimen of popular history, aiming at fairness to Jackson with a minimum of contentiousness regarding other historians.
Marvin Meyers’s study remains the best single account of Jacksonian political thought, centered on the political and economic controversies surrounding the president’s attack on the Second Bank of the United States because these so well illuminate the way Jacksonians understood the American regime. As Meyers puts it, his book consists of “an inquiry into some special traits of democratic politics during the Jacksonian years,” some of which “have been persistent qualities of the democratic order in America” (MM vi).
Gerard N. Magliocca brings considerable knowledge of Constitutional law to bear on Jackson, who was by no means the careening wild man of legend—at least, not by the time he acceded to the presidency. Magliocca uses Jackson’s Constitutional arguments as features of his own argument about way the Constitution ‘changes,’ maintaining that because “each generation goes through a unique set of collective experiences that sets it apart from its predecessors,” and because each generation is motivated by “the primal desire to win” in a rivalry with the previous generation, Constitutional interpretation becomes a weapon of both adaptation to new circumstances and of the will to power (MM, 2, 47). Specifically, Jackson sought to overthrow the founding generation’s understanding of the Constitution they wrote and then interpreted, especially as interpreted by Chief Justice John Marshall in a series of landmark cases. The opening for the Jacksonians in terms of generational experience came in the aftermath of the Panic of 1819, which occurred only three years after Congress chartered the Second Bank of the United States, and accustomed younger Americans not only to distrust the National Bank but to distrust their own national government, as well. Marshall’s decisions, which reinforced the power of that government, and the intensifying regional disputes over internal improvements, tariffs, Indian removal, and (in temporarily less virulent form) slavery all led to debates over the authority of popular sovereignty in the American democratic republic. The essay below mines Magliocca’s work for its insights into Jackson’s understanding of the constitutional dimensions of his policies, leaving aside his theory of political/Constitutional ‘development.’
The Experiences Andrew Jackson Brought to the Presidency
“In some ways, [Jackson] was the first truly American president—not shaped by British manners and mores but something unique to this continent,” champion not of the North or the South but first of all the West, the American frontier and its settlers (B 2, 10). Not for him Aristotle or Cicero, but also not for him the notions of continental European thinkers then gaining currency on the Atlantic coast, the notions which coalesced as Transcendentalism in New England and ‘race theory’ in the South. For a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian, the teachings of the Bible and the ideas of the American Founders were plenty good enough, and the virtues of honesty, courage, continence, and loyalty, tried in rough experience, would get a man through life with honor (B 20-22). Having lost his father in infancy, his mother and two brothers during the Revolutionary War (in which he fought, as a boy of thirteen), he began adulthood “utterly alone” and with a grudge against the British (B 24). A grudge in the heart of a Scotch-Irish youth will never die, and this one didn’t.
And he was smart. He attended law school, learning enough to enter the North Carolina bar in 1787 and the Tennessee bar the year after, as the Founders wrote and defended the new Constitution. His prospects now decent, he married ‘above himself,’ as the saying went, in 1791, and moved up quickly in Tennessee politics, serving at the Tennessee Constitutional Convention in 1796 and in the United States House of representatives the same year, followed by a brief stint in the United States Senate a year later. He soon convinced himself and his colleagues of his unsuitability for legislative life, being a man better suited for executive command than for what a later political writer would call the politics of discussion. “It was as major general of the Tennessee militia that Andrew Jackson finally became Andrew Jackson” (B 33). In his day, the Amerindian peoples of Tennessee were formidable rivals of the settlers, and in General Jackson they more than met their match. In time he would frighten the hated English away from New Orleans, digging in and facing down an expeditionary force of 14,000 with 2,000 militiamen in the final battle of the War of 1812, losing fewer than a dozen of his own men while they killed some 1,500 of the invaders.
Military command requires one to think in terms of gaining control of strategic chokepoints. Jackson understood the whole of Florida as one such point. Under the Madison and Monroe administrations he launched raids and then a full-scale invasion of the colony, then weakly ruled by Spain. “The failing empire claimed authority but had neither the ability nor the desire to use it” (B 68), allowing it to become a sanctuary for Seminole Indians and runaway slaves who endangered American citizens on their side of the border. “Additionally, he claimed, his actions in Florida had demonstrated to Europe’s growing Holy Alliance that its members should not interfere with the United States” (B 68)—giving teeth to the Monroe Doctrine, much to the pleasure of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, its author, who used the Jackson menace as a lever in his successful negotiations to purchase Florida from the Spanish and to recognize the borders of the Louisiana purchase. As a reward, President Monroe appointed him territorial governor of Florida in March 1821. The restless Jackson soon moved on, but not before establishing common-law courts and instituting universal male suffrage, with neither racial barriers nor property qualifications.
By now he was being mentioned as a candidate for the presidency, indeed nominated by the Tennessee legislature for the 1824 election, although he had initially supported Adams. His state returned him to the Senate in 1823, to the dismay of Senator Henry Clay (another man of the West, and also a presidential candidate, but no war hero), who called him a “military chieftain”—an intended insult (Bonaparte had died less than a decade earlier) which Jackson chose to take as a compliment. His fighting spirit nonetheless aroused, he watched as his fellow citizens gave him a plurality of the popular vote but an insufficiency of votes in the Electoral College; in the ensuing machinations in the House of Representatives, Clay threw his support behind Adams, who rewarded him with the office of Secretary of State. The disgusted Jackson and his partisans scored this “corrupt bargain” for the next four years, and with the support of the newly-formed Democratic Party (the “brainchild of three men: Martin Van Buren, John C. Calhoun, and Thomas Hart Benton), who joined Jackson’s fellow Tennesseeans James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Senator John Eaton, Jackson sailed to victory four years later. In his Inaugural Address Jackson understandably pointed to the rule “that the majority is to govern” as “the first principle of our [political] system” (MPP III. 1011). Popular sovereignty, always the operational principle of American constitutional republicanism, found its embodiment in President Jackson.
Against this democratic aspect of American republicanism there stood oligarchic elements embodied in the Bank. As Meyers puts it, “To the Bank’s influence Jacksonians trace constitutional impiety, consolidated national power, aristocratic privilege, and plutocratic corruption. Social inequality, impersonal and intangible business relations, economic instability, perpetual debt and taxes, all issued from the same source.” (MM 11) Among Jacksonians, by contrast, “one finds the steady note of praise for simplicity and stability, self-reliance and independence, economy and useful toil, honesty and plain dealing” (MM 24). This was no valorization of “wild-woods democracy,” but a vision of “a countryside of flocks and herds and cultivated farms, worked in seasonal rhythm and linked in republican harmony” (MM 24)—an ethos Meyers captures in the paradox, “venturous conservativism” (MM 34). As he sees, this is the America Tocqueville saw. In it, the suspicions Madison and many other Founders entertained concerning the dangers of social egalitarianism “went underground, so to say, and out of mind” (MM 253), submerged by a buoyant faith in popular democracy. As Magliocca remarks, the Jacksonians kept their eyes fixed on the other side of the coin Madison had laid on the table in the tenth Federalist: While state government corruption and folly might be diluted by the formation of an extensive republic governed by a strong but limited central power, that very power might itself fall pray to corruption and folly (MM 12-13). How would this go, under the Constitution Madison and his political friends had designed?
Jackson’s Understanding of the United States Constitution
To a man like Jackson, an oath was inviolable, and that very much included the oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. This would stand as the guarantee against any feared Bonapartist ambitions, although his enemies may be forgiven for their concerns at the time. Dissatisfied with the provisions of the Constitution that made the “corrupt bargain” possible, he had attempted no coup d’état, bided his time, won the presidency outright, calling in his First Inaugural “to amend our system that the office of Chief Magistrate may not be conferred upon any citizen but in pursuance of a fair expression of the will of the majority” (MPP III.1011). If no candidate won a majority of the Electoral College votes, the runoff would be restricted to the two top vote-getters; the term of the presidency itself should be limited to four or six years; alternatively, the members of Congress could be barred from running for the presidency, thus avoiding a circumstance in which a candidate might wheel and deal his way to office with the connivance of his colleagues and promoting “the purity of our Government” (MPP III.1011). Unlike most of Jackson’s fights, physical and political, he lost this one, although he found other ways to vindicate the democratic surge that brought him to office.
Magliocca usefully reminds us of Chief Justice Marshall’s constitutional principles, against some of which Jackson would strain. In the same year of the economic depression which would spell the end of the First Bank, Marshall had written three opinions which supported that doomed institution. In Dartmouth v. Woodward he held that the Constitution’s contract clause bars a state legislature from amending a charter granted to a corporation, an opinion which strengthened the nascent corporate structuring of American capitalism; in Sturgis v. Crowninshield he held that the contracts clause invalidates efforts to provide retrospective debt relief to farmers and small businesses, thereby strengthening banks; in M’Culloch v. Maryland he held that the national bank had been authorized by an implied, not expressed, constitutional power and that moreover the states may not tax its earnings. Crucially, Marshall “upheld the constitutionality of the bank with a stirring defense of popular sovereignty,” maintaining that the Constitution itself, the only law ratified by the American people in assemblies elected for the sole purpose of addressing the question of whether the Constitution should be approved as the supreme law of the land, therefore uniquely embodied that sovereignty. Having thus established the authority of the Constitution, Marshall took care to broaden its meaning, holding that its Necessary and Proper Clause did not apply only to federal actions “that were indispensable,” but also to those upon which, as Marshall wrote, “upon which the happiness and prosperity of the nation… vitally depends” (GM 8). He took care not to claim that the Court could determine whether an act or institution was necessary, leaving that to the discretion of Congress (GM 72).
Jackson countered Marshall’s version of popular sovereignty by using Constitutional principles against oligarchic tendencies on a wide front, including the controversies over the Bank and Indian removal. One example of this came in his second term, in the spring of 1834, when the Senate, its majority angered over Jackson’s attempt to de-fund the Second Bank, voted to censure him, alleging that “in relation to the public revenue [the President] has assumed upon himself authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and the laws but in derogation of both” (MPP III.1288)—an impeachable “high crime,” as Jackson did not quail from pointing out. But on the contrary, he riposted, it was the Senate resolution that was “wholly unauthorized by the Constitution, and in derogation of its entire spirit,” assuming, as it did, “that a single branch of the legislative department may for the purposes of a public censure, and without any view to legislation or impeachment, take up, consider, and decide upon the official acts of the Executive” (MPP III.1291). But the Senate has no power to impeach, and its only constitutional judicial function with respect to the president is to try impeachment cases brought by the House of Representatives. Under law, the House serves as the prosecutor, the Senate as the judge; in this case, the Senate assumes both roles. Further, in censuring the president for directing the Secretary of the Treasury to redirect the funds of the Bank to the several state banks, senators also encroached on the executive power, whereby the Secretary obeys the Chief Magistrate, not either of the legislative branches. “If by a mere denunciation like this resolution the President should ever be induced to act in a matter of official duty contrary to the honest convictions of his own mind in compliance with the wishes of the Senate, the constitutional independence of the executive department would be as effectually destroyed and its power as effectually transferred to the Senate as if that end had been accomplished by an amendment of the Constitution.” (MPP III.1305). To so “concentrate in the hands of the Senate the whole executive power” (MPP III.1305) would bring the Constitution part-way back to the arrangements under the Articles of Confederation; it would further incline the government toward the parliamentary model seen in Great Britain, where a legislative censure would imperil the prime minister’s administration. Jackson makes neither of these arguments, however, confining himself to observing that if the Senate can bring executive officers under its control, the president, “the direct representative of the American people” as a whole (MPP 1309), would be undermined by the elected representatives of the states, putting both the American federal system at risk (again by returning it to something more resembling the federalism of the Articles); the Union “would fall to mutual crimination and recrimination and give to the people confusion and anarchy instead of order and law, until at length some form of aristocratic power”—presumably centered in the Senate—would be established on the ruins of the constitution or the States be broken into separate communities” (MPP III.1310).
By far the most serious constitutional crisis of the Jackson Administration came in the early 1830s, when South Carolina attempted to ‘nullify’ a federal law, the 1828 tariff law. Calhoun, Jackson’s vice president and ally during the 1828 election, resigned and took the position of senator in order to spearhead the fight. As Birzer writes, Calhoun earlier had abandoned his support of a strong federal government for a states’-rights stance in reaction to the abolitionist passions stirred by the admission of Missouri to the Union in 1820. The “Tariff of Abominations,” as the Carolinians styled it, brought the question of federalism back to the center of national politics.
Jackson had begun his administration with a defense of states’ rights in his Inaugural Address. “I may be called on to pursue [measures] in regard to the rights of the separate States.” In so doing, “I hope to be animated by a proper respect for those sovereign members of our Union, taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the Confederacy” (MPP III.1000). Nine months later, in his First Annual Message, he praised the work of the Framers of the Constitution, adding, “We are responsible to our country and to the glorious cause of self-government for the preservation of so great a good.” This being so, “the great mass of legislation relating to our internal affairs was intended to be left where the Federal Convention found it—in the State governments.” He warned Congress “against all encroachments upon the legitimate sphere of State sovereignty” (MPP III.1015). Nullification of duly enacted federal laws was another matter, however. As early as the Jefferson Day Dinner in April 1830, Jackson fixed Calhoun with his formidable stare and toasted “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved” (B 127). The warning went unheeded; indeed, the nullification movement spread to other Southern states. On November 1, 1832, South Carolina solemnly nullified the tariff law, threatening to secede from the Union if the federal government moved to enforce it. (South Carolina, the state legislators intoned, “will forthwith proceed to organize a separate government and to do all other acts and things which sovereign and independent states may of right do”—thus echoing the language of the Declaration of Independence without noticing its underlying principle of unalienable natural rights). In his Fourth Annual Message of December 1832, Jackson reported that “in one quarter of the United States opposition to the revenue laws has arisen to a height which threatens to thwart their execution, if not to endanger the integrity of the Union” (MPP III.1162). He followed this a few days later with a proclamation refuting Southern pretensions.
To claim a constitutional right to nullify federal laws as unconstitutional, “coupled with the uncontrolled right to decide what laws deserve that character, is to give the power of resisting all laws; for as by the theory there is no appeal, the reasons alleged by the State, good or bad, must prevail” (MPP III.1204). But the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, provides only two appeals from allegedly unconstitutional federal laws: judicial review and constitutional amendment. If the South Carolina doctrine “had been established at an earlier day, the Union would have been dissolved in its infancy” (MPP III.1205). Anticipating arguments made a generation later by Abraham Lincoln, Jackson remarks that the Union predates the Constitution, the Articles, and the Declaration of Independence, as seen in Americans’ 1774 declaration, taken jointly by the several states, “by which they agreed that they would collectively form one nation for the purpose of conducting some certain domestic concerns and all foreign relations” (MPP III.1206). Later, under the Articles of Confederation, the states pledged to “abide by the determinations of Congress on all questions which by that Confederation should be submitted to them,” with no state entitled to “legally annul a decision of the Congress or refuse to submit in its execution,” although the Articles provided no means of enforcing this provision (MPP III.1206). Again anticipating Lincoln, Jackson remarks that the 1787 Constitution forms “‘a more perfect union’ than that of the Confederation” (MPP III. 1206). How, then, could that law permit the Union to backslide beyond even the unenforceable Union enacted under the Articles? “I consider, then, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one State, incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed” (MPP III.1206). “This right to secede”—which Jackson clear-sightedly perceives as inherent in the assertion of the sovereign right to annul—”is deduced [by the nullifiers] from the nature of the Constitution, which, they say, is a compact between sovereign States who have preserved their whole sovereignty and therefore are subject to no superior” (MPP II.1211). But, once more in ‘Lincolnian’ terms, Jackson identifies the American people as the sovereigns, not the states; the people and not the states are represented in the executive branch of the federal government, and under the Constitution the executive is charged with enforcing federal law. “The Constitution of the United States… forms a government, not a league; and whether it be formed by compact between the States or in any other manner, its character is the same,” and that government “operates directly on the people individually, not upon the States,” as it had under the Articles (MPP III.1211).
“It is the acknowledged attribute of free institutions that under them the empire of reason and law is substituted for the power of the sword” (MPP III.1284). As argued in the Declaration of Independence (and earlier by Locke and other natural-rights philosophers), it “needs not on the present occasion be denied” that “a State or any other great portion of the people, suffering under long and intolerable oppression and having tried all constitutional remedies without the hope of redress, may have a natural right, when their happiness can be no otherwise secured, and when they can do so without greater injury to others, to absolve themselves from their obligations to the Government and appeal to the last resort,” namely, the force of arms (MPP III.1184). The right to revolution under such circumstances is a right not only of Americans but “a right of mankind” (MPP III.1184). “It is not the right of the State, but of the individual, and of all the individuals in the State” (MPP III.1284). Secession, “like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right is confounding the meaning of terms,” inasmuch as “a compact is an agreement or binding obligation” (MPP III.1212). If that compact “contains no sanction, it may be broken with no other consequence than moral guilt,” as a league among independent nations might be broken; “a government, on the contrary, always has a sanction, express or implied, and in our case it is both necessarily implied and expressly given” in the provision made “for punishing acts which obstruct the due administration of its laws” (MPP III.1212). The name for “an offense against sovereignty” is treason. Of the nullifiers, Jackson charges, “Their object is disunion…. Disunion by armed force is treason,” and Jackson leaves no doubt that he will use his executive power as president of the United States to punish its perpetrators accordingly (MPP III.1217). Thus Jackson clearly defines popular sovereignty not as a principle justifying the political superiority of the states over the federal government (as nullifiers and secessionists did), nor as a principle justifying might-makes-right majority rule of a nation over the states (as Stephen Douglas did), but as an instrument justified only by its adherence to the standard of natural rights. “It was not for territory or state power that our Revolutionary fathers took up arms; it was for individual liberty and the right of self-government” (MPP III.1281).
In a letter to Congress in January 1833, Jackson warned that “If these measures can not be defeated and overcome by the power conferred by the Constitution on the Federal Government, the Constitution must be considered as incompetent to its own defense, the supremacy of the laws is at an end, and the rights and liberties of the citizens can no longer receive protection from the Government of the Union” (MPP III.1180). With no major source of revenue other than the tariff, the federal government itself would shrivel and collapse and the states would take over the rule of the people resident within them. Citing the Constitutional obligation of the Executive to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” and of Congress “for calling forth the militia for executing the laws of the Union” (MPP III.1188), Jackson signed the “Force Bill” on March 3,1833, the day before his Second Inaugural Address. He then “called up militias, ordered three divisions of artillery to South Carolina, gave General Winfield Scott command over Charleston Harbor, ordered the reinforcement of Charleston’s federal forts, and placed naval warships just offshore” (B 141). In the Address, he wrote that “The eye of all nations are fixed on our Republic. The event of the existing crisis will be decisive in the opinion of mankind of the practicability of our federal system of government” (MPP. 1223). In the event, South Carolina backed down. When Lincoln tried the same thing, justifying his actions with the same arguments from the logic of constitutional law to the invocation of natural rights, South Carolina and its allies did not back down. But, then, tariff revenues were not so important to the South as slavery was, and they doubted Lincoln’s prowess as a military commander-in-chief. They may have preferred not to test a man like Jackson.
By the time of his Farewell Address, four years later, Jackson could assert with confidence, “Our Constitution is no longer a doubtful experiment, and at the end of nearly a half century we find that it has preserved unimpaired the liberties of the people, secured the rights of property, and that our country has improved and is flourishing beyond any former example in the history of nations” (MPP IV.1512). He nonetheless warned, “We behold systematic efforts publicly made to sow the seed of discord between different parts of the United States and to place party divisions directly upon geographical distinctions; to excite the South against the North and the North against the South, and to force into controversy the most delicate and exciting topics—topics upon which it is impossible that a large portion of the Union can ever speak without strong emotion” (MPP III. 1514). Again like Lincoln, he does not deny the wrong of slavery, only that the consequences of disunion are worse; disunion would have reintroduced international war to North America without liberating the slaves. “Has the warning voice of Washington been forgotten, or have designs already been formed to sever the Union?” (MPP IV.1514) Jackson was mistaken in only one thing, predicting that if a war over secession began, “and the citizens of one section of the country arrayed in arms against those of another in doubtful combat, let the battle result as it may, there will be an end of the Union and with it an end to the hopes of freedom” (MPP IV.1516). And even so, had that happened in his own generation he probably would have been right.
Jacksonian Political Economy
Jackson enunciated his underlying political-economic policy in his First Inaugural Address. “The great interests of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures should be equally favored”; “perhaps the only exception to this rule should consist in the peculiar encouragement of any products of either of them that may be found essential to our national independence” (MPP III.1000). His most immediate task was to impose economy upon the federal departments, which he rightly suspected of bloat. Birzer well describes the efforts of Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, Amos Kendall, who uprooted corrupt practices in his own department (the custom houses were the worst of several offenders) and joined with the other Cabinet secretaries to remove approximately “one of every seven government bureaucrats between 1829 and 1832 (B 110-111). Such economies enabled Jackson to extinguish the national debt by the end of his first term, at which time he adjured Congress “to fix our system of expenditure on firm and durable principles,” in particular “a rigid economy and an inflexible determination not to enlarge the income beyond the real necessities of the Government and not to increase the wants of the Government by unnecessary and profuse expenditures” (MPP III.1248). At the end of his presidency Jackson remained steadfast: “Congress has no right under the Constitution to take money from the people unless it is required to execute some of the specific powers entrusted to the government; and if they raise more than is necessary for such purposes, it is an abuse of the power of taxation, and unjust and oppressive, inasmuch as “the surplus revenue will be drawn from the pockets of the people—from the farmer, the mechanic, and the laboring classes of society” (IV. 1518). In effect, unnecessarily high taxes weaken popular sovereignty by reducing the wealth of the people. “The preservation and success of the republican principle rests with us” (MPP III.1052); such preservation and success will require fiscal solvency.
Although Jackson did not want the federal government to “favor” one economic sector over another, he unquestionably regarded agriculture as “superior in importance” to commerce and manufactures; “it is principally as manufactures and commerce tend to increase the value of agricultural productions and to extend their application to the wants and comforts of society that they deserve the fostering care of Government” (MPP III.1013). Tariff policy should be framed accordingly. Jackson and his negotiators expended substantial effort in opening foreign markets to American trade in agricultural products, obtaining treaties with the Ottoman Empire in 1830 and Spain in 1833. Persuading the British to open their Caribbean colonies to free trade proved a harder sell.
He remained most concerned with putting America’s own economic house in order. He judged many efforts at federally-funded ‘internal improvements’ or transportation infrastructure to be one form of unnecessary expenditure, and often unconstitutional as well. Early in his first administration he vetoed a bill funding the “Maysville Road,” a proposed project entirely within the borders of one state, Kentucky. He contrasted this with President Jefferson’s purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory and his funding of the Cumberland Road, which extended through three states. Although James Madison had also supported these and other projects designed to promote interstate commerce, he had rejected a bill to build roads and canals “within the limits of the States” as an arrogation of a power neither stated nor implied in the interstate commerce clause (MPP III.1049). “A disregard of this distinction would of necessity lead to the subversion of the federal system” (MPP III.1050) by running up the national debt and precipitating “a scramble for appropriations that have no relation to any general system of improvement” and to consequent abuses “lead[ing] far exceed[ing] the good which they are capable of promoting” (MPP III.1053). Among these abuses, he predicted, would be attempts “to shift upon the Government the losses of unsuccessful private speculation, and thus, by ministering to personal ambition and self-aggrandizement, tend to sap the foundations of public virtue and taint the administration of the Government with a demoralizing influence” (MPP III.1053). Because the “diversities of interests of the different States” owing to “diversities arising from situation, climate, population and pursuits” will make such grants to individual states the objects of jealousy among the others, unconstitutional internal improvement projects will also threaten the Union (MPP III.1076). Anticipating the rise of a form of apparently legal (but in fact unconstitutional) corruption, Jackson opposed “the patronage of the Government” directed at local ‘projects. “To suppose that because our Government has been instituted for the benefit of the people it must therefore have the power to do whatever may seem to conduce to the public good is an error into which even honest minds are too apt to fall” (MPP III.1337). And not all minds will be honest. Federal patronage provides “materials” for “sinister appeals to selfish feelings” in the service of “purposes of personal ambition” (MPP III.1337-1338). For Jackson, then, political economy is always political economy, and politics flows from moral principles, good or bad. Ethos or character flows from regime, and regime requires the ethos it fosters to sustain itself. As Birzer puts it, economics was as much about morality as it was about efficiency and progress” (B 121).
On the same principle, Jackson vetoed a bill that would have given the proceeds of sales of federally-owned lands to the states. “One of the fundamental principles on which the Confederation of the United States was originally based was that the waste lands of the West within their limits should be the common property of the United States”; after their cession to the United States, the federal government was logically obligated to dispose of the “for the common benefit of the States,” and “for no other purpose” (MPP III.1281). One such purpose was the payment of the national debt. As with the Maysville Road project, “Congress possesses no constitutional power to appropriate any part of the moneys of the United States for objects of a local character within the States,” but the bill in question directed the monies to “objects of internal improvement or education within those States” (MPP III.1284). Although the bill seems to benefit the states, and may do so in the short run, in the end it can only injure them. “It appears to me that a more direct road to consolidation can not be devised. Money is power, and in that Government which pays all the public officers of the States will all political power be substantially be concentrated…. Being the dependents of the General Government, and looking to its Treasury as the source of all their emoluments, the State officers, under whatever names they might pass and by whatever forms their duties might be prescribed, would in effect be the mere stipendiaries and instruments of the central power.” (MPP III.1286). And this might occur with eager compliance of state representatives. “the simplicity and economy of the State governments mainly depend on the fact that money has to be supplied to support them by the same men, or their agents, who vote it away in appropriations.” Wasteful spending of the taxpayers’ money will induce punishment at the polls. “But if the necessity of levying he taxes be taken from those who make the appropriations and thrown upon a more distant and less responsible set of public agents, who have power to approach the people by an indirect and stealthy taxation there is reason to fear that prodigality will soon supersede those characteristic which have thus far made us look with so much pride and confidence to the State governments as the mainstay of our Union and liberties. The State legislatures, instead of studying to restrict their State expenditures to the smallest possible sum, will claim credit for their profusion, and harass the General Government for increased supplies,” effectively centralizing the power of taxation at the federal level (PMM III,1463) with the quiet applause of the states themselves.
The Second Bank of the United States raised the questions of regime and of the federal state in the starkest way. Jackson had deprecated it from the beginning, winning the hostility of the Whig Party and its favorite son, Senator Clay, for whom the Bank stood as a pillar of his “American System” of finance, tariff revenues, and internal improvement (MM 15). In all this Jackson smelled the rat of oligarchy, the “money power” (MM 22-23). “The greatest corporation in the country,” integrated into “the fiscal routine of the national government,” a “semiprivate” entity (today we would call it a ‘public-private partnership’) with monopoly powers, “it became the great holder of the nation’s specie and exchange reserve—with all the power implied” (MM 104-105). It used paper money to finance not only projects intended to speed western expansion but also urban development; “the rate of urban population growth in the 1830s was twice the growth rate for the total population” (MM 111). Feverish real estate speculation ensued; sooner or later, such fevers break, as this one did in 1837, a few years after Jackson left office. And the Bank financed the founding and growth of the new corporate firms—oligarchic structures that made American civil society less and less agrarian, a harder place for the average man and his family to remain independent. Tocqueville had described the American mind as restless; the new currency made society even more restless than ever, while at the same time eroding the social equality Tocqueville (and Jackson) understood as the bedrock of American republicanism (MM 26-28).
From his First Annual Message to his Farewell Address, Jackson went gunning for the Bank. Although its charter wouldn’t expire until 1836, Jackson urged Congress to prepare for that happy day early and often. It “has failed in the great end of establishing a uniform currency” (MPP III. 1025). Its “powers and privileges” are “unauthorized by the Constitution, subversive of the rights of the States, and dangerous to the liberties of the people” (MPP III.1139). Much of its stock was “held by foreigners” (MPP III.1139), thereby posing a national security risk in the event of war. “Controlling our currency, receiving our public moneys, and holding thousands of our citizens in dependence, it would be more formidable and dangerous than the haval and military power of the enemy” (MPP III.144). “Is there no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country?” (MPP III.114) Then as now, ‘globalization’ found little favor among those who cherished self-government. Meanwhile, the Bank directors assured their own self-government by electing all the members of the board.
Indignantly aware of the Supreme Court’s favorable nod to the Bank’s constitutionality in 1819, in vetoing the Congressional bill re-chartering the Bank Jackson recurred to Thomas Jefferson’s claim that each branch of the federal government “must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.” “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both” (MPP III.1145). In his reading of the Constitution, Jackson found a Congressional power to grant monopolies in only two instances: patent law and copyright law. The Bank is anything but an instance of the exercise of the Necessary and Proper Clause, empowered as it is to transfer stock to foreigners, exempting them from State and national taxation, which would serve “to impoverish our people in time of peace, to disseminate a foreign influence through every section of the Republic, and in war to endanger our independence” (MPP III.1148). Contrary Chief Justice Marshall, Jackson held that states did indeed retain the right to tax corporations, local or national, inasmuch as the states had “surrender [their taxing power] only as it regards imports and exports” (PMM III.1150).
More broadly, though, “the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” While social inequalities will “always exist under every just government,” given the natural inequality of talents, industriousness, frugality and other virtues. “But when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmer, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government” (PMM III.1153). Failing to meet the standard of the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Bank charter violates the Equal Protection Clause. Not only inter-class struggle but inter-sectional struggle pitting frontiersmen and farmers against East Coast corporation has flared on account of this. The Bank directors themselves exacerbated such factionalism by taking “steps to obtain control over public opinion” by paying for pamphlets supporting a re-charter and by issuing loans to pro-Bank newspapers (mostly controlled by the rival Whig Party) (MPP III.1225). As James Madison had seen, in a democratic republic public opinion comprises the common coin of politics; Jackson held that the Bank and the oligarchs it served intended to control not only the bodies of Americans, their means of livelihood, but also their minds. “The Bank of the United States [has been] converted into a permanent electioneering engine”; “the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the Unites States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions” (MPP III.1249).
With “the honor and preservation of the republican system” on the line, in years immediately preceding the re-charter deadline Jackson moved for the privatization of the Bank. “At war with the genius of all our institutions,” an entity “the fundamental principle of which is a distrust of the popular will as a safe regulator of political power,” the Bank would rule through a system of “lavish public disbursements and corporations with exclusive privileges” substituting “for the original checks and balances of the Constitution” the “silent and secret operation” of oligarchic rule (MPP III.1384). In this instance, Jackson would leave the functions of collecting and disbursing “the moneys of the United States to the state banks. “Severed from the [general] Government as political engines, and not susceptible of dangerous extension and combination, the State banks will not be tempted, nor will they have the power, which we have seen exercised, to divert the public funds from the legitimate purposes of the Government,” which will retain the tariff revenues Jackson had defended successfully against the nullifiers (PMM III.1384). In place of the Bank’s paper money, gold and silver coins can then “become the principal circulating medium in the common business of farmers and mechanics in the country” (PMM III.1385). As Jackson concluded in his Farewell Address, it is on this independent yeomanry that the future of the regime of self-government depends (PMM IV.1524). It was in part to protect those citizens that Jackson established his Indian removal policy.
Indian Removal
As Birzer shows, Jackson respected the Amerindian nations and tribes as valiant warriors, and he adopted an orphaned Indian boy during the War of 1812. In one of his first acts as president he asked Congress to provide support for the Passamaquoddy Indians in Maine, in recognition of the military assistance the tribe had lent the Patriot side during the Revolutionary War (MPP III.1026). He also knew (as many Americans in New England and the Middle States had forgotten) that several of those tribes and nations posed a threat to Americans, especially when allied with foreign powers—as they had, in the War of 1812, when the Shawnee chief Tecumseh gathered several tribes together in Ohio and aimed to “eradicate the whites” (B 51). At Fort Mims, in the southern theater of the war, the Creeks enacted their customary policy of slaughtering defeated foes, which included tearing babies out of the wombs of their mothers. Upon defeating the Creeks, Jackson proved rather more lenient, pardoning and eventually befriending Chief William Weatherford. He also included a Choctaw regiment in his militia force, remarking that “our Choctaws are more civilized than the British” (B 59). After the war, he was enraged when the governor of Georgia approved a massacre of Indian women and children during the campaign against the Seminoles, wondering how “there could exist within the U. States, a cowardly monster in human Shape, that could violate the Sanctity of a flag” (Birzer 104).
In his First Inaugural Address Jackson professed his “sincere and constant desire to observe toward the Indian tribes within our limits a just and liberal policy, and to give that humane and considerate attention to their rights and their wants which is consistent with the habits of our Government and the feelings of our people” (PMM III. 1001). And in fact the longstanding policy of regime change had worked well, particularly with respect to the Cherokee, who occupied a 6.2-million acre territory in Georgia on which they the governed themselves peacefully; now having a written language, they published a newspaper and by the 1820s began work on a constitution (GM 22).The final point deserves serious consideration when considering any decision made within a natural-rights framework; just as with slavery, in a republican regime more than any other it may not be possible to do the best thing if feelings run high among some substantial portion of the citizenry. And so they did: under the growing influence of ‘race science,’ Georgian legislators enacted laws disqualifying Indians and their descendants from eligibility as witnesses at trial and blocking them from voting if they chose to remain on tribal lands in what Magliocca calls “an undeclared war against the Cherokees” (GM 28).
In his First Annual Message to Congress he reviewed past U. S. policy, beginning in the Washington Administration. “It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life”—a policy implemented by Washington’s Secretary of War, Henry Knox, who maintained that “any other approach ‘would be a gross violation of the fundamental laws of nature and of that distributive justice which is the glory of a nation'” (GM 14). For this task Knox engaged Christian missionaries to distribute surplus Army goods and to teach technical skills, Christian doctrine, and republican practices—what much later would be called a ‘regime change’ policy. But, Jackson continued, “this policy has…been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success,” namely, purchasing their lands and “thrust[ing] them farther into the wilderness” (MPP III.1020). These contradictory policies have fostered reasonable distrust among the Indians in many parts of the country; nonetheless, “the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites,” have “made some progress in the art of civilized life,” and have now “attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama.” But the Constitution explicitly prohibits a new state’s formation within the jurisdiction of another “without the consent of its legislature” (MPP III.1020). “It is not believed that there is a single instance in the legislation of the country”—under the Articles of Confederation or the U. S. Constitution—in which the Indians have been regarded as possessing political rights independent of the control and authority of the States within the limits of which they resided” MPP III. 1100). To extend state laws throughout the territory of each state remained an unquestioned state right. As president, Jackson could only deny the Indians’ request for recognition.
This left Jackson with the obligation to explain how the Southern Indians had been permitted to retain de facto sovereignty within the states. “De facto” proves the crucial point: Not the “acknowledged principles of the [federal] Government” but “necessities” required such treatment. “The United States at that period had just emerged from a protracted war for the achievement of their independence”; the Southern Indians, “as powerful as they were ferocious in their mode of warfare, remained in arms, desolating our frontier settlements.” The treaties with the Cherokee “were sanctioned as measures of necessity adapted to the character of the Indians and indispensable to the peace and security of the western frontier,” and “can not be understood as changing the political relations of the Indians to the States or to the Federal Government”; “the Indians thus situated can not be regarded in any other light than as members of a foreign government or of that of the State within whose chartered limits they reside” (MPP III.1102). But they could not have been regarded as sovereign nations because the United States government had in effect conscripted them during the War of 1812. “To an independent and foreign people this would seem to be assuming I should suppose, rather too lofty a tone” (MPP III.1103). What is more, in the several wars the United States has fought against hostile Indian tribes within the limits of the states, Congress has never issued a declaration of war, as the Constitution provides when engaging a sovereign belligerent (MPP. III.1103). The Indians residing within the states therefore do not enjoy sovereign status.
Given the bad relations between the Southern Indians and the citizens of Georgia and Alabama, Jackson “advised [the Indians] to emigrate beyond the Mississippi [River] or submit to the laws of those States” (MPP III.1021). If something is not done, “the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware” tribes—subordination and ultimate eradication or near-eradication—will “fast overtak[e] the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek…. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity.” (MPP III.1021). Those nations and tribes that choose to emigrate to territories beyond the Mississippi would then settle in territories under the protection of the federal government, where those Americans who wish to continue to “teach them the arts of civilization” and help them “raise up an interesting commonwealth” will be free to do so without interference from suspicious and hostile Georgians and Alabamans (MPP III.1021). Indeed, once the civilized tribes and nations settle in to their new domain, they may exert a civilizing influence on the savage tribes nearby (PMM III,1082).
Magliocca quotes Jackson’s ally and eventual successor Martin Van Buren on the reaction to the Indian Removal Act: “A more persevering opposition to a public measure has scarcely ever been” (GM 25). Galvanized by the plight of the Indians and the missionaries, ministers denounced the law and also the discriminatory codes enacted by Georgia. In the United States Senate, Theodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, known as “The Christian Statesman,” spearheaded the opposition, arguing that it was one thing to require individual Indians who no longer self-identified as Indians but as Americans to abide by state laws, it was quite another thing to violate treaties, whether or not they were made under duress (GM 26-27). As to the denials of voting rights and the right to bear witness at trial, this surely violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. To this, Jacksonians could only reply that civil rights and privileges cannot be extended to ‘savages’—a dubious claim indeed when applied to the now-literate and eminently civil Cherokees.
Indeed, the Cherokees proved sufficiently civilized to hire an attorney the former Attorney General William Wirt. The first case he brought, Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, was dismissed on technical grounds, with Chief Justice Marshall holding that the Constitution’s classification of the Indian tribes as neither foreign nations nor states, but as sui generis, called into question the right to sue in the Supreme Court. Another opening soon appeared, however. When Vermont missionary Samuel Worcester was fired from his job as a postmaster in the Cherokee homeland for refusing to take Georgia’s newly-enacted loyalty oath, admitting Georgia’s sovereignty over the tribes. As an American citizen, Worcester had every right to take his case to the Court. Worcester v. Georgia saw Marshall argue that the Cherokee were indeed independent from the state of Georgia because “control of tribal relations ‘are committed exclusively to the government of the Union'” (GM 45) under the Commerce Clause. Inasmuch as the Commerce Clause, as its title implies, pertains only to commercial relations and not relations tout court, the Chief Justice was stretching things. And even if the main treaty with the Indians extended Congressional rule well beyond the Commerce Clause, why did this not actually legitimate the Indian Removal Act, as passed by Congress? (GM 45-46) In the event, Jackson simply ignored the ruling.
By the end of 1830, Jackson had reported that the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes had consented to removal, as “they have preferred maintain their independence in the Western forests to submitting to the laws of the States in which they now reside”; their passage will be eased by “a liberal sum” to cover the expense of their journey and “comfortable subsistence on their arrival at their new homes” (MPP III.1083). “Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth.” In fact, not all of the Amerindians tribes are aboriginal, and their treatment will be better than that accorded to their predecessors on the land: “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated or has disappeared to make room for the existing savage tribes” (MPP III,1084). And with regard to the existing warlike tribes of the West, “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, town, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” (MPP III.1084). Those very Americans themselves left the land of their forefathers, and continue arrive, without any support from the United States government. Although the Cherokees fought in the courts to remain, they too eventually took to the ‘Trail of Tears.’
Throughout his administration, Jackson’s conviction that he had set down the right policy only strengthened. Such “savage” tribes as the warlike Sac and Fox Nation in Michigan, defeated in the brief but fierce Black Hawk War 1832, deserved removal because “they have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear” to territories “beyond our boundaries,” so that they may reorganize “their political system upon principles adapted to the new relations in which they will be placed” (MPP III.1252). The civilized tribes must also remove in order to be “preserve [them] from destruction” by continued contact with large populations of whites (MPP III.1332). In their new territory, “no political communities can be formed… except those which are established by the Indians themselves or by the United States for them and with their concurrence. A barrier has thus been raised for their protection against the encroachment of our citizens, and guarding the Indians as far as possible from those evils which have brought them to their present condition” (MPP III. 1391).
Magliocca observes that the Treaty of New Echota, whereby the Cherokee removal was formalized, was initially voted down overwhelmingly by the tribal assembly, only to be reversed when Georgia invaded and seized the assemblymen. Some U. S. senators, led by Henry Clay, refused to ratify the treaty, based as it was on a “transparent fraud,” but Democrats outvoted them (GM 69). Twenty percent of the Cherokees died on the way to Arkansas, prodded violently by U. S. Army troops led by General Winfield Scott. While Magliocca deplores the Removal, Birzer makes the tough but valid point that the Southern tribes survived, unlike many of the Northern tribes and also (it might be added) the Amerindians of California, later. Jackson’s policy, agonizing as it was in conception and cruelly botched as it was in execution, saved the Southern tribes from likely extermination at the hands of slaveholding whites, who would continue on for another generation as an example of civilized savagery. Civil war among the white Americans, the bloodiest in our history so far, would only begin to address the injustice.
Jackson’s Foreign and Military Policy
Jackson was not a nationalist in the sense that he detested foreigners as such, or harbored racial animosity. When the Marquis de Lafayette died in 1834, Jackson wrote that “his memory will be second only to that of Washington in the hearts of the America people” as “the zealous and uniform friend and advocate of rational liberty” throughout his life, but particularly as an officer under General Washington during the Revolutionary War (MPP III.1314). Jackson was a nationalist in the sense that he judged foreigners, his fellow Americans, and Indians alike by the criterion of faithful adherence to the principle upheld by the American regime, a universal principle best secured by that regime of democratic republicanism.
He continued the foreign policy of Washington and the founding generation, which consisted of commercial relations with foreign countries combined with neutrality when they were at war. Respecting commerce, “the rule which has long guided our national policy” has been “to require no exclusive privileges and to grant none” (MPP III. 1155). Respecting neutrality, we extend to foreigners “good offices when required [to] promote the domestic tranquility and foreign peace of all nations with whom we have any intercourse”—service as a third-party negotiator between two countries at loggerheads, for example—but no “intervention in their affairs further than this” (MPP III.1159). At least eight European countries had violated those rights in the past, and Jackson’s negotiators demanded reparations from all of them (MPP III.1109). Most of these claims were settled during his time in office, with France and Great Britain, the two greatest powers among them, proving the most recalcitrant. “The law of nations provide a remedy for such occasions”: “where one nation owes another a liquidated debt which it refuses or neglects to pay the aggrieved party may seize on the property belonging to the other, its citizens or subjects, sufficient to pay the debt without giving just cause of war” (MPP III. 1325). “Collision with France” (for example) “is the more to be regretted on account of the position she occupies in Europe in relation to liberal institutions, but in maintaining our national rights and honor all governments are alike to us” (MPP III.1326).
Jackson served in the years following the announcement of the Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers away from intervention in the New World. These years coincided with revolutionary turbulence in Latin America, as Spain’s empire weakened and as peoples unaccustomed to self-government, republican or other, struggled to establish themselves as independent countries. “Intestine dissensions have too frequently occurred to mar the prosperity, interrupt the commerce, and distract the governments of most of the nations of this hemisphere which have separated themselves from Spain.” While “the friends of freedom expect that those countries, so favored by nature, will be distinguished for their love of justice and their devotion to those peaceful arts the assiduous cultivation of which confers honor upon nations and gives value to human life,” he also hoped that “some people of these luxuriant regions” would not, “in a moment of unworthy distrust of their own capacity for the enjoyment of liberty, to commit the too common error of purchasing present repose by bestowing on some favorite leaders the fatal gift of irresponsible power” (MPP III.1318). Moreover, as “revolution succeeds revolution” there, “injuries are committed upon foreigners engaged in lawful pursuits” and often no government sufficiently stable to redress those injuries exists. “If this unhappy condition of things continues much longer, other nations will be under the painful necessity of deciding whether justice to their suffering citizens does not require a prompt redress of injuries by their own power, without waiting for the establishment of a government competent and enduring enough to discuss and to make satisfaction for them” (MPP III.1371). This was the same dilemma faced by Theodore Roosevelt some seventy years later, leading him to set down the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine: foreign countries should stay out of Latin America, but the United States might intervene militarily on their behalf. Jackson hadn’t the military power to do such a thing, and his preference for the Washington policy of defending American rights, not those of other nations, would have inclined him to vindicate American honor, only.
Jackson held the traditional view that standing armies are “dangerous to free governments in time of peace,” and that they “should be held subordinate to the civil power” at all times (MPP III.1000). He also held the equally traditional view that standing navies pose a much lesser threat, and he advocated the strengthening of American naval forces, including the maintenance of those forces in the Mediterranean, where they had defended American shipping from privateers controlled by the Barbary States. Geopolitics required a strong navy. “Our local situation, our long line of coast, indented by numerous bays, with deep rivers opening into the interior, as well as our extended and still increasing commerce, point to our navy as or natural means of defense,” as well as “the cheapest and most effectual” (MPP IV. 1526). This notwithstanding, “the bulwark of our defense is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible,” since “a million of armed freemen, possessed of the means of war, can never be conquered by a foreign foe” (MPP III.1001). It did not escape Jackson’s notice that a well-organized, arms-bearing militia would reinforce the democratic aspect of democratic republicanism. “As long as our Government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of person and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending; and so long as it is worth defending a patriotic militia will cover it with an impenetrable aegis” (MPP III.1001). As the navy secured the coasts, the militia secured the western frontier against Indian tribes and nations, sometimes allied with European powers. “If in asserting rights or in repelling wrongs war should come upon us, our regular force should be increased to an extent proportioned to the emergency, and our present small Army is a nucleus around which such force could be formed and embodied. Bu for purposes of defense under ordinary circumstances we must rely upon the electors of the country,” an armed and vigilant citizenry organized as militia troops, on call as needed (MPP III.1166).
Conclusion
Andrew Jackson does indeed qualify as “the first truly American president” in the sense that his soul matured within the American regime, its way of life and no other. Tocqueville would have recognized his restlessness, his hard-headed practicality, his love of liberty and equality as habits of mind and heart seen preeminently in the great democratic republic.
In his defense of the United States Constitution, Jackson saw both energetic character of Americans and the need for firm but limited governance of that propensity by their elected officers on all levels of government. He understood that the Constitution constitutes a government, not a league, a confederation not a federation. He denied the constitutional right to nullify federal laws and to secede from the Union, as asserted and implied, respectively, by Calhoun and his political allies in the South. In this he anticipated Abraham Lincoln, who was a Jackson man when it came to federalism. Jackson sought to maintain the Constitution as an instrument of self-government by democrats, not the few—whether these were senators, Supreme Court justices, plantation oligarchs, or bankers.
Jackson never stood taller as a democrat than in his political economy. Low taxes would allow self-governing mechanics, small businessmen, and (above all) farmers to keep their money and their independence from would-be aristocrats. The national bank looked suspiciously like such an oligarchy with aristocratic pretensions; Jackson put it on the course of dissolution. Public works projects or ‘internal improvements’ were licit only if they served interstate, not intrastate, commerce; federal funding to the states would bring the states to depend upon the federal government, again leading to a sort of aristocracy of federal officers. Here, Lincoln departed from Jackson, endorsing ‘The American System’ of finance and internal improvements while lauding Senator Clay as his “beau ideal of a statesman.”
Indian removal, harsh though it was, aimed at protecting the natural rights of both American and Amerindians. Jackson respected the diversity that of the growing population of the extended republic, but judged that diversity can only be held together in one nation when the citizens are really citizens—that is, civil. Some Amerindians had not been civil to one another, or to Americans; some Americans had not been civil to Amerindians. Both populations had at times exhibited barbaric and indeed savage behavior. Separation of these populations was the best of the several bad choices available, especially given the expanding population of the Americans and their surge toward the Mississippi River and beyond. Lincoln advocated a similar policy of colonization for freed slaves.
In his foreign and military policies, too, Jackson defended American democratic republicanism. Respecting foreign nations, he insisted on reciprocally just and honorable treatment regarding reparations owed to the United States by nations which had violated our neutrality. For military protection he relied primarily on the militia—the democracy armed—secondarily on a navy to guard America’s extensive coastlines, and only then on a standing army, which might turn into yet another kind of aristocracy if allowed to expand too much. Lincoln considered the attempted secession of the South an instance when the army would require dramatic if temporary expansion in defense of the Union Jackson, following the Founders, had regarded as indispensable to the defense of American republicanism.
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