America's Greatest 19th Century Presidents (18 page)

Jackson's Cabinet, however, was divided on the issue.  Secretary of the Treasury William J. Duane opposed the decision, and refused to remove the federal deposits.  Jackson was so adamant that he fired Duane and replaced him with Attorney General Roger Taney, who would later become best known as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who wrote the opinion in the
Dred Scott
case. 

The Jackson Administration moved the federal deposits to “pet banks” located throughout the states.  These were hand-picked small banks, often locally or state-based. But the move infuriated some members of Congress were furious.  Led by Senator Henry Clay, the Senate censured President Jackson, the first time in history a president was censured, and it refused to accept Taney's nomination to the Department of the Treasury.  The Senate condemned Jackson's acts as unconstitutional.  But Jackson also had some supporters, and the House issued resolutions supporting Jackson’s destruction of the Bank.

Throughout the crisis, a new anti-Jackson political party was born.  The National Republicans, led by Clay and Quincy Adams, acquired the label of “Whigs.”  This term was given by President Jackson himself, who labeled them after a British political party that supported the interests of the rich and industrial.  Regardless, the party appreciated the label and used it over the next few decades. 

While Jackson won the Bank battle, his later actions threw his successes into question.  In 1836, Jackson issued the Specie Circular, requiring all purchases of federal land in the west to be done using precious metals, not paper money.  This led to a run on Jackson's “pet banks,” creating a financial crisis and an economic depression.  With that, the political success of the Democratic coalition began to disintegrate.

Texas

Jackson's second term as President was dominated by another issue: Texas.  Jackson, like his predecessor, tried to buy the territory from Mexico, but had failed.  Events in 1835 and 1836, however, completely changed the situation of Texas' relation to the United States.

After the Louisiana Purchase, the United States stretched westward to the Rocky Mountains, establishing an enormous new area available for settlement and farming. After the expanse of this territory became known to the public, it was possible to imagine the United States spreading from sea to sea, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Some Democrats believed that the country would ideally be made up of settlers and farmers all owning land and having a relatively equal distribution of wealth, and population growth in the United States necessitated the growth of the territory of the United States. Besides, many supporters of the expansion believed the country had a moral duty to expand across the continent, so the United States could bring democracy and liberty to areas that were unsettled or ruled by undemocratic foreign powers.

This idea, which came to be known as “Manifest Destiny”, was popular across the country, but it did have some opponents. The idea that the United States should continue to add territory was opposed by Whigs and some Democrats, who instead favored concentrating on industrialization and building America's economy.

As a result of Manifest Destiny, in the decades leading up to the 1830s, white American settlers had settled in Texas to such an extent that whites outnumbered Mexicans four to one in the region by the early 1830s. Nevertheless, Mexico ruled with an iron fist over the settlers, demanding that they convert to Catholicism and abolish slavery. The American settlers bristled under Mexican authority and demanded the repeal of these laws, but Mexico refused.  In 1835, a rebellion broke out.

In 1836, the Texians, as they were called, declared their independence from Mexico, and war broke out. Ironically, the war is best known for the Battle of the Alamo, which has become one of the most famous battles in American history despite the fact the United States was not officially involved. After the small garrison of Americans was wiped out at the Alamo, it became a rallying cry for the Texians. In response, Tennesseean Sam Houston, who had distinguished himself under Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, led a force into Texas and fought the Mexicans at the Battle of San Jacinto.  After Houston’s victory there, Mexico acknowledged the independence of the new Republic of Texas. 

On July 4, 1836, Congress joined Mexico in acknowledging the independence of the Republic of Texas.  Jackson, however, was a strong advocate of Texas' admission to the union as a state, a position many Southerners also favored. On the other hand, some Americans, like Senator Benjamin Swift of Vermont, were vocally opposed to Texas' admission, arguing that it would adversely affect relations between the North and South. Swift was one of a growing number of abolitionists who believed no slave state should ever be again admitted to the United States.  Though Texas would not join the United States under the Jackson Administration, the arguments surrounding the expansion of slavery into the West, which ultimately played a decisive role in leading to Civil War, began on his watch.

Chapter 6: Post-Presidency, Death, and Legacy, 1837-Present

Photograph of Jackson near the end of his life, 1844

Hermitage and Death

Jackson was ill with tuberculosis when the Election of 1836 was held, so he did not run for reelection. Instead, much like Jefferson had done before him, Jackson sought to solidify his legacy by hand-picking his successor.  He chose a long-time loyal ally from the North, Vice President Martin Van Buren of New York.  Van Buren easily won election in 1836, but his four years in office were largely forgetful, and Van Buren remains one of the most obscure presidents in American history. Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840 and lost to William Henry Harrison, the first Whig President to be elected, and, more famously, the president who served the shortest time as a result of falling ill after his inaugural address.

Van Buren

After leaving the White House, Jackson returned to the Hermitage.  He quickly recovered from his bout of tuberculosis, and his health was restored.  Over his remaining years, the former President began demonstrating less of his legendary feistiness and became more religious, something that would have made his mother proud after he had kept his distance from the church as a teen. Jackson also spent much time with family, and continued to advocate for the annexation of Texas.

In the late spring of 1845, Jackson was in his final decline, at age 78.  His children reported that the President's body was swelling and that he was in agonizing pain.  On June 8, 1845, the former President and hero of New Orleans died of natural causes. President Jackson's funeral was held at the Hermitage, where it is estimated more than 3,000 people came to see Old Hickory's body.

Legacy

President Jackson's left the nation with an era of “Jacksonian Democracy”, an era of the common man was a product both of Jackson's policies and his personality. In terms of character, Jackson was a significant outlier not only among the early presidents, but among most of those that followed him.  While presidents besides Jackson also had “rags to riches” stories, Jackson never joined the cultural elite. He was poorly educated and held no interest in the cultural affinities of the rich.  He remained firmly a man of the Western frontier, preferring the rough-and-tumble crudeness that was the culture of Tennessee.  His inauguration celebration, which was more of a western-style bar fight than a stately ball, attests to Jackson's cultural alignment.

This personality cult of the “common man” was one significant element of Jacksonian Democracy, representing the transformation of American government into self-government by the “common man.”  But policy was not completely unimportant.  Jackson's stringent opposition to the national bank was on the policy agenda of rural Southern farmers for decades.  Achieving the Bank's death was a significant accomplishment on behalf of this constituency.  Jackson's violent extermination of the Native Americans and his support for slavery were also strongly supported regionally.

In hindsight, though, historians of Andrew Jackson question whether the evolution of Jacksonian Democracy was worth the price.  Systematically exterminating the Native Americans has gone down as a great stain on American history, as has the existence of slavery at a time when most advanced industrial nations had eliminated the institution decades earlier.  Among Presidents, Jackson was by far the most anti-Indian and pro-slavery.  While some Presidents, such as George Washington, had supported slavery, they did so with hesitance.  Jackson, however, was firm and unrelenting in his support for Southern slavery and vocally detested those who opposed the peculiar institution.  He even signed into law a ban on the mailing of anti-slavery pamphlets, outraging abolitionists.

Other policy initiatives of the Jackson Administration left horrible results for the United States.  While the defeat of the Bank was hailed as a triumph for the common man, it led to one of the worst economic crises in American history.  On the Nullification Crisis, Jackson left a solid precedent for opposition to threats of secession with military force, a legacy that President Lincoln came to rely on somewhat less than 30 years later.  However, elsewhere Jackson was contradictory, when he allowed a state to defy the Supreme Court in the case of Worcester v. Georgia.  In his public statements, Jackson had a mixed record on secessions and threats to Union: while he was strong during the Nullification Crisis, he admitted that states should reserve the right to revolutionary secession if their rights were severely infringed by the federal government.  This, of course, was an important piece of the argument for Southern secession during the Civil War.

In the end, Jackson is probably best described as the country’s most controversial President, and in some ways, his legacy has never changed from past to present.  The same constituencies that detested Jackson as an ignorant, backcountry fool continue to despise his legacy today.  In the North, particularly in New England, Jackson is viewed as somewhat of an embarrassment today, which is ironic given the dominance of his political party, the Democrats, in the region, who continue to celebrate the “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner” every year.  In the South, Jackson's legacy is much more favorable, where he is hailed as a noble and patriotic man of the people.

Despite the partisan and regional debates over Jackson's legacy, all agree on one thing: Jackson was a great American general who helped inspire the nation in the War of 1812.  Without Jackson, that war would have remained a grave stain on the confidence of the American democratic experiment.  Because of Jackson's victory in New Orleans, the nation felt its disastrous war actually ended victoriously and was thus at least partially justified.  In addition, whether Jackson's Presidency was for the best or the worst, his character and background opened the doors of the White House and American government to a whole new type of American, revolutionizing the very character of the American nation ever since.

Bibliography

Brinkley, Alan and Davis Dyer.  The American Presidency: The Authoritative Reference.  Boston:

              Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.

Meacham, Jon.  American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.  New York: Random

              House, 2008.

Remini, Robert V.  Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821.  New York:

              Harper Row, 1977.

Smith, Carter and Allen Weinstein.  Presidents: Every Question Answered.  New York: Hylas

              Publishing, 2004.

Abraham Lincoln

Chapter 1: Early Life and Education, 1809-1842