Everything Wrong with the Jackson Administration

Even Jackson’s somewhat sympathetic standard biographer, Robert Remini, recognized Jackson’s penchant for acting the tyrant on occasion. While he was military governor of New Orleans during the War of 1812, Jackson “established a police state with no other authority but his own” that led to a period of “lunatic militarism” in the days before and after the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. “Highhanded, bizarre, and dangerous” actions made Jackson unpopular until he redeemed his reputation through victory over the British Army. Tendency towards Caesarism typified Jackson, but he seemed to genuinely believe he had a right to exercise power and to disregard the people’s elected representatives. As president, Jackson viewed himself as a tribune of the people. He disliked the electoral college and called for a constitutional amendment to get rid of it altogether. Raw majoritarian electoral will—led of course by Jackson himself—must govern. Minority or individual rights, whether they be the communal rights of Indians or the right of financiers to constitutional due process, remained subordinate to Jackson’s will, which he claimed was the ostensible will of the people.¹

The belief that presidential will replicated and represented an amorphous will of an equally nebulous American people drove Jackson and made him in many ways the first American populist. In the Early Republic, as now, political and social resentment engendered political populism. David S. Brown rightly noted that the populist script of the early 21^st century, “that economic inequality, liberal elitism, and demographic change in America and elsewhere have encouraged a backlash reflected in the rise of charismatic strongman leadership, is one that applies to Jackson as well.” Jackson’s own resentments—personal and political weren’t particularly separate in his mind—against the national bank’s influence, “against a political system that routinely returned quasi aristocrats to the presidency, and against a supreme court that disagreed with him on the Indian removal question,” were shared by large segments of contemporary American society. All of Jackson’s political antagonists, Brown noted, somehow embodied the prerogatives of established institutions that “in practice ministered primarily to Atlantic Seaboard Society.” Populist indifference to constitutionalism has helped drive cults of personality from the Jacksonian Era to our own. The cult of personality that developed around Jackson convinced him he was above the law, and this penchant for authoritarian action throughout his presidency offered ample proof that the people’s will—defined according to Jackson’s political preferences and needs and inevitably synonymous with his own will—was the final authority, not the Constitution.²

Jackson’s authoritarianism might have been palatable had it not been so patently hypocritical. Unlike his predecessor John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s politics were hardly fixed. He declared his commitment to democracy, non-​sectarianism in religion, and free market principles. Throughout his presidency, Andrew Jackson argued that attempts to institutionalize Christian politics and also federal economic interventions were likewise insidious invasions of the rights of individual citizens. Jackson’s decision to kill the Second Bank of the United States and his supposed refusal to allow Christian ministers or churches greater influence in federal politics stemmed from his belief that the American republic’s constitution guaranteed individual liberties. He told the American people that the national bank was nothing more than a government-​sponsored corporation that enriched a select group of urban elites at the expense of the rest of the citizenry.

All the while, Jackson felt free to garner the support of Southern Protestants who extolled his politics as delivering them from northern moralism regarding slavery and the constitutional and treaty rights of Native Americans. And his free market commitments understandably seemed laughable after he killed the Second Bank of the United States, only to funnel its moneys—by raw executive fiat—into often corrupt state banks inevitably run by his political supporters or by personal friends.³

The presidency of Andrew Jackson—and especially his second term—served as the catalyst for a major political battle over the place of capitalism in the American republic. For nearly two decades, capitalism transformed American culture, economic life, and society. Capitalism’s greatest champion emerged in the person of Henry Clay, who joined liberal capitalism to socio-​cultural and political nationalism in the form of his “American system.” Economic protectionism defended manufacturers from cheaper European (and especially British) products such as textiles. A firm embrace of modern financial instrumentation—a national bank, an increasingly cash-​based economy, and a stable currency—guaranteed that those who produced goods sold in the United States enjoyed the special care of the federal government. Clay’s system wasn’t libertarian in its modern sense, but likewise it was hardly socialistic. A federally-​funded system of internal improvements built roads and canals, improved ports and dredged rivers, and generally made moving the United States’ manufactures quicker and cheaper. Federal land auctions allowed the general government to oversee western settlement, which, at least in the free states and territories north of the Missouri Compromise line, generally favored the socio-​economic structures of bourgeois liberal capitalism.⁴

Defenders of Jackson, like historian Arthur Schlesinger, saw the seventh president not as a defender of capitalism but as a personification of democracy. Schlesinger’s view witnessed a sort of bastardized resurgence during the presidency of Donald Trump, who casted his presidency in the mold of Jackson the populist. Both interpretations are correct; Jackson was not a champion of capitalism, individual rights, or the free market. He was a champion of democracy. The historical tendency to pit Jackson against John Quincy Adams or against Henry Clay, with the latter two being portrayed, somehow, as statists, ignores entirely the reality that it was Jackson alone, not his rivals, who used the power of the government to take away property and to transfer wealth in a constitutionally dubious and undoubtedly authoritarian way.

Liberal capitalism’s popularity amongst businessmen in northern cities meant that many of capitalism’s most vociferous defenders in the 1830s also attended church regularly and generally conformed to the type of Protestantism identified as “Evangelical.” Christian—and not simply Protestant—piety allowed the sort of disciplined life that made for responsible business owners. The precepts of Christian charity ostensibly meant that believers in the free market treated their workers with at least some altruistic regard for their souls and physical needs. Finally, Christian prioritization of spiritual and not necessarily material rewards for righteousness oriented the devout believer towards eternal goals and not temporal affluence. Historian Richard Pointer pointed out that Presbyterians in Philadelphia “sounded a mixed-​message” as they tried to navigate the tensions between their Christianity and an economic system that tolerated systematic socio-​economic inequality. “A life of Christian discipline kept people from conforming to America’s current passion for wealth, but at the same time it heightened their likelihood for reaping large earthly rewards.” Northern Evangelical capitalists’ message “was not a gospel of crassness, yet it did reflect how extensively emergent capitalism was shaping the proclamation of Christianity” in northern cities especially but also anywhere where capitalism and Evangelical-​style Protestantism interacted.⁵

For Jackson, the question of a free market versus a national bank was a moral question, and the president in his capacity as a protector of the United States’ citizenry and guardian of the Constitution unabashedly framed his bank veto as a moral and religious question. He was convinced that God was on the side of justice and moral government. “I have,” he announced, “done my duty to my country. If sustained by my fellow-​citizens, I shall be grateful and happy; if not, I shall find in the motives which impel me ample grounds for contentment and peace.” Jackson implored his fellow citizens to put their hopes for their “relief and deliverance … on that kind Providence which I am sure watches with peculiar care over the destinies of our Republic, and on the intelligence and wisdom of our countrymen. Through [God’s] abundant goodness and their patriotic devotion our liberty and Union will be preserved.” Without saying, Jackson implied that his veto was a facet of God’s relief and divine deliverance for the American republic.⁶

When pressed about the wisdom of vetoing the bank by members of his own party, Jackson resorted to further religious language. Delegations for states and from the federal congress called on him and begged him to return federal deposits to the Bank of the United States, but their pleas never moved the president. When a group from New York asked the president to restore deposits and recharter the bank, Jackson exploded. “Why am I teased with committees?” he exasperatedly demanded of the gathered New Yorkers. “I am receiving two or three anonymous letters every day,” he indignantly stated, that threatened him with “assassination if I don’t restore the deposits and re-​charter the bank—the abominable institution—the monster, that has grown up out of circumstances, and has attempted to control the government.” Jackson asked rhetorically if he was “to violate my constitutional oath? Is it to be expected that I am to be turned from my purpose? Is Andrew Jackson to bow the knee to the golden calf, as did the Israelites of old?” Jackson understood his veto not simply in terms of expediency but in terms of the rhetoric of the Christian Bible’s morality. Jackson subordinated economic freedoms—supposedly to electoral control and religious morality –but his use of executive power to dole out the national bank’s deposits to crony state banks showed how hollow his commitment to lawful economic policy really was.

Despite his sensational blustering about capitalists using the national bank to enrich themselves, Andrew Jackson’s coalition did not materially change the material condition of the working poor for the better even as he purported to give them a substantive voice. In fact, Jackson seemed more interested in using politics to take revenge on his enemies than he did on becoming a true champion of the working poor. He resorted to class warfare and anti-​capitalist rhetoric throughout his presidency, but never used it more than he did in his war against the national bank. Jackson accused “many of our rich men” of not being “content with equal protection and equal benefits.” They used the Bank of the United States in order “to make them richer by act of Congress.” Through this supposedly nefarious action they attempted “to gratify their desires,” and according to Jackson had “arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundation of our Union.” Jackson’s rhetoric regarding the merchant class dovetailed with his advisor Amos Kendall’s obviously sensational rhetoric regarding the social and political culture of the federal capital at Washington City. “On the whole,” Kendall moaned, “if there is more extravagance, folly, and corruption anywhere in the world than in this city, I do not wish to see that place.” People of moderate income attempted “to imitate foreign ministers, the President, and secretaries, and thus keep themselves poor, when by prudence and economy they might make ample provision for their families.” There was “great room for reform here in almost every respect, and I hope Jackson and his friends will introduce it.”⁷

In fact, neither American businessmen nor the city of Washington were particularly corrupt by the standards of the civilized word. The leadership of the Bank of the United States, far from being indifferent fat cats, stabilized the American monetary regime. Although the bank’s president, the capable Nicholas Biddle, hailed from patrician Philadelphia stock, he disliked partisan politics. His sympathy with Alexander Hamilton on questions regarding high finance was joined with public admiration for the classical liberal legacy of Thomas Jefferson. Biddle even eulogized the third president in 1827. He might not have ever been seen as a political figure at all had Jackson not decided to veto the bank after its successful recharter in 1832. The Bank of the United States, noted Jackson biographer Andrew Burstein, was perfectly well managed. It regulated the availability of credit through its practical control over the loan activities of state banks. Jackson, however, saw the national bank as a “morally suspect institution, a symbol of secret manipulation.” A combination of ignorance and the bank’s status as a private institution that did not answer to him motivated Jackson’s veto of the bank—not a well-​thought-​out concern over the bank’s actual relationship to classical liberal freedoms. Jackson “stubbornly refused to believe that the Bank of the United States, under private management, could contribute to the democratization of American society by extending credit to the yeomanry of the country,” and insisted “that banks, as monopolies, only served to undermine republicanism.”⁸

If Jackson’s veto of the national bank was intended to lead Congress to decide what measured decisions were needed to deal with federal deposits, his decisions would have been evidence of a clear commitment to classical liberalism and republican liberties. Instead Jackson claimed the right to decide what happened to the government’s money for himself. He placed it in state banks of often dubious quality, led by equally dubious partisan supporters. Despite Jackson’s supposed support for urban working people, he created a party machine driven more by corrupt party bosses and place-​seeking than devotion to bettering the lives of the working poor. Jackson’s presidency actually changed very little for working people. Jackson gave them a new political and public stature, but his own animus towards capitalism and his open dislike of the capitalist class meant that his administration ultimately helped neither businessmen nor their workers. Jackson’s ideological commitments led not to prosperity, but instead to the Panic of 1837, the most significant economic downturn the United States had experienced in a generation.⁹

Jackson’s politics shouldn’t have surprised anyone. From the outset of his political career he made his will and dispositions the marker for truth, and rarely allowed himself to be talked out of a position already taken. His actions regarding the second bank of the United States destabilized the currency regime that served the United States well for nearly fifteen years and precipitated the Panic of 1837. Authoritarianism regarding the bank, however, paled in comparison to the scale of federally sponsored and sustained property dispossession and redistribution by the state of Georgia during Indian Removal.

The racial element of Indian Removal and the fact that non-​white peoples were dispossessed of ancestral land is a story that is well-​known. The legal ramifications of granting the federal or a state government the right to unlimited coercion regarding individual property rights seems galling to 21^st-century Americans, but we should not forget that while Cherokee society did not have an analogous tradition of individual property, they did nonetheless believe in possession and right, even if those were understood to be communal or tribal. Cherokees held land in common as members of the “nation;” while they lacked a system of individual land ownership, Cherokees in the Early Republic Era did not believe they lacked the right to their land, whether that right was ancestral, customary, or constitutional under the laws of the United States. Some Cherokees did own land outright, and even those who participated in the communal ownership of the nation could gain long-​term tenure of certain parcels. The fact that Indians did not have a tradition of individual land ownership did not make them strictly communitarians or some sort of indigenous proto-​socialists. When in December 1828 Georgia governor John Forsyth signed into law a bill appropriating all Cherokee land, he was running roughshod over property rights.¹⁰

Georgia’s land grab took place in an era of relative Cherokee prosperity. Since the Washington administration, the American republic had treated Native Americans variously as childlike wards of the Union or a socio-​political problem that needed to be fixed for the advancement of American civilization. Racist and culturalist attitudes of the era led most Americans—even those who sympathized with the difficult position Native Americans found themselves in—to believe that indigenous peoples would eventually go extinct if they were left to their own devices. The only two options federal policymakers treated seriously were removal or some sort of assimilation. With the exception of Jefferson, who proposed an early form of removal, the first six presidents pursued a paternalistic course. The federal government, Protestant churches, and states incentivized Native Americans, especially the sizable nations still left in the South, to implement white societal norms and replicate the hallmarks of American civilization in Cherokee lands. Mary Young noted that during the Early National Era “church and state collaborated to present the Cherokee with a unitary vision of republican, Christian, capitalist civilization.” The ideal American presented to Indians as the model to emulate “lived under written laws framed by chosen representatives and enforced by impartial public authority.” With such laws protecting property of all types, and their own industry and frugality, Indians might become prosperous—or at least that was the pitch. Federal agents and Protestant clerics encouraged Cherokees to partition communally owned lands to male heads of families. They admonished newly propertied Indian men to take up the plow and become farmers. Indian women were to become stolid Protestant matrons overseeing the domestic sphere.¹¹

The plight of the Indians and their dispossession was not merely the result of congressional or federal corruption or incompetence. Indian removal occurred as a direct result of authoritarian executive overreach. The 1830 Indian Removal Act, Alfred A. Cave noted, “neither authorized the unilateral abrogation of treaties guaranteeing Native American land rights within the states, nor the forced relocation of eastern Indians.” Both nonetheless occurred “on a massive scale, during Andrew Jackson’s administration, and were the result, not of an explicit congressional mandate, but an abuse of presidential power.” In order to implement removal, and to do it on the necessary scale to satiate the frontier populists’ desire for land, Jackson “not only disregarded a key section of the Indian Removal Act, but also misused the powers granted to him under the trade and intercourse act of 1802.” Jackson also refused “to honor promises made in his name in order to win congressional support” for removal. He also abrogated “a number of federal treaty commitments to Indians, including some he had personally negotiated.”¹²

Jackson’s legacy has been debated ad nauseum. Even his devotees, however, have acknowledged his penchant for accumulating executive power, an ambition which never stayed within constitutional or even precedential boundaries. His actions regarding the national bank and Indian removal were not the actions of a champion of classical liberal freedoms, but of a populist idealogue determined to exercise as much control as he could over the American republic. This did not mean Jackson’s actions were unpopular; a sizable majority of the American electorate in the 1830s—white men—supported him enthusiastically. Jackson saw himself as the paternalistic guardian of the common man, and he used the government accordingly. Whatever faults classical liberals might find with the national bank and Cherokee communal property, Jackson led the way towards an activist executive and eventually an activist and uncontrolled federal bureaucracy that proved far more problematic in the long run than an enduring national bank or enduring Cherokee communal land-​holding would have been. On the opening page of Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman castigated the idea that the government should be a patron and the citizen a ward as unworthy “of the ideals of free men in a free society.” A paternalistic government, be it Jacksonian paternalism or New Deal liberalism, was obviously “at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny.” Jackson’s predilection for raw majoritarian power was at odds with the classical liberal’s belief that society was “the collection of individuals who compose it.” Jackson might have fought for populist democracy, but his ideology ran routinely roughshod over liberal freedoms.¹³