John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. By then an older generation had passed away and Americans were living in a changed world. The Federalist Party was gone. And strangely enough, so was the dream shared by all the Founders, that political parties would fade away. Instead, Americans fell head over heels for parties, and built a new style of democracy based on them.
The last of the old order was James Monroe of Virginia, who followed Madison as president (and died on July 4, too, in 1831). As an eighteen-year-old, Monroe had crossed the Delaware with Washington and been wounded in the battle afterward. Tall and angular, he was the last president to powder his hair and tie it back, the last to pull on knee britches, high white stockings, and buckled shoes. But more was changing than the fashions of the day. Peo- ple behaved differently, with a more democratic air—even if the changes came so gradually that many Americans didn’t notice.
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Visitors from Europe did. They were astonished that a complete stranger might come up, shake hands, and begin asking personal questions, such as “what my business is here, and whether I carry a pistol about me; also whether I believe that it isn’t lucky to play cards on Sundays.” European common folk spoke to their “betters” only if their betters spoke to them. Worse, Europeans found it hard to tell who in America was rich or poor. A simple oyster seller along the streets of Philadelphia might wear a sleek coat, glossy hat, and doeskin gloves. Even if his outfit was not as well made as a gen- tleman’s, it was tailored in the same style. Climbing aboard one of the new steamboats that chugged up and down rivers, Europeans were surprised to find no first-class cabins. “The rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant, the polite and the vulgar, all herd on the cabin floor, feed at the same table, sit in each others laps,” complained one gentleman. At the dining table, Americans rushed in, loaded up their plates, and “pitchforked down” huge quantities of food within a matter of minutes. At theaters they slouched in chairs, put their feet up on the bench in front of them, and didn’t bother to take off their hats. Men chewed tobacco constantly and spit, indoors and out. “A perfect shower of saliva,” groused a visit- ing Englishwoman.
Politics were just as free and easy. In Jefferson’s day, most of- fice seekers were gentlemen who expected ordinary folk to choose them to lead. By the 1830s, if a gentleman did run for office, he took care to act humble. “If a candidate be dressed farmlike,” confided one congressman, “he is well received and kindly remembered.” On the campaign trail, frontiersman Davy Crockett didn’t give formal addresses. Instead he confessed to his audience that “there had been a little bit of speech in me a while ago, but I believed I couldn’t get it out”—which made everyone roar out “in a mighty laugh.” After a few more jokes, Davy admitted he “was as dry as a powder horn” and invited everyone “to wet our whistles a little” at the liquor stand. His poor opponent was left behind to speak to only a handful of remaining listeners.
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During the early years of the Republic, only men who owned property could run for office—or even vote. But one by one states dropped these requirements, allowing more ordinary Americans to make a career of public service. Martin Van Buren of New York followed this path. The son of innkeepers in the Dutch-speaking town of Kinderhook, young Martin learned English as a second language. He got ahead in politics by listening politely, calculating carefully, and setting up a political network, the Bucktails, whose members were stoutly loyal to him. Van Buren was so successful at getting bills passed that he was nicknamed “the Little Magician.” And he saw what the Founders, for all their wisdom, had missed. Political parties would never fade away, and should not. Parties were “highly useful to the country,” he insisted. As they competed fiercely against each other, they defended the interests of ordinary citizens. They kept their rivals honest by watching them like hawks, and they became expert at rousing supporters with rallies and torchlight parades, challenging opponents in newspa- pers and public debates, holding barbecues, promoting campaign songs, and wetting whistles. Their efforts stirred up thousands of citizens. In 1824, only one out of four eligible men bothered to vote in the presidential election. By 1840, three out of four did.
In the early days, party leaders chose candidates by holding a private meeting called a caucus. But many people began to con- demn “King Caucus” as a backroom meeting that kept out ordi- nary citizens. Instead, parties held political conventions to make nominations, which allowed more people to get involved. But the new system came too late for the 1824 election, when no fewer than four candidates—all of them Republicans—ran for president. None gained more than half the votes in the Electoral College, so Congress had to choose a winner from among the top three, as the Constitution specified. John Quincy Adams, son of the sec- ond president, emerged as the winner, even though Adams had come in second in both the popular vote and in the Electoral Col- lege. He won because Henry Clay of Kentucky, the candidate with
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the least votes, convinced his followers in Congress to support Adams.
That left the man who had come in first—General Andrew Jackson—distinctly annoyed. During the War of 1812 Jackson’s sol- diers had nicknamed him Old Hickory because he was as tough and unyielding as the tree itself. In 1824, most political leaders had not taken him seriously. “One of the most unfit men I know of” to become president, commented old Thomas Jefferson. Jackson became convinced that the election had been stolen through a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Henry Clay, especially after Adams turned around and appointed Clay to be his secretary of state. Four years later, Jackson’s supporters stuck up hickory poles on steeples, gave away hickory canes and brooms, and voted for their man in greater numbers than ever. Jackson swept into office at the head of a new party, the Democrats. Adams and Clay even- tually reorganized and renamed their party the Whigs.
Jackson’s followers called him “the Hero” and “Old Hickory” and many more nicknames, most with the people in them. The new president was “a man of the people”; he championed the “will of the people.” He was the people’s idol, the people’s servant. And he behaved very much like one of the people, in a larger-than-life sort of way. Jackson’s parents had traveled Pennsylvania’s Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia west to the Appalachians and then south, to settle in the Carolina backcountry. There, young Andrew stud- ied law by day and partied by night. Brawling in barrooms, sporting with young ladies, moving outhouses in the wee hours as a prank, he was a “roaring, game-cocking” fellow, one neighbor recalled. Moving to Nashville, Tennessee, Jackson served as a prosecutor and later as a member of Congress. Meanwhile, he bought a cot- ton plantation and built it up, until eventually it used the labor of a hundred slaves. In March 1829 thousands of people flocked to Jackson’s inauguration, clogging the roads and crowding into the presidential mansion, now known as the White House. Barrels of punch were spilled, glasses and china broken, and satin-covered
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chairs stained by muddy boots, as “the people” clambered onto every spare inch of space to see their man. He had become a sym- bol of America’s new politics of equality.
What did equality mean to these Americans? Not that all peo- ple were equally talented, equally educated, or equally rich. Not even that they should be equal in those ways. What mattered most was that every citizen have an equal chance to get ahead. Or, as one American put it, “Every man shall be free to become as unequal as he can.” The people wanted not equality, but equality of opportunity. In trying to give everyone that chance, Jackson became espe- cially suspicious of banks. The largest corporation in the country was the Bank of the United States, which Alexander Hamilton had promoted as necessary to help the economy run smoothly. The bank held all the deposits of the federal government. It issued paper money and made loans. All this gave it a great deal of power over ordinary people’s lives. It had angered many during a finan- cial crash known as the Panic of 1819, when businesses failed and people were thrown out of work or even out of their homes, if they couldn’t pay their mortgages. The bank had taken away so many houses with bad mortgages, it seemed sometimes as if it owned en- tire towns. Jackson took such experiences personally. He had once nearly gone bankrupt himself. When Congress extended the life of the bank for another fifteen years, against his wishes, Old Hickory declared war on the “monster,” as he called it. “The Bank is trying to kill me,” he told his ally Martin Van Buren, “but I will kill it.” And he did, vetoing the bill and then ordering that federal deposits be taken out of the bank and put in state banks.
For a while good times continued without the bank. But it had performed important services, even though it sometimes acted in a high-handed way. Without its guidance, the economy finally crashed: the Panic of 1819 seemed mild compared to the Panic of 1837. By then Jackson was no longer president. Martin Van Buren had succeeded him and, sadly for the Little Magician, the people gave him a new nickname: Martin Van Ruin.
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A strange lesson can be learned here. In defeating the Monster Bank, Jackson had carried out the will of the people. And he and the people, it turned out, didn’t understand the bank’s importance. But a democracy doesn’t succeed because the people are always right. Any government is sure to be wrong sometimes. The dif- ference is, kings or tyrants can ignore their mistakes because they answer to no one. A democracy succeeds because, when mistakes are made, the people feel them and have the power to correct their errors. This they did in the election of 1840, when the Whig candi- date for president, William Henry Harrison, soundly thumped the Democrat, poor Van Ruin. In that sense, the system worked. The people had corrected their own mistakes at the ballot box.
But America’s new style of democracy contained a deeper flaw, one that could not be mended so easily. Although every American was supposed to have an equal opportunity to succeed, in truth, large chunks of the people had been left out of the system. Women could not vote. Neither could most African Americans, whether slave or free. As for Indians, their rights and wishes were ignored almost completely.
Native Americans still controlled much of North America in 1820. Even east of the Mississippi River, well over one hundred thousand lived on their own lands. Of these, many still hunted, fished, and planted corn, but others had thoroughly adopted white ways. Traveling through Georgia, you might meet a Creek Indian chief named—not Little Turtle or Wingina—but William McIntosh. His father was a Scottish trader, his mother a Creek. Although McIntosh dressed in Indian leggings and moccasins, he wore a ruffled shirt and black tie, as a white gentleman would. He owned a plantation and slaves to work it. He fought alongside An- drew Jackson during the War of 1812, against other Indians. None of these Indians, no matter what their names or customs, were given an equal chance in the new democracy. Andrew Jack- son’s own plantation was carved out of Indian lands and Jackson himself led the way in taking those lands during the War of 1812. By
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the time he finished forcing Indians to sign treaties, he was person- ally responsible for adding one-third of Tennessee, three-quarters of Florida and Alabama, and one-fifth of Georgia and Mississippi to the United States. As president, he proposed that the remaining Indians living east of the Mississippi should move across the river to lands in present-day Oklahoma. Some Indians took up arms to resist; they were put down by military force. The Cherokee na- tion, which had its own written constitution, tried to protect itself using American law. It took the state of Georgia to court when Georgia took away its Cherokee laws and rights; and the Supreme Court sided with the Cherokees. But Jackson simply ignored the court’s decision. About fifteen thousand Indians were forced off their lands, some at bayonet point, and made to march hundreds of miles along a “Trail of Tears” to their new “reservations”—land set aside for them. Often robbed of their horses, bedding, and cooking gear, and marching barefoot in winter weather with only summer clothes, over three thousand Indians died along the way.
In his boldest battle as president, Jackson faced off against the state of South Carolina. There, wealthy planters protested the tar- iffs that Congress had placed on manufactured goods imported into the United States. The tariffs drove up the price that planters paid for such items. Northern manufacturers, on the other hand, liked the tariffs because they made it possible for them to sell sim- ilar American-made goods at a cheaper price. South Carolina was angry enough to hold a special convention, proclaiming that any state in the Union could nullify a law it believed was unconstitu- tional. South Carolina not only declared that the tariff would not be collected in the state, it also insisted that if Congress didn’t re- peal the law, South Carolina had a perfect right to secede, or with- draw, from the Union.
Jackson was a southerner and a plantation owner, so he might have been expected to support South Carolina. But he took the threat as a personal insult. He had been elected by the people to enforce federal laws, and South Carolina couldn’t pick and choose
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the ones it wanted to obey! Nor could it secede without the per- mission of the other states. The Union was “perpetual,” Old Hick- ory warned, and if South Carolina tried to resist his authority with force, he would “hang the first man of them I can get my hands on to the first tree I can find.”
In this face-off, South Carolina blinked. It gave up the idea of nullification, although in years to come it continued to consider secession. Jackson had a hunch that South Carolina really wanted “disunion,” he told a friend. It wanted to start its own “southern confederacy.” The fight over the tariff was only an excuse. “The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question,” he predicted. If northerners could convince Congress to pass tariffs, what was to stop them from interfering with slavery?
In an earlier chapter I spoke about the twin histories of equality and inequality—how these forces seemed to be uneasy partners. As the belief in equality and freedom spread during the eighteenth century, so, too, did slavery. The same could be said about the new politics during the age of Jackson. Most white Americans expected to be treated equal in ways that astonished Europeans. Yet the equal rights of Indians were ignored. And African Americans—whether free or enslaved—found themselves being treated more harshly. White Americans in both the North and South were claiming that the African race was naturally inferior and could never be equal. The dance between slavery and freedom was hardly done; it was only becoming more frantic. There was a reason for this—as the next chapter will show.
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