While urging Congress to lower the high tariffs, Jackson sought and obtained the authority to order federal armed forces to South Carolina to enforce federal laws. Violence seemed imminent, but South Carolina backed down, and Jackson earned credit for preserving the Union in its greatest moment of crisis to that date. Jackson survived an assassination attempt on January 30, , beating his would-be assassin, Richard Lawrence, with his walking cane.
Andrew Jackson died at his home, the Hermitage, of congestive heart failure on June 8, In contrast to his strong stand against South Carolina, Andrew Jackson took no action after Georgia claimed millions of acres of land that had been guaranteed to the Cherokee Indians under federal law, and he declined to enforce a U. Supreme Court ruling that Georgia had no authority over Native American tribal lands. In , the Cherokees signed a treaty giving up their land in exchange for territory west of Arkansas , where in some 15, would head on foot along the so-called Trail of Tears.
The relocation resulted in the deaths of thousands. As a slave-owner himself , Jackson opposed policies that would have outlawed slavery in western territories as the United States expanded. After leaving office, Jackson retired to the Hermitage, where he died in June Start your free trial today. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Andrew Johnson , the 17th U. Johnson, who served from to , was the first American president to be impeached. A tailor before he entered politics, Johnson grew up poor and Rachel Jackson was the wife of U.
This was timely, as voting qualifications for white men were being eased. By , Jackson was ready to win the White House. First, he would suffer through a bruising campaign still recognized today as one of the most malicious in American history.
Technically, Rachel was a bigamist and Jackson her partner in it. They largely stayed away from other controversial issues. They struck back with attacks on corrupt officials in the Adams administration and labeled Adams an elitist who wanted to increase the size and power of government to benefit the aristocracy. In the fall of , the decision fell to the voters, and they overwhelmingly elected Jackson. His victory was seen as a complete repudiation of Adams and his vision for America.
Furthermore, it revealed that some believed the United States government was run by a small group of aristocrats unresponsive to the demands of the voters. Voters trusted Jackson and saw his military accomplishments as an indication he would bring the same success in restoring honor to the government.
It was also the opportunity to lay waste to the barbs and accusations flung during the campaign. Jackson had reached a high point in his life, but its cost proved tragic. He threw his support behind the "American System," Henry Clay's program of congressional aid to economic development through transportation subsidies and protective tariffs.
Adams's activism backfired as Jackson and his publicists mounted a cry to clean out the corruptionists and restore purity and economy in government. This diffuse coalition included both friends and foes of the American System. To break it, Adams men tried to smoke out Jackson's position.
Jackson refused to be pinned down, while his followers fended off questions about his qualifications and experience by touting his battlefield exploits, indomitable patriotism, and opposition to aristocracy and corruption. A good deal of mud was slung on both sides, much of it aimed at Jackson's marriage, his violent escapades, and the incidents of ferocious discipline and of disrespect for civilian authority that dotted his military career.
Adams men painted him as a grasping and bloodthirsty character, a budding tyrant in the model of Caesar or Napoleon, whose election would spell the death of the republic. Jacksonians branded Adams as a corruptionist, an aristocrat, and—ridiculously—a libertine.
In the end, none of the slanders could touch Jackson's invincible popularity. He won easily in , with 56 percent of the vote and electoral votes to Adams's He was the first President elected from west of the Appalachians and, at that time, the oldest man to assume the office. But his victory was touched with grief. As if in response to the torrent of abuse, Rachel sickened and died on December Jackson stood for re-election in By this time he had come out publicly against the American System.
He had also created a new issue by vetoing the recharter of the Bank of the United States. A third party also took the field: the quixotic Anti-Masonic Party, formed in reaction to exposures of political favoritism and corruption by members of the fraternal order of Freemasons.
Strong in some northern states, the Anti-Masons nominated former attorney general William Wirt. They were generally anti-Jackson, but thoughts of uniting with the National Republicans collapsed when Clay refused to denounce the Masonic order, of which both he and Jackson were members. The campaign introduced the national nominating convention in place of the old discredited congressional caucus as a means of selecting a candidate. The National Republicans and Anti-Masons held conventions and adopted formal addresses to the public.
The Bank's open involvement in the presidential campaign convinced him more than ever of its inherent corruption. To draw its fangs until its charter ran out in , he determined to withdraw the federal government's own deposits from the Bank and place them in selected state-chartered banks.
This was a maneuver requiring some delicacy. Under the charter, the secretary of the treasury, not the President, had authority to remove the deposits. He had also to explain his reasons to Congress, where the House of Representatives had just voted by a two-to-one margin that the deposits should stay where they were.
Jackson canvassed his cabinet on removal. Most of them opposed it, but he got the support and arguments he needed from Attorney General Roger Taney.
Jackson drew up a paper explaining his decision, read it to the cabinet, and ordered Treasury Secretary William John Duane to execute the removal. To Jackson's astonishment, Duane refused. He also refused to resign, so Jackson fired him and put Taney in his place.
Taney ordered the removal, which was largely complete by the time Congress convened in December Even many congressional foes of the Bank could not countenance Jackson's proceedings against it. He had defied Congress's intent, rode roughshod over the treasury secretary's statutory control over the public purse, and removed the public funds from the lawfully authorized, responsible hands of the Bank of the United States to an untried, unregulated, and perhaps wholly irresponsible collection of state banks.
To many, Jackson seemed to regard himself as above the law. Fortunately for Jackson, Bank president Nicholas Biddle over-reacted and played into his hands. Regarding the removal of deposits as a declaration of open war, Biddle determined to force a recharter by creating a financial panic. Loss of the deposits required some curtailment of the Bank's loans, but Biddle carried the contraction further than was necessary in a deliberate effort to squeeze businessmen into demanding a recharter.
This manipulation of credit for political ends served only to discredit the Bank and to vindicate Jackson's strictures against it. Congress did not even consider recharter, but it did lash out at Jackson. Clay men and Southern anti-tariffites could not agree on the American System; they could not all agree on rechartering the Bank; but they could unite in their outrage at Jackson's high-handed proceedings against it.
In the session, Jackson's congressional foes converged to form a new party. They took the name of Whigs, borrowed from Revolutionary-era American and British opponents of royal prerogative.
Whigs held a majority in the Senate. They rejected Jackson's nominees for government directors of the Bank of the United States, rejected Taney as secretary of the treasury, and in March , adopted a resolution of censure against Jackson himself for assuming "authority and power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both.
Led by Thomas Hart Benton, Jackson's defenders mounted a crusade to expunge the censure from the Senate journal. They succeeded in , at the end of Jackson's presidency, after Democrats finally won majority control of the Senate.
The Bank, defeated, retired from the fray after the session. When its charter expired it accepted a new one from Pennsylvania and continued to operate as a state institution. Meanwhile, the state banks, cut loose from central restraint and gorged with federal funds, went on a lending spree that helped fuel a speculative boom in western lands. Everything came crashing down in the Panic of , which broke just as Jackson retired from office.
The ensuing depression plagued Martin Van Buren's presidency and lingered on into the s. Jackson's unsatisfactory experiment with the state banks helped drive his economic thinking toward more radical extremes. He renounced all banknote currency and demanded a return to the "hard money" of gold and silver. To that end, and to curb rampant speculation, he ordered the issuance of a "Specie Circular" in requiring payment in coin for western public lands.
By the end of his presidency he was attacking all chartered corporations, including manufacturing concerns, turnpike and canal companies, and especially banks, as instruments of aristocratic privilege and engines of oppression. His Farewell Address in , drafted largely by Taney, warned of an insidious "money power" that threatened to subvert American liberty.
During Jackson's presidency, the momentous question of slavery intruded forcefully into politics. Northern evangelical opponents of slavery known as abolitionists organized and began to bombard the nation and Congress with pleas and petitions to rid the republic of this great wrong.
Defenders of slavery responded with denunciations and with violence. They demanded in the interest of public safety that criticism of slavery be not only answered, but silenced.
Some, especially the South Carolina nullifiers, linked abolitionism to the tariff as part of a systematic campaign of Northern sectional oppression against the South. There is nothing to show that Jackson ever pondered slavery as a fundamental moral question. Such thinking was not in his character: he was a man of action, not of philosophy. He grew up with the institution of slavery and accepted it uncritically.
Like his neighbors, he bought and sold slaves and used them to work his plantation and wait on his needs. Jackson reacted to the abolitionist controversy in purely political terms. He perceived it as a threat to sectional harmony and to his own national Democratic party, and on that ground he condemned the agitation of both sides. During Jackson's administration, Congress began adopting annual "gag rules" to keep discussion of abolition petitions off the House and Senate floor.
In , abolitionists sent thousands of antislavery tracts through the mails directly to southern clergy, officials, and prominent citizens. Many of these were never delivered, intercepted by southern postmasters or by angry mobs. Jackson and Postmaster General Amos Kendall approved their action. Jackson recommended federal suppression of "incendiary publications" and damned the abolitionists' "wicked attempts" to incite a slave rebellion.
His Farewell Address in warned of the dangers of sectional fanaticism, both northern and southern. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S.
Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Lyndon B.
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