By , universal white-male suffrage was the norm, and by , nearly all requirements to own property or pay taxes had been dropped. The fact that many men were now legally allowed to vote did not necessarily mean they would, and local parties systematically sought out potential voters and pulled them to the polls. Voter turnout soared during the Second Party System, reaching about 80 percent of the adult white men by However, the Free Soil Jacksonians, notably Martin Van Buren, argued for limitations on slavery in the new areas to enable the poor white man to flourish; they split with the main party briefly in The Whigs generally opposed Manifest Destiny and expansion, saying the nation should build up its cities.
Many Jacksonians held the view that rotating political appointees in and out of office was not only the right, but also the duty, of winners in political contests. It was theorized that patronage would encourage political participation by the common man and would make a politician more accountable for poor government service by his appointees. Jacksonians also held that long tenure in the civil service was corrupting, so civil servants should be rotated out of office at regular intervals.
However, patronage often led to the hiring of incompetent and sometimes corrupt officials due to the emphasis on party loyalty above any other qualifications. Like the Jeffersonians, who strongly believed in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, Jacksonians initially favored a federal government of limited powers. As the Jacksonians consolidated power, they more often advocated for expanding federal power and presidential power in particular. Complementing a strict construction of the Constitution, the Jacksonians generally favored a hands-off approach to the economy, in contrast to the Whig program sponsoring modernization, railroads, banking, and economic growth.
The U. Senate censured Jackson on March 28, , for his actions removing U. When the Jacksonians achieved a majority in the Senate, the censure was expunged. In , South Carolina nullified, or declared void, the tariff legislation of , and set in motion the right of a state to nullify any federal laws that went against its interests. Although Jackson sympathized with the South in the tariff debate, he believed it was important to maintain a strong union with effective powers for the central government, and the issue led to a bitter rivalry between Jackson and Vice President John C.
In December of , Calhoun resigned as vice president to become a U. On January 30, , what is believed to be the first attempt to kill a sitting president of the United States occurred just outside the United States Capitol. Davis, Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter from England, aimed a pistol at Jackson, which misfired. Lawrence pulled out a second pistol, which also misfired. Lawrence was restrained. Historians believe the humid weather contributed to the double misfiring.
Later, Lawrence told doctors that he blamed Jackson for the loss of his job. Lawrence was deemed insane and institutionalized. The failed assassination attempt led many to believe Jackson was blessed by the same providence that protected the young nation he governed, which in turn fueled the American desire to expand during the s.
The modern Democratic Party arose in the s out of factions from the largely disbanded Democratic-Republican Party. The modern Democratic Party was formed in the s from former factions of the Democratic-Republican Party, which had largely collapsed by It was primarily built by Martin Van Buren, who rallied a cadre of politicians in every state behind war hero Andrew Jackson of Tennessee.
The spirit of Jacksonian democracy animated the party from the early s to the s, shaping the Second Party System, with the Whig Party serving as the main opposition.
The new Democratic Party became a coalition of farmers, city-dwelling laborers, and Irish Catholics. While it was weak in New England, it was strong everywhere else, and it won most national elections thanks to its strength in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia by far, the most populous states at the time as well as the frontier lands to the west.
From to , banking and tariffs were the central domestic policy issues. Democrats strongly favored expansion to new farm lands, as typified by their attacks on and expulsion of eastern American Indians and their invasion of vast amounts of new land in the West after The party favored the war with Mexico and opposed anti-immigrant nativism.
Both Democrats and Whigs were divided on the issue of slavery. In the s, the Locofocos in New York City were radically democratic, anti-monopoly, and proponents of hard money and free trade. Their chief spokesman was William Leggett. At this time, labor unions were few, though some were loosely affiliated with the party.
The Democrats later got the presidency back in with James K. During his presidency, Polk lowered tariffs, set up a subtreasury system, and began and directed the Mexican-American War, in which the United States acquired much of the modern-day American Southwest.
A major cause of his defeat was the new Free Soil Party, which opposed slavery expansion and split the votes of the Democratic Party, particularly in New York where the electoral votes went to Taylor. Democrats in Congress passed the hugely controversial Compromise of In state after state, however, the Democrats gained small but permanent advantages over the Whig Party, which finally collapsed in , fatally weakened by its division over slavery and nativism.
The fragmented opposition could not stop the election of Democrats Franklin Pierce in and James Buchanan in Polk, Franklin Pierce, and New York financier August Belmont, this faction broke with the agrarian and strict constructionist orthodoxies of the past and embraced commerce, technology, regulation, reform, and internationalism.
They called for Congressional land grants to the states, claiming that internal improvements should be locally rather than federally sponsored.
Young America claimed that modernization would perpetuate the agrarian vision of Jeffersonian Democracy by allowing yeomen farmers to sell their products and therefore prosper.
They tied internal improvements to free trade while accepting moderate tariffs as a necessary source of government revenue. They supported the Independent Treasury the Jacksonian alternative to the Second Bank of the United States not as a scheme to quash the special privileges of the Whig monied elite, but as a device to spread prosperity to all Americans.
While the spoils system of awarding government jobs to political supporters had existed for a long time, it was greatly popularized under Andrew Jackson.
In American politics, a spoils system or patronage system is a practice in which a political party, after winning an election, gives government jobs to its voters as a reward for working toward victory. In such a system, jobs are also awarded as incentives so individuals will continue working for the party. This type of practice is in contrast to a merit-based system, in which political offices are awarded to individuals with the highest merit, regardless of political activity.
Marcy in reference to the victory of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party in the election of In other nations, spoils systems are common, particularly in areas traditionally governed by tribal organizations or kinship groups. Before March 4, , moderation had prevailed in the transfer of political power from one presidency to another. Supporters of newly elected President Andrew Jackson had been lavished with promises of positions in return for political support, and these promises were honored by an astonishing number of removals after Jackson assumed power.
A total of officials were removed from government positions—nearly 10 percent of all such posts. The Jackson administration attempted to explain this unprecedented purge as reform, or constructive turnover; however, in the months following the changes, it became obvious that the sole criterion for the extensive turnover was political loyalty to Andrew Jackson.
The most targeted organization within the federal government was the Postal Service. At that time, the Postal Service was the largest department in the federal government and had even more personnel than the war department.
The "spoils system" of government patronage inaugurated by Jackson inspired activity and instilled discipline within party ranks. Jackson and the Democrats cast their party as the embodiment of the people's will, the defender of the common man against the Whig "aristocracy.
After the War of , constitutional changes in the states had broadened the participatory base of politics by erasing traditional property requirements for suffrage and by making state offices and presidential electors popularly elective.
By the time Jackson was elected, nearly all white men could vote and the vote had gained in power. In , only half the states chose presidential electors by popular vote; by , all did except South Carolina. Jackson and the Democrats benefited from and capitalized upon these changes, but in no sense did they initiate them. The presence of a class component in Jacksonian parties, setting Democratic plain farmers and workers against the Whig bourgeoisie or business elite, is argued to this day.
One can read Democratic hosannas to the plain people as a literal description of their constituency or as artful propaganda.
Once the popular Jackson left the scene, the two parties were very nearly equal in their bases of popular support. Presidential elections through the s were among the closest in history, while party control of Congress passed back and forth. Close competition and nearly universal white-male suffrage turned political campaigns into a combination of spectator sport and participatory street theater.
Whigs as well as Democrats championed the common man and marshaled the masses at barbeques and rallies. Both parties appealed to ordinary voters with riveting stump speeches and by crafting candidates into folk heroes. Whigs answered the popularity of "Old Hickory" Andrew Jackson, hero of New Orleans, with figures like "Old Tippecanoe" William Henry Harrison, victor of the rousing "log cabin" presidential campaign of With both parties chasing every vote, turnout rates spiraled up toward 80 per cent of the eligible electorate by Looking beyond the white male electorate, many of the Democrats' postures seem profoundly anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic, judged not only by a modern standard but against the goals of the burgeoning humanitarian and reform movements of that time.
Mortgaged farmers and an emerging proletariat in the Northeast, nonslaveholders in the South, tenants and would-be yeomen in the West—all had reasons to think that the spread of commerce and capitalism would bring not boundless opportunities but new forms of dependence. And in all sections of the country, some of the rising entrepreneurs of the market revolution suspected that older elites would block their way and shape economic development to suit themselves.
By the s, these tensions fed into a many-sided crisis of political faith. To the frustration of both self-made men and plebeians, certain eighteenth-century elitist republican assumptions remained strong, especially in the seaboard states, mandating that government be left to a natural aristocracy of virtuous, propertied gentlemen.
Simultaneously, some of the looming shapes of nineteenth-century capitalism—chartered corporations, commercial banks, and other private institutions—presaged the consolidation of a new kind of moneyed aristocracy.
And increasingly after the War of , government policy seemed to combine the worst of both old and new, favoring the kinds of centralized, broad constructionist, top-down forms of economic development that many thought would aid men of established means while deepening inequalities among whites.
Proposed cures for this sickness included more democracy and a redirection of economic policy. In the older states, reformers fought to lower or abolish property requirements for voting and officeholding, and to equalize representation. A new generation of politicians broke with the old republican animus against mass political parties.
Urban workers formed labor movements and demanded political reforms. Westerners clamored for more and cheaper land and for relief from creditors, speculators, and bankers above all, the hated Second Bank of the United States.
It has confounded some scholars that so much of this ferment eventually coalesced behind Andrew Jackson—a one-time land speculator, opponent of debtor relief, and fervent wartime nationalist. His career as an Indian fighter and conqueror of the British made him a popular hero, especially among land-hungry settlers. His enthusiasm for nationalist programs had diminished after , as foreign threats receded and economic difficulties multiplied.
Above all, Jackson, with his own hardscrabble origins, epitomized contempt for the old republican elitism, with its hierarchical deference and its wariness of popular democracy. Only after taking power did the Jacksonian Democracy refine its politics and ideology. Out of that self-definition came a fundamental shift in the terms of national political debate.
Under the Jacksonians, government-sponsored internal improvements generally fell into disfavor, on the grounds that they were unnecessary expansions of centralized power, beneficial mainly to men with connections. The Jacksonians defended rotation in office as a solvent to entrenched elitism. Around these policies, Jacksonian leaders built a democratic ideology aimed primarily at voters who felt injured by or cut off from the market revolution.
Updating the more democratic pieces of the republican legacy, they posited that no republic could long survive without a citizenry of economically independent men. Unfortunately, they claimed, that state of republican independence was exceedingly fragile. According to the Jacksonians, all of human history had involved a struggle between the few and the many, instigated by a greedy minority of wealth and privilege that hoped to exploit the vast majority.
More broadly, the Jacksonians proclaimed a political culture predicated on white male equality, contrasting themselves with other self-styled reform movements. The election of The Era of Good Feelings came to an end with the presidential election of Although Republicans dominated national politics, the party was breaking apart internally.
Monroe's cabinet included no fewer than three men with presidential ambitions, each representing sectional interests. John C.
Party leaders backed Crawford. Although a paralyzing stroke removed him from an active role in the campaign, he received almost as many votes as Clay. Calhoun removed himself from the race, settling for another terra as vice president and making plans for another run at the presidency in or Jackson received 43 percent of the popular vote compared to Adams's 31 percent, and he won 99 electoral votes to Adams's Because Jackson did not receive a majority in the Electoral College, the election was decided by the House of Representatives, where Speaker Clay exercised considerable political influence.
With no chance of winning himself, Clay threw his support to Adams, who shared his nationalist views. Although there is no firm evidence to support the charge, it became an issue that hounded Adams during his presidency and was raised by Jackson himself during the next presidential campaign.
The Adams presidency.
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