href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@21537@[email protected]#image_17" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">Railroads in Operation 1850

EXPANSION AND CONFLICT

EXPANSION AND CONFLICT

CHAPTER IToC

ANDREW JACKSON

“Let the people rule”—such was the reply that Andrew Jackson made to the coalition of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams which made the latter President. And Andrew Jackson was an interesting man in 1825. He was to be the leader of the great party of the West which was forming for the overthrow of the old political and social order. Born in a cabin on the southern frontier in 1767 and reared in the midst of poverty during the “hard times” of the Revolution, Jackson had had little opportunity to acquire the education and polish which so distinguished the leaders of the old Jeffersonian party. After a season of teaching school and studying law in Salisbury, North Carolina, he emigrated, in 1788, to Tennessee, where he soon became a successful attorney, and a few years later a United States Senator. But public life in Philadelphia proved as unattractive as school-teaching had been; he returned to the frontier life of his adopted State and was speedily made a judge, and as such he sometimes led posses to enforce his decrees. During the second war with England he made a brilliant campaign against the Creek Indians, who had sided with the British, and gained the reputation of being the mortal enemy of the aborigines, a reputation which added greatly to his popularity in a community which believed that the “only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

At the close of the war, when most men were expecting news that the British had conquered the lower Mississippi Valley and that the Union was breaking to pieces, he proved to be the one American general who could “whip the troops who had beaten Napoleon.” The battle of New Orleans made Jackson an international character, and the West was ready to crown him a hero and a savior of the nation. Nor did his arbitrary conduct in the Seminole War, or later, when he was Governor of Florida, injure him in a region where Indians, Spaniards, and Englishmen had few rights which an American need respect. The attacks of Henry Clay in the House of Representatives, and of William H. Crawford in the Cabinet, were regarded as political maneuvers. When, therefore, Jackson offered himself in 1823 as a candidate for the Presidency, most Western men welcomed him, fearing only that his age and his delicate health, of which he had said too much in public, might cut him off before he could render his country the great service of which they considered him capable. The politicians, especially those who followed Henry Clay, did their utmost to defeat him, and the votes of the West were divided almost evenly between the two backwoods rivals. But when it became clear in 1825 that Speaker Clay of the House of Representatives had added his influence to that of John Quincy Adams in order to prevent Jackson from winning, Western men everywhere made his cause their cause. “Let the people rule” became a battle-cry which was taken up in every frontier State from Georgia to Illinois.

It was time that the people devoted more attention to public affairs; they had in fact well-nigh abdicated. In Virginia, with a white population of 625,000, only 15,000 had voted in the election of 1824; in Pennsylvania, whose population was over a million, only some 47,000 had taken the trouble to go to the polls; while in Massachusetts, where the “favorite son” motive operated, just one man in nineteen exercised the right of suffrage. Government had become the business of “gentlemen” and of those who made a specialty of politics. The old Jeffersonian machine, organized as a popular protest against aristocracy and the “money power,” had itself become aristocratic, and it had ceased to represent the democracy of the United States; and the democracy had lost interest in its own affairs.

When Clay, the Westerner and long-time opponent of Adams and the New England element in politics, executed his surprising somersault in February, 1825, and thus made the eastern leader President and then himself became Secretary of State, occasion was given to a second Jefferson to arouse the people to a sense of their responsibility. Jackson, a very different man from the former man of the people, seized the opportunity. Thus the campaign of 1828 began in 1825, and in the course of the bitter struggle which ensued men divided into social