Andrew Jackson

Plastered onto the $20 bill and the subject of statues scattered all across the United States, Andrew Jackson has rarely escaped the upper tier of US presidents in historians' rankings of this nation's leaders. Ever since he left office in 1837, Jackson has been praised for his dedication to democracy and representation for the common man - even having called for the abolition of the Electoral College - and success at purging corruption from the government. In reality, however, these assessments are faulty, ranging from only telling one side of the story to being outright inaccurate. Andrew Jackson was one of our worst presidents, and his policies, despite his image as a populist opposed to corruption, actually enabled corruption and hurt the population, even the common man he so hollowly "championed".

Before I begin, I do want to note that I don't view the Jackson Administration as a vehicle of harm and nothing more. Jackson did do some legitimately good things. He brokered several trade agreements with other countries, expanded democracy in the federal government, and paid off the entirety of the national debt. In fact, he was the only president to ever accomplish that third achievement. He also, as previously mentioned, reduced corruption in the federal government. However, he also replaced the general corruption that existed before he moved into the White House in 1829 with a new form of corruption: The spoils system.

The spoils system, created by Jackson in 1829, was a bureaucratic trend that existed in the government for much of the 19th century. Essentially, the spoils system was the tendency to appoint officials not based off of their actual merits, but rather on their support for you and your policies. This idiotic and depraved policy led to the dismissal of numerous qualified and competent officials in favor of buffoons whose only accomplishment in life was sucking up to any new authority in a desperate attempt to cultivate jobs and revenues for themselves. In fact, future-President William Henry Harrison actually fell victim to the spoils system, as Jackson dismissed him from the office of ambassador to Columbia in order to be replaced by one of Jackson's supporters. And this awful ghoul of a system would continue to damage the government until 1883 when Chester A. Arthur - who himself had benefitted from the spoils system, becoming the collector of the port of New York due to his support of New York's Republican establishment - signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.

On May 28, 1830, Jackson famously signed the Indian Removal Act. This law permitted the president to broker treaties that required indigenous tribes to abandon their historic homelands. Jackson - as well as his successor, Martin Van Buren - would then use this policy in several instances to force Native Americans off of areas they had inhabited for centuries. In fact, on one occasion, the Indian Removal Act was used by Jackson and Van Buren to force the Cherokee tribe out of Georgia and to Oklahoma. On the way there, 4,000 of them died in a tragedy known as the Trail of Tears.

Jackson's social policy held other reprehensible actions. In 1835, a group of American abolitionists sent anti-slavery literature to prominent figures across the southern US. Their goal was to convince them of the obvious evils of slavery and to, from there, use their high positions in southern society to convince the rest of the south to abandon the practice of slavery. This outraged Jackson, who, in response, ordered the postal service to stop delivering anti-slavery texts to anyone or anywhere in the south. Jackson was not only violating the First Amendment in this endeavor, but he was actively inhibiting people from realizing how abhorrent slavery was by censoring, of all ideologies, abolitionism.

After the War of 1812, Henry Clay, a prominent American politician, proposed the American System. This was a package of reforms Clay believed could help the economy recover from the conflict with Britain. There were 3 policies embedded in the proposal:

• High tariffs - High tariffs would make imported products more expensive, and so less appealing to American spenders. This would ensure the consumption of items produced at home rather than abroad, and so the health of businesses at home. As a result, businesses would continue to operate, Americans would continue to be employed, and so continue to spend.
• Increased funding for roads - Funding the construction and improvement of roads would make travel easier. Hence, it would make it easier to sell products made in the south in northern states and to sell products made in northern states in southern states. This would both make the south less reliant on foreign imports - as they could just get industrially-produced objects from their northern neighbors in the Union - and increase commerce, hence stimulating the economy.
• A temporary national bank - In 1791, following the Revolutionary War, George Washington, at the behest of Alexander Hamilton, founded the Bank of the United States, a national bank meant to dissolve after 20 years. The basic logic was a national bank would further centralize the economy, and so allow the government to implement a stronger response to the war's economic impact. As expected, the BUS dissolved in 1811. However, the following year, another conflict broke out. So, Clay wanted to use this idea again and encouraged the creation of the Second Bank of the United States, tasked with the same goals the original bank had.

Clay and Jackson despised one another. In 1824, Jackson had run for president but lost to John Quincy Adams. Jackson accused Clay of working with Adams to help rig the election against him. Consequently, Jackson was staunchly opposed to the American System. Additionally, he worried that Clay's national bank gave too much power to too few people. And as a southerner, Jackson, whose region of the country relied on foreign imports due to its agricultural and pre-industrial nature, loathed tariffs. Consequently, as president, Jackson worked to dismantle the American System.

On May 27, 1830, Jackson launched his project to abolish the American System by vetoing the Maysville Road Bill. This proposal would have allowed the federal government to purchase $150,000 worth of stocks in the Maysville, Washington, Paris, and Lexington Turnpike Road Company in order to help it fund the construction of a road in Kentucky. This veto, I believe, was unnecessary and irrational. Buying these stocks would have not only helped with the construction of a road, which is indisputably a good thing, and would have provided additional funding for government efforts. And more generally, Jackson's refusal to fund the construction and improvement of roads worsened infrastructure. Additionally, by preventing the refinement of these roads, Jackson was impeding commerce between the north and south. This blocked northern industrial goods from entering the south, and so making the southern states continually reliant on imports. This allowed them to maintain their agricultural society, and so preserving their reliance on slavery.

Two years later, on July 15, 1832, Jackson signed the Tariff of 1832 as part of the effort to destroy the American System. This law reduced the tariff. However, Jackson's predecessor - John Quincy Adams - had signed the Tariff of 1828, which placed the tariff rate at such an immense height that one southern politician, John C. Calhoun, created a legal doctrine known as nullification. According to Calhoun, unless a law was actively placed in the Constitution, states were not required to follow a federal statute. Jackson's new tariff - which I actually agree with; even as a protectionist, I find the Tariff of 1828 far too extreme - while it did reduce the rate of import tax, was not satisfactory to southern advocates of free trade. So, on November 24, 1832, South Carolina declared the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void within its borders.

Jackson, horrified by this dismissal of his power, denounced nullification on December 10, 1832. From there, he stationed federal troops around South Carolina. A few months later, on March 1, 1833, Jackson signed the Force Act, which permitted the president to use the military to enforce tariffs. The following day, on March 2, 1833, Jackson, to his credit, signed the Compromise Tariff of 1833. Under this new law, the Tariffs of 1828 and 1832 remained as statutes and continued to be enforced, including in South Carolina. However, the bill stipulated that over a 10-year period following the new tariff's passage, the tariff rate would gradually decline. By the 10-year anniversary of its passage, the tariff rate would return to what it was before 1828. With Jackson's signing of the 1833 tariff, the dispute, known as the Nullification Crisis, came to an end.

While I give Jackson credit for his signing of the Compromise Tariff of 1833, I think the rest of his response to this affair was needlessly cruel and authoritarian. He turned the Ordinance of Nullification, the 1832 declaration in which South Carolina stopped enforcing the two tariffs, into the Nullification Crisis. His denunciation of Calhoun's nullification theory, stationing of federal troops around South Carolina, and support of the Force Act all drastically increase tensions beyond the point they needed to be. It was his outrage that nearly brought the nation to civil war in 1832 and 1833.

Furthermore, I think it's plausible that Jackson's outrage at the Ordinance of Nullification and borderline attempt to invade South Carolina may have alienated South Carolina from the federal government. As a result, South Carolina was more comfortable outright seceding when Lincoln won the 1860 election, as they had already grown relatively separated from Washington DC. And had South Carolina not seceded, other southern states may have chosen to remain with the Union in 1860 and 1861.

Around the time Jackson signed the Tariff of 1832, Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second Bank of the United States, convinced Congress to draft a bill extending the life of the SBUS for another 15 years. In other words, the bill would shift the date at which the SBUS was destined to expire at from 1836 to 1851. Jackson vetoed the bill, as he disliked the SBUS and the SBUS was a part of the American System he was so dedicated to undoing. Now, I do agree with Jackson's veto here. As previously established, the SBUS was an emergency measure to help the economy recover from the War of 1812. However, the War of 1812 ended in 1815. So by 1832, the institution had obviously overstayed its welcome. Jackson's actions regarding the bank after his original veto are where I have an issue.

Later in 1832, Jackson forcibly dissolved the SBUS and withdrew its money. From there, he distributed the funds across various state and private banks. This created an increased demand for loans, which the state banks ended up printing money to continue keeping up with. Obviously, this depleted the value of money and resulted in a severe inflation crisis, dramatically damaging the economy.

Soon after, Jackson issued the Specie Circular. This was an executive order that required American land to be paid for with gold and silver. All of a sudden, people who had easily bought land in the US, were, because of Jackson's new policy, were now being ordered to give away precious metals in order to maintain their possession of this land. Not wanting to make such a sacrifice, a large portion of them outright rescinded their purchases. Obviously, this drastically decreased spending, further harming the economy. This, coupled with the inflation caused by Jackson's dissolution of the SBUS in 1832 and the closure of 800 banks due to debt (which, in all fairness, was not Jackson's fault), culminated in a severe recession known as the Panic of 1837.

In 1831, the Jackson Administration brokered an agreement with the French government in which Paris agreed to start paying reparations for damages its military did to neutral American ships during the Napoleonic War. However, a crucial French finance official refused to actually enforce this new policy. Obviously, Jackson had to take some sort of action here. For example, he could have threatened to withdraw from trade agreements with France if they didn't fire that official or coerce him into actually enforcing the treaty. Yet, he didn't take any reasonable type of action. Instead, he literally began preparing to declare war on France. And it was only when the British government intervened in the affair to convince the French finance ministry to finally began paying the reparations. But had such an intervention never taken place, a disastrous conflict likely would have broken out.

Jackson was an atrocious president who perpetrated a genocide of Cherokee Native Americans, censored abolitionists, created a horrific type of corruption that hurt the government's ability to function properly and efficiently, dismantled reasonable American System reforms, nearly sparked a civil war, implemented inept economic policies that caused a recession, and almost started a war with France. His presence on the $20 bill is an insult to all those who suffered due to his actions.