Hello, and welcome to Western Sieve Episode five and eighteen. The Age of Jackson. The Age of Andrew Jackson was an Arab that was allowed to be honest with you. There was argument, there was motion. It was a time when American politics finally burst beyond the marbleholes of elites and spilled into American taverns, newspapers, parades, and polling places. It was messy, democratic, and often brutal, an age defined as much by expansion and participation as it was by
exclusion and violence. And to understand it we have to first start not in water Ishington, but on the frontier, where our central figure first makes his name. When Andrew Jackson emerged as a national figure after the War of eighteen twelve, he did so not as a polished statesman, but as a soldier. His victory at the Battle of New Orleans in January five eighteen transformed him into a
symbol of American toughness and defiance. Of course, the war itself had ended inconclusively in a draw or an American loss, depending how you want to see it, but Jackson's triumph, fought after the peace treaty had technically been signed, felt decisive in the public. He became Old Hickory, a man of iron will forged in the frontier hardship Now. Jackson's
appeal lay in part in his story. Born in poverty on the Carolina Frontier, orphaned young, scarred physically and emotionally by violence, He embodied a narrative many white Americans found irresistible, the self made man who had fought his way upward. In an age when property requirements for voting were falling away, more white men than ever could participate in politics, and many saw Jackson as one of their own. The election of eighteen twenty eight marked a turning point in American
political life. Campaigning was now raucous and personal. Newspapers aligned openly with parties. Mass rallies, slogans, and symbolic imagery replaced deferential silence. Jackson's supporters painted him as a champion of the people, while his opponents decried him as dangerous, impulsive, and maybe even tyrannical. This was the essence of Jackson in democracy, the belief that political power should rest with the majority of ordinary white men, not with entrenched elites.
Jackson distrust institutions that he believed insulated power from popular control. He celebrated rotation in office what critics called the spoils system, arguing that government jobs should circulate among citizens rather than to simply crystallize into a permanent ruling class. But this democracy, of course, had major boundaries, and they were sharp and well delineated. Women, Native Americans and African Americans free or enslaved,
were entirely excluded. Jacksonian democracy expanded participation for some by hardening exclusion for others. No conflict better reveals Jackson's governing style than his war against the Second Bank of the United States. The Bank War was not a single battle, but it was a long, grinding political campaign, one fought with vetos and speeches, pamphlets and cartoons, bank deposits, and
critically banked withdrawals. It was a struggle over money and power, over who controlled the nation's economy and therefore truly spoke for quote unquote the people. At its center stood Andrew Jackson, wielding the presidency like a weapon, and across him the most powerful financial institution in the United States. Now, by the eighteen twenties, the Second Bank of the United States
stood at the very heart of America's economy. It had been chartered by Congress in eighteen sixteen, and it regulated the nation's currency, restrained what it saw as reckless banks, and provided stability in a rapidly expanding economy. To many merchants, creditors, and politicians, the Second Bank of the United States was considered indispensable. But to Andrew Jackson, the bank was dangerous.
He saw it as a symbol of entrenched privilege, a private corporation backed by government power, dominated by wealthy shareholders, some of them foreign. Jackson's suspicion ran deep and per arsenal. Early in life he had been ruined by debt and speculative finance, and he never forgot about it. To him, paper money, banks and credit just kind of smelled of corruption and manipulation. Jackson believed that the bank did not
merely influence politics, it was actually distorting democracy itself. Now I want to back up for just a quick second here, because it had been disputed, really since the days of Alexander Hamilton's fights with Thomas Jefferson over whether or not Congress had the authority under the Constitution to actually create a Bank of the United States, and America is going to go through these throws over and over and over again until we arrived at the Federal Reserve, which is
actually in twenty twenty six currently actually again under attack by a different populist president. So the more things change, sometimes the more things stay the same. Now, well, the Constitution doesn't expressly say that Congress has the power to create a bank. It does have the power to regulate interstate commerce, and so the question becomes, does Congress have an implied power to create the bank? Doesn't say it expressly, but in order to regulate commerce, can you create something
that allows you to do so? Let me give you an example of an implied power. Now, certainly Congress has the ability to declare war and to regulate a standing army, but doesn't technically say anywhere in the Constitution that you can create uniforms for your army. Now our uniforms necessary for an army. Some would argue yes, someone I suppose, argue no. And that's the question of can you do something which is implied under the constitution or can you
only do things which are expressly stated. It's a debate that we've had since the beginning of this country, and we still have it today. But let's get back to the Second Bank of the United States. The bank's president, Nicholas Biddle, was everything Jackson was not. He was refined, aristocratic, and intellectually brilliant, which Jackson wasn't. Biddell believed sincerely that the bank was essential to national prosperity. He viewed himself not as a political operator, but as a steward of
economic order and growth. Yet Biddle underestimated Jackson and misunderstood the mood of the country. The very sophistication that reassured elites alarmed many ordinary Americans. Biddle's confidence in the bank's necessity came across as arrogance in a democracy increasingly suspicious of concentrated power. This was a fatal miscalculation. Now, by law, the Bank's charter would expire in eighteen thirty six, but in eighteen thirty two, four years earlier, bank supporters pushed
a bill through Congress to renew it. The move was political. Jackson was up for reelection, and his opponents believed he would not dare to vet up such a popular institution in an election year. They were wrong. When the bill reached his desk, Jackson seized the moment. His veto message was not a technical legal document. It was a manifesto. Not only did he veto the bill, but he denounced
the bank as unconstitutional, monopolistic, and hostile to liberty. He declared that government should not grant special privileges to the wealthy few at the expense of the many. And Jackson did something radical. He appealed directly to the voters over the heads of Congress, and so the veto transformed the election of eighteen thirty two into a referendum on the second Bank of the United States. Jackson's opponent, Henry Clay,
championed the institution as a pillar of national stability. Jackson cast himself as the defender of democracy against a corrupt financial elite. Ultimately, the public sided with Jackson decisively. His victory at the polls in eighteen thirty two was as overwhelming as it had been in eighteen twenty eight. To Jackson, it was proof that the people had spoken, and they had spoken against the bank, and so now he meant not just to veto the renewing of it, but to
destroy it completely. In fact, Jackson did not wait for the charter to expire. In eighteen thirty three, he ordered federal deposits withdrawn from the bank and placed them in selected state banks. His critics derisively call them pet banks. When his Treasury secretary refused, Jackson fired him. When the next secretary hesitated, Jackson fired him too. Only when he found someone willing to do what he wanted did the plan proceed. This was executive power exercise to its absolute limit.
Congress protested, The Senate censured Jackson, the first time in US history. Jackson was defiant. He bel leave the president was the direct representative of the people and that the popular will outweighed institutional resistance. Now, Biddle fought back the only way that he knew how, with money. He tightened credit. He called in loans, and he triggered a financial contraction that meant to prove the bank's necessity. Business has failed.
Unemployment rose, but the strategy backfired. Instead of blaming Jackson, most Americans blamed the bank. By eighteen thirty six, the Second Bank of the United States was finished. Its federal charter expired, and it limped on briefly as a state bank before collapsing entirely. Indeed, Jackson had won the bank war, but his victory came at a cost. Without a central bank, to regulate credit. Speculation literally exploded. State banks issued paper
money freely, fueling land bubbles and reckless investment. Just after Jackson left office, the economy crashed into the Panic of eighteen thirty seven, a devastating depression that will haunt his successors. Now. Jackson never accepted responsibility for any of this. He believed the bank's destruction was necessary and just, even if it had been temporarily painful, and the bank wiar permanently changed
American politics. It strengthened the presidency, heart and political divisions, and embedded a deep suspicion of centralized financial power into American political culture that persists today. It also raised enduring questions can democracy safely restrain economic elites, or does at risk destroying the very institutions that sustained prosperity. In Jackson's mind, the answer had been clear. The bank was a threat to liberty, and liberty however imperfect was worth the risk.
But the question of federal authority and the States didn't come to a head in the bank warp. It came to a head in the Nullification crisis of eighteen thirty two. The nullification crisis of eighteen thirty two to eighteen thirty three was the moment when the American Union came perilously close to fracturing, this time not over slavery directly, but over a deeper, and I guess much more difficult question.
Who held ultimate authority in the republic. Was the United States a nation of people bound together by a supreme federal government, or was it a compact of sovereign states free to reject federal law at will. In this confrontation, rhetoric hardened into defiance, and political theory threatened to become civil war. The roots of the crisis lay in economics.
In the early nineteenth century, Congress passed a series of protective tariffs designed to shield American manufacturers from foreign competition. These tariffs benefited northern industry, but they enraged Southern planters, who relied on imported goods and the export of cotton to them. Tariffs raised prices at home and invited retaliation abroad. The Tariff of eighteen twenty eight, denounced in the South as the Tariff of Abominations, became a symbol of federal injustice.
No state felt the grievance more acutely than South Carolina. Where economic distress fused with a long tradition of suspicion towards centralized authority. The intellectual architect of the resistance was John C. Calhoun, ironically then serving as Vice President of the United States. Calhoun anonymously authored the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, arguing that the Constitution was, in its end,
a compact or agreement among sovereign states. If the federal government exceeded its delegated powers, a state had the right declare a federal law null and void within its boundaries. Now this was, of course, not just simple theory. It was revolution and this revolutionary doctrine challenged the supremacy of federal law and hinted at the idea that a state could secede from the Union if it didn't like what it was getting. Calhoun believed nullification was a constitutional safeguard,
a peaceful mechanism to protect minority interests. Critics saw it as legalized rebellion. In eighteen thirty two, Congress slightly reduced the tariff rates, but not enough to satisfy South Carolina. That November, a specially elected state convention adopted an ordinance of nullification, declaring the tariffs of eighteen twenty eight and
eighteen thirty two unconstitutional and unenforceable within the state. After February first, eighteen thirty three, South Carolina then began preparations to resist federal enforcement by fois if it was necessary. State militias were drilled and unionists were intimidated. This language of sovereignty now quickly replaced the language of compromise. The crisis was no longer theoretical, it was real and imminent. This was looking very much like a dress rehearsal for
civil war. And now, of course, many assumed President Andrew Jackson, who was both a Southerner and a slaveholder, was sympathized with South Carolina. But they were wrong, and they misunderstood Jackson. Honestly, Jackson despised the concept of nullification. To him, it was treason masquerading as a constitutional principle. In December of eighteen thirty two, Jackson issued his Proclamation to the People of
South Carolina, a thunderous defense of the Union. He rejected the compact theory outright and insisted that the Constitution derived its authority from the people and not from the states. Secession, he warned, was incompatible with liberty and would be met with military force. Privately, Jackson was even more blunt. He reportedly toasted with John C. Calhoun in the room, our federal union must be preserved. Jackson asked Congress for authority
to enforce federal law. The resulting Force Bill empowered the President to use military force to collect tariffs. It was an unmistakable threat. Warships were sent out to Charleston Harbor, and federal troops stood ready. The nation held its breath. For the first time since ratification, a state openly denied federal authority under threat of arms. The crisis quickly exposed how fragile the Union truly was, and how easily constitutional
disagreement could become armed conflict. Salvation ultimately came through compromise. Henry Clay, the great broker of legislative peace, as he will be throughout the years, proposed a gradual reduction of tariff rates over ten years. The Compromised Tariff of eighteen thirty three gave South Carolina a face saving exit while preserving federal authority. South Carolina then repealed its ordinance of nullification, but in a final symbolic act of defiance, it nullified
the Force Bill. The immediate crisis was over, that's true, but the constitutional questions definitely remained unresolved. The nullification crisis also set a few dangerous precedents. It affirmed federal supremacy in practice, but it also legitimized the language of state resistance. The doctrine of nullification had failed, but the idea that a state might interpose itself against federal authority did not disappear. For Jackson, the crisis was a victory for the Union
and the presidency. He had demonstrated that popular democracy did not require a weak federal government. For Calhoun, it was a warning Southern interests could not rely on national majorities for protection. His focus would soon turn toward more directly defending slavery. The crisis of eighteen thirty two to eighteen thirty three did not break the Union, but it revealed
the fault lines that would three decades later tear it apart. Yet, what Jackson remains most famous, or I guess infamous for today in American history isn't the nullification crisis, and it's not the Bank War. It is Indian removal. The story of Indian removal during the Jackson era is one of law cloaked in the language of progress of democracy, as we discussed at the beginning of this episode, advance for some, in this case unpropertied white men, while catastrophe unfolded for
others ie just about everyone else. It is a story not of actually sudden violence, as it not been portrayed, but of relentless pressure, both political, military, and legal, that culminated one of the most devastating force migrations in American history, the Trail of Tears. By the eighteen twenties, the United
States was a land constantly obsessed with territory. Cotton cultivation was spreading rapidly across the Deep South, driven by the invention of the cotton gin and by sustained by enslaved labor. White settlers poorered westward, and state governments, especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, looked hungrily at native lands that stood in the way of expansion. Five native nations in the Southeast, the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole, occupied millions of acres.
These were not nomadic societies. By an he stretched the imagination. They farmed, traded, published their own newspapers, adopted written constitutions, and in some cases owned enslaved people themselves. But to the white Americans, this only sharpened the resentment civilization. They believed had not erased Native claims to the land, it
had simply made them competitors. And into this moment stepped Andrew Jackson, the man who, of course, entire career, as I mentioned at the very beginning of this episode, had been forged on the frontier. That was his identity. Jackson had fought Native nations as a general and governed former Native lands as a territorial administrator. He didn't see Indian removal as cruelty. He saw it as an inevitability. To him, Native peoples could not coexist alongside American expansion, one side
he believed had to give way. In eighteen thirty, Jackson pushed through Congress the Indian Removal Act. The law authorized the federal government to negotiate treaties exchanging Native lands east of the Mississippi River for territory in the west what would later become the state of Oklahoma. Supporters framed removal as humane. They spoke of protecting Native nations from extinction by relocating them beyond the reach of settlers. Jackson himself
claimed that removal would be voluntary and beneficial. Of course, in reality it was neither. The vote in Congress was close, actually revealing the deep unease on the issue over at the time, but once passed, the machinery of removal began to grind forward with terrifying momentum. Nowhere was the conflict more visible than in Georgia, where gold had been discovered
on Cherokee land. The state moved aggressively, extending its laws over Cherochoe territory, dissolving the tribal government and seizing land. The Cherokee fought back, not with weapons this time, but with the law. They appealed to the Supreme Court, asserting their sovereignty. In Worcester versus Georgia in eighteen thirty two, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Georgia's actions were unconstitutional and affirmed that Native nations were distinct
political communities. That decision should have protected the Cherokee, but it did not. Jackson refused to enforce the ruling, whether or not he actually uttered the infamous line that is now attributed to him. Quote John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it. End quote. His actions spoke clearly. Federal power would not be used to defend Native sovereignty. Instead,
it would be used to dismantle it. Federal agents pressed Native leaders designed removal treaties, often negotiating with small factions rather than legitimate governments. Promises of compensation and protection were made and then routinely broken. Some Native nations did ultimately resist militarily. The Seminole fought a brutal guerrilla war in Florida.
Others tried to negotiate survival. The Cherokee split bitterly as a small group signed the Treaty of a Chodah in eighteen thirty five, agreeing to removal without authorization from the tribal government, and then that treaty ultimately became the legal pretext for expulsion. In eighteen thirty eight, after Jackson had now left office, but under the authority of the policies he had put in motion, US troops rounded up Cherokee
families at gunpoint. Homes were looted, fields were abandoned. Thousands were quickly herded into stockades. The forced march West began in freezing conditions. Disease spread, food was scarce. The officials who were supposed to be managing the march were woefully corrupt. Children and elders died among the roads, in camps, and in shallow graves. By the time the journey was over, roughly one quarter of the Cherokee population, about four thousand people,
were all dead. Similar tragedies unfolded for other nations. Collectively, these removals became known as the Trail of Tears, a phrase that captures only a fraction of the suffering that was endured. This was not an unintended consequence of the policy. It was, frankly a predictable outcome. Now. Jackson, throughout his life, never wavered in his defense of Indian removal. He believed he acted in the nation's interest and even in the
interest of the Native peoples themselves. History has rendered a harsher verdict. Indian removal was, to many, state sponsored ethnic cleansing, carried out through law, coercion, and ultimately force. It expanded American democracy and economic opportunity unity for white settlers, while annihilating Native sovereignty and communities across the Southeast. The Jackson era celebrated the will of the people, but Indian removal forces us to ask which people and at what cost.
The Trail of Tears stands as one of the clearest reminders that American expansion was not only a story of opportunity and growth. It was also a story of dispossession, suffering, and lives erased, all in the name of progress. We're going to see a very similar phenomenon in the imperialistic era in Europe. By the time Jackson left office in eighteen thirty seven, the United States was transformed. Politics was louder, it was much more participatory, and it was much more partisan.
The presidency was stronger, it was more personal, and it was more powerful. Ordinary white men now felt a new sense of ownership over the republic. But the costs had been immense. Democracy had been expanded unevenly. Economic instability followed the destruction of the bank. Native nations were shattered, enslaved people remained bound in chains, even as the language of liberty echoed more and more loudly. The age of Andrew Jackson, of course, was not simply the story of one man.
It was the story of a nation wrestling with who counted as the people, How power would be wielded and what democracy was willing to sacrifice in its own name. It left a legacy that still shapes American politics today, populist energy, executive assertiveness, and a democracy forever struggling with
the limits of its promises. Now next week we're actually going to go back across the pond to Europe and catch up with affairs there as the eighteen thirties to eighteen forties become a raucous affair, indeed own the world.