Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
There were quite evident reasons for this aristocratic contempt. The
new Democracy was heavily weighted with what gentlemen were pleased to
call the rabble. Fresh Democratic recruits had been gathering since
Jefferson molded the first party of protest. Industrialism was creating
a city proletariat, and the frontier was producing the coonskin voter;
neither as yet possessed any adequate political philosophy, but they
needed no philosophy to enlist against the traditional privileges and
perquisites of broadcloth. They had had their fill of such rule. The
stake-in-society theory was worn threadbare, and other philosophies
were preparing. Meanwhile in the person of Old Hickory they saw the
visible embodiment of their vague aspirations, and they turned to
him with an unquestioning loyalty that nothing could weaken. He was
our first great popular leader, our first man of the people. If he
aroused a wild enthusiasm in breasts covered by linsey-woolsey, it
was because he believed that linsey-woolsey had its stake-in-society
equally with broadcloth. He was one of our few Presidents whose heart
and sympathy were with the plain people, and who clung to the simple
faith that government must deal as justly with the poor as with the
rich. Believing so, he could not be turned aside from his course by
paid clamor, but with a courage rare in the White House he dared make a
frontal attack on the citadel of exploitation in the face of an army of
mercenaries.
The dramatic career of Andrew Jackson, so unlike that of Jefferson,
which was determined by a speculative temperament and founded on a
critical examination of diverse systems of society and politics, was
shaped in large measure by prejudice and circumstance. A man of iron
will and inflexible purpose, he was almost wholly lacking in political
and social philosophy. His conclusions were the reactions of a simple
nature of complete integrity, in contact with plain fact. Fundamentally
realistic, he cherished few romanticisms. There was no subtlety in his
mental processes and this lack kept him free from the temptation to
follow devious paths beloved of politicians. He must take the shortest
way to his objective, crashing through such obstacles as lay in his
path. He was never a bookish man. He was surprisingly ill read, and his
grammar and spelling were those of the plain people. He loved horse
racing and was a master of profanity; yet in spite of characteristics
that link him with Davy Crockett, he possessed an innate dignity and
chivalry that set him far above the wag of the canebrakes. He was a
born leader whose headlong onslaughts and rash mistakes might imperil
the cause but could not shake the confidence of his followers. All
who knew a man when they saw one respected Andrew Jackson. Imperious
and dictatorial, he knew how to command but not to obey; he took
orders from no one, not even his superiors, unless such orders fell
in with his own plans. In short General Jackson represented the best
which the new West could breed in the way of capable and self-reliant
individualism, and the backwoodsmen loved him for the enemies he made,
and backed him loudly in his fight against the aristocratic East.
When Jackson settled in Nashville in 1788, at the age of twenty-one,
the Cumberland valley had somewhat under five thousand inhabitants
scattered a distance of eighty-five miles along the river. The first
settlements had been made only nine years before, and Nashville was a
frontier post with frontier manners. Into this rough society the young
Scotch-Irishman fitted easily. His smattering of the law sufficed to
gain him clients and he soon became a local political leader. When
he was only twenty-nine he was sent to Philadelphia as the first
Congressman from the state of Tennessee, where he came in contact with
the “aristocratic Neebobs” of the government and heartily disliked
them. The next year he was sent to the Senate, but a single session
satisfied him and he resigned to accept a judgeship in the state
Supreme Court, which post he held for six years. During these early
years he was unconsciously following the path that conducted straight
to a middle-class philosophy. He threw himself into speculation,
bought and sold land in great blocks, traded in horses and slaves,
set up a general store, and was well on the road to wealth when the
panic of 1795 caught him unprepared. He lost most of his extensive
holdings, including his homestead and many of his slaves, and removed
to a six hundred and forty acre tract eight miles from Nashville--the
Hermitage--which was to become one of the famous places of America.
With this removal his middle-class ambitions fell away and he became a
planter with a simple agrarian point of view; and this old-fashioned
agrarianism became in later years the determining force in all his
political thinking.
He was fifty-eight when he emerged as a potential candidate for the
Presidency in 1822, and for years his sole interests, other than those
of his plantation, had been military. He was singularly wanting in any
formulated political philosophy, and his reëlection to the Senate two
years later did little to supply the lack. He had picked up some shreds
of the protectionist theory and in a letter written in 1824 he went so
far as to declare for a “judicious” protective tariff, basing his view
on the grounds of the country’s economic unpreparedness at the time
of the War of 1812, on the lack of markets for the produce of western
farms, and on the desirability of drawing labor from the farm to the
factory. But he added a significant passage that reveals the agrarian
bias of his mind. To the end of his life he insisted that he was an old
Republican of 1798, and this comment of 1824 suffices to connect his
later attack on the Bank with Jefferson’s attack on Hamilton’s fiscal
policy.
Beyond this, I look at the Tariff with an eye to the proper
distribution of labor and revenue; and with a view to discharge our
national debt. I am one of those who do not believe that a national
debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic;
inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration
a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country.
(Quoted in Bassett, _Life of Andrew Jackson_, Vol. I, p. 346.)
The tariff was the only question on which he was receptive to Whiggish
arguments, and although he never openly repudiated a protectionist
policy he soon grew lukewarm in its support. Such other fragments of
Whiggery as found accidental lodgment in his mind were swept away in
the fierce struggles that marked his years in the White House. During
those eight years Jackson found himself, and the man who emerged from
the struggle was an agrarian of the old Virginian school. As he came to
understand the significance of the principle of exploitation he learned
to interpret social classes in terms of economics. He instinctively
hated all aristocrats, extending his dislike to the circle that
pretended to social preëminence in Tennessee, speaking of them
contemptuously as the “aristocrats of Nashville.” But in these later
years a change in his vocabulary appeared; his favorite phrases became
“the monied capitalists” and the “hydra of corruption.” He had come to
associate aristocracy with the control of the economics of society. He
was learning how aristocracies are built up through the instrumentality
of the state; and as that lesson sank into his mind his opposition to
such class favoritism hardened into adamant. He would put a stop to
such practices, cost what it might. His attack on the Bank was perhaps
the most courageous act in our political history; he knew how fiercely
it would be defended; yet he was amazed at the number of hornets that
issued from the shaken nest. “Such has been the scenes of corruption
in our last congress,” he wrote in 1833, “that I loath the corruption
of human nature and long for retirement, and repose on the Hermitage.
But until I can strangle this hydra of corruption, the Bank, I will
not shrink from my duty.” And a little later, “I want relaxation from
business and rest, but where can I get rest; I fear not on this earth”
(Bassett, _Life of Andrew Jackson_, Vol. II, pp. 635, 637).
As his policy unfolded it became clear that Jackson had not changed
with the changing times. He remained to the last the product of an
earlier domestic economy, with an old-fashioned horror of debt. He
was too generous to be frugal, too kind-hearted to be thrifty, too
honest to live above his means. He desired a simple independence for
himself and for his country. He believed that the government should
pay its debt, reduce its revenues, and live simply. In his austere
personal rectitude he exhibited a Puritan conviction of the sacredness
of stewardship; he must return to the common people, who had put their
trust in him, an honest reckoning of that trust. It was not in his
nature to betray their faith. He would have nothing to do with the
new theory that government is an agency to help business. To take
profits from an instrument erected supposedly for the common good was
abhorrent to his old-fashioned views; it was impossible for him to
lend the sanction of his office to particular or special interests;
and when circumstances made the Bank the central vexing problem of his
administration, his position was predetermined by every conviction of
his mind. While he was President he would not allow the government to
be used for business ends; he would not permit its funds or credit to
be turned to private profits; he would not tolerate a money monopoly,
no matter how conventionally correct its operations might be proved to
be, that challenged the sovereignty of the national government. The
twin powers of the purse and sword--to recall Clay’s famous phrase
that every Whig orator used on the stump--were in Jackson’s opinion
the ultimate tests of sovereignty; and to turn over the money of the
government to private hands for private use, he believed, was as grave
an abrogation of sovereign rights as would be the use of the army and
navy by private interests for private ends.
In the judgment of many critics Jackson, in his ignorance of the
intricacies of capitalistic finance, wantonly destroyed a necessary
credit system, thereby bringing a devastating panic on the country.
Whether or not that judgment is true is of little importance today.
More interesting historically is the fact that in his attitude towards
the Bank, as in his attitude towards internal improvements, Jackson
returned to the agrarian position of Jefferson and John Taylor,
nullifying for a time the victories gained by the middle class
during the boom period of nationalism. The more he learned about
the methods of capitalistic finance, the more he distrusted it. His
prejudices were his strength. He disliked speculation and he could
see nothing permanently wise or sound in a speculative economy that
put American industry at the mercy of bankers to expand or contract
credit. With an old-fashioned love of a stable currency he gave his
warm support to the project to return the country to a specie basis.
“The great desideratum, in modern times,” he said in his message to
the twenty-fourth Congress, “is an efficient check upon the power of
banks, preventing that excessive issue of paper whence arise those
fluctuations in the standard of value which render uncertain the
rewards of labor.” The establishment of additional mints to provide an
adequate coinage of gold or silver became therefore a natural corollary
of his attack upon bank currency. It was John Taylor’s economics
written into the law of the land.
In his attitude towards the state Jackson followed the nationalistic
tendencies of the West. He was as patriotic as Clay, and in spite of