Chapter 13 Notes
Andrew Jackson, Trail of Tears, Whigs,
Texas
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson
1767-1845
• Seventh president of the United States.
• Created what is known as the Modern Democratic Party
• A forceful, at times violent personality, Jackson continues to provoke
controversy among historians, who see in him reflections of both the
best and the worst tendencies of the new Republic.
• Jackson was a southwestern gentleman who combined a sense of
rough-hewn egalitarianism with the gentlemanly honor typical of his
class.
• Born in the Carolina backwoods to an immigrant farming family
from Ireland, he fought in the Revolution and was captured and
imprisoned by the British.
• By war's end, all but one member of his immediate family had died in
connection with the conflict.
• A teenager alone and adrift, Jackson eventually decided to study law
and then to head farther west.
• Although immensely ambitious, he would never lose touch with his
plebeian roots.
Election of 1824
Corrupt Bargain?
• The Republican party broke apart in the 1824 election.
• A large majority of the states now chose electors by popular vote, and
the people's vote was considered sufficiently important to record.
• With four candidates, none received a majority. Jackson received 99
electoral votes with 152,901 popular votes (42.34 percent); Adams,
84 electoral votes with 114,023 popular votes (31.57 percent);
Crawford, 41 electoral votes and 47,217 popular votes (13.08
percent); and Clay, 37 electoral votes and 46,979 popular votes
(13.01 percent).
• The choice of president therefore fell to the House of
Representatives.
• Many politicians assumed that House Speaker Henry Clay had the
power to choose the next president but not to elect himself.
• Clay threw his support to Adams, who was then elected. When
Adams subsequently named Clay secretary of state, the
Jacksonians charged that the two men had made a "corrupt
bargain."
• John C. Calhoun was chosen vice president by the electoral college
with a majority of 182 votes.
The Presidency…
• Jackson defeated Adams in 1828, believing he had vindicated his
principle that "the majority is to govern."
• He checked the program of federal internal improvements proffered
by Adams and Clay, believing it a dangerous expansion of federal
power favorable to established wealth.
• On Indian affairs, he ran roughshod over his critics and proclaimed a
policy of forced relocation of eastern tribes west of the Mississippi
River, opening fresh lands for settlers.
• As antislavery agitation mounted—a danger, he thought, to national
tranquility and his own democratic political project—he condemned
the abolitionists and backed efforts to curtail their activities.
• At the same time, he angrily defeated those emerging southern
nationalists (led by his former ally, John C. Calhoun) who defied
federal authority in the name of states' rights.
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia 1831
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By refusing to consider Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Supreme
Court denied self-government to a Native American tribe.
Prior to 1831, the federal government treated tribes as foreign entities in
conducting official interactions with them.
In an effort to keep their tribal lands, the Cherokee living within Georgia
turned to farming and ranching.
They also wrote a constitution and laws reflecting some aspects of U.S. law.
The state of Georgia declared all the Cherokee laws void, prompting that
nation to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the opinion dismissing the case, saying
that Indian tribes were "domestic dependent nations" and could not turn to
the Supreme Court. The case's dismissal allowed Georgia to strip the tribe of
its governmental forms.
A year later, however, in Worcester v. Georgia (1832), Marshall wrote
that the "laws of Georgia can have no force" in Cherokee territory.
He then established the doctrine that the national government alone could
conduct Native American affairs.
President Andrew Jackson and John Marshall locked horns on the issue.
After Worcester, Jackson remarked, "John Marshall has made his decision.
Now let him enforce it." Georgia instead enforced its laws on the
Cherokee tribe.
Trail of Tears
Five Civilized Tribes
• The term Trail of Tears refers to the
removal of the Five Civilized Tribes
from their ancient homeland in the East
to present-day Oklahoma.
• Though all of the tribes—Cherokees,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and
Seminoles—were forcibly uprooted and
herded westward, the removals varied in
severity.
The Cherokee
• In 1791, a U.S. treaty had recognized Cherokee territory
in Georgia as independent, and the Cherokee people had
created a thriving republic with a written constitution.
• For decades, the state of Georgia sought to enforce its
authority over the Cherokee Nation, but its efforts had
little effect until the election of President Andrew
Jackson, a longtime supporter of Indian removal.
• Although the Supreme Court declared Congress's
1830 Indian removal bill unconstitutional (Worcester v.
Georgia, 1832), the national and state harassment
continued, culminating in the rounding up of the
Cherokee by troops in 1838.
• President Andrew Jackson ordered their removal
under the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830,
intended to provide more land for white settlement.
What happened?
• Under the supervision of Gen. Winfield Scott, the U.S.
Army uprooted thousands of Indians from their homes,
stripped them of their possessions, and herded them west
on foot.
• The Cherokee were forced to abandon their property,
livestock, and ancestral burial grounds and move to
camps in Tennessee.
• From there, in the midst of severe winter weather, they
were marched another eight hundred miles to Indian
Territory.
• An estimated four thousand people—over 25 percent
of the Cherokee Nation—died during the march.
• The Trail of Tears, the path the Cherokee followed,
became a national monument in 1987, serving as a
symbol of the wrongs suffered by Indians at the hands of
the U.S. government
The Kitchen Cabinet
• The "Kitchen Cabinet" was a group of unofficial advisers with
whom President Andrew Jackson regularly consulted,
particularly during his first years in office, 1829 to 1831.
• Jackson soon stopped holding cabinet meetings altogether and
instead formed his Kitchen Cabinet.
• Only two members of the official cabinet joined the informal group:
Martin Van Buren and the secretary of war, John H. Eaton.
• Relations between Jackson and his official cabinet reached a new low
in the spring of 1831, when all the members except Van Buren
opposed the president and supported their wives in ostracizing
Secretary Eaton's new wife, a former barmaid.
• Eaton and Van Buren chose to resign over the matter, permitting
Jackson to request resignations from the rest of the cabinet, most of
whom were Calhoun supporters.
• After the formation of a wholly new cabinet in the summer of 1831,
the role of the Kitchen Cabinet was considerably diminished.
Nullification
• The famous nullification confrontation of 1832-1833,
pitting President Andrew Jackson against South Carolina
senator John C. Calhoun over whether a state could
nullify federal law, was an important step in a long series
of attempts to define the proper powers of the states.
• In 1832-1833, Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers also
threatened to secede if the federal agency trampled on
states' rights.
• But the nullifiers added the notion that a state convention,
while remaining in the Union, could use its absolute
sovereignty to render a law of the federal agency null and
void within that particular state's limits.
• The occasion for this addition to states' rights politics was
an escalation of anxiety within the South's most extreme
state, South Carolina.
Tricky Tariffs
• The simultaneous passage of progressively higher
American tariffs in 1816, 1824, and 1828 to protect
American industry from more advanced European
competitors at least temporarily boosted the prices
American farmers had to pay for industrial products.
• Carolina cotton producers blamed all their woes on
these tariffs. They also claimed that the federal agency
could not use its power to pass tariffs, a constitutionally
enumerated, revenue-enhancing act, in order to protect
industry, a manufacture-enhancing act nowhere explicitly
authorized in the Constitution.
• In 1832, a Carolina convention declared the tariff null
and void in the state and warned it would secede if
President Andrew Jackson tried to enforce the tariff in
South Carolina.
• Behind the explicit assault on the tariff lay another
implicit concern—protecting slavery.
• The first confrontation over slavery, which led to the
Missouri Compromise of 1820, had helped inspire the
unsuccessful slave revolt in Charleston led by Denmark
Vesey in 1822.
• Southerners outside of South Carolina, though they also
suffered from low cotton prices and disliked high tariffs,
did not have the nullifiers' angry edge, partly because
cotton yields were not as poor on virgin southwestern soil,
partly because their fears of an imminent challenge to
slavery were less acute since their region had fewer blacks.
• These less distressed southerners clung to Jefferson's
old position that states' rights allowed a state to secede.
But they rejected Calhoun's addendum that a state
could remain under a general government and still
nullify its laws.
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President Jackson pleased the anti-nullification southern majority by
urging lower tariffs. But he angered many of his southern states' rights
followers by denouncing not only Calhoun's addendum but also the
essence of Jefferson and Madison's original position.
Jackson's notion that states' rights justified neither state nullification
nor state secession, stated most powerfully in his Nullification
Proclamation of December 10, 1832, precipitated the defection of a fraction
of his states' rights followers over to the opposition, which became the Whig
party.
Until 1832, Jackson had possessed almost monopoly control of the Deep
South. Now a two-party struggle swept over the region, with both parties
claiming that they could save states' rights and slavery.
Antebellum southerners would never try to nullify another law, although
the nullification controversy would reecho in the George Wallace-led
"interpositions" of southern states against federal desegregation edicts in the
1960s.
Instead, in the pre-Civil War years, most southerners worked within the
two-party system to shore up slavery and states' rights. For many years,
southern two-party politicians succeeded in this enterprise.
The Bank…
• After vetoing the Bank's re-charter in 1832—a
move that helped secure his reelection—he
ordered the removal of U.S. funds, tried to put
the nation's economy on a hard-money footing,
and revived populist, anti-capitalist sentiments
latent since Thomas Jefferson's presidency.
• After seeing his protégé Martin Van Buren
elected as his successor, he returned to the
Hermitage, where he lived out his final years as a
country gentleman and elder statesman.
The Hermitage
Anti Masonic Party
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The Anti-Masonic party, the first third-party movement in the United States,
arose in response to the disappearance of William Morgan, shortly after his
release on September 12, 1826, from a Canandaigua, New York, jail.
Morgan had threatened to publish a book divulging the secrets of Freemasonry;
opponents of the order asserted that a conspiracy among Masons had led to his arrest
on trumped-up charges and subsequently to his being kidnapped and murdered.
The Anti-Masonic movement grew rapidly, drawing its initial following from
farmers and skilled craftsmen—many of them with ties to evangelicalism and the
temperance movement.
They maintained that the Masonic order's secrecy, rituals, and aristocratic character
posed a threat to republican democracy.
In 1831, the Anti-Masonic party nominated William Wirt to run for president; in the
process, it became the first American political party to select a presidential
candidate by means of a national convention and the first to adopt an official
party platform.
Wirt carried only one state (Vermont) in 1832, but the party continued to grow,
offering an increasingly general program of reform.
As it expanded, it came to be dominated by new members more impelled by
personal ambition or by a general opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats than
by Anti-Masonry. At its second and final convention (1835), the Anti-Masonic party
approved a slate for 1836 identical to that of the new Whig party, and thereafter it
disappeared into the Whig coalition.
The Whig Party
• In 1834 political opponents of President Andrew Jackson
organized a new party to contest Jacksonian Democrats
nationally and in the states.
• Guided by their most prominent leader, Henry Clay, they called
themselves Whigs—the name of the English antimonarchist party—
the better to stigmatize the seventh president as "King Andrew."
• They were immediately derided by the Jacksonian Democrats as a
party devoted to the interests of wealth and aristocracy, a charge
they were never able to shake completely..
• Although unable to unite behind a single candidate in 1836, thus
permitting Jackson's handpicked successor Martin Van Buren to
obtain an electoral majority, the Whigs won a popular vote for their
candidates that was close to the popular tally for the Democrats. And
in 1840 and 1848, the party captured the White House.
• Their only loss in a presidential election during the decade occurred
in 1844 when Clay lost by a hair to the Democrats' dark horse James
K. Polk, who had greater appeal to voters favoring the expansion
both of territory and slavery.
• But in 1852, as slavery's expansion became the great issue of
American politics, the Whigs suffered a drastic decline in popularity.
Who are they?
• Historians have interpreted the Whigs in strikingly different ways.
They have been seen as champions of banks, business,
corporations, economic growth, the positive liberal state,
humanitarian reform, and morality in politics, and as opponents
of expansionism, executive tyranny, states' rights, labor, and the
democratic suffrage, among other things.
• The Whig party was founded by individuals united only in their
antagonism to Jackson's war on the Second Bank of the United
States and his high-handed measures in waging that war and
ignoring Supreme Court decisions, the Constitution, and Indian
rights embodied in federal treaties.
• Beyond that, however, there were Whigs and Whigs. Some played
the demagogic anti-Catholic game; others scorned it. Some spoke
critically of working people; others, admiringly. Detailed studies of
the Whig party in the states and biographies of such Whig leaders as
Clay, William Seward, Daniel Webster, and Horace Greeley
reveal dissimilar policies from one state to another and important
differences in the character, beliefs, and actions of the leaders.
Who Supported the Whigs?
• In Congress, Whigs supported the Second Bank of the United States, a
high tariff, distribution of land revenues to the states, relief legislation
to mitigate the effects of the great depression that followed the financial
panics of 1837 and 1839, and federal reapportionment of House seats
(a "reform" likely to enlarge Whig representation in Congress).
• Studies of voting patterns in the states reveal Whig support of banks,
limited liability for corporations, prison reform, educational reform,
abolition of capital punishment, and temperance.
• Although the Whig party was hardly an antislavery party, free blacks and
abolitionists overwhelmingly preferred it to more ardently proslavery
Jacksonian Democrats.
• Whigs fared well at the polls among people of all classes in
economically dynamic communities heavily engaged in commerce.
• Jacksonian propaganda did induce many people to regard the Whigs
as an upper-class party (not organized working men, however, whose
leaders dismissed both Democrats and Whigs as "humbugs").
Their Demise
• Ultimately, however, the Whigs are best
understood as an American major party trying to
be many things to many men, ready to abandon
one deeply held "conviction" for another in the
drive for political power.
• The party died not because its unique aura no
longer appealed to voters but because it could not
cope effectively or persuasively with what after
the Compromise of 1850 became the great issue
of American politics, the expansion of slavery.
The Texas Revolution and Alamo
The Beginning…
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After gaining independence from Spain in the 1820s, Mexico welcomed
foreign settlers to sparsely populated Texas.
Promised land on generous terms, some twenty thousand to twenty-five
thousand Americans migrated there within a decade, far outnumbering
the resident Mexicans (Tejanos).
These immigrants clustered in relatively autonomous colonies along the
lower Brazos and Colorado rivers and in the east.
Alarmed at their reluctance to assimilate, Mexico passed laws in 1830 to
slow American immigration. But with conflict between federalists and
conservative centralists, the government could not enforce them. The
regulations succeeded only in angering both settlers and those Tejanos
interested in economic development.
Some immigrants had never been reconciled to Mexican rule, citing
putative U.S. claims to Texas by virtue of the Louisiana Purchase.
Speculators counted on American annexation to raise the value of their
land.
Many Texans balked when earlier privileges, such as exemption from import
duties, began to be withdrawn.
Slavery in Texas
• The national government and the state government of
Coahuila and Texas (in which Texans had little influence)
passed various emancipation measures and banned the
import of American slaves.
• Slaveholding Texans won exemption from some of
these laws and evaded the others, and by 1835 slaves
represented 10 to 15 percent of the non-Indian
population.
• Though the laws did little except slow the immigration of
slaveholders, they clearly worried those who believed
rich but labor-scarce Texas could prosper only through
slave cultivation of staple crops.
Civil Rights
• The Mexican government presumed it could mold
economic, social, even religious life in Texas.
• It allowed the military to intrude upon what
Americans took to be civil affairs—trade, legal
proceedings, the master-slave relationship.
• Yet this same government could not with any regularity
provide such seeming fundamentals as speedy justice
or trial by jury.
• Immigrants from Jacksonian America had certain
expectations of republican government, expectations that
involved government neither claiming so much nor
delivering so little.
• This failure of government to behave in accustomed
ways provoked a crisis in 1835.
Politics
• Political turmoil allowed Gen. Antonio López de Santa
Anna to amass an increasingly authoritarian power.
• Like colonists in pre-revolutionary America, Texans
perceived in the prospect of more strictly governed
relations with the central government larger threats to
their liberties and property.
• A "war party" had been agitating for separation for some
time, but the insistence of Mexican authorities that
troublemakers be turned over to the military and, finally,
an influx of Mexican troops in September convinced even
the traditionally conciliatory Stephen Austin that "war is
our only resource."
War
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A chaotic rebellion ensued. Significant military action occurred well before the
rebels officially declared for independence.
A provisional government, established in November, called only for separate
statehood within Mexico and the federalist constitution of 1824, hoping to win the
aid of liberal Mexicans elsewhere.
That government could barely rally support within its own ranks, however, as the
governor and council vied for authority.
No single, effective military authority existed either. Volunteers held the Alamo, for
instance, despite orders to the contrary.
The creation of a new government and a consolidated military command after Texas
declared independence in early March 1836 did not immediately bring order.
The fall of the Alamo and the retreat of Sam Houston's forces eastward provoked
panic and mass flight among civilians.
Perhaps only the overconfidence this bred in Santa Anna—and the anger of Texan
volunteers over the massacres at the Alamo and Goliad—saved the day.
In late April, Houston's men surprised a Mexican force at San Jacinto. Houston's
victory and the capture of Santa Anna suddenly ended Mexico's effort to subdue
Texas.
But apparently, independence was not what many Texans really desired. Voters
elected Houston president, but also overwhelmingly endorsed union with the
United States.
Annexation of Texas?
• The Jackson and Van Buren administrations
spurned annexation, however.
• They feared both diplomatic trouble and the
political consequences of pressing for the
admission of a territory in which slavery, now
constitutionally protected, was growing rapidly.
• Many southerners, eager to secure and expand
America's slaveholding territory, worried that
Britain intended to promote abolition in
Texas.
• President John Tyler vainly hoped that the Texas
issue might win him a new following since he
had alienated both parties.
Texas a State
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Democrat Martin Van Buren and Whig Henry Clay, announced against
immediate annexation.
A treaty admitting Texas as a territory failed to win a majority in the Senate,
much less the required two-thirds.
But southern Democrats blocked Van Buren's nomination, opening the way
for dark horse James Polk who campaigned for the acquisition of both
Texas and Oregon (which presumably would remain free territory).
Annexationists heralded Polk's narrow victory as a mandate.
In early 1845 Congress, employing its power to admit new states, simply
annexed Texas by a majority vote.
Texan leaders who had been coy on annexation, hoping to prod either Europe
into guaranteeing Texas independence or America into admitting Texas on
the most favorable terms, likewise yielded to public sentiment.
In June 1845 the republic's Congress accepted U.S. statehood.
James Buchanan would later compare Texas to the Trojan horse. Its
admission hastened the unraveling of the national parties.
Annexation helped provoke war with Mexico, bringing America
additional southwestern territory and fatally linking the politics of
slavery and expansion.