I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible. When I was President of the Senate, he was Senator; and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage. His passions are, no doubt, cooler now; he has been much tried since I knew him, but he is a dangerous man.
— Thomas Jefferson on Andrew Jackson, interview with Daniel Webster (1824)
Let me paint you a picture of rural America combining forces with dissenting Easterners, pushing back against banks and moneyed interests, even turning its own party against the very principles which its modern founder espoused and to the utter shock the old guard.
This could very well describe the populist tidal wave under Trump that is swamping the modern Republican Party contra Reagan (pun unintended). Yet this very same force also swept under the old Republican Party — that of Thomas Jefferson. The wave eventually cracked the Republicans three ways, giving us the still-remaining Democratic Party (under Jackson) and the antecedent to the modern Republican Party under the Whigs.
There have been any number of prognosticators that are reflecting with glee the prospect of the demise of the Republican Party today. A similar three-way split between Jacksonian populists (Trump), evangelicals (Cruz), and moderates-of-a-sort (Rubio) along with a smattering of traditional classical liberals and liberty-leaning voters (Paul) and old-school arch conservatives (who never quite had a candidate this year) are holding out the prospect of an epic and shattering realignment of the American political landscape.
If this holds, and while the pearl-clutchers have been worrying about visions of 1860, the more apt comparison could very well be something along the lines of 1824, an election thrown to the U.S. House of Representatives that gave us President John Quincy Adams, a Massachusetts man and son of President John Adams who remains generally recognized as one of our greatest ambassadors and presidents.
Jackson was able to finally capture the White House in 1828 once the realignment was in full swing, dissestablishing the National Bank of the United States — long a Federalist stronghold — paying off the national debt, fighting soundly with the Marshall Court in his now infamous statement refusing to enforce Supreme Court rulings, and even challenging states rights over tariffs against South Carolina Senator John Calhoun. Yet Jackson also had several serious marks against him: the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of souls from Georgia to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears (now generally recognized as an act of genocide), the Nullification Crisis, bringing America to the bring of civil war, the spoils system, the organization of his “kitchen cabinet” and the now-famous Panic of 1837.
As a committed Jeffersonian? Jackson was an unmitigated disaster. The conquest of authoritarian government and the clear sign that what the Founders originally envisioned for a free citizenry on this continent was in dire jeopardy. Though initially Jackson busted up corporate interests and paid off the national debt, his mismanagement of the economy resulted in near economic collapse as the Panic of 1837 took hold, with the Whigs calling for a national debt spiraling into a $200 million national bond to cover state debts which had increased six-fold during the panic — a potential $5.1 trillion assumption of public debt in 2015 dollars.
Many states simply repudiated some or all of their debt. The damage done to State banks, to private lending, and confidence in American finance would not and in some ways has never truly recovered. The deflationary cycle — not terribly unlike what we are experiencing now — had a short term negative but long term beneficiary impact on the American economy, strengthening the dollar and improving both GNP and consumption, a fallout that is generally credited to the Jackson-Polk era, but is more an event of happy circumstance than policy.
America seems to be on the cusp of a new Jacksonian moment, sharing less in common with the populist rantings of Fr. Coughlin, but more in common with the strongman tradition of Jacksonian democracy. Interesting that it comes at a time where the Democratic Party seems to be abandoning the memories of both Jefferson and Jackson just at a time where the populists are picking up the latter, and conservatives are wistfully reminiscing about the former.
