Jackson, Andrew is the seventh president of the United States and the first Westerner to be elected president. His election marked the end of a political era dominated by the planter aristocracy of Virginia and the commercial aristocracy of New England. Jackson himself was an aristocrat, but from a rougher mold than his predecessors. He fought his way to leadership and wealth in a frontier society, and his success established a bond between him and the common people that was never broken. Small farmers, laborers, mechanics, and many other Americans struggling to better themselves looked to Jackson for leadership.
Jackson’s followers considered themselves the party of the people and denounced their political opponents, the National Republicans and later the Whigs, as aristocrats. In fact, Jacksonian leaders were nearly all as wealthy, and as different from the common people, as the Whigs. For all of Jackson’s talk about helping working people, his policies accomplished little for them. His banking policies destabilized the nation’s currency and, some historians think, were designed to help bankers friendly to his Democratic Party.
However benevolent Jackson may have been toward blacks and Native Americans in his personal life, they clearly were not included in the “common people” he sought to aid in his public life. His Native American policy deprived America’s original peoples of millions of acres despite prior treaties and the disapproval of the Supreme Court of the United States. His party promoted the interests of slaveholders and thereby helped to delay a solution to the slavery question until it erupted into the Civil War in 1861.
Jackson left a legacy of a strong presidency. Since his time it has been commonplace for presidents to repeat his assertion that the president represents the will of the people better than Congress does.................
