Andrew Jackson Flaws

Andrew Jackson was President of the United States from 1829 until 1837. He is best known for his policy on the Trail of Tears and United States’ Bank. He is a president fraught with misconceptions and misinformation, however he accomplished good things during his presidency, despite popular misconception. Jackson was his own version of aristocracy. Those in Tennessee and South Carolina had a looser definition of aristocracy than those from New England and the North. Despite being mostly illiterate, Jackson had a stint as a school teach, debt collector and even lawyer by the time he was twenty-two. By the time he was thirty, he had served, in some iteration, in almost every level and branch of government. Nevertheless, he found his pride in

This began the commoners’ (middle and lower class) distrust of the government and big corporations. Jackson himself suffered from the Panic as well as its’ lingering effects. Jacksonian Democracy is enlarging the expanding opportunities for the lower and middle class by removing restrictions and privileges given to large businesses and corporations by the federal government. He did this multiple ways, but the most notable of which was allowing the charter of the United States’ Bank to expire—just like Jefferson. Jackson was once an agrarian republican, albeit with a significant amount of nationalism added in, in a similar vein to Jefferson. However, as he evolved in his political thought (which was more linear and less fluid than Jefferson) he landed on a Randolph-Macon

Jackson believed that the common man could be involved with politics as easily as the wealthy. His brand of democracy endeavored to ensure that any form of aristocracy was no longer present in American politics (as seen with the bank), because Jackson’s ‘base” was found in the common man. Jackson’s past seemed to saddle him between the aristocracy and the common man, but due to his upbringing and location, Jackson appealed greatest to the common man. Patronage and Manifest Destiny were also largely influential in Jacksonian democracy. His opposition to banking is a large pillar of his beliefs, and he ended up doing away with the U.S. Bank which ultimately thrust the country into a recession a few years later. Jacksonian Democracy is considered a democracy of the common people because it valued them as full citizens and advocated for white male suffrage, something that had been restricted to property-owning citizens