Andrew Jackson Values And Beliefs

Andrew Jackson's personal and political values largely reflected those of early American colonists, but he was a man of contradiction. While he professed to be a strong Christian, and seemed to become more so as he got older, he was a strong supporter of slavery and believed that Indians, or native Americans, were "children, who required guidance.

Early American colonists started the American revolution because they believed that every man should have a voice in government, that true representative government was the right way to run the new United States. Jackson was a strong supporter of this concept. As President, the term "Jacksonian Democracy" was applied to him. This was because he was a strong believer that people should actively

He felt it was refusing to help settlers in the west and, instead, was giving too much money to those who owned big factories in the east. Jackson was defending both the rights of Americans to settle westward, trying to make sure they could get the funding to do that, and saying they had the same rights to try to be successful as those with political connections. These things are very much in line with beliefs of early Americans, who believed every man should be able to own land and try to be

While Jackson believed that everyone who wanted could do this, he used what would today be considered terrible methods to get results. Jackson sent the military to fight against many Indian tribes and, after they had beaten the Indians, they claimed their lands for white settlers. This forced the Indians to move farther and farther west into less favorable lands. He created the "Indian Removal Act", which made it legal and, in his opinion, morally right to force the Indians from their lands. The biggest and most remembered event of this was the "Trail of Tears", where tens of thousands of Indians were led on a forced march to lands west of the Mississippi. The land they occupied in the east had fertile farming ground, and white settlers wanted it. So Jackson ordered military attacks, and then the forced march, many of them members of the Cherokee Nation, to the west. Many died during this march. While Jackson is given the blame for this, many early American settlers would not have objected. They did not understand the Indians, they did not live peacefully with them, and they remembered that many Indians had fought against the US in the French and Indian wars, and later in the War of 1812. So, this move to remove the Indians was not an unpopular