Was President Jackson Guilty

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While President Jackson might’ve been remembered as a national hero, with his image being immortalized onto the $20 bill, I believe that President Jackson was simply bad at his job of managing the United States, and should be guilty all for the crimes he performed. Not only did President Jackson introduce the spoils system, a method of assigning government positions simply to any person who supported one’s campaign, whether or not they were good at the job, but Jackson also jeopardized the entirety of the US’ economy, leading up to the Panic of 1837, and finally, committed atrocious crimes against the indigenous Native Americans who lived there. While he was viewed as a champion of the people, he should be remembered as a terrible president, …show more content…

The first reason is his the fact that he used the spoils system, a way of giving out government positions to political backers. Needless to say, this is not a good idea: the spoils system encourages bias in the political world towards people who might not deserve acclaim, but will have it anyway due to the appeal of a government job. Another reason why Jackson should be considered guilty in the trial is that he ended up causing the Panic of 1837 (an economic disaster), just for the guise of being on the people’s side. After vetoing the 2nd Bank of US’ charter, Jackson gave all of the remaining money to banks run by the state, which ended up giving out far too many loans and driving the value of the dollar down. This led to an economic collapse which greatly pained the fledgling nation. However, the final nail in the coffin in Jackson’s case for innocence was his treatment of the Native Americans. Jackson said that his priority would be to get the Natives off of their land, and he did so in an extremely gruesome way: after allowing white settlers to encroach onto natives’ land, with the Indian Removal Act, Jackson outright refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision, and forced the Natives to take a snow-ridden several-hundred-mile trek towards the West, without anything but what they could carry on them. In fact, the actions committed by Jackson’s government were so atrocious that they have been compared to the Holocaust by several