H.W. Brands: Andrew Jackson & Troubled Birth of Democracy

good afternoon everyone and welcome welcome to the Miller center and welcome to our continuing series on the historical presidency my name is Wil hitchcock I'm a professor of history here at the University of Virginia and I also serve as the director of research and scholarship here at the Miller Center as part of our ongoing investigation into the American presidency and the crises of the 19th century were privileged today to have two great historians on the stage Elizabeth Barron is the Lange born Williams professor of American history here at UVA and she will facilitate this afternoon's conversation with our distinguished guests HW brands dr. Barron is the author of numerous books on nineteenth-century American history including most recently a new book called Appomattox victory defeat and freedom at the end of the Civil War and a plug she will be speaking on that book here in this room on Wednesday next at 11 o'clock on November 13 our guest today is HW brands who holds the Jack Glanton senior chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin where he joined the faculty in 2005 he previously taught history at Texas A&M for 17 years professor brands has written an astonishing 28 books he is Co authored or edited seven others and published dozens of articles and scores of reviews on many topics his writings have received much critical and popular acclaim several have been New York Times and Washington Post Beck's bestsellers his books have been he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for the first American the life and times of Benjamin Franklin and for traitor to his class the privileged life and radical presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt professor brands regularly writes for the National press he's a frequent guest on radio and television programs and simply put he is one of the leading scholars of the history of the presidency in American life it's a privilege to have him here today to discuss Andrew Jackson and the troubled birth of democracy when he finishes his remarks dr. Varon will engage him in two or three or four large questions just to get a few digs in early before the rest of you take your shots at him and then we'll take her questions from the floor please welcome with me professor HW brands thank you will for that very kind introduction I'm delighted to be back at the Miller center and thank you all for coming I'm a teacher I teach at the University of Texas at Austin and I flatter myself to think that I my classes are kind of interesting but I know perfectly well that if the students didn't have to be there a lot of them wouldn't be there and I know that none of you have to be here so I'm quite flattered that you took time out of your day to come it really is an honor and the Miller Center is a great place to be talking about the presidency I have been a consumer of what the Miller center produces over the years especially the oral history projects that they've been doing and if you don't know the Miller center is the premier place in this country for creating and disseminating oral histories these are the recollections of people involved in presidential administrations I'm currently working on a biography of Ronald Reagan and I have used several of the Miller centers or history interviews with members of the Reagan administration to I hope a good effect at least I have learned a lot from I hope I can convey that to my readers anyway I'm going to talk about Andrew Jackson and I think the subtitle is the troubled birth of American democracy or something like that the general theme of the series and I gather some of you been to previous installments in the series is the crises of the presidency and I'm going to suggest that there is sort of a permanent crisis of American democracy and presidents find themselves right in the middle of it I'm going to elaborate on that more general theme but I'm going to talk in particular about the crises of the Jackson presidency and the - I'm going to talk about are the Nullification Crisis the question was the country going to break into pieces would South Carolina in particular secede in the early 1830s that's the first crisis that I will deal with the second one has to do with American monetary policy the so called Bank war the crisis between the president and the director of the Bank of the United States so these are two well almost and sort of knock-down drag-out battles in the Jackson administration and I think they go pretty far if we look at them in isolating identifying critical issues regarding the Jackson presidency but I'm going to suggest that they're actually much broader than that they really go to the heart of trying to govern this country I might say that they go so far as delineating the the problems of governing any democracy maybe that's a little bit too ambitious for today but let's just say the democracy that we have under our particular Constitution but before I get to the crises I got it I have to talk a little bit about Andrew Jackson because well I guess I could say that Andrew Jackson treated life almost as a permanent crisis Jackson was one who seemed to attract crises and a lot of this had to do with his outlook on life I've studied a number of presidents and presidencies do not which lie say perfectly reflect the tenets that particular tenant of the White House but there is a really strong connection there are certain presidents who are combative and not surprisingly they tend to get into combat with Congress and with other people they deal with other presidents are rather more relaxed and they tend not to find themselves in the middle of crises in this regard I suppose the presidency is a lot like life generally I'm sure you know people maybe you are a person who takes life as a combat and you're probably or that your friend is always fighting with people and then other people are just more relaxed so the presidency is an institution but the president is a person and the person has a strong influence on how the presidency plays out at least while that person is present anyway Andrew Jackson had a difficult life his father died before he was born he or fanned his mother died when he was about 14 years old now this was at a time when Andrew Jackson was already involved in the Revolutionary War he was born in 1767 at the age of 13 he became a courier for the Revel of the American forces in Carolinas in the back country of the Carolinas now for those of you who remember your American history I have to be careful here one time I was trying to make a statement like this I was speaking to a group of mostly retired people and I'm looking around there I'm guessing a few of you may be retired but it was a continuing education program at the University of Texas and the average age in the room I the folks there wouldn't have taken a Miss if I would guess that the average age was probably 70 so what I intended to say was because I was talking about Benjamin Franklin and I intended to say that you will remember that when Parliament passed the Stamp Act in 1765 it raised a great ruckus well I mean actually excuse me what I what I intended to say was you will remember from your study of American history that I left out the study of American history and one elderly gentleman in the back of the room silver-haired stood up right then in the middle of lecture and he said young man how old do you think we are anyway so you may remember from your study of American history that the fighting in the American Revolutionary War was most bitter in Carolina backcountry and one of the striking things to remember about it is it was most bitter not between the Americans and the British between Americans and Americans between the Patriots and the loyals and Jackson found himself right in the middle of that he was a young man he was 13 years old videos very good on a horse and I guess as a young man the people who enlisted him into service felt that perhaps the British would lay off a kid and so he was carrying messages to and fro but in fact within a few months he was captured and he was I have to think he was one of the not sure I should call him a soldier exactly because he wasn't bearing arms that he was certainly one of the youngest participants in the Revolutionary War the age of 13 that's pretty young and he was a prisoner of war by the time he was 14 and it was during this particular time that Jackson developed a particular way of thinking about the world but especially about the British he was a British prisoner of war he was a young man he was he had always been feisty he was always skinny he always had to sort of fight for everything that he got for any kind of respect and when a British officer came in and in a very imperious tone told Jackson to shine his boots that is the officers boots Jackson refused so you can shine your own boots and the officer outraged that this kid should say this in a rebel besides took out his sword and took a swipe at Jackson's head now Jackson was able to get his hand up to block the blow but cut his hand and it creased his skull and for the rest of his life Jackson Bawra scar on his head and a slight dent in his skull and he developed an abiding animosity toward the British he never could believe that the British would do anything right just goodworthy or anything for Jackson the British were the enemy the constant enemy didn't matter if the United States was formally at war with Britain the British were out to get the United States and there are reports of Jackson at various times in his life when he was upset with somebody or other not necessarily some British person but if set with somebody could be Henry Clay or John Calhoun or something like that and involuntarily his hand would go to his forehead and he would feel that crease and he could remember I'm sure this wasn't at this point it wasn't conscious but he could sort of remember that the world is a dangerous place and this is the important thing to remember Jackson to Jackson the world was a dangerous place Jackson went from his service in the Revolutionary War he inherited some money when his mother died but he quickly squandered that gambling and racing horses and for one of anything better to do he decided to come a lawyer and so he read law and this is in North Carolina and he took the bar exam it was a oral kind of exam he took the bar exam he passed and he decided that they were probably already too many lawyers in North Carolina so at least in the eastern half of North Carolina he decided that he would do what any number of people have done in the course of American history he would go west because there were greater opportunities in the West there weren't so many lawyers in the West so he headed out to the west to Nashville which at the time was still part of North Carolina it was the western part of North Carolina but it would become a state and Jackson would be one of the first people to be there now getting out there was a task in itself and travelers from the settled regions of North Carolina out to Nashville were well advised to wait until there was a critical mass of people going because travelers between North Carolina and Nashville were commonly subject to attack by Indians and when Jackson gets to Nashville it is still surrounded by Indians and I won't go into sort of why there was constant warfare on the frontier between the Indians and the white settlers but there was actually one thing I will add to this is that it occurred to me when writing about Jackson there one of the ways to understand Jackson was is simply a chief of a different tribe and the tribe was the scots-irish who settled on the frontier who had felt themselves embattled in the various places they had been including on the frontier and so with Jackson life was a struggle life was a battle life was a crisis and the battle in his early years in Tennessee often consisted of defending the nashville community against Indian raids and then taking pre-emptive raids you know on behalf of the Nashville community he fairly early on became the commander of the Tennessee militia in his district and so he became the / and most responsible for defending Tennessee defending the women and children the community of Nashville against Indians it was a wild frontier it was one where the casualties from Indian raids and of course the other way around Indian casualties from American raids were a constant part of life very often people wouldn't go to the well without carrying a rifle with them for fear that they would be attacked the reason I say all this is to try to recreate for you the mindset of somebody like Andrew Jackson because he became successful but the success was a consequence of his willingness to look upon life as a struggle he felt that life as a struggle if he let down his guard then danger perhaps disaster would ensue and one of the reasons that Jackson became politically successful in Tennessee and eventually politically successful in the country is that his view of life resonated with all sorts of other people and especially with people on the frontier Jackson will become I'm going to jump ahead a little bit he became the first Westerner to become president the first one who lived across the Appalachian Allegheny Mountains and he brought that Western view to Washington into American policy domestic policy and foreign policy Jackson I'll very briefly digress in it's not really a digression into Jackson's married life because actually this is going to reinforce what is insane Jackson fell in love with Rachel Donaldson Roberts and he found her attractive and she liked him the problem was that she was already married to somebody else but this other person Lewis Roberts was a very unreliable person he would be gone for months at a time he may have abused Rachel in one way or another she certainly let Andrew Jackson believe that that was the case and he was a boarder in her mother's house at a time when she had come back from where she was living with her husband because he had become intolerable and so she came home and something some kind of sparks struck fairly quickly between Jackson and Rachel but there was this question of well where's her husband and had he abandoned her and the the laws on divorce were much more stringent in those days than today now today Rachel simply would have filed for divorce gotten divorce and that would've been that but in those days divorce was very difficult the only way you could get a divorce was to get a special bill passed through the state legislature so there's no general divorce law and then there was the question of will this abandonment desertion meet the the threshold the requirement for divorce and and what happens if the person disappears and and dies you'd only he's dead or not so this question of what were Andrew Jackson and Rachel going to do well in fact chalk it up to young love young passion or something they basically decided that they would elope and they headed off and they may or may not have gotten married in Spanish Spanish controlled Nashes along the Mississippi River when they came back they sort of let out to the community that we are now husband and wife well there was this question well what about your former husband and well did he had he gotten a divorce because there were stories that he had filed for divorce with the Virginia legislature because they had got married in Kentucky which was then part of Virginia but it was there was a long way away and they couldn't tell whether there was had gone through now as a matter of fact they were not thinking that this was going to be a big deal and it would not have become a big deal I would not be talking about that you would not have heard about this except for the fact except for what none of them anticipated that Andrew Jackson becomes famous at the time he was a very obscure lawyer in the backwoods of the western United States and who cared actually except for maybe Roberts and a few other people well in fact so when he heard that Jackson had taken up with Rachel he decided he wanted out of this wedding and so he filed for divorce on grounds of adultery and at which point when the divorce finally came through then Jackson and Rachel are faced with okay so what do we do about this now we know that you are actually divorced and which which suggests that the wedding ceremony if any and it's unclear that there actually was one but the one we've been telling people there was that that was invalid because the owner actually married somebody else so should we get married again and Jackson stoutly resisted this because to do it would admit that they hadn't been legally married before and initially he said no we're not gonna do this but finally various people said I you know you really ought to do it and he did but he always thought that that was probably a bad idea because it really did cast a shadow over the first part of the relationship again no one really would have cared much except that Jackson became famous and when he did people had an incentive if they wanted to get a rise out of Andrew Jackson they would raise questions about so who was it that you married and wasn't she married to somebody else well people eventually discovered that you did this sort of thing to Jackson at your peril Andrew Jackson as far as I know I'm pretty sure about this part Andrew Jackson is the only President of the United States ever to have killed a man in cold blood I think he's the only president the United States ever had ever to ever have killed a man with his own weapon now it's possible that George Washington actually killed somebody it had fired again I know Theodore Roosevelt liked to brag that he had killed a Spanish soldier in Cuba during the fore of 1898 I'm pretty sure he's wrong and if you read the letters there the first time he says I shot at this fleeing Spaniard I think I may have winged him the second time he tells the story I hit him the third time he tells the story and he went down dead so anyway but so and now the circumstances killing a man the cold was Charles Dickinson had gotten in a dispute with Jackson over a start-over horse race but it escalated and no one knows exactly what Dickinson said to cause Jackson to insist on having recompense but there's strong reason believe that Dickinson who did this in part because he was trying to make a name for himself in the Nashville area and no better way than to fight a duel with the leading citizen of Nashville and he either gathered somebody told him you know if you really want to get Jackson to go off say something about Rachel well it was said of Andrew Jackson that he was a person in whom you could see his rising temper when he was getting mad and his face would flush and he would start to talk loudly up to a certain point but when he got really angry then all of a sudden he would get deathly quiet and apparently this is what happened when Dickinson crossed that line because all of a sudden Jackson gets really quiet and Dickinson understood uh-oh so they had this duel and dueling was illegal in Tennessee so they went across the border into Kentucky where it's actually illegal to but nobody ever prosecuted there and this by the way this was just two years after the more famous duel of Hamilton and burr which of course was illegal in both the states where they were but nonetheless this was the way things were done now I won't give you the D I won't give you the detailed story of the duel I do with my students especially occasionally I speak to elementary school or junior high school students and the 7th graders they're a tough crowd there are a whole lot tougher than you you're an easy crowd these they all have to be there and they're not interested in stuff that happened ages ago but once I start talking about the duel and I get people to play the different roles oh great fun anyway so he kills this guy now there were plenty of people who thought this is appalling that a major public figure kills a man in a duel isn't that didn't duels go out 100 years ago but the thing is that there were plenty of people in America who thought that made Jackson all the more qualified to be to lead something be President the United States because a lot of them would say well yeah the guy insulted his wife that's what I do too now the reason I say this is to underscore this business of the combativeness of Jackson but also Jackson's appeal to American voters now for the most part appeal to voters wouldn't well it wasn't that crucial when Jackson was a young man because as perhaps you know from your study of American history that early on in the American national period the electors for president were not by and large chosen by popular vote they were chosen by state legislatures and so one a president been chill candidates popular appeal that is for the people at large was much less important than a presidential candidates ability to connect with members of state legislatures but during the Jacksonian era and one the reasons I wrote about Jackson was I wanted to see how democracy was born in this country and you can follow a lot of it through the career of Andrew Jackson anyway Jackson becomes nationally famous during the war of 1812 accident is really the sole genuine hero of the war of 1812 award that for the most part was pretty disappointing from the American standpoint it it included various attempts to invade Canada and they didn't go anywhere it ended with well the the phrase was on the basis of the status quo ante bellum which basically means I forget it so you have this war Americans went in with high hopes they were going to seize territory and smite the British and all this and at the end just and the as you will remember from your study of American history the Battle of New Orleans which was Jackson's finest hour took place two weeks after the treaty was signed in Europe now some people say therefore it should be simply a footnote to the war I would suggest actually there was more than that because with the British intended ah remember Jackson has this thing that the British are out to get the United States they fought against them in the revolution where he fights against them in the war of 1812 and it's quite clear that their strategy in attacking the mouth of the Mississippi was that they were going to split American territory into right up the line of the Mississippi and they were going to create if they could some kind of friendly but non American state in the western part of the Mississippi Valley perhaps it was going to be an alliance with various Indian tribes but they were going to hem in they were going to contain the United States they were going to contain this infection of republicanism just as I would say the United States try to contain Soviet Communism during the Cold War and so you prevent America's growth and you can stop this noxious thing from spreading okay so by defeating the British at New Orleans Jackson prevented this happening now one could say that yeah the war's over didn't really count I'm not sure that that's actually the best interpretation because although the treaty had been signed you will remember in this case from your personal experience that the salt 2 treaty was signed but never ratified treaties don't take effect until they're ratified and the treaty had not been ratified by either the tree degan had not been ratified by either side at the moment of the Battle of New Orleans and had the British won they would have plenty of incentive to just forget the treaty and continue with their offensive okay but now something odd happens the it takes about three weeks for the news to get from Gant in Belgium what's going to become Belgium to these coasts of the United States to New York to Washington and so on the Battle of New Orleans takes place two weeks after the signing of the treaty and the news from New Orleans takes a little less than a week to get to these cities New York and Washington so Americans hear the news of the victory at New Orleans Jackson's great victory and then they hear shortly thereafter the war is over and it you might infer cause and effect from here we won at New Orleans and Jackson's the great hero in the war ends the British scores had to quit after their Smashing defeat at the hands of Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson became the I think it's fair to say the most popular figure of his generation he was the hero in fact he was often referred to as simply the hero when I was writing about Jackson I was trying to figure out if there was any way to quantify Jackson's popularity and I knew perfectly well that there were no public opinion polls you know no public view no popular approval rating at that time so that wouldn't work I thought about well maybe I should read newspaper editorials and see if they're for or against Jackson but then I thought yeah that's not so good because this in those days sort of even more than today and way more than today the newspapers were often simply organs of political parties and their position on individuals were perfectly predictable from who whichever party operated and funded the paper so I thought I'll let you decide whether this was a brainstorm or not I decided okay how can I measure the popularity the the fame of an American public figure having to be flipping through an atlas now I know what I'm going to do I'm going to go to the index of the app I'm going to go the back and I'm going to count the number of entries for things that are named Jackson so Lake Jackson Mount Jackson Jacksonville Jackson City and so on and I'm going to compare that with the other popular place names and you know what at least in my atlas there are more Jackson's than there are anybody else the ones who come in close behind can you guess who the other two are Washington Franklin there we go Washington Franklin and I would suggest that this even understates Jackson's popularity because Washington Franklin had a whole generations head start on Jackson a lot of things were already named now I allow that there might be those odd places named for a Reynolds Stonewall Jackson but just as there would be something named for some other Franklin but anyway so but Jackson was this exceedingly popular I used the word popular advisedly because that's what I want to get at he was by the political classes by the people who actually sort of thought they ran the country Jackson was considered something of a wild man he was this well they often use the term military chieftain and you know we've been out there fighting the Indians so he's kind of like a chieftain but they talked about if Jackson should ever become President this is sort of like Julius Caesar taking over something like that and it's fair to say that Jackson was the favorite of none of the of neither the political parties at least at first and actually by this time the Federalists are more or less fading away so there's sort of a single party and it's going to break up into two parties one which is going to be the Jacksonian faction it's going to become the Democratic Party but anyway Jackson does some various things he seizes Florida from the Spanish in large part because he fears the British we're using the Spanish as a cat's paw Jackson is a real Anglophone he's got England on the brain and if I get a chance I'll tell you the last chapter of his life which is all about fear of Britain and maybe somebody better ask the question because I need to get to what I'm actually going to talk about okay so Jackson gets elected president but not on his first try Jackson gets elected president on his second truck the first try was the election of 1820 or in which Jackson pulled the most popular version by the way 18:24 is the first election where popular vote returns are generally recorded if you look in your encyclopedia whatever you see the popular vote from 1789 to 1820 the popular votes aren't recorded you just the electoral vote but in 1824 for the first time you see the popular vote record and Jackson got most of the putt you got a majority he got the mo more popular votes than any of the other major candidates he did not get majority the electoral vote so the race went to the House of Representatives where his rivals ganged up on him as he sought the number two finisher John Quincy Adams allied with the number four finisher Henry Clay clay was speaker the house and clay managed to swing a majority in the house under the rules by which presidents had chosen those cases to Quincy Adams with the result that Jackson and his supporters believed that the result the election of John Quincy Adams was illegitimate this was a denial of the principle of infers I think that may be the first time I'm using the term of democracy this is the idea that people ordinary people can vote for president not just state legislators and not just the folks who are wealthy I guess I should have added briefly that qualifications for voting are becoming less stringent especially starting in the West with gravitating back to the east so more and more ordinary people can vote now in fact of course this leaves out most African Americans and most women but the idea that any adult white male can vote that you don't have to be educated you don't have to be rich you don't you had don't have to have lived there for 10 years or something like that the idea that ordinary people can actually exercise political power this was the revolution of Jackson's generation this was the birth of American democracy and democracy was frustrated the first time when the old guard in the old system denied Jackson his presidency if you think that political campaigns last a long time these days the election campaign of 1828 began on Inauguration Day 1825 because the Jacksonians I'll call him Jackson is because they're not yet calling themselves Democrats but they will they believe that Quincy Adams had stolen the election the the term that they used was a corrupt bargain and the bargain was apparently or at least tacitly that Adams gets the presidency and Henry Clay gets the Secretary ship of state which in those days was the heir apparent to the presidency so clay pushes Adams to the presidency thinking that he'll be the next one along the Jacksonians go out and they start campaigning right away the election campaign of 1828 was one of the most bitter one of the dirtiest in American history duels were fought if you think that politics is low and dirty today when was the last time we had a duel not really we're just playing softball compared to what they played in the old days and it gets even maybe worse than this I mean you can decide on this in my opinion the marriage of Andrew and Rachel Jackson is one of the great love stories in American history there was this cloud over the origins of the marriage but they were utterly devoted to each other and it got a little bit difficult at times because and perhaps you've seen this in relationships Jackson became famous Jackson became this great man and Rachel remained the simple Tennessee girl that she had been she didn't like politics she didn't like Fame she liked nothing more than sitting in a rocking chair on her veranda smoking her corncob pipe well this was fine with Jackson he thought she was the most beautiful the most precious person in the world but all sorts of people thought that point what a hey see what a rube and they would make fun of Rachel's behind Jackson's back they learned from the Charles Dickinson experiment you had to do it behind his back but they also recognized that once Jackson became a national figure he really wasn't about to start dueling with people although he wished that he could because in the election campaign of 1828 Jackson's opponents the sport of John Quincy Adams they circulated all sorts of rumors all sorts of stories starting with the true ones about Rachel and the cloud of nature the the marriage but all sorts of slanders and libels against Rachel to the point where Rachel suffered a nervous breakdown during the campaign and she suffered a physical breakdown at the end of the campaign and she died between Jackson's election and what would be his inauguration she died Jackson was prostrate with grief he threw himself down on the ground beside her grave in the rain in Nashville the Hermitage outside of Nashville and his friends had to bodily pick him up and take him inside and clean him up he seriously thought about not even going to Washington just resigning the presidency before being in argot he didn't think he could carry on he did say on a number of occasions that he knew he would never be happy again until he was reunited with Rachel in heaven but he was eventually persuaded to go to Washington if only to get his revenge on those people who had killed his darling okay so this is the guy who becomes president at the beginning of 1829 now I promised sir I have two particular crises and how they played out when Jackson became president South Carolina was always was already agitating for a showdown over taxes now the particular tax bill in question was called by knots by its supporters you can imagine the tariff of abominations a tariff for heaven's sakes it's worth remembering though that tariffs in the 19th century were the chief form of taxes there were no income taxes so if people argue about taxes today and they do well just translate that back into the nineteen twenties they argue about taxes they call them tariffs but they're deeper question was who holds final sovereignty in the United States is it the national government or is it the state governments and I would point out to you that this is a question on which the framers the Constitution decided not to take a stand basically they punted on this one they knew they had to because well if they're going to get the states to give up their sovereignty to sign this treaty and there were some skeptics among the states they had to leave it kind of open in yea the Constitution does say that the statute of the country shall be the ultimate law of the land but there still is this question what if Congress passes a law that's unconstitutional because at that point nobody quite knew what unconstitutional meant and who would decide these questions now today oh it goes to the Supreme Court well questions like this had gone to the Supreme Court not the question of secession or the term was nullification can a state refused to enforce a federal law within its own boundaries that's what nullification was about and in fact distinguished opinion starting with Thomas Jefferson James Madison had said yeah the states can do this Jackson took just the opposite view Jackson considered himself a states rights man he believed that the states were more likely to make wise laws make good decisions then the federal government was the closer government was to the people the better the governance that was his general philosophy but Jackson drew a sharp line between states rights and secession or nullification because secession was the obvious consequence of nullification and he drew a sharp line why because he remembered as he stroked his head that the British were out there and they were waiting to pick the American states off one by one Jackson I have to reiterate this Jackson thought the world was a dangerous place and that danger was something Jackson had felt personally and as present the United States he felt it institutionally for the country and he believed that secession the separation of the states would open the United States up to attack threat coercion by foreign powers starting with the British now Jackson believed that nullification was wrong that secession was war against the United States things got rather difficult because the principal spokesman for secession was his vice president John Calhoun now Calhoun's role in fomenting or articulating the secessionist theory the nullification theory was not entirely known that it was clear that the country had this administration where the president stood for holding the Union together at all costs and the vice president was taking the opposite idea and there was a moment of great drama on the birthday of Thomas Jefferson and by this time we're now in the early 1930s they're calling themselves Democrats but they're from the original Jeffersonian Republicans you know the name switches okay and so even then they held their Jefferson Day dinners to celebrate the founder of their party and it was a moment when all the bigwigs in the party would show up and they would make toasts and they would make points with their toasts and sometimes the president showed up sometimes presidents didn't show up but on this particular occasion Jackson showed up now Andrew Jackson was never an effective public speaker he had a rather Reedy voice he often coughed he was chronically sick from the time he was young sometimes he lives simply on tobacco and alcohol but this time he showed up and well the other great orator is were there including Calhoun and and they sort of this of course this was at a time when Americans appreciated oratory it was one of the great indoor sports well they heard that Jackson was going to be there but Jackson didn't have a big voice which of course made it all the more effective because when Jackson turn came he spoke in a low voice and everybody had to listen very carefully and he said our federal union it must be preserved so he was throwing down the gauntlet to those who would say you know what the states put this country together the states can take it apart if they want when South Carolina persisted saying that if the federal government tried to enforce that law the tariff law in the borders of South Carolina South Carolina would exercise his right to secede from the union Jackson got his Secretary of War to draw up plans for an invasion of South Carolina and he prepared to lead the invasion himself at the moment of crisis a congressman from South Carolina came to the White House this was just before the winter break and he was about to go back to South Carolina and he dropped in he said mr. president do you have any message for my constituents and Jackson said yes I do please tell my friends in South Carolina now Harold point out exactly where Jackson was born is a little bit unclear it was somewhere on the border between North and South Carolina he played it for greatest effect whenever he wanted to so at this point he was speaking as a South Carolinian he said please tell my friends in South Carolina that if a single drop of blood is shed against the United States I will hang the first person I find from the highest tree in the state now the South Carolina congressman took the message back to South Carolina and when Andrew Jackson threatened physical harm against people given his record with Charles Dickinson people took it seriously and in fact the crisis passed South Carolina withdrew its demands now Jackson was a sufficiently astute politician to allow South Carolina a face-saving out but he made very clear that you can debate issues of taxes of governance but the debate has to stop short of the point where you say you're leaving this union okay this is in the beginning a the end of 1832 the beginning of 1833 now Jackson in kind of accepting the victory commented he understood this issue hasn't gone away but he said the next time it's going to be over the slavery question which of course is how things turned out okay but actually it does raise an interesting issue what if Andrew Jackson had been president in 1861 would southern states have had the nerve to go out Jackson made very clear before South Carolina passed any Ordinance of Secession this means war and you're going to bear the brunt of it now one of the effects of this was to deter the secessionist movement in South Carolina perhaps even more important to scare away any other southern states from perhaps joining South Carolina suppose Abraham Lincoln had taken that strong position that's actually too much of a supposition because Abraham Lincoln as far as we know had not killed anybody and anyway but it is it is interesting to to even like okay the second crisis the second crisis has to do with the Bank of the United States but it's a broader issue than that and it requires you to do something that well I think you have to do if you want to understand history as it was lived and one of the things we use to examine history is we use the advantage of hindsight we know how things turned out and therefore we know what to look for when we go in the past I'm going to suggest you however that if you really honor if you really want to understand how the world looked to the people who were living it you have to abandon hindsight you have to forget everything that happened after that moment in time that you're looking at because of course the people that you're studying didn't know how things were going to turn out and I'm going to actually raise it on two points right now we know that American democracy survived here in the year 2013 the United States is a functioning democracy we can debate over how well it's functioning but we do hold elections and people vote in all this stuff and it's tempting knowing how things turned out to think that well that was kind of inevitable and it was going to happen well maybe that's so although actually I'm going to says it wasn't inevitable all in fact I'm gonna say it even didn't happen I'm gonna say it in American democracy actually crashed during the Civil War but we'll get to that I mean because you know if democracy is about anything is about resolving our issues at the ballot box not on the battlefield if you have a civil war whatever system you had failure but leave that aside Jackson didn't know the democra is going to survive he had seen the opponents of democracy won election tonight steal a next one and given Jackson's attitude toward the world that it's a dangerous place that there are people out there who wish us ill and will do us harm at first opportunity he believed that democracy was something that had to be defended at every turn this was his attitude toward the nullification crisis we can't just take a relaxed view of this the existence of this country the existence of democracy is at stake okay now on the bank of the United States question the Bank of the United States was a kind of a private forerunner of the Federal Reserve and it tried to answer a perennial question in American economic and fiscal and monetary policy and that is what is money who makes money who determines how much there will be who determines its value the issue of course has not gone away as anybody who's been following the debate over Ben Bernanke and is handling the Fed and the quantitative easing expansion the money supply and all this stuff it is a complicated issue that is always with us in the early 19th century well first in the late 18th century Congress decided to hand it over to well a private version of a central bank it was called the Bank of the United States and it was a bank that had a privileged position with respect to American federal deposits and the like and it essentially set monetary policy and means in ways not unlike the way the Fed does it today but it was stoutly resisted by people who thought wait a minute money is too important to be handed over to private interests because everybody depends on money everybody is affected by the quantity of money value money and so on in a democracy this is a decision that ought to be made by the representatives the people not the representatives of the rich because everybody needs money so the first bank the United States was chartered and it ran out started in 8 1791 it lasted till 1811 and it was chartered by the Federalists it was allowed to lapse under the Republicans they soon changed their mind the war of 1812 came along and it turned out that a central bank is pretty handy to have during wartime and so the Madison and Monroe administration decided okay maybe we should have another Bank of the United States so they reach our turd and they got the second version and the second version of the Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 and it was on a 20-year run in those days corporate charters were not open-ended corporations were chartered for 20 years or so kind of like well you know Charter is in some ways a special license so it's a little bit of kin to unlawfully and just like monopolies just like patents they run out at least that was the feeling then so the Bank of the United States was chartered from 1816 is gonna run until 1836 and it was something that actually came to the attention of the Supreme Court and in the 1890 case 1819 case in McCulloch versus Maryland John Marshall one could call him the last of the Federalists said that the Bank of the United States is perfectly constitutional and that seemed to settle the issue until Andrew Jackson became president and Jackson took a view that is going to sound very odd quite foreign to us but in fact was rather unremarkable at the time and that is that the Supreme Court in its decisions speaks for the judicial branch of government it does not speak for the legislative branch and it certainly does not speak for the executive branch and so Jackson could waive aside the fact that the Supreme Court had ruled the Bank of the United States constitutional he said it's unconstitutional and this wasn't the only issue on which Jackson differed with John Marshall and it wasn't the only one which he adopted this view that the Supreme Court rules for the judicial branch but the whole reason we have separate branches is so that we get the different views and different intelligence as of different people so the bank became the focus of the election campaign of 1832 Henry Clay wanted to ride the issue the bank of the United States into the White House Henry Clay by the way is one of two too many of the jewels to individuals who have holds the distinction of having achieved the nomination of a major party for president three times and never won once Henry Clay has won do you know who the other one was William Jennings Bryan very good yes which is kind of interesting you think about it because you have to be pretty popular to get nominated three times but just unpopular enough not to get elected anyway so Henry Clay collaborated with the director of the bank of the United States Nicholas Biddle to apply to Congress for early renewal of the bank of the United States thinking that this would force Jackson's hand Jackson would either have to succumb and approve the renewal or conceivably he could veto the renewal of bank's charter but of course that would derange American business make Jackson very unpopular and Henry Clay would waltz into the White House this was the plan so bank Charter was renewed and Jackson took this as an affront said okay you can renew this but it's still unconstitutional now Jackson's view of banks and bankers was fairly characteristic of a lot of people in the United States call it the populist wing of the American polity and I'm going to suggest to you that some of this strain still lives in that when Jackson looked at banks and bankers he could see that they were rich and they made a lot of money off of transactions that were necessary in the lives of ordinary people but he couldn't see that they actually did anything worthwhile so what did they do they're simply money changers and they take their cut you know wall street in the financial industry in the United States has even very recently come in for similar kind of criticism what's all this derivative trading you know who gets who gets any benefit out of this besides the bankers well that was the Jacksonian view so Jackson believed well I thought I said that he was a states rights man in politics you could call in a states rights man in banking as well he thought the Bank of the United States holding this favored position in the nation as a whole had an unfair advantage over the state banks so against the advice of many of his top counsel certainly against the expectations of Henry Clay and Nicholas Biddle and probably against the opinion of most American business vetoed the bank Charter and Henry Clay thought this is it I'm going to win Jackson had a better sense of what American opinion felt about banks and he carried his reelection campaign easily at which point while Henry Clay was distraught he didn't know what he was going to do Nicholas Biddle was outraged Nicholas Biddle believed that he knew better what was good for Americans for the American economy then that Yahoo Andrew Jackson did well then pretty much anybody else did now I'm just going to point out that he was probably right but to Jackson that was immaterial Jackson of course didn't believe that was right and so Jackson decides that he is since the bank is going to be winding down anyway and since Nicholas Biddle here was Jackson's problem with Biddle and a big central bank was there was too much power in the hands of an unelected official this is the age of democracy Jackson said ordinary people should have as much control as possible over their own lives and there's this one guy Nicolas fiddling nobody elected who can cause prices to go up cause prices to go down this is intolerable in a democracy and in fact Nicholas Biddle proved Jackson right he tried to demonstrate the importance of the Bank of the United States by artificially engineering a financial panic which caused interest rates to rise which caused businessmen to needed to borrow money to go to Nicholas Biddle and said mr. Biddle you know you we need the money he says don't blame me go to the White House so they went to the White House and mr. president you must relent you must come up with some kind of deal and Jackson said don't come to me go to the man who has the money go to that monster Jackson believed that Nicholas Biddle was declaring war on him Andrew Jackson and because he was the elected president of the United States declaring war on the American people and he turned to his vice president he said Mr Van Buren the bank is trying to kill me but I will kill it and he did Jackson removed the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States this was the lifeblood of the Bank of the United States and the bank quickly slid into irrelevance its charter ran out in 1836 and that was the end of it and it was a great triumph for democracy the elected officials of the United States the elected president the United States had triumph over the unelected banker it was a triumph for democracy and it was a disaster for the economy the the termination of the Bank of the United States led to a vast speculation funded by state banks in western lands the bubble burst what followed was the panic of 1837 the most serious panic in American history before the Civil War now the fasten of this that's I'm getting to the end the lesson is well in the case of Andrew Jackson Andrew Jackson never repented he felt that he had done the right thing by the time the panic hit he was out of office and it was somebody else's problem but he still believed that there was a principle worth fighting for and if it was a principle worth fighting for he wasn't gonna back him but it does kind of raise a couple of issues I'll start with the one about whether this triumph of democracy was good for the United States and it's a kind of a deep question well the subtitle of my talk is the troubled birth of American democracy and I suggested instead that it could be sort of the permanent crisis of American democracy and it has to do with these two issues that are exemplified by these two particular crises so there's the one about nullification well ever since the Civil War no state with the exception of the one that I live in Texas has ever really spoken and even in Texas the so called secessionist movement in Texas is nobody takes it seriously my the governor of my state Rick Perry occasionally sort of talks out of one side of his mouth saying you know that's the right idea but no nobody's going to do it so the civil war settled the issue I think I mean I actually raised this question I raised it to you you think it's settled forever the civil war settle the question of whether you can leave the Union but it didn't settle the question of when you have a two-tiered system of democracy we have some decisions that are made at the national level and other decisions that are made at the state level what do you do when push comes to shove what do you do for example if I don't know just to pick something out of the blue the Congress passes and the president signs I don't know the Affordable Care Act and a bunch of states including the state that I live in Texas and we don't like this I think it's a terrible idea and they do whatever they can to sandbag it to opt out of it so what do we do well in fact what we do now is we resort to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court said that in certain parts of the law konna the states can opt out but we still have not resolved this issue of how do you run a country when there are two levels that are often at odds with each other and this is this is a problem that's not going to go away as long as we have this federal system now I'm not saying we should undo the federal system but I just think it's important to beware that every system has its drawbacks then the other issue the one about well the Bank of the United States and whether the triumph for Jackson's democracy and the disaster for the economy well what do we do about this the fact that we have democracies based on the idea that generally speaking the majority with things carved out for minority rights but generally speaking the majority gets things right but do you believe that that's always the case generally the case sometimes never the case what do you do and this is going to become an issue for example after the Civil War what do you do when a majority supports a policy that is we could just call it various things wrong immoral unethical criminal is democracy the fact that you know we let people vote is this any guarantee of good government its popular government but is it good government and I mean I'm not gonna weigh in in this eye I guess I'll close I don't want to leave you with a on a down note but I will close by citing Winston Churchill on the subject you know you know a Churchill said about democracy and you will remember this maybe from your study of history some of you may be from maybe you heard it and he said that democracy is the worst form of government there is except for everything else that's been tried okay I'll stop there thank you

Channel: MCamericanpresident

Views: 21,975

Rating: 4.7333331 out of 5

Keywords: Andrew Jackson (US President), President Of The United States (Government Office Or Title), H.W. Brands

Id: 9b5J2to3j3w

Length: 62min 1sec (3721 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 26 2015