CHAPTER XI. ANDREW JACKSON, 1828.
Jackson was in truth a popular idol. Hickory poles, the emblem of devotion to “Old Hickory,” stood in every village throughout almost every State, and at the street corners of many a city. In his own Tennessee, less than three thousand votes were cast against him in the entire State, and in many precincts he received every ballot.
The story is told of a stranger who visited a Tennessee village on the afternoon of the election, and found its male population turning out with their guns, as if for a hunt, and in a state of great excitement. On inquiring what game they were after, he learned that they were starting in pursuit of two of their fellow-citizens who had had the audacity to vote against Jackson, thereby preventing the village from casting a solid vote for “Old Hickory.” The miscreants had avoided a tarring and feathering only by taking to the woods.
The result of the campaign was a triumph for Jackson. New England was the stronghold of Adams, who received all its electoral votes except one from Maine. The National Republicans also carried New Jersey and Delaware, and New York and Maryland were divided. Every other State declared solidly for Jackson, whose total vote was 178, to 83 for Adams.
During that campaign, the same question appeared on the surface as that presented in the campaign of ’92. The Whig party represented apparently higher tariff, and the Democrats were opposing the increase of duty; but the fact remained that John Quincy Adams represented the aristocracy of New England, and the Whig Party had become encrusted with the same false stucco of “caste” that concealed the merits, worth, and virtue of Lincoln’s Republican party in 1892. E’en the most wonderful orator that America has ever produced, the great and honored Daniel Webster, with all of his personal magnetism, magic of speech, and logic of argument, could not boost the aristocrats of the Whig party into power; even though the bill for a higher tariff had passed, the cry was kept up, and was made to appear as one of the issues of the campaign of 1892.
Andrew Jackson represented, in his person, the people, the masses. By birth, education, and mode of living, Andrew Jackson was identified with the Common People, and, as we are all common, with all of the people. Like Abraham Lincoln, the masses saw in Andrew Jackson a champion, ready and brave enough to resent the attempted differentiation sought to be foisted upon the people of America by the then Whig aristocracy—the claimed parent of the Republican party. However, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party was not a progeny of the aristocrats of the Whig party. Andrew Jackson, in his person, represented the purest type of the western pioneer, patriot, and soldier, and such men in America will only be found in the ranks of the people.
In 1828, John Quincy Adams, and his party of the would-be “Four Hundred,” received at the hands of the people the same punishment and rebuke that was administered to Benjamin Harrison and the Republican party, which, just like the Whig party, had become hidden from the view of the people by the glamour of wealth and would-be aristocracy that was thrown over it. In Andrew Jackson, the people elected as their chief one possessed of great firmness and decision of character, one who was honest and true; not always correct in judgment, but when he erred the people were ready to forgive him, because the error was one of judgment and not of intention. He was of them, and like them, as Abraham Lincoln was in 1860, and the people’s love and trust in him erased from their memory mistakes that in another would have been judged with a critical eye. He was often rash in expression and action, but his very rashness was the rashness of a man untrained in duplicity. He was not a diplomat. The people are not diplomatic, and he, as one of them, could not be expected to possess characteristics other than those of the mass. His actions were as a mirror in which the people saw themselves. How the chord he struck, when he threatened to hang John C. Calhoun and the nullifiers, finds a responsive echo in many of the utterances of Abraham Lincoln! What two men so nearly resemble each other to the people?
The mere idle calling one a Democrat and the other a Republican is, as Hamlet says: “Words, words, words.” There is no significance in the mere word Democrat and Republican. Both were men of the people, elected as the choice of the masses, in the constant battle that the masses wage against the crime of “caste.” The similarity in the characters of Lincoln and Jackson is nowhere more forcibly illustrated than in that both were patriots of the purest stamp.
Andrew Jackson took up the administration of the government with fearless energy, feeling confident that he had the unalloyed loyalty of the people to support him. Let us hope that Grover Cleveland, with the same fearless courage, will wage war upon those things objectionable to the people who have placed in his hands the weapons with which to do battle.
The distinguishing act of Jackson’s first term was his veto of the bill to re-charter the United States Bank—the boldest defiance that a President ever cast to the money power of the country. “When President Jackson attacked the Bank,” De Tocqueville notes, “the country was excited and parties were formed. The well-informed classes rallied round the bank, the Common People round the President.” It is a commonplace of history that, in such cases, the “Common People” are more often right than those who claim superior information. Jackson’s veto is regarded by most observers as a remarkable popular victory over a great capitalistic monopoly.
In none of the six Presidential campaigns between the time of Jackson and that of Lincoln was the question of popular sovereignty versus class pretensions brought into the contest as an issue, although events were gradually shaping themselves for the great struggle in which the period ended. Yet, in 1840, the Democratic personality of General William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate, contributed not a little to his success. The veteran soldier, statesman, and frontiersman had spent most of his life in a log house beside the Ohio River, at North Bend, Indiana. A log cabin was chosen by his political followers as the symbol of his plain and unpretentious way of life, and a barrel of cider as an emblem of his simple but generous hospitality. During the “log cabin and hard cider” campaign all over the country, in cities, villages, and hamlets, log cabins were erected as rallying places for Harrison’s partisans, who met there to toast their champion in abundant glasses of cider.
THOMAS JEFFERSON.
The “People’s” President, 1800.