Tuesday, July 12, 2016

In what ways did Andrew Jackson represent the major developments of his era: westward movement, the Market Revolution, and the expansion of democracy for some alongside the limits on it for others?

Andrew Jackson is often regarded as the embodiment of these three developments, largely because they were themselves interrelated.
To take the first, Jackson actively championed the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, which was seen as necessary to the settlement of what was then called the "Southwest": modern-day Alabama and Mississippi. This cleared the way for American settlement of the region and was in many ways a centerpiece of Jackson's domestic policy. Jackson also attempted to purchase the territory of Texas from Mexico, and though he did not openly advocate the annexation of that territory, he tacitly supported proponents of annexation within the Texas Republic.
Jackson's association with the Market Revolution, a phrase used to describe the emergence of market capitalism in the United States, is more complex. On the one hand, some historians have argued that he set himself against the changes wrought by the Market Revolution, pointing in particular to his opposition to the program of internal improvement championed by Whig leaders and his "Bank War" against the Bank of the United States. He also came to office on the votes of Northern urban workers, many of whom had suffered from the economic changes of the period. At the same time, recent historians have emphasized that the Market Revolution was driven in many ways by the emerging cotton economy, and Jackson's actions while President, especially the Indian Removal Act, played a major role in making this happen.
Finally, Jacksonian democracy was inherently racialized. We can see this by the many states that expanded voting rights to all white men during the period while simultaneously denying free blacks the right to vote. We can also see this in the fact that a cornerstone of Jacksonian democracy was Native American removal, which secured lands on which white farmers settled and cultivated cotton (through the labor of the enslaved). Jackson also took steps to prohibit the dissemination of abolitionist literature in the South and approved of the so-called "gag rule" adopted in response to antislavery petitions to Congress. Jackson, more than perhaps any other American politician, perceived how the extension of white democracy was dependent on the subjugation of nonwhites.
https://millercenter.org/president/jackson

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