What’s So Bad About Old Hickory?

It is a good essay, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. My only complaint: it does not go far enough in its condemnation of Old Hickory.

I have now written two books of history in the last four years. The first was a history of the Democratic party. The second, released just last week, is about political corruption — part history and part contemporary policy analysis. It’s called A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption.

So, I have had occasion to study Jackson with some care. And I have to say: I cannot stand him.

The typical praise of Jackson is one of two varieties. First, he expanded and extended the powers of the presidency, and in so doing helped advance a truly national identity. Lincoln, it is correctly averred, drew on Jackson’s response to the Nullification Crisis while justifying the Civil War. Second, Jackson helped democratize American politics, and in so doing helped make the country a little more broad-based and fairer than it had been. We see that, for instance, with his veto message of the Second Bank of the United States, the first — and perhaps best — call to arms in our nation’s never-ending class war.

However, both of these points are wildly overstated, or come with substantial caveats.

Let’s take the first point — his strengthening of the powers of the presidency. For starters, Jackson was grossly hypocritical in his approach to executive authority. He is indeed celebrated for his nationalism against the South Carolina nullifiers, but what about his attitude toward Georgia’s blatant violation of the Cherokee Nation’s rights under federal treaties? While he was threatening to hang the nullifiers, he effectively said to the Cherokee, “Georgia is going to violate your federal rights, and there is nothing I can do. You’d better remove to the West.” Contrast this response to what John Quincy Adams did just a few years earlier, by threatening Georgia with legal action for their transgressions, even though it cost him political capital.

What is the difference? Politics. South Carolina was suffering under the Tariff of Abominations, hence the Nullification Crisis. Yet that tariff law — which was really outrageous in how it stuck it to Southern farmers for the sake of Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern manufacturers — was actually designed to help Jackson get elected in the first place. In 1828, Jackson’s agents in Congress — including future president James Buchanan — engineered the bill as a payoff, mostly to Pennsylvania, a state deemed essential to a Jackson victory in 1828. South Carolina chafed under this onerous regime, and Jackson came down hard on them. Pennsylvania voted for Jackson twice.

As for the Cherokee, Jackson’s political coalition was a mish-mash of regional interests that included poor farmers in the Old Southwest. They were hungry for land, and Jackson was intent on delivering to them, even if it meant a fundamental shift in America’s policy toward the Native Americans, and even if those tribes had federal treaties.

So, Jackson was an inconstant steward of executive authority. He allowed it to expand here, but shrink there — depending on how it suited his political interests.

Moreover, Jackson’s expansion of executive authority created enormous trouble over the following half century. By seizing for himself the power to remove officeholders for political purposes, he facilitated the patronage system. It had already existed to some extent — Jefferson struggled with what to do about old Federalists during his first term — but Jackson transformed it from a necessary evil into a virtue. Subsequent, “powerful” presidents abused the system worse than Jackson, and after the Civil War, federal patronage distributed by Ulysses S. Grant birthed statewide political machines, many of which were not destroyed until the Great Depression.

So, when we talk about Jackson expanding the powers of the president, I respond: perhaps, but he did so in a partial, unfair manner, and those expansions often were detrimental to the national good.

What about the other point in praise of Jackson, that he democratized politics? I have even less regard for him on this front. For starters, democratization was a process that was ongoing. It is better to say that Jackson — as a national celebrity — was able to take advantage of processes that had been working their way through the system for nearly a generation by that point. In doing so, he stepped over men of better intellectual caliber and superior temperament — John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, in particular.

But it is worse than this. The foundation of a true republic is not democracy. It is the rule of law, and Jackson had precious little respect for it. One gets a flavor for that in how he dealt with the Cherokee Nation, but that is not the end of the story. Jackson hated the Second Bank of the United States. There were fair reasons to; for instance, its president Nicholas Biddle was heavily invested in the political process and his predecessors were hack politicians who nearly ruined the national credit. But Jackson’s understanding of public finance was decidedly lacking, even for his day.

Jackson famously vetoed a recharter of the Second Bank, and passages from his veto message have regularly been hailed ever since. Still, I think historian Bray Hammond put it best when he characterized the entire document as an, “unctuous mixture of agrarianism and laissez faire.”

Jackson was — arguably — within his rights to veto the recharter. Typically the veto had been used up to that point only to reject bills that the president thought unconstitutional, but the Constitution gives the commander in chief total discretion in terms of justification.

What is so objectionable is what he did next. He broke the law, pretty egregiously.

After the 1832 election, which Jackson won handily, he sought to destroy the Second Bank by removing federal deposits from its vaults. Congress had given that authority to the secretary of the treasury, and only if the deposits were deemed unsafe. The House of Representatives had recently affirmed that the deposits were indeed secure, and Secretary William Duane (whom Jackson had expressly selected because his predecessor, Louis McLane, was too pro-Bank) refused to remove the funds. So Jackson fired him, and installed Roger Taney to do the dirty work.

But it gets worse: Jackson’s cronies expressly sent the federal deposit funds to local banks that were loyal to Jackson. They were known as the “pet” banks. Moreover, in a blatant conflict of interest, Taney’s friends in Baltimore also got a piece of the action.

So, return to Jackson’s veto message against the Second Bank. In it, he says:

Now, compare that to what he actually did: He allowed Bank funds to be used as a form of political payoff.

That, to me, is Jackson in a nutshell. He talked a big game about republican virtue, rooting out corruption, and honest government — but when it came time to act on it he was partial, fractious, corrupt, and dangerous. Removing the deposits from the Bank ultimately hurt the economy, and the United States did not have anything approaching a reasonable system of public finance until Salmon Chase became treasury secretary in 1861.

This is the most I am willing to admit of Jackson: In his borderline sociopathic conflation of his own vanity with the national interest, he occasionally expanded the powers of the chief executive; some of these expansions were useful to truly great men like Lincoln, who had a more fair and impartial sense of the world.

Overall, his tenure was dangerous to the republican quality of the nation. Was he the worst president we’ve ever had? No. One of his successors — Franklin Pierce and Buchanan, both Jacksonians (not coincidentally) — probably deserve that dubious distinction because they were inept in the face of crisis. But I think the only way to praise Jackson is to overhype his virtues and overlook his many, many flaws.

Jay Cost is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His new book, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, is now available.