3 - The Jackson Democrats
Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit
Democrats and Republicans:
HOW CAPITALISTS RULE IN A CAPITALIST DEMOCRACY/Pt.3
The Jackson Democrats (Andrew, that is...)
By Vince Copeland
(Third article in a series)
Andrew Jackson is usually looked upon as the co-founder, with Thomas Jefferson, of the national Democratic Party. He is hailed as a "man of the people," "a diamond in the rough," and so on.
Jackson was undoubtedly a less talented person than Jefferson and much more flamboyant--a gambling card player, a boastful duelist and slave trader. He led the war against the Seminoles in Florida, in reality a merciless hunt for fugitive slaves protected by the Native people. He was a ruthless suppressor and mass murderer of the Native peoples, a leading maker--and breaker--of treaties.
But he did have the "common touch" as far as the great masses of white farmers were concerned. He fulminated against the "money power" and vowed to destroy the Bank of the United States, which in the minds of the majority of farmers represented the money lenders and mortgagers who oppressed them.
Having distinguished himself as the general who defeated the English at the naval battle of New Orleans, he became an "available" candidate for some faction of the ruling class to run for president.
As a big slave owner himself, he was considered firmly rooted in the slave system and thus acceptable to the feudal barons of the South. But he also came under the influence of the New York banks through the medium of his first secretary of state, Martin Van Buren.
Jackson didn't win the presidency on his first try. When he ran for president in 1824, he received only a plurality of the Electoral College vote. The House of Representatives then chose John Quincy Adams, a Northerner, who served as president from 1825 to 1829.
It was not long after this that the Democrats adopted the two-thirds rule at national conventions. This meant that the South, although numerically weaker, now had veto power over any northern Democratic candidate. The rule stayed in effect until 1936.
John Quincy Adams
This Adams is rarely given much credit, but he was already pulling away from the slave-owning Democrats and beginning to take a position against slavery. After losing the presidency to Jackson in 1828, he was instrumental in forming the National Democrats, which became the Whig Party.
He then ran for the House in 1830 and served nine terms, dying in 1848. He was physically half-paralyzed during his last term. Adams successfully fought the gag rule, which prevented petitioners from talking about slavery on the House floor. And he was the attorney for the magnificent mutineers of the slave ship Amistad.
Today it is hard to imagine anyone who has retired from the super-centralized Washington dictatorship "demoting" himself or herself by running for the House of Representatives. But at that time not only was it the only body in the capital with a remote claim to popular representation, but it still played an important role and could be more influenced by popular pressure than today.
Adams himself was a principled and intransigent fighter within the boundaries of his own perception of what was right. And his perception was pretty good.
The democratic 'deluge'
Jackson's popular vote when he ran again in 1828 was a little over 650,000. His "democratic deluge" was about 5 percent of the whole population!
However, it was the first direct vote ever tallied for president. Before that, the presidents had been elected by the state legislators and their closely appointed Electoral College. This 50-year period of virtual dictatorship--even over the white masses--was necessary for the ruling classes to consolidate their rule before permitting the operation of a popular vote for president.
The "founding fathers" were very conscious of this problem from the beginning. The Constitution nowhere provides for a people's vote for anything but the House of Representatives. And even that vote was hemmed in by property qualifications in the various states. There is no property qualification in the Constitution itself, but this is because the most radical section of the population at that time and for many years thereafter was the free farmers, who, however poor, did own property and therefore could not have been excluded from the franchise that way.
It can be stated flatly that "King Andrew," as the Whigs called Jackson, never did anything to really oppose the slave-owning power in spite of all his talk about democracy.
But what was all that business about the Bank of the United States that they drummed into our heads at school? Why did he use the presidency to denounce and liquidate it?
First, this was a payoff to the rival New York banks for supporting him. And it was also a measure of the partnership, although still junior, that these banks exercised in the ruling class and in the Democratic Party.
A governor abdicates
When Jackson was elected president, Martin Van Buren had just been elected governor of New York. On hearing the news of Jackson's election, Van Buren dropped the governorship and hurried to Washington to become an "adviser" to Jackson, who later appointed him secretary of state.
This highly unusual procedure would be inexplicable to those who did not know that Van Buren was in the confidence of the Manhattan and other big New York banks. Van Buren was an extremely adept politician, known in upper New York state as "the Red Fox of Kinderhook." He was the first northern Democrat to become president (1837-41). (John Quincy Adams was from Massachusetts, but at the time of his election was already in that faction of the Democratic Party that later founded the Whig Party.)
Van Buren was careful to state flatly in a campaign autobiography that he supported the institution of human slavery.
Van Buren was Jackson's main adviser on the Bank of the United States, which was headquartered in Philadelphia. Jackson was supposed to hate this bank, and probably really did. But he did not hate all banks. He supported the state banks, many of which were incompetent and corrupt. The New York City banks, which were not especially incompetent, were contributors and supporters of Jackson, besides being to some degree his master.
Van Buren's opposition to the Bank of the United States had its roots in the old rivalry between New York and Philadelphia for financial control of the country.
Some of Jackson's appointments might be interpreted as being biased in favor of state banks in general, not just those in New York. For example, his four appointments to the Supreme Court were all people who opposed the Bank of the United States and sided with the state banks.
He appointed Roger B. Taney as Chief Justice to take the place of John Marshall. Taney later delivered the infamous Dred Scott decision. Yet he was not an archaic, slaveholding dinosaur of the Old South, even though his parents were slaveholders and he was highly acceptable to the slavocracy. He was a director of several state banks, an attorney for some of them, and an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism as well as slavery.
Polk and the Mexican War
One of the outstanding Democrats before the Civil War period was the now little-remembered President James K. Polk. He presided over the Mexican War of 1848. His electoral opponent, the Whig Henry Clay, was publicly opposed to this war, although privately, as befitted the "Great Compromiser," he was soft on the issue.
The real issue was the extension of slavery. New England, which voted for Clay, was strongly opposed to the war. It was unpopular in the North generally because it was widely understood not just as a land grab but as a pro-slavery war. Mexico had abolished slavery in its territory. In 1836, when Texas had its "revolution," it restored slavery there. Now, in 1848, the new Western states seized from Mexico were also "opened up" for slavery.
The discovery of gold in California just after this war upset the plans of the Southern oligarchs. It led to a great influx of white Easterners who would oppose the extension of slavery, if only because such an event would hurt their own fortunes.
The influx also spurred plans for a continent-wide railroad backed by Northern capital and encouraged the idea of Northern settlement of the entire West.
On the other hand, it also stepped up the Indian Wars, in which more treaties were made and broken. Big capital used the small pioneers as cannon fodder, after duping them into believing they were fighting for land "ceded" to the U.S. government by the Native peoples.
It is more than likely that at that time the capitalist elements, led by the New York City Democrats, were among the more enthusiastic saboteurs of the Indian treaties of the West. The slave owners, however, resisted settlement in the West by great numbers from the Northeast, and might have delayed the extermination of the Native peoples--until a time more appropriate to their interests.
But the backbone of the Democratic Party until the Civil War, it must be remembered, was the alliance of the slave lords, the small, independent, mainly white farmers, and the merchant-banker crowd in New York City--with the slave lords in final command.
The mass base
The great majority of the population of the United States before the Civil War was still small farmers, mostly in the North. But they could not be taken for granted any more. A great shift was taking place in their consciousness during the 1850s. Their idea that they were really free and independent was a deeply rooted one, based to a large degree on their possession of land--however small, poor or unproductive it may have been. But they too were oppressed by a hidden hand, and were beginning to feel it.
The fact that the Democratic Party was also the party of slavery was mostly shut out of their consciousness by the convenient fact that slavery was confined to a different geographical area. The political alliance with the slave masters, which was clear and profitable enough for the merchant banks of New York City, was more hidden, more implicit and less dynamic as far as the great petty-bourgeois masses were concerned.
What broke up the alliance? Did it make the Democratic leaders any more sensitive to the Black or even white people's needs?
Next: The coming war
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