The American Yawp — Chapter Ten: American Democracy
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

On January 20, 1835, an English immigrant named Richard Lawrence aimed two pistols at President Andrew Jackson from only eight feet away. Each pistol misfired, and Jackson attacked the man with his cane. It was the first attempt to kill an American president. To many Americans, Jackson was the great champion of the "common man." To others, he was a dangerous threat to the republic. Jackson entered the White House promising reform, but his cabinet soon fell into crisis. The Eaton Affair, a social scandal about the wife of his secretary of war, divided his advisors. Critics also accused Jackson of giving government jobs to his supporters, a practice they called the "spoils system."

Jackson deeply distrusted the Second Bank of the United States and its director, Nicholas Biddle. When Congress voted to renew the bank's charter, Jackson vetoed the bill. He then removed federal money from the bank and placed it in state banks that critics called his "pet banks." The Bank War made Jackson popular with ordinary voters who feared wealthy bankers. Jackson used the veto more than any earlier president, including a veto of a Kentucky road project known as the Maysville Road bill.

The tariff caused another crisis. The Tariff of 1828 protected Northern manufacturers but raised prices for Southerners. Vice President John C. Calhoun secretly wrote the "South Carolina Exposition and Protest," arguing that states could nullify federal laws they considered unconstitutional. In 1832, a South Carolina convention declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 "null, void, and no law." Jackson answered with force, and South Carolina backed down, but the crisis joined the ideas of states' rights and secession together.

New political parties formed around these fights. Jackson's supporters called themselves Democrats, organized nationally by Martin Van Buren. Their opponents became the Whigs, who mocked Jackson as "King Andrew the First." The short-lived Anti-Masonic Party grew from anger at the secretive Freemasons after the disappearance of William Morgan. Some Protestants also attacked immigrants: in 1834 a mob destroyed a Catholic convent in Massachusetts, and ministers like Lyman Beecher warned against Catholic influence. These nativist fears showed the darker side of American democracy.

The economy then collapsed in the Panic of 1837. Wild speculation in western land, risky loans, and Jackson's Specie Circular of 1836 — which required gold or silver for federal land purchases — tightened credit and burst the bubble. Martin Van Buren, elected president in 1836, faced a long depression.

Jackson also forced Native peoples from their lands. Although the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) that Georgia's laws did not apply inside Cherokee territory, Jackson pushed for removal. About sixteen thousand Cherokee were forced west on the Trail of Tears, and only about ten thousand survived the journey. The Seminole in Florida resisted removal in a war that lasted from 1835 to 1842.

At the same time, slavery grew with king cotton. The cotton gin and new cotton strains made cotton hugely profitable: Southern exports rose from about 5 million pounds to more than 500 million pounds by 1835. Enslaved people resisted in many ways. In 1831, Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, and frightened white Southerners answered with harsher laws. In the North, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison started the antislavery newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Farther west, Texas won independence from Mexico after Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto in 1836, and Texas later joined the United States — adding new fuel to the national argument over slavery.