The Age of Jackson - Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The battle between the differing ideals of Thomas Jefferson's small-government notions, with freedom and energy based in the hands of the decentralized electorate, and Alexander Hamiliton's Federalism, which recognized the needs for a strong centralized government around which the states would have to orbit, would only begin to be settled by the generation which succeeded the Founding Fathers. As the young nation battled over the less revolutionary issues of governance and domestic tranquility, the form and function of American government and society would begin to take lasting shape. Such becomings, Schlesinger argues, could not be understood isolated from the rise of industrialism, and the awakening of class consciousness which attended it. Debates centering upon issues such as the Bank of the United States, the Free Soil difficulties (and eventual violence), the annexation of Texas, the American System, and the Tariff of Abominations (to name just a few) are best understood as a young nation not only trying to negotiate the civil relation to government, but also between the classes. Would power be vested in manhood, or in property? While we may know the country's answer to this question (how certain are we really that the people won-out?) the years of Jacksonian America were a time when these contestations were far from settled.

To historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr's way of telling it, Andrew Jackson's founding of a vigorous and powerful executive branch upon the will of a democratically empowered electorate, was to set the standard for how America would come to expect the relationships between democratic and republican principles to be negotiated. More than any other single time period, it was the Age of Jackson, and the years which followed it, which set the course for American government as part of American society.

While it may be tempting to see these largely democratic principles as the spawn of Jeffersonianism, Schlesinger reconciles Jefferson's calls for limited government with the strong unifying power of the federal system which the country felt in 1944, and which we feel still today. The rise of industrialism and the centralization of populations, coupled with the coming storm of civil war, meant that Jefferson's ideal (over-emphasized by many) of a country composed of yeoman farmers would prove largely impossible. As wealth became divorced from the land, and was refounded in the cities, it was no longer enough to say "that government is best which governs least." Were the government to continue to retreat from the civic sphere, it would only ensure the rampant growth of industrial wealth, further vesting power in the upper class. Such would sound the death-knell of Jefferson's democratic principles.

Though the author of the Declaration of Independence could not have foreseen such eventualities, during the Age of Jackson Jeffersonian democracy would become unified with a vigorous and powerful executive branch. Were either capital or labor, during these crucial years when their relationship seemed still in its birthing pangs, to fully gain the upper hand over the other, the history of the United States would look very different. The changing arenas of presidential and congressional politics throughout this age simultaneously responded to and altered social and business spheres. Yet the age was governed largely by democratic principles responsive to Washington as the seat of power. As the electorate struggled to reorient itself to a changing world, so too would the political sphere be transformed. Much was uncertain during these formative years, yet they can be properly termed the Age of Jackson because the tenor of American class and political contests cannot be understood without reference to the role the Jackson played in founding the power of a strong central government directly upon the will of the people. This centralized American democracy still exists today.