ANDREW JACKSON, 1828.
Jackson was in truth a popular idol. Hickory poles, the emblem of
devotion to “Old Hickory,” stood in every village throughout almost
every State, and at the street corners of many a city. In his own
Tennessee, less than three thousand votes were cast against him in the
entire State, and in many precincts he received every ballot.
The story is told of a stranger who visited a Tennessee village on the
afternoon of the election, and found its male population turning out
with their guns, as if for a hunt, and in a state of great excitement.
On inquiring what game they were after, he learned that they were
starting in pursuit of two of their fellow-citizens who had had the
audacity to vote against Jackson, thereby preventing the village from
casting a solid vote for “Old Hickory.” The miscreants had avoided a
tarring and feathering only by taking to the woods.
The result of the campaign was a triumph for Jackson. New England was
the stronghold of Adams, who received all its electoral votes except
one from Maine. The National Republicans also carried New Jersey and
Delaware, and New York and Maryland were divided. Every other State
declared solidly for Jackson, whose total vote was 178, to 83 for Adams.
During that campaign, the same question appeared on the surface as
that presented in the campaign of ’92. The Whig party represented
apparently higher tariff, and the Democrats were opposing the increase
of duty; but the fact remained that John Quincy Adams represented the
aristocracy of New England, and the Whig Party had become encrusted
with the same false stucco of “caste” that concealed the merits,
worth, and virtue of Lincoln’s Republican party in 1892. E’en the most
wonderful orator that America has ever produced, the great and honored
Daniel Webster, with all of his personal magnetism, magic of speech,
and logic of argument, could not boost the aristocrats of the Whig
party into power; even though the bill for a higher tariff had passed,
the cry was kept up, and was made to appear as one of the issues of the
campaign of 1892.
Andrew Jackson represented, in his person, the people, the masses.
By birth, education, and mode of living, Andrew Jackson was
identified with the Common People, and, as we are all common, with
all of the people. Like Abraham Lincoln, the masses saw in Andrew
Jackson a champion, ready and brave enough to resent the attempted
differentiation sought to be foisted upon the people of America by
the then Whig aristocracy--the claimed parent of the Republican
party. However, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican party was not a progeny
of the aristocrats of the Whig party. Andrew Jackson, in his person,
represented the purest type of the western pioneer, patriot, and
soldier, and such men in America will only be found in the ranks of the
people.
In 1828, John Quincy Adams, and his party of the would-be “Four
Hundred,” received at the hands of the people the same punishment and
rebuke that was administered to Benjamin Harrison and the Republican
party, which, just like the Whig party, had become hidden from the view
of the people by the glamour of wealth and would-be aristocracy that
was thrown over it. In Andrew Jackson, the people elected as their
chief one possessed of great firmness and decision of character, one
who was honest and true; not always correct in judgment, but when he
erred the people were ready to forgive him, because the error was one
of judgment and not of intention. He was of them, and like them, as
Abraham Lincoln was in 1860, and the people’s love and trust in him
erased from their memory mistakes that in another would have been
judged with a critical eye. He was often rash in expression and action,
but his very rashness was the rashness of a man untrained in duplicity.
He was not a diplomat. The people are not diplomatic, and he, as one
of them, could not be expected to possess characteristics other than
those of the mass. His actions were as a mirror in which the people saw
themselves. How the chord he struck, when he threatened to hang John
C. Calhoun and the nullifiers, finds a responsive echo in many of the
utterances of Abraham Lincoln! What two men so nearly resemble each
other to the people?
The mere idle calling one a Democrat and the other a Republican is, as
Hamlet says: “Words, words, words.” There is no significance in the
mere word Democrat and Republican. Both were men of the people, elected
as the choice of the masses, in the constant battle that the masses
wage against the crime of “caste.” The similarity in the characters of
Lincoln and Jackson is nowhere more forcibly illustrated than in that
both were patriots of the purest stamp.
Andrew Jackson took up the administration of the government with
fearless energy, feeling confident that he had the unalloyed loyalty
of the people to support him. Let us hope that Grover Cleveland,
with the same fearless courage, will wage war upon those things
objectionable to the people who have placed in his hands the weapons
with which to do battle.
The distinguishing act of Jackson’s first term was his veto of the
bill to re-charter the United States Bank--the boldest defiance that a
President ever cast to the money power of the country. “When President
Jackson attacked the Bank,” De Tocqueville notes, “the country was
excited and parties were formed. The well-informed classes rallied
round the bank, the Common People round the President.” It is a
commonplace of history that, in such cases, the “Common People” are
more often right than those who claim superior information. Jackson’s
veto is regarded by most observers as a remarkable popular victory over
a great capitalistic monopoly.
In none of the six Presidential campaigns between the time of Jackson
and that of Lincoln was the question of popular sovereignty _versus_
class pretensions brought into the contest as an issue, although events
were gradually shaping themselves for the great struggle in which the
period ended. Yet, in 1840, the Democratic personality of General
William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate, contributed not a little
to his success. The veteran soldier, statesman, and frontiersman had
spent most of his life in a log house beside the Ohio River, at North
Bend, Indiana. A log cabin was chosen by his political followers as
the symbol of his plain and unpretentious way of life, and a barrel of
cider as an emblem of his simple but generous hospitality. During the
“log cabin and hard cider” campaign all over the country, in cities,
villages, and hamlets, log cabins were erected as rallying places for
Harrison’s partisans, who met there to toast their champion in abundant
glasses of cider.
[Illustration: THOMAS JEFFERSON.
The “People’s” President, 1800.]