3.9 Andrew Jackson’s Administration

Without question, Andrew Jackson was the most controversial and forceful president between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Jackson was a man of strong opinions and implacable hatreds. There was no middle ground. He believed that Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams had stolen his victory in the corrupt bargain that put Adams in the White House in 1824. Worse, he blamed them for assailing his wife’s honor in the election of 1828 causing her death. When he triumphed in the election of 1828, he took office determined to strike down what he regarded as special privilege.

Even though Jackson was a southern aristocrat, he personified the changes transforming American society that will be examined in the next module – the triumph of the common man as well as universal white male suffrage. On inauguration day, an enthusiastic crowd so huge it could not be constrained tramped through the White House in muddy feet, and Jackson had to spend his first night in office in his hotel. Then came his controversial policies – the spoils system, the Cherokee removal, the Nullification Crisis, the Bank War, and many others. His policies certainly contributed to the financial Panic of 1837, the worst economic downturn in the country’s history. This recession finished the career of Jackson’s chosen successor, Martin Van Buren.

On May 30, 1806, Andrew Jackson, a thirty-nine-year-old Tennessee lawyer, came within inches of death. A duelist’s bullet struck him in the chest, just shy of his heart (the man who fired the gun was purportedly the best shot in Tennessee). But the wounded Jackson remained standing. Bleeding, he slowly steadied his aim and returned fire. The other man dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. Jackson—still carrying the bullet in his chest—later boasted, “I should have hit him, if he had shot me through the brain.”¹

The duel in Logan County, Kentucky, was one of many that Jackson fought during the course of his long and highly controversial career. The tenacity, toughness, and vengefulness that carried Jackson alive out of that duel, and the mythology and symbolism that would be attached to it, would also characterize many of his later dealings on the battlefield and in politics. By the time of his death almost forty years later, Andrew Jackson would become an enduring and controversial symbol, a kind of cipher to gauge the ways that various Americans thought about their country.

The Rise of Andrew Jackson

The career of Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), the survivor of that backcountry Kentucky duel in 1806, exemplified both the opportunities and the dangers of political life in the early republic. A lawyer, slaveholder, and general—and eventually the seventh president of the United States—he rose from humble frontier beginnings to become one of the most powerful Americans of the nineteenth century.

Andrew Jackson was born on March 15, 1767, on the border between North and South Carolina, to two immigrants from northern Ireland. He grew up during dangerous times. At age thirteen, he joined an American militia unit in the Revolutionary War. He was soon captured, and a British officer slashed at his head with a sword after he refused to shine the officer’s shoes. Disease during the war had claimed the lives of his two brothers and his mother, leaving him an orphan. Their deaths and his wounds had left Jackson with a deep and abiding hatred of Great Britain.

After the war, Jackson moved west to frontier Tennessee, where despite his poor education, he prospered, working as a lawyer and acquiring land and slaves. (He would eventually come to keep 150 slaves at the Hermitage, his plantation near Nashville.) In 1796, Jackson was elected as a U.S. representative, and a year later he won a seat in the Senate, although he resigned within a year, citing financial difficulties.

Thanks to his political connections, Jackson obtained a general’s commission at the outbreak of the War of 1812. Despite having no combat experience, General Jackson quickly impressed his troops, who nicknamed him “Old Hickory” after a particularly tough kind of tree.

Jackson led his militiamen into battle in the Southeast, first during the Creek War, a side conflict that started between different factions of Muskogee (Creek) American Indians in present-day Alabama. In that war, he won a decisive victory over hostile fighters at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. A year later, he also defeated a large British invasion force at the Battle of New Orleans. There, Jackson’s troops—including backwoods militiamen, free African Americans, American Indians, and a company of slave-trading pirates—successfully defended the city and inflicted more than two thousand casualties against the British, sustaining barely three hundred casualties of their own.²  The Battle of New Orleans was a thrilling victory for the United States, but it actually happened several days after a peace treaty was signed in Europe to end the war. News of the treaty had not yet reached New Orleans.

The end of the War of 1812 did not end Jackson’s military career. In 1818, as commander of the U.S. southern military district, Jackson also launched an invasion of Spanish-owned Florida. He was acting on vague orders from the War Department to break the resistance of the region’s Seminole American Indians, who protected runaway slaves and attacked American settlers across the border – and driven by his own well-known racism and hatred of Native Americans and African-Americans.  On Jackson’s orders in 1816, U.S. soldiers and their Creek allies had already destroyed the “Negro Fort,” a British-built fortress on Spanish soil, killing 270 former slaves and executing some survivors.³ In 1818, Jackson’s troops crossed the border again. They occupied Pensacola, the main Spanish town in the region, and arrested two British subjects, whom Jackson executed for helping the Seminoles. The execution of these two Britons created an international diplomatic crisis.

Any friendliness between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, however, did not survive long. In 1824, four nominees competed for the presidency in one of the closest elections in American history. Each came from a different part of the country—Adams from Massachusetts, Jackson from Tennessee, William H. Crawford from Georgia, and Henry Clay from Kentucky. Jackson won more popular votes than anyone else. But with no majority winner in the Electoral College, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. There, Adams used his political clout to claim the presidency, persuading Clay to support him. Jackson would never forgive Adams, whom his supporters accused of engineering a “corrupt bargain” with Clay to circumvent the popular will.

Four years later, in 1828, Adams and Jackson squared off in one of the dirtiest presidential elections to date.⁴  Pro-Jackson partisans accused Adams of elitism and claimed that while serving in Russia as a diplomat he had offered the Russian emperor an American prostitute. Adams’s supporters, on the other hand, accused Jackson of murder and attacked the morality of his marriage, pointing out that Jackson had unwittingly married his wife Rachel before the divorce on her prior marriage was complete. This time, Andrew Jackson won the election easily, but Rachel Jackson died suddenly before his inauguration. Jackson would never forgive the people who attacked his wife’s character during the campaign.

In 1828, Jackson’s broad appeal as a military hero won him the presidency. He was “Old Hickory,” the “Hero of New Orleans,” a leader of plain frontier folk. His wartime accomplishments appealed to many voters’ pride. Over the next eight years, he would claim to represent the interests of ordinary white Americans, especially from the South and West, against the country’s wealthy and powerful elite. This attitude would lead him and his allies into a series of bitter political struggles.

The Nullification Crisis

Nearly every American had an opinion about President Jackson. To some, he epitomized democratic government and popular rule. To others, he represented the worst in a powerful and unaccountable executive, acting as president with the same arrogance he had shown as a general in Florida. One of the key issues dividing Americans during his presidency was a sectional dispute over national tax policy that would come to define Jackson’s no-holds-barred approach to government.

Once Andrew Jackson moved into the White House, most southerners expected him to do away with the hated Tariff of 1828, the so-called Tariff of Abominations. This import tax provided protection for northern manufacturing interests by raising the prices of European products in America. Southerners, however, blamed the tariff for a massive transfer of wealth. It forced them to purchase goods from the North’s manufacturers at higher prices, and it provoked European countries to retaliate with high tariffs of their own, reducing foreign purchases of the South’s raw materials.

Only in South Carolina, though, did the discomfort turn into organized action. The state was still trying to shrug off the economic problems of the Panic of 1819, but it had also recently endured the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy, which convinced white South Carolinians that antislavery ideas put them in danger of a massive slave uprising.

Elite South Carolinians were especially worried that the tariff was merely an entering wedge for federal legislation that would limit slavery. Andrew Jackson’s own vice president, John C. Calhoun, who was from South Carolina, asserted that the tariff was “the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things.” The real fear was that the federal government might attack “the peculiar domestick institution of the Southern States”—meaning slavery.⁵ When Jackson failed to act against the tariff, Vice President Calhoun was caught in a tight position.

In 1828, Calhoun secretly drafted the “South Carolina Exposition and Protest,” an essay and set of resolutions that laid out the doctrine of nullification.”⁶ Drawing from the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799, Calhoun argued that the United States was a compact among the states rather than among the whole American people. Since the states had created the Union, he reasoned, they were still sovereign, so a state could nullify a federal statute it considered unconstitutional. Other states would then have to concede the right of nullification or agree to amend the Constitution. If necessary, a nullifying state could leave the Union.

When Calhoun’s authorship of the essay became public, Jackson was furious, interpreting it both as a personal betrayal and as a challenge to his authority as president. His most dramatic confrontation with Calhoun came in 1832 during a commemoration for Thomas Jefferson. At dinner, the president rose and toasted, “Our Federal Union: it must be preserved.” Calhoun responded with a toast of his own: “The Union: next to our Liberty the most dear.”⁷ Their divorce was not pretty. Martin Van Buren, a New York political leader whose skill in making deals had earned him the nickname “the Little Magician,” replaced Calhoun as vice president when Jackson ran for reelection in 1832.

Calhoun returned to South Carolina, where a special state convention nullified the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832. It declared them unconstitutional and therefore “null, void, and no law” within South Carolina.⁸ The convention ordered South Carolina customs officers not to collect tariff revenue and declared that any federal attempt to enforce the tariffs would cause the state to secede from the Union.

President Jackson responded dramatically. He denounced the ordinance of nullification and declared that “disunion, by armed force, is TREASON.”⁹  Vowing to hang Calhoun and any other nullifier who defied federal power, he persuaded Congress to pass a Force Bill that authorized him to send the military to enforce the tariffs. Faced with such threats, other southern states declined to join South Carolina. Privately, however, Jackson supported the idea of compromise and allowed his political enemy Henry Clay to broker a solution with Calhoun. Congress passed a compromise bill that slowly lowered federal tariff rates. South Carolina rescinded nullification for the tariffs but nullified the Force Bill.

The legacy of the Nullification Crisis is difficult to sort out. Jackson’s decisive action seemed to have forced South Carolina to back down. But the crisis also united the ideas of secession and states’ rights, two concepts that had not necessarily been linked before. Perhaps most clearly, nullification showed that the immense political power of slaveholders was matched only by their immense anxiety about the future of slavery. During later debates in the 1840s and 1850s, they would raise the ideas of the Nullification Crisis again.

The Eaton Affair and the Politics of Sexuality

Meanwhile, a more personal crisis during Jackson’s first term also drove a wedge between him and Vice President Calhoun. The Eaton Affair, sometimes insultingly called the “Petticoat Affair,” began as a disagreement among elite women in Washington, D.C., but it eventually led to the disbanding of Jackson’s cabinet.

True to his backwoods reputation, when he took office in 1829, President Jackson chose mostly provincial politicians, not Washington veterans, to serve in his administration. One of them was his friend John Henry Eaton, a senator from Tennessee, whom Jackson nominated to be his secretary of war.

A few months earlier, Eaton had married Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, the recent widow of a navy officer. She was the daughter of Washington boardinghouse proprietors, and her humble origins and combination of beauty, outspokenness, and familiarity with so many men in the boardinghouse had led to gossip. During her first marriage, rumors had circulated that she and John Eaton were having an affair while her husband was at sea. When her first husband committed suicide and she married Eaton just nine months later, the society women of Washington had been scandalized. One wrote that Margaret Eaton’s reputation had been “totally destroyed.”¹⁰

John Eaton was now secretary of war, but other cabinet members’ wives refused have anything to do with his wife. No respectable lady who wanted to protect her own reputation could exchange visits with her, invite her to social events, or be seen chatting with her. Most importantly, the vice president’s wife, Floride Calhoun, shunned Margaret Eaton, spending most of her time in South Carolina to avoid her. Even Jackson’s own niece, Emily Donelson, visited Eaton once and then refused to have anything more to do with her.

Although women could not vote or hold office, they played an important role in politics as people who controlled influence.¹¹  They helped hold official Washington together. And according to one local society woman, “the ladies” had “as much rivalship and party spirit, desire of precedence and authority” as male politicians had.¹² These women upheld a strict code of femininity and sexual morality. They paid careful attention to the rules that governed personal interactions and official relationships.

Margaret Eaton’s social exclusion thus greatly affected Jackson, his cabinet, and the rest of Washington society. At first, President Jackson blamed his rival Henry Clay for the attacks on the Eatons. But he soon perceived that Washington women and his new cabinet had initiated the gossip. Jackson scoffed, “I did not come here to make a cabinet for the ladies of this place,” and claimed that he “had rather have live vermin on my back than the tongue of one of these Washington women on my reputation.”¹³ He began to blame the ambition of Vice President Calhoun for Floride Calhoun’s actions, deciding “it was necessary to put him out of the cabinet and destroy him.”¹⁴

Jackson was so indignant because he had recently been through a similar scandal with his late wife, Rachel. Her character, too, had been insulted by leading politicians’ wives because of the circumstances of her marriage. Jackson believed that Rachel’s death had been caused by those slanderous attacks. Furthermore, he saw the assaults on the Eatons as attacks on his authority.

In one of the most famous presidential meetings in American history, Jackson called together his cabinet members to discuss what they saw as the bedrock of society: women’s position as protectors of the nation’s values. There, the men of the cabinet debated Margaret Eaton’s character. Jackson delivered a long defense, methodically presenting evidence against her attackers. But the men attending the meeting—and their wives—were not swayed. They continued to shun Margaret Eaton, and the scandal was resolved only with the resignation of four members of the cabinet, including Eaton’s husband.

The Bank War

Andrew Jackson’s first term was full of controversy. For all of his reputation as a military and political warrior, however, the most characteristic struggle of his presidency was financial. As president, he waged a “war” against the Bank of the United States.

The charter of the controversial national bank that Congress established under Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan had expired in 1811. But five years later, Congress had given a new charter to the Second Bank of the United States. Headquartered in Philadelphia, the bank was designed to stabilize the growing American economy. By requiring other banks to pay their debts promptly in gold, it was supposed to prevent them from issuing too many paper banknotes that could drop suddenly in value. Of course, the Bank of the United States was also supposed to reap a healthy profit for its private stockholders, like the Philadelphia banker Stephen Girard and the New York merchant John Jacob Astor.

Though many Democratic-Republicans had supported the new bank, some never gave up their Jeffersonian suspicion that such a powerful institution was dangerous to the republic. Andrew Jackson was one of the skeptics. He and many of his supporters blamed the bank for the Panic of 1819, which had become a severe economic depression. The national bank had made that crisis worse, first by lending irresponsibly and then, when the panic hit, by hoarding gold currency to save itself at the expense of smaller banks and their customers. Jackson’s supporters also believed the bank had corrupted many politicians by giving them financial favors.

In 1829, after a few months in office, Jackson set his sights on the bank and its director, Nicholas Biddle. Jackson became more and more insistent over the next three years as Biddle and the bank’s supporters fought to save it. A visiting Frenchman observed that Jackson had “declared a war to the death against the Bank,” attacking it “in the same cut-and-thrust style” with which he had once fought the American Indians and the British. For Jackson, the struggle was a personal crisis. “The Bank is trying to kill me,” he told Martin Van Buren, “but I will kill it!”¹⁵

The bank’s charter was not due for renewal for several years, but in 1832, while Jackson was running for reelection, Congress held an early vote to reauthorize the Bank of the United States. The president vetoed the bill.

In his veto message, Jackson called the bank unconstitutional and “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” The charter, he explained, didn’t do enough to protect the bank from its British stockholders, who might not have Americans’ interests at heart. In addition, Jackson wrote, the Bank of the United States was virtually a federal agency, but it had powers that were not granted anywhere in the Constitution. Worst of all, the bank was a way for well-connected people to get richer at everyone else’s expense. “The rich and powerful,” the president declared, “too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.”¹⁶  Only a strictly limited government, Jackson believed, would treat people equally.

Although its charter would not be renewed, the Bank of the United States could still operate for several more years. So in 1833, to diminish its power, Jackson also directed his cabinet to stop depositing federal funds in it. From now on, the government would do business with selected state banks instead. Critics called them Jackson’s “pet banks.”

Jackson’s bank veto set off fierce controversy. Opponents in Philadelphia held a meeting and declared that the president’s ideas were dangerous to private property. Jackson, they said, intended to “place the honest earnings of the industrious citizen at the disposal of the idle”—in other words, redistribute wealth to lazy people—and become a “dictator.”¹⁷  A newspaper editor said that Jackson was trying to set “the poor against the rich,” perhaps in order to take over as a military tyrant.¹⁸ But Jackson’s supporters praised him. Pro-Jackson newspaper editors wrote that he had kept a “monied aristocracy” from conquering the people.¹⁹

By giving President Jackson a vivid way to defy the rich and powerful, or at least appear to do so, the Bank War gave his supporters a specific “democratic” idea to rally around. More than any other issue, opposition to the national bank came to define their beliefs. And by leading Jackson to exert executive power so dramatically against Congress, the Bank War also helped his political enemies organize.

Increasingly, supporters of Andrew Jackson referred to themselves as Democrats. Under the strategic leadership of Martin Van Buren, they built a highly organized national political party, the first modern party in the United States. Much more than earlier political parties, this Democratic Party had a centralized leadership structure and a consistent ideological program for all levels of government. Meanwhile, Jackson’s enemies, mocking him as “King Andrew the First,” named themselves after the patriots of the American Revolution, the Whigs.

Andrew Jackson and the Native American Removal

During Jackson’s presidency, in 1830, the Indian Removal Act was passed.  This was a law that ultimately allowed Native Americans east of the Mississippi to be forced to surrender their lands in that vast expanse of the United States and then be forcibly removed to territories west of the Mississippi.  Most of these tribal nations would end up in American Indian Territory, the future state of Oklahoma, as well as Kansas and other neighboring areas.  While the presentation of the process was of an exchange of lands and the US government providing the material support for the relocating tribes, the process itself was effectively “ethnic cleansing” through the use of brutality – and a dramatic expansion of the devastating reservation system and forced cultural colonization.

The Removal policy, almost always enforced despite the resistance of native peoples and their governments, had many terrible effects on Native Americans.  Those who had acculturated, like the Cherokee, to the lifeways of their white neighbors – including, unfortunately, the Cherokee ownership of African-American slaves – found their reliance on American property rights destroyed and their economic foundations liquidated.  Those further north that had gone into business with their American neighbors or moved to cultivate their lands in the white fashion faced the same economic devastation.  Those native peoples who had managed to salvage or defend large swaths of their traditional lifestyles would find themselves in entirely different terrain and biospheres without even the basic knowledge of plants and animals upon which the survival of their people would depend.

As described above, the removal process failed dramatically to provide for the Native Americans forced to walk across thousands of miles of nearly complete wilderness, often in the worst of weather.  Stripped of their possessions and in alien terrain, forced to move despite the needs of children, the elderly, and the disabled, they were also denied the basic provision of food, clean water, medical resources, and basic protection against the elements.  Infants, children, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, died of privation as the supplies they had been promised by American governments were never sent – or stolen and resold in a form of corruption rarely addressed.  Others, and healthy adults, died of the same privation – or of violence.  Thousands died in each tribe, with the Cherokee calling this nightmarish borderline genocide the Trail of Tears, and the Potawatomi calling theirs the Trail of Death.  Tribal populations crashed, in many cases to fractions of what they had been – or worse.

This policy also had dramatic impacts on the United States as a whole.  Few legal holdings of tribal governments exist east of the removal lines today.  And although clearly many native peoples, often of mixed race, remained behind in acculturated lives outside of their tribes, the majority of those identified or identifying as native or members of tribal nations were pushed out the most densely settled areas of America.  This presaged a constant of American governance and society until late in the 20th century, the concept that non-white peoples should be removed or separate from white Americans.  This concept was impossible to entirely enforce, but effective at creating inequality, hardship, violence, and also at supporting racism.  It would eventually largely fall as a legal concept under the impact of facets of the Civil Rights Movements of the later 20th century.  The social, cultural, economic, and political impacts of this discrimination, inequality, and denigration remain to this day.

Andrew Jackson supported this process as president, as did most of the sweeping majority of American voters that supported him.  Support was particularly strong in Georgia, though it is important to note that white Americans calling for the forced removal of native peoples were not limited to any one region or section of the United States.  Jackson’s innate brutality, his ingrained racism, and his willingness to take any action necessary to enforce the separation of peoples of different groups helped ensure this process and its extremes would predominate in his time – and after.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this involved the Supreme Court decision Worcester v. Georgia.  Missionaries attempting to help the Cherokee resist the removal process driven by the State of Georgia – presaging the complex role of Christian missionaries who sought to preserve the lives and tribes of Native Americans to allow time to “save” their souls in accordance with the missionaries’ beliefs – fought a legal battle that culminated in this decision.  Though Worchester v. Georgia held that states did not have the constitutional authority to impose their regulations on Native American land, and became the foundation for the ideas of Native American tribal sovereignty that today provide the best hope for native peoples to protect their cultures and lands, President Jackson refused to carry out his constitutional duty to enforce this decision.

Jackson’s refusal, motivated by his racist ideas on Native American removal, represented a clear violation of the duties of the executive.  It also helped foreshadow that in the event of a conflict between the demands of the Constitution most white Americans then held legally sacrosanct and the demands of racist separations of peoples, slaveowners like Jackson and their supporters would choose their ideas of racial separation.  This would, in turn, come to a head after the election of abolitionist Abraham Lincoln in 1860, setting off the 1861-1865 American Civil War, in which those defending slavery waged war on the United States and its Constitution.

1. Quoted in James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, Vol. 1 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 297.
2. Robert V. Remini, The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America’s First Military Victory (New York: Penguin, 1999), 167–168.
3. Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817–1818,” Journal of Negro History 36, no. 3 (July 1951): 264.
4. See Lynn Hudson Parsons, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
5. John C. Calhoun to Virgil Maxcy, September 11, 1830, quoted in William M. Meigs, The Life of John Caldwell Calhoun, Vol. 1 (New York: Stechert, 1917), 419.
6. John C. Calhoun, “Exposition and Protest,” in Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lence (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992), 311–365, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/683.
7. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years’ View: Or, a History of the Working of the American Government for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850, Vol. 1 (New York: Appleton, 1854), 148, http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000405607.
8. “South Carolina Ordinance of Nullification,” November 24, 1832, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ordnull.asp.
9. Andrew Jackson, “Proclamation Regarding Nullification,” December 10, 1832, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/jack01.asp.
10. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 200.
11. Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
12. Margaret Bayard Smith to Margaret Bayard Boyd, December 20 [?], 1828, Margaret Bayard Smith Papers, quoted in ibid., 215.
13. Andrew Jackson to John Christmas McLemore, April [26], 1829, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, eds. Daniel Feller, Harold D. Moser, Laura-Eve Moss, and Thomas Coens, Vol. 7 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 184; John F. Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackson’s White House (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997), 64.
14. Andrew Jackson to John McLemore, November 24, 1829, quoted in Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights and the Nullification Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 61.
15. Michel Chevalier and Andrew Jackson, quoted in Andrew Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson (New York: Knopf, 2003), 200.
16. Andrew Jackson, “Veto Message Regarding the Bank of the United States,” July 10, 1832, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp.
17. “The Philadelphia Meeting,” Niles’ Weekly Register (July 21, 1832), 375.
18. “The Bank Veto,” National Intelligencer, August 9, 1832, in David A. Copeland, ed., The Antebellum Era: Primary Documents on Events from 1820 to 1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003), 153.
19. Quoted in Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 151.