Hi everybody and welcome back. Congratulations on being halfway through the semester. This week we're picking up with our normal format and restarting our conversation on Andrew Jackson. I do want to remind you for note-taking purposes that we covered some topics involving Andrew Jackson prior to the midterm and those topics will be included on the final exam too. So there's a small amount of overlap on the two tests, but mostly the final is new material.
If you have your PowerPoint open, we'll be starting this lecture on slide one. So in 1824, the next presidential election after James Monroe's administration, Andrew Jackson was nominated for president. Interestingly, his opponent, John Quincy Adams, John Adams'son, and Andrew Jackson both ran on the popular Democratic-Republican ticket, which couldn't happen today.
Jackson was enormously popular as a candidate. largely based on his reputation as the hero of New Orleans. Remember, Jackson's actions in New Orleans didn't end or win the War of 1812, but it did launch Jackson to fame.
In the election returns, even though Jackson won the popular vote, the electoral college count was too close to call. And so... Like the election of 1800, it went to the House of Representatives.
Alexander Hamilton was no longer the Speaker of the House. It was now a man named Henry Clay. Clay disliked Jackson and felt that he was not presidential in education, social standing, history, and temperament.
So like the election of 1800, where the Speaker urged the House to vote in a certain way, Clay urged the House to lock out Jackson and vote Adams in as president. John Quincy Adams did win the presidency, but it was a terribly costly victory. Americans believed that Jackson should have won.
He did win the popular vote, but as we know, We're not a democracy, even though people say we are all the time. We're a republic. In a democracy, everyone gets one vote and that's it.
There would be no need for an electoral college in a democracy. In a republic, you vote and that vote elects an elector to vote at the state level for you. So a person can win the popular vote and still not win the White House.
In recent history, it happened in 2000, it happened in 2016, it happens. However, people believed that what had happened was corrupt. That kind of language, that's new in 1824. No one said that in 1800 when we were still... dealing with the original founders because people assumed they wouldn't be cheating at their own game.
They created the government. Why would they hurt it? They did, but people just didn't think they would or could.
I think a lot of people still think the founders could do no wrong, that they're more than human. Anyway, by 1824,... That assumption was gone, and people were quite angry.
So go to your second slide. There were in total four presidential candidates in 1824. Jackson, Adams, Henry Crawford, the Secretary of War, and wait for it, Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House. So this was a totally bogus election. You're not supposed to be able to hold a position in the federal government while running for the office of the presidency because it's a conflict of interest. So Henry Clay, who ran.
and didn't win got to influence who did win in a close election? Well, everyone that didn't vote for Adams, the Jackson, Crawford, and even Clay supporters turned on John Quincy Adams. It united all his foes.
People were so opposed to Adams in general that even politicians didn't want to work with him and be cooperative because They were worried about their own re-elections. A lot of people claimed that John Quincy Adams had made a bargain with Henry Clay to secure the presidency. Now, even today, there is no evidence that a bargain was ever struck.
However, it did not help matters when John Quincy Adams appointed Henry Clay as Secretary of State for his administration. You'd think that the office of the vice presidency would set you up best to become president. However, historically, more presidents come from the office of secretary of state.
So it did look bad. Clay was a problematic politician, even in the 1840s, due to his open stance as a gradual abolitionist. That was. also a slaveholder that refused to free his slaves.
This meant Clay was disliked for one reason or the other in both the North and the South. From 1824 all the way through the 1830s into the 1840s, he's always a problematic politician because of this hypocritical stance that people bring up quite often. So a campaign to elect... Jackson to the presidency in 1828 started in 1824. Imagine a presidential campaign lasting that long. Slide three.
In 1828, the Adams campaign denounced Jackson. They claimed that he was bad-tempered. I don't think that there's any denying that. They claimed that he was a, quote, ignorant barbarian.
I don't know about that language. Jackson was, by modern standards, uneducated and only quasi-literate. At that, most of America was like Jackson in 1828. So that insult may have only made him more supporters. Jackson famously responded to that allegation by saying, quote, he had no respect for a man that could only think of one way to spell a word, end quote.
Now, that barbarian part, I imagine he's referencing his tremendous record for killing. They specifically brought up his history with dueling. Jackson was a famous. dueler. He very notoriously got into a fight in a bar in Tennessee.
The other man challenged Jackson to a duel and Jackson, of course, accepted. As they were going outside to fight, people ran in front of Jackson to try to dissuade him from fighting the man because he had won a contest as the best sharpshooter in the state of Tennessee. Jackson did the duel anyway. The other man did pull his gun first and fire.
The bullet lodged right next to Jackson's heart. He straightened himself up, leveled his gun, and killed his opponent. The bullet couldn't be removed because the surgery would have been too dangerous. So Jackson lived with lead bullets riddled through his body.
They leached lead into his bloodstream and he had... constant low-grade lead poisoning and all of the symptomology related to that. If you look at the image here, all those coffins you see are free white men that Jackson killed in duels, not battle. That's what this broadside is talking about. Others claimed that Jackson was just a frontier brawler.
He killed natives and Spaniards and really anybody else that got in his way. Again, that allegation only endeared him to his supporters. who liked and admired Jackson's toughness and his overtly violent nature. They claimed that Jackson garnered his entire reputation and fame from simply being a well-known killer. Does being a really good killer qualify you for the office of the presidency, they asked.
The other thing they brought up was his relationship with his wife, Rachel. Okay. Long story, grab a snack. Okay, so young Jackson was born into a family where his father had died before he was born.
His older brothers volunteered to fight in the War of Independence, and they were killed by the British. Young Jackson saw a group of redcoats and hid in the bushes to escape them. But one of the British officers saw him hiding there, dismounted his horse, walked over to Jackson and sabred him in the head.
It slit his scalp and actually cut the bone of his skull. If you look at portraits of Jackson, you might notice that he has a rather modern hairline. rather than a center part, which was popular at the time. That's because Jackson had a terrible scar down the center of his head, and his hairline from the side covered it mostly.
Jackson's mother died of disease, and then he was orphaned and totally alone. He worked hard. He fought for money.
He drank a lot. He fought a lot. He was angry a lot. He was alone a lot. I would argue that Jackson was almost torn between longing for success and death.
He chased them both relentlessly. He bought land. He bought slaves. He shadowed a lawyer and went into law, but he wasn't very good as a lawyer as he wasn't particularly literate and he didn't exactly care about the law much. He made a lot of money on fighting and slaves.
In one of his duels, Jackson sustained an injury from a bullet passing through one of his lungs. He needed help, constant help. He had a good friend from his younger military days whose family ran an inn, contacted him to see if he could stay there for a prolonged period of time. He had the money.
They agreed. He checked in. Turns out his friend had a daughter named Rachel. Now, Rachel was married to a man named Louis Robards. Louis...
cheated on Rachel all the time. He was verbally abusive for sure, if not physically abusive. He, Lewis, often got into relationships with other women and left Rachel for periods of time to have children with them, to live with them, before eventually tiring of them. returning again to Rachel.
Remember at this time if your husband cheated on you it was your fault because you couldn't make him happy. This time Louis left for a really long time and Rachel couldn't afford to live. Women couldn't go just procure work. So she wrote to her mother and asked if she could return home and work at her in.
So Rachel was there when Jackson was there. She was a social misfit, ostracized by the way her husband treated her, insecure, knowing that a lot of people were gossiping about her. Jackson was a loner, a recluse. He was wealthy but not elite.
comfortable with his soldiers but not common anymore. Neither of them fit anywhere. Jackson wasn't good at reading but um He did enjoy having things read to him. Rachel liked reading and would often read news and books to Jackson when she wasn't working. Their relationship was entirely platonic.
Rachel was very religious. Jackson was not religious and probably would have... pursued a relationship with a married woman, but this time he didn't.
Until Louis Robards wrote to Rachel informing her that he was divorcing her. That was very bad news for a woman in the 19th century. Her mother, of course, worried that when she passed, Rachel would be alone.
Jackson probably didn't wait an appropriate amount of time before asking if he could marry her. It was great news. Jackson was wealthy. He didn't care about her reputation, or his for that matter.
He loved her genuinely. They went to Spanish territory. I know that's odd because he killed Spaniards sometimes, and they got married there. Most people think they got married in what is modern-day Texas. Her love changed Jackson.
He hadn't been loved since he was a child. Now, ladies, I'm not telling you to fall in love with a man you want to change. The story isn't meant to inspire that.
But it did change Jackson. He suddenly... had something, someone to live for.
Years later, Lewis contacted Rachel and informed her that he had never divorced her and that she was living in bigamy with Jackson. He threatened to go to the media and ruin Jackson's political career if she did not pay him a large sum of money. Jackson was wealthy, but Rachel...
did not have access to his money. She worried about how Jackson would react. She became distant and reclusive. Jackson noticed a shift in their relationship and became jealous that she might have feelings for someone else.
He eventually cornered her on the matter, and she very reluctantly gave him Lewis's letter. Jackson was relieved. He was just being blackmailed.
That was a lot less problematic for him than if his marriage was falling apart. Unfortunately for Louis Robards, he had included a date at which he would come to Jackson's home, the Hermitage, to collect his money. Jackson sent Rachel on a trip with her mother and was at the Hermitage alone himself. when Lewis appeared. For Jackson, there was more than one solution to the issue at hand, because legally, there's more than one way to end a marriage.
Lewis could agree to a quiet legal divorce, or a marriage also legally ends with the death of one of those spouses. And Jackson had brought about someone's death a time or two. We don't know exactly what happened between Lewis and Jackson, but we know that Lewis and Jackson appeared together to file the legal paperwork for Lewis's divorce and that Lewis never contacted Rachel again.
There doesn't seem to be any indication that Jackson made any substantive financial payments around that time either. in his accounting. He and Rachel remarried after the divorce was legalized. So when the pro-Adams supporters said that Jackson and Rachel lived in bigamy, it was technically legally true, but neither of them knew it, and they had resolved the issue before his presidential candidacy.
Jackson didn't care what you said about him. But he hated people talking about Rachel. Slide four. The pro-Jackson campaign that organized against Adams claimed that John Quincy Adams was too elite to thoughtfully run the country, that he'd lived his whole life on the public treasury since his first job was as a foreign ambassador when he was quite young.
John Quincy Adams had grown up with founding fathers as parents and uncle figures. They claimed that Adams had been corrupted by foreign values with all his young travels and that he wasn't American enough to understand the American people. They also claimed that he delivered a teenage American girl to the Russian czar for sexual purposes.
Adams claimed this wasn't true, but other foreign secretaries that worked with him after time did confirm it. Could they be lying about John Quincy Adams? They could, but several of them said that they did do that. They claimed that John Quincy Adams was a puritanical Calvinist hypocrite, that he hated common people.
Now his father, John Adams, was a Calvinist. John Quincy Adams wasn't very devout. But he definitely did have some disdain for common people, and that was apparent to voters.
Slide five. Jackson's victory in 1828 brought a new political world to the United States. Jackson was the first non-elite person to win the White House.
It made people believe that the highest office in the United States could really be of the people and for the people. After Jackson was elected, people started telling their children that they could become anything, even president. Jackson had proven it was true. Unfortunately, Rachel Jackson died after Jackson won the election, but before he took the oath of office.
She died of cardiac. arrest. Jackson blamed the media for the stress and sorrow their slanders had caused. He had the sentence, quote, of being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound, but could not dishonor, put on her tombstone.
So Jackson very quickly became depressed and angry again. The man people elected wasn't the man that took the office of the presidency. Jackson was going through a lot in his personal life.
He was dealing with being very much alone again. Slide six. The election of Andrew Jackson has had long-term effects on how presidential campaigns unfold.
After Jackson... No political candidate would ever want people to believe that they were elite, even if they were. After Jackson, politicians would manipulate their past or outright lie in order to convince voters that they were common, self-made men.
Slide seven. So we do have to talk about Jackson and his treatment of... people of color.
Before we do, I should remind you that in the 1820s and 1830s, though the United States was a multicultural nation, we weren't a nation of equality. Most Americans were openly racist against African Americans and Native Americans. So the same behavior that most people find unacceptable in Jacksonville, Jackson today is partly what made him so popular in the 19th century. Politically, Jackson was pro-slavery and a slave owner.
He also believed that Native Americans were quote barbarians that were in the way on the expansion of the United States and most importantly to him, slave lands. That's what he needed that space for. Slide eight.
It may seem unthinkable. to us today. But most Americans believed that it was a humane policy to relocate Native Americans from their current lands to new lands west of the Mississippi River. The alternative, as most Americans saw it, was slaughter.
There was virtually no thought of leaving Natives on their current lands. In 1830, Jackson asked Congress for the Indian Removal Act. To be clear, this was a law passed through Congress. Jackson did not do this unilaterally, as a lot of people like to portray.
Jackson was wrong for this, but the nation approved it. So the problem was much deeper than just Jackson. Really, any time the nation has president that does unethical things. You have to look at the nation as a whole that supports or tolerates it.
And we'll talk about other administrations that pass laws and executive orders that hamper civil rights in pretty significant ways. And again, we've got to talk about the nation and the president. And this is a good example of that. The Jacksonian era of has a lot of complications as far as people and conflict is concerned.
But with the 1830 Indian Removal Act, Americans accepted it, but not all Natives complied easily. In 1832, Natives refused to leave their land in Illinois and it sparked conflict. The Illinois state militia engaged in what is called the Black Hawk War, wherein they slaughtered nearly 600 natives.
Famous future political figures like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were both volunteers with the Illinois State Militia. Lincoln was never in combat during the conflict, but did bury bodies and saw the aftermath of scalping. It's interesting that both these men were there around the same time as they would both be presidents of a divided nation during the Civil War. Lincoln as president of the United States and Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States of America, which we will talk about toward the end of this class. Slide nine.
The most famous conflict from the Native Removal Act revolved around the Trail of Tears and Cherokee removal. It's no coincidence that one year before Jackson asked for the Native Removal Act in 1829, gold had been found in the mountains of Georgia. The Cherokee Nation did not believe that the law was legal because it violated their right to property.
So a legal battle began. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. And you'll always know a Supreme Court. Court case because there's just a V in the title, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.
Any other court would say V.S. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the final decision. The Supreme Court agreed with the Cherokee people that they had an unquestionable right to their lands.
However, Cherokee people were not American citizens and their lands were not. part of the United States. The Supreme Court claimed that they simply lacked the jurisdiction to force Jackson to take any certain course of action because the Supreme Court could not dictate how a president treated a foreign nation or its citizens. Jackson didn't care what the Supreme Court recommended. He only cared that they couldn't stop.
By the end of the Supreme Court hearing, Jackson was angry and did everything in his power to make the 800-mile journey very difficult on the Natives, even though the actual trail of tears occurred under his successor's administration, Martin Van Buren. The journey was marked by incredible cruelty on the part of the soldier escorts that assaulted the Natives. Even stomped in the heads of Native American infants if the parents had laid them on the ground while they were cleaning themselves, dressing, or ate. So some Native American women would never set their babies down. They just always held them for fear that the soldiers would kill them very brutally.
The Natives were denied rations, clothing, even shoes. The soldiers even stole food and items from the natives along the way in the freezing weather. Of the 17,000 Cherokees that departed, only 8,000 survived. So let's stop this lecture here, and we will pick back up, kind of pivoting to talk more about the nation as a whole, and some shifts in economy and art and political action. activism during this period of Jackson.
So you guys take a break and I will see you in our next video lecture.