Chapter 13

A.P. U.S. History Notes
Chapter 13: "The Rise of Jacksonian Democracy"
~ 1824 – 1830 ~

I. Politics for the People
1. When the Federalists had dominated, democracy was not respected, but by the 1820s, it was widely appealing.
a. Politicians now had to bend to appease and appeal to the masses, and the popular ones were the ones who claimed to be born in log cabins and had humble backgrounds.
b. Those who were aristocratic (too clean, too well dressed, too grammatical, to highly intellectual) were scorned.
2. Western Indian fighters and/or militia commanders, like Andrew Jackson, Davy Crocket, and William Henry Harrison, were quite popular.
3. Jacksonian Democracy said that whatever governing that was to be done should be done directly to the people.
4. Called the New Democracy, it was based on universal manhood suffrage.
a. In 1791, Vermont became the first state admitted to the union to allow all white males to vote in the elections.
5. While the old bigwigs who used to have power sneered at the "coonskin congressmen" and the "bipeds of the forest," the new democrats argued that if they messed up, they messed up together and were not victims of aristocratic domination.
II. Nourishing the New Democracy
1. The flowering the political democracy was in part caused the logical outgrowth of the egalitarian ideas that had taken root in colonial times.
a. The steady growth of the market economy also nourished it.
b. More and more people understood how banks, tariffs, and internal improvements affected the quality of their lives.
c. The panic of 1819 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also helped it grow.
2. In the panic of 1819, overextended banks had called back their debts, and often, farmers unable to pay up lost their farms while the bankers didn't have to lose their property because they simply suspended their own payments, and the apparent favoritism caused outcry.
3. The problem with Missouri had aroused Southern awareness to how the North could... [continues]

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