Andrew Jackson Villain

Andrew Jackson, Was He a Great President or a Villain?
Christina Nguyen
November 18, 2015
US I HIS 121 Fall 15
Instructor: Verzosa

President Andrew Jackson, the first man from the western state of Tennessee voted into office in 1828, was one of the most controversial president in American history. As the American political party system takes its shape, Andrew Jackson became the leader of the newly established Democratic Party. Andrew Jackson represented and appealed to the common man. Jackson, as a military hero, displayed a heroic aura that attracted many of his western supporters and additionally captivated the support from workingmen in the East. This Jacksonian Democracy alarmed political elites as he establishes the spoil system in
In 1814, President Jackson commanded the military force that defeated the Creek nation. In the Creek nation’s defeat, the Creeks “lost 22 million acres of land in southern Georgia and central Alabama” (PBS, Indian Removal). Andrew Jackson championed the malicious and imperial “Indian Removal Act” through both of the houses of Congress in 1830. The Indian Removal Act permitted President Andrew Jackson to “disavow earlier treaty commitments and force the 74,000 Indians remaining in the East and the South to move to federal lands west of the Mississippi River” (Shi and Tindall 330). Under these agreements, the Native Americans were to voluntarily hand over their lands “east of the Mississippi and in exchange for lands to the west” (PBS, Indian Removal). Despite the rhetoric proposing a voluntary and fair exchange of their lands, the Indian Removal Act cleared the way for the U.S. militia to drive out the Native Americans from their own land with brute force under President Jackson’s
Andrew Jackson was undoubtedly a national war hero. He gained his national fame and heroic stature from the American Revolution to the War of 1812. Andrew Jackson’s greatest victory at the Battle of New Orleans in the massacre of the British painted him as a national war hero. Andrew Jackson’s presidency in the 1820’s to 1830’s revealed many contradictions and paradoxes. Glorifying Andrew Jackson as the president of “common man” undermines his treatment towards Native Americans. The fact that he relocated them and ignored their territorial rights exposed Andrew Jackson as a villain. He was all for economic and political rights of the common people, but disregarded the rights of Indians. He is remembered for the great things he did for the nation as the political party system emerges, but Jackson was also infamous for many reasons as well. Andrew Jackson was a confusing political figure. He was known as the man of the common people, nonetheless, he was a man of mass