As a general, official, candidate, and especially as seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) was and is one of the most polarizing figures on the American scene. Because of the Jacksonians’ occasionally lurid rhetoric and Manichean approach to certain policy issues, historians have long been in the habit of including Jackson and his followers in the ranks of “paranoid” or conspiracy theory-prone political movements. This interpretation comes most powerfully from the post-World War II “consensus” historians, led by Richard Hofstadter, with their downplaying of class, economic, and ideological conflict as forces in U.S. history. The Jacksonians constantly described American society in these terms, and practiced a politics of angry confrontation, so the consensus historians set them down as demagogues using class rhetoric to mask a capitalist agenda, or as conspiracy theorists who, as David Brion Davis puts it, saw “the growing inequality of wealth as the product of an aristocratic conspiracy against the rights of the laboring classes” (Davis, 69).
This view is inadequate. Coming to prominence in a time of sweeping change—what more recent scholars have labeled the “Market Revolution”— the Jacksonians were expressing serious concerns when they attacked their Monster Banks and hydras of corruption. This revolution saw millions of Americans become wage laborers for the first time, subject to the will of employers and forced to meet their daily needs by buying goods and services in the marketplace. Inequalities of wealth deepened as many traditional trades were decimated by industrialization. The legal and institutional order was remade in ways that maximized the power and protected the earnings of capitalist entrepreneurs over and against the rest of society. Finally, two major economic depressions punctuated the Jack-sonian era, the panics of 1819 and 1837, and in those crashes millions of Americans found themselves suddenly susceptible to the fortunes and policies of unfamiliar institutions like banks and corporations, run by and for the benefit of a new class of economic power brokers. In sum, while we may find the Jacksonians’ analysis of the Market Revolution extreme and their policy responses to it crude and simplistic, the problems they perceived were no paranoid delusions.
Jackson himself was probably a bit paranoid. Much of his political career was spent crusading against various enemies and evildoers, some open, some hidden, but most not especially evil by any objective analysis. Jackson tended to turn any issue into a quest for personal vindication, and while this tendency was an important flaw in Jackson’s character as a leader, it should not lead us to conclude that he was always merely paranoid. In many cases, they really were out to get him. The following is just a sampling of the occasions when Jackson detected conspirators at work against him, and vice versa.
The Election of 1824 and the “Corrupt Bargain”
Though Andrew Jackson’s candidacy began as a merely local, tactical maneuver, the hero of New Orleans emerged rapidly as a popular favorite, disrupting the presidential plans of House Speaker Henry Clay and Monroe administration cabinet members John Quincy Adams, William Crawford, and John C. Calhoun. Jackson’s sudden rise was one of the seminal events in U.S. political history, potentially placing the power of presidential selection into the hands of popular majorities for the first time.
Unfortunately, the U.S. political system was unprepared for this development. The established means of nominating presidential candidates, the congressional caucus, fell apart when only one quarter of the members attended. Crawford was nominated but the supporters of Jackson, Adams, and Clay ignored the caucus decision, setting up a four-way presidential race that was guaranteed to be difficult to resolve. Jackson finished first in the popular and Electoral College voting, but fell short of the required majority in the College. This meant the final decision would have to be made in the House of Representatives.
The Jacksonians expected the House to simply ratify the people’s choice, but that was not a constitutional requirement. Though some feared riots if Jackson was not elected, the House voting on 9 February 1825 had the look of a deal between the Adams and Clay forces. The states that had given their Electoral College votes to Clay went to Adams, along with several Jackson states, making Adams president. Rumors of a conspiracy to thwart the people’s will circulated heavily, and one week later they seemed to come true, when Adams announced Clay as his choice for secretary of state. Adams and Clay both denied that there had been any arrangement, but the circumstantial evidence for a perhaps unstated understanding between them is strong.
The Jacksonians exploded in anger, denouncing the election as a “corrupt bargain” against the people and Adams as a morally and democratically illegitimate president. Jackson’s own reaction was typically violent: “So you see, the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver. [H]is end will be the same” (Dangerfield, 228). His supporters used the battle cry of “bargain and sale” to undermine the Adams administration’s every move, finding sinister motives behind even the most high-minded initiatives and the least significant decisions. Adams and Clay were dubbed “the coalition,” a pejorative term in those days, used to denote an alliance based purely on self-interest and lust for power.
Missouri senator and ardent Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton led a congressional investigation of corruption in the administration. The committee issued a report comparing Adams and Clay to the kings and prime ministers of England before the American Revolution. The coalition was supposedly out to seize absolute power by using the government’s revenue to buy up supporters, specifically by appointing partisans to office and subsidizing friendly newspapers. Later a Committee on Retrenchment was formed during the campaign year of 1828 to look further into Adams’s alleged excesses. Of course, this so-called spoils system of partisan appointments expanded dramatically once the Jacksonians were in power, despite their cries for “reform” while Adams was president.
Ironically, all these attacks were directed at what was probably one of the least partisan administrations in U.S. history. Most of the charges were exaggerated or fictitious, but all were made plausible by the circumstances of Adams’s election. Whether corrupt, a bargain, or not, the Adams-Clay coalition was based on assumptions about the role of democracy in the constitutional system that suddenly became outmoded in the 1820s. The founders may have placed the election of the president in the hands of the Electoral College and Congress, but in practice it had become the province of the people themselves.
Slaying the Monster Bank
Probably the best-known examples of Jacksonian “paranoia” can be found in the so-called Bank War, in which Jackson destroyed the Second Bank of the United States first by vetoing a bill renewing its charter and then by removing the government’s deposits from the bank. Couched in some of the most radical rhetoric ever to come out of the White House, Jackson’s crusade against the bank struck the institution’s defenders and most later commentators as extreme and hyperbolic if not downright pathological.
Like the attacks on the “coalition,” Jacksonian fears about the institution they sometimes called the Monster were rooted in serious concerns. Giant national institutions of any kind were virtually nonexistent in this period. The Bank of the United States (BUS) was perhaps the first national business corporation, and the only other real national institution of any kind, the federal government, had no presence in most communities besides the local post office. The BUS was not the Federal Reserve or a government treasury. Instead, it was a privately owned, profit-making commercial bank, with branches across the country, that happened to enjoy the very great privilege of holding the government’s money on deposit.
From the inception of its first incarnation back under Hamilton and Washington, the BUS had been highly controversial, as much for its potential for political abuse as for its economic power. Especially under the direction of Nicholas Biddle, who assumed the presidency of the Second BUS in 1823, the national bank set the example followed by most major U.S. corporations since, working to maximize its influence by forging close ties with politicians. Loans to lawmakers and political journalists were made freely, and several of the most prominent congressional leaders, including Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, were hired by the bank in their private capacity as lawyers. The influential New York Courier and Enquirer switched from opposition to support of the BUS after a loan came through. This sort of influence-buying is what the Jacksonians were thinking of when they denounced the BUS as a “hydra of corruption” (Watson, 154).
Banks themselves were unfamiliar, suspicious institutions to most Americans of the early nineteenth century. Bank-loaned paper money was felt to be, in essence, fake money (in contrast to gold and silver) that encouraged reckless, groundless speculative investments. Jackson told Biddle he had been “afraid” of banks ever since reading about the South Sea Bubble, a disastrous British investment mania of the early eigthteenth century. Jackson had also personally experienced a bank-driven financial boom and bust. The BUS was widely blamed for a banking and land speculation bubble that had burst and plunged the country into a depression beginning in 1819. Newly reestablished at the end of the War of 1812, the national bank had first failed to restrain a rapid overexpansion of credit by new state and local banks and then suddenly cracked down a few years later to save itself. An epidemic of bankruptcy, unemployment, and homelessness ensued, followed swiftly by tens of thousands of debt collection lawsuits that sent many debtors to jail. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were only two among many major figures who barely escaped total ruin in the panic of 1819, and many other similar and lesser Americans were not so lucky.
Jackson’s home region and electoral base, the West, was especially hard hit. The new western cities like St. Louis and Cincinnati had been the center of the land boom, and in aggressively collecting debts after the crash, the BUS stripped hundreds of western farmers and businessmen of their property. By some reports, most of Cincinnati ended up owned by the BUS. Westerners responded with political outrage that would fuel Jacksonianism later on. New senator and future Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri reported that his trip to Washington was “one long ride amidst the crashings and explosions of banks” (Chambers, 101). In Washington, Benton helped launch the antibank crusade that Jackson would finish a decade later, giving voice to many westerners’ sense of sudden enslavement to an evil foreign entity. “All the flourishing cities of the west are mortgaged to this money power,” Benton thundered. “They are in the jaws of the monster! A lump of butter in the mouth of a dog! One gulp, one swallow, and all is gone!” (Watson, 39).
The ideas of Jacksonians like “Old Bullion” Ben-ton, so named for his advocacy of a “hard money” currency of gold and silver coins only, can be seen as typical conspiracy theories to the extent that they blame large, disturbing changes on one villainous institution. As with many other conspiracy theories, this act of scapegoating allowed Jacksonians to avoid both acknowledging the global, systemic forces at work and admitting that any fundamental or irreversible damage had been done to U.S. society. A villain or monster could be defeated more readily than the Market Revolution or industrial capitalism.
The depth of Andrew Jackson’s own antipathy to the BUS was not widely known during his first two presidential campaigns and for most of his first term as president. It came out only when his longtime political enemy Henry Clay, now a senator, decided to press for early recharter of the BUS. (The existing charter did not expire until 1836.) Clay expected a veto and hoped to use the issue against Jackson in the 1832 presidential race. Though Thomas Hart Benton led a stiff resistance and the Jacksonians had a majority in Congress, enough of them defected to allow the recharter bill to pass on 3 July 1832. The whole thing smelled of corruption to Jackson, who was sick and suffering intense pain at the time from an old bullet wound in his arm. He took the recharter drive as a personal challenge that had to beaten back: “The Bank … is trying to kill me, but I will kill it” (Watson, 143).
The message that Jackson and his aides concocted to explain the veto remains a shocking presidential document, crackling with anger and critical of dominant elements of U.S. society in a way that would be impossible to imagine today. Hardest for his opponents to take was Jackson’s harsh class rhetoric, condemning the wealthy for conspiring against democracy and the welfare of the nation: “The rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” the veto message argued.
The document set the terms for the “Bank War” that followed, boiling down a host of fears about the social and political impact of the rise of corporate capitalism into this one battle against a monstrously large and dangerous bank. While also attacking the bank as unconstitutional and overly beholden to foreign investors, Jackson focused his greatest ire on the way government involvement with business inevitably led to the subversion of democratic institutions and values:
Many of our rich men have not been content with equal protection and equal benefits, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress. By attempting to gratify their desires we have in the results of our legislation arrayed section against section, interest against interest, and man against man, in a fearful commotion which threatens to shake the foundations of our Union. (Jackson, 1832 )
Bank president Nicholas Biddle and his allies thought this was crazy talk, that the veto message would ruin Jackson: “It has all the fury of chained panther biting the bars of his cage. It is really a manifesto of anarchy” (Watson, 150). So convinced was Biddle that the message would contribute to Jackson’s downfall that he had thousands of copies printed up and mailed at bank expense.
Obviously, this was far from the case. Jackson was resoundingly reelected in 1832, an election that his opponents tried to turn into a referendum on the Bank War, with the aid of the BUS itself. As his second term opened, Jackson was determined to finish what he had started. Fearful that Biddle’s political loans and lobbying might secure another, perhaps veto-proof recharter bill sometime in the Monster’s remaining four years of life, Jackson and his advisors planned a preemptive strike. They would withdraw the government’s money from the BUS and deposit it in a number of different state banks, thereby crippling Biddle’s institution both financially and politically.
The recipient institutions were denounced as “pet banks” by administration critics, and they were indeed more Democrat-friendly in their politics than the BUS. One long-standing interpretation of the Bank War posits a “Wall Street Conspiracy” led by Jackson’s henchman, vice-president, and successor, Martin Van Buren of New York. The BUS was based in Philadelphia, then the nation’s financial center, and historian Bray Hammond argued in the 1950s that Van Buren and New York bankers had schemed to destroy Philadelphia’s preeminence by getting the government’s money shifted to New York and elsewhere. Later historians have debunked the idea of a Wall Street conspiracy, pointing out that the financial community as a whole strongly opposed the removal of the deposits.
The removal of the deposits was a precipitous step, of questionable legality and wisdom, that could really only be justified in terms of the lurid conspiratorial rhetoric about monsters and hydras that the Jacksonians had been using. The secretary of the treasury, not the president, controlled the location of the deposits, and Jackson had to fire two different treasury secretaries in 1833 before finding one that would comply, Roger B. Taney, a coauthor of the veto message. Even worse was the fact that many of the evils that the Jacksonians had blamed on the BUS would be made worse by spreading the money around to other commercial banks even further from the government’s control. If banking itself was a problem, then it became far worse during the Bank War era, with the states chartering some 347 new banks between 1830 and 1837.
Where the removal of deposits did succeed admirably was in provoking a response from Nicholas Biddle that proved the Jacksonians’ point about the threat that the BUS posed. “This worthy president thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned judges he is to have his way with the Bank,” Biddle wrote. “He is mistaken” (Watson, 157). As Jackson’s congressional opponents sought unsuccessfully to reverse the policy or punish the president, Biddle engineered an artificial recession, calling in the Bank’s loans more quickly than necessary, contracting credit and increasing unemployment sharply across the nation as businesses suddenly found themselves unable to finance their operations. Biddle hoped the induced panic would galvanize the business community in support of the bank, but the opposite turned out to be true. He had more or less conceded defeat in the fall of 1834, and allowed prosperity to return.
The “Riot Year” and the Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson
Though not well-known as such today, the period of the Bank War was as restless, troubled, and paranoid as any in U.S. history. Indeed, the “Great Riot Year” of 1834 rivals 1919 or 1968 for the sheer depth and breadth of unrest. As the removal of the deposits and Biddle’s recession unfolded, a wave of political violence broke out the likes of which the country had not seen since the Revolution. Every imaginable political and social division generated riots that pitted Jacksonian Democrats against their opponents, workers against employers, whites against blacks, “natives” against immigrants, Protestants against Catholics, and various local communities against such perceived fringe dwellers as abolitionists, Mormons, and even riverboat gamblers.
Unsurprisingly, some of this violent ill-will was directed at Andrew Jackson, whose rabble-rousing Bank War rhetoric was blamed by some for the wave of unrest. In February1834, Jackson received a note that said, “Damn your old soul, remove them deposits back again, and re-charter the Bank, or you will certainly be shot in less than two weeks, and that by myself!!!” (Cole, 221).
This was the first of many threats that Jackson received. Rumors spread that a rebel army of 5,000, possibly financed by the Bank of the United States, was being organized in Baltimore to overthrow the president, and when Jackson was warned, he promised to hang them all high if such a army dared to come after him.
Finally, just after the close of the “riot year” (which led into a year that was actually more violent by some measures), there was a real attempt on Jackson’s life. On 30 January 1835 an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence approached within 8 feet of Jackson as he was leaving the Capitol after a congressman’s funeral. As Jackson was receiving applause of the crowd gathered outside, leaning on Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury, Lawrence drew a pistol and fired with a loud bang; then he drew a second pistol and fired again. Jackson hesitated to see if he was shot. Miraculously, he wasn’t: it was a damp, muggy day and the pistol cap had failed to set fire to the powder, in both guns! Though he needed help to walk at this point in his life, Old Hickory (as he was popularly known) lived up to his tough-guy reputation on this occasion, letting go of Woodbury and going after Lawrence with his cane.
By all accounts, Richard Lawrence was the original lone gunman. Depressed, angry, and occasionally delusive, Lawrence had previously tried to kill his own sister and threatened other acquaintances. In explaining his motives for trying to assassinate Jackson, the painter sometimes followed Jackson’s political opponents in blaming the president for the hard economic times, but at other times Lawrence claimed that the president had murdered his father or was blocking his bid to take his rightful place as King of England. A jury eventually wasted little time acquitting Lawrence by reason of insanity.
Nevertheless, conspiracy theories circulated about the attempt on Jackson, usually tailored to the political interests of those who spread them. Some rumor or other linked “almost every eminent politician” in Washington with the would-be assassin (Rohrs, 150). Led by the administration spokes-paper, the Washington Globe, the Jacksonian press questioned Lawrence’s insanity and blamed the fiery speeches of Jackson opponents, especially one given by South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun two days before the attack, for inspiring the attack. (Entertainment options in early Washington being limited, the shooter really did hear Calhoun’s speech.) One of the doctors who had examined Lawrence was cited as agreeing that political controversy could have driven him to murder.
Jackson himself believed that Lawrence had been hired by Mississippi senator George Poindexter, a personally violent man who was also one of the administration’s most violent critics. Jackson told some visitors on the day of the attack that Poindex-ter had turned to Lawrence because he was too cowardly to kill Jackson himself. Witnesses were found who testified to seeing Lawrence at Poindexter’s house. The evidence against “Old Poins” was serious enough to warrant congressional investigation, but the testimony of the two men who had been willing to give affidavits against Poindexter, Mordecai Foy and David Stewart, fell apart under scrutiny. Stewart could not correctly describe Lawrence and Foy turned out not to know where Poindexter’s house was. Other evidence surfaced indicating that government contractor Charles Coltman might have offered work to Stewart, a blacksmith, for testimony incriminating Poindexter. The Poindexter conspiracy theory itself began to look like, as the anti-Jackson United States Telegraph put it, “one of the foulest conspiracies ever set on foot” (Rohrs, 159).
This last accusation should serve as a reminder that Andrew Jackson and his supporters had no monopoly on conspiratorial thinking. Regarding the attempted assassination, the opposition press (along with George Poindexter) argued that the whole thing was a setup. They accused the Jacksonians of arranging Richard Lawrence’s attack themselves to keep Jackson high in the public’s favor despite the widespread unrest and the continuing fallout from the Bank War. The fact that both of Lawrence’s pistols failed to fire properly was regarded as too unlikely to be accidental, and the Jacksonians had made political hay out of threats to Jackson in the past. Lawrence himself blamed the humid weather, but the investigation showed that the pistols had been loaded correctly and both performed flawlessly when tested. Of course, modern forensic methods were still a distant dream in 1835, so it is probably best not to place too much stock in the tests. No link between Lawrence and the Jacksoni-ans could ever be found, and once Lawrence and Poindexter were cleared, the whole matter descended to the level of mere partisan innuendo.
However, it was an index of the no-holds-barred nature of Jacksonian era politics that charges of conspiracy-linked assassination were made so openly in such mainstream venues. The modern equivalent would have been the New York Times and Lyndon Johnson—not do-it-yourself conspiracy theorists—accusing Richard Nixon or Barry Gold-water of hiring Lee Harvey Oswald immediately after the Kennedy assassination.
The American Whigs versus “King Andrew the First”
No review of the Jacksonian era would be complete without some mention of the more general conspiracy fears expressed by Andrew Jackson’s opponents. Beginning with the 1828 campaign, Jackson had been the subject of some of the most remarkably over-the-top vilification ever visited on a presidential candidate. Aiming to frighten pious Christians across the settled regions of the North, anti-Jackson newspapers depicted him as a martinet, bigamist, murderer, and all-around madman whose rule might literally bring hell on earth. Items like the famous “coffin handbill” detailed Jackson’s career as a duelist and as a cruel “military chieftain” who had executed prisoners and his own men on numerous occasions.
The anti-Jacksonians were a disparate group that finally coalesced during his second term into a new national political organization, the Whig Party. The new party’s name was rooted in the opposition’s rather conspiratorial or at least histrionic take on Jackson’s conduct during the Bank War. “Whig” was the named used by both the parliamentary opponents of absolute monarchy in England as well as the American opponents of British tyranny during the Revolution. The nineteenth-century American Whigs adopted the name because it encapsulated their basic message that Jackson sought to become, or already was, a dictator or king. A famous Whig cartoon labeled the president “King Andrew the First,” and pictured a crowned Old Hickory with robes and scepter, trampling on the Constitution.
Although the President Who Would Be King was undoubtedly a partisan campaign theme, the leading Whigs seemed to mean it in deadly earnest. Jackson had a long record, going back to his military career, of shrugging off legal restraints and treating himself as the supreme authority. A number of future Whigs had been bitterly critical of General Jackson’s unauthorized conquest of Spanish Florida back in 1818. Henry Clay had given a celebrated speech depicting Jackson as a potential military dictator in the mold of Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Jackson’s opponents warned voters about his dictatorial tendencies during his first two presidential campaigns, and they found ample evidence in Old Hickory’s presidency to support their fears. Southern anti-Jacksonians like Calhoun and Poindexter were alarmed by Jackson’s uncompromising stance and threats of force during the Nullification Crisis of 1831-1833. For most northern and western Whigs, the most troubling aspect of Jackson’s presidency was his use of the veto power against the Bank of the United States and a number of so-called “internal improvement” bills, mostly road and canal bills. All of these measures were highly prized by Henry Clay and other supporters of Clay’s so-called American System of aggressive, government-sponsored economic development, but the veto itself was a major concern.
The veto power had always been controversial because it was an attribute of absolute monarchy that the English Whigs had stripped from their kings in the Glorious Revolution of 1689. Early U.S. state governors often did not possess a veto. The presidential veto had been used only a handful of times before the Jackson administration, and even then (according to the Whigs) only on constitutional grounds, never because a President simply disapproved of a policy and wanted to impose his will on the rest of the government. Later in U.S. history, it became expected that the president would set the policy agenda for Congress, but in the early days of the Republic this was regarded by many as executive “usurpation,” a corrupt violation of the constitutional separation of powers. Thus Washington, D.C.’s oldest and most established newspaper, the National Intelligencer, could write, in apparent seriousness, that Jackson’s bank veto had rendered the Constitution a “dead letter” and the “will of a dictator . . . the Supreme Law!” (Watson, 152).
In fairness to the Whigs, their charges concerned the tendency of Jackson’s actions and the character of his leadership, and usually did not posit a literal monarchical conspiracy. Yet if Jackson sought to kill a symbolic monster in crusading against the Bank of the United States, the Whigs had their own monster in Jackson himself.
