Andrew Jackson

Statue of Andrew Jackson, the triumphant warrior, in Jackson Square, New Orleans.

Andrew Jackson was born in 1767 near the border between North and South Carolina. His parents were poor; his father died before the Revolution and his mother (and two brothers) during it. Jackson’s education was sporadic, but that did not prevent him from becoming a lawyer, judge, merchant, land speculator, military officer, planter and politician.

Jackson married Rachel Robards (1767-1828) in 1791 and again in 1794 upon her official divorce from her first husband. The couple produced no offspring but adopted two boys, the son of Rachel’s brother and a Creek Indian orphan. Jackson dueled courageously on several occasions and developed a reputation for bravery that helped him to lead large military units during the War of 1812, most famously in the Battle of New Orleans.

Politically, Jackson was a Democrat. As the first Westerner and the first self-made man to serve as President, Jackson tried to increase the economic and political power of the common man through a series of policies ranging from vetoing the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States to the Specie Circular, both of which sought to reduce the influence of bankers, to advocating the elimination of the elitist Electoral College in presidential elections.

Critics of his administration, however, cast Jackson in a more sinister light. In addition to blaming him for the Panic of 1837 and subsequent recession, they attacked him for creating the “spoils system” whereby friends of the administration, rather than the most qualified individuals (typically, incumbents), were given federal government posts like local postmaster. In addition, Jackson’s frequent use of his veto power brought down on his head the metaphorical crown of “King Andrew I.”

Although he had health issues from his dueling and Army days, Jackson lived until 1845. He is buried at his Hermitage plantation near Nashville, Tennessee.

Mudslinging 19th century style: The coffin handbills circulated by the J. Q. Adams camp during the 1828 presidential election campaign.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, politicians claimed to “stand” for office like gentlemen rather than to “run” for office like demagogues. Most, in fact, sort of sauntered toward the presidency behind the scenes. Jackson, by contrast, galloped into the White House on a war steed; military jargon has since dominated election rhetoric.

In his first bid for the presidency, in 1824, Jackson received over 41% of the popular vote, 10 points higher than John Quincy Adams and well ahead of the other two major contenders, William Crawford and Henry Clay. He received only 99 votes in the electoral college, however. This was well shy of the 131 then needed to win so the choice, per the Constitution, was given over to the House of Representatives. Unfortunately for Jackson and his supporters, the Speaker of the House was disappointed runner-up Henry Clay. Clay threw his support behind Adams and soon thereafter Adams made Clay his Secretary of State, a post then considered the stepping stone to the presidency.

A few months later, an outraged Jackson condemned the “corrupt bargain” made between Adams and Clay and began actively seeking support for the 1828 election. The long “campaign” grew so uncharacteristically acrimonious that Jackson attributed the death of his wife Rachel in late December 1828 to it. The Adams “camp” branded the couple adulterers because Jackson and Rachel had lived together as man and wife in the early 1790s when Rachel was still technically married to another man.

Adams also painted Jackson, in the infamous coffin handbills, as nothing more than a military man who brutally executed Indians, duelists and even his own men. The Jackson camp countered with a campaign song, “Hunters of Kentucky,” and by accusing Adams of serving as the Czar’s pimp while minister to Russia. Jackson handily won what some consider to be the first modern presidential election, 178 votes to 83. In 1832, he completely avenged the corrupt bargain by defeating Clay 219 to 49 in the electoral college.

Elevation and plan of Jackson’s plantation mansion outside of Nashville during the final year of his presidency.

Born to parents of modest means, Jackson tried to improve his economic condition by working for wages and fees as a soldier, attorney, judge and politician; by reselling goods like knives, files, silk hose, hats, sugar, raisins, wines and other sundries; by borrowing money to buy large tracts of cheap wilderness land that he hoped to flip for a profit; and by buying and managing a plantation. He struggled at first as a merchant and land speculator but managed to accumulate modest wealth as the owner of a fairly large, highly diversified plantation – “the Hermitage” – located near Nashville, Tennessee.

Like most planters, Jackson was asset rich but cash poor. His land and slaves were undoubtedly valuable but, scarred by losses incurred during his land speculation days, Jackson was reluctant to borrow against them. And when western bank notes depreciated after the Panic of 1819 he could not even scrape together enough money to tour the eastern states. He bred and raced horses, a very lucrative sideline. One of his horses, Truxton, won more than $20,000 in prize money and commanded $30 stud fees. Jackson also grew corn for the slaves and livestock, and wheat and cotton for sale in the market. By his presidency, he had over 100 slaves. Andrew Jr., one of Jackson’s sons, ran Jackson into debt by mismanaging the plantation during Jackson’s long absences in Washington. Political supporter Frank Blair kept the plantation together by lending Jackson $7,000 during the long recession that began in 1837.

Samuel D. Ingham, Secretary of the Treasury (March 1829 to June 1831)

Samuel D. Ingham, the first of five Treasury Secretaries to serve under Andrew Jackson, was born during the Revolution (in 1779) in New Hope, Pennsylvania and died after the Civil War (in 1869) across the Delaware River in Trenton, New Jersey. A paper manufacturer and politician, Ingham supported the Second Bank of the United States and had he stayed in office may have been able to broker a deal between his boss (Jackson) and his fellow Pennsylvanian (Biddle).

But it was not to be. Ingham, along with most of Jackson’s cabinet, resigned their posts in 1831 during the so-called Petticoat or Eaton affair. US Senator turned Secretary of War John Henry Eaton, a widower, married Peggy O’Neale scandalously soon after the death of her husband, John Timberlake, from disease while on a long voyage on the USS Constitution. The wives of the other cabinet members, including Ingham’s, refused to socialize with Peggy, evoking a visceral response in Jackson who had married his beloved Rachel before her previous marriage was legally terminated. The resulting acrimony ended in the resignation of almost the entire cabinet, including Ingham, who went back to making paper and looking for coal in Pennsylvania’s mountains. Several counties and ships have been named in Ingham’s honor, far fewer and smaller than would have been had he been able to salvage the heart of the Second Bank.

Louis McLane, Secretary of the Treasury (August 1831 to May 1833)

Louis McLane, the second of Jackson’s five Treasury Secretaries, was born in 1786 in Smyrna, Delaware and died in 1857 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was well educated and well heeled in part because his father, a Federalist federal tax collector, was friends with powerful Delaware politician James A. Bayard, in whose law office McLane apprenticed. In addition to practicing law and siring 13 children with his wife Kitty Milligan, McLane served with the Wilmington Artillery Company during the War of 1812, a unit that saw no combat.

After the War, McLane served Delaware in the House of Representatives from 1817 until 1827 and, despite being a Federalist, was named Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. He also served two years in the Senate before resigning in 1829.

During his time in Washington, McLane became friends with William H. Crawford and Martin Van Buren. The latter affiliations led him into the camp of Andrew Jackson, who he vigorously supported in the 1828 election. Jackson lost Delaware anyway and McLane ended up with the relatively minor post, ambassador to England. After Samuel D. Ingham resigned due to the Eaton Affair, Jackson recalled him and at Van Buren’s urging nominated him for Treasury Secretary. Like Ingham, McLane sought to broker a deal on the Second Bank issue but was rebuffed by attorney general Roger B. Taney, who reminded Jackson of McLane’s Federalist background.

After he vetoed a bill that would have re-chartered the Second Bank, Jackson sought to financially eviscerate the institution by removing the government’s deposits from it. McLane refused to do so and was moved to Secretary of State, a post that he resigned in June 1834 after a bitter dispute with Van Buren. His political career in shambles, McLane moved to the nation’s burgeoning corporate sector, serving first as president of the Morris Canal and Banking Company and then as president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. After a brief reprise as ambassador to England under James Polk, he retired from business in 1848.

William J. Duane, Secretary of the Treasury (May to September 1833)

William J. Duane, the third of Jackson’s five Treasury Secretaries, was born in Ireland in 1780, emigrated to Pennsylvania with his parents in 1796 and died in Philadelphia in 1865. He helped his father, William, publish the scurrilous, pro-Republican, anti-Federalist newspaper Aurora before marrying Deborah Franklin Bache, granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin and daughter of merchant and insurer Richard Bache, and becoming an influential lawyer and politician in his own right in his late 1820s and 1830s.

When Treasury Secretary Louis McLane refused to remove the government’s deposits from the Second Bank and place them in state “pet banks,” Jackson moved him to the State department and recalled Duane from a diplomatic post in Denmark. The appointment, which McLane urged on Jackson, proved ill-advised. Duane agreed with Jackson that the Second Bank needed to be curbed but believed that removal of the deposits was illegal and likely to cause a financial panic that would hurt the common man, Jackson’s main constituency. Duane defended his view in a book, titled Narrative and Correspondence Concerning the Removal of the Deposits, and Occurrences Connected Therewith and published in 1838, well after he had been cashiered and the Second Bank allowed to expire. Jackson called him “either the weakest mortal, or the most strange composition I have ever met with.”

Roger B. Taney, Secretary of the Treasury (September 1833 to June 1834)

Roger B. Taney, Jackson’s fourth Treasury Secretary, was born in 1777 in Calvert County, Maryland and died in 1864 in Frederick, Maryland, where he is buried. The second son of a tobacco planter, Taney graduated from Dickinson College with honors in 1795. Unlikely to inherit much land, Taney became a lawyer and politician who held nuanced positions on the most important subjects of the day, including slavery and states’ rights. A Federalist turned Democrat, Taney became a Jackson man during the 1824 presidential election. Jackson rewarded him for his loyalty with several important posts, including acting Secretary of War, Attorney General, acting Treasury Secretary and Chief Justice.

Taney is best known and most hated for his controversial pro-slavery decision in the Dred Scott case (1857) when serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a post he held from 1836 until his death. Jackson appointed him to the high court in recognition of his services as acting Treasury Secretary. Unlike his two immediate predecessors in that office, Louis McLane and William J. Duane, Taney gleefully removed the federal government’s deposits from the Second Bank of the US and distributed them to state banks throughout the country loyal to the Jackson administration. The Senate responded by rejecting his nomination – his was a recess appointment – by a vote of 28 to 18.

Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Treasury (July 1834 to March 1841)

Levi Woodbury, Jackson’s fifth and final and Martin Van Buren’s only Treasury Secretary, was born in Francetown, New Hampshire in 1789 and died in 1851 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1809 and attended Tapping Reeve Law School in Connecticut in preparation for a career in private practice and public service, first in the New Hampshire state senate, then in its supreme court, then in its statehouse. He served in the US Senate as a dependable Jacksonian from 1825 until 1831, when he joined the Jackson administration as Secretary of the Navy. He served in that capacity until 1834 when he moved to Treasury after the Senate refused to confirm Roger B. Taney as Treasury Secretary.

Like Taney and Jackson, Woodbury was a staunch foe of the Second Bank of the US, but he learned that state banks were a poor alternative for the people’s money. He therefore devised an “independent treasury” system in which the Treasury essentially acted as its own bank. His system was dismantled but revived in 1846 under President James Polk. Upon Joseph Story’s death in September 1845, he was rewarded with a nomination to the US Supreme Court. Confirmed in early 1846, he served until his death. He is one of only three individuals to serve as a state governor and in all three branches of the federal government (legislature, executive, judicial). His name graces several avenues, cities, counties, schools and ships throughout the country.

The pitiful plight of an unemployed tradesman, his family and his creditors due to the policies of Jackson and Van Buren.

After having killed the Second Bank by vetoing its re-charter and removing the government’s deposits from it, Jackson attacked the entire banking industry by issuing in 1836 an executive order known as the Specie Circular. The order, which was issued by Jackson’s fifth and final Treasury Secretary, Levi Woodbury, required payment for government lands in specie (full-bodied gold or silver coins), not in bank notes or deposits, after August 15.

Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, continued the policy despite the fact that contemporary critics blamed it for the Panic of 1837 and the long and deep recession that followed. In fact, all of Jackson’s major financial policies contributed to the economic fiasco by removing the financial system’s ability to respond to shocks, like the steep decline in cotton prices that followed a financial panic in London. Under President Nicholas Biddle, the Second Bank of the US had stopped the spread of a similar panic to America in 1825. By 1837, however, the remnants of the defunct Second Bank had been transformed into just another state bank with a high falutin’ sounding name (United States Bank) and president (Biddle) that instead of acting as a lender of last resort had actually exacerbated the panic by massively speculating in cotton. The Specie Circular added to the problem by withdrawing specie from the banking system at the moment that banks should have been increasing their specie reserves.

Certificate for shares in the Second Bank of the US owned by Baring Brothers of London, April 1830.

This stock certificate for 25 shares was issued on April 14, 1830 by the Second Bank’s New York branch to London bank Baring Brothers and Company, likely to consolidate one or more purchases of shares by Barings in the local secondary market. The market price for Second Bank shares in New York at that time was $125 for each $100 par share, giving this certificate a street value of $3,125 (25 x $125).

To minimize fraud, the branch issued certificates bearing six major authentication/anti-counterfeiting devices: 1) the signature of the cashier; 2) the signature of the president; 3) the raised seal of the mother bank (barely discernible at the left of the image, just above the cashier’s signature); 4) the printed engravings at the top and sides (border, banner, eagle-Columbia-ship image and the flourishes at the bottom left); 5) the certificate number at the top left; 6) the waved cut or indent at the left (which could be matched to the stub remaining in the book from which the certificates were cut).

Unissued Second Bank of the US notes, Philadelphia.

These are blank, unissued banknotes of the Bank of the United States’ headquarters in Philadelphia. They were deliberately printed with blanks by Draper Underwood Bald & Spencer, an engraver based in New York and Philadelphia, so that they could be signed, dated, numbered and made payable to a specific individual at issuance. That practice made the unissued notes less valuable to would-be thieves and the notes more difficult to counterfeit.

The notes also contained several other anti-counterfeiting measures, the most obvious of which are the four different methods of identifying the note’s denomination: Arabic numerals (e.g., 10), Latin numerals (“X”), English numbers (“ten”) and unique banner icon (eagle on striped shield). It was important to protect the denomination because a common counterfeiting technique was to raise the denomination of true notes (e.g., $10 to $100). The intricate banners also helped to dissuade counterfeiters from attempting to replicate true notes and often conveyed important subtexts. In addition to depicting the nation’s flag and bird, for example, the banner on the $20 note proclaims E pluribus unum (“out of many, one” in Latin), the Republic’s de facto motto and a metaphor for the bank itself, which was composed of numerous branches as well as the mother bank in Philadelphia.

Second Bank of the United States editorial published in the Boston Weekly Messenger, April 18, 1816.

This article shows that opposition to the Second Bank predated the institution’s formation but that moderate critics, like the editors of the Boston Weekly Messenger, admitted that the new bank could be a “blessing to the country” if it fell into “the hands of such men as will conduct its concerns on sound and upright principles.” Ironically, the Second Bank was at first controlled by men with unsound principles. Instead of controlling the issuance of bank notes by state banks, as the first BUS had done, the Second Bank at first added to what the newspaper editors called the “too great amount of bank bills in circulation,” and thereby exacerbated an asset bubble that popped in late 1818 and early 1819, leading to three years of recession. The Second Bank also suffered from several embezzlement scandals in its early years, including most famously and seriously at its Baltimore branch. Declining stock prices (from $154 per share in early December 1817 to $90 in late June 1819) induced large stockholders to step up and clean up the institution, which thereafter was ably led by Langdon Cheves (1819-1822) and Nicholas Biddle (1822-1836). The stockholders’ activism was rewarded with an increase in dividends, as well as stock prices that stayed in the vicinity of $120 per share for over a decade.

Speech on the Bank of the United States veto and its aftermath.

Reactions to Jackson’s veto of the Second Bank’s re-charter bill in July 1832 were of course mixed. Most of the pamphlets that appeared in reaction were highly partisan in nature, either praising or vilifying the President’s actions in broad terms in the hopes of influencing the presidential election that fall. Jackson ended up winning that election handily, with 219 of the 274 votes cast in the electoral college. Thus emboldened, Jackson in 1833 ordered his Treasury Secretary, Louis McLane, to remove the government’s deposits from the Second Bank and re-deposit them in state chartered banks throughout the country derisively labeled Jackson’s “pet banks.” When McLane refused, Jackson cashiered him and appointed William J. Duane in his stead. After Duane also failed to comply with the order, Jackson replaced him with the more pliant Roger B. Taney of Maryland. Soon after, Jackson rewarded Taney by making him Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Ardent Jacksonians, like William C. Rives, of course supported removal of the deposits and the President’s foes, those like Henry Clay who called him “King Andrew,” deprecated it. Some of the reactions to the removal of the government’s deposits from the Bank, however, were more nuanced. Some of those who backed the re-charter veto, for example, argued that moving the government’s deposits from the Second Bank to a plethora of state banks friendly to the administration was both illegal and poor policy. John C. Calhoun, Jackson’s jilted former Vice President, argued that the Senate, per the Bank’s charter, had to approve the Treasury Secretary’s withdrawals. Without that check, Calhoun warned, the President had seized control of the government’s purse not from private stockholders but from the people in Congress assembled.

The Senate eventually censured Jackson (a slap on the wrist it later revoked) but did not move to impeach. Jackson’s actions, which were designed to weaken the Second Bank and to strengthen the Jacksonian faction of the Democratic Party, therefore stood.

Report of a Committee of Directors of the Second Bank of the United States, 1833 (first edition).

This is the official response of the Bank of the US to Jackson’s removal of the public deposits, September 1833.

Political cartoon: A potential Third Bank of the United States provides Jackson and Van Buren an awful affright.

This cartoon depicts Jackson’s reaction to Pennsylvania’s chartering of the United States Bank, a reputed Third Bank of the United States. On the right side of the image, Biddle stands in front of the former bank with the new charter in hand. Jackson, at left, is frightened by the reappearance of his old nemesis (represented in reality by Biddle, who he calls Old Nick, and in his imagination by the bank, or the two headed monster atop the charter) and flees brandishing what is left of a cane representing his major weapon against the bank, his power to veto federal legislation. Jackson’s vow to “cut stick,” slang for running away, was therefore a pun. “Araby” is an archaic reference to Arabia, a peninsula in the Middle East some 6,500 miles from Washington DC. Used in conjunction with the verb “fly,” in the sense of moving quickly, its use apparently intended to convey Jackson’s deep fear of the new bank.

The character on his backside in the middle of the image is Jackson’s Vice President and heir-apparent, consummate New York politician Martin Van Buren. Reference to the prophet Elisha and use of the word mantle, a caped ecclesiastical garment, suggest that the cartoonist thought adherence to Jackson’s policies more a matter of faith than of reason. Clearly, the cartoonist wonders if Van Buren is willing and/or able to continue Jackson’s policies against the bank (“no monopoly”; “deposits”), banknotes (“specie currency” probably a reference to the Specie Circular), and the national debt (“appropriations”), and in favor of administration-controlled newspapers (“collar presses”; “Globe”).

Jackson vetoes the re-charter of the Second Bank of the US, 1832.

Andrew Jackson vetoed the bill re-chartering the Second Bank in July 1832 by arguing that in the form presented to him it was incompatible with “justice,” “sound policy” and the Constitution.

The bank’s charter was unfair, Jackson argued in his veto message, because it gave the bank considerable, almost monopolistic, market power, specifically in the markets that moved financial resources around the country and into and out of other nations. That market power increased the bank’s profits and thus its stock price, “which operated as a gratuity of many millions [of dollars] to the stockholders,” who, Jackson claimed, were mostly “foreigners” and “our own opulent citizens.” He then suggested that it would be fairer to most Americans to create a wholly government-owned bank instead, or at least to auction the Second Bank of the US’s monopoly privileges to the highest bidder.

The charter was bad policy for several technical reasons. First, it gave incorporated state banks better note redemption rights than those accorded to ordinary Americans and thereby created “a bond of union among the banking establishments of the nation, erecting them into an interest separate from that of the people.” Second, it exempted foreign stockholders from taxation but contained a clause that would allow states to tax resident stockholders. The effect of the differential taxation, Jackson believed, would drive most of the stock overseas and thus “make the American people debtors to aliens in nearly the whole amount due to this bank, and send across the Atlantic from two to five millions of specie every year to pay the bank dividends.” Because foreigners could not vote in corporate elections, the Bank would fall under the control of its few remaining citizen stockholders. “It is easy to conceive,” Jackson argued, “that great evils to our country and its institutions” would result “from such a concentration of power in the hands of a few men irresponsible to the people.”

Finally, Jackson believed the Bank of the US was unconstitutional, noting that while there was precedent for a federally chartered bank there was also precedent for not renewing its charter, as in 1811. He then rejected the notion that the Supreme Court was the sole or final arbiter of constitutionality, arguing instead that “the Congress, the Executive and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.” He ended with a long litany of reasons why he could not reconcile his oath to uphold the Constitution with the bank’s re-charter bill.

Nicholas Biddle, Philadelphia gentleman and banker.

Nicholas Biddle was born in Philadelphia in 1786, the son of patriotic Pennsylvania politician Charles Biddle and the nephew of a Revolutionary War naval hero also named Nicholas Biddle. A precocious youth, Biddle at age 15 was valedictorian of the graduating class at Princeton. He then traveled widely in Europe until 1807 when he returned to Philadelphia to serve as editor of Port Folio magazine and to prepare Lewis and Clark’s report of their expedition into the heart of the recently acquired Louisiana Territory. He found it impossible to complete the latter work, however, after entering the Pennsylvania state legislature, where he vociferously supported the re-charter of the first Bank of the United States.

Elected president of the Second Bank in 1822, Biddle ran the institution virtually flawlessly, a fact reflected in the bank’s dividend record and stock price. In 1825, Biddle used the bank as a lender of last resort, thereby averting the importation of a calamitous European financial panic. During the Bank War with Jackson, however, Biddle made several strategic blunders, including making the re-charter an issue in the 1832 election, that ultimately cost the Second Bank its bid for re-charter. Biddle countered by establishing a new bank, the United States Bank, under a Pennsylvania state charter. He died in 1844 with his reputation and fortune much diminished by the failure of that institution in 1841.

Bank of the United States building on Third Street in Philadelphia.

The first Bank of the US’s headquarters was located on Third Street, just south of Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. The building was unavailable to serve as the headquarters of the Second Bank because it had been purchased by merchant and private banker Stephen Girard after the first bank’s charter expired without renewal in 1811. The building survives to this day.

Postcard of the Second Bank of the United States building.

At first housed in the relatively diminutive Carpenter’s Hall, the Second Bank of the US commissioned the construction of a new, larger headquarters on Chestnut Street between Fourth and Fifth Streets, just northwest of the first Bank of the US building, in 1819. Designed by architect William Strickland, who modeled it after the Parthenon, the building was completed in 1824 and cost almost $500,000. Eight fluted Doric columns grace the outside of the structure, complimenting the 12 fluted Ionic columns uplifting the bank’s spacious interior of almost 12,000 sq. ft. Much like tall office buildings today, the headquarters of both national banks were deliberately designed to evoke the awe and admiration of customers and passersby, monuments in stone to the presumed underlying financial strength of the institutions. Today the Second Bank’s headquarters house a National Park Service portrait museum.

President of the United States (1829-1837)

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