In some ways I really don't like Andrew Jackson as a person. But as a leader he had the best interests of the country in mind. He was a fighter in a time when fighters were needed. His excesses therefore were America's excesses.
Jackson was elected in 1828, during a time when the South and the West felt they needed to team up to defeat New England domination over them and to make the new Republic more fully Republican and Democratic. It is the reasons behind Jackson's attitudes that I find are still worth studying. He opposed what he opposed for the right reasons.
When he was elected he was adamantly against the National Bank, and mildly approved of a tariff which was despised by the South. His vice President was John C. Calhoun who cared very little about the National Bank, but was opposed to the Tariff in a major way. These two disagreed on fundamental philosophy. And their disagreement echos to this very day. First let's talk about the National Bank.
Jackson opposed a National Bank. The US already had one, but he opposed to it on principle. William Freeling tells us that 1 He "was distressed about the Capitalists and stock jobbers who supposedly made profits by spewing forth paper money instead of producing a material product. The President was determined to stop rich, moneyed interests from using government funds to secure paper profits at the expense of the people." The author goes on to say that Jackson could "tolerate the tariff, one suspects, because industrial capitalists made a finished product instead of "gambling" with paper money and because manufacturers did not employ funds from the public treasury. A National bank, on the other hand, gave paper profits to "a few Moneyed Capitalists", who are trading upon our revenue, and enjoy the benefit of it, to the exclusion of the many." A National debt, Jackson believed, was "a curse to a republic" because "it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy."
Now, all that was prescient. Indeed that state seems to be coming to pass at the present time. As a result, Jackson was so determined to destroy the bank that he succeeded. Still, though he was absolutely right in his reasons, in his analysis, and in his prognostation -- getting rid of the Bank didn't really solve anything but only made the US economy all the more chaotic. A banking system was necessary to the evolution of Capitalism. If one wasn't created by fiat, it was going to evolve by trial and error. His destruction of the bank thus didn't prevent the rise of a moneyed class because, people with money created banks by getting the states to charter them, once created these privately chartered banks stepped into the vacume created by the destruction of the National Bank and began making loans, and some of them to print money. The Federal Government still found ways to borrow money and still found ways to spend beyond their means. The state banks did so as well. And the lack of a central bank meant that periodically the populace would have to pay for the malfeasance or bad gambles of those assorted "gamblers" and their bad bets. The US would have periodic runs on it's banks and depressions that would last for years at a time, largely because there was no central authority to regulate the banks. So his remedy was worse than the illness.
To be continued.