Nullification and the Second Party System
- Explain the nullification crisis and Jackson's response
- Compare Democratic and Whig coalitions and their programs
- Analyze how the Panic of 1837 shaped party politics
The nullification crisis
The Tariff of 1828 — the "Tariff of Abominations" — pushed rates high enough that South Carolina, its economy already strained, treated it as sectional plunder. John C. Calhoun, Jackson's own vice president, argued anonymously in the South Carolina Exposition and Protest that a state convention could declare a federal law void within its borders. When a modest reduction in 1832 failed to satisfy, South Carolina nullified the tariff and threatened secession if force were used. Jackson's reaction is the part students most often get backward: though a slaveholder and a states'-rights Democrat, he denounced nullification as treason, obtained a Force Bill authorizing military collection of duties, and simultaneously supported Clay's Compromise Tariff of 1833, which lowered rates over a decade. South Carolina rescinded nullification of the tariff — and then nullified the Force Bill, so both sides claimed victory.
Two parties, two visions of government
The fights of Jackson's presidency produced the second party system, and it divided along a clear axis: what should government do about the economy? Democrats — Jackson, Van Buren — wanted limited federal power, no national bank, low tariffs, no federal internal improvements, and rapid westward expansion, drawing support from Southern planters, Western farmers, and urban immigrants, especially Irish Catholics. Whigs — Clay, Webster, later Harrison — wanted the American System: a bank, protective tariffs, federally funded improvements, plus moral reform such as temperance and public schooling, drawing support from Northeastern businessmen, commercial farmers, and Protestant reformers. Unlike the first party system, both parties were genuinely national and competitive in every region, which is why party loyalty briefly held sectionalism in check.
The Bank War and the Panic of 1837
Jackson's veto of the Second Bank's recharter in 1832 was cast as democracy against privilege, and after re-election he removed federal deposits to state "pet banks." Freed from the Bank's restraint on note issue, credit and land speculation ballooned. Jackson's Specie Circular (1836) then required gold or silver for public land purchases, abruptly contracting credit. Combined with a British financial contraction and falling cotton prices, the result was the Panic of 1837 and a depression lasting into the 1840s. Martin Van Buren inherited it, refused federal intervention on strict-construction grounds, and lost in 1840 to the Whigs, who ran William Henry Harrison in the "log cabin and hard cider" campaign — mass politics with parades, slogans, and a manufactured common-man image. The tools of modern campaigning arrive here.
Briefly explain ONE way Andrew Jackson's response to the nullification crisis differed from his general political principles.
- 1.State his usual principles: a Democrat committed to limited federal power and states' rights, and himself a Southern slaveholder.
- 2.State his action: he condemned nullification as treason and secured the Force Bill authorizing the use of the military to collect the tariff.
- 3.Explain the tension and its resolution: preserving the Union outranked his states'-rights convictions, though he simultaneously backed a compromise tariff that gave South Carolina much of what it wanted.
The Whig Party of the 1830s and 1840s is best characterized by its support for
Party names mislead. Democratic-Republicans of 1800 are not the Democrats of 1830, and Whigs are not Federalists reborn even though both favored a bank. Anchor each party by its program, not its label, and you will not mix up the party systems on a stimulus question.
Reform, and the political trouble it caused
The reform energy of the Second Great Awakening had a partisan geography that essays should notice: temperance, public education, asylum and prison reform, and abolitionism clustered where Whigs were strongest, and that alignment made reform politically explosive. Immigrant Catholic voters, many of them Democrats, correctly read temperance and Protestant-inflected common schooling as aimed at their communities. Abolitionism was more dangerous still, because it split both parties along sectional rather than partisan lines. The gag rule in the House, which tabled antislavery petitions from 1836 to 1844, was a bipartisan attempt to keep the subject out of national politics — and John Quincy Adams's long campaign against it turned the debate into a free-speech question that antislavery forces could win.
The Panic of 1837 was most directly linked to which Jacksonian policy?
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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