As she observes, "the history and legacy of Jacksonian Democracy are far more contradictory than recent populist invocations of him would have us believe." As an example of the latter, she cites a book by Bradley Birzer’s In Defense of Andrew Jackson (2018) published by the rightwing publishing House Regnery. Regnery is known for publishing hackwork. I read part of a favorable review of this book on a John Birch Society website. So I'm not linking any of this stuff because, ick!
Sinha makes the following observations about the Nullification Crisis of 1832–33 that are critical to the politics of slavery and secession that led to the Civil War:
Jackson’s staunch nationalism at times trumped his provincial identity as a southern slaveholder. He is a crucial figure in the development of the antebellum American state, a government of courts and parties as the political scientist Stephen Skowronek has called it in Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (1982). His persona and policies defined the antebellum party system. One can also trace the origins of the imperial presidency to Jackson, much earlier than the twentieth century as most historians have argued. His Whig critics called him King Andrew, and J. M. Opal in Avenging the People: Andrew Jackson, the Rule of Law, and the American Nation (2017) draws attention to his vengeful personality against perceived enemies of the nation–state. As president, Jackson had no use for abolitionists, approving of the exclusion of their literature from the mails. But Jacksonian Democracy also included labor abolitionists like William Leggett and antislavery free-labor advocates such as William Cullen Bryant. Jackson also famously held no truck with South Carolinian nullifiers and the extreme states’-rights constitutional views of their avatar, John C. Calhoun. Jackson’s forceful proclamation repudiating nullification or the alleged right of a state to nullify a federal law and secede from the Union, which he linked to disunion and the tyranny of minority rule, laid down a precedent for Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War. [my emphasis]This is not only a key element in the development and defense of democracy and the development of the American nation. It's also one of the key things that make Jackson himself interesting as a biographical figure. His personal outlook and his own immediate class and financial interest as a slaveowner put him on the side of slavery. But when forced to choose between the American nation and democracy, on the one hand, and the defense of slavery in the manner of John Calhoun and the later Confede4rates, he came down solidly on the side of the Constitution, democracy, and the Union.
As Sinha argues, the US at that time was a "white man’s democracy," and the Jacksonian movement pushed to expand white male suffrage, which was still significantly restricted by property requirements. By 2019 standards, it wouldn't even qualify as a democracy. Today's EU entrance requirements included universal suffrage (for citizens), including all races and women, too. The United States was very far from that in 1928, the year Jackson was first elected President. But as she states:
Careful historians of the age of Jackson have shown that the institution of white manhood suffrage preceded the election of Andrew Jackson, even though the process continued to unfold during his presidency, and that white man’s democracy in the United States was accompanied by the disfranchisement and severe curtailing of black men’s suffrage in many northern states. Jackson represented the rise to prominence of the “common man” or what I would call the common white man.But it is also the case that in 1928, the US was a radical democracy by world standards of that time. And it was recognized as such as a model to be emulated or a menace to be avoided in Europe and Latin America.
What the Nuliification Crisis brought to public attention like nothing before was that there was a severe contradiction in American democracy between the slave system and democracy, or white men's democracy which in America then was the same thing. And this wasn't an abstraction, or merely hypocrisy in principle. (Though it certainly was the latter!) As time went on, it became more and more concrete that maintaining the slave system meant a continual restriction and retrogression of democracy for white men, North and South.
This is central to understanding the historical process by which slavery produced secession and civil war in America.
One of Abraham Lincoln's best-known quotes is from a 1955 letter to Joshua Speed, referring to the program of the xenophobic, Protestant extremist American Party, which has gone down in history by the name Lincoln and others applied to it at the time, the Know-Nothings, i.e., the Bannonites of the 1850s. And it addresses this very issue of how slavery and the Slave Power (large slaveowners) threatened democracy for everyone else:
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes" When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic]. [my emphasis]
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