The Tariff of highlighted economic conflicts of interest between the Northern and Southern states that eventually led to the Nullification Crisis of This ordinance declared, by the power of the state, that the federal Tariffs of and were unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the sovereign boundaries of South Carolina. The South and parts of New England opposed the tariff and expected that the election of Andrew Jackson as president would result in the tariff being significantly reduced.
The nation had suffered an economic downturn throughout the s, and South Carolina in particular had been affected. Many South Carolina politicians blamed the change in fortunes on the national tariff policy that developed after the War of to promote American manufacturing over its British competition. The major goal of the Tariff of was to protect industries in the northern United States, which were being driven out of business by low-priced imported goods, by putting a tax on such imports.
The South, however, was harmed directly by having to pay higher prices on goods the region did not produce, and indirectly because reducing the exportation of British goods to the United States made it difficult for the British to pay for the cotton they imported from the South.
By , South Carolina state politics increasingly organized around the tariff issue. In Washington, an open split on the issue occurred between Jackson and his vice president John C. Calhoun, the most effective proponent of the constitutional theory of state nullification.
On July 14, , after Calhoun had resigned his office in order to run for the Senate where he could more effectively defend nullification, Jackson signed into law the Tariff of This compromise tariff received the support of most Northerners and half of the Southerners in Congress. However, the reductions were too little for South Carolina, and in November of , a state convention declared that the tariffs of both and were unconstitutional and unenforceable in South Carolina as of February 1, Military preparations to resist anticipated federal enforcement were initiated by the state.
In late February, both a Force Bill authorizing the president to use military forces against South Carolina and a newly negotiated tariff satisfactory to South Carolina were passed by Congress.
In response, the South Carolina convention reconvened and repealed its Nullification Ordinance on March 11, The crisis was over, and both sides could find reasons to claim victory. Historians consider the crisis to be one of the first direct causes of the Civil War.
By the s, the issues of the expansion of slavery into the western territories and the threat of power of slave states became central issues in the nation. The Indian Removal Act of set the stage for the forced relocation of American Indians from the east to the west.
Describe the transformation of government policy toward American Indian tribes under President Andrew Jackson. Indian removal was a nineteenth-century policy of the U. The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Jackson in , and it had a profound and devastating impact on the lives of Americans.
For white land-hungry Southerners, the policy allowed for a prosperous westward expansion. For American Indians, the Removal Act brought death and destruction. While the United States eventually tripled in size, thousands of American Indians lost their homes, their families, and often their lives in what many historians consider a sweeping genocide.
Since the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, The U. This idea was proposed in by Jefferson, but was not used in actual treaties until , when the Cherokee agreed to cede two large tracts of land in the east for one of equal size in present-day Arkansas. Many other treaties of this nature quickly followed. Under Andrew Jackson, elected president in , government policy toward American Indians moved from coercive to outright hostile. Congress opened a fierce debate on an Indian Removal Bill.
In the end, the bill passed, but the vote was close. The Senate passed the measure 28—19 and the House — Jackson signed the legislation into law on June 30, In , the majority of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee were living east of the Mississippi as they had for thousands of years. While it did not authorize the forced removal of the American Indian tribes, it authorized the president to negotiate land-exchange treaties with tribes located in lands of the United States.
The first removal treaty signed after the Removal Act was the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, , in which Choctaws in Mississippi ceded land east of the river in exchange for payment and land in the west. Two years prior, the state legislature of Georgia enacted a series of laws that stripped the Cherokee of their rights under the state law with the hope of forcing tribe members off of their fertile and gold-sprinkled land.
By the s, many of the five major tribes in that area had assimilated into the dominant culture; some even owned slaves. In , members of these tribes decided to use the U. Supreme Court to combat Jacksonian policies in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Supreme Court. Wirt argued that Georgia violated the U. Constitution as well as United States-Cherokee treaties.
In , the U. Supreme Court decision Worcester v. Georgia ruled that Georgia could not impose its laws upon Cherokee tribal lands. However, the state and President Jackson refused to accept or enforce the decision.
Jackson used the Georgia crisis to pressure Cherokee leaders to sign a removal treaty. Ridge was not a recognized leader of the Cherokee Nation, and this document was rejected by most Cherokees as illegitimate.
More than 15, Cherokees signed a petition in protest of the proposed removal; however, the Supreme Court and the U.
Due to the infighting between political factions, many Cherokees thought their appeals were still being considered until troops arrived. Trail of Tears : This map illustrates the route of the Trail of Tears. In , the Seminole tribe refused to leave their lands in Florida, leading to the Second Seminole War. Osceola led the Seminole in their fight against removal. Based in the Everglades of Florida, Osceola and his band used surprise attacks to defeat the U.
Army in many battles. In , Osceola was seized by deceit upon the orders of U. General T. Jesup when Osceola came under a flag of truce to negotiate peace. Osceola later died in prison. Some Seminole traveled deeper into the Everglades, while others moved west. Removal continued out west, and numerous wars over land ensued.
In , about 2, miles of trails were authorized by federal law to mark the removal of seventeen detachments of the Cherokee people.
Eligibility to vote in the United States is determined by both federal and state law. Currently, only U. Who is, or who can become, a citizen is governed on a national basis by federal law. In the absence of a federal law or constitutional amendment, each state is given considerable discretion to establish qualifications for suffrage and candidacy within its own jurisdiction. At the time of ratification of the Constitution, most states used property qualifications to restrict franchise.
When the country was founded, only white men with real property land or sufficient wealth for taxation were permitted to vote in most states. Freed African Americans were allowed to vote in only four states. White men without property, almost all women, and all other people of color were denied the right to vote. By the time the American Civil War had begun, however, most white men were allowed to vote, whether or not they owned property. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and even religious tests were used in various places to determine voter eligibility, and most white women, people of color, and American Indians still could not vote.
Jacksonian democracy is the political movement toward greater democracy for the common man typified by U.
President Andrew Jackson and his supporters. Leading up to and during the Jacksonian era, suffrage was extended to nearly all white male adult citizens. New states adopted constitutions that did not contain property qualifications for voting, a move designed to stimulate migration across their borders. Vermont and Kentucky, admitted to the Union in and respectively, granted the right to vote to all white men regardless of whether they owned property or paid taxes.
Alabama, admitted to the Union in , eliminated property qualifications for voting in its state constitution. Two other new states, Indiana and Illinois , also extended the right to vote to white men regardless of property. Initially, the new state of Mississippi restricted voting to white male property holders, but in , it eliminated this provision. By , nearly all voting requirements to own property or pay taxes had been dropped.
The cartoon depicts two kinds of politics: one the corruption of republican virtue, the other a restoration of it. On the left, a party politician dressed as a wealthy man — note the top hat again — and carrying a bag of money makes a deal with Satan. In other words, the devil controls all the opposing parties; they are all his favorites. By turning one — any one — over to the hack, he will insure that the poor will be oppressed. In contrast, on the right, a workingman, raising a ballot, approaches a box carried by Lady Liberty, who holds a pole adorned with a liberty cap, a symbol of revolution and equality.
This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. Three images with accompanying close reading questions provide analytical study. An optional follow-up assignment enhances the lesson. From the s through the s American politics became in one sense more democratic, in another more restrictive, and, in general, more partisan and more effectively controlled by national parties.
Since the s, politics became more democratic as one state after another ended property qualifications for voting. Politics became more restrictive as one state after another formally excluded African Americans from the suffrage. By , almost all white men could vote in all but three states Rhode Island, Virginia, and Louisiana , while African Americans were excluded from voting in all but five states and women were disfranchised everywhere.
At the same time, political leaders in several states began to revive the two-party conflict that had been the norm during the political struggles between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans — Parties nominated candidates for every elective post from fence viewer to president and fought valiantly to get them elected.
The number of newspapers exploded; the vast majority of them were mouthpieces for the Democratic Party or the Whig Party the National Republican Party before Accompanying the newspapers was a flood of pamphlets, broadsides, and songs aimed at winning the support of ordinary voters and teaching them to think as a Democrat or a Whig.
Parties also created gigantic and incredibly effective grass-roots organizations. Each party in almost every school district and urban ward in the country formed an electoral committee, which organized partisan parades, dinners, and picnics; distributed partisan newspapers and pamphlets, and canvassed door-to-door.
Even more than in the earlier period, parties were centrally coordinated and controlled. They expected their leaders, their newspapers, and their voters to toe the party line. Once the party caucus or convention had decided on a policy or a candidate, everyone was expected to support that decision.
The Democrats, National Republicans, and Whigs were not the only people creating a new kind of democracy, however. Several small, sectional parties promoted a way of conducting politics that was quite different from the practices of the major parties. The two paintings and the cartoon offered here capture the passion, tumult, and divisions that came to characterize American democracy at this time. George Caleb Bingham —79 was one of the most successful and important American artists of the early nineteenth century.
Born in to a prosperous farmer, miller, and slaveowner in western Virginia, Bingham knew prosperity but also experienced economic hardship when his father lost his property in and again when his father died in During the s he moved to St. Louis, the largest city in the West, where he pursued a successful career as a portrait artist.
In he was elected to the Missouri General Assembly and later held several appointive posts. With gentle humor The County Election captures the arguing, the campaigning, and the drinking that accompanied the masculine ritual of voting in mid-nineteenth century rural America. Richard Caton Woodville —55 was born in Baltimore. His family hoped he would become a physician, and he did undertake medical studies in However, by , when he traveled to Germany to train at the Dusseldorf Academy, he had abandoned medicine to pursue a career as an artist.
Although he spent the rest of his life in Germany, France, and England, he devoted himself to re-creating his native Baltimore on canvas. As in The County Election , the political realm is exclusively masculine, for the oyster house is a male-only pub. It suggests that the corruption of both the Whigs and the Democrats will lead to the oppression of the poor.
For each image, before posing the content-specific questions listed below, we recommend that you have students conduct a general analysis using the following four-step procedure. Louis Art Museum. How did Bingham explain the enormous popular participation in politics?
What drew so many people into politics? The political parties offered drink, food, fellowship, and the opportunity to discuss issues of the day. They distributed pamphlets and broadsides. Why might elections in rural areas have become important social gatherings? They would be a reason for those in rural areas to gather.
General farm work took up much of the time, and an election was a reason to take a break from farm work and catch up with the community. The fact that elections occurred on a regular schedule for the most part helped as well. How important were political candidates, issues, and party loyalties?
But the president faced determined opposition everywhere he turned, both from Jackson's backers and Calhoun, who filled Senate committees with men who did not support the administration's policies. When Adams asked Congress for funds to send a delegate to the Congress of Panama, a meeting of the newly independent nations of Latin America, southerners argued so vociferously against the idea that the conference had ended by the time money was actually appropriated.
Adams did not help his own cause. Refusing to engage in partisan politics, he did not remove opponents from appointed office when he became president and thereby alienated his own supporters. His rather idealistic position earned him little backing for a second term. Politics had an impact on one of the most important domestic issues—protective tariffs. Four years later, Congress raised tariffs to the highest level before the Civil War and increased taxes on imports of raw wool.
Indeed, Jacksonians believed the bill to be so onerous to different interest groups in different parts of the country that it had no chance of passing. But the Tariff of did become law, and it was soon called the Tariff of Abominations. Martin Van Buren of New York, who preferred rivalries between parties to disputes within one party, masterminded the emergence of the Democrats. The campaign itself was less about issues than the character of the two candidates.
Supporters of Adams vilified Jackson as a murderer he had fought several duels , an adulterer he and his wife had mistakenly married before her divorce from her first husband was final , and an illiterate backwoodsman. These attacks by the National Republicans did little to detract from Jackson's popularity. Ordinary Americans admired his leadership qualities and decisiveness; they preferred to remember Jackson the Indian fighter and hero of the Battle of New Orleans and forget about the important role Adams played in negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of Jackson also had clear political advantages.
As a westerner, he had secure support from that part of the country, while the fact that he was a slave owner gave him strength in the South. Conversely, Adams was strong only in New England. Jackson was swept into office with 56 percent of the popular vote from a greatly expanded electorate.
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