[LC-USZ62-1805]
D.C.
Washington,
Division
Photographs
and
Prints
Congressof
Library
The President’s Levee. Robert Cruikshank drew Jackson’s inaugural reception with
men and women of all classes, children, dogs, and bucking horses celebrating the Old General’s victory. Cruikshank subtitled his lithograph All Creation Going to the White House.
He became Jackson’s most valued adviser. Other appointments were less promis-
ing, for Jackson filled cabinet posts with old friends and political supporters who, in many cases, proved unfit for their jobs. A critic looked at Jackson’s cabinet and pronounced it—with the exception of Van Buren—“the Millennium of the
Minnows.”
Others were more concerned about what Jackson would do to the civil service
than about whom he named to his cabinet. During the campaign, Jackson had
vowed to fire corrupt officeholders—a term he applied to grafters, incompetents,
long-term officeholders who considered their jobs personal property, and those
who supported John Quincy Adams. Opponents soon complained that Jackson
was replacing able public servants with political hacks. They soon had convincing evidence: Samuel Swarthout, whom Jackson had appointed collector of the Port of
New York (an office that handled $15 million in tariff revenue annually), stole $1.2
million and took off for Europe.
Actually, much of the furor over Jackson’s “spoils system” was overwrought
and misdirected. He aimed, Jackson claimed, only to institute “rotation in office.”
Arguing that government jobs could be performed by any honest, reasonably
intelligent citizen, Jackson proposed ending the long tenures that, he said, turned the civil service into “support of the few at the expense of the many.” Jackson
removed about 1 in 10 executive appointees during his eight years in office, and
his replacements (at least at the level of ambassadors, federal judges and attor-
neys, and cabinet members) were as wealthy and well educated as their predeces-
sors. They were, however, most decidedly political appointees. Acting out of his
own need for personal loyalty and on the advice of Van Buren and other
Jacksonian Democracy and the South
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architects of the Democratic Party, Jackson filled vacancies—down to postmasters
in the smallest towns—with Democrats who had worked for his election.
Jackson sought Van Buren’s advice on appointments. Van Buren knew the polit-
ical value of dispensing government jobs; one of his henchmen coined the phrase “To the victor belongs the spoils.” In resorting to patronage to build the party, however, Jackson gave his opponents an important issue. Revolutionary republicans feared a government of lackeys dependent on a powerful executive, and congressional opponents argued that Jackson was using appointments to “convert the entire body of
those in office into corrupt and supple instruments of power.” “A standing army,”
railed Henry Clay in the Senate, “has been, in all free countries, a just object of jeal-ousy and suspicion. But is not a corps of one hundred thousand dependents upon
government, actuated by one spirit, obeying one will, and aiming at one end, more dangerous than a standing army?” It became an antiJacksonian axiom that Jackson
had made the federal civil service an arm of the Democratic Party and of despotic executive power.
JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY AND THE SOUTH
Andrew Jackson was a national figure, but his base of support was in the South,
where he won 8 of every 10 votes in 1828. Southerners had grown wary of an
activist government in which they were in the minority. They looked to Jackson
not only as a military hero but also as a Tennessee planter who talked about returning to republican fundamentals. Although southerners expected Jackson to look af-
ter southern interests, disagreement arose within the administration about how
those interests should be protected. Some sided with Vice President Calhoun, who
argued that states had the right to veto federal legislation and in extreme cases to secede from the Union. Others agreed with Secretary of State Van Buren that the
Union was inviolable and that the South’s best safeguard was in a political party committed to states’ rights within the Union. The differences were fought out in
the contest between Calhoun and Van Buren for the right to succeed Jackson as
president, a contest that shaped every major issue of Jackson’s first term.
Southerners
When Jackson entered office, a final crisis between frontier
and Indians
whites and the native peoples of the eastern woodlands was
under way. By the 1820s, few Indians remained east of the
Appalachians. The Iroquois of New York were penned into tiny reservations,
and the tribes of the Old Northwest were broken and scattered. But in the Old
Southwest, 60,000 Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles lived
on their ancestral lands, with tenure guaranteed by federal treaties that (at least implicitly) recognized them as sovereign peoples. Congress had appropriated funds for schools, tools, seeds, and training to help these Civilized Tribes make the transition to farming. Most government officials assumed that the tribes would even-
tually trade their old lands and use their farming skills on new land west of the Mississippi.
Southwestern whites resented federal Indian policy as an affront to both white
democracy and states’ rights. The poorer farmers coveted the Indians’ land, and
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