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The Progressive
Case for Andrew
Jackson
Hamilton Craig

October 14, 2022

ILLUSTRATION: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

No 19th-century political figure provokes a stronger

emotional reaction among contemporary Americans than
Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president and the first
to be nominated by the Democratic Party. He was a man of
the Tennessean frontier, and was identified in the public
mind with his humble pioneer roots despite amassing
wealth, land, and more than a hundred slaves. Around the
time he was elected, property qualifications for voting were
eliminated in most states in the country, and he was swept
into power by a mass of “common people.” These newly
enfranchised voters saw him as their champion against the
nation’s ruling interests.

Jackson’s legacy as president is defined by two grand actions.

In 1832, he vetoed the renewal of the Second Bank of the
United States, a federally chartered financial institution that
favored large capitalists over farmers and craftspeople. He
also urged the removal of the Cherokee from their homeland
in the Southeast, against the ruling of the Supreme Court, in
order to make way for white settlement. In a sense, both
actions reflected his populist commission.

Earlier generations of left-leaning historians recognized the

mixed legacy of Jacksonian populism, but regarded his
struggle against moneyed elites and on behalf of workers and
farmers as a crucial phase in the realization of America’s
democratic promise. More recently, however, it has become
controversial in the academy to suggest Jackson was
anything other than a genocidal maniac. This evolution
reveals a precipitous loss of sympathy among academic
historians and educated liberals for the “common people”
with whom Jackson identified his presidency.

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