- [Instructor] All
right, in the last video,
we talked about the election of 1824,
which turned into a grudge match
between John Quincy
Adams and Andrew Jackson
in which Andrew Jackson
won the popular vote
but John Quincy Adams
won the electoral vote
and the tiebreaker turned out to be
Speaker of the House Henry Clay,
who helped give the election to Adams
but then was shortly named
Secretary of State by Adams,
leading Andrew Jackson and his partisans
to claim that a corrupt
bargain had taken place.
And this really shows how the nature
of American politics had changed
because this sort of you scratch my back,
I'll scratch yours was common
practice in American politics
between a few elite men who were generally
in charge of the political process.
But Andrew Jackson and his supporters
say that this is undemocratic.
This is the kind of elitist hokum
that we do not need in our
nation of free white men.
So, four years later in
the election of 1828,
it is a Jackson/John Quincy Adams rematch
and the gloves are off.
So, in the first video in this series,
I mentioned that during this time period,
a lot of the aspects that we consider
part of American politics
first came to the fore.
And one of the things that you'll see
in the election of 1828,
really for the first time,
is down and dirty mudslinging,
or making angry attacks
ad hominem, or at the man,
rather than at his principles,
attacks on your opponent.
So, Andrew Jackson probably already had
all the ammunition he needed
with the corrupt bargain of 1824.
John Quincy Adams kinda considered himself
above this kind of mudslinging.
But his supporters did not,
and they came out with some real gems.
Not only did they put out
handbills with coffins,
this is known as the Coffin
Handbill to this day,
detailing how many men had
been killed by Andrew Jackson,
either through execution or duels,
they also accused his
mother of being a prostitute
and his wife of being a bigamist.
In fact, Andrew Jackson's wife died
shortly before his inauguration
and he believed to his dying day
that it was the terrible
slanders about her
that had led to her untimely death.
Another first for the election of 1828
is Andrew Jackson as the first candidate
for the Democratic Party.
This is a new party united around Jackson.
In the previous election,
all of the candidates
had been Republicans
in one form or another,
but now the Republican
Party is going to start
to fade away and the Democratic
Party will come to the fore.
And this is the same Democratic Party
that is still in existence
in the United States today.
Of course, its goals
and ideas have changed
a great deal since the 1820s.
And with his Democratic Party
and even with the supporters
of John Quincy Adams,
what Jackson taps into
is this kind of mass party democracy.
He has great party machines
working for him in Eastern cities.
He also really takes
advantage particularly
of people on the frontier,
so white people who are
looking to expand westward
to kind of make it, as we
would say, rugged individuals,
people pulling themselves
up by their bootstraps
and they saw that in Andrew Jackson
because he had been born fairly penniless.
And then, by the time he was
elected president in 1828,
he had become part of the frontier elite.
He was now a slave holder;
he was one of the guys who had made it.
But those on the frontier looked to him
and saw the example of
what they wanted to be.
Jackson also had the
advantage of being a war hero
from the Battle of New
Orleans in the War of 1812.
And throughout the 19th century,
those with valorous military service
will do well in national elections.
And another thing that Andrew
Jackson does quite well
is harnesses anti-Indian,
anti-Native American sentiment.
John Quincy Adams had attempted
to bargain in good faith,
to try to hold up the
side of the United States
with Native American nations
living in what was then
the territorial borders
of the United States.
He'd bargained with them
as if they were sovereign
nations unto themselves.
Andrew Jackson understood
that white settlers
desperately wanted Indian lands
and he played to those white settlers,
assuring him that he would do his utmost
to remove Native Americans
from those lands,
a promise that he will make
good on during his presidency.
So, Jackson wins the election of 1828
and immediately it's
obvious that the democracy
under Jackson is quite different
from the American system
under previous presidents.
At his inauguration, he
turns to the crowd and bows,
signaling that he thinks of himself
as being beneath the
people that he's serving.
He also opens up the White House
during what's called the Inaugural Brawl,
and it's believed that many
people went into the White House
and they wrecked the china and
they destroyed the furniture
and they wouldn't leave
until people told them
there was alcohol outside on the lawn.
And to an earlier generation
who had been raised
with this early American aristocracy
of the Adamses and the Washingtons,
this looks like anarchy.
They thought this was the beginning
of the French Revolution
in the United States.
It was not, but it was the beginning
of massive party politics,
political campaigns,
and the beginning of a new
politics in the United States
that appealed to the common man.
And we'll talk more about
that in the next video.
