these papers, when examined, were as yet uncalendared and unbound, they are referred to here as Jackson MSS. and Van Buren MSS. WILLIAM MACDONALD. JACKSONIAN DEMOCRACY CHAPTER I THE UNITED STATES IN THE THIRTIES (1829-1837) IE administration of Andrew Jackson marks, with greater distinctness than does the administration of any other president, the beginning of a new period in the political history of the United States. Down to the close of the second war with Great Britain, American politics presented tolerably uniform characteristics: the administrative organization of the government under the Constitution, the development of a theory of constitutional law under the force of new problems, and the struggle with Great Britain and France for political and commercial recognition, were for each succeeding administration the questions of chief prominence. When, in 1814, the treaty of Ghent assured to the United States commercial independence, and freed the country once for all from serious intermeddling by any foreign power, there set in a period of political, VOL. XV.-2 economic, and social reorganization which rapidly prepared the way for that clear break with tradition, precedent, and form for which the Jacksonian period will always be distinguished. There was to be still the same Constitution, but a new theory of it; the same administrative organization, but a new and unheard-of spirit animating it; the same confidence in national honor and resource, but a more striking assertion of them; the same vigorous social life, but with strange and startling manifestations. The United States of 1830 presented few radical differences from the nation of a generation before; the United States of 1840 had almost forgotten that its past was more than a decade in extent. The United States at the beginning of Jackson's administration comprised three distinct parcels of territory. The original area of 843,799 square miles, as established by the treaty of 1783, had been more than doubled by the purchase of Louisiana in 1803; while in 1819 the acquisition of the Floridas added 58,680 square miles to the national possessions. Altogether, the area of the United States in 1829, leaving Oregon out of account, aggregated 1,793,400 square miles.1 All of the most fertile portion of the <continent, between the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes on the north, the Gulf of Mexico on the south, the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Rocky Mountains on the west, was under American jurisdiction. No country in the world was better fitted, by geo 1 Twelfth Census (1900) Statistical Atlas, 25. |