The First Democrat: Andrew Jackson Part 4

Thanks to his land-stealing schemes, Jackson went from living in a log cabin to running a huge plantation stretching over a thousand acres. In 1819, he and Rachel moved out of their log house and built a mansion that still stands today, with a spectacular white colonnade front that awed visitors then as it does now. As for the old log cabin, Jackson found another use for it. What good is a plantation if you don’t have slaves? Jackson converted his former dwelling into slave quarters.

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Altogether, Jackson owned some three hundred slaves over the course of his life. The most he owned at any one time was 150 slaves.

This made him a large slave owner by American standards. By contrast with the South American plantations, American plantations were typically quite small, employing fewer than twenty slaves. Jackson was also a slave trader, a practice disparaged by most slave owners. In one telling incident, Jackson purchased an ad in a local paper offering a bounty for one of his runaway slaves. Jackson offered a $50 reward for the return of the slave “and ten dollars extra for every hundred lashes any person will give him to the amount of three hundred.”

Eventually Jackson rode his wealth and popularity all the way to the White House. In 1824, the first time Jackson ran, all the candidates were from a single party, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party. There was at the time no system of primaries to determine who should get the nomination. Although Jackson won the most votes, he was outmaneuvered by an adversary, Henry Clay, who steered the presidency to John Quincy Adams.

An indignant Jackson and his supporters formed the Democratic Party, while his opponents coalesced into a rival Whig Party. These were the two parties that dominated American politics for the next few decades, until the Whig Party collapsed and the Republican Party was founded. The Whigs, led by the stalwart Henry Clay, provided modest though largely ineffective resistance to Jackson. Until the founding of the Republican Party, however, there was no party in America strong enough to stop the thieving Democrats.

Source: Hillary’s America. The Secret History of the Democratic Party (2016) by Dinesh D’Souza.