The purpose of this research is to show that the era of Jacksonian democracy, roughly the period 1825-1835, not only encompassed the values of its Whig predecessors but also reorganized and redefined those values in ways that directly shaped and prepared America, perhaps unwittingly, for the arrival of the present-day polyarchical pluralist system. But it was, in fact, no accident, as William Chambers explains:
The shapers of the American nation had provided lessons for a second generation of party leaders. They had shown what parties could be, and had marked the way toward a renewed American Party System which could sustain broad representation, mass participation and popular choice in a functioning political democracy.
Americans of this time were experiencing life in a rapidly changing world, convinced that the future would inevitably be better than past or present. Alexis de Tocqueville described the period as follows:
A man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crop, . . . he settles in a place, which he soon afterward leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.
As David Lindsey suggests, "the middle third of the 19th century proved to be the heyday of the entrepreneur." When Jackson entered politics, the United States extended only to the Mississippi River; afterward, by 1950, it reached west to the Pacific Ocean. The American people, numbering 7 million in 1810, increased their population to 23 million by 1850. In economic terms, the United States made gradual but steady gains, with national wealth fixed at $900 million in the period 1810-1830, increasing to $2.3 billion in 1850. Following the Jeffersonian tradition of emphasis on the yeoman farmer, farming was the most widespread occupation, with Jacksonian ...