for that matter, many present-day Republicans) would be eager to claim. How, then, are we to interpret Jackson? What did "Jacksonian democracy" mean in his own day? What relationship did his laissez-faire economic policies have to the traditional role of Democrats as champions of the working man against vested interests? How could he stand for rule of the people, yet endorse subjecting black Americans to fetters and bullwhips and driving native Americans off their ancestral lands?
The place to begin is with the meaning of democracy, as it was understood in the early nineteenth century. Educated people of that time, steeped in classical learning, were perfectly well aware that democratic Periclean Athens was to be credited with the most brilliant single chapter in the history of Western Civilization. In the pages of the greatest classical historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, they could read critical but sympathetic analyses of Athenian democracy in action. Yet it happens that the mainstream of Western political philosophy, coming down from Plato and Aristotle, was c
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