Jacksonian Democracy (United States)

American hunters and trappers trade with the natives throughout the West and explore the land.

Mountain Men, as skilled fighters and hunters, trap beaver in small groups throughout the Rocky Mountains.

With the demise of the fur trade, they have established trading posts throughout the west, continuing to trade with the indigenous peoples.

They also serve as guides and hunters for the western migration of settlers to Utah, Oregon, and California.

Westward expansion by official acts of the U.S. Government has been accompanied by the western (and northern in the case of New England) movement of settlers on and beyond the frontier.

The frontiersman Daniel Boone, for example, had pioneered the settlement of Kentucky.

Jacksonian democracy, from 1820, had begun a set of reforms that included wider white male suffrage; it leads to the rise of the Second Party System of Democrats and Whigs as the dominant parties from 1828 to 1854.

The American political stage is set, after the First Party System of Federalists and Republicans withers away in the 1820s, for the emergence of a new party system based on well organized local parties that appeal for the votes of (almost) all adult white men.

The former Jeffersonian (Democratic-Republican) party splits into factions.

They split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe, and the party faction that supports many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, becomes the Democratic Party.

President Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States, runs for a second term in 1832  under the slogan "Jackson and no bank" and does not renew the charter of the Second Bank of the United States of America, ending the Bank in 1836.

Jackson is convinced that central banking is used by the elite to take advantage of the average American, and instead implements state banks, popularly known as "pet banks."

Congress passes the Indian Removal Act, which authorizes the president to negotiate treaties that exchanged Native American tribal lands in the eastern states for lands west of the Mississippi River, in 1830.

Its goal is primarily to remove Native Americans, including the "Five Civilized Tribes", from the American Southeast; they occupy land that settlers want.

Jacksonian Democrats demand the forcible removal of native populations who refuse to acknowledge state laws to reservations in the West; Whigs and religious leaders oppose the move as inhumane.

Thousands of deaths result from the relocations, as seen in the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

The Trail of Tears results in approximately two thousand to eight thousand of the sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-three relocated Cherokee perish along the way.

Many of the Seminole Indians in Florida refuse to move west; they fight the Army for years in the Seminole Wars.

The process of settling the U.S. border with Canada continues in the Buckshot “War” (1838) and the Aroostook War (1838-39).

The Trail of Tears in the 1830s exemplifies the Indian removal policy that forcibly resettles native tribes into the west on Indian reservations.

The United States is occupied during this era with such internal conflicts as the Black Hawk War (1832), the forced removal of the Cherokee tribe to Indian Territory, and the long and costly second Seminole War (1835-42), while a border dispute with Canada flares up as the Indian Stream ”War”.

By 1825, more than thirty-six percent of all the enslaved people in the New World were in the southern United States.

Although slavery had been a divisive issue in the United States for decades, never before had sectional antagonism been so overt and threatening as it was in the Missouri crisis, but compromise measures appear to have settled the slavery-extension issue.

Low-level sectional conflict arises again, however, in response to the so-called Tariff of Abominations (1828).

The institution of slavery remains the nonpareil reform issue in the United States, however, and fuels such conflicts in Texas as the Fredonian Rebellion (1826-27) and the Texan War of Independence (1836).

In 1831 occurs the only effective, sustained slave rebellion in U.S. history, led by an enslaved African-American named Nat Turner (widely popularized by William Styron in his 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner).

In the aftermath of the terror, a new wave of unrest spreads through the South, accompanied by corresponding fear among slaveholders and passage of more repressive legislation directed against both slaves and free blacks.

These measures are aimed particularly at restricting the education of blacks, their freedom of movement and assembly, and the circulation of inflammatory printed material.

Increased vigilance on the part of Southern authorities prevents the success of such bizarre episodes as Murrel's Uprising (1835).

The national financial panic of 1837 creates even greater unrest among U.S. farmers and workers, setting the stage for a new round of rebellion.

The nonnative population of Illinois has increased rapidly following the War of 1812, exceeding fifty thousand in 1820; a development that has sharpened previous disputes about land ownership, especially in the lead-mining region north of the Rock River, an area claimed by the close allies of the Sauk, the Fox.

In 1828, the U.S. government liaison, Thomas Forsyth, informs the tribes that they should begin vacating their settlements east of the Mississippi.

Sauk warrior and leader Black Hawk (or Black Sparrow Hawk: Makataimeshekiakiak), finally forced from Sauk and Fox tribal lands in Illinois, tries gamely but without success to enlist neighboring Kickapoo, Potawatami and Winnebago tribes in an anti-American coalition.

Jedediah Smith, at twenty-nine, has traveled more extensively in unknown territory than any other single mountain man.

Having rediscovered the South Pass in 1824, Smith opens the connecting trail between California and the Oregon Country in 1828, reaching the Willamette Valley in July.