With brand new political ideologies coming out of the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the federal government was once again left with many questions about what it could and could not do. As the new political era began, many different issues gained importance during Jackson’s second term. The federal government had to decide first, whether or not it had the power to issue a second state bank, and second, to decide whether or not it wanted to issue a second state bank; disagreement led to economic hardship for the country as a whole, and the recession led to a rise in worker’s unions. The rise in union participation gave way to a new political force. Finally, the abolition movement continued to grow to the point where it greatly affected politics in the north while increasing sectionalism.<\/p>\n

I agree with MASPEED<\/a> that the economic section (as well as the political\/union section) was hard to understand, but I think that Wilentz’s main point is that Jackson had to deal with many issues in his second term, and when he dealt with them, he greatly increased federal and executive power. With many differing opinions about the magnanimous issues of economics, labor, and slavery, political parties became more fragmented. If the Jacksonians and anti-Jacksonians were more established, or if the first party system of the United States was still in tact, I think that the federal government may have been more capable in dealing with the issues. Because Jackson’s supporters’ opinions varied between the three major issues, he did not know how to lead one party, and Jackson’s weak followers led to him making controversial executive decisions in trying to appease different supporters while upholding his own values.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the greatest issue of the 1830s was the abolitionist movement and attitudes toward slavery. Not only did people argue about whether or not slavery should be abolished, but they also argued about how it should be abolished (e.g. gradual vs immediate). Abolitionists appealed to both selfish and selfless ambitions in order to try to grow their movement. In the lead up to the Civil War, the abolitionists tried to throw many blows to the Southern pro-slavery advocates, and the South counterpunched right back, but when the time came to solve the issue once and for all, the only ammunition (no pun intended) that the Southern states had was to secede from the Union.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With brand new political ideologies coming out of the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the federal government was once again left with many questions about what it could and could not do. As the new political era began, many different issues gained importance during Jackson’s second term. The federal government had to decide first, whether or … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “An Era of Uncertainty”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,96,172,252],"class_list":["post-601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abolitionism","tag-democracy","tag-jacksonian-democracy","tag-republic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}