others believed him a master demagogue intent upon exploiting the credulity
of the masses to enhance his power. Those who made him a strong nationalist
found others who cast him as the champion of the old Republican virtues of
frugality, fiscal solvency, and limited government. To some he appeared a
selfless and courageous leader, to others a man duped by clever subordinates
bent on exploitation and power.

As with the leader, so with the movement he led. Most scholars have
agreed that Jacksonian Democracy was a sprawling, diverse, and many-sided
movement. But agreement has ended when discussions of its nature, purposes,
and objectives are raised. For some found its origins in the frontier wilderness,
while others discovered those origins in the urban centers of the East. Some
looked upon its aims as political, while others depicted a more broadly based
movement embracing economic, social, and even intellectual objectives. Some
found in its major struggles the intent to free Western and Southern farmers
from Eastern domination; some viewed them as a revolt of urban--and rural--
workers against the domination of a business elite; while others discovered in
them a group of entrepreneurs on the make battling a similar group who had
already arrived. Its adherents, said some, aimed at creating a utopian future
based on political and economic equalitarianism, while others were as certain
that the Jacksonians sought the restoration of a golden past, real or imagined.

The persevering reader who endures to the final page will find the selec-
tions in this book falling into five general divisions that illustrate the major
schools of Jacksonian historiography. James Parton, ablest representative of
the early patrician school, spoke for the first generation of Jackson scholars,
who wrote during the last half of the nineteenth century. Sharing character-
istics common to their Eastern or European backgrounds, they discovered in
the Jacksonians men who had defied their traditions of education, social
prestige, and the inherent right of qualified families to furnish political
leadership. Jackson and his followers, they believed, had disregarded both the
claims and the ethics of gentlemen in politics, and his administration therefore
furnished a needed object lesson in the degradation of American democracy.
They could praise Old Hickory for his nationalism, however, and his laissez
faire economic policies so congenial to these disciples of Herbert Spencer;
some even defended his banking and monetary policies. But they condemned
him more for his removal policies, which to their way of thinking became the
most important and far-reaching measure of his administration.

In the first three decades of the twentieth century a new group of Jackson
scholars contested the evaluations of the patrician school. Deeply influenced
by the broad current of reform that characterized the Progressive movement,
they viewed Jackson and his democracy in a far more sympathetic spirit. From
the pen of Frederick Jackson Turner came a new Jackson who championed
the cause of the "upland democracy," conquered the "traditions of conservative

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