we talked about the election of 1824,

which turned into a grudge match

between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson

in which Andrew Jackson won the popular vote

but John Quincy Adams won the electoral vote

and the tiebreaker turned out to be

Speaker of the House Henry Clay,

who helped give the election to Adams

but then was shortly named Secretary of State by Adams,

leading Andrew Jackson and his partisans

to claim that a corrupt bargain had taken place.

And this really shows how the nature

of American politics had changed

because this sort of you scratch my back,

I'll scratch yours was common practice in American politics

between a few elite men who were generally

in charge of the political process.

But Andrew Jackson and his supporters

say that this is undemocratic.

This is the kind of elitist hokum

that we do not need in our nation of free white men.

So, four years later in the election of 1828,

it is a Jackson/John Quincy Adams rematch

and the gloves are off.

So, in the first video in this series,

I mentioned that during this time period,

a lot of the aspects that we consider

part of American politics first came to the fore.

And one of the things that you'll see

in the election of 1828, really for the first time,

is down and dirty mudslinging,

or making angry attacks ad hominem, or at the man,

rather than at his principles, attacks on your opponent.

So, Andrew Jackson probably already had

all the ammunition he needed

with the corrupt bargain of 1824.

John Quincy Adams kinda considered himself

above this kind of mudslinging.

But his supporters did not,

and they came out with some real gems.

Not only did they put out handbills with coffins,

this is known as the Coffin Handbill to this day,

detailing how many men had been killed by Andrew Jackson,

either through execution or duels,

they also accused his mother of being a prostitute

and his wife of being a bigamist.

In fact, Andrew Jackson's wife died

shortly before his inauguration

and he believed to his dying day

that it was the terrible slanders about her

that had led to her untimely death.

Another first for the election of 1828

is Andrew Jackson as the first candidate

for the Democratic Party.

This is a new party united around Jackson.

In the previous election, all of the candidates

had been Republicans in one form or another,

but now the Republican Party is going to start

to fade away and the Democratic Party will come to the fore.

And this is the same Democratic Party

that is still in existence in the United States today.

Of course, its goals and ideas have changed

a great deal since the 1820s.

And with his Democratic Party and even with the supporters

of John Quincy Adams, what Jackson taps into

is this kind of mass party democracy.

He has great party machines

working for him in Eastern cities.

He also really takes advantage particularly

of people on the frontier,

so white people who are looking to expand westward

to kind of make it, as we would say, rugged individuals,

people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps

and they saw that in Andrew Jackson

because he had been born fairly penniless.

And then, by the time he was elected president in 1828,

he had become part of the frontier elite.

He was now a slave holder;

he was one of the guys who had made it.

But those on the frontier looked to him

and saw the example of what they wanted to be.

Jackson also had the advantage of being a war hero

from the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812.

And throughout the 19th century,

those with valorous military service

will do well in national elections.

And another thing that Andrew Jackson does quite well

is harnesses anti-Indian, anti-Native American sentiment.

John Quincy Adams had attempted to bargain in good faith,

to try to hold up the side of the United States

with Native American nations living in what was then

the territorial borders of the United States.

He'd bargained with them

as if they were sovereign nations unto themselves.

Andrew Jackson understood that white settlers

desperately wanted Indian lands

and he played to those white settlers,

assuring him that he would do his utmost

to remove Native Americans from those lands,

a promise that he will make good on during his presidency.

So, Jackson wins the election of 1828

and immediately it's obvious that the democracy

under Jackson is quite different

from the American system under previous presidents.

At his inauguration, he turns to the crowd and bows,

signaling that he thinks of himself

as being beneath the people that he's serving.

He also opens up the White House

during what's called the Inaugural Brawl,

and it's believed that many people went into the White House

and they wrecked the china and they destroyed the furniture

and they wouldn't leave until people told them

there was alcohol outside on the lawn.

And to an earlier generation who had been raised

with this early American aristocracy

of the Adamses and the Washingtons, this looks like anarchy.

They thought this was the beginning

of the French Revolution in the United States.

It was not, but it was the beginning

of massive party politics, political campaigns,

and the beginning of a new politics in the United States

that appealed to the common man.

And we'll talk more about that in the next video.