11. Democracy in America: 1815-1840

week 11 - learning objectives

1. Identify the social bases for the flourishing democracy of the early mid-nineteenth century.

2. Describe the efforts made in this period to strengthen the economic integration of the nation and identify the major crises that hindered these efforts.

3. Identify the major areas of conflict between nationalism and sectionalism.

4. Describe the ways Andrew Jackson embodied the contradictions of democratic nationalism.

5. Explain how the Bank War influenced the economy and party competition.

week 11 - questions for consideration

• Discuss how, during the Age of Jackson, politics became a spectacle.

• Describe how Andrew Jackson embodied the prevailing mood of America. What did Americans see in his life and character that made him so popular?

• Discuss the ways liberty and freedom were used to justify the removal of the Indians in the 1830s. How did opponents of Indian removal use liberty and freedom?

• How did the nullification crisis illustrate the divide between the North and South? Compare the significance of the nullification crisis with the Missouri Compromise.

• How were “liberty” and “freedom” used by various sides of the debate over the Bank War?

• Women and blacks were left out of the political democracy. These two groups were also left out of the market revolution. Was it inevitable that their exclusion from one would lead to their exclusion from the other? What determined their exclusion?

• Discuss why property ownership was so easily excluded as a voting requirement by the 1840s, when ownership of property had been so vital to defining freedom in the eighteenth century.

• What were the key arguments made in the debate about the removal of Indians from the southeastern states to what is now Oklahoma?