50 Fun Facts About The Age of Jackson

When Richard Lawrence's two pistols misfired in 1835, Jackson went after the would-be assassin with what?

His cane did the work: the 67-year-old president beat Lawrence until others pulled the gunman away. It was the first known attempt to kill a sitting president.

As a boy prisoner in the Revolution, Jackson was slashed by a British officer for refusing to do what?

Polish his boots, the officer ordered; the boy refused, and the sword left scars on his left hand and head. His mother had passed on to her sons a strong hatred of the British.

In January 1835 Jackson's government achieved which financial feat, managed by no other American president?

Paying off the national debt had been one of his goals from the start. He leaned on the tariff, which brought in 90 percent of federal revenue, to get there.

A famous cartoon attacking Jackson's use of presidential power dressed him as which kind of ruler?

A king in crown and robes, he grips a scepter while the Constitution lies in tatters under his feet. The unknown artist modeled the pose on a playing card.

After Jackson took the oath in 1829, a huge crowd of supporters pressed into which building for the party?

The White House was not ready for the crush at its front door. The drunken mob only left when bowls of liquor and punch were set out on the lawn.

Which name is given to the 1838 forced march of the Cherokee from Georgia to lands beyond the Mississippi?

The Trail of Tears uprooted about 60,000 people of five nations between 1830 and 1850. Gold found on Cherokee land in Georgia drew prospectors in and hardened the push to expel them.

Which name stuck to Jackson's practice of handing federal jobs to loyal supporters after the 1828 election?

The spoils system took its name from a remark by New York senator William Marcy about the winner's right to the loser's goods. Jackson preferred to call it rotation in office.

Which nickname did critics give the friends and editors who advised Jackson in place of his department heads?

The Kitchen Cabinet included newspapermen Amos Kendall and Francis Preston Blair. Opponents meant the label as an insult; it now describes any leader's private advisers.

Which phrase did Jackson's backers use when the House chose John Quincy Adams as president in 1825?

The corrupt bargain was their charge after Adams handed the State Department to the Speaker who had backed him. Jackson had won the most popular and electoral votes.

Which nickname did Jackson earn in the War of 1812 by leading his troops on a hard march home to Nashville?

Old Hickory honored his toughness: ordered to disband his volunteers far from home, he refused and brought them back himself.

Which New Yorker, nicknamed the Little Magician, followed Jackson into the presidency in 1837?

Martin Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York, and is the only president whose first language was not English.

Which humble dwelling became the emblem of William Henry Harrison's winning 1840 presidential campaign?

A log cabin and a barrel of hard cider began as a Democratic newspaper's sneer, which his party turned into a badge of pride. Harrison was in fact wealthy and well educated.

Which animal became a symbol of Jackson's party after opponents twisted his name into an insult?

A donkey, or jackass, was the taunt his enemies made of his name. Decades later the cartoonist Thomas Nast fixed the animal as the mascot of the Democrats.

Which voting requirement had most states dropped by Jackson's election, opening the polls to nearly all white men?

Owning property had been the old test of a voter. The change reached white men only: women and most Black Americans stayed shut out of the polls.

Jackson's rise is often said to have opened the political era of which kind of person?

The common man was the hero of Jacksonian politics, set against entrenched elites. It was in the 1920s that historians attached the label to his rise to power.

Jackson, who opposed paper money as president, has appeared since 1928 on the front of which U.S. banknote?

The $20 bill has carried his portrait since the series of 1928, which fell on the hundredth anniversary of his first election. A brush with bankruptcy in 1804 had turned him against paper currency.

Which presidential power did Jackson use more often than all six of his predecessors put together?

The veto: he issued 12, against 10 from the six presidents before him combined. His most famous, in July 1832, killed a bill to recharter the national bank.

Which nickname did critics give the state institutions that took the federal deposits Jackson moved in 1833?

Pet banks was the jeer because the chosen state banks had political ties to his party. The deposits came out of the national bank he was determined to destroy.

Which state declared federal tariffs void within its borders in 1832, pushing Jackson to threaten military action?

South Carolina held a convention that ruled the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 unenforceable there after February 1, 1833. Jackson replied with a proclamation calling the theory an impractical absurdity.

Which vice president resigned in 1832 to enter the Senate after breaking with Jackson over states' rights?

John C. Calhoun was the first vice president ever to resign; only Spiro Agnew, in 1973, has followed. He left with just a few months of his second term to run.

Which party emerged in the 1830s in opposition to Jackson, whom its members likened to a tyrant?

The Whigs took a label from the Revolution, casting the president as another George III. Their first significant act was to censure him over the national bank deposits.

Which senator, nicknamed the Great Compromiser, lost presidential races in 1824, 1832 and 1844?

Henry Clay ran against Jackson as the National Republican nominee in 1832. His program called for high tariffs, a national bank and federal spending on new roads.

Which doctrine of the Jackson era held that a state could void a federal law it judged unconstitutional?

Nullification found its most effective advocate in Jackson's own vice president, who made the case anonymously in an essay written at his plantation.

Which 1830 law let Jackson exchange land west of the Mississippi for Native homelands in the eastern states?

The Indian Removal Act passed the Senate by 28 votes to 19 and was signed on May 28, 1830. More than 60,000 people from at least 18 tribes were pushed west in the years that followed.

Which chief justice sided with the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia, a ruling Jackson did nothing to enforce?

John Marshall's court threw out the Georgia law under which the missionary Samuel Worcester had been convicted. The famous retort daring him to enforce it is probably apocryphal.

Which Philadelphia financier ran the Second Bank of the United States during its war with Jackson?

Nicholas Biddle was the third and last president of the institution, running it from 1823 until its federal charter ran out in 1836.

Which French aristocrat toured the United States in 1831 to study prisons and then wrote Democracy in America?

Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months traveling the country with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. The first volume of the book appeared in 1835 and the second in 1840.

Which breakaway republic did Jackson formally recognize on March 3, 1837, his last full day as president?

Texas had declared its independence from Mexico a year earlier and elected Sam Houston its president. Jackson made the recognition official by naming a diplomat to its government.

During the bitter 1828 campaign, opponents accused Jackson's wife Rachel of which offense over her first marriage?

Bigamy was the charge because her first husband's divorce had not been completed when she wed Jackson. She died of a heart attack that December, before the inauguration.

Which cotton plantation near Nashville was Jackson's home, where he retired after leaving office in 1837?

The Hermitage held nine enslaved people when he bought it in 1804 and 110 by the time he died there in 1845.

Jackson became a national hero in 1815 by routing a British army outside which Southern city?

New Orleans cost the British over 2,000 casualties against 71 American. The battle came 15 days after a peace treaty was signed in Europe, before the news had crossed the ocean.

In 1806 Jackson killed Charles Dickinson in which kind of encounter, after first taking a bullet in the chest?

A duel ended a quarrel that began over payments for a forfeited horse race. Dickinson, an expert marksman, fired first, and the bullet shattered against Jackson's breastbone.

Which enslaved preacher led the 1831 Southampton County uprising, the deadliest slave revolt in U.S. history?

Nat Turner and his followers killed an estimated 55 white people. Because he was educated, Southern legislatures answered with laws against teaching enslaved people.

Which abolitionist weekly did William Lloyd Garrison publish in Boston for 35 years, starting in 1831?

The Liberator never sold more than about 3,000 copies, yet its demand for immediate emancipation made it notorious nationwide. In 1834 three-quarters of its subscribers were African Americans.

Which waterway, completed in 1825, was the first to link the Atlantic Ocean with the upper Great Lakes?

The Erie Canal earned back its building costs in tolls within nine years of opening. It gave New York City a strong advantage over every other American port.

Which Cherokee silversmith completed a syllabary in 1821 that let his people read and write their own language?

Sequoyah saw his script officially adopted by the nation in 1825. It soon carried the Cherokee Phoenix, the first bilingual newspaper in North America.

The territory where the Cherokee and other eastern nations were sent in the 1830s became which present-day state?

Oklahoma was formed under a 1906 act that merged two territories, one of them the land set aside for the displaced nations. Nearly 17,000 Choctaws had been among the first to move there.

Which wave of Protestant revivals, spread by frontier camp meetings, fed the reform movements of the Jackson era?

Second Great Awakening preachers began on the frontier in the 1790s among Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. Their converts went on to campaign against alcohol and slavery.

Handbills printed against Jackson in 1828, attacking his execution of six militiamen, showed rows of which objects?

Coffins, six of them in black, headed the first sheet from Philadelphia editor John Binns, with twelve more further down the page. The pamphlets are remembered as the Coffin Handbills.

Which state saw the Dorr Rebellion of 1841 and 1842, an attempt to win broader democracy from its government?

Rhode Island, unlike most states, had kept its original royal charter of 1663 as its constitution. Thomas Dorr and his closest allies went as far as planning to storm the state arsenal.

Southern opponents of the steep protective tariff of 1828 branded it the Tariff of what?

Abominations was their word for what the duties did to the Southern economy. A revision in 1832 lowered some rates, but too little to satisfy the law's fiercest critics.

Which 1833 law authorized Jackson to use the military to collect federal tariffs from a defiant state?

The Force Bill ran to eight sections expanding presidential power, passed at Jackson's urging. Congress approved a compromise tariff at the same time, which defused the crisis.

Which senator's 1830 reply to Robert Hayne was hailed as the most eloquent speech ever delivered in Congress?

Daniel Webster argued that the federal government answered to the American people, not to state legislatures. Lincoln later paraphrased one of its phrases in the Gettysburg Address.

Which scandal over the snubbing of a secretary's wife led nearly all of Jackson's department heads to resign in 1831?

The Petticoat Affair began when Washington wives ostracized Peggy Eaton, who had married the secretary of war. All but one member of the president's official circle ended up leaving.

Which 1836 order from Jackson required that large purchases of public land be paid for in gold or silver?

The Specie Circular applied to sales of more than 320 acres and was aimed at speculators buying with depreciating paper money. Smaller settlers could keep using paper until mid-December.

Which Jackson ally moved the federal deposits as Treasury secretary and later led the Supreme Court until 1864?

Roger B. Taney got the Treasury post after Jackson fired a secretary who refused to move the money. The Senate then rejected his nomination, the first such refusal in the nation's history.

Which movement held America's first presidential nominating convention, meeting in Baltimore in 1831?

The Anti-Masonic Party chose William Wirt, himself a former Mason, for the 1832 race. All the major parties soon adopted the convention idea.

Which historian won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for his influential book The Age of Jackson?

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. read the era through the New Deal, casting Jackson's followers as working people struggling against exploitation by business.

Which Seminole leader was seized under a flag of truce in 1837 after leading resistance to relocation from Florida?

Osceola had come for peace talks near Fort Peyton when he and 81 followers were taken. The general who gave the order lost his reputation for the rest of his life.

In 1830 Jackson refused federal money for the Maysville Road, a turnpike lying wholly inside which single state?

Kentucky was home to his chief political enemy, and the refusal has been put down partly to that grudge. The road was to link Lexington with the Ohio River.