The Age of Jackson
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50 free The Age of Jackson trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Andrew Jackson's two terms changed what the presidency was for. Between the disputed election of 1824 and the financial panic of 1837, American politics became a mass sport, with new parties, noisy campaigns and a president who claimed to speak for ordinary voters against bankers and insiders. This quiz covers the whole era: the elections, the war on the national bank, the tariff crisis that nearly split the Union, the expulsion of Native nations from the Southeast, and the reformers, rebels and writers who shared the stage. Every answer comes with a short explanation. It suits students reviewing a US history unit on Jacksonian democracy, teachers who want a ready-made recap, and anyone curious about how the 1830s shaped American politics.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01When Richard Lawrence's two pistols misfired in 1835, Jackson went after the would-be assassin with what?
His cane
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.
Q 02As a boy prisoner in the Revolution, Jackson was slashed by a British officer for refusing to do what?
Polish his boots
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.
Q 03In January 1835 Jackson's government achieved which financial feat, managed by no other American president?
Paying off the national debt
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.
Q 04A famous cartoon attacking Jackson's use of presidential power dressed him as which kind of ruler?
A king
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.
Q 05After Jackson took the oath in 1829, a huge crowd of supporters pressed into which building for the party?
The White House
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.
Q 06Which name is given to the 1838 forced march of the Cherokee from Georgia to lands beyond the Mississippi?
The Trail of Tears
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.
Q 07Which name stuck to Jackson's practice of handing federal jobs to loyal supporters after the 1828 election?
The spoils system
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.
Q 08Which nickname did critics give the friends and editors who advised Jackson in place of his department heads?
The Kitchen Cabinet
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.
Q 09Which phrase did Jackson's backers use when the House chose John Quincy Adams as president in 1825?
The corrupt bargain
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.
Q 10Which nickname did Jackson earn in the War of 1812 by leading his troops on a hard march home to Nashville?
Old Hickory
Old Hickory honored his toughness: ordered to disband his volunteers far from home, he refused and brought them back himself.
Q 11Which New Yorker, nicknamed the Little Magician, followed Jackson into the presidency in 1837?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York, and is the only president whose first language was not English.
Q 12Which humble dwelling became the emblem of William Henry Harrison's winning 1840 presidential campaign?
A log cabin
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.
Q 13Which animal became a symbol of Jackson's party after opponents twisted his name into an insult?
A donkey
Q 21Which party emerged in the 1830s in opposition to Jackson, whom its members likened to a tyrant?
The Whigs
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.
Q 22Which senator, nicknamed the Great Compromiser, lost presidential races in 1824, 1832 and 1844?
Henry Clay
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.
Q 23Which doctrine of the Jackson era held that a state could void a federal law it judged unconstitutional?
Nullification
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.
Q 14Which voting requirement had most states dropped by Jackson's election, opening the polls to nearly all white men?
Owning property
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.
Q 15Jackson's rise is often said to have opened the political era of which kind of person?
The common man
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.
Q 16Jackson, who opposed paper money as president, has appeared since 1928 on the front of which U.S. banknote?
The $20 bill
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.
Q 17Which presidential power did Jackson use more often than all six of his predecessors put together?
The veto
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.
Q 18Which nickname did critics give the state institutions that took the federal deposits Jackson moved in 1833?
Pet banks
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.
Q 19Which state declared federal tariffs void within its borders in 1832, pushing Jackson to threaten military action?
South Carolina
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.
Q 20Which vice president resigned in 1832 to enter the Senate after breaking with Jackson over states' rights?
John C. Calhoun
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.
Nullification found its most effective advocate in Jackson's own vice president, who made the case anonymously in an essay written at his plantation.
Q 24Which 1830 law let Jackson exchange land west of the Mississippi for Native homelands in the eastern states?
The Indian Removal Act
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.
Q 25Which chief justice sided with the Cherokee in Worcester v. Georgia, a ruling Jackson did nothing to enforce?
John Marshall
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.
Q 26Which Philadelphia financier ran the Second Bank of the United States during its war with Jackson?
Nicholas Biddle
Nicholas Biddle was the third and last president of the institution, running it from 1823 until its federal charter ran out in 1836.
Q 27Which French aristocrat toured the United States in 1831 to study prisons and then wrote Democracy in America?
Alexis de Tocqueville
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.
Q 28Which breakaway republic did Jackson formally recognize on March 3, 1837, his last full day as president?
Texas
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.
Q 29During the bitter 1828 campaign, opponents accused Jackson's wife Rachel of which offense over her first marriage?
Bigamy
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.
Q 30Which cotton plantation near Nashville was Jackson's home, where he retired after leaving office in 1837?
The Hermitage
The Hermitage held nine enslaved people when he bought it in 1804 and 110 by the time he died there in 1845.