The Philadelphia physician and politician Benjamin Rush, for example, sensed that the Revolution had launched a wave of popular rebelliousness that could lead to a dangerous new type of despotism. It would prevent the creation of a secure and united republican society. Too much participation by the multitudes, the elite believed, would undermine good order. “The evils we experience flow from an excess of democracy,” he proclaimed. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton warned of the “vices of democracy” and said he considered the British government-with its powerful king and parliament-“the best in the world.” 2 Another convention delegate, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who eventually refused to sign the finished Constitution, agreed. But ordinary citizens’ growing direct influence on government frightened the founding elites. Wasn’t the American Revolution a victory for democratic principles? For many of the founders, however, the answer was no.Ī wide variety of people participated in early U.S.
We tend to assume the nation’s early political leaders believed the same. Today, most Americans think democracy is a good thing. By the time of his death almost forty years later, Andrew Jackson would become an enduring and controversial symbol, a kind of cipher to gauge the ways that various Americans thought about their country. The tenacity, toughness, and vengefulness that carried Jackson alive out of that duel, and the mythology and symbolism that would be attached to it, would also characterize many of his later dealings on the battlefield and in politics. The duel in Logan County, Kentucky, was one of many that Jackson fought during the course of his long and highly controversial career. Jackson-still carrying the bullet in his chest-later boasted, “I should have hit him, if he had shot me through the brain.” 1 The other man dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. Bleeding, he slowly steadied his aim and returned fire. But the wounded Jackson remained standing. A duelist’s bullet struck him in the chest, just shy of his heart (the man who fired the gun was purportedly the best shot in Tennessee). On May 30, 1806, Andrew Jackson, a thirty-nine-year-old Tennessee lawyer, came within inches of death. Anti-Masons, Anti-Immigrants, and the Whig Coalition The Eaton Affair and the Politics of Sexuality
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