Were Andrew Jackson's policies "good for the economy"?

• Author: Whaples, Robert
• Position: Essay

From the point of view of most twenty-first-century Americans, Andrew Jackson was at best a lunatic, at worse a monster. Jackson's unpardonable sins include building his wealth on the backs of slave labor, massacring Native Americans, and trampling the Supreme Court's rulings to send the Cherokee to their doom on the Trail of Tears. (1) In addition, he was a wild man--who married a woman who wasn't yet legally divorced and who carried to the grave festering wounds and bullet fragments from two duels (Remini 1981, 1). His contemporary critics damned him for constantly overstepping his authority, calling him a demagogue whose violent partisanship unsettled the economy. Many of his deeds clearly deserve condemnation. But the majority of the American people seemed to love this war hero and successful businessman, electing him with landslide majorities in both 1828 and 1832.

Were Jackson's policies ultimately good for the economy? The answer to this question hinges on what is meant by "good for the economy" and depends on one's implicit model of how an economy functions--on what it takes for an economy and its people to grow and prosper. What is "the economy"? In a word, it is "us." If we, the people of the economy, are prospering, then the economy is prospering. The millions of individual decision makers in the economy are us, so "what's good for the economy" means "what's good for us." The thrust of modern economic thinking and much of economic history is that widespread prosperity and economic growth come from establishing a society' with (1) secure property rights, which gives people incentives (2) to put their resources into high-valued uses--for example, to develop (not waste) natural resources, to work smart and hard, to take responsible risks, to trade, to become educated--and (3) to develop new technologies (Margo 2013).

Economists often look at the proximate sources of economic growth using mathematical models, which simplify the entire economy into a single equation--a production function that models how the economy turns inputs (such as land, labor, and capital) into specific outputs (such as corn, cotton, and cloth) and ultimately into the gross domestic product (GDP). These models emphasize that the two direct channels to growth in per capita income are increasing the amounts of inputs per person and increasing "total factor productivity" so that the same amount of inputs produce more output, especially because technology' improves.

Andrew Jackson would probably have had little use for these models, but he had an intuitive feel for what would allow the American economy--or, more precisely, the American electorate of the early nineteenth century--to grow and prosper. However, it is vitally important to realize that Jackson and his electorate defined "us" much differently than we do today. They defined "us" as white people--excluding American Indians and African Americans, whom they saw as impediments to progress or resources to be exploited or both. The bulk of this essay, therefore, will take on Jackson and his policies from the point of view of the early-nineteenth-century electorate. In these terms, Jackson's policies were arguably pretty good for the economy'. However, the moral failures of this outlook and these policies should not and cannot be ignored.

Jackson's Land Policies

Perhaps the most important Jacksonian policy that encouraged growth and prosperity for the electorate was his push for an increase in the amount of land available for cultivation in a country in which 71 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture (Carter et al. 2006, 2:110). Jackson's key policy was Indian removal, which allowed whites access to fertile land, especially in the South Central and upper Midwest regions. The electorate's point of view was that because Indian hunters were using the land very inefficiently, they had no right to it.

An Indian chief explained that "[w]e must have a great deal of ground to live upon. A deer will serve us but a couple days, and a single deer must have a great deal of ground to put him in good condition. If we kill two or three hundred a year, 'tis the same as to eat all the wood and grass of the land they live on, and this is a great deal" (qtd. in Lebergott 1984, 13). Stanley Lebergott calculates that in the early 1800s Indian tribes required almost two thousand acres (or three square miles) per person, but that the white population could meet its food (and whiskey) requirements on a couple acres per person. Thus, "European settlers required fantastically less land than the largely hunting and fishing peoples with whom they came into conflict" (1984, 14-15).

White Americans generally shared an ancient feeling that land must be put to good use. Jackson's predecessor in office, John Quincy Adams, put it this way: "[W] hat is the right of [the] huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence.. be monopolized by one of the ten thousand for which they were created?" (qtd. in Lebergott 1984, 18). Likewise, Thomas Jefferson agreed that "[wjhenever there is in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on" (qtd. in Lebergott 1984, 19). German immigrant Francis Lieber explained, "The earth is given to mankind for use; and if it be left: wholly unused, it fails to obtain its object.... While other territories are crowded and many over-peopled ... no mere declaration 'This belongs to us' can become a bar against the very destiny of so genial a soil" (qtd. in Lebergott 1984, 18). In other words, the Indians' claims to vast tracts of forested lands made no sense to all these European Americans who saw it sitting idle. Lebergott points out that this attitude wasn't directed only toward Native Americans. Early in the eighteenth century, Scotch-Irish immigrants seized lands owned by the Penns, the Proprietors of Pennsylvania, declaring it "against the laws of God and Nature that so much land should lie idle while so many Christians wanted to labour on it" (qtd. in Lebergott 1984, 19).

Whites knew that many of them could prosper on land that would allow far fewer Indians to merely subsist. Jackson obliged them upon becoming president by rapidly removing Indians from the land and then trying to quickly turn it over from the government to settlers--who immediately set out to clear it of trees and plant it (especially with cotton and corn) or turn it into pasture (where cattle, hogs, and other domesticated animals yielded far more calories per acre than the deer that the Indians hunted) or both. During Jackson's eight years in office (1829-37), about seventy treaties were signed by which more than 100 million acres (almost 170,000 square miles) of Indian land were added to the public domain at a cost to the government of about $65 million plus 32 million acres in the new Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma). This was more than twice the acreage ceded by Native Americans in the eight years before Jackson's terms (Remini 1981, 264; Lebergott 1985, 211-12). (2) Jackson made it a priority to get such lands into the hands of the public as soon as possible. During his eight years in office, the federal government sold almost 50 million acres to the public out of the 88 million acres sold from 1820 to 1849. The lands opened to farming were almost all in the trans-Appalachian West, which was much more fertile than the land in the East. (3) Most of the electorate saw this Indian removal policy as an immense success.

Beyond this wholesale transfer of land from Native Americans to white voters, Jackson's land policy aided the "little guy" by cutting the minimum acreage of purchases of government land and allowing more squatters to purchase the land they had illegally settled before it was offered for sale to others. Although Jackson had threatened to send federal troops to clear out squatters, he ultimately signed the Preemption Act of 1830, which allowed unauthorized settlers to purchase up to 160 acres on which they had been squatting--living and farming before the land had been sold by the federal government. (4) The Land Act of 1832 cut the minimum lot size sold by the government from 80 to 40 acres and held the minimum price at $1.25 per acre, an amount that a common laborer could earn in about one day (Atack and Passell 1994, 258). (5) Robert Gallman estimates that 41 percent of capital formation in the United States in the 1830s came from land improvements--farmers clearing, breaking, fencing, draining, and irrigating their land--almost twice as high as during any other period in his study (2000, 40). These land improvements helped the economy prosper in the ensuing decades.

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