social movements of the early

19th century in the United States,

you can't deny that the emergence

of Jacksonian democracy is one of the most

influential aspects of early 19th century culture,

so what was Jacksonian democracy

and why do we care so much about it?

Well, I wanna make the argument to you that

Jacksonian democracy was really the birth

of modern American political culture.

By that, I mean that during this time,

lots of practices emerged that are still with us today.

For example, the two party system.

The spoils system.

Even some aspects of American political character

that are still with us today emerged in this time period

and by that, I mean the kinds of traits

that we like to see in our politicians

to consider them electable.

So in this series on Jacksonian democracy,

I'm gonna take you on a journey from

the earlier American political culture,

some of the major changes that

came about in the Jacksonian period,

and then just discuss some of the ways

that this still influences us today.

All right, so if Jacksonian democracy

was a new thing, what came before it?

Well, in the very early era of American political life

and I'm talking here from approximately 1790 to about 1820,

American politics was very aristocratic.

There were a couple of families

that tended to dominate politics.

The Adams family, for example.

George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,

and these men were kind of considered to be,

maybe a higher character of man.

They were the quintessential citizens of a republic

and along with that came a certain amount

of wealth and status and education.

In between George Washington and Andrew Jackson,

every single person who served as president

had a college degree.

Many of them were Virginians

and particularly Virginian planters.

You see a lot of Virginians

and a lot of people from Massachusetts

in the first couple of years of the republic.

Many of them kind of shared a concern

that there could be too much democracy, shall we say,

that even though the United States was a democracy,

many of the founders of the United States

worried about the tyranny of the majority,

the tyranny of the mob,

that they had set up this democratic experiment

where many people could vote,

but they were afraid of having just too many people voting

'cause they looked down on lower classes

of society in that time period.

They worried that if you didn't have a stake in the country,

usually shown by property ownership,

either in terms of land or in terms of wealth,

then you wouldn't have the proper investment

in the fate of the nation in order to

make a rational decision about what

sort of policies should be enacted.

So in the early years of the United States,

many states had voting laws

that restricted the franchise

to just propertied men.

So really, a quite small proportion of the overall populous

of the United States could vote.

Interestingly, this actually meant that

in some northern states, both free people of color,

free black men

and women could vote

because they met the requirements for property ownership,

but in the early 1800s, 1810s,

these ideals of democracy began to catch on more and more

among the common people

and as new states joined The Union, like Ohio and Illinois,

they came in with state constitutions,

saying that all white male citizens could vote,

regardless of whether or not

they owned property or they paid taxes.

So in this time period, white male citizenship

became associated with voting

and some of the other states began to rewrite

their state constitutions to grant the vote

to all white males and it probably won't surprise you

that when they rewrote those laws,

they managed to take out the little loophole

for free people of color and women

with certain amounts of property.

So by the end of this period, in the 1850s,

all property requirements for voting had been eliminated

and any white male above the age of 21

in the United States had the right to vote

and we'll get to what that meant

for American politics in the next video.