What accounts for Andrew Jackson's unanticipated popular electoral success in the election of 1824?

Question

Why did President Jackson's biography and political attacks appeal to specific domestic constituencies?

Answer 1

Answer: An ideal answer will:
1. Discuss Andrew Jackson's explicit popular appeal to citizens in the election of 1824 based on his previous role as a military hero of the War of 1812 against the British.
2. Discuss how Jackson's forceful acquisition of Indian lands in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama also made him a local hero in these areas and allowed him to use his popular appeal as a military leader who expelled Indians from their lands.
3. Discuss how Jackson used his personal experience being born in a log cabin and growing up poor, though he had become wealthy as an adult, to tap deep appeal among the economically and socially wider electorate.
4. Discuss how Jackson attacked the economic elite's policy decisions, such as the development of a national bank and a high tariff, in order to appeal to struggling farmers, frontiersmen, settlers and workers during the election. Discuss how Jackson found much of his support in the slaveholding South, the West, and among recent Irish and European immigrants in Northeast cities.
5. Discuss how Jackson's electoral success in winning the popular vote in the 1824 election persuaded the new political parties, the National Republicans (later known as the Whigs) and the Democrats to compete as two distinct political parties offering competing policy promises and explicitly seeking votes based on popular appeal to a larger electorate that included nearly all white men and some free blacks in the North.
6. Discuss how political campaigns in national politics by 1828 also had become personally nastier and slanderous, composed of all the campaigning materials evident in a modern campaign including buttons, mugs, posters, and slogans.
7. Discuss how the broader voting participation in 1824 of nearly all whites across the country and some free blacks in the North foreshadowed the exponential increase in popular vote percentages of all eligible voters by the election of 1828.
8. Write a concise and persuasive conclusion.