Always keep in mind, when the US began only landowners were allowed to vote... that slowly changed to allow "all white men" the right to vote during the 1820s and 1830s.
It wasn't until 1856 that the last holdout, North Carolina, finally reformed.
The US and its "democracy" was always a capitalist enterprise.
@fedwards9965@paninid it is underappreciated that the origin of the democratic party was Andrew Jackson's white man's suffrage movement. he leveraged the momentum of new states joining the union to encourage a rethink of participation, yet he only did it because he was so mad about losing in 1824.
John Quincy Adams kept calling him a jackass, so Jackson made a jackass the mascot for his new party, which makes me lol every time i think about it
@fedwards9965@paninid I often feel the same! The phrase feels gross from 2024, but it also speaks towards how few people could actually vote at the time.
To the point you made earlier, the 1824 election allowed around 3% of the population to vote, but that shot up to over 9% by 1828. With that in mind, we can see why Jackson's party was called the "democrats".
Aside from his fierce defence of the Union, Jackson was otherwise a very typical 1800's southerner and owned 200+ slaves
@fedwards9965@paninid BUT, the real value of saying "white man's suffrage", as absurd as it is for us in 2024, is because it leads right up to the way southern elites lied to their population to get them to fight in the civil war.
The southern elites pitched the war as "equality for white men" to states where ~70% of working white men worked in slave based industry.
THOSE people didn't think that war was about slavery. They believed they'd escape poverty, eg. white men's suffrage 🤮
@paninid@fedwards9965@jmsdnns I never actually connected Jackson with the movement to allow all white men to vote, so I learned a lot in this thread.
Being in TN for most of my adult life, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this aspect of his political career discussed. He was still a jackass, and he did a lot of bad things, especially to the indigenous peoples, but at least this one thing he did pushed us towards a truer democracy.
@ramsey@paninid@fedwards9965 He is definitely best known today for the brutal trail of tears, but the consensus among historians seems to be that, relative to his era, he was 51% good and 49% evil.
I'll share some of the things he did that historians regard as good, where "good" is wildly subjective but generally centered around defending the constitution and the nation.
@ramsey@paninid@fedwards9965 the first, and possibly the most shocking, is that he was seen as the second george washington because of how badly he wrecked the brits at the end of the war of 1812. Check the casualties & woundings in the link and you'll see it wasn't even close.
The Brits never stopped fucking with the US, especially on sea, but Jackson stopped all of that.
This ushered in the only period in US history without war, called the era of good feelings!
@ramsey@paninid@fedwards9965 Jackson hated banks and banking, so he became friends with Aaron Burr entirely because he shot Hamilton, creator of the first national bank. Through that, he learned of Burr and Wilkinson's plot to sever land from the US to create a new nation and Jackson wrote to President Jefferson to tell him about it while promising to defend the nation. He testified as a witness in the Burr's trial for treason where John Marshall defined "treason" for the first time in US law
@ramsey@paninid@fedwards9965 John C Calhoun was first exposed to ideas about secession during his time at Yale in 1804, where Federalists were exploring it essentially because they hated Jeffersonians. Many years later, Calhoun becomes John Quincy's VP and also Jackson's and he mentions secession once to Jackson who promptly lost his notorious temper so badly that historians say it delayed the civil war by 30 years because it scared the shit out of Calhoun, who quit his job as VP and went home
@ramsey@paninid@fedwards9965 The main detail that makes Jackson unusual relative to the early 1800's south was his fierce loyalty to the union. IMO, that loyalty emerges from two things: British soldiers tortured him as a child, which is why he wrecked them so hard in the war of 1812, giving him a furious blend of trauma and narcissism tightly coupled with stories about defending the nation.
His narcissism is arguably why he is a little more good than bad, which is a mindfuck
@ramsey@paninid@fedwards9965 one of my favorite anecdotes about Jackson is that when he got in duels he would stand still and let the other side shoot first. he actually got shot because of this and spent his life with a lead ball very close to his heart.
Jackson's reason for doing this was to avoid rushing the shot. He wanted the other side to rush, reducing their aim, and then he'd take his time and nail the shot in response.
He was completely fucking nuts and I dont know say that lightly
funny how both sides seem to feel like the victors from 1812... when nothing really changed for either, except increasing their respective national debts.
Canada was, effectively, the only real victor in that conflict.
@fedwards9965@ramsey@paninid well said! Canada was considered part of England at the time, so it can all be said to be a war with england, but to your point, Canada beat the US over and over. It was true years later when the border for Maine was settled too.
Underappreciated anecdote from the war of 1812 is that the brits burned the white house and pissed on the ashes.
@fedwards9965@ramsey@paninid one way to think about it is that the US fought hard for years to win their independence, but Canada asked for it and England said, "yeah ok better than fighting" :D
by the time Canada sought "independence" the British empire was in decline and Canada, while stable and rich in natural resources, represented an administrative / governance burden that could be eased by creating an allied entity
And Canada wasn't "truly" independent until 1931's Statute of Westminster
Barring imperialist egos I don't believe there was much desire to retain Canada
but now, that's mostly my opinion, on paper historians insist on more "nuance". ;-)
I only know some Canadian history as a side-effect of reading US history. I want to study Canada at some point, but I'm halfway through a long, chronological march through US Presidential bios right now, so might be a while too
Research suggests the population of the Americas far exceeded that of the rest of world, when Columbus landed in the Bahamas. However, the diseases the Europeans brought spread rapidly far and wide, and in a matter of decades, they had wiped out out so much of the population that later explorers assumed the land was mostly uninhabited, virgin forest/plains.
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