Posted by
john on Sunday, November 16, 2008 12:13:34 AM
"...the Jacksonians proclaimed that 'the world is governed too much'."
"The single most important heritage from the revolutionary age was freedom. Individual liberty. That was an American's most prized possession. That is what had to be preserved. That is what was at stake in the 1820s and what had been jeopardized by the corruption of the government following the War of 1812, and that was the essence of Jackson's political leadership of this country after he concluded his military career. There really was no other issue. Everything else - banking, internal improvements, tariffs, even slavery in a strange and peculiar way - was secondary. Individual liberty. That was the basic question."
"From colonial days through the Revolution and well into the nineteenth century, Americans believed that those who exercised power were naturally inclined to suppress liberty and that they regularly devised means to limit if not abrogate the rights of the people. They viewed corruption as power's greatest weapon and virtue as freedom's greatest defense. The struggle between liberty and power produced the Revolution... But the dangers to freedom persisted. They persisted as long as power could be concentrated and the operation of government corrupted. The only defense rested upon the virtue of the American people."
Robert Remini, "Andrew Jackson, The Course of American Freedom, 1822-1832"