Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson are two ex-American presidents’ whose presidency is often taken in the same breath. The two had similar views in major issues that were crucial to major policies that constituted everyday operations and administration of the country. Thomas was not only the author of the declaration of independence, but also the third president of the United States. Moreover, he founded the Democratic Republican Party and is often regarded as one of the greatest president America has had. On the other hand, Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of USA and a democrat whose fame hails from his protection of liberty and democracy. Despite the time difference between their presidency, the two men had strong ideological similarities.
Economically the two also shared important ideological similarities. This manifested in their views over the issue of Central Bank of United States. Both presidents were opposed to the idea of having a national bank. During Jefferson’s era, Hamilton’s report on a National Bank sought to establish a privately-owned bank that would provide credit and currency controls to the federal government, in addition to providing credit to commercial investors as well as interests. However, Jefferson opposed the ideology citing that it was not only unconstitutional, but also a classic illustration of corruption. He argued that since the constitution did not permit congress to formulate a national bank, any efforts to create one was unconstitutional. In addition, Jefferson opposed the creation of national bank because the national elite sought to use government’s power to extend financial privileges to a small group of people at the expense of the many American tax payers. Similarly, Jackson viewed the National Bank as both unconstitutional and fundamentally anti-democratic in the sense that it provided a small number of national elites access to the country’s economic reserves and investment capital as well as locked the vast majority working American to such access. However, Jefferson’s lost his opposition bid to Hamilton who rationalized his proposal under the ‘necessary and proper’ clause of the US constitution, which saw the Bank receive a twenty-year charter. Unlike Jefferson, Jackson was determined to put an end to the national bank to the extent that he used veto-power to defeat the politically powerful Bank.
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The two presidents shared the ideology that native Americans were not equal to the American whites. Jefferson reigned when the ordinary American white men had greater political rights as well as economic opportunities which made the Louisiana Purchase an indispensable necessity in establishing a democratic republic. By purchasing the land, Jefferson incorporated foreign people into the United States which besides expanding the territories of the United states, created a serious problem for the Native Americans. The purchase implied that the native Americans were to face immediate pressure from white American settlers, possibly losing their lands in the process. Similarly, Jackson believed that any obstacle to the extension of Anglo American civilization had do be demolished if American Republic was going to be rooted in a democratic soil. As such, the western expansion was extremely essential. Jackson, therefore, aggressively removed the Native Americans from Tennessee and Jefferson purchased Louisiana land following a blueprint laid out by Jefferson that encouraged the removal of native Americans from fertile lands in the southeast.
In conclusion, the two presidents shared vast ideological similarities. Most of their ideologies stretched the boundaries of the American constitution and affected the American People in different ways. Nonetheless, Jackson’s policies cannot be understood through the republican framework because his policies though benefited Americans in many ways, they perpetrated several abusive agendas. This is in contrast to Republican’s framework whose objective was to adhere to the basic standards of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
