Like many of his supporters, Andrew Jackson had been born in a log cabin. His parents, poor farmers, died before he was 15. As a teenager, Jackson fought with the Patriots in the American Revolution. Before he was 30, he was elected to Congress from Tennessee. Jackson gained fame during the War of 1812. He defeated the Creek Nation in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans. His troops called him “Old Hickory” because he was as tough as a hickory stick.

Small farmers, craft workers, and others who felt left out of the expanding American economy loved Jackson. They felt that his rise from a log cabin to the White House demonstrated the American success story. His popularity with the common man changed politics in Washington, D.C.

Jackson promised “equal protection and equal benefits” for all Americans, or at least for all white American men. During his first term, a spirit of equality spread through American politics. In the nation’s early years, most states had limited suffrage, or the right to vote, for men who owned property or paid taxes. By 1815, many states had loosened or soon would loosen the property requirements for voting. In the 1820s, democracy expanded as people who had not been allowed to vote voted for the first time. Between 1824 and 1828, the percentage of white males voting in presidential elections increased from 26.9 to 57.6 percent. For the first time, white male sharecroppers, factory workers, and many others were brought into the political process.

The expansion of suffrage continued, and in 1840, more than 80 percent of white males voted in the presidential election. However, women still could not vote, and African Americans and Native Americans had few rights of any kind. Another development in the broadening of democracy involved presidential electors. By 1828, 22 of the 24 states changed their constitutions to allow the people, rather than the state legislatures, to choose presidential electors.

When Jackson decided not to run for a third term in 1836, the Democrats selected Martin Van Buren of New York, Jackson’s friend and vice president, as their candidate. Van Buren faced bitter opposition from the Whigs, a new political party that included former National Republicans and other anti-Jackson forces. Jackson’s great popularity and his personal support helped Van Buren easily defeat several Whig opponents. Van Buren was inaugurated in 1837.

Shortly after Van Buren’s election, the country entered a severe economic depression, a period in which business and employment fall to a very low level. The depression began with the Panic of 1837. Land values dropped sharply, investments declined suddenly, and banks failed. Thousands of businesses closed, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs. In the South, cotton prices fell to record lows. Farmers plunged into debt and lost their land. In the cities, many people could not afford food or rent.

Van Buren believed in the principle of laissez-faire, that government should interfere as little as possible in the nation’s economy. Van Buren did persuade Congress to establish an independent federal treasury in 1840. The government would no longer deposit its money with private individual banks as it had started to do during President Jackson’s war with the Second Bank of the United States. Instead, the government would store its money in the federal treasury. The private banks had used government funds to back their banknotes. The new treasury system would prevent banks from using government funds in this way and so help guard against further bank crises. Van Buren and his supporters hailed the new law as a “second declaration of independence.” However, criticism of the act came from members of Van Buren’s own Democratic Party as well as from Whigs. The split in the Democratic Party meant the Whigs had a chance to win the presidency in 1840.

The Democrats controlled the presidency for 12 years. However, with the country still in the depths of depression, the Whigs thought they had a chance to win the election in 1840. They nominated William Henry Harrison, a hero of the War of 1812, to run against Van Buren. John Tyler, a planter from Virginia, was Harrison’s running mate. Because Harrison had gained national fame defeating Tecumseh’s followers in the Battle of Tippecanoe, the Whigs’ campaign slogan was “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”

To win the election, Harrison had to gain the support of the laborers and farmers who had voted for Jackson. Ironically, the Whig Party, which seemed to be made up of anti-Jacksonian politicians, was using Jackson’s image to win, and painting the Democrats as elitists. The Whigs adopted a log cabin as their symbol. Political cartoons in newspapers showed Harrison, a wealthy man from Virginia, in front of a log cabin. The Whigs wanted to show that their candidate was a “man of the people.” The Whigs also ridiculed Van Buren as “King Martin,” a wealthy snob who had spent the people’s money on fancy furniture for the White House. The log cabin campaign seemed to work, and Harrison went on to defeat Van Buren by a wide margin.

William Henry Harrison was inaugurated in 1841 as the first Whig president. The Whigs were still celebrating their victory when Harrison died of pneumonia on April 4, 1841. He had given his very long inaugural address on a cold day without a coat and caught a cold. Tyler became the first vice president to gain the presidency because the elected president died in office. Although Tyler had been elected vice president as a Whig, he had once been a Democrat.

As president, Tyler, a strong supporter of states’ rights, vetoed several bills sponsored by Whigs in Congress, including a bill to re-charter the Bank of the United States. His lack of party loyalty outraged Whigs. Most of Tyler’s cabinet resigned, and Whig leaders in Congress expelled Tyler from the party. It seemed that the Whigs could not agree on their party’s goals. Increasingly, Whigs voted according to sectional ties, North, South, and West, not party ties. This division may explain why the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, lost the election of 1844 to Democratic candidate James Polk. After only four years, the Whigs were out of power again.