ABSTRACT

Reexamination of Andrew Jackson’s attitude toward the judiciary reveals more than the defiance historians have associated with Jackson’s conflict with John Marshall during the famous Georgia controversy. The storm center was in Georgia, where the Governor and legislature exhibited increasing resistance to Adams’ efforts to enforce treaties with the Indians. Jackson was known to be sympathetic to the interests of the whites in this region and this was a major factor in his electoral success there in 1828. The Jacksonians, as lineal descendants of the Jeffersonians, were vigorous critics of the federal judiciary, and Jackson’s election in 1828 was in part a popular repudiation of the institutional aggrandizement of the judicial branch. The theory fits the Jacksonian pattern, and the most cautious generalization is that the President’s advisers, in their arguments before the courts, expressed a Jacksonian view of executive independence, and probably the view of the President himself.