2003 Chapters (Layout Features)

Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party

John, Richard R.

This essay contends that the rise of the federal executive departments in the decades preceding Andrew Jackson's victory in the election of 1828 was a necessary precondition for the emergence of the Democratic party in the months immediately following his inauguration. It further contends that the political orbit around which Jackson's Democratic party revolved had been subtly yet fundamentally reoriented by the Missouri crisis of 1819-1821.