John Quincy Adams A Failure

President John QuincyAdams served as the sixth President of the United States in 1824. John Quincy Adams was the son of former President John Adams. John Quincy Adams spent much of his youth accompanying his father overseas and also accompanied him in diplomatic missions. Benefitting from his fathers Presidential experience, John Q. Adams was able to gather, formulate, and practice the fundamentals of foreign policy. Through his presidential term he was able to negotiate European politics where freedom of the seas and freedom of commerce were slowly granted for the United States. I rate President John Quincy Adams average on his term of presidency. He had good intention, but the era was struggling financially. “It was also important to note

that Adams had many innovative and creative ideas, but he was ahead of his time. He requested in his inaugural address that Americans should come together as cooperative citizens under the banner of the red, white, and blue. His first annual message to Congress emphasized a program of internal improvements, the founding of a national university, the creation of an interstate infrastructure with emphasis upon the buildings of canals, reads, and highways, and the building of an astronomical observatory.” John Q.

Adams had big dreams within our nation, however the competition with Jacksonian's made it real difficult for him. John Quincy Adams signed the the tariff of 1828, this raised the cost of consumer goods by the south. This is one example of why Adam’s administration is best illustrated as a failure. “Poor eroded soil produced fewer pounds of cotton per acre and brought fewer cents per pound in a world market not protected by tariff. And yet the south was not developing any industry. Southern consumers therefore had to buy “Yankee-made” items or pay a higher price for foreign-made manufacturers. They also realized that the lack of British maritime vessels delivering manufactured goods to Southern ports strongly implied correspondingly fewer purchases of rice, tobacco, and cotton by those British merchants.” The Southerners denounced the tariff as the Tariff of Abominations. John Quincy Adams suffered with popular votes in the next term, he lost his presidential position to Andrew

Jackson.
Andrew Jackson spent the entire term of John Quincy Adams in preparation for the presidential campaign of 1828. The American public loved rough and tumble politics. The election of 1828 had more than three times as many people participate than that of the 1824 election. Voters gave indication of their love of sensationalism, misdeeds, and alleged sexual misconduct on the part of political participation. He was the first president without college education since Washington. Regardless of his lack of educational background, I rate the 7th President of the United States, Andrew Jackson as a high president. He represented new American Voters and new ideas. Jackson was a high profiled frontier aristocrat. Yet, he had a unique personality and image that appealed to common people. He worked hard to advance socially and politically. His actions during the War of 1812, especially his overwhelming victory against British troops at the Battle of New Orleans 1815, and the Creek War made him a national hero. Jackson vetoed bills that he thought did not benefit the country. He also monitored activities of government officers and eventually replaced ten percent because of corruption.
Jackson defeated Adams by popular vote. “On March 4, 1829, more than twenty thousand of Jacksons supporters made their way to Washington where they watched the Federalist Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Marshall, administer the presidential oath of office. Just after the inaugural ceremony, thousands of men, women, and children rushed toward the White House to join in the celebration of their hero and friend, Andrew Jackson….Jackson determined to begin his administration by inaugurating the concept of rotation in office. He insisted that if people held office too long, they became indifferent; Jackson, therefore, believed that offices could be rotated to those who served the incoming administration because performance in these kinds of jobs required no special talents or trainings.” His supporters viewed these rotations as an opportunity to build a stronger Democratic Party, and it did.
Another westerner to become president besides Jackson, was the 11th President of the United States, James Polk who served for one term (1844-1849).

“Perhaps no other president during the first half of the 1800’s exerted as much of an impact on U.S domestic affairs regarding land acquisition as the eleventh chief executive, James K Polk. As president he finalized the annexation of Texas, and created a war with Mexico that transferred over 1.2 million acres of land to the U.S., now five states of the American Southwest. He also brokered a deal with Great Britain to purchase the state of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Polk is thus credited with expanding the domestic terrain of the United States, but at the expense of Native Americans who lost their land, and African Americans who were taken as slaves to these new states and territories.” I rate president Polk as a high president. He did the necessary to expand Southwestward. With political forcefulness, President Polk pursued his ambitious goals. Texas joined the country as the 28th state during his first year in office. Tense negotiations with Great Britain concluded with American annexation of the Oregon Territory. Following a controversial two year war, Mexico ceded New Mexico and California to the United States. The Polk administration also achieved its major economic objectives by lowering tariffs and establishing an independent Federal Treasury. “He felt that government plans to fund internal improvements was

unconstitutional…Government, he reasoned, must be made limited and small regarding national development. Polk, like Jackson and Van Buren before him, also pursued an independent treasury system and a reduced tariff to protect the nation’s farmers from recession.” In 1846 they both became policies. The governments funds were no longer connected to a national banking system, it now controlled its own funds. During Polk’s term of office, the United States acquired more than 800,000 square miles of western territory and extended its boundary to the Pacific Ocean. This expansion had thousands of Americans rushing west in search of California gold, the gold rush had begun.
President Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860. He was a captain in the Black Haw War, he spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. He rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1963, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declare forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.
Throughout the war, Lincoln would repeatedly make stirring speeches that reflected his attempt to peacefully unite North and South in a shared nation, this makes President Abraham Lincoln a high rating. Of all the presidents from Washington to Grant, Abraham Lincoln is the highest.
“Lincoln for example, took the unpopular move of immediately suspending the writ of habeas corpus at the beginning of the war in order to imprison Confederate sympathizers who threatened the government. Lincoln also expanded the scope of the military budget (700,000 Union soldiers needed to be equipped), instituted a draft, and actively served as commander in chief of the armed forces as James K Polk had done during the U.S Mexican War. But Lincoln, took the role a step further by symbolically taking responsibility for all military decisions.”
“President Lincoln through Congress immediately initiated a high tariff to protect American industry. President Lincoln’s plans for economic development included passage of the Homestead Act to provide cheap land for American settlers in 1862; passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act to provide land to states to create colleges; the creation of the Department of Agriculture in 1862 to help farmers with scientific approaches to agriculture; and the creation of a federally-chartered corporations, such as the Union Pacific Railroad Company, to improve the transportation system of the nation. Lincoln also presided over the creation of the greenback dollars through the Legal Tender Act of 1862 as a means to create a national currency to fund the war through paper rather than hard money. This decision enlarged the fiscal control of the federal government over the national and state economy. When the Civil War ended 1865, the federal government never relinquished the increase in government powers that it accrued during the war.” Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion. Lincoln was shot in the back of the head, he was the first president to be assassinated. At the time of his death, Lincoln was working on a domestic policy, Reconstruction, a program to rebuild the South that would occupy the attention of the next two Presidents, Andrew Johnson was on of them.
With the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson became the 17th President of the United States (1865-1869). I give President Johnson a poor rating upon his Presidential term. After Lincoln's death, President Johnson proceeded to reconstruct the former Confederate States while Congress was not in session in 1865. He pardoned all who would take an oath of allegiance, but required leaders and men of wealth to obtain special Presidential pardons. By the time Congress met in 1865, most southern states were reconstructed, slavery was being abolished, but “black codes” to regulate the freedmen were beginning to appear. “The formation of the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Codes, both designed by former slaveholders in the South to intimidate African Americans from exercising their rights as freemen and women, forced a confrontation between President Johnson and his Radial Republicans Congress. Johnson’s Reconstruction plan known as Presidential Reconstruction, would now face a major overhaul through Congregational pro-Confederate provisional government representatives from taking their seats in Washington D.C. The republicans had decided that Johnson would purposefully placing former Confederates back in power at the expense of African American rights.” Radical Republicans in Congress moved vigorously to change Johnson's program. They gained the support of northerners who were dismayed to see Southerners keeping man prewar leaders and imposing many prewar restrictions upon Negroes. The radicals first step was to refuse to seat any Senator or Representatives from the old Confederacy. Next they passed measures dealing with the former slaves. Johnson vetoed the legislation. The Radicals mustered enough votes in Congress to pass legislation over his veto, this was the first time that Congress had overridden a President on an important bill. They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established Negroes as American citizens and forbid discrimination against them. Shortly after, Congress submitted to the states the Fourteenth Amendment, which specified that no state should “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” In 1867, the Radicals effected their own plan of Reconstruction, again placing southern states under military rule. They passed laws placing restrictions upon the President. When Johnson allegedly violated one of these, the Tenure of Office Act, by dismissing Secretary of Was Edwin M Stanton, the House voted eleven articles of impeachment against him. He was tried by the Senate in the spring of 1868 and acquitted by one vote.