Enlightenment

In her book The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty, Jill Norgren explains that Americans in 1830 felt "that their presence in North America, as well as westward movement of their society, was the fulfillment of destiny and for some a providential mission." (66)  This notion of a "providential mission" did not develop in a vacuum.  It was the product of Enlightenment philosophy and the nascent pseudo-science of what would later be called social Darwinism.  Enlightenment philosophy was a double-edged sword.  On the one hand it elevated liberty and human knowledge above irrational thought, but with the other assigned a hierarchy to human beings, with non-white and especially indigenous peoples at the bottom of a pyramid dominated by white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian men.  American industry was in full force by this time as well, having secured title to lands as far south as Florida and into the interior U.S.  Expansionism and manifest destiny were outright expressions of Enlightenment philosophy put to work in the "undiscovered" Americas.  This was the socio-political climate that drove the inimitable General Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1829.

The new United States capital building at this time was built in the swamps at the headwaters of the Potomac river.  Jackson was only its second occupant.  Americans saw "the symbolic value of a new government metropolis built out of the Potomac dirt and swamp" (64) in a new nation that was also growing by leaps and bounds into uncharted territory.  President Jackson harnessed these sentiments to advance his own views on white superiority and States' rights.  This was the impetus for westward expansion that ignored treaties with nations like the Cherokee and allowed the federal government to forklift colonizing settlers into what were previously Indian occupied lands.

In today's fifty-state nation, Americans' political influence is broad and broadly dispersed, no longer concentrated in the industrious east coast of 18th and 19th America.  The executive has his/her powers checked by a large and cacophonous representative legislature instead of one that only deigns to represent the narrow views of a relatively small population of white, male landowners.  Andrew Jackson and his contorted notions of white superiority would appear anachronistic in the framework of American governance today.  And just like today, in the 1830's individual American citizens through the proxy of an elected official crystallized and enacted into law their intentions for the social and economic parameters that defined the nation.  So it is certain that the scientific and geopolitical traditions that politicians have at their fingertips would preclude such an anachronistic figure as President Jackson from assuming the office of the Presidency today.

References

Norgren, Jill. The Cherokee Cases: Two Landmark Federal Decisions in the Fight for Sovereignty. Norman: U of Oklahoma, 2004. Print.

Bristow, William. "Enlightenment." Stanford University. Stanford University, 20 Aug. 2010. Web. 15 Feb. 2016. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/#SciManSubEnl>.