Guest Essayist: Professor Mark Cheathem
Andrew Jackson’s defeat of John Quincy Adams in the 1828 presidential election has often been heralded as the beginning of the second American party system. While historians today offer a more complicated interpretation of the two-party system that emerged in the 1820s and 1830s, the 1828 contest between Jackson and Adams was unquestionably a pivotal turning point in American political history.