Most of Jacksons' proponents argue that Jackson embodied, protected, and promoted the American "common man," and that he was the progenitor of mass democracy in the United States.

The mid-20th century historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, argued in his Age of Jackson series that the emergence of Jacksonian democracy represented a key moment in America’s longstanding conflict between the people and the elite, the poor/working-class against the wealthy, the liberal reformers against the conservatives who want to protect the status quo. In his later series on FDR and the New Deal, Schlesinger drew a historical line connecting Thomas Jefferson and his idea of an agrarian democracy to Andrew Jackson and his promotion of popular democracy. That line continued after Jackson, Schlesinger argued, with the Populists’ and Progressives’ and their fight against big business in the late-19th/early-20th century. The Jeffersonian/Jacksonian strain of mass democracy and economic equality eventually culminated with FDR’s New Deal and its policies that aimed to rein in America's corporate elite and restore the economic and political power of ordinary Americans. For Schlesinger, and for many other historians, Jackson has earned a place in the pantheon of American political figures because he played a vital role in pushing America forward along its path toward greater democratization and the economic prosperity of the "common man."

Other prominent advocates for Jackson include Robert Remini, whose three-volume biography emphasizes Jackson’s success at inspiring farmers and other working-class Americans to enter into the national political arena and demand their economic and political rights. More recently, Sean Wilentz has argued in The Rise of American Democracy that Jackson single-handedly brought about a political revolution by creating and mobilizing the first mass-based political party. Finally, Charles Sellers’ The Market Revolution has become a foundational work on the Jacksonian era that expands on the positive portrayal of Jackson offered by Wilentz and the like. Sellers’ arguments are worth looking at in-depth.

Sellers argues that Jackson was the protector of rural and working-class Americans, a group that was then facing an all-out economic and cultural assault from the country’s financial elite and a burgeoning middle-class. During the period 1815-1846, the United States underwent a massive transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy. Throughout this period, capitalist institutions became intertwined with rural America as innovations in transportation and communication lessened the distance between city and country. The nation’s wealthy elite exploited these innovations and began to encroach into rural America by substantially investing in the production of agricultural goods. Urban elites' economic investment in agricultural goods led to the growth, first, of regional economic markets and, eventually, a national economic market that tied city and country, rural farmer and big-city capitalist, together. The economic changes wrought by this “market revolution” led to massive social upheaval and conflict between rural Americans, a rising middle-class, and the country's financial elite.

Rural Americans favored popular democracy, minimal government activism, and low taxes. They also saw local social institutions, like churches, as the bedrock of American society. Middle-class Americans, on the other hand, favored an activist government, federal support for internal improvements like railroads and dams, national financial institutions, and laws that effectively enforced contracts and property rights—all issues that sought to protect and stimulate the emerging industrial capitalist economy. According to Sellers, rural and working-class Americans were devastated by the effects of the market revolution. Jackson (as portrayed by Sellers) acted as an important bulwark against the ravages of industrial capitalism by seeking to minimize the economic damage and social dislocation felt by the American "common man." In sum, Sellers argues that while the market revolution was an overall painful experience for most rural and working-class Americans, Jackson acted as their most vocal and successful champion at the time.

But is this portrayal true? Other historians have reached far more pessimistic conclusions about Jackson and the Jacksonian Party. Lee Benson’s classic 1961 book, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, attempts to put to bed many of the popular myths about Jackson and his party. Using a case study approach that focuses on New York state politics, and incorporating a heavily-quantitative analysis that analyzes voter behavior patterns, Benson reaches several conclusions that cast serious doubt on the arguments made by Jackson’s strongest supporters. First, Benson shows that the Jacksonian Party in New York was nowhere near as popular as previous historians had claimed. Benson argues that Jackson’s Democratic Party typically received only a very slight majority of votes and, in several cases, won with only a plurality of votes. For Benson, these results show that the Democratic Party under Jackson was far from a popular or mass-based political movement.

Moreover, Benson determined that the vast majority of New York’s Democratic Party were not farmers or members of the working-class; rather, they were primarily middle-class businessmen. The primary reason that these businessmen joined the Democratic Party, Benson argues, is because they wanted freedom from government interference in economic affairs and supported the Party’s laissez-faire economic platform. Far from working in the interests of America’s common man, Benson’s Jacksonian Democrat is a middle/upper-class capitalist seeking only to better his and his class's economic opportunities, often at the expense of the very people Jackson and his Party claimed to represent. For Benson, Jacksonian Democrats were not protectors of the American "common man" but rather of the capitalist elite.

Benson also reaches another conclusion that contradicts the argument that Jackson was the organizer of America's first political party based on mass democracy. Benson shows that most Americans met Jackson’s national political platform with a soft shrug of the shoulders. As his voter behavior statistics show, most New York voters cared very little about national issues. State and local issues held far more salience for voters.

More recently than Benson, Daniel Walker Howe, in his book What Hath God Wrought, has also criticized historians for mythologizing Jackson and his movement. For Howe, Jackson did not bring about a period of democratic inclusion but rather one of exclusion based on white supremacy. Jackson’s support for the institution of slavery and his policy toward Native Americans are only the most prominent examples of Jackson's philosophy of democratic exclusion. Jackson supporters like Wilentz and Remini see the Indian Removal Act of 1830 as a misguided but sincere attempt by Jackson to “uplift” Native Americans. Howe, on the other hand, argues that the Removal Act and Jackson’s attitude toward Native Americans in general were influenced by his conviction that Native Americans were inferior to whites, unable to integrate into American society, and largely incapable of civilized self-rule.

Howe also sees Jackson's policies as having been driven by his intense egotism and desire to control others, and not from any altruistic desire to give voice to and protect the common man. Jackson’s decision to veto the charter of the Second Bank of the United States is a good example of this. As Howe argues, Jackson falsely claimed that the Bank of the United States favored some regions in the country more than others; in fact, the Bank distributed money to its subsidiary branches with relative uniformity. While the Bank did have a history of engaging in favoritism by giving credit to politicians and the nation’s economic elite, the Bank’s then-head, Nicholas Biddle, had largely curbed these practices. For Howe, Jackson primarily opposed the Bank because it constituted a rival power center to Jackson himself, not because (as Jackson falsely claimed to Americans) the Bank’s policies favored the elite and exploited the poor. Thus, while historians like Wilentz and Remini see Jackson’s veto of the Bank as a move that protected America’s common man, Howe sees it in a less favorable light. Instead, it was an unfortunate event wherein an important and largely fair national financial institution was destroyed due to the insecurities of an egomaniacal man with a power complex.

There were other Jacksonian policies that contemporary historians argue either corrupted American political institutions and/or hurt the common man. One of the most prominent of those policies was the “spoils system,” which provided government posts to individuals loyal to Jackson and the Democratic Party. The spoils system ultimately eroded the federal government’s accountability to the American people by installing party apparatchiks throughout the government, whether or not they possessed the ability to adequately perform their duties.

edit: rewrote some parts for better clarity; apologies for the rough first draft.

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