Andrew Jackson's Maysville Road veto : a reappraisal

Historians generally agree that the most important political issues of the Jacksonian period were the tariff, the Bank of the United States, and internal improvements. In discussions of the latter, they often cite Andrew Jackson's 1830 Maysville Road veto as the watershed event. This veto, they claim, ended the federal sponsorship of internal improvements and established opposition to such measures as a principle of the Democratic party. This study attempts to fill a void in the historiography on the Maysville Road veto by addressing more thoroughly the veto's impact on party loyalty in Congress and on the issue of internal improvements. To accomplish this, Guttman scalogram analysis was employed in order to determine senators' and representatives' positions on the issue during the Twenty-first Congress, that in which Jackson issued the veto. This analysis has revealed that in the session before the veto a consistent majority favored internal improvements and moreover, that section and region were more accurate determinants of voting on the issue than party loyalty. In the session after the veto, legislators reacted only by modifying proposed improvements bills to meet Jackson's criteria. Geographic and partisan trends in congressional voting behavior remained virtually the same as during the first session. From this study, it appears that historians have overestimated the political impact of Jackson's Maysville Road veto on party formation and on the issue of internal improvements. Not only did Congress continue to pass internal improvements bills after Jackson's veto, Jacksonians actively supported their passage. Because the Democratic party could never demand loyalty on the issue without alienating many of it supporters, it concluded that internal improvements was not as crucial an issue as the Bank or the tariff.