The idea of the American System suffered a decline during the two terms of President Andrew Jackson. When Jackson took the oath of office to become the seventh President of the United States on 4 March 1829, his opinions on the policies of the American System remained elusive. While serving as a senator from Tennessee in the 18th Congress from 1823 –5, he had voted for a number of internal improvements bills, including a scheme for the federal government to purchase stocks in private companies, most notably the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal Company. However, he mostly refrained from participating in such debates.

Jackson also voted in favour of the Protective Tariff Act of 1824. He remained silent during Senate debates over the bill. The former general also elusively expressed his opinion on tariffs in a letter, aimed at his constituents during the presidential campaign in 1824. ‘It is, therefore’, Jackson wrote, ‘my opinion that a careful and judicious Tariff is much wanted to pay our national debt and afford us the means of defence within ourselves on which the safety of our country and liberty depends.’

Andrew Jackson: Frontiersman, Soldier, Presidential Contender

Although Jackson's ideas on the American System remained mysterious, his upbringing and career path seemed to indicate that he was not in its favour. He was born to a Scots-Irish family in Waxhaws, then a frontier region on the border between South Carolina and North Carolina. His father died three weeks before Jackson was born. Jackson became an orphan at the age of fourteen during the American Revolution, as his mother and two brothers succumbed to diseases and hardship. He then lived with relatives in Charleston, South Carolina and read law in Salisbury, North Carolina. Admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1787, Jackson then moved to Nashville, Tennessee the following year to find a job as a public prosecutor. Jackson thrived as a frontier lawyer, land speculator and merchant, eventually acquiring the Hermitage, a large plantation outside Nashville.